Vintage Courreges

These Courreges vinyl classics and many other wonderful creations are up for auction today at Leslie Hindlman Auctioneers.

Hoboken Impromptu

Spontaneous mini-vacation yesterday afternoon in Hoboken, NJ. The weather was glorious, and the city was in full bloom.

If this wisteria bunting doesn’t secure a tenant, I don’t know what will.


Vestiges of pre-gentrification …


A typographic identity crisis.
Restored ceiling of the historic Elysian Cafe.

Wavy wrought iron and a pair of watchful bees.

Flying Colors

I don’t remember how I even came upon this first page of model airplane decals, but after seeing this one, I went, admittedly, a little nuts. I just find them graphically irresistible. Sources for many of these and more, here, here, here, and here.

Le Cuteness

The French magazine Votre Enfant sure got it right on their covers from the 1950s. Their recipe for cuteness: baby human + baby animals + a hat or other costume. Now, make that all French, and you can't miss. Adorable, n'est–ce pas?






These are all for sale at the site Chapitre.

Backwards and Upside Down

Last month, when I heard that David Stark would be speaking at the next Apartment Therapy Offline Meetup, I didn’t know who he was, or what he did. So why did I know the name? After a couple of minutes, I realized that that was name on the on the truck with the backwards type I had photographed last summer.

Stark is an event designer and producer (I snapped this pic behind the Museum of Natural History, where he must have had a gig). At his talk Wednesday evening, I found out that event design and production is nothing like party planning. Many of his projects take as long as a year to produce—think Whitney Biennial installation filling the Javits Center. Go to his website to see the range of his creativity.

But back to his truck--here it is, along with a few other examples of typographic inversion.



This upside down Gap bag is part of a promo stunt they did in Vancouver where they turned they entire store upside down.
I took this in Florence, where type is backwards or forwards depending on which direction you happen to be facing.

Michel Gourdon Book Covers

A blue robot ominously transports a limp, chorus girl, in a red-satin bodice. She’s needed for her flesh, of course …

It's just one of the 3,500 covers the prolific Michel Gourdon executed for “Fleuve Noir” Editions between 1950 and 1978. He said in an interview, that sometimes he would produce as many as 20 covers in a month.

Over the weekend, I got to wander through New York’s Antiquarian Book Fair where I saw the original gouache painting, which is quite luminous. Bookseller, Michael R. Weintraub had the illustration displayed along side the book it was painted for, La Nuit des Trépassées (Night of the Dead).

There is lots of Gourdon’s work to be seen online here, here and for some of his pin-up art and more explicit covers go to Deadlicious.

The Geography of Hate

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A really good way to remember the millions who died, is to keep on top of the activities and influence of hate groups around us.

Southern Poverty Law Center has been at the forefront of monitoring hate groups of all kinds. What I especially admire about them is that in addition to tracking these groups and exposing their activities, they are dedicated to teaching tolerance. They "provide educators with free resources that teach school children to reject hate, embrace diversity and respect differences.”

Every year SPLC publishes a report on extremist groups and locates them on a Hate Map. The map is interactive so you can see the groups state, by state. This year there are 932 on the map including neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, Klansmen and black separatists. Also, hate groups that target gays or immigrants, and some that specialize in producing racist music or propaganda denying the Holocaust.

Of great concern this year was the tremendous growth of antigovernment “Patriot” groups and militias.

Found Infographic: Vintage Corset Directions

Imagine needing directions with a diagram for getting dressed! Before elastic and stretch fabrics came into regular use for foundation garments, the design and proper fit of a corset took a fair amount of engineering and customization. (See previous post on the Berlei Body Type Calculator.)

I was curious about why the name of a corset manufacturer would be “Camp.” I thought that perhaps the company originally manufactured tents--you know, canvas, cord, grommets, rigging hardware. Not so. It turns out that the name of the corset maker was Samuel Higby Camp. In 1908, he patented the "fan-lacing" system of attaching straps and buckles to groups of laces so that the garment could be tightened from the front, by the corset wearer herself. Before that, women were dependent on a maid/mother/other, to pull the laces tight from the back and tie them. So, what appears to us as a garment of torture and confinement, actually provided women with a level of self-sufficiency, not previously available to them.

And remember, NEVER pull upwards or downwards, always in a straight line!