utorak, 4. prosinca 2012.

Ulična moda Cassette Playa & Cindy Sherman & ganguro




Groteskno, parodijsko, hiper-materijalističko stiliziranje - od Cindy Sherman do modnog brenda Cassette Playa. Odjeća koja oponaša YouTube; narativno-histerične majice koje brbljaju o tebi brže od tvojih riječi. "Karakter" osobe i "identitet" danas se ne grade unutrašnjim, psihološkim "razvojem", nego kameleonski - vanjskom stilizacijom, dizajnom, šminkom, konstruiranim (glumljenim) slikama, imaginarnim reflektorima... koji se svaki čas mogu promijeniti. Identitet je neonska reklama za vještice, demone i klaune u nama. Biti zrela osoba jednostavno je prevladano.



 [Cassette+Playa+CL+jacket.jpg]

Cindy Sherman: From Pop Art to the New Web


Carri Munden, the designer behind the avant garde streetwear brand Cassette Playa, writes a weekly blog for Vice Style and she recently talked about visiting New York City and seeing the Cindy Sherman Retrospective at MOMA.  Munden discussed at length the impact Sherman has had not only on her own perspective on culture, but also the arts in general.  So much of Sherman’s work is concerned with the idea of persona and a chameleonic identity that can be completely changed and altered through makeup, fashion, and specific stylistic cues.  Sherman’s use of photography has anticipated so many different cultural trends and movements, including the ever-changing culture of the online world.

Munden’s blog sets up an almost linear evolution of both Sherman’s work over the years and how its influence has predicted different facets of the arts.  From the ganguro trend of Japanese street culture where girls tan their skin and dye their hair blonde as an exaggerated version of common hip hop tropes, to Ryan Trecartin’s absurdly decorated, but oddly contemporary caricatures in his films that embody post-human persona and identity transformations.  Even Tumblr culture stars like Molly Soda and bon vivant Lady Gaga are also referenced in retaining at least some her influence.  Whether or not it’s purposeful they definitely both owe something to Sherman’s aesthetic, where both Tumblr and Gaga have a distinct focus on transformation, cultural identity, and the ability to utilize culture to create and elaborate on an infinite number of personas.

Munden’s own aesthetic for her label Cassette Playa also completely embodies Sherman’s idea of modern day dress up and subverting fashion and design culture to create any persona you can conjure up.  Cassette Playa’s clothing is very often a complex pastiche of some of the best in vintage and one-off fashion trends completely altered into a one of a kind style that simultaneously encompasses familiar trends of the past while evoking an entirely alien futuristic feel.
 
One of the most prevalent examples of Sherman’s influence really lies in the world of Tumblr culture and online personas.  So much of her vantage point and aesthetic is found in the creation of characters through makeup, fashion, and design which seamlessly translates to the current world of Social Media.  Sherman creates these photographs to comment on what encompasses identity and how easily we can be manipulated through how culture is presented, which is exactly what’s become commonplace on Tumbler and Social Media in general.  As Munden puts it Sherman basically invented the GPOY, or “Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself”, except her photos are purposefully imitating cultural norms and satirizing their aesthetic and expectations, while the current version achieves the same effect without actually realizing it’s become a parody of itself. - lunavega.net/

Carri Munden <3s city="city" ii="ii" new="new" pt.="pt." viii:="viii:" york="york">


By Carri Munden


Not Carri in 20 years time.
Last week in NYC, I went to see the Cindy Sherman show at the MOMA. Since she basically invented the GPOY and pioneered deliberately grotesque and parodic hyper-materialistic styling and the way a lot of the people really into fashion dress, seeing the show was a big deal for me.


I've been into Cindy since I was a teenager making awkward feminist art at high school—unfortunately my work was banned from the end of year show because it included tampons and boobs, LOL. Her work is an exploration of identity, which appealed to me as a confused teen—I couldn't work out if I was part-chav, part-metaller, total geek, or just an outsider. It also explains her crucial relevance to the tumblr generation of image-savvy internet curators and anyone who has ever dressed up and posted a photo on their myspace.



Cindy's work is also about storytelling, building characters, the stories implied in the image. She often uses sets and lighting, but most purely through costume, hair, and make-up.


These obvious connections to fashion editorial and advertising are highlighted by her collaborations with fashion brands—first Comme des Garçons in the 90s, and more recently, Balenciaga and magazines including Pop andVogue.

Cindy Sherman has also collaborated with MAC Cosmetics.

Sherman styles herself in all her work and uses prosthetics and costume to completely change her identity. In her more recent work, she uses a combination of the latter and digital post-production. This Rhizome article explores the transition in her processes.



It's as if Cindy was predicting the ganguro—



—or people like Ryan Trecartin. When I think about Cindy, the ganguro, and Ryan's work, I think psychedelic-cyborg-tween-soap-opera-video-art-web-2.0 to infinity. Ryan explodes rather than explores identity. His videos are visions of an addictive and terrifyingly accelerated nation of supersaturated consumption and hysterical communication. His characters are both alien and familiar. He is my favorite artist.


The female internet artists like Alis Pelleschi and Grace Miceli also following in Cindy's footsteps.



Sherman is not afraid of the grotesque, and like Trecartin, her work parodies our culture's obsession with image. Performance artist Orlan took this to the extreme by permanently changing her body through plastic surgery in the 80s. Her work is her transformation. Orlan was a premonition of a culture of extreme body modification and plastic surgery #fails.



And definitely an inspiration to Gaga and her Monsters.



Finally... Without Cindy Sherman Molly Soda would blow your mind?

 
Photoshopped Sherman


Rachel Wetzler

A friend recently recounted an anecdote about teaching Cindy Sherman’s work to her undergraduate students. She was in the middle of her lecture, explaining Sherman’s elaborate, chameleonic process of casting herself in various roles in her photographs, when one student interrupted, insisting that the photograph projected on screen must have been Photoshopped, that it was impossible that the woman in this image was the same person as in the one before. The others nodded in agreement. Faced with this chorus of disbelief, my friend checked her notes: the image on her slide was from the mid-1980s, several years before Photoshop’s commercial release. The process of creating it was, indeed, analog: the photograph was shot on film, and Sherman’s apparent physical mutation in it the result of costuming and skillfully applied makeup rather than digital manipulation. However, the students’ responses raise interesting questions about how we might conceive of her work in the wake of the digital, particularly since her most recent work has, in fact, made use of such software.

For those of us who first encountered Sherman’s photographs before “Photoshopped” became part of the vernacular, her work carries rather different connotations: it is less about a process of editing or altering the image than one of altering the self through a kind of private performance staged for the camera. Sherman transforms herself, in each image, to the point that she is not only no longer wholly recognizable, but also no longer present as “Cindy Sherman” at all, instead appearing as a litany of characters and stock types. As she noted in an interview with filmmaker John Waters in the catalogue of her current MoMA retrospective, “Before I ever photographed it, I was playing around in costumes and dressing up as characters in my bedroom.”
It is precisely this aspect of dressing up—of adopting and embodying different types—around which much of the critical reception of her work has revolved over the past decades. Moreover, she has maintained a rigorously private studio practice throughout her career, rarely, if ever, working with assistants: Sherman is not only photographer and model, but also hairdresser, costumer, makeup artist, and prop stylist. She performs in front of the camera, but also behind it, adopting multiple roles and functions over the course of creating each photograph. When presented in serial form, the photographs reveal the meticulousness of her process, with each successive image calling further attention to the laborious transformation involved in creating the one preceding it.



Yet over the past decade, Sherman has increasingly embraced the digital, resulting most recently in works that do, in fact, achieve their transformative effects through Photoshop rather than prosthetics, makeup, and careful staging. Her experimentation with working digitally began with the “Clown” series (2003–04), for which she added lurid, patterned backgrounds to images initially shot on slide film, and culminates in the large-scale untitled wall murals she began in 2010, one of which lines the entrance to her MoMA exhibition. In them, her bizarre characters are inserted into a pixelated black-and-white landscape, where they hover flatly against the crudely rendered trees. Moreover, she wears no makeup, transforming her facial features exclusively through digital means, suggesting that Sherman has steadily shifted the orientation of her practice from performance to post-production.

In addition to the murals, the MoMA show includes Untitled #512 (2011), part of a series commissioned by POP magazine, which depicts a figure set against a trompe l’oeil backdrop of a craggy landscape digitally altered to resemble paint on canvas. While these works are overtly manipulated, the use of digital means is more subtle in others: the “Society Portraits” (2008), which cast the artist as aging doyennes, appear less obviously edited than uncannily off. Up close, signs of digital intervention become more apparent: rather than photographing herself in situ, Sherman adds the backgrounds after-the-fact, resulting in awkward, claustrophobic compositions. Wrinkles, pores, and other signs of age are enhanced, making them unabashedly visible.
In one sense, this is a logical step: on a pragmatic level, working digitally offers a quicker, easier way to achieve the same effects—as Sherman noted in a New York Times interview, “it’s horrifying how easy it is to make changes” using Photoshop. It also opens up new possibilities, allowing her to experiment with techniques previously unavailable to her, such as inserting multiple figures into the same image, or placing them in unfamiliar settings. However, for an artist whose work has long been tied to her process, the implications of such a shift seem significant.
Sherman’s photographs have always been ontologically complex, challenging our ability to properly categorize them: they are photographs of Cindy Sherman that are also, simultaneously, not photographs of Cindy Sherman, portraits of the artist in which she is both present and absent. From the beginning of her career, her photographs have insisted upon the constructed nature of images, their potential to manipulate and lie to the viewer, yet they have been anchored by the fact that, on some level, everything in them has actually occurred—she is not a clown, nor an old Hollywood vamp, nor a Renaissance Madonna, but she has dressed like one. The illusion is never seamless: we see incongruous details (a shutter cord in her hand, an obvious prosthesis) that call attention to the fictitious construction of the scenario depicted, but nevertheless, such details also serve to highlight the fact that Sherman has actually constructed it in real life; they are not just images, but documents of her activity.

The digitally altered photographs, too, call attention to their fabrication, but the terms have changed: they lack the implicit tension that underpins the earlier works, between Cindy Sherman as artist who constructs the tableau and Cindy Sherman as model who effaces herself in the image; between the knowledge that the scene is staged and yet, that it has also taken place. Part of what has always been so captivating about her photographs is exactly what made my friend’s student insist that they were faked: no matter how convincing her costume, her staging, her makeup, we know that the same woman lies underneath it.

What to make of this turn toward the digital? In spite of her embrace of software, Sherman’s work is still made for the gallery rather than the screen. Just as the “Film Stills” mimic the old promotional stills produced by movie studios not only through style, but also print size and paper type, the “Society Portraits” echo the gaudy, overlarge scale of a wealthy patroness’s portrait, resembling the sort of thing that might hang in one of her subjects’ living rooms. Even the murals, though they escape the frame, are resolutely oriented in the material, quite literally bound to a physical space.

At first, I couldn’t help but feel that by exchanging the elaborate masquerade for Photoshop, Sherman was, somehow, cheating. But perhaps this new direction is fitting: though they have often been read in terms of performance, Sherman’s photographs have always been, at their core, images about images: about the way images function, how they are created, trafficked, and coded, the ways in which they manufacture and disseminate meaning. Now that Photoshop has become the norm, we know better than to have faith in their fidelity—we assume that what we see is mediated, altered, and edited, regardless of whether it is an Instagrammed iPhone snapshot or an airbrushed celebrity on the cover of a magazine.

Throughout her career, Sherman has been singularly attuned to the cultural role of images, and her digital works, too, capture and comment on the way we understand photographs today—not as documents of reality, but as raw materials that can be endlessly refashioned.


Još Cassette Playa:







Još malo otkačene mode:

London Menswear Spring/Summer 2013: Chaps, Dandies, and Transients

This past week kicked off the first ever London Menswear catwalk shows and it was the perfect summation of the wide range and eccentricity of English fashion.  Inspirations were present from across the board, from stately modern takes on English Prep, to an avant garde androgynous pastiche straight from the animated gifs of Tumblr.  One of the most impressive elements of the collections was the extremely varied take on what comprises modern English fashion.  As Patrick Grant, who showed his E Tautz collection, noted in a New York Times piece about the shows, designers have been exploring every facet of the English aesthetic instead of sticking to the molds they’ve become accustomed to: “The great thing about British fashion is that it is going in every direction,” Mr. Grant said. “In the past, people pigeonholed us as either dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists or streetwear designers, and they didn’t imagine anything in between. I think we have been a bit braver.”
English fashion has a long tradition of elaborate experimental designs that have been at the forefront of innovation while simultaneously changing what the mainstream perceives as wearable.  Vivienne Westwood almost single-handedly ushered in the punk aesthetic while contemporary designers like Alexander Mcqueen continually pushed the boundaries and artistic decadence of modern fashion, and their influence was consistently present in a number of the menswear collections.  This upcoming generation of English designers has really shown they’re creating some of the most otherworldly and forward thinking collections in modern fashion.

Design team Meadham Kirchoff presented their collection in an alternative venue comprised of a two room installation full of dingy mattresses, dollar store linens, and the leftover debris from a night of excess.  It was an amazing blend of a Harmony Korine-esque post-rave squalor with a neon and floral color palette accented by dozens of dead roses and squatter fuselage.  The look was an androgynous post apocalyptic gypsy dreamscape that combined Eastern tunics with American vintage sportswear, day glo Nikes, and multi-hued pajama bottoms and sloppy boy shorts.  At least some part of the aesthetic was also reminiscent of the current Tumblr hyper-pastiche looks floating around the web, eliciting many URL in IRL moments.  It was one of the most jaw dropping but also strangely organic collections this season, which completely shattered any semblance of conformity, as noted in this quote by half of the design team Benjamin Kirchhoff: “There is no idea of personal freedom or personal style anymore.  It’s something people have lost in London and around the world.”

Sibling’s designs comprised another audacious collection that perfectly exemplified the tenacious experimentation of English designers.  It was a futuristic take on hip hop tropes and tailored sportswear with bizarre headpieces and facemasks that looked like mutated q-tips or streamlined jousting masks.  It was a decidedly white palette with tons of gold and gaudy accents with intricate knitwear designs and pants that very often resembled baseball uniforms cut below the knee.  A lot of the designs reminded me of the Hood By Air homo thug designs that blend sleek urban sportswear with hyper-stylized minimalist touches that automatically invert any overtly masculine cues.  There were even bling emblazoned baseball caps matched with a severely plunging neckline hoodie and exposed full body tattoos that were both subtlety threatening and a tad bit decadent twee.  Overall it was such an interesting mix and match aesthetic that seems like a harbinger for every rapper’s wardrobe in maybe 2030 or so.
These are some of our other favorite collections from this season’s London Menswear: Fashion East, MAN – Astrid Andersen, Katie Eary, and JW Anderson. -
lunavega.net/news/

File:Yamanba cropped.jpg

Ganguro is an alternative fashion trend of blonde, pink or silver hair and tanned skin among young Japanese women that peaked in popularity around the year 2000. The Shibuya and Ikebukuro districts of Tokyo were the centers of ganguro fashion. In contradiction to the traditional Japanese concept of beauty by having pale skin, dark hair, and neutral makeup tones, rebellious youth tanned their skin, bleached their hair, and used colourful makeup. There is a connection to Japanese folklore of ghosts and demons, who are depicted with a similar appearance and often displayed in kabuki and noh costumes. This connection to folklore is further noted in the ganguro offshoot style called yamanba, named after a famous story about a mountain witch. The term ganguro is a portmanteau of the Japanese word gangan-kuro, meaning extremely dark, and guro, meaning grotesque, and the word ganguro can also be translated as "blackface".
Ganguro appeared as a new fashion style in Japan in the early 1990s and was prevalent mostly among young women. In ganguro fashion, a deep tan is combined with hair dyed in shades of orange to blonde, or a silver grey known as "high bleached". Black ink is used as eye-liner and white concealer is used as lipstick and eyeshadow. False eyelashes, plastic facial gems, and pearl powder are often added to this. Platform shoes and brightly coloured outfits complete the ganguro look. Also typical of ganguro fashion are tie-dyed sarongs, miniskirts, stickers on the face, and many bracelets, rings, and necklaces.
Ganguro falls into the larger subculture of gyaru (from English "gal"), a slang term used for various groups of young women, usually referring to overly childish women. Researchers in the field of Japanese studies believe that ganguro is a form of revenge against traditional Japanese society due to resentment of neglect, isolation, and constraint of Japanese society. This is their attempt at individuality, self-expression, and freedom, in open defiance of school standards and regulations.[4] Fashion magazines like Egg and Ageha have had a direct influence on the ganguro. Other popular ganguro magazines include Popteen and Ego System. The ganguro culture is often linked with para para, a Japanese dance style. However, most para para dancers are not ganguro, and most ganguro are not para para dancers, though there are many who are ganguro or gal and dance para para.
One of the most famous early ganguro girls was known as Buriteri, nicknamed after the black soy sauce used to flavor yellowtail fish in teriyaki cooking. Egg made her a star by frequently featuring her in its pages during the height of the ganguro craze. After modelling and advertising for the Shibuya tanning salon "Blacky", social pressure and negative press convinced Buriteri to retire from the ganguro lifestyle

Yamanba and manba


ManbaYamanba and manba are styles which developed from Ganguro. Old school Yamanba and Manba (particularly known as 2004 Manba) featured dark tans and white lipstick, pastel eye make-up, tiny metallic or glittery adhesives below the eyes, brightly coloured circle lenses, plastic dayglo-coloured clothing, and incongruous accessories, such as Hawaiian leis. Stickers on the face died out shortly after 2004 and, for a while, Yamanba died. Manba is now more extreme, and hair is often multicoloured and usually synthetic. 2008's Manba has seen a darker tan, and no facial stickers. Hair is usually neon/bright colours, with pink being a favourite. Wool ("dreadlocks"), extensions and clips are worn to make hair appear longer. Clothing remains the same, although leis are worn less frequently now.[2]
Manba and Yamanba are not to be confused. Yamanba have white make-up only above the eye, while Manba has makeup below the eye also.[citation needed] Stuffed animals, bracelets, bells and hibiscuses are worn.[citation needed] The male equivalent is called a "Center guy" (センター街, Sentāgai?),[citation needed] a pun on the name of a pedestrian shopping street near Shibuya Station in Tokyo where Yamanba and center guys are often seen.
- wikipedia



What is a Ganguro, Yamanba, Manba, and Centre Guy? a little 101 on this Japanese Street Fashion


by Jessica Ruthless Fatale

From my pinterest account and looking at some paul mitchell photos, they had a ganguro girl. Something i know about since i'm heavily influenced and in love with Japanese Street Fashion. Whomever wrote the negative comment on P.M.'s pinterest about ganguro girls, ridiculing their fashion and creative nature- i decided to educate those who are unknown to them. Instead of ignorance getting in the way of understanding a different culture. A lot of trends come from Japan and work their way around. The world of Ganguro is rather interesting, and dressing up is always fun to do.


What is Ganguro?
Well Ganguro in literal translations means black face girls. Ganguro girls is a form of gyaru- which translates into gal. It is a unique and a very rad japanese street fashion. In ganguro fashion, a deep tan is combined with hair decolorized/lightened in shades of orange to blonde, or a silver grey known as “high bleached”. Black ink is used as eye-liner and white concealer is used as lipstick and eyeshadow. False eyelashes, plastic facial gems, and pearl powder are often added to this. Platform shoes and brightly-colored outfits complete the ganguro look. Also typical of ganguro fashion are tie-dyed sarongs, miniskirts, stickers on the face, and lots of bracelets, rings, and necklaces. This type of style is rebellious, and often goes against the traditional asian culture social beauty ideal image of fair skin and dark hair.

(Subtle Ganguro girls above and below is more closer to a gyaru style where the girls have a more elegant appearance)



Yamanba and manba developed from ganguro and are terms often used to describe extreme practitioners of ganguro fashion. Old school Yamanba and Manba; featured dark tans and white lipstick, pastel eye make-up, tiny metallic or glittery adhesives below the eyes, brightly-colored circle lenses, plastic dayglo-colored clothing, and incongruous accessories, such as Hawaiian Leis (Often the alba rosa brand which is popular among ganguros).
For a period of time stickers were no longer popular after 2004, and Yamanba had a date with death for a time being. Manba is now more extreme, and hair is often multicoloured, and usually synthetic. 2008′s Manba has seen a darker tan, and no facial decoration (stickers).


Hair is usually neon/bright colors, with pink being a favorite. Wool (“dreadlocks”) extensions and clips are worn to make hair appear longer.

Clothing remains the same, although Leis are worn less frequently now. Manba and Yamanba are not to be confused. Yamanba has white make-up only above the eye.

While Manba has makeup below the eye also. Stuffed animals, bracelets, bells and hibiscuses are worn. The male equivalent is called a “center guy” Sentāgai. Which are quite interesting to see too, they can have short heavily highlighted blonde hair and tan skin- some where the eye makeup; while others have long colorful hair. A popular anime called peach girl is about a ganguro girl just more on the softer side- Her name is momo and she is tan, with lightened hair. The japanese word for peach is Momo, which is why she is tan.


Ganguro and Yamanbas all hanging out together. Two of the most extremes Manbas are wearing what seems to be looking like Japanese traditional wear; Kimonos. Which isn't usually part of the ganguro style.
 
 <----manba>

Personally i think this style is rather interesting and very cool. Unique to their own, these girls and centre guys are creative with their look and are not afraid of being who they are and experimenting with their appearance. I would say the closest thing we have to ganguro, yamanbas, manbas, and centre guys are Scene girls and scene boys in the western world just without the tan.

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