2 of a Kind

The TPWP architecture contributor called me a few days ago exclaiming "I just visited the best furnished clothing store in the city." A very grave statement from a very discerning guy - so I rushed to visit this store, expecting, I dunno, something shockingly different. Instead I found a very simple and subtly creative store which he describes as a great example for aspiring retailers that are looking to stand out - without spending too much.

For The Greater Good is a 2-month old Menswear Outpost in the newly nascent shopping hub of the 1700 block of Florida Avenue. They have an eclectic mix of young designer labels and contemporary mens fashion brands such as Comme Des Garcons, Stone Island, Maiden Noir, Public School, Red Wing, Clarks, Common Projects, Fullcount Japan, APC, Shades of Greige.

This is what our contributor finds special about the design of the store - They started with a great blank space of concrete floors and white walls and created a sophisticated interior aesthetic by using simple walnut boxes to display clothes and to create a register





They used simple, inexpensive materials to build their clothing racks




They injected character with a clever addition of inexpensive vintage speakers


They elevated the design of the space with a Bertoia Diamond Chair in the dressing room and an Eames walnut stool in the store.




Successfully AND inexpensively they have created a space with a clear statement relevant to their store and their clothes - conversely to many big-box-retailers who over-design spaces, spend thousands of dollars, and end up with a space with an undefined point of view.

After Christmas Drinks

My favorite thing about the Target designer capsule collections is their element of surprise. How we are kind of in the dark about what they're going to do next and suddenly you receive an email about them partnering with your favorite designer (I'm still waiting for that day) and it's kinna like a small Christmas, because now you know the date of release and you wait excitedly for the goodies to arrive to the Christmas-colored store.

I had that giddy feeling when I read that Target had partnered with designers Toni Hacker and Ben Harnett to launch a limited-edition handbag collection, Hayden-Harnett for Target®. I fell inlove with their designs at HH:Design Shop in Brooklyn, their charming little store in which you can find much more than just bags. This is definitely my favorite handbag collection so far, at least in pictures, they look beautiful and so well designed. The bags range from $19.99 to $49.99 and will be available in stores right after Christmas from December 28, 2008 through March 15, 2009.

These are my favorites:

Corner Clocks

The TPWP architecture contributor showed me this brilliant idea of a wall covered in panels made from a vintage map of Washington DC (picture at left from Apt Therapy). Since I love everything vintage I became obsessed with the idea of recreating this for my non-existent blank wall - so I set out searching for antique maps, and then my search evolved to anything I could find that was vintage-DC-related and found some marvelous little treasures - a lot of 9 DC area high school yearbooks from the 1930s, a 1859 complete issue of "The Semi-Weekly Constitution Newspaper," a porcelain license plate from 1907, and most fascinatingly - a dozen images of streets and people in Washington DC from the 1920s.

The city is so charming in those pictures, so cosmopolitan it seems, so vibrant. Delightfully for me, most of the pictures were taken around my current neighborhood - and now I've spent hours analyzing the images, wondering what each of the little people in the photographs was doing there, where they lived, how they got there, what they thought of the city. I've also been trying to figure out what the un-labeled buildings were, and researching the labeled ones. Below are my favorites:

Oh yeah, and you can purchase the reproductions of these images for ~$15 by following the links under each.


11th and F St. NW Washington DC - Trolley Scence from 1918 - can you recognize this corner?


9th and G St. NW Washington DC - The famous Moore's Rialto Theatre - 1925


New Hampshire Ave and 8th St NW Washington DC - Traffic lights with old Model-T - 1925


F Street NW Washington DC - Treasury building in the backround - 1915


13th and F Street NW Washington DC - Rapid transit bus - 1925


905 F Street NW Washington DC - 1920s - A record store that also sold sporting goods (right window), this is actually one of windows of the current McCormick & Schmick's, back then each window was a different little store.


9th and F Street NW Washington DC - Movie theatre street scene - 1928

Topman USA

This Fall edgy men have no more reason to complain about lack of fashion-forward items at a reasonable price in the US. Lucky for them Topman, the male counter-part of the cult-favorite Topshop, launched its US website in September.

If I was a guy, Topman would become one of my major one-stop-shops - not only are the items very fashionable, but they range from formal wool suits to socks and umbrellas, and are very reasonably priced. One of my favorite things about Topman is their capsule designer collection, because to my knowledge there aren't any other major stores in the US doing designer collaborations for men - and it's not fair that we (girls) have all the fun. The newest of these available this Fall is called Priceless, by Antony Price, the meticulous master craftsman who is known for dressing rock and roll royalty. You can also buy other edgy brands on their website - Self, H by Hudson, Swear & Nanny State - any of these is otherwise very hard to find on this side of the Atlantic.

It was hard for me to pick my favorite items from Topman, there were so many colorful and fun cardigan sweaters, I could've made an entire post about just them. Alas, here are my selections - all the items are under $200!



Items clockwise from top left (sorry outgoing links don't work): Self jersey blazer with vintage metal buttons, Premium grey bomber jacket, Knit vest, Denim western style button down shirt, Retro watch, Indigo slim jeans, Blue patent retro high top, Red reflective plimsolls, Black low profile dress shoes, Green canvas bag, Smart Umbrella, Bright cotton cardigans, Knit scarf.

Anglomania

So sorry for the extremely long absence.... I've spent the last two weeks laboriously preparing for a presentation and tragically the effort monopolized ALL my time.... I'm so glad it's over.... I really missed you :(

I am sad I wasn't able to share these pictures with you earlier, but here they are. They are from the Vivienne Westwood Trunk Show at Muleh - the event was so much fun, specially playing dress-up with Rachel, she tried on our favorite dress from the collection, and she looked like a princess in it. I also photographed Carrie's wedding dress from Sex in the City, it looked surprisingly small, I think because it was missing the train, but it was nice to see it in person.


The Party:










Models parading clothes from the collection:









This is me trying on one of my favorite pieces - this gunmetal grey raincoat:



Rachel twirling around in the dress:



Carrie's wedding dress:

Vamos a Mexico

You didn't forget about Fashion Week in Mexico City did you? In case you did, here are a few pieces from Carlos Temores, one of my favorite designers, who showed an edgy monochromatic line accented by plastic handbags and colorful helmets:

My lemons are bigger than yours

I consider myself very lucky to have a terrace in the city that is big enough to house Richard Schultz 1966 lounge chairs and an upstairs bright enough to nurture an extraordinarily fecund and fragrant lemon tree.

Yes, that really is a lemon from my tree in the picture, it is gigantic, and the tiny little plant currently bears 7 more lemons!!! Its immature branches cannot tolerate the weight of the fruit, so I have to prop each of them up with silly contraptions.

As much as I appreciate and love my little plant and my terrace, they pale....tremendously....in comparison to this Nolita rooftop ....er.... forest. My lemon tree suddenly feels very inept.






Chris and Lisa Goode's penthouse apartment atop a building in New York City's Little Italy is a gardener's dream. They started their sustainable green roof project four years ago, acting as their own general contractors and managing the hoisting of 5-ton soil bags by crane onto the roof, among other equally daunting tasks. I'd like to impress upon you the grandiosity of this outdoor place by giving you a few facts from the NY Mag article- It houses a honey-producing bee hive, monarch butterflies migrate through It, AND the little girl that lives there rides her tricycle on Its roof lawn and picks berries for her morning cereal from Its in-house berry bushes. OK, now just look at the pictures and gasp.


The modern penthouse pavilion is surrounded by Hornbeam trees and acanthus along the edge, a large black locust tree in the corner and a lemon tree on the deck.


"A bird’s-eye view, facing west, of the green roof, planted with succulents, sedums, and delospermas, atop the pavilion, as well as the lawn and decking of the pavilion below."


Through the glass is a greenhouse which harbors warm-weather plants like lemon and banana trees. This year, they ate bananas from their own tree!!!!


"The north-facing kitchen looks over a garden that includes squash, cherries, peaches, persimmons, fava beans, “every herb known to man,” and an espaliered apple tree."


Wildflowers, which vary by season.


Five egg-laying chickens roam one level below the wildflowers (yes, there are TWO levels of terrace)

Come Over

The expectation was palpable in the dense air of the Rock & Roll Hotel last night, palpable and excitedly progressing in intensity through 3 opening acts.

I was certainly not the only one who was there to see US Royalty.


If I had been a stranger to the looks of the headlining band I would've still been able to pick them out of a band line up - not so much because they looked like US royalty, but because they looked hmmm... polished - rock & roll, clean, stylish, sexy, confident type of polished. Not that this imparts any merit to their musical talent, but I personally get a little extra enjoyment from seeing a good-looking set of guys singing to me. That and their incredible presence on stage, specially John Thornley's, the lead singer, who honestly could be singing about cleaning products and it wouldn't matter because I wouldn't be able to look away, his warbling, 60s-music-idol voice won't let me. I have seen a fair amount of bands play live but only a few of them have had this type of magic onstage, and it's so exciting to see it materialize and permeate the crowd song after song. And for me, the blues impregnated sounds really really really seal the deal.

If you missed them, see their live sessions at Brightest Young Things

Blocks and Lines

I wonder if we are going to experience a post-war artistic movement like Paris did in the 1920s. Ok, maybe not, at least we can be inspired by the fruits of the innovation that took place in those fertile days - Piet Mondrian and his un-confoundable grid paintings are one of the first ones to come to mind - probably because the "Mondrian Day Dress" that Yves Saint Laurent created several decades later is one of my favorite designs of his ever.





There's something so simply genius about this dress, maybe it's the asymmetrical symmetry of the shift shape and the lines, maybe it's the simplicity of its form, maybe the crispness of the primary colors, maybe it's the way he camouflaged the shaping in the grid of the seams. Whatever it is, it's perfect.

























Probably due to that timeless perfection, color-block designs like YSL's seem to be part of everyone's collections - so many in fact that I had to sort them out in my head - these are my favorites:


Clockwise from top left with links: Vivre color block lighters, Chloe Ines clutch, Marc Jacobs Mary-Janes, Topshop color block silk playsuit, Kara Ross Mondrian clutch, Emilio Pucci skirt, Pierre hardy heels, Forever 21 geometric dress, Mint Jodi Arnold color block dress, Jonathan Saunders Somerby dress, Herve Leger color block bandage dress, Nike Mondrian sneakers.


Even my closet has recent color-blocked additions - my favorite is this dress here that needed a little modifying since it was 7 inches longer and had terrible purple sleeves - not quite a Mondrian day dress, but it conveys the sentiment....

Nails Pencils Zippers

Jennifer Maestre is a South African born artist and sculptor who creates fascinating little creatures out of unpredictable materials that make me very nervous - they remind me of underwater creatures with thousands of teeth and their silhouette and texture give me the impression that they are going to come to life any second. Yes, I am also afraid of all types of insects.


My fear is actually sanctioned since her sculptures were inspired by the form and function of the sea urchin and she states that "Paradox and surprise are integral in her choice of materials" - which to me translates to "Beware, they may look like they're inanimate objects, but they will jump up at you unannounced."

Doesn't stop me from staring at them and wanting to acquire the scariest one as my new pet. Maybe for now I'll just buy one of her pencil pins.


My Box


Persephone


Dreaming


Materialize


Seethe


Springtime Tall Tale