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…
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.
London-based brand Heresy presented its new collection this week in the guise of its Autumn Winter 2014 lookbook. Entitled Forming, the collection is a quiet amalgamation of illustration and traditional workwear, combining illustrated elements and hand-drawn type with carefully crafted structural staples made from loop-back jersey and felted wool.
A brief serving suggestion before you lean back and scroll through this spectacular new work from Josh Reim: put on the Twin Peaks theme tune and sniff some tennis balls. The last time we featured Josh’s work it was to rave about his extraordinarily unique look book for his Autumn/Winter 14 collection which he had shot with the help of his best pal and collaborator, Jetro Emilcar. In his third collection the 18-tear-old ex-skateboarder and designer from Montreal has channelled the cold, dark vibe of the leisure activities of the wealthy.
This week marks the halfway point of Fashion Month, AKA the queen of all trade shows, with Spring Summer 2015 collections being shown in New York, London, Milan and Paris respectively from mid-September to mid-October. Exciting though it is, rummaging through the masses of fashion coverage the internet has to offer can sometimes feel like drowning in an ocean of show reports and final walks, so here’s our rundown of the five best alternative places to see the best of the collections this season.
