Regardez: Peu de Cheveux frais

He's got the look. Cool hair anyway.

Regardez: Minimalism, Sartorially Speaking

 

So this past weekend I was in Savannah visiting some of my old school friends.I brought my laptop along with me but spent my time out and about so no blogging was done. I did have a chance to pick up a few magazines, this editorial was in Complex the side that featured Michelle Trachtenberg. Brooklyn electronic rap sensation Theophilus London worked the looks for all they were worth. I was struck by the richness of the colors, I haven't seen colour this viberent since Jil Sander's Spring 2007 collection. That collection was sharp, precise, and pinging with hard, bright color. An acid-yellow shirt with a short, navy duchesse satin skirt. A skinny-legged black pantsuit with a cropped, high-fastened, one-button jacket, showing a flash of emerald shirt at the neck. An inky-blue (better known as Yves Kline Blue) elliptical dress with a drape in the back. Walking minimalism, for me it does not get any better!! So this editorial is the perfect style direction going into spring.

Histoire noire de Clebrate

" But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit?
The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high-and low.

For example: in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.D., there hangs a Quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt making, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling. Below this quilt I saw a note that says it was made by 'an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago.'

If we could locate this 'anonymous' black woman from Alabama, She would turn out to be one of our grandmothers-an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use."

~Alice Walker~

Regardez: Muscling In on the Front Row

By:Cathy Horyn

IF designers are not terribly, terribly worried that Snooki and Pauly D will show up and spoil their party — don’t be alarmed, dears, it’s only Fashion Week — it may be because they have excellent gatekeepers like Billy Daley of Michael Kors.
“I just said no to three celebrities who wanted to come to Michael’s show,” said Mr. Daley, the communications director for Mr. Kors, identifying the type as “very obscure and up-and-coming actresses who may or may not be the next Blake Lively.” Their Hollywood publicists had requested seats to the show, which is on Wednesday.
Of course. You don’t think all those fabulous stars turn up at fashion shows to pay homage to the designer, any more than Nicole Polizzi, known as Snooki, the loud, devouring star of the controversial MTV reality show “Jersey Shore,” is dying to put on one of Mr. Kors’s cute twin sets.
Media reports last week that cast members of the Italian-American beach-house rumpus might be seated with the style mavens at New York Fashion Week produced groans of “Oh, no, not them.”
The reports turned out to be pure ballyhoo, the work of a talent agent for several cast members who said that a number of fashion houses had extended invitations. Later, Emily Yeomans, a communications manager at MTV, said that none of the cast had plans to attend shows, nor had any designers invited them.
The industry’s recoil from a threatened invasion of bad taste exposed anxieties over the changing role of the front row, once the exclusive domain of influential editors, retailers, socialites and celebrity friends of the designer. That fortress was breached long ago, about the time Paris Hilton and her Chihuahua showed up. More recently, bloggers and Real Housewives of New York have plunked themselves down. But fashion still wants its front row to look glamorous, and it obsessively monitors the seepage of image.
Like the Super Bowl and the Sundance Film Festival, Fashion Week, which began Thursday, has become such a media event — beyond showing the next season’s clothes, beyond cozy parties for industry insiders — that the front row has assumed a crazy significance in terms of drawing publicity.
In flush times, fashion houses spend small fortunes in money and time trying to get at least one big catch for their front row: a celebrity whose picture qualifies as an endorsement and will be seen everywhere. Agencies exist just for that purpose, though many designers use Hollywood stylists as go-betweens, and still others, like Marc Jacobs and Narciso Rodriguez, have personal relationships with celebrities — Mr. Jacobs with Victoria Beckham, Mr. Rodriguez with Claire Danes.
“It’s such an underworld in a way, the celebrity wrangling,” said Vanessa Bismarck, a New York-based fashion publicist whose firm, BPCM, represents labels like Preen and Azzaro. She was referring to the deals, trades and exclusive contracts — first-class airfare, hotel rooms for friends, per diems, designer boutique shopping sprees — that miraculously clear a path to the front row for a busy actress. This is especially the case in Paris and Milan, where budgets and appetites for celebrities are that much bigger.
“Their managers and agents realize fashion shows are a money-making opportunity,” said Roger Padilha, whose firm MAO Public Relations represents a number of fashion brands. “If you see an A-list star at a show, that’s because she’s making $100,000 on the deal.”
Yet this season, because of the economy and a general souring on celebrity, many designers are taking a budget approach to V.I.P.’s, paying only for a guest’s outfit for the show and maybe grooming and car-service expenses. A publicist for several New York designers said his clients had been approached by actresses in Los Angeles willing to grace their front rows — provided travel expenses were covered. The designers said no thanks. “Nobody has the money,” the publicist said.
Last season, Ms. Lively, a Gossip Girl, was considered a good get. This week, according to Mr. Padilha, “Sandra Bullock is the get. Even more so than Anne Hathaway.” (Ms. Hathaway, a clotheshorse, made her most recent front-row appearance in January at Giorgio Armani’s haute couture show in Paris. Ms. Bullock is a favorite to win an Oscar for her role in “The Blind Side.”)
The actress Laura Linney is expected to attend Mr. Kors’s show, Mr. Daley said. Also on guest lists, according to KCD, a publicity and show production company, are the actress Zoe Saldana, the singer Maxwell and Alexa Chung, the former MTV host who has her own namesake bag from Mulberry.
Maybe the blunt mercantile aspects of celebrity — your frock for my recognizable face — have turned off the taste-makers. On Wednesday, Mr. Jacobs’s business partner, Robert Duffy, told Style.com that no celebrities were being invited to the designer’s show on Monday, a reversal of years of packing rappers in with famous artists and actors. Mr. Duffy said that “the celebrity thing” had become a bore.
It used to be fun. It used to be glamorous. Anyone who went to a Gianni Versace show in the early ’90s can recall seeing Sting, Sylvester Stallone and Tupac Shakur. Mr. Versace didn’t seek to supplant the editors and socialites, but by displaying an unaffected love for pop culture and pop idolatry he made the role of the front-row celebrity seem new and urgent.
“Some people had a hard time understanding why we invited Prince,” recalled Emanuela Schmeidler, a publicist who worked with Versace for more than 20 years. “Who was this guy?”
Now, like a worn rut in a road, the whole business of celebrity seems so well established as to be old and familiar, and in fashion, hopelessly preoccupied with the new, that makes it worthy of contempt.
Stars, too, find a front-row appearance less of a thrill. They see little reason to put up with the swarming photographers and inane questions from pouncing gossip reporters. Some celebrities strive for loftier images. “Angelina Jolie doesn’t go to the shows,” Ms. Schmeidler observed. “She goes to Haiti.”
Which brings us back to Snooki and the “Jersey Shore” bunch.
Inevitably they will be invited to a fashion show, just as surely as Lindsay Lohan, who only a few years ago was a desired “get” for the front row, will be told by someone’s publicist that there is no place for her now. She’s old business.
“Oh, you know you’re going to see them at something,” Mr. Kors said of the “Jersey” cast. The fashion world scorns anything — camp taste, bad hair — until suddenly it’s in its interest to approve them, and then the idea is genius. Who can say when that will happen? But it will help if “Jersey Shore,” which has just been renewed for a second season, continues to be a hit.
Snooki, through her representatives, was not available for comment.

Tim Blanks reflects on Mcqueen

The news that Alexander McQueen has killed himself is particularly devastating because it always felt to me like he’d be the last man standing. He was restless, but so pragmatic with it I assumed he had what it took to endure the extreme situations he placed himself in. He was also an arch romantic with a pessimistic streak. It produced some of the most beautiful, shocking images in the history of fashion, but it’s a state of mind that can lead to endless disappointments. The death of McQueen’s mother last week would have validated his pessimism. It would undoubtedly have taken away his most vital support. It’s awful to imagine him trying—and failing—to cope, and one can only hope that, if he was looking for peace, he found it. For everyone left behind, there will eventually be consolation, however scant right now, in a body of work whose power will never die.

—Tim Blanks

les jeunes meurent: Alexander Mcqueen

The British designer Alexander McQueen provokes emotional reactions—extreme ones. One season, his audience sheds tears of frustration over his inhospitable choice of venue; the next, tears of joy over the haunting beauty of both the clothes and the staging. Though he's close to 40, the controversial McQueen is hardly ever written about without the phrase "enfant terrible" following his name. And yet, despite the perennial bad-boy tag, he's won all the big awards given out in London and was even honored by Queen Elizabeth as a Commander of the British Empire in 2003.

Theatricality is the name of McQueen's game—from romantic, corseted silhouettes to gobsmacking gowns created from feathers or, say, fresh flowers—but his grand gestures are backed up by incredible attention to detail and tailoring. He was born in 1969 in the East End, the son of a London cabbie. At 16, he began work as an apprentice cutter on Savile Row, where, according to a story too delicious not to be believed, he graffitied obscenities into the linings of suits intended for the Prince of Wales. After a brief sojourn in Milan cutting patterns for Romeo Gigli, McQueen enrolled at Central Saint Martins. In 1994, his graduate collection caught the eye of the late fashion stylist Isabella Blow, who purchased it for $7,750 and became his champion. The following year, McQueen cemented his rising-star status with the hackle-raising Highland Rape collection, which featured tattered dresses, bloodstained models, and his notoriously low-cut "bumster" pants. In 1996, Givenchy came calling, installing McQueen as chief designer. But his reign there was a tumultuous one: It ended in 2001, a few months after the Gucci Group bought a 51 percent stake in his own label. McQueen has since expanded into menswear, accessories, fragrance, and eyewear, and he has launched a second line, McQ. His Spring 2008 show was a tribute to his mentor, Issy Blow, who died in May 2007.

McQueen was found hanged in his flat in Central London on the 11th February 2010. Paramedics were called but he was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said his death is not being treated as suspicious. A spokeswoman for Mr McQueen said: "Mr McQueen was found dead this morning at his home. We're devastated and I hope you understand that out of respect to his family and his colleagues we're not going to be making any further statement."

A true master of fashion is gone now. Rest in Peace Alexander Mcqueen.
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Regardez: Sartorially Speaking

Célébrez l'histoire noire: Song for Assata par Common

(Common)
In the Spirit of God.
In the Spirit of the Ancestors.
In the Spirit of the Black Panthers.
In the Spirit of Assata Shakur.
We make this movement towards freedom
for all those who have been oppressed, and all those in the struggle.
Yeah. yo, check it-

There were lights and sirens, gunshots firin
Cover your eyes as I describe a scene so violent
Seemed like a bad dream, she laid in a blood puddle
Blood bubbled in her chest, cold air brushed against open flesh
No room to rest, pain consumed each breath
Shot twice wit her hands up
Police questioned but shot before she answered
One Panther lost his life, the other ran for his
Scandalous the police were as they kicked and beat her
Comprehension she was beyond, tryna hold on
to life. She thought she'd live with no arm
that's what it felt like, got to the hospital, eyes held tight
They moved her room to room-she could tell by the light
Handcuffed tight to the bed, through her skin it bit
Put guns to her head, every word she got hit
"Who shot the trooper?" they asked her
Put mace in her eyes, threatened to blast her
Her mind raced till things got still
Opened her eyes, realized she's next to her best friend who got killed
She got chills, they told her: that's where she would be next
Hurt mixed wit anger-survival was a reflex
They lied and denied visits from her lawyer
But she was building as they tried to destroy her
If it wasn't for this german nurse they woulda served her worse
I read this sister's story, knew that it deserved a verse
I wonder what would happen if that woulda been me?
All this shit so we could be free, so dig it, y'all.

(Cee-lo vocals)
I'm thinkin' of Assata, yes.
Listen to my Love, Assata, yes.
Your Power and Pride is beautiful.
May God bless your Soul.

(Common)
It seemed like the middle of the night when the law awakened her
Walkie-talkies cracklin, I see 'em when they takin her
Though she kinda knew,
What made the ride peaceful was the trees and the sky was blue
Arrived to Middlesex Prison about six in the morning
Uneasy as they pushed her to the second floor in
a cell, one cot, no window, facing hell.
Put in the basement of a prison wit all males
And the smell of misery, seatless toilets and centipedes
She'd exercise, (paint?,) and begin to read
Two years in the hole. Her soul grew weak
Away from people so long she forgot how to speak
She discovered freedom is a unspoken sound
And a wall is a wall and can be broken down
Found peace in the Panthers she went on trial with
One of the brothers she had a child with
The foulness they would feed her, hoping she's lose her seed
Held tight, knowing the fight would live through this seed
In need of a doctor, from her stomach she'd bleed
Out of this situation a girl was conceived
Separated from her, left to mother the Revolution
And lactated to attack hate
Cause federal and state was built for a Black fate
Her emptiness was filled with beatings and court dates
They fabricated cases, hoping one would stick
And said she robbed places that didn't exist
In the midst of threats on her life and being caged with Aryan whites
Through dark halls of hate she carried the light
I wonder what would happen if that would have been me?
All of this shit so we could be free.
Yeah, I often wonder what would happen if that would have been me?
All of this shit so we could be free, so dig it, people-

(Cee-Lo)
I'm thinkin' of Assata, yeah.
Listen to my Love, Assata, yeah.
Your Power and Pride, so Beautiful...
May God bless your Soul.
Oooh.

(Common)
Yo
From North Carolina her grandmother would bring
news that she had had a dream
Her dreams always meant what they needed them to mean
What made them real was the action in between
She dreamt that Assata was free in they old house in Queens
The fact that they always came true was the thing
Assata, had been convicted of a murder she could not have done
Medical evidence shown she couldna shot the gun
It's time for her to see the sun from the other side
Time for her daughter to be by her mother's side
Time for this Beautiful Woman to become soft again
Time for her to breathe, and not be told how or when
She untangled the chains and escaped the pain
How she broke out of prison I could never explain
And even to this day they try to get to her
but she's free with political asylum in Cuba.

(Cee-Lo vocals)
I'm thinkin' of Assata, yeah.
Listen to my Love, Assata, yeah.
We're molded from the same mud, Assata.
We share the same Blood, Assata, yeah.
Your Power and Pride, so Beautiful...
May God bless your Soul.
Your Power and Pride, so Beautiful...
May God bless your Soul.
Oooh.

(Assata)
Freedom! You askin me about freedom. Askin me about freedom?
I'll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn't
than about what it is, cause I've never been free.
I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.
Uhh, the way I see it, freedom is-- is the right to grow, is the right to
blossom.
Freedom is -is the right to be yourself, to be who you are,
to be who you wanna be, to do what you wanna do. (fade out)

Click the link to hear the song.
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Regardez: Bad Apples

Aside from the touch screen, what can the iPad do that a phone and a laptop can't? I don't understand why they won't develop one powerful device that can do EVERYTHING. Camera, phone, laptop, iPod, and now, the iPad? Can you imagine carrying all that mess in your bag? 16-64 Gig memory and no camera or phone functions? And you have to pay more extra for 3G capabilities? Typical Apple behavior to nickle and dime features because they know suckers will buy them every time they release a new version.

Regardez: Movie Posters

If you have seen this movie then this poster will make perfect sense. It's perfectly clever I wish I designed it.

Regardez: tres frais on tumblr

Bonjour Amis,

I am so excited to let you know that tres frais is now available on tumblr. The tumblr site is similarly styled but as far as content, it is totally different. It will feature remarkable found images , music and videos. The major content can still be found on the blogsopt address. The tumblr site will be updated just as often as the home site. Please follow via the RSS feed leave comments and let me know what you think as my blogs horizon broaden.

Jusqu'à la prochaine fois,
najee

http://tresfraisnajee.tumblr.com/

Regardez et Ecoutez- Mos Def: Casa Bey

This video is about the lyrics so watch the words form as they flow past his lips.