Friday 28 May 2010

Beyonce - Why don't you love me

Beyonce is back and she looks fiiine. I've seen many articles about this video both on blogs and in magazines so I  was very excited to watch it! Since I first watched it I must have played it again about a million times, not only is the song super-catchy and AWESOME but the aesthetics of the video are amazing. Beyonce has the perfect figure to pull off the pin up style, she looks absolutely amazing in this video and those legs...daaaaym!

ANYWAY





FMP: part one

I haven't mentioned it much (or perhaps even at all) on here but for the last month I've been working on my Final Major Project at college, once I finish this I'll be done with college forever and moving down to London to do a fashion design course, it both scares and really excites me that I'm literally at the beginning of my creative career. ANYWAY for my FMP I've been looking at human anatomy, mental disorders, straight jackets, stuff like that. I'll do some posts later with sketchbook shots and exhibition photo's.

For now here are a couple of dresses I made for this project, the pictures are fairly unedited at the moment.



The material this dress is made from is amazing, it's the stuff they make blinds out of, mainly for kids rooms, and has a matte plasticy feel. You can get some really good shapes out of this and it folds really nicely so I decided to just sew a MASSIVE tube and then play around and pin it until I got a nice shape. Oh, this dress is based on the original straight jacket design.
This dress is made from some plastic sheeting (the stuff they wrap front doors and stuff in) from B&Q, a man named Andy who works on tiles smuggled it to me after I told him a sob story about how I had no money. Here I just cut out a really simple dress shape and used a cheap white double bias binding on the edges. The organs are from an anatomy book, i blew them up on the photocopier, printed them on acetate and sewed into them.

The model is my mate Michaela, she was really nice to photograph and was so easy going about stripping off. I'd love to use her again she photographs beautifully.

Food porn

The weather is getting warmer, my hemlines are getting shorter and food is getting brighter! I love the summer months, not just for the obvious (summer clothes, long nights, no school and sangria...) but because all the best foods are out, yaaaay! Alately I've spent a LOT of time looking at food blogs, here are two of my favourite food blogs:

This is a blog kept by a keen baker, not only are there some amazing recipes on here, the way she writes is very poetic and the photographs she takes of her food look amazing!






This blog is kept by Jennifer Causey and just features beautiful pictures of her daily breakfast, I feel sad when I look at this with my boring bowl of musli 





After looking at all this food I'm stupidly excited to cook my tea tonight.

Thursday 27 May 2010

Terry Richardson kills puppies

So, after I posted the other day about my lack of love for Terry Richardson a few people of asked me why I harbour so much hate. I've spent the last week or so displaying my utter disgust to my boyfriend and we decided I should probably stop whining to him and write a post, so here are my top ten reasons for thinking Terry Richardson is a complete twat.

  1. This quote from Rie Rasmussen pretty much summarises my opinion on how he treats models and she words it really well. "He takes girls who are young, manipulates them to take their clothes off and takes pictures of them they will be ashamed of. They are too afraid to say no because their agency booked them on the job and are too young to stand up for themselves. His 'look' is girls who appear underage, abused, look like heroin addicts … I don't understand how anyone works with him."
  2. His photographs completely objectify women,  he treats women more like a prop than anything else, when you look at the (rare) shoots he's done with male models the feel is completely different. You must be a massive misogynist if you're willing to exploit women to that extent.
  3. He puts himself in front of camera a LOT, often taking the place of the subject and again using female models as props, when a man puts himself in front of the camera and starts touching the NAKED model the photographs can no longer be viewed as fashion photography but instead, pornography.
  4. If any female artist were to act the way he did within his photographs they would instantly be branded as a slut.
  5. I'm in no way against nude photography but the way Richardson chooses to approach it is by either taking pictures to show that 'he da man'  or to be controversial for the sake of being controversial, there's no reason behind what he's does.
  6. His photographs are always completely sexist no matter what the campaign/subject/theme, the men in his photographs come off as being smart, wealthy, well kept men whereas women are made to look, again, like brainless naked objects.
  7.  He uses taboos and nudity to make pictures that create uncomfortable viewing for literally no reason, there's no message behind his work other than 'yeah, I'm Terry Richardson, It's okay I can be a sex pest, I get paid to do it'
  8.  You'd have thought with the whole 'situation' with Terry recently he'd have sat down and had a bit of a think about what a naughty little boy he's been but allegedly he has no soul.
  9.  He strips off naked during shoots and sometimes lets the models take pictures of him naked first to stop nerves...right, WHAT?!
  10. He completely abuses his power within the industry, women who fall victim to his prying hands (I won't try tell you what he did and didn't do but I'm sure you can do the research and decide for yourself) are afraid to speak out in case they get dropped by their label or blacklisted.

EDIT: After writing this post I found this post written by Tavi at Style Rookie, worth a read!

Monday 24 May 2010

Mayfair


On Wednesday I took part in a vintage and handmade stall, here I sold handmade moustache pillows which I had hurriedly sewn the night before -oops. The event took place in Tokyo, one of the biggest night clubs in Huddersfield (granted there are very few) on a very sunny day. Other stalls included a vintage stall, handmade jewellry and yummy cupcakes as well as a BBQ and a selection of live music. I didn't make very much money but the day was so lovely I wasn't particularly bothered. 
Here's the blog for the event, hopefully they'll be another in the next few months! Read.

















photographs taken by the lovely Marco and Rachael.

Saturday 22 May 2010

Levi Strauss, be my friend?

I have always had a lot of respect for Levi's as a company, created by Levi Strauss, immigrant to America, blue jeans were initially birthed for workmen. the shop itself was born in 1853. 
They don't try and be different, they don't try and change denim into some sort of high fashion item, even when they collaborated with Junya Watanabe the items produced still stuck to the brands general motif, to produce wearable, good quality denim. 

Just a lately you can't open a magazine or jump on a tube without seeing the Levi's craftwork ad campaign. The campaign is based on the 'mend and make-do' feel left over from the peak of the recession and ties in to the brands routes of craftsmanship. All of the models in ad's are working in some form of creative industry, these including designers, illustrators and songwriters.

Personally, I like to pretend they're all my friends.












inky fingers

Here are some quick illustrations I did for my friend at bamboo bear to help her decide how to style her website. I really like the way these have come out for the amount of time they took, I love drawing hair with fine liners, it always looks okay even if it's rushed.



Wednesday 19 May 2010

Terry Richardson

I just don't like you very much at the moment. Please get out of my media.


Space (cont...)

For my space project (see below, hey down there!) I made a spacey dress. The material is unbleached muslin that I soaked in black ink and then rinsed, then I rubbed in different hues of purple, magenta, green and blue. The shoulder detail is stuffed soda bags and a shiny jersey material and the bottom of the dress contains a rubber ring. 
My model is are Kira, she was an absolute star and we had so much fun! I wanted the shoot to have kind of a kid playing space dress up vibe and I'm pretty pleased with the results. 









Edit: on some screens these pictures are coming out too blue and over exposed, the dress itself has lots of purpley magenta tones as well as blues, once again technology has turned against me, shame.

Wednesday 12 May 2010

Space

Quite a few people have been asking to see examples of my work recently, so I thought I'd bite the bullet and upload my most recent complete project. Whenever I finish a project I like it for about an hour and then I'm sick of it and want to do something new. 
So anyway, for this project we asked to explore something under the theme of rhythms and cycles, so I looked at SPACE. My inspiration for this project was mainly star constellations and NASA images combined with a sort of Barbarella theme AND space technology.

Sketchbook






















Design Sheet (no flats just sketches)



Mood Board