Ben Banks

Just an update: Tomorrow I'm leaving for Utah for 4 weeks to work as Costume Designer on the indie film BEN BANKS. Everyone involved in the movie is unbelievably supportive and positive and inspiring. Tons of amazing brands have rallied to be involved in the film: Alternative Apparel, RVCA, Atwater, Converse, Volcom, Toddland, Zuriick, and my dear friend Lillian Crowe Jewelry. I'll be posting pics and updates and probably more landscape snaps than you'd ever care to see here. My associate Jazzi McGilbert will be doing the same on her (far-more-amazing) blog.

Cosmic Cement

I haven't updated in an unforgivable amount of time. Please forgive me and blame it on the visual overload from the past six months. And a really slow macbook...

Moving forward I have a lot of really exciting things to share--new designers, amazing images, and lots of behind-the-scenes for a movie I'm working on in August. I'm going to try to find some way to facilitate uploading images to the blog. And of course make up for the last few months.

First though, look at these pieces by NOGA WINOKUR. She is a jewelry designer based out of Tel Aviv and the loveliest person i've ever encountered. She finds crushed cement pieces around her neighborhood and weaves these outrageously intricate pieces--both delicate and crazy hardcore, her work just blows me away. I didn't get a shot of it but the necklace is actually grounded by a metal car parts. The earrings are mounds of cement with mirrored porcelain. And just wait til i get a shot of the bracelet with shards of glass...

X Ray Vision

Nina Ricci, Avenue Montaigne

Film Strip

Miuccia Advice

"I'm tired of being so sweet," declared Miuccia Prada. "We women should go back to strength—and the sober side. Stop trying to appeal to everyone, and go out into the world."
[Fall 2006 Collection]
My favorite pair of shoes--towering and comfortable--a gift from the gorgeous and lovely Kalina, is from this collection. I look back on this season now, with a newfound reverence--no gimmicks, no elaborate references, just beautiful elements of a wardrobe. A woman who takes herself seriously, unwaveringly, is the most powerful thing--and something others love to trample on. Stop pleasing others. Beautiful parkas, knits, furs, and pencil flannel trousers help!

Kalina went out into the world, or rather, she left New York City for another part of the world. She doesn't realize that this was very brave and inspiring to me. This post is a highly-tangential-inter-continental vote of confidence that Kalina is going to come out on top. And a lot of the trick to growing up is that you can't sweet-talk your way there--that it's hard and isolating and a hotbed for self-doubt. I'm about to head to Los Angeles, and whether it works out or doesn't, it's important to remember to be your own thing and know it. Such a moody wardrobe for L.A. huh? Well I have to represent New York, in all of it's layering, blackgreytanbrownbeigenudeputtyeggshell glory.

Flounce= Flutter and Pounce

Photographer:Alex John Beck
Model: Skye Stracke

After this shoot, and my breakthrough- "I can now die happy and fulfilled since I have fondled an entire rack of vintage 70s YSL safari suits"-moment in the Exquisite Costume basement, it got me thinking about my quest for certain vintage items that I have dedicated my life to (yes, high aspirations for this School of Foreign Service graduate). These include (but are not limited to): 1920s Velvet dresses, a YSL Le Smoking jacket, Victorian army boots, the perfect striped navy breton top, Argentinian riding boots, a '70s trench, a scarab ring, and a buttery leather briefcase with a messenger strap. I'm sure there's more--everytime i see a french film, another gets added to the list. What are your vintage quests?

Band Meeting. Present.

Just got back from a shoot this past weekend. Lot's of music (inside-outside speakers). Exquisite Costume is my favorite vintage store in the city and they let me pull from their basement. It was just color, air, feel and lots of other moody fabrics from decades past. Here's some b-roll, as usual.


(this was purchased by me at cost $30. It's from the 1930's and all torn up, in the best way)

Magic Eye

I'm of the belief that there's two camps of high design in fashion.* One's reductionistic--the stripping of all froth and excess down to the elements: wearable, effortless, beautiful, impeccable construction. Just think- Yves Saint Laurent, Raf Simmons, Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Margiela--and of course their offshoots (the perfect tee shirt crew). They strip style down to its most basic, beautiful, and exalted function: living.

Then there's the other approach, what I've read described as "Arch Style."** The mad geniuses like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Rei Kawakubo, Philip Treacy, Thierry Mugler, the couturiers. Fashion is to be pushed, molded, obliterated, and reconceived. Style is not for living (or necessarily wearing), it's about life.

Of course, designers can weave in and out of both camps, and the usual, if not always fulfilled expectation is that they can do both. The emphasis of late, since the recession, has been on the former camp. But i have to say that despite my personal preference for the simple, Alexander McQueen's collection was the apex of Paris, so beautiful, inventive, and forward thinking was it. The kaleidoscopic reptillian prints, the shoes that looked, in Cathy Horyn's words, like "the hulls of ships," and the narrative of evolution: the interplay between nature and technology.






















These are images from Style.com but do yourself a favor and go to the NYTimes gallery, where you can focus in. Simply mindblowing.

* By all means, if you disagree with how i've divided the above, or have other names to throw in the mix, please please do!

**Articulated by photographer Tom Hines in a Dossier article

Lush Color

It's odd when you find yourself drawn to polar opposite agendas. My palette is rigidly muted. My favorite colors are black, grey, ecru, putty, greige, nude, and every such variant. But i find myself often collecting and crushing on images with the opposite, lush, candy colored, impossible-to-resist ROYGBIV ethos. I keep them these tacked up on boards and glue-stuck in little notebooks. Here are a few. Could there be anything more childishly obvious and heart-achingly lustworthy? I think it's instinctually appealing. Like bees to a buttercup.








(from Luxirare)




(from The Selby--Christina and Swaim Hutson)





(still from the first film in the Trois Coulers series, Bleu by Krzysztof Kieślowski.)


(photographer Alex John Beck)




(Le Ballon Rouge, 1956 and Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge, 2008)


(Laduree macaroons)


(sharpies!)


(best of beauty!)

Colors arranged like this are often cues for my own shutter as you can tell my a lot of the photography i've featured here. You need only look! But here's an example:



The blog MY NYC IN COLOR also has so many divine photographs of new york alive with color, along this vein, you could spend hours feeling breathless over it. I couldn't even start to post all of the images i like, and it would ruin it to isolate them from her insightful writing, and discerning edits.

Too Miuccia II

I swear this show wrapped just a bit ago. But so beautiful, dreamy, smooth--her fabrics and the way she uses them--with so much integrity. We should all treat our clothes so well.

“Beach and antiquity — high and low — it is all the same,” Prada told Suzy Menkes backstage. “It is supposed to be an ironic take — sometimes nostalgic, for a contemporary take on antiquity for those who don’t understand the beauty of the past.”