Fornarina

Fornarina is an Italian fashion brand that I have had my eye on for the past few years. I would describe the clothes as delightfully tacky. Very delightfully. Cutesy, sexy,and just plain fun. Their Spring/Summer 2009 collection combines tasty sweets, flowy chiffon, quirky graphics, simple staples, hearts, and a little tough edge. I wish I could get my hands on a few of these adorable pieces.

My favorite elements include:

1. Sophie Bag

2. Kerstin Necklace

3. Mash T-shirt & Mayo shorts,

4. Cook top

5. Dada dress

6. Oven Jacket

7. Beiki T-shirt

Their choice of Lindsey Lohan as the face of Fornarina though, I am not so supportive of. She is anything but cute and sexy. The girl had such potential when we saw her in Mean Girls but since then... I just rather not see her as the face of anything.

Fornarina's fashion show seems to be a combination of fashion, art, music, and performance called Urban Beauty Show. The following pictures are from this event which happened on May 12th 2009. It looks like a beautiful show.

To be a kid again

Sitting by the fire with a hot cup of chai spice blacktea (someone once told me "chai" just means tea) stressed as all get out on a Thursday evening. Actually that "fire" is just a fan propelled electric space heater, but hey our last gas bill was only $40, and believe me Chicago is cold in January. Thrifty.

Nearing the end of winter quarter in school and that means a lot due. Stats tests, sales talk in professional selling, Persuasive speech in effective speaking, and a nice big business plan and presentation in global marketing.

Tomorrow morning I will be presenting my Art lovers speech to a class of Chicago 5th graders for my effective speaking class final.

This involves a speech on an artist and an art project for the kids.

I will be having the kids create charm necklaces based on jeweler Gijs Bakker's Rose Necklace..

Rose Necklace: Gijs Bakker

My adaptation for 5th graders (I made this one)

It is patterns cut from magazines and origami paper in simple shapes (circles, squares, triangles) glued to a strip of white poster board (glossy side up!) holes are punched at either end and shapes are cut out leaving some space around the edges. The charms are then tied together with thin string and a long string is attached at either end, long enough to slip over the head. Cute, right? I'm not so good with kids so I'm a bit nervous. I need to keep them occupied for an hour.

Side note: today I realized the big difference to going to school for fashion in Chicago and going to school for fashion in New York. In New York they are interning at fashion magazines during their freshmen year. In Chicago we are happy if we get to dress models for a fashion show once every other quarter.

Central Saint Martins

Just after finishing that post. I did not type Japanese street style into the yahoo search bar but rather Style.com. I decided I'd check up just a bit on London Fashion Week. My eyes were drawn to the Central Saint Martins thumbnail ( A man in a structural leather something or other). So, I clicked. To my surprise I found myself in a slide show of 179 looks. The Central Saint Martins is not one designer but a school of fashion design to the line includes student work. There was just so much happening. The collection of student lines showcased so many different designs but some how they all kind of came together.It went all over the place starting with sporty, simple, structural, and drappy looks and then exploding into interesting uses of volume, form, material, and subject. Just before this explosion there was a series of dresses that looked like 4 or 5 dresses pieced together. I was unsure of my feelings about these looks but I feel that they tied the all of the designs together in that they didn't go together. there was strange sexuality, elegance, and some down right quirky (try sheer dresses with cartoonish animals layered over stripes.) I loved how every ones work came together and I didn't see a weak piece in the show.

A few of my favorites follow.

college in Chicago= the best part of your life you never get to enjoy.

I wanna be a better blogger.
I wanna be a better fashion follower.
Honestly I never have any idea what is going on with designers. Whats new? Who's new?

Going to school in Chicago is the best part of your life... that you never have time to enjoy.
Everything in my life right now is school school school, work, work, work.
In fact as we speak I am supposed to be writing an informative speech. I think I plan on doing my speech on Japanese street fashion. So we will see how that goes.
It's amazing how easy the first half of my college education was and now I am seeing that it's really tough.

In addition to going to school and working I will soon be starting an internship with the online fashion magazine Second City Style. I will be using Photoshop to do photo layouts for the articles and blog. Luckily I can do this from home for the most part, which will be convenient with my busy life.

I am still working on my camera sitch. My dad is seeing what he can do about my broken camera and I am currently borrowing my boyfriends but do not have the cord to upload the pictures. So basically what I'm saying is this is a picture less post.
Better words later.

I think 6 foot rabbits might really exist

I really liked this editorial in the March 2009 Harper's Bazaar "Street Chic"

Not a big fan of the fashions but I thought the concept was cute and liked the photography. I liked that the fashions kind of took a second to the big rabbit and the setting. It is so Harvey... or I guess Donnie Darko, but Harvey is better.

Personally, I think that rabbits have a place in fashion.

Jewelry

I was just looking at these photos because I am currently working on putting my portfolio together, so I thought I would share some of my old jewelry designs here.
Though I would love to more than anything, I haven't worked with metals since high school since the materials are outrageously expensive. So if anyone wants to invest some money in me...

In past Februarys

I'm a little fool for love in fashion. Whimsy and Romance really get me. I should pick up this months Teen Vogue as they tend to really capture that whimsy in their February issues but honestly, I'm still caught up on last years. These pictures from the February 2008 Teen Vogue keep popping up in my memory so I fished the issue out of the stack on a bookshelf in my bedroom. The styling is awesome and the images are just perfect.
I am in love with the little baby pink bustier dress, the bow tie, the polka dot gloves, the white tights, and most of all the big red heart on her head. It's all cutesy perfection.

I love the yellow and pink, a personal favorite color combo. Love the hiked up dress, the gloves with rings and bracelets over them, and his shoes.

This picture is just adorable and her hat is gorge. Tulle is among my favorite things on earth. So her bright blue petticoat gets my love.

I have this white petticoat and have been desperately seeking the perfect swingy simple skirt to go over it for the past year now because of this photo. It's been a fruitless search.

So the moral of this post: Minette loves love, loves hearts, loves tulle, loves you.

Happy valentines week and happy 6 month to me and the boy!

Power Serges and Typewriters

Half the power in our apartment is out. No kitchen, living room or bathroom. I guess the microwave was too much on top of two space heaters and the TV. So, Mindi never got hot tea and we never got to finish watching La Vie En Rose. We have no idea where our fuse box is. Looked all over the apartment, and even in a creepy basement with a million doors. Power Serge.

Wednesday though some wishes came true. In my last post we talked about typewriters. What I didn't share is the fact that there is one I had been looking at for five months. Little sky blue electric typewriter just sitting at the Ark Thrift Store down the street. Every time I would go in there I'd take a look at it and smile but never took it home with me. At work Wednesday all I could think of was that typewriter. After work Mindi and I walked down there. Did some other shopping around. I bought some gloves to turn into cool driving gloves, a Betsy Johnson scarf for $3, some pretty sketchy flowered sheets, and then of course as you should have already guessed... the little blue typewriter. I dropped it on the snowy sidewalk during the walk home, but it works just fine. Little did I know though, someone had plans to buy me a very special typewiter. I ruined that plan I guess and now I will always wonder what the one Michael would have bought me would have been like. My first typewriter note...

On another sad note, I would have more pictures of my purchases but my camera seems to be broken. All the pictures I take are turning out tinted blueish green. It's very disappointing because that camera is one of my most prized possessions and I had been getting really excited about doing some new fashion photo shoots.

colected and coveted

Old things get to me. Old things trigger an incredible feeling for me. Old things create deep pleasure. Old things feel like treasures. Old things in collection, even better. I'm kind of a collector. I just like things that feel precious. Even plastic dinosaurs from thrift stores are precious to me. Treasures that once belonged to another person, and then they didn't want them or need them anymore. Or somehow they got lost to that person. When I find these things in little shops I am exhilarated in the strangest way. I guess vintage clothing is an obvious collection of mine. Just dresses and such that used to belong in another person's everyday wardrobe that are now a part of mine. That's a cool feeling to me. Clothing with history. Old things have history beyond my life.

So those vintage clothes hang in my closet and those plastic dinos sit on my cupboards.

I guess I think these old things are beautiful and these old things are my sense of fashion. They are kind of the reason I love fashion. I love how everything becomes old but anything can become new. Fashion to me is about composition and old things, and collections remind me of that.

Stacks of hat boxes. preferable vintage hat boxes. My collection only consists of six lovely boxes. It's a collection I hope to enhance in the future. The boxes stacked one on another, different sizes, colors, patterns, latches, strings, and lids.The art and the randomness of the composed pile.

And then one more thing, lovely old thing. My current obsession, my current desire. Typewriters. I want one. So pure and real. It doesn't include cool things like blogs and Photoshop, and facebook and mystylediary like this yellow Dell laptop does but sometimes, who needs that all? Just keys and words, the sound of your words, and the immediate gratification of the paper copy. All complete on a marvelous little machine.

RoyalQuiet DeLuxe

Hermes Baby/Rocket 1960s Smith-Corona Silent-Super 1950s

Typewriters from mytypewriter.com

Rescued tresures.

Every once in a while I pull on this Statue of Liberty centennial shirt from 1986. It's color is faded and its cotton has thinned in a way I don't think today's shirts can even wear out. I personally have been wearing this shirt since about 5 years old. But hell, I wasn't even alive in the year 1986. It is believed that this shirt originally belonged to my cousin Jeff when he was about 6. This shirt in no way really fits my grown body. It hugs my armpits and doesn't reach past my belly button. But every time I throw it on over a beater and pair it with some jeans I have this wonderful nostalgic feeling. Not only does this one shirt pull me back to childhood in its own special way but it connects me with the four other people I know have worn this shirt before me. I am the last child in the family. I am the baby. I am where the hand-me-down's stopped.

Yet not all the hand-me-downs stayed in my closet. There are boxes of childhood threads in the basement at my grandparent's. Many of these clothes were worn by myself, my two sisters and my three cousins. Some of these clothes were only mine.

Christmas day has always been when my family gets together and has our Hanukkah celebration. Really just a lime for us to all get together and eat latkas and brisket. So here i was with all my family including my two sisters and three cousins with whom i shared my childhood wardrobe. I wondered away from the social scene and down to the musty basement on a search for my moms old ice skates to bring back to Chicago with me.

I didn't find any skates but when I saw the plastic boxes filled with the colorful gems of childhood I couldn't help but go in for a dig. As I sifted through the little pieces, the baby onesies, adorable dresses, and even a hooded sweater that had my name knitted all over it, I found a few things that stuck out. These select items didn't look so small they struck me as wearable. I tried these three buried treasures on. Not only did they bring about that same nostalgia but they seemed as if they would really have a place in my current wardrobe. I closed up the boxes taking these items with me, a black and white printed skirt with a hot pink elastic waist band, a colorful printed kimono, and a black plether limited too jacket.







I ran upstairs, still wearing the skirt over my jeans. Upstairs my cousin and my aunt were sitting at the kitchen table looking at pictures. They saw my skirt and minutes later called me over to show me a picture in which my older sister at about age 4 was wearing the very same skirt that was right there on my 18 year old body. I guess if the skirt meant for a 4 year old fits, wear it.