Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Shapes of Things to Come


Not a Toy, published by Pictoplasma is a book that explores ways the human body and its adorning clothes can be transformed into grotesque hybrids by mixing mascots, comic characters, the circus, the zoo, and commercial gadgets.  The result is a fantasy of return to that funny and disturbing mental process when the baby, itself a body in transition, first encountered and identified with objects, toys, and animals. "Avant-garde fashion, like art, is increasingly becoming a reflection of the repressed tensions and discrepancies that mark contemporary culture."  Imagine the mind transformed into a stomach in which all junk mail, every photographic image ever seen, all purchases made and rejected, remain undigested but randomly re-figures the body.   Mr. Wells, Help! "The body of mankind is one single organism."



Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Well Worn Art, A Tale of two Worlds

Valerie Hooe
Valerie Hooe founded her company, Well Worn Art, in 2006, having seen this, done that in New York.  Now she travels the world and visits the Bookstore [she often spends an hour or two with us] looking for those aesthetic elements of the past/vintage, that still speak in present fashion.  An "eclectic kind of gal" style for her is uniqueness, one of a kind flair, which will be worn by women with an independent spirit eager to "grab the best things life has to give."