Despite the bank holiday we are still kicking off this week’s guest poster on a Monday so that you don’t miss out on your usual weekly fix. Expect bags of colour and excitement this week as we are pleased to welcome Fred Butler to the It’s Nice That team to kick May off. I’m certain if you don’t know her work already, by the end of the week you’ll be a fan, so without further adieu…
Lucien Freud, Kate Moss, Joaquin Phoenix…it reads like that list of dream dinner party guests you have to reel out in awkward “getting to know you" games. But it’s more than that: this all-star list is just a sliver of the cast that creative director David James has worked with over the years. David has been creative director at AnOther Magazine for the past decade, creating iconic images with photographers including Craig McDean, Willy Vanderperre and Nick Knight. If you missed out on getting the mags IRL, don’t fret: today sees the launch of Everything that Matters – an online retrospective of David’s editorial work. It makes for a lovely little scroll, even if it does make us feel pretty old to think that the time that’s passed since 2005 is retrospective-worthy.
Large-scale luxury brands tend to be fairly guarded when it comes to their extensive archives, guarding them under the technological equivalent of those two cheeky goblins in Labyrinth. Not Prada. Recognising the truth in the notion that sharing is caring, the house has just published the whole of its archive online, in a carefully tailored site which makes it entertaining AND easily navigable.
If like me you were regularly dragged off to your local Olan Mills photographic studio as a child to have family portraits taken of you and your siblings looking unusually clean and composed in front of a dappled background, you might be similarly drawn to Mosaert’s new lookbook. Carefully constructed like the most stylish family pics, they feature a whole bunch of models immaculately robed in Mosaert’s bright new collection, and there’s something innately compelling about them.
If you thought that writing a Printed Pages feature about KENZO – in which I delve in glorious technicolour detail into the brand’s past collaborations over the course of a 12-page spread – would stop my perpetual blathering on about them, then I’m afraid you thought wrong. It’s a new season, meaning a whole new visual campaign, and as ever I’m incapable of reining in my admiration for the masterminds behind KENZO’s art direction.
We’ve a certain bias towards French creative studio Bonsoir Paris. We’ve collaborated with them on projects in Milan, been stunned by their window displays at Selfridges at the start of the year and then they shot the cover of the Autumn issue of Printed Pages, firmly cementing our love for them forever more. It’s their restless experimentation that makes them so interesting; for a group of three guys their ability to push materials in new and exciting directions is unparalleled and they bring fresh perspectives to materials we’ve seen used a thousand times before.
I have to confess that the name 02gb didn’t ring any bells for me, but it turns out the photographic duo, which is made up of Max von Gumppenberg and Patrick Bienert, is a pretty big fish on the German fashion scene. Looking through their portfolio this comes as no surprise; they’ve worked for the likes of Hussein Chalayan, Kostas Murkudis, and shot numerous times for Vogue. It’s their lookbook for couture master Valentino that we were seduced by however.
In the summer of 1979, several legs boarded a ferry travelling from Dieppe to Plymouth. However unlike most other legs making the journey, these didn’t have any feeling in their toes.
If you’re yet to be acquainted with the weird and wonderful world of Toiletpaper then allow us to introduce you. Artist Maurizio Cattelan, photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari and art director Micol Talso got together some years back to create images which distilled their passion for the bizarre, the grotesque, the darkly humorous and the sensual. From this came Toiletpaper Magazine, and before long their work had spread across the fashion and art industries like wildfire, picking up the attention of a number of big-time brands along the way. No surprises there.
Fashion editorials aren’t always a straightforward point-and-shoot affair any more, very often now when we look through a designer’s clothes – be it in a specially created lookbook or a spread in a magazine – we want a story, visual impact and pizazz. This demand has resulted in many brilliant amalgamations of ideas between designers, photographers and stylists and I for one am all for this type of collaboration.
Most of merely dabble in the world of fashion and recycle what little knowledge we have by saying phrases like “yah that’s so hot right now.” But recycle no more as SHOWstudio will be your fashion education forevermore.
Only good things can happen when designer Leta Sobierajski gets together with online platform Print All Over Me (PAOM) to create this fantastic series of images for their website and lookbook.
As the reigning royal family of fashion culture, i-D has built up an impressive roster of friends – designers, models, photographers, and magazine editors have been affiliated since Terry Jones first set up shop in 1980 – and they’re all happy to lend a hand when called on. So when fellow online daily resource Business of Fashion announced its index of the 500 most influential figures working in the fashion industry today, I guess it only made sense to cast them all together in a film with a suitably flamboyant brief.
