Nicola Tyson

An artist I'm obsessed with right now: Nicola Tyson. I fell in love with one picture in February's Art in America and off I went. I'm especially into her pencil drawings; something about the textures and both delicate and hard lines, plus the amazing abstract/anthropomorphic shapes is just fascinating!

    

Chanel Spring 2013 RTW: Euro-aero-chic

A few years ago one of my obsessions was Style.com and browsing runway fashion. (I had another blog at the time but I tried to do too much and the fashion part it kinda tanked but it was fun to look at and save a little archive on my laptop!) I got an idea of what the big designers were and a sense of their style, and accumulated my own favorites. It's been invaluable to developing my personal style, knowledge of the fashion world, and the "feel" and history of different styles and trends in fashion.

Coco Chanel and her fashion legacy will have to be an entire other post. Anyway, I normally wouldn't consider myself such a "Chanel girl" or even a mainstream "fancy lady" chic sort of person. But I gravitated to this collection immediately in a way I almost didn't for most of the other tweed-n-pearls sort of Chanel collections!  One of my favorite things, obviously, was the presentation with the giant wind turbines and solar panel runway.

J-Street

It all began with ...

I was looking up 18th century fashion for my doll-clothes-making at my library, and stumbled across this book in the fashion section, and fell in love with it. I skirted around various Japanese subculture styles (decora, gothic lolita, mori etc) in my online art circles, but now I am actually delving into them and they are fascinating! Tokyo street style is famous for being colorful, creative and eclectic, but when you really study it, it's a complex synthesis of many subcultures and specific style sets (kei) that each person puts together in unique ways. I enjoy working within strict guidelines just for fun when I'm making art, so the way these guys and gals are so creative within these style frameworks are so interesting to me.

I'm also fascinated by how Tokyo and other large cities have this vibrant street style culture, so that young people dress and go out in certain neighborhoods and possibly get photographed by professionals for magazines specifically devoted to street style. It's almost an institution there, unlike US or European street style, which seems to be a more informal thing individual people snap with their smartphones and post on personal blogs. Maybe they were inspired by Japan's street fashion magazines and are trying to bring something like it to Western culture? I think it would be amazing to put together your look, go out on the town, and expect you could be photographed for a professional style magazine! (I already do two of those things!)

A collection of things that inspire me from the Tokyo streets lately! Images have a watermark to show where they came from; if not, they are linked to where I got them.

Mori Kei

I grew up in a little town on the edge of the woods, so perhaps it's no surprise that I came to rest on mori kei (forest style) as one of my favorite Japanese subculture styles. I don't so much wear it myself as gravitate to the world of it, but I did buy a tan-hued floral tank the other day, so I think it is creeping into my own style!

brilliant bones

Checked this out of the library last week

"In 1578 word spread of the discovery in Rome of a network of underground tombs containing the remains of thousands of early Christian martyrs. Many skeletons of these supposed saints were soon removed from their resting place and sent to Catholic churches in Europe to replace holy relics that were destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. Once in place the skeletons were then carefully reassembled and enshrined in costumes, wigs, jewels, crowns, gold lace, and armor as a physical reminder of the heavenly treasures that awaited in the afterlife.

Over the past few years photographer Paul Koudounaris who specializes in the photography of skeletal reliquaries, mummies and other aspects of death, managed to gain unprecedented access to various religious institutions to photograph many of these beautifully macabre shrines for the first time in history." (text via)

Am now completely obsessed with bones covered in jewels and gold. One of the peculiarities of the middle ages is now really inspiring gothic (in the sense of morbid) roccoco art phenomenon.