Category Archives: Fashion

➤ Dalston Superstars pit Shoreditch irony against beanie brigade realness

Posted on 15 Dec 2011 | Leave a comment

➢ Click the pic to run video of Dalston Superstars Ep 3 at Vice.com

❚ IN EPISODE 3 OF DALSTON SUPERSTARS, Vice online’s “structured reality” mockumentary series about who’s more hip than who in Hackney, this week’s highlight is an exhibition of work @ Wagwan Studios. An infamous art collective called NoiNoiNoi from Dalston E8 describe themselves as “an experiment in cosmic dissonance”, and produce installations collaged from photos and consumer brands which are spookily close to the art stuff in galleries throughout the east London postcodes of E1, 2 and 8. Also this week …

✰ Vee says “Just say no to capitalism: uncapitalise.”

✰ Sam and Anna’s relationship is on the rocks.

✰ Dweeby Stefan becomes Captain Scarlet, psychedelic astronaut, then gets confused about the meaning of reality — “We’re real, right?”

✰ “All the boys want… lipstick paradise.”

✰ Just wait for the punchline when Stefan says “I think I know a little something about art…”

[No scriptwriter gets an onscreen credit but words and images above are
© 2011 Vice Media Inc]

EP 3 #COMMENTS AT VICE ONLINE…

❏ Tom McArthur, Breaking News Editor at Msnbc “This is like an episode of Nathan Barley that’s been plagiarised by humourless German students.”

❏ Beth Wrays, photographer “would everyone over the age of thirty stop going on about nathan f***ing barley, who gives a toss! your not cool!”

❏ Daniel Worrall, Uni Sussex “I’m 23. Nathan Barley was ahead of its time :-p Bloody Hipsters”

❏ Carly Jeannette Skone, Seattle, Washington “This is the most retarded thing I’ve ever seen!”

❏ Allan Struthers, Top Commenter, BRGS “The title music for this is really awesome.”

Art collective NoiNoiNoi: “an experiment in cosmic dissonance” (videograb from Dalston Superstars)

➢ Catch up with Dalston Superstars, Episode One — “cool parties, cool people” and a fingerboard skate park

➢ Catch up with Dalston Superstars, Episode Two — numero uno sex vixen, Holly Wood, has got eyes for Sam — bad luck, Anna!

❏ Festive question for the producers — As Top Commenter Struthers notes, some great tracks backing Ep3 of Dalston Superstars but… where’s the free Christmas download of tunes from the show, such as Grant Armour’s theme tune Dalston Riddim, and Mum Dad I’m moving to Dalston, by DJ Platinum ft Decland’n’Karl? … Update Dec 23: By popular demand, here’s a taster of the download at, like, #christmasmixtape

❏ Subcultural decryption: Dalston is the area of east London that UK hipsters regard as, like, paradise. Unless they live a mile away in Shoreditch, then it’s Shoreditch.

❏ Subcultural analogy: Nathan Barley was a UK television series featuring hipster role models for Dalston Superstars, like, six years ago… Not to mention the Dalston-based absurdist series The Mighty Boosh (2004–7) — its four way crimp-off (below) led by Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, says it all for the coolest of the cool.

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➤ Nathan Barley walks again in Vice’s video serial Dalston Superstars

Posted on 2 Dec 2011 | 1 comment

➢ Click the pic to run the video of Dalston Superstars at Vice.com

❚ IN EPISODE 2 OF DALSTON SUPERSTARS, Vice online’s no-holds-barred East London reality series, Sam, Anna, Maeve, Vee and Stefan try to heal the wounds after last week’s nightclub bust up. Maybe a night out will help? Unlikely, with Dalston’s numero uno sex vixen, Holly Wood, back on the scene. She’s got eyes for Sam — bad luck, Anna!

✰ Maeve learns from Stefan what a Yoko is.

✰ Sam scores a job as a cool-spotter — “I’m not here to make friends.”

✰ “Holly Wood thinks she is Courtney Love circa 94 but she’s actually more like Courtney Love circa 2010.”

✰ “When you come back from LA it’s sort of like you come back from a sauna”

✰ “Tell me what happened with Jared Leto” — “We were tweeting together so that’s like having a thing.”

✰ Anna stages a tantrum and wins the accolade “badass”.

[No scriptwriter gets an onscreen credit but all words and images above are
© 2011 Vice Media Inc]

➢ Catch up with Dalston Superstars, Episode One — “cool parties, cool people” and a fingerboard skate park

Dalston Superstars, Vicedotcom, Nathan Barley, video, hipsters,Stefan, Maeve

Dalston Superstars: Stefan and Maeve networking f2f in hipster London

❏ Subcultural decryption: Dalston is the area of east London that UK hipsters regard as, like, paradise. Unless they live a mile away in Shoreditch, then Shoreditch.

❏ Subcultural analogy: Nathan Barley was a UK television series featuring hipster role models for Dalston Superstars, like, six years ago

TBH, THE #COMMENTS AT VICE ARE
BETTER THAN THE SCRIPT

❏ “I hope this is a joke because as a joke it’s funny.”

❏ “Hipsters mocking hipsters is like Dawn French mocking fats. Doesn’t work.”

❏ “It’s like, funny thinking it’s not funny, because it’s like funny to like, not realise that it’s funny, but then also it’s not funny but it’s funny to pretend it’s not funny like it is funny, even though it isn’t.”

❏ “Stupid people think it’s Cool. Smart people think it’s a joke: also Cool.”

❏ “ ‘Realness’ is particularly hard to put your finger on.”

❏ “Fashankers ridiculing Fashankers… like double irony… or something.”

❏ “They all need a good wash and for someone to tell them they’re not unique, they’re clones of each other in different colour thriftwear.”

❏ “Sam has perfected the ‘confused gormless stare’. Robert Pattinson will be so pissed.”

❏ “This is not real, blatantly — why do people post serious comments on this?”

❏ “This is the funniest and the saddest thing ever. Funny because it’s hyperbole but sad because it’s only slightly exaggerated.”

❏ “Are these real humans?”

❏ Either that or it’s hashtag fail.

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Posted in Fashion, London, Media, Social trends, TV, Youth culture

Tagged Comedy, cool, Dalston Superstars, hipsters, mockumentary, Nathan Barley, Reviews, spoof, TV shows, Vicedotcom, Video

2011 ➤ Wham!’s cunning plan for a Christmas No1 as climax to the 80s revival

Posted on 15 Nov 2011 | Leave a comment

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❚ TWO REASONS TO CELEBRATE. Mother-of-two Shirlie Kemp has just exhumed a load of fab clothes from her heyday with Pepsi Demacque as the all-jiving all-singing girls in Wham! She has piled a load of glam photos of her stage clothes on to her otherwise sedately titled blog, No Place Like Home. We see her Melissa Caplan sheath from the 1982 Top of the Pops debuts of herself as Shirlie Holliman and of the clubland group’s single Young Guns in the lucky TV turning point [above] that broke the group after their first single Wham Rap! had initially failed to take off.

Shirlie Kemp, fashion, Kahn & Bell,Wham!

Shirlie’s bling leather top for Wham! It bears the Kahniverous label. Photo from shirliekemp.com

Shirlie also shows the cowgirl fronded suede top from American Classics in Endell Street, worn in an earlier incarnation of Young Guns.

Most eye-catching of all are those skimpy, gilded, blingy black leathers by the Brummie design duo Kahn & Bell who had shops in Birmingham and Chelsea. However, after a deep search through Wham’s YouTube videos as the first Western pop group into China, we find no footage of Shirlie’s claim that she wore them onstage there in 1985 — see below for Everything She Wants filmed live in China by British director Lindsay Anderson (which is wrongly dated). By then they had achieved three number-one singles in a row in the US with Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Careless Whisper and Everything She Wants, while the Billboard year-ending chart listed George Michael’s Careless Whisper as the US number-one song of 1985.

➢ Click pic for the fizzing Wham Rap! video in a new window

Above — “Man or mouse” Andrew Ridgeley establishes the group’s clubbing credentials in the opening shots of their Wham Rap! video by reading The Face cover story, The Making of Club Culture, written by yours truly in the February 1983 issue

❏ The reason why we’ve been catching glimpses of Pepsi & Shirlie around the media is the second reason to celebrate. An explosive 25th anniversary comeback by Wham! themselves takes the shape of a 27-track 2-CD anniversary edition of The Final, their farewell compilation album from 1986, with its minimalist Peter Saville cover design. Embracing all four years’-worth of output, it contains six UK No 1 hits, plus both George Michael solo singles (Careless Whisper and A Different Corner). A deluxe edition includes a DVD of 13 restored videos.

Wham!, The Final, albums, Peter Saville The Final is such a double-whammy of greatest dancefloor hits that its November 28 release is a calculated pitch for the top spot in the Christmas chart. And with Duran’s magnificent comeback year all but spent musically, Wham!’s cunning plan will represent the last major chart assault by the 80s revival that has warmed our cockles for a full two years.

Wham! went out on a high 25 years ago with an eight-hour grand finale of a concert at Wembley Stadium which coincided with their farewell single The Edge of Heaven hitting No 1 in June, 1986. Pepsi says: “A lot of thought went into stopping when we did — we were at our peak, it was such a high and that’s why we can celebrate Wham! The Final now, because we all still have great memories and we’re all still great friends.”

➢ “Maybe George was going through a cowboy phase” — this week’s interview with Pepsi & Shirlie for RealMusic Blog

➢ Rich List puts George Michael top of the popstars
from the un-lucrative 80s

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1980 ➤ Ribald tales of excess as the kids from The Blitz took over West End clubbing

Posted on 6 Nov 2011 | 1 comment

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❚ FRIDAY NIGHT WAS AN EXCUSE for the wags to tell their tall tales of clubbing in the 80s. This was the first reunion in recent memory of the bright sparks the media once called Blitz Kids and New Romantics. We’re talking about the straighter faction tonight — the make-up brigade had their day at Boy George’s 50th birthday party in June. All of them, whatever their persuasion, were diehard nightowls, the spiritual offspring of the mighty innovator who shaped the 1970s pop scene almost singlehandedly, David Bowie. He taught them to adopt stances: individualism, transgression. He bequeathed them principles for living amusing lives: disposable identities, looks not uniforms. In turn, they then shaped the sounds and styles of the Swinging 80s set in motion by 1976 and the birth of punk, along with a passion for black dance music, on through the decadent glamour of the Blitz Club years, to the watershed of Band Aid in 1984.

On Friday, photographer Graham Smith took over Soho’s newest rendezvous, the Society Club, for a gallery show of his 80s photographs, which capture the panache and derring-do of style leaders such as PX, Stephen Jones, Kim Bowen Melissa Caplan, Stephen Linard, Fiona Dealey, John Maybury and such nascent popstars as Spandau Ballet, Visage, Animal Nightlife, Sade, Blue Rondo à la Turk and others.

Our two videos capture the essence of Smith’s collaborators, Robert Elms and Chris Sullivan, powering through their often unprintable anecdotes, edited on video down to bite-sized chunks and garnished with Graham’s images. The highspot was meant to be Sullivan as guest speaker, but when he was reportedly “still on his way”, in stepped writer and broadcaster Elms to recall the early one-night clubs he also helped to run. He sounded genuinely shocked by the precociousness of his peers — “We were kids!” — who persuaded West End nightclubs to hand over door control to them as teenagers. Eventually, Sullivan arrived in the guise of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and of course excelled at spinning his “ribald tale of excess” about the mayhem he helped cause in clubland, en route to running Soho’s Wag club for 19 years.

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The photos form a dossier creative endeavour, as we’ll soon see in We Can Be Heroes, a 320-page coffee-table book containing 500 mostly unseen images and 100 voxpop interviews by Graham Smith. Warts-and-all main text is penned by the mellifluous Welshman Sullivan, with other contributions from Robert Elms, Boy George, Steve Strange and Gary Kemp.

We Can Be Heroes, Graham Smith, Chris Sullivan, Robert Pereno, Society Club , Soho ,books,Unbound Publishing,photography, exhibition,afterparty, Aviary Bar, Robert Elms, Boy George, Gary Kemp ,Steve Strange, Blitz Kids,Wag club,

Smith & Sullivan’s invitation to a party

➢ Visit the publisher Unbound.co.uk to place your order for We Can Be Heroes and secure your name in the limited first edition. This month the authors aim to hit an advance sales target by this new “crowd-funding” technique in order to guarantee publication.

➢ Visit The Society Club, London W1F 0JF where Graham Smith’s photographs are on sale until Christmas. Subjects include Boy George, Sade, Steve Strange, Spandau Ballet, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie Sioux, the Sex Pistols and many more.

➢ Skimmable list of media coverage of We Can Be Heroes so far

Making up the rules of 80s clubbing: Robert Elms, Phil Dirtbox and Chris Sullivan at Friday’s nostalgia fest. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s

Fanatical about music: Chris Sullivan, Jo Hagan (remember 1983’s Gold Coast?) and Darrell Gayle at the Society Club. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s

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Posted in Clubbing, Fashion, London, Media, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

Tagged Blitz Kids, Books, Boy George, Chris Sullivan, Gary Kemp, Graham Smith, Interview, New Romantics, photography, Robert Elms, Steve Strange, Swinging 80s, theblitzclub, Unbound publishing, Video, Wag club, We Can Be Heroes

➤ No panic at Duran HQ — when you want glamour, glitz and shiny just outsource your video

Posted on 4 Nov 2011 | Leave a comment

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❚ SPONSORSHIP, EH? Why fork out your own money to make a pop video when you’re a penniless 80s retro band and you can persuade an international luxury brand to pay for it? In return for a few words of gratitude of course. So before we get to see the real thing, here is the 12th tease trailer, yes 12th, posted today, for Duran Duran’s next video. The first eleven can be viewed on DD’s YouTube channel.

This one is the “making of” version, and do not view it unless you’re braced for a hair-raising and shameless suck-up to their wonderful sponsor by all four members of the film-it-grab-it-and-run Rio gang. They are seen on location at London’s Savoy Hotel (B&B from £455 per night) shooting the archetypal DD lush-life single, Girl Panic! (Musically, the stand-out track on the album, more’s the pity.)

The Birmingham-born and high-school educated former nightclub disc jockey turned keyboardist Nick Rhodes whispers seductively from behind a cut-crystal glass curtain: “We teamed up with Swarovski who have provided some fantastic elements, crystals, for us in the video. You really do need to try to work with people who fit the aesthetic of what you’re trying to do, and with Swarovski, er, I think they, er, [he did pause, twice, let’s hope for ironic effect, though we cannot be sure] they represent quality, glamour and glitz and shiny things.” Yes, Nick did say shiny things. And yes again, dear reader, the key word there was aesthetic, with its very scholarly diphthong. As we discover, “Hey, this is only rock’n’roll” — the final words of the real video — is nearer the OTT mark.

Models ARE Duran Duran (No, not really, it’s just make-believe) ... Cindy Crawford, Helen Christensen, Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova and Yasmin Le Bon play Duran Duran for a photoshoot in the December issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK

Guitarist John Taylor adds his tuppenceworth of product plug for the Austrian gemstones-to-home-decor-to-optics-to-luminous-road-markings brand, yes, road markings, whose energy-intensive glass grinding processes take advantage of hydroelectricity in the local mountains: “That connection has brought a beauty to the look of the video that we wouldn’t have had without them.” And yes, everything from guitar straps to hand mikes were vajazzled with Austrian glitzy bits — 700 on the singer’s microphone alone, we are told.

Off-screen Rhodes spoke about the project from New York, where the band have just completed a six-week US tour: “Harpers UK had approached us about collaborating with the magazine on something really special when the new album came out. I’d had this crazy idea for a video for the song Girl Panic! that looked fantastic on paper — to recreate a day-in-the-life of the band, with five of the world’s greatest supermodels playing all of us. The magazine loved the idea of doing a cover shoot within the video itself.” (Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana play Harper’s guest fashion editors for the day, during a photoshoot scene which will form a 22-page cover story for the December issue. Yes, 22!)

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Giving their services free are the supermodels: Naomi Campbell IS lead singer Simon Le Bon, Cindy Crawford IS bassist John Taylor, blonde Eva Herzigova IS blond keyboardist Nick Rhodes, Helena Christensen IS drummer Roger Taylor, while Yasmin Le Bon does a droll turn as “the anonymous guitarist”. (Only joking about the free bit.) Directed by Jonas (Telephone) Åkerlund, Girl Panic! will have its world premiere at the Harper’s Bazaar Women of the Year Awards 2011 at Claridge’s Hotel on Monday, and is released next day online at Vevo.

Wags at YouTube commented today: “It could be a Duran Duran commercial brought to us by Swarovski” … or “This Swarvoski commercial is brought to you by Duran Duran.”

❏ Wikipedia footnote: “Swarovski is also product-placed in the 2011 J-Lo promo video for the single On The Floor.” Eat your heart out, J-Lo.

➢ The Daily Mail gets the exclusive modelly pix from the Harper’s Bazaar shoot… while Grazia magazine declares the video a “Grand Fashion Moment”

➢ Previews of the December issue at Harper’s Bazaar