In the fashion publications business for 20 years, we have seen in the modest setting of the bookstore the people and ideas which inspire the art form of the 21st century. 1 (800) 347-2589
Aneesha DuBois has quite a following. Inspired by an attitude turned philosophy, she believes in "breaking all the rules: fashion is: what I like." Asked if she is influenced by where she plans to go and who she expects to meet, she answers, "of course." After developing a reputation for what goes with what she is seen here at the Fashion Project Cafe working on developing her own line.
A place to visit that recaptures those first happy memories of how accessible the world is; a place that makes you feel powerful because you find subjects to pursue; a serious place where the unknown, the surprising beckon; a place to be with others who feel a similar longing; a place that teaches a respect for learning and a humility before the generosity of authors, who for often modest rewards, share; a place that makes you feel, "I belong here." Bookstores rock!
Rin Tanaka, whose series of books My Freedamn and Heller's Cafe has visually chronicled the poetry of American everyday life by publishing the clothes of every-day life, visits the Fashion Bookstore to sign and deliver his latest book, Heller's Cafe Vol. 2.
Michelle Jonas buys a half a dozen Vogue magazines from different countries. A designer with a past that comfortably fits into her present: by 16 she had lived in seven different countries, thought each of them home, worked in New York for Harper's Bazaar, then Vogue Magazine where Ralph Lauren met her and asked her to join his company because he thought she was "the epitome of the Ralph Girl." After an acting career in Hollywood, she is now the owner and designer of a travelwear company with styles "classically original, playfully confident, and comfortably sexy."
With bodyguard, cameraman, and assistant, Christian Audigier arrives. The celebrity designer-entrepreneur whose tattoo driven Ed Hardy brand so successfully projected the showmanship and aesthetic of the P. T. Barnum era, is about to launch something new. In fourteen minutes he gathers thirty choice books but pauses long enough to observe a space missing on our gallery wall of famous designers. "I'll send you a photograph to put me up there," he says.
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."
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."
Aneesha DuBois has quite a following. Inspired by an attitude turned philosophy, she believes in "breaking all the rules: fashion is: what I like." Asked if she is influenced by where she plans to go and who she expects to meet, she answers, "of course." After developing a reputation for what goes with what she is seen here at the Fashion Project Cafe working on developing her own line.
With bodyguard, cameraman, and assistant, Christian Audigier arrives. The celebrity designer-entrepreneur whose tattoo driven Ed Hardy brand so successfully projected the showmanship and aesthetic of the P. T. Barnum era, is about to launch something new. In fourteen minutes he gathers thirty choice books but pauses long enough to observe a space missing on our gallery wall of famous designers. "I'll send you a photograph to put me up there," he says.
