Hussein Chalayan A/W 13
screaming
I have a bonerDamn.
this is some cinna shit right here
Cameron Russell’s TED talk deconstructing the facade of the modeling industry.
VS model and daughter of ZipCar co-founder Robin Chase deconstructs what it means to be a “sexy white” model.
Caught wind of this talk via Tricia and Kevin the other night. It’s very emotionally honest in a way that most TED talks aren’t. It’s also really damn good.
I look at this dress and imagine it saying “Fuck you, Fashion!” but it probably isn’t. It’s probably more like “Hey. Yeah, Fashion and I dated back in 72’. She was going through a psychedelic phase. We’re cool now, though.”
How Social Media Has Changed the Modeling Industry
via NEW YORK – TOKYO:
15 years ago, all a model had to do was show up and look pretty. But in today’s social media-saturated world, a great pair of legs and killer cheekbones do not a supermodel make. More and more, a model’s earning power is derived not only by how many shows she walked or magazines she covered, but how many Twitter followers she has, according to the AP.
Name recognition has always been a powerful asset in a model’s career, but whereas in the past the public mostly got to know the industry’s biggest players through countless covers, campaigns, gossip columns and paparazzi photos, today’s social media has enabled models to make names for themselves. Now, any business-savvy model can get her name out there–and control her brand–through Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.
The new crop of social media friendly models–like Coco Rocha, Doutzen Kroes, and Karlie Kloss–may even see the return of models to the covers of magazines–or at least making some headway on the celeb covers that are de rigueur–said Wilhelmina president Sean Patterson. “With fan sites, blogs and Facebook, all of a sudden you can follow a model and know who she is,” Patterson told the AP. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that having a big social media fanbase can bring instant buzz to any brand that hires the model. “I imagine, for example, that Victoria’s Secret likes that Doutzen (Kroes) has so many Twitter followers and that she tells them, ‘Watch the Victoria’s Secret show I’m in at 9 p.m.”
Of course, it isn’t just brands and agencies that are benefitting from the new trend: Models are relishing their newfound power and voice. “Because I have a voice and I’m sticking to having that voice, I feel like I have extended my career,” Tweeting-machine Coco Rocha, told the wire. Model Heide Lindgren agrees: “You can make yourself into more than a model this way…It introduces me to a new audience, and it might be more people seeing my posts than something that’s in Vogue.”
Read the rest at NY-T
Welcome Back Corinne to ThreadBanger!
threadbanger: Loving this! Thanks guys!
I don’t even sew and I love this show.
Toms Shoes Founder Might Have Different Political Views Than Many People Wearing His Shoes — Daily Intel
Vogue-approved Blake Mycoskie, who came up with the idea to donate a pair of shoes to a needy child for every one sold, is apparently a Focus on the Family supporter. That’s an affiliation that’s sure to irk many of the hipster types who have proudly sported the brand in recent years as a sort of crunchy alternative to Chuck Taylors.
urban outfitters redux
A *fantastic* post by about how menswear is dealing with what fashion blogs in general wrought about two years ago and blogs in general did to media during the height of the Denton/Calacanis years.
Click through for the entire link but I’ve paraphrased my favorite parts below…
Outside of menswear, I spend a lot of my time reading about economics and politics, and this issue has been treaded over many times. As one arguement goes, before the internet, we had identifiable public intellectuals who had to climb their way up through the ranks - usually academic or journalism ranks - before they could be taken seriously. They had to have rigorous training of some kind, and they held to high professional standards. Nowadays, anyone with a laptop can prattle on about the Middle East conflict or state of the global economy. There is no need to prove yourself to other intellectuals or have newspaper editors check your facts. All you need is an account at Blogspot.
One of the important things to recognize here is that traditional media failed the public long before blogs were even around. The death of the public intellectual happened arguably in the 1980s or 1990s, and that’s just in social commentary; it happened much earlier in the arts. Where we used to have Bertrand Russell and George Orwell, we now have David Brooks and Paul Krugman. Even Maureen Dowd has a column (how I have no idea). I like Brooks and Krugman, but they’re no Russell or Orwell.
Contrast that with blogs, where the conversation is a thousand times richer than what you’d find in most mainstream magazines and newspapers. To be sure, there are still great publications such as The Financial Times, The Economistand Harpers, but most mainstream publications are pretty devoid of any serious insight. In my opinion, blogs have saved the public discourse on politics and economics.
There’s a theory out there called Condorcet’s theorem. Roughly speaking, it says that if you take a group of people who each have over a 50% chance of being correct, they will as a collective make a better decision than any single person. I’d like to think that this is happening with menswear blogs. Allowing the public to decide which voices are worthy of listening to, instead of just giving that power to one editor, seems to have allowed better content to emerge. This is one instance with rapid democratization has been incredibly successful.
MS Excel spreadsheet of counterfeit logos accidentally spits out MS Excel function as the logo.
pith: Very shortly we will see a clothing label called =if(Labeljrichmanesq: this is absolutely fascinatingBroken counterfeit jeans in Chatuchak market, Krung Thep, Thailand. The label reads: =if(Label=”“,”RMA”,”?”) This is an Excel function. It also would work in Microsoft Access. The factory is using Excel or Access to store all the logos for the different jeans they make and then print them onto leather. This is what happens when there is a bug in their software. (by bsdfm, via Rhizome)
This is beautiful.
