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  • PUNK-Chaos to Couture

    PUNK-Chaos to Couture

    In 1982, I was a teen in New York, attending Stuyvesant High School and as preppy as preppy can be. I was a pink button-down oxford Ralph Lauren shirt with khaki pants wearing Bass shoes prepster.

    Then I heard the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” and everything changed. Punk music was cool, but to me punk clothes and style were cooler!

    Was I true punk ?  Nah… I was never going to drop out of school especially since I wanted to go to Brown or MIT when I graduated. But, I got an unconstructed olive green blazer, ripped out the shoulder pads and covered the lapels in safety pins. Wearing it made me feel like a superhero. I wore it everyday for almost a year. I had learned the transformative powers of fashion.

    Starting this month, the stunning exhibition PUNK-Chaos to Couture at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores the influence of punk style on high fashion.

    Focusing on the relationship between the punk concept of ‘do-it-yourself’ and the couture concept
    of ‘made-to-measure,’the exhibition will be organized around the materials, techniques, and embellishments associated with the anti-establishment style.Presented as an immersive multimedia, multisensory experience, the clothes will be animated with period music videos and soundscaping audio techniques.

    In this video, curator Andrew Bolton walks us through the galleries:

    If you have the chance, make sure you see it before it closes August 14th.

  • House Vision 2013 Tokyo Exhibition

    House Vision 2013 Tokyo Exhibition

    Back in March for almost three full weeks, the House Vision 2013 Tokyo Exhibition , a groundbreaking collection of seminars, installations and an expo, organized by Kenya Hara and Tsuchiya Sadao took place. House Vision seeks to introduce the current Japanese urban lifestyle and discuss how traditional Japanese design elements can be pulled into its future.

    About HOUSE VISION from HOUSE VISION on Vimeo.

    In the U.S. our connection to our homes and urban lifestyle is based on the “melting pot”, we take in influences from everywhere.  However, in Japan, the relationship between home design and  preservation of traditional Japanese culture is strongly connected.

    A few things about this exhibition were very interesting to me. First, is the idea of  how “housing literacy” needs to be taught to the now maturing Japanese urban dwellers with emphasis on the “proper lifestyle” that is more a fit with their mature identity and thus will bring in happiness to their lives. This “identity” anticipates children moving out of the home and parents giving up having too much stuff. The mature Japanese urban dweller should be able to live in a smaller space that includes multipurpose appliances in a traditional Japanese living space design format.

    This is totally different from the latest trend in the U.S. of generations families living together, as demonstrated by Lennar’s very successful NextGen homes. In a Nextgen home, a complete suite that includes a separate kitchen and living space can be added to the home.

    In a way, our homes can be said to be ‘curated” by us; after all, we fill our homes with items that we hope represents our aesthetics and beliefs. Is it right to have all that stripped from you at a certain age because it is the “proper” way to live  is a question that comes up when listening to the House Vision discussions.

     

  • Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse

    Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse

    The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse has just set a world speed record for open top production car at the Volkswagen testing grounds in Ehra-Lessein.  Hopefully, this will put to rest some of the controversy started by Hennessey when they asserted that the Hennessey Venom GT was the fastest production car in the world by pointing out the Bugatti did not have a speed limiter.  This technicality in turn caused Guinness to strip Bugatti of the title of world’s fastest production car which they had held since 2010.

    As the Bugatti site states:

    It is now official: the world’s fastest roadster is a Bugatti. Following the spectacular record-breaking drive of the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport in 2010, during which the coupé achieved a top speed of 431.072 km/h, witnessed and officially confirmed by the renowned independent German organisation for Technical Inspection and Certification TÜV, an impressive speed that remains unparalleled to this day, Bugatti has added yet another milestone. The open top version of the 1,200 PS sports car, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse, now also officially holds the world record. In the presence of TÜV, the open-top super car reached a maximum speed of 408.84 km/h (254.04 mph) at the Volkswagen Group’s proving grounds in Ehra-Lessien, making it the fastest open-top production sports car in the world

    It looks like the gauntlet has been thrown down, so for us sports cars enthusiasts, it looks like 2013 will be a great year !

    Check out this great video on the Bugatti from the Wall Street Journal here :

  • Thick As A Brick Installation – Milan

    Thick As A Brick Installation – Milan

    Curated by Maria Christina Didero, the Thick As A Brick Installation – Milan at Giò Marconi  shows a collection of over 100 Mousse Publications within brick structures designed by Kuehn Malvezzi and fabricated by Petersen Tegel Brickworks.

    As  the Mousse Magazine site states:

    Thick As A Brick goes back to simple, manual practices and ancestral materials – such as the brick used here as a narrative device – and to ancient, basic ideas in order to rediscover their potential: projected into the future, such renewed values serve as a groundwork to literally build a new encyclopedia of balance, strength, and positivity. In this project, these basic materials are replaced by books, iconic tools for spreading knowledge down through the centuries. The bricks produced by the Danish company Petersen serve as the base from which culture symbolically evolves, and the modular pieces in the show, conceived by the Kuehn Malvezzi architectural studio, open a door to the hope of continued growth. The link between bricks and the books presented here by Mousse – a publisher at the cutting edge of the international scene – reinforce this idea of a solidity built on knowledge, a concept embodied by material nature of the object-book itself.

    If you are in Milan, check out this installation it before it closes !

    GIÒ MARCONI, Milan

    April 9 – April 14, 2013

    Opening: Thursday April 11, 6:30–9:30 pm

    More pics after the jump… (more…)

  • 2013 W Hotels Designers of the Future Award Winners

    2013 W Hotels Designers of the Future Award Winners

    Design Miami/Basel and W Hotels have announced the winners of the 2013 W Hotel Designers of the Future Award.  This award recognizes emerging designers and studios that are pioneering the field of design.

    The 2013 W Hotels Designers of the Future Award winners are: Seung-Yong Song from Korea , Canadian-American Jon Stam  and Bethan Laura Wood from the U.K. !

    These winners were selected by an international jury that included Jan Boelen of the Design Academy Eindhoven and Z33; Tony Chambers of Wallpaper* Magazine; Aric Chen of M+ Museum Hong Kong; Alexis Georgacopoulos of Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL); Marianne Goebl of Design Miami/; Benjamin Loyauté, author, curator and journalist; and Mike Tiedy of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, parent company of W Hotels Worldwide.

    For 2013, the theme of “Making Connections” challenged aspirants to go on-site to a specific new or renovating W Hotel to create a space that captured the vibrant ambiance of the location and synced it with the experience of the international visitor whether for business or pleasure.

    Congrats to this year’s winners !

    You can read more about Design Miami/ and the W Hotels after the jump…

    (more…)

  • 40 Years of Cell Phones

    40 Years of Cell Phones

    This year marks the 40 years of cell phones! I hate to admit it, but I do have a few old Nokia phones lurking around my house.

    Check out this cool video from the Wall Street Journal on “A Short History of the Cell Phone on its 40th Birthday”:

  • The #Coolness: Girls Who Code

    While you would think that the technology industry would be more fair and less prone than other industries to gender issues, the truth is that it is not.  A good illustration of this is the firing last month of a female developer after she confronted a group of men making sexist comments at a programming conference. In this case, the maxim “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” was way over-applied.

    Thankfully, the gender gap is being closed by the good works of fabulous organizations like Girls Who Code, founded by Reshma Saujani.  Their mission statement says it all: “Girls Who Code works to educate, inspire, and equip young women with the skills and resources to pursue academic and career opportunities in computing fields.”

    Girls Who Code has just started taking applications for their 2013 Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program in San Francisco,  San Jose, Davis, Detroit and New York City.  I wish there had been programs like this when I was growing up.

    Here is a great video on this amazing organization via Fast Company:

    You can listen here to NPR’s The Takeaway‘s piece done on “Closing the Gender Gap in Tech” that highlights the Girls Who Code organization here: