The Correspondents: Dapper electro-swing merchants The Correspondents are back with a new video, Cheating With You. I saw this band many a time back when I lived in London and not only do they give great live performances, the frontman's costumes are a consistent delight. Usually it's some variation on the slimline neo-Edwardian suit, but I also recall hankering after his splendid green peacock-feather-patterned catsuit (not everyone can pull that off). Engravings of preposterous 18th-century wigs (via The Oncoming Hope): Waiter, there's a hair in my satire! Because who doesn't love 18th century wigs?
The non-season known as "Pre-Fall" has begun, apparently: With Pringle Of Scotland, who for once have produced some clothes that I rather like. Ordinarily I don't have much interest in Pringle because I'm not a knitwear person (sorry) and the silhouettes aren't to my taste. Yes, sometimes even the endorsement of Tilda Swinton, Ultimate Human (to give her her full title) is not enough to seduce me. However, some of the pre-fall 2012 stuff is rather nice:
A new black-and-white silent film, set in the jazz age: The Artist (via The Oncoming Hope).
Couture-style redesigns of X-Men costumes from artblog Project: Rooftop. (I love it when people link me to this kind of thing. Water-colour paintings of X-Men: YOU KNOW ME SO WELL.)
This film looks STUNNING: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. The visual beauty of The Fall in what is described as "Sherlock Holmes meets Crouching Tiger", a Chinese steampunk story involving... well, I can't really tell aside from lots of awesome action sequences, a female martial-arts expert, some kind of super-sleuth, a dastardly plot, and dubstep music. So, basically... what is not to love?
Another thing sent to me on Twitter: Jugend und Tolheit, a 1913 film about a woman who crossdresses and joins the army in order to be close to the man she loves. Ffff, I want to see this!
Model-Morphosis. Photos of models with a slider to see their faces before and after catwalk makeup has been applied. I was actually surprised to see how little makeup they often seem to be wearing!
For as long as I remember, my local arthouse cinema has been running what appears to be a never-ending LGBT film festival of dismal-looking movies about oppressed teenagers or Eastern Europeans declaiming tearfully at one another before suffering a tragicand/or dissatisfying end. But today I noticed an ad for this movie:
Stories about stylish and dangerous-looking people in suits are an immediate draw for me, but on top of this I found out that Gigola...
Is set in 1960s Paris.
It about a suit-wearing lesbian gigolo (I'm not 100% clear on the logistics of this, but I hope that it involves at least some implausible Shakespearean gender-bending).
Mostly takes place in what looks like the cabaret bar from Victor/Victoria, although admittedly most cabaret bars look the same.
Contains some kind of gambling/gun-crime related subplot.
Includes hand-kissing. (How can something that seems so suave in fiction almost always be so creepy in real life? Tragic.)
Guys, Gigola will have to be pretty awful for me not to love it. I tend not to like fiction about sex-work, since it's usually either weirdly romanticised (WTF, Pretty Woman?) or depressing, but this movie looks just unrealistic enough to brilliant. Although let's face it, I'm mainly in it for the costumes.
Fashions of AD 2000 (from the perspective of the 1930s)
"... another designer goes so far as to believe that skirts will disappear entirely!"
I love retrofuturistic shit. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? I have seen it three times (conservative estimate). But you know what? This isn't even retrofuturistic. Instead of some artist's impression of New York where all the dogs are wearing spacesuits and the nuclear family travels to work in a streamlined monorail car, these fashion predictions are actually kind of accurate. Shoes with cantilevered heels? Hello, Lady Gaga! I saw a girl wearing a highstreet version of these yesterday!
Pop-up fashion show, 1950s style
Finally. A way to keep my fringe fresh and bouncy when I go swimming with the gals! The solution to bikini season.
If everyone still wore things like this to the beach, not only would they probably look better, but there would also be way fewer of those crazy-making "get your summer bikini body in just three weeks of intense juice-fasting and daily sit-ups!" articles. I'm not saying everyone should be more modest or anything like that... but I'd definitely prefer to wear one of those bathing costumes from the beginning of the video to a string bikini.
Maybe not all this elasticated girdle stuff, though. :/
