Just a sample of what’s coming
Model: Cassie Kerns
Hair/Makeup: Kat
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[tg_masonry_gallery gallery_id=”9481″ layout=”contain” columns=”2″]
Look for more in our full gallery this Sunday
behind the scenes
How can people not tell the difference?
I am not an athlete. One look at me pretty much lets one know that. Not that I didn’t try, though. All through Jr. High I did my best to fit it. I tried ’em all: football, baseball, and basketball. One coach even let me on the basketball team in eighth grade. I played for the last three minutes of one game where we were already losing by 18 points. Other than that, I did my best to be encouraging from the bench. Because of my experience, however, I have an incredible amount of respect for those whose eye-hand coordination is sufficient to allow them to be successful at a sport or two.
When I got older, I tried my hand at some other sports that weren’t quite as dangerous, such as tennis and racquetball. Uhm, did I say they weren’t dangerous? That would be an error. One of my worst sprains ever came from diving across a racquetball court and missing the damn ball. It was fantastic exercise, mind you, but I was repeatedly covered in bruises and spraining something, which probably contributes to the arthritis pain I have now.
Sports are wonderful. I can sit and watch football for as long as the chips and beer hold out. I can watch baseball live if there are plenty of hot dogs, and I can sometimes even tolerate an NBA game as long as 1. I didn’t pay for the seats, 2. We start drinking upon arrival, and 3. I don’t have to drive home, ‘cuz I’m not going to be sober by the time we hit the fourth period. I have absolutely no axe to grind with sports in general. I’ve even been out on the golf course and am pretty sure the solution to doing well is taking four or five Xanax before hitting the course. Although, that probably violates some rule about athletics and drugs.
So, given that sports are sports and involve getting all sweaty and worked up and physical in one way or another, I am totally perplexed why entire athletic organizations would get so freaking upset by being told that they’re not arts. What the literal fuck? How can anyone in their right mind even begin to put the arts and sports in the same basket? Why would you even want to try? They are both two very distinct and different things with two dramatically different purposes. Why are we even having this conversation?
Blame Meryl Streep.
Here’s What Happened
When I wake up each morning, one of the first things I do is check to see what’s trending on Twitter. I try to prepare for our 5 Things You Should Know article before I go to bed each night, but there’s always the chance something can happen while I’m sleeping. I went to bed Sunday night before the Golden Globes because, 1. we had been up 17 hours already and was exhausted, and 2., find awards shows to generally be a complete waste of time. Monday morning, however, I get up to see that not only is #GoldenGlobes trending, so is #SportsAreNotArt and #MerylStreepForPresident. That was my first clue that something of reasonable significance had taken place.
Sure enough, it didn’t take long to discover that Ms. Streep had pretty much eviscerated the president-elect, who deserves every last bit of the condemnation heaped on him last night. That was a big story in of itself. What was getting just as much attention, at least on Twitter, was when Ms. Streep had said that football and MMA are not art.
Oh. My God. You would have thought that Ms. Streep had plunged a dagger into the very heart of the planet and that we all were about to die. The President of MMA even wrote and posted a huge ass response trying to convince Ms. Streep and the rest of the world that there is something remotely artistic about two people stepping into the ring and proceeding to pummel each other to the point of concussion and, most likely, permanent brain damage. Yeah, some people apparently think that there’s an art to bleeding.
Now, before we go too much further, we should take a look at Ms. Streep’s words in context. So, here’s a larger version of what she actually said:
I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola [Davis] was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Veneto, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates?
And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in — no, in Ireland, I do believe. And she’s here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.
So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. They gave me three seconds to say this, so. An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that — breathtaking, passionate work.
The longer point Ms. Streep would go on to make is how the president-elect continually demonstrates a lack of regard for anyone who is not white and rich and that the press needs to habitually call him out on his nonsense. Like the opinion or not, Ms. Streep has a right to it and since she had the platform to make that opinion heard she had every right to take advantage of that situation.
What she said about football and mixed martial arts not being the arts, however, is correct. They’re not the arts. They never have been and they never can be in their current forms. Moreover, we really don’t want to think of them as art. To put athletics into the art basket would require fundamentally changing their reason for existing. We wouldn’t like most sports if they concentrated on being artistic. We want them to be the physical display of training and skill in a competitive format that they are. We like them that way.
So, what’s the difference, really?
The MMA world seems to be much more upset about Ms. Streep’s remarks than is anyone in the NFL. Bellator CEO Scott Coker even took the time to write and tweet a response which says in part:
Please be my guest at the LA Forum on January 21st and you will see that Mixed Martial Arts is truly artistic – which will feature fighters from all over the world competing at a world class level.
Now, in case you’re not a huge MMA fan, which I am not, we looked up the event scheduled for the LA Forum on January 21. The multi-bout card includes the following people beating the living hell out of each other: Tito Ortiz and Chael Sonnen, Georgi Karakhanyan against Emmanuel Sanchez, Paul Daley against Brennan Ward, and Ralek Gracie against Hisaki Kato. The event is broadcast free on the SPIKE cable network. All the young men on the card are big, tough, and athletic. I’m sure they will all give their best in the ring. Those who enjoy watching this type of competition will be thrilled. However, not a damn thing about this event is going to be artistic except, possibly, the singing of the national anthem.
Why? Because sports are not arts. In case you were sleeping during your humanities class, or completely skipped out that semester, the are five basic arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. Those have existed since the beginning of time and deserve to be respected as such. As society developed, somewhere along about 3,000 BCE, theatre and dance were added to the list. As part of that gradual progression and the development of technology, film was added as an extension of the theatre. Photography, video production/editing, design, sequential art, conceptual art, and printmaking have been added as an extension of painting. Arts related to painting, sculpture, and architecture as generally classified as visual arts while those related to music, dance, and theatre as classified as performing arts.
Now, please, take a close look. Do you see anything in that list that looks like a competitive sport? Granted, dancing is extremely athletic, which probably explains why I suck at that, too. Still, a dance performance isn’t a competition like a sport is. No one keeps score. There’s no audience hoping that the prima ballerina pulls a hamstring so that the understudy can win. Dance is not a sport. Sport is not an art.
While I could spend hours nit-picking all the minute details that hold arts apart from sport, the primary difference is that one is a competitive exhibition whose purpose is to determine a definite winner while the other is a presentation for the visual and visceral pleasures of its audience over that of those creating. Athletes want to win, to beat their competition. Artists want only to please an audience in some form or fashion. There’s no contest. In the case of visual arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, there’s not even an end point so long as the works still exist. They can go on and deliver pleasure and expression for centuries provided they are given appropriate care.
To be art the work has to attempt some significance outside itself, either through its impact on society and culture or to the greater art itself. There must be an aesthetic element to the work and contain an element of emotion that varies from artist to artist and work to work. Art requires no participation of anyone outside the artist and yet is fulfilled in its exhibition. If one is an Art History major, one classifies art through both form and function. Art requires a unique creative act whose interpretation is variable by either the performer or the audience, and sometimes both.
I suppose, if one really stretches the definitions, one might claim that some sports figures are artistic in their work, but then we still come back to the fact that sport must, inherently, be competitive. Sport is a contest; there is a constant adversary. The fundamental of success in sports is that one follows the rules for their function within their sport or one is disqualified and penalized. Even in a sport seemingly as benign as golf, one must still exhibit some form of aggression against that stupid little ball if one hopes to ever win. None of those things are appropriate for art.
And none of this explains why anyone would bother to be upset that the two are distinct and separate entities. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone trying to turn art into a sport. Most artists I know would bristle at the very idea. So why would a sport try to portray itself as an art? What is the purpose of such an attempt? Are athletes feeling left out that, despite their million dollar salaries, they’re somehow left out or cheated by being portrayed as artists? If football players want to feel more like real artists, then perhaps they could start by attempting to get by on one-tenth their current salaries; that would still have them being paid more than most artists. I simply cannot imagine why anyone in sports would be offended by Ms. Streep’s comment.
The only thing I can surmise is that the athletes who are upset are simply jealous that there’s an arena from which they are excluded, which is interesting since I’ve known multiple athletes who were also wonderful artists in genres that are actually art. It’s not that the person can’t be an artist, but more that the sport itself isn’t art.
Sports are sport, and they’re a lot of fun and have an important place in our society. The arts are art, and they’re a lot of fun and have an important place in our society. Yet, art and sport as distinct, separate entities occupying different spaces that have no need to overlap. Together, with other fields such as science and math, and philosophy and literature, they make our world a very wonderful place to be. We don’t all need to occupy the same space. Be cool with what you are and let others be what they are and we’ll all get along much better.
A muse today is different than 10 years ago
muse1
[myo͞oz] NOUN
-
(Muse)(in Greek and Roman mythology) each of nine goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who preside over the arts and sciences.
2. muse
a. A guiding spirit.b. A source of inspiration: the lover who was the painter’s muse.
Who needs a muse? Not everyone, for sure. If one is a photojournalist one need’s a keen sixth sense to know what to shoot and when to get the hell out of a situation. If one is a portrait artist, one needs a good light setup. If one is an editorial photographer one needs a strong perception of the details in everyday life. There are plenty of creative endeavors that have no call at all for a muse.
Artistic photography is one of those genres, though, where having someone consistent, someone on whom a photographer can depend, really can make a lot of difference. I base this not only on my own experience, but what I hear from other photographers as well. While we enjoy working with several different models, having that one person, or, if you’re lucky, maybe two people, around who you can shape and build concepts and ideas is invaluable.
The requirements for that role, however, have changed over the years. At least, they have for me. For example, as inspirational as Kat is for me and as encouraging as she constantly is, you might have noticed that we took only one set of pictures of her last year, and that was while we were on vacation. The myriad demands on Kat’s time and energy leaves her without the space necessary to be a muse. She simply cannot fill that role, no matter how much I love her.
At the same time, I can no longer wait around for someone to have some spare time, or drop by at any random time of day, or call me up in the middle of the night. Those were all former options that made it easy to accommodate a muse. However, as my life and work have transitioned, that level of randomness no longer works for me. A lot has changed. What I want and need from a muse has changed. I don’t know if these guidelines necessarily apply to anyone else, but I think they make a good foundation. Every artist and photographer is going to have their own modifications to this list, but take a look and consider whether you might be someone’s answer to a serious need.
A muse doesn’t need to look like a goddess
In the past, there was always a lot of emphasis on the person in the picture being pretty. That requirement, generally speaking, is gone. For me at least, what is more important is that the model is genuine, open, and capable of revealing her true nature and personality to the camera. I’m not looking to create a fantasy. I’m not telling a fairy tale. Instead, I’m expressing a perspective of reality. I need a muse that is real and not faking it for the camera.
This means that I’m open to models who are not 19 years old, whose bodies show the wear and tear of real life. I’m open to a muse who has physical limitations, someone who has to work within given parameters and has strict limitations. Those challenges can actually aid inspiration because it challenges us to find a way to be expressive within that box while simultaneously creating something outside the normal concept of artistic figure work.
I also feel that we are at a point in our society where beauty does not always deliver the message we want. Beauty often equals conformity and there are few instances where anything artistic should be conformist. There is such a thing as being too beautiful for certain types of artwork. A muse today can be the ordinary person who simply wants to become a part of art. Those works can be every bit as moving as anything else we’ve ever created. One just has to be willing to try.
A muse doesn’t have to be a model
Historically, there have been advantages to having experienced models as muses. They understood posing. They knew from which angles their bodies look best. They understood the processes behind a photo shoot. Those were all valuable qualities to have and I’m still certainly not opposed to working with experienced people. There are times where experience is a must. However, experienced models don’t always make the best muses for a number of reasons.
A muse needs to be able to work with and capture the creative mind of a specific artist, not an entire audience of fans. Experienced models today come with large numbers of Instagram followers demanding to be fed new images on a regular basis. Models have obligations to maintain an image on social media that might be contrary to what the artist is wanting to achieve. A muse needs to be more like a blank slate without the external influence of someone else’s expectations.
Experienced models also tend to impose their own perspective over the top of the artist. The photographer suggests a specific pose, for example, and the model is reluctant because it might show belly rolls or expose cellulite or make her hips look big. Sorry, that just doesn’t work anymore. Imperfections, the natural ways in which our bodies respond to sitting or lying in certain positions, are expressions we don’t want to avoid. Working with a muse who doesn’t mind if her stretch marks show or her face is a bit wrinkled is wonderful. Act how you are, not how you think someone else wants you to be.
Muses allow an artist to plan
It’s one thing to have a concept for a photo shoot and then cast a model to fit that concept. Quite different is the experience of having a muse around which you can mold, shape, and most importantly, plan a shoot. Knowing exactly the face and the body with which one will be working allows the artist to plan deeper, to think in greater detail, and to create in ways that are more precise, even when the product being created is abstract.
A problem many of us have had before is that too many would-be muses wanted to know exactly what we were doing before they would agree to do the shoot. There is some validity in that if the model/muse has safety concerns or doesn’t know the photographer/artist well. There have been too many instances where one is asked to just show up with a bag full and clothes and wing it. That approach is not only unprofessional, it is unacceptable in the current social reality.
What we need from a muse today, though, is someone who does not dictate the concept, but rather inspires it and works with a photographer to create something wonderful. The photographer might ask their muse, “How long can you stand on one foot?” The muse wouldn’t challenge why they were being asked to stand on one foot, but would know on which foot they can stand the longest. And yes, that can make a difference. Being able to plan for the peculiarities of a muse makes the end result better and the overall process run smooth.
Muses understand the intersection of life and art
Now, more than ever I think, people look at artistic photographs and expect them to say something about life. Figure studies that play with concepts of light and shadow fall flat on today’s audience that has already seen just about every permutation of shadow manipulation possible. While that doesn’t mean light and shadow work isn’t still valid, what it tells us is that we do well to consider placing those studies within the broader concept that envelopes some condition of life.
This affects who one chooses as a muse because some models are so dramatically disconnected from normal life that it is impossible for them to present an image of the human condition. We need muses with whom not only the photographer can relate but the potential audience as well. We need muses who help keep both us and our work real. We need muses who are grounded in what it means to be alive in 2017.
At the same time, though, those same muses need to appreciate how art intersects life, that there are moments of beauty in the things we do that are mundane and ordinary, that expressing our emotions in careful and planned outbursts can deliver powerful images, and that fragility and vulnerability is a level of beauty all its own. A modern muse is aware of how the image they portray can affect society and plays to that artistic reality.
Muses find synchronization with an artist
I have enjoyed working with several people over the years who acted as wonderful muses for a great wealth of work. Those with whom I’ve done the best, though, have always been the ones with whom there is a natural, unspoken, synchronization; a mutual agreement in the way we view life, art, love, and freedom. As I look at what is required of artists today, I find that achieving that synchronization with a muse is all the more important.
This is one of those places where it’s the little things that matter. For example, I don’t think I could work with a muse right now if they didn’t drink coffee. Caffeine not only affects our energy level, coffee specifically puts us in a unique emotional space that is not achievable with other caffeinated drinks. I need a muse who can sit down and have a cup of coffee with me before we ever think about taking any pictures. If a model can’t meet me on that specific emotional wavelength we’re not going to do as well as we might.
Interpersonal synchronization is difficult to describe because it’s going to be different for everyone. Sometimes it’s knowing that a specific time of day works best for you both. Other times it’s the silly things like the way you both cross your legs or enjoy listening to the same kind of music. Synchronization is personalized for every artist and muse and no two muses are likely to synch on exactly the same things. One has to wait for it and let it happen.
Muses understand the risks
I can’t begin to tell you the number of times over the past 30 years where models have gotten upset because we didn’t deliver as many finished photos as they expected, or the outcome was different from what they anticipated. There have been times where, even after letting a set sit for several days, I couldn’t find anything to my liking. Understand, that is almost never the model’s fault. Some days I don’t feel well and my perspective is off. On other occasions, I may not have planned well enough or perhaps even forgot a necessary piece of equipment that prevented me from getting the shots I wanted.
More than ever, I need a muse that understands those risks. Not every concept is going to be a good one, no matter how much planning we might put into it. Work with me long and often enough and there will be those times where I fail to anticipate consequences, such as the taco seasoning that didn’t wash off or the drink mix that burned sensitive skin. When one works with an artist on a regular basis these things are going to happen.
This is one of the defining differences between a model and a muse. Models get pissed when things happen, especially if it turns their skin orange for the next two weeks. Muses understand and find a way to work it in to their life story. Muses enjoy the adventures that come from working with an artist, even if those adventures sometimes don’t come out exactly as we planned.
Muses know the work isn’t about them
One of my greatest frustrations is when we spend hours giving a set of photos a particular artistic look and/or perspective only to have the model say, “You did a good job, but I just don’t like the way I look in them.” This is the artistic equivalent of, “it’s not you, it’s me.” In a single statement, the model destroys the work of the artist and makes the whole issue about them. I can’t think of many statements that drive an artist mad any quicker than that one.
We need muses that understand that the work we’re producing is not about them at all. How they look in a painting or a photograph needs to respond to the overall theme of the image, not some personal vanity that makes them feel good about themselves. The sum of the image is greater than any of its individual parts. That’s why we select certain poses and facial expressions while leaving others alone. And yes, it’s going to differ dramatically from one artist to another. There is no gold standard in art that says we have to portray someone with flawless skin or a perfect body. If anything, art prefers exactly the opposite.
We need muses who are willing to become a part of the art, who understand that they are giving themselves to something greater, to a concept that is larger than the individual. Artistic imagery today cannot be flat and singular. As we’ve discussed already, contemporary artistic imagery has to express life and explore the whole of reality, not merely a pleasant looking portrait of a pleasant looking person.
Muses are flexible
No, we’re not talking about physical capabilities, though sometimes those qualities, too, are advantageous. When I ask a model to be flexible, I’m thinking that one needs to be open-minded about what we’re doing, the message we’re attempting to make, and the social impact of what that message might be. This can be really challenging for the would-be muse, even if they’re clicking on every other level with the artist.
Here’s the thing: sometimes art demands that we shout in order to be heard. If we oppose something that is taking place in society, it is not enough that we create an image that calmly says, “I disagree with that.” No one pays attention to those images. Instead, we have to look for ways of expressing our disdain that is dramatic, different, and even shocking. For the muse, that might mean asking them to do something they normally wouldn’t consider doing. We need them to be flexible.
For example, let’s say that I was considering doing a piece protesting men’s involvement in attempting to dictate a woman’s reproductive rights. I might think of a concept that involves the proper medical use of a speculum. There’s no way in hell that image is going to be considered safe for work, is it? Just thinking about it makes me a little uncomfortable. That wouldn’t be a “fun” set of pictures for me to take. Yet, the message resulting from those images would undoubtedly make a point. We need muses who are flexible reaching outside their comfort zone for the sake of the art.
Muses don’t last forever
There have been times in my career where I could repeatedly call upon the same muse time after time, even with long periods of not seeing each other, and still produce wonderful results. Given the state of my life and that of society in general in 2017, I’m not sure that is even remotely a reasonable expectation anymore. What I’m seeing today is a situation where lives don’t just gradually morph from one stage to the next, they leap and jump, sometimes violently, across disparate and unexpected conditions. Life in 2017 is more fluid, more open to immediate change and that renders one’s longevity as a muse much shorter than we might like.
It is no one’s fault when what was once a creative and thriving relationship between artist and muse suddenly becomes impossible to maintain because of changes in either life. A muse’s life is suddenly skewed by the need to stay home and take care of a parent radically disabled in a car accident. A painter wakes up one morning to quite unexpectedly find they can no longer hold a paintbrush. A job offer half-way around the world suddenly alters one’s career choices. These things are a reality of our lives and sometimes we have to bid goodbye to people and things we love in order to do the things that are better.
Letting go of a gifted and talented muse isn’t easy. I’ve cried more than once. Yet, no muse lasts forever. We don’t want them to. Artists must change as well and if we latch on to a muse and never let them go then we eliminate at least some of the opportunity for us to grow and explore new forms of creativity. Muses speak to a specific period in our lives and leave behind a record of what was important to us both individually and socially at that time. Then, like starting a new book in a series, we open a new cover, find blank pages, and start to fill them with new images.
We may not all need a muse, but when we are lucky enough to find them they do wonderful and amazing things for our work. Perhaps you might think of the artists you know and whether you might risk being a muse. Perhaps a trial run, posing for something simple or even silly, might be a good first step. Being a muse is a special relationship and one should take care to connect with an artist whose vision is complimentary to their own. Be sure, every second one spends working with an artist is a special moment that the rest of the world should envy, and being a muse, even for a short while, is a very special calling indeed.
Sorting out the Business of Fashion report
Earlier this week, Business of Fashion and consulting firm McKinsey & Co. jointly released their State of Fashion 2017 report. The purpose of the report is to try and make some sense, connect the dots so-to-speak, of a fashion industry that is too large to report on cohesively on a daily basis. If fashion were its own country it would have the world’s seventh largest GDP, encompassing everything from luxury wear to crew socks.
While the full report, which you can download here, is a whopping 92 pages, what I want to focus on today is a list on page 13 titled: 10 TRENDS THAT WILL DEFINE THE FASHION AGENDA IN 2017. They’ve made the list short enough to fit on one page, but I want to take those trends, expand a bit, and maybe even give some of them a bit of a Hoosier twist. There’s a lot to dig into here, so let’s get busy.
1. INTENSIFYING VOLATILITY
What the report says: Volatility is the new normal. Geopolitical instability, terrorism, Brexit, and stalled trade deals will all increase a pervasive sense of uncertainty in the global economy.
Our take: Volatility may be an understatement. We’ve not even begun to see what the ramifications may be of a new US president and administration that is overly protective of American jobs, anxious to add taxes to companies that move overseas, and quick to add tariffs to imports. On one hand, this could aid US garment manufacturing which has struggled to compete with cheap shops in Bangladesh and other Asian countries. However, American workers are demanding better wages which the new US Labor Secretary isn’t keen on providing. There’s also a chance that we see OSHA’s powers diminished under the new administration, which could make working conditions more dangerous.
Put it all together and I don’t think one is overstating anything to call the atmosphere volcanic.
2. CHINA’S COMEBACK?
What the report says: China’s fundamentals, including growth of the middle and upper classes, remain strong and the government’s new fiscal policies are expected to improve conditions in 2017, but uncertainty remains.
Let’s define some of that uncertainty, shall we? Fashion loves the Chinese market and the rise of a luxury class across that country is what kept many of fashion’s biggest names from going under during the 2009 recession. However, even before recent political events muddied the waters, we were starting to see a pulling back from China’s wealthiest buyers. China’s government is looking to develop their own fashion industry so that they can keep more of that revenue at home. At the same time, as Europe and the United States become more protectionist and wary of international tourists who might also be corporate/industrial/political spies, frequent travelers from China are finding themselves facing increased scrutiny and suspicion.
Combine that with tensions rising in the South China Sea and the president-elect breaking protocol by contacting the president of Taiwan, and the stage is set to see China pull back from the West in a dramatic way should they be offended.
3. URBAN ENGINES
What the report says: City-based strategies trump country-based strategies: a new class of rapidly growing wealthy cities in newly influential markets are becoming central to the evolution of fashion.
The change has come subtly. We no longer talk so much in terms of French, Italian, or British fashion. Instead, we talk about the cities themselves. London, Paris, Milan, New York, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Sidney, Toronto, and even Moscow are all major fashion centers with more being added to the list. While the “big four” still dominate, designers and major labels are already beginning to pay attention to some of the other cities. Chanel has shown in both Istanbul and Buenos Aires. Tommy Hilfiger’s next show will be in Los Angeles.
What this ultimately means is that there are more players in a field growing broader than it ever has before. This could be a great thing for consumers as they have more choices. However, it is difficult to tell whether this kind of growth is sustainable.
4. SHREWDER SHOPPERS
What the report says: Working harder to keep up with smarter shoppers: “always-on” consumers are becoming ever more sophisticated, more technology-driven, and harder to predict.
Everyone loves a bargain and increasingly people are unwilling to spend any money unless they feel like they’re getting a deal. This is affecting the industry in a couple of different ways. One, it is setting up a discount tier in retail that is unsustainable and unrealistic. The entire outlet mall concept is costing labels millions of dollars and threatens to sink some major names if not curbed. At the same time, it is pushing a few retailers to break the law. The Los Angeles district attorney has charged four major stores—JC Penney, Sears, Kohls, and Macy’s—of misleading shoppers. According to the DA, the stores are claiming that clothes are discounted from a price at which they never sold in the first place. So, the bargain one thinks they’re getting isn’t such a bargain after all.
Now, with Amazon getting into the fray with their own brands, expect the discounting to take even more of a toll. American shoppers especially largely refuse to pay full price for anything. This makes belts at fashion houses and retailers quite tight.
5. GENERATION CORRELATION
What the report says: Opportunities to serve the young and the old better: fashion companies should consider how to fine-tune and diversify the way they approach both retired and millennials consumers.
What we’re looking at generationally isn’t really anything new. Younger generations buy because they want to look conteporary in their choice of styles. Older people buy because they have more disposable income and can afford nice things. What’s happening now, though, is a magnification of those trends. Younger people have extended lines of credit at an earlier age. Clothing is a major expenditure for those under the age of 25 but they’re careful about what they spend so they can buy more. Older generations secure in their retirement are looking for luxury purchases at a rate that far outspends their parents. Both have the ability to be dramatic wins for fashion labels.
However, fashion labels are failing to generate the loyalty that keeps them profitable long term. Especially as millennials get older, they are less likely to stay faithful to the brands they shopped when they were in college. Labels have a considerable challenge in more firmly addressing these sections of the market.
6. THE WELLNESS DIVIDEND
What the report says: Feeling good is the new looking good: more fashion players can start profiting from the wellness movement rather than competing with it.
Like it or not, fitness wear is the dominant sector in fashion, across the board, in almost every country. As a result, we see Chanel blending fitness fabrics in with their tweeds and other labels making strategic partnerships with athletic footwear companies. The ability to look good while working out as well as immediately after working out has drive sales of athliesure wear to the top of the charts.
This trend shows absolutely no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Interestingly enough, though, traditional athletic brands are not always reaping the rewards as traditional fashion labels move into the sector. While big names like Nike and Under Armor are seeing strong profits, smaller brands are having difficulty competing as names such as Ballenciaga and Prada hit the shelves in sporting goods stores. Amidst all the growth their looms an inevitable shake out between winners and losers.
7. CHANGING THE RHYTHM
What the report says: Disruptions to the fashion cycle: expectations set by the faster pace of fashion and consumer desire for instant gratification must be addressed to deliver fashion immediacy.
See-no, buy-now is here to stay, despite heavy opposition from both Parisian and Milan labels. The fahion cycle we once knew is gone. Also gone at an increasing rate are separate men’s and women’s shows. Designers are frequently opting to put both in the same show to save both time and money. This past September was the first big experiment with such a disruption and those who participated enjoyed significant rewards. As a result, we can expect more labels to fallow suit.
At the same time, consumers are demanding new fashions coming at them faster and faster. This is where things get dangerous. In order to produce more at less costs, garment manufacturers are turning to sweatshops and child labor in dangerous settings that frequently border on slavery. While both government and retailers having taken steps to prohibit child labor specifically, increasing demand makes it easy to skirt around the laws and the inspector. As long as demand remains high, labor issues will continue to be a problem.
8. ORGANIC GROWTH
What the report says: Investing more to nurture local clientele: 2017 has the potential to be the year of organic growth based on deeper relationships with existing clients rather than geographic, channel, and store network expansion.
Check your wallet. How many consumer loyalty cards do you have? Almost every major retailer has some form of customer retention program that involves sales, discounts, and other incentives to keep you coming back. What you can expect in the next year is for those programs to get more aggressive and more competitive. They know they’re not the only card you’re carrying. What they’re vying for is to be the one in the front of your wallet, the one you rely on the most.
There’s an opportunity here, though, for smaller designers and boutique shops. Local shops already know more about their customers, or, at least, have that opportunity. Mining those relationships so that customers stay local could give small shops and designers an advantage. Consider having special events to introduce frequent customers to new merchandise, or working with other shops near you to create bundled deals. Pampering customers has never held more opportunity than it does now.
9. UPSTREAM TECHNOLOGY
What the report says: Digital innovation goes behind the scenes: digitisation is a key to supply-chain efficiency, lower procurement costs, and enhanced sourcing opportunities.
You probably won’t see any of the digital logistics changes taking place within the industry, but you reap the benefits in lower prices. Everything from fabric development to inventory control benefits from increased efficiency in backend systems. Your purchases are immediately factored into how much of the same material is manufactured, when new orders are placed, and even where garments are placed in the store.
Nope, not the most romantic aspect of fashion at all, but this is where money is saved to pay for those dicounts we keep demanding. What is looking on the horizon is the ability to walk into a store, try on a pair of slacks, and walk them right on out the store. Amazon appears to be the current leader in that technology, but as it all comes together we could see even more innovations.
10. OWNERSHIP SHAKE-UP
What the report says: Emotionless reappraisal of brand portfolios: fashion conglomerates can be expected to further intensify their focus on big brands, creating space for other brands and industry outsiders such as private equity and family owners to acquire targets.
This is another part of the fashion industry that doesn’t get a lot of attention except in industry mags such as Business of Fashion and WWD. This is important, though, because it gives emerging designers a chance to be seen. When investors sell a brand, they can then use that capital to help younger brands become established. With fashion institutions churching out more young designers every year, this turnover of capitol is necessary for anyone to succeed.
2017 holds a lot of promise, but it also holds a lot of challenges. The winners will be those who step up to the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities.
So, the question would be: are you up to the challenge?
People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. —Audrey Hepburn
Every once in a while we need to go back through the archives and revive some photos that were once ignored
This is one of those days where I just couldn’t handle the current topics in my newsfeed. The top five news stories this morning all dealt with the same issue which dominated yesterday’s news. I don’t want to add to that noise. Plus, I’m still tired, recovering from a month of fashion shows and trying to get things in gear for next year. This is typically a quiet time where we don’t shoot as much, but we’re extremely busy with business stuff.
Given all that, today seemed like a good day to show you some pictures we’ve revived from the archive. Rather than put them in a slide show, though, which would be very easy, I want to take you through each of them and explain why they were omitted from their original set’s production. Perhaps this method will be a bit more interesting.
Let’s start with the photo above. This is a picture of downtown Dallas, TX taken from the passenger seat of my brother’s vehicle. I love that Dallas is not afraid of modern architecture. There is a lot to that city that will surprise you, despite the large number of morons who live there (No, baby brother doesn’t actually live there). Why was this image not part of the original set? Two reasons. First, the uniqueness of the architecture leaves me uncertain as to where the straight lines are supposed to be. Perspective is a wonderful thing and this image defies it. Second, look in the bottom right corner and you’ll see my reflection in the snow-covered hi … uhm, I mean, car window. Rather creepy.
Revived Workout
Why I Revived This Picture: I love the ambiguity of this frame. We see their arms extended upward but have no reason why they are engaged in such a pose. I had only recently met both girls and they were such good sports to be out shooting on a rather cool Sunday morning. What are they actually doing? Pullups. There’s a bar just above them, hence the reason for their arms being in the position they are.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: The very reason I like this image is why we left it out of the original set: it’s too ambiguous. We were doing an article on fitness, had tons of photos, and this one just muddied the water too much.
A Bit Of Tack
Why I Revived This Picture: Symmetry. This is the tack room at the stables where my niece rides. I was taken first by the color of all the different tack, but as I looked I noticed the symmetry with which they were hung on the wall. I couldn’t resist the photo.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: We were on a family vacation. Do you see any family in this picture? No. This happens every vacation. I take a lot of pictures and then never get around to processing the ones that don’t include family members.
Body Paint
Why I Revived This Photo: I really love the painting Kelly Oswalt did for this set. Having to cover an entire body in white is a lot more difficult than it sounds. The design she chose was absolutely wonderful and has always been one of my favorites.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: At the time we shot this I was cropping everything to a square orientation and this photo just doesn’t fit. I was also dropping in a substitute background and that didn’t work with this photo, either.
Am I Blue?
Why I Revived This Photo: Color. It’s not often we have a photo with such high contrasting color, especially with any level of nudity in the photo. Here is one of those rare instances where it all comes together and looks best with very little treatment to it at all.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: Originally, this photo was part of a composite image, hence the blue background. The image was heavily blurred and at a reduced opacity so that the bright contrast of the colors was not evident.
Long Sleeves
Why I Revived This Photo: This sleeve is one of the best examples of detailed color ink work I’ve seen. There are a lot of times I don’t like full sleeves like this because, depending on how the arm is bent or what clothes might be worn, the flow of the image is interrupted. This piece works nicely, though, even under blouses that cover most of her arm. Very beautiful work.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: When we first processed this series of photos I really wanted to make sure every image focused on the ink more than a model. I was concerned that the nipple might be distracting because, as the past few hours have demonstrated, the world is full of pigs.
Down On The Farm
Why I Revived This Photo: Because this is one of those sets where we should have done better. We had been shooting all day outdoors and hadn’t taken enough lights to adequately handle shooting after dark. Not many of these photos are worth saving, but this one is.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: The whole set was largely buried. I only processed three images when we first shot them. As an aside, since these photos were taken, the model returned to college and is now an RN. A lot of people called her a lot of not-so-nice names and refused to work with her. To those people, we say, “Fuck you.”
Eternal Terminal
Why I Revived This Photo: Lines. Look at them. The perspective of the hallway, uniquely shaped by unseen staircases, trailing off into darkness, lends itself to so very many stories. My imagination runs wild when I think of all the adventures that might have had their beginning or ending in this hallway.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: This image is not from a public set. We were doing some location scouting and this was one of the images that convinced me we needed to shoot here. However, I typically don’t process photos from a scouting shoot. In fact, it’s rare I keep them at all. I just couldn’t let this one go.
Almost Anonymous
Why I Revived This Photo: Nothing from this set has ever been processed. They were shot a few years ago, the middle set in a three-set shoot. First set was processed, third set was processed, these were skipped. Since I was going through looking for photos that hadn’t been seen before, this seemed like a pretty good choice.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: I don’t remember exactly, but the set that comes after this is a very popular series involving a pocket watch. Some of you might remember having seen those photos. I think there’s still one in my portfolio. Excitement over that last set most likely led to this set being ignored.
Life Sometimes Sucks
Why I Revived This Photo: This poor young woman has had a rough go of it lately. Every time she turns around, someone she cares about is dying. There are other issues as well. This is one of those moments when life is not being kind and there’s not a helluva lot anyone can do about. So, I’m hoping this photo might bring a smile to her day and remind her that someone cares.
Why This Photo Was Omitted: At the time we processed the other photos from this set, this one didn’t seem to particularly fit the narrative. We’d had a fun shoot. She had a fun shoot. This image seemed a little too serious to match with all the smiles and laughter. The photo feels a lot more poignant by itself.
There, ten photos revived from the archive. I hope you’ve enjoyed the stroll. Maybe I’ll think of something important to write by tomorrow.
There’s not a single business model, and there’s not a single type of electronic content. There are really a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and we just have to discover all of them. —Tim O’Reilly
All it took was one new website to totally change the business model for photography. The bar has been set.
You’re going to want to bookmark this website: miramira.tv . Photographer Mario Testino, a favorite of Vogue US, launched the new site this week after sponsoring a 48-hour hackathon asking students: “What could the next frontier of visual communications look like?” They told him, and the results are probably not what you’re doing now, but are almost certainly where we all need to go. Fashion website/magazine Business of Fashion featured Mario and the new website in a top-line article this morning. Testino tells them early on:
“The kids don’t have 35 years of experience, but they have hundreds of years of knowledge through access. The mix of that is quite magical. In a way, I’m looking for new ideas, new ways of seeing things, new ways of solving a challenge.”
What he’s saying isn’t that different from how many of us feel. We’re all looking for new ideas, new ways of seeing things. That’s just part of being a photographer. Unlike the rest of us, though, Testino took some serious steps for force a change in his vision: he relied on eyes that are not his and trusted what they saw. The end result of his effort affects us all, though, whether he intended that to happen or not, whether we like it or not.
Testino has hit on something that requires a change in how we do business. Not that we copy exactly what he’s doing, but consider the structure behind the effort.
Open Up Your Archives
Who among us doesn’t have tons of pictures sitting around that no one has ever seen? Both of the photos above fall into that category. We took the pictures for an event that never happened. They’ve been sitting in my archives, untouched, since 2009. Testino’s model is to worry less about copyright infringement and more about making sure the pictures are seen; all the pictures. Granted, his archives are filled with pictures of supermodels like Kate Moss. Not everyone is going to offer that kind of appeal in their archives. Still, the point is to get the pictures out there. Curate yourself in a bolder, more dynamic way.
Manage Your Social Media
We all have social media accounts sitting all over the place. I don’t know about you, but I have multiple accounts that I can’t even remember. A new website comes along, looks good up front, then goes nowhere. Even on the ones that do have staying power, though, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, our efforts tend to be disjointed, haphazard, and almost accidental. One of the critical aspects of the new website is that it serves as a landing place for all Mario’s social media posts. If he puts a picture on Instagram, it points back to the website. If he puts a video on Facebook, it points back to the website. Everything is coordinated so that social media followers don’t just see one picture and move on. They click and see more.
Organize Photos By The Stories They Tell
We have projects, we have themes, and we have those shoots that are just out there. Traditionally, we would organize them into portfolios according to genre: fashion, editorial, portrait, wedding, babies, etc. That’s the way mine are organized now. Testino hits on a key change in how people view photos online, however. They look for stories, not genres. They want to see a series that has a beginning, middle, and end. Maybe they’re all from the same shoot. Maybe they’re not. What matters is that when someone looks at them, they see a story line that is recognizable. Save the portfolio approach for lookbooks, whose usefulness is limited. Mario makes a good point here:
“Today, I feel that the books are limited because you can only reach a certain amount of people. Whereas online, you can reach 2 million people in one go. There’s something about sharing that I find very interesting, and very of today. So it makes sense to put it online.”
Develop Relationships
Photographers know they’re supposed to do this, but, as a group, we’re lousy at doing it. We tend to develop relationships based on what they can do for us, not whether we can help each other. Part of what fuels the depth of content coming to this new website are Mario’s relationships with people; not just models, but his assistants, makeup artists, stylists, tour guides, etc. He puts their stories on this new website. He highlights people other than himself. The concept makes perfect sense when one thinks about it. What’s missing for many of us, though, is that concerted effort to create and maintain relationships. I’m horrible at it. That needs to change.
Work In Different Media
On the new website, one not only finds the incredible photographs for which Mario is famous, one finds videos, and podcasts, and stories. Testino isn’t afraid of new and developing media. Instead, he’s mastering it and using it to his advantage. I’ll admit to being frightened by this one. Back when Canon and Nikon first started adding video capability to their DSLRs, I argued that there is a world of difference between video and still photography. There is. But if we stay focused on a singular media the world is going to pass us by. So, maybe we need to take a class or hire a twenty-something kid to show us how it’s done. Staying focused on only still images no longer makes good business sense.
Travel
Yeah, it may cost you a bit, but it needs to happen. Get out of the studio, explore different cultures and environments, meet different people, photograph something that isn’t your own backyard. That doesn’t necessarily mean one has to travel far or expensively. Consider volunteering for a charitable activity that takes you someplace different and take pictures while you’re there. Maybe you explore small towns in your own state. There are many ways to twist this. We don’t all need to winter in Abu Dabi. One trick here is to figure out how to get clients to pay for your travel. Don’t ask me, I don’t know. I am certain it can be done, though.
Get Help
No, I’m not necessarily talking about psychiatric help, though I’m guessing almost all of us could use some. One of the first things I picked up from the BoF article is that Testino has a CEO, and it’s not him. Suki Larson is the chief executive of Mario Testino+. Mario Testino+ is the business side of everything the photographer does. This is where things are kept organized. There are people who schedule travel, organize photos, manage social media, plus his two photo assistants and others. All this business elements are handled by people who are not the photographer. Sure, most of us don’t have the budgets to hire that many people; maybe not anyone at all. Still, we need to find people who can help us. Perhaps we have to do some creative bartering at first, but photographers are notoriously lousy at business. Maybe we need to let go of that side and find someone who knows what a P&L is and why it’s important.
Position Yourself For The Future
Photographers notoriously look backward and long for the way it used to be. They were doing it 30 years ago and we’re still doing that now. Stop it. Stop yearning for the days of film. Quit looking at old business models that failed 20 years ago. Instead, now is the time to be exploring things like virtual reality and 3D imagery. No, we’re not there yet on either front, but they are coming in one form or another. Being able to adapt to those new media quickly will keep you at the front of your field. Don’t be afraid. Look ahead.
Keep Doing Stuff
Not everything is going to work for you. Mario is a rare kind of photographer who has a knack for seeing a niche and making it his own. We can’t all be Mario Testino. What we see in his business model, though, is that we have to keep doing stuff. We have to keep taking pictures. We have to keep trying new things in new places with new people. There is no room for us to sit back and bemoan the fact that no one is knocking on your studio door. Keep moving. Explore what is beyond you. I like what Mario says at the end of the BoF article:
“It’s the doing that makes you get better. Everything has changed, I think I should already be over in a way. I think there is something to be said about staying open to everything and anything. Curiosity is the biggest gift that you have.”
Testino has set an extremely high bar and not many of us are going to reach it. One thing is for sure, though, and that’s the fact that the photography business has already changed around us. We will either adapt, or we will fail.
Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper. The photographer begins with the finished product. —Edward Steichen
Of all the ways there are to hire a photographer, some people make us not want to work with them at all.
A lot of people are clueless when it comes to knowing how to hire a photographer. Some just go to the nearest commercial studio, sit down, pay the fees, and try to enjoy the results. It’s easier that way. Those who need something specific, though, and especially corporate entities that need product and marketing imagery, need more than can be found at the Photos-R-Us booth at the mall.
A source on social media led me to this article on Libris: How To Hire A Professional Photographer. The article is well written and covers the major topics one might want to consider before hiring a professional photographer for corporate imagery. The same recommendations wouldn’t necessarily apply to someone hiring a portrait photographer, though. Similarly, there’s a very different set of questions to ask before hiring a wedding photographer, or someone who can adequately capture your four-year-old’s birthday. Hiring a good photographer can be challenging.
At the same time, however, photographers are plagued by would-be customers who don’t have a clue what they’re doing. Most of the time, we can help and guide them toward exactly what they need. For example, if you ask me about wedding photos, I’m going to guide you toward a number of colleagues who do nothing but weddings. They’re good at that. Weddings just drive me nuts. Still, there are always those who get it so wrong we just walk away.
Here’s a humorous list of ways to NOT hire a professional photographer.
Start with “How much would you charge …”
I don’t want to hear any more. If all you are interested in is the cost, then you’re not interested in the professionalism and quality of my work, which is a large part of how my price is determined. If you’re shopping based on price, go to the mall. I, on the other hand, am likely to give you my sarcastic (and very poor) Groucho Marx impression:
“How much do I charge? How much do you have? Here, show me your wallet. We’ll just take all those credit cards there and max ’em out and call it even. That works for me, doesn’t it? By the way, who did you say you are?”
Don’t have a clue what you want
“We need someone to take pictures for our company’s website.” comes the typical request.
“Wonderful, what kind of pictures do you want?” we’ll ask. “Headshots of company leadership? Pictures of your products? Photos of your employees pretending to work together?”
“I don’t know. Just stuff around the office or something.”
Uhm, yeah. You need to find someone who has to patience to stand around and twiddle their thumbs all day while you make up your mind. This never works because, regardless of what pictures might ultimately be taken, they’re never the “right ones,” because no one has a freaking clue what the “right ones” are. Call me when you know what you want.
Think anything under $500 is a budget
Sure, you can always find a photographer willing to work for next to nothing, or maybe even nothing. They’re out there. You get what you pay for. This applies in double doses to corporate imagery. We apply a formula when calculating the value of corporate photographs. That formula includes various forms of media and how many people are likely to view the image(s). The pictures going into a $3 million global ad campaign are going to cost a lost more than the pictures we shoot for Uncle Fester’s Bait Shop.
Photographers often feel a lot of pressure here and too many companies are willing to take advantage of us. We want the job, especially if the client carries some name recognition. However, we also know the value of our work. If you’re a corporation, it’s beyond rude to ask for anyone to take a shot of your company headquarters for less than $1,500. Try to understand the value of our work and give us a budget that is reasonable.
Balk at paying for my staff
You want me to take your pictures. You’ve looked at my portfolio and like what you see. But when I mention the cost of my staff, you don’t want to pay for them? Seriously? How the fuck do you think I took those great pictures in my portfolio? There was a makeup artist, a hair stylist, a wardrobe stylist, possibly an art director, certainly an assistant or two, and quite possibly someone whose job is to make sure I don’t fall down too much (it happens). Granted, the size of the staff fluctuates with the difficulty and particular needs of the project. Still, there is almost always going to be at least one other person with me, even if we’re just taking pictures of the grass growing on your front lawn.
Wanting to hire a professional photographer and not pay the staff is like buying a new car and not wanting to pay for the engine. You want them. You need them. They’re professionals as well. Don’t be the ass who doesn’t want to pay them. I’ll just wrap their costs into my fee, plus an extra 20% for the trouble.
Diss pictures in my portfolio
Let me expand on that. Don’t diss the pictures, nor the models in the picture, nor the products in the pictures, nor the clients for whom the pictures were taken, nor where the pictures were taken, or anything else involving the pictures in a photographer’s portfolio. If you don’t like our pictures, then why the fuck are you asking us to take yours? You’re not impressing me with your alleged “knowledge of photography” or “commitment to quality.” You’re just being a gripey old bitch who is probably not going to be pleased with anything we do.
I don’t like working with/for negative people. I have better things to do with my time. Plus, it’s really difficult to be creative and artistic when there’s someone on set who just isn’t going to be pleased. You keep that bad attitude up and I’m stopping and making everyone do the chicken dance.
Talk politics
Do ya’ want to take pictures or do you want to start a fight? Hmm? Or do you want me to take pictures of the fight? I add a hazardous duty surcharge for getting that close to the action. I’m unapologetically liberal, but even if we agree on most issues, the photo set isn’t the place or time for political discussions, even if what we’re shooting is inherently political. Let the photographer do his work, take the pictures you need, and then you can discuss the political ramifications of electing a toad for president.
Distractions on the set are a problem. I know sometimes they can’t be avoided, but, by all means, don’t intentionally introduce them where they’re not needed.
Cancel last minute then expect us to rebook for free
Sure, we’re willing to consider special circumstances outside anyone’s control, such as natural disaster, death, severe illness, or sudden IRS audit (it’s happened). However, if you’re cancelling within 48 hours of a scheduled shoot simply because it’s not “convenient” for someone, we’re charging a rebooking fee and it’s probably not going to be small.
Here’s the thing: we create our schedules well in advance. When someone cancels last-minute, we can’t just turn around and take the next client standing in line. That cancellation removes our ability to make money during that time block. You’re effectively costing us money. Your photographer is going to be reluctant to reschedule under those circumstances because if it’s “inconvenient” once, it’s likely to be “inconvenient” again and someone obviously doesn’t value our time. We may not tell you we won’t rebook, but a smart photographer charges a fee for doing so.
And other stupid shit
There are plenty of other things I could add to this list but time and your lack of interest prevent me from making this article too terribly much longer. Know that most photographers don’t give a damn about your opinions on anything, don’t want anyone second-guessing their work, and yes, we do mind that your second-cousin with an “interest in photography” is shooting right behind us. If that same person had an “interest in medicine,” would you take them to your next OB/GYN exam? Hmm?
As I said, I’m trying to treat the topic humorously. The issues are real, though, and might cause you to miss out on the best pictures you could have had. I’m not the only photographer who is a bit picky about his clients. Not by a long shot.
So, get your ducks in a row, have a reasonable budget, and let us do our job without interference. If you can do that, hiring a professional photographer is easy.
Fashion is here to help make people look very important. If they have good taste and choose what suits them, I give them options on how they can do that. It’s always sexy, and it’s always with the same result: making women look fantastic. —Vivienne Westwood
We’re seeing a lot of sexy looks on the New York runways, but will they work in the Midwest and, if one dares, what are the social ramifications?
New York fashion is different from what we see in the other three fashion capitals, London, Milan, and Paris. Fashion here doesn’t have 150-year-old brands with house aesthetics that can’t be breached. New York fashion tends to run more current, more realistic, more “street,” and more accessible. Yes, we have some designers who make lovely red-carpet gowns. We also have a handful that are very experimental. For the most part, though, New York designers like to keep it real with collections that run from casual daywear to luxurious eveningwear with something for just about everyone.
That “something for everyone” approach may have gotten American fashion into trouble, though. A recent article in Fast Company explores how major American brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren have lost their luster. Speculation in the article runs along the lines that the labels spread themselves too thin, discounted too much. In trying to be everything to everyone, they risk becoming nothing.
Business of Fashion questions whether Tommy Hilfiger’s partnership with model Gigi Hadid was enough to revive a brand that’s no longer cool. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren announced this morning they’re moving to the popular see-now, buy-now concept. What we’re actually seeing on the runway, though, is that New York brands are being much sexier.
Mentioning The Unmentionables
I’ve mentioned multiple times this past week in our reviews on Pattern that we’re seeing a lot of bras on the runway this season. While that’s not too unusual for brands such as Desigual, and certainly understandable for labels such as Chromat, we’re not as accustomed to seeing them from designers such as Jill Stuart, Altuzarra, and Jason Wu. Victoria Beckham even designed her entire collection around the bra concept.
Then, we’re seeing a lot more sheer this season. Sheer has been a normal part of European design for several seasons. American designers have tended to stay away, though, because many community decency laws would prohibit them being worn without a camisole or something else underneath. However, as I’m typing this, I just finished watching a Very Wang show in which half the collection was sheer, and not necessarily in the most modest of ways. We’ve seen a tremendous amount more sheer this season than ever before.
Some are blaming the exhibitionism encouraged by photo-sharing sites such as Instagram. While almost all the sites prohibit outright nudity, the closer one gets to exposing everything the more one’s list of followers increases. More followers mean more sponsorships so seeing models in their underwear is a relatively normal occurrence. Fashion designers would seem to be merely following that trend and taking the look to the street. The question is, are the streets ready for the look?
Will It Play In Indy?
With all these new, sexy looks dominating the runways, the question becomes one of whether Indiana women are interested in wearing these clothes, will they be able to find them in local stores, and if they do, what are the social and legal implications? Here’s where I would like to start a serious dialog because, quite honestly, I’m not sure of the answers. I would like to think that people can wear whatever they want and not have to worry about it. We all know that’s not the reality of the situation, though.
I do know that some buyers for local department stores stay away from current season clothing in part to give people here some time to become comfortable with what is being worn on the coast. As they see their favorite celebrities dressing a certain way, Midwestern shoppers then become more interested in mimicking those styles. However, that process takes a while, As a result, some stores routinely stock fashion that is off by a season or two. Not everyone is that way, though. Fast fashion stores such as H&M are more likely to duplicate whatever is selling best on the two coasts.
The Midwest has a well-deserved reputation for dressing more conservatively. Even as people see their favorite celebrities dress certain ways, is that enough to convince people to cross social barriers that have existed for generations? Are women okay with wearing a light jacket open with nothing under it but a bra? Or consider the low-plunging hoodies shown at DKNY. Are local gyms likely to be tolerant of women wearing sports gear that is intentionally sexy? There are a lot of open questions that probably need to be answered.
Let’s Start Talking
These are almost all spring/summer looks that are doing the boundary pushing. Designers doing current season are keeping people bundled up so the issues are not too pressing. We have time to talk. I would love to see Indianapolis be a safe place for people to wear anything, anytime. For that to happen, though, we all need to be talking with each other. Perhaps Polina can help us start a conversation with city officials so everyone is clear on exactly what is legal without getting into trouble. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a conversation between shop owners and store buyers as to what their criteria might be for stocking new fashion this next spring.
There is a lot of really great fashion coming up for this spring/summer. Why should those opportunities be limited only to those who live on either coast? And as Indianapolis continues to draw ever-growing numbers of people here for conventions and trade shows, we increase the likelihood that people visiting will have some of these more forward-thinking styles in their suitcases. How will the city respond to them?
Watching fashion shows is a lot of fun, but ultimately I want to see people actually wearing some version of what I see on the runway. Are you ready Indy? Here comes the sexiest fashion we’ve seen!
I am called a dog because I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals. —Diogenes
Not everything in our world revolves around fashion. I still have to walk the dog.
I’m taking everything that happens this morning as a sign from the universe, and it’s not looking good at this point.
We have a cat tree in our living room positioned right by the entrance to the hallway leading to/from the bedrooms. When I woke up this morning, all three of the adult cats were sleeping on the tree. As I pass, the eldest cat, and only male of the bunch, reaches out and baps me upside the head. Normally, he’s rather gentle but not this morning. There was some claw in that bap. I consider that a wake-up message. I need to pay attention—and give the big guy some love.
Taking the dog out, I was enjoying the cool 57° as we traversed our route around the neighborhood. Being away from the computer screen at the start of the day helps me clear my mind, sort my thoughts, and avoid stepping in someone else’s dog’s poop. I needed that time away this morning. I was pissed that after spending so very much time creating yesterday’s picture of the day only seven people actually saw it. Seven. Everyone’s off looking at the fashion reviews, which is flattering in a way. But there’s more to life.
Like popsicle sticks, apparently. We returned from our walk and I filled the dog’s bowl. Most days he nibbles a bit then lays back down and naps. The cats happen to like this particular brand of dog food, though, and steal it from his bowl.
Subheadings Make Copy More Readable
They also interrupt the story at awkward moments. As I was saying, the cats keep stealing the dog’s food.
So, this morning, the dog decides he’s had enough of the culinary theft and devours his morning ration the instant it hits the bowl. Then, apparently still not satisfied, he goes sniffing around the couch to see what else he can find. What he found was a popsicle stick that Kat had left out on the couch. Of course, dogs don’t need popsicle sticks, what with splinters and all. I took the stick away and put it in the trash.
Five minutes later I hear a crunching sound behind me. Sure enough, the dog had retrieved the popsicle stick from the garbage and was continuing his treat. I took the stick away again and gave him a stern warning to stay out of the trash.
Dogs understand human logic; I’m sure of it. Don’t laugh at me.
I sit back down to look at the morning’s news, something about the Democratic candidate passing out from boredom or some other nonsense, when I heard sounds coming from the vicinity of the cats’ litter box. That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that all three cats were back in their tree. I check and sure enough the dog was back there eating the cat poop.
Good thing we use an all-natural cat litter.
Other Things Happened This Weekend
Football. You know, those guys who get paid millions of dollars to give each other concussions. I like football at the college level, but the so-called pros bore me. Besides, there were fashion shows to watch. Lots and lots of fashion shows.
There were also neighbors that needed some attention.
We’ve known for a while that our friend across the street was struggling. Some of the bitchier old ladies in the neighborhood have made it impossible for him to do the minor mechanic work he was performing in his driveway. Not that he was doing anyone any harm, mind you, just changing oil (with appropriate disposal), adjusting and replacing belts, swapping out the occasional fuel pump. Quick, easy things he could do without needing a rack or a lot of other heavy and expensive equipment. The old biddies in the neighborhood would call code enforcement every time they saw a car in his driveway. It didn’t matter whether any codes, it was the constant harassment that mattered. As a result, they’ve eliminated his sole source of income.
The poor guy was sitting over there quite literally starving to death. When Kat found out he had nothing in his refrigerator, we had no choice but to act. Kat’s good about that. While I was watching people parading around in costumes that retail for more than most people make in a month, she ran to the store and made sure our neighbor had enough food to get him through the next few weeks. We have to watch out for each other like that.
Turn The Lights Out When You Leave
There was a full-size tractor-trailer going out of the neighborhood this morning. Talk about zoning violations. It wasn’t a moving truck, either, which would be the one logical explanation. The dog and I heard a lot of banging and clanging while we were on our walk this morning. I’m assuming it was whoever was loading that truck. Perhaps they were disassembling their meth lab and moving it. If so, good riddance.
There’s also a school bus that goes through picking up kids at 6:00 AM. I don’t get it. That’s too damn early for children to be up.
I just started the third pot of coffee brewing. It really shouldn’t take me so long to write these articles, but it does. Between the dog snatching popsicle sticks, cats leaping around the room, and trying to get the kids to school completely dressed, I don’t get to write too many words at once. I’m fortunate if I make it through a sentence without being interrupted.
I’m still pissed at how few people read yesterday’s article. I worked really hard on that, dammit.
Sigh. There are more fashion shows to cover this morning. If I get a break from that, there are pictures to edit. There is no such thing as down time around here. In fact, we’ve been keeping track and there’s typically only about an hour a day, between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, when no one is up and busy. One hour.
No wonder we burn through so many lightbulbs.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for sharing. Oh, and did you know there are people who make eight figures off YouTube? None of them are over 50. Sigh.
Sometimes I think God wants there to be a circus so we can show there’s another way to respond. —Tony Dungy
The circus that is NYFW got off to a chaotic and often confusing start yesterday
We knew that this season of fashion weeks was going to be a bit of a circus. With everyone changing which season they were showing and how they were showing it was inevitable that there would be some confusion and chaos. What we couldn’t know was exactly how that confusion and chaos would take shape and who would end up being the clowns in this circus and who would be the lion tamers. While events don’t officially start until today, yesterday gave us a pretty good preview of what we can expect.
Is This A Fashion Show?
There is a lot of experimentation going on this season. Many people feel that the traditional runway setup just doesn’t connect the way it needs to. As a result, we found ourselves looking at some things that we weren’t quite sure were an improvement. At least with a traditional runway, there’s no question as to what is happening. Models + clothes + runway = fashion show. Taking away the runway doesn’t seem like it would be that big a different to the total equation, but it turns out that maybe we need that element a little more than we thought.
Two examples spring to mind. Rachel Comey presented her 15-year anniversary collection yesterday morning. She wanted to give us a back-to-my-roots kind of feeling, so she staged her show right out on the sidewalk. Not kidding. There was a FedEx van in the background of most the runway shots I saw. Guests were seated in white folding chairs perched between doorways and around scaffolding. This left models just enough room to walk carefully in front of them. The only problem is that Comey’s every-day-woman style left passers-by wondering what was going on. Was this a fashion show or just a rehearsal? It was also difficult to tell where the fashion show left off and normal well-dressed pedestrians began.
Another example would be Misha Nonoo‘s Snapchat-exclusive presentation. The show was presented through Refinery 29’s Snapchat account, which was probably chosen for its high number of followers. However, the pieces of Nonoo’s collection were posted separately and at various times throughout the day. I don’t normally keep Snapchat up and running all day. Every time I looked at a new segment I wondered if I was seeing everything or missing a snap. The drawings on top of the photos were distracting as well.
Poof, The Stream Is Gone
Labels that show before the official start of fashion week have to handle all the elements of that presentation themselves. This includes any live streaming they might wish to attempt. Recent changes in Facebook’s Live option led a couple of yesterday’s designers to give that a try rather than paying for real cameras and stuff. I can be rather sympathetic to some degree. Professional live streaming is incredibly expensive, especially when more than one camera is involved. Being able to eliminate that cost helps keep the budget a little bit lower.
However, it also makes the streaming much less predictable. None of the Facebook streams we were watching started on time. In fact, not all of them ever started. Twice we waited, and waited, and waited over an hour before finally giving up. The one we did see was very poor quality, broadcast from an intern’s phone we’re guessing, and then mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the presentation. Perhaps the phone ran out of battery.
Streaming has never been the most reliable technology. A lot can go wrong under the best of circumstances. Trying to short-cut the process doesn’t seem to generate positive results.
They’re Doing WHAT On Roosevelt Island?
I’m going to have to choose my words carefully here because I have a filter on my browser that blocks any mention of a certain pseudo-celebrity family that I find particularly annoying. Unfortunately, one of the loud-mouthed members of that family fancies himself a designer. He’s not, really. This is where the circus just gets ugly. It’s only the family’s disturbingly close relationship with Vogue’s Anna Wintour that continues to provide them with any major attention. Everyone else stays as far away from the cluster fuck as possible. Nonetheless, he presented what he is calling Season 4 right smack out in the middle of Roosevelt Island.
Wait, Roosevelt Island? You mean that largely-forgotten strip of land in the middle of the East River? Yep, that Roosevelt Island. The one that was never meant to accommodate too terribly many people because it’s only 800 feet wide and its most broad point. The one that contains a tribute to FDR, for whom the island is named, at the South end. There’s barely room to stage a picnic on Roosevelt Island, let alone a fashion show.
They tried. It sucked. From models having to remove their shoes to walk to guests arriving after the presentation, the whole thing was one giant failure. Again. We keep hoping the so-called designer will stop. No one needs that many different shades of tan.
A Safe Place To Hide
We tend to think of a circus as being a spectacle that no one can miss. However, a circus can also be a good place to hide. While everyone else is watching the clowns, one can go off and do their own thing without anyone else noticing. Or, perhaps disappear without anyone noticing.
When Wednesday’s schedule first came out, Herve Leger by Max Azria was scheduled for that afternoon. Some time Wednesday morning, however, that entry disappeared. We checked both the brand’s Facebook page and their website and there’s no mention of the show’s cancellation. There’s no mention of the show at all.
This made us curious so we started looking for Azria’s major label: BCBG. Nope, that’s not on the schedule for this season, either. Anywhere. Both are gone. This raises our suspicions a bit. While everyone knows that Max’s wife, Lubov, has done most the creative work the past several seasons, Azria has still kept his hands on the reigns. Could the 67-year-old designer be in ill health, or could all the chaos of this season have forced the labels to take a step back and wait? There are also reports of clothing orders placed on the website being cancelled without explanation.
Perhaps there’s a dark side to this circus.
Grab The Popcorn
No matter what the problems, a circus always manages to be entertaining and this one is no different. We’ve already posted our first review of last night’s Tom Ford presentation on Pattern. There is a lot more to come. Remember, Tommy Hilfiger is staging an actual carnival on Friday night. This may be the craziest circus we’ve ever seen. Grab your popcorn and enjoy the show.
Indiana has had a great influence on fashion. People here care about style but they’re not too quick to adopt everything New York throws at them.
Designer Marlene Thomas with models Katherine Gulling (left) and Emily Miedema backstage prior to the 2012 IFT event. Her Marlene H Couture collection hits the NYFW runway Thursday at noon.
I was still sitting in front of the computer yesterday morning when something came across my Facebook newsfeed that made me smile. Not a meme nor a picture from the past, it was a status update from designer Marlene Thomas, leaving Fort Wayne for New York. For a brief moment, I almost wished that I was going to New York as well. Watching NYFW from Indiana has some challenges that are often frustrating, especially this season when the spectacle has ramped up a bit. If I don’t stop to think about the chaos and confusion that is hitting Manhattan this morning, I’m tempted to actually miss being there.
Then, I come to my senses. While being at NYFW and the other big four fashion weeks was exciting enough back when I was 30, today it would be exhausting and perhaps even a bit torturous. All the walking. All the security checks. You can take your camera here but you can’t take it there. Where’s my town car? Nevermind, I’ll take the subway. How am I supposed to get across town in 15 minutes? The pastries before that last show aren’t setting well with my stomach.
There are advantages to staying in Indiana and watching NYFW from here. The Internet makes a lot of things possible that we couldn’t have dreamed twenty-five years ago. Still, if you’re going to do this with me, there are some things you really need to know before we start. Pay attention.
Hashtags Are Everything
Want to know what’s really going on and what’s really hot? Watch the hashtags for changing trends. Almost every designer, at least those whose PR teams are on top of things, has their own hashtag for their show. When a hashtag takes off and starts trending we have our first clue that the brand has achieved a level of popularity and is worth watching. That’s not to say that less-popular brands with less-popular hashtags should be dismissed, but the power of the hashtag has become a dominant part of fashion PR.
Sitting here in Indiana, we don’t feel the power of the hashtag quite so much. In fact, there are still a lot of people in Indiana, especially those of us over 40, who don’t really understand the whole hashtag thing and how it works. For those whose minds still think old-school, a hashtag is like a brightly colored marker stuck in the middle of a card catalog. In a mind-numbing sea of excess information, hashtags not only allow us to find specific information faster, but to group information quickly on a given topic by searching for that hashtag. The more people use your hashtag, the more markers are placed in that sea of information.
Business of Fashion even ran an op-ed piece yesterday declaring that fashion has hashtag cults. Calling the obsession with hashtags a cult might be a bit over-the-top, but the basic premise of the article is correct: hashtags are everything in fashion and the only way to keep up-to-the-moment the next four weeks is to follow those hashtags religiously.
Start Your Social Media Engines
I am not sure how we ever surfed the Internet in the days before browsers allowed users to have multiple tabs open. I’m sitting here with 14 of them open now and I haven’t even started pulling up all the social media sites I know I’m going to need to get through the day. In addition to social media, there are a plethora of fashion magazines and blogs that are worth watching this week more than normal. I try to keep them sorted from left to right across my monitor in order of relevance. Sometimes that approach almost works.
Following the schedule on NYFW.com is the logical starting point. Be very much aware, however, that the listing there is incomplete and only contains the presentations showing at official NYFW venues. If you want a more complete listing, you’ll want to take a look at Fashion Week Online. Even that list doesn’t have everything, though, and times are definitely subject to change. For example, Marc Jacobs is still listed as showing at 6:00 PM, which is his traditional timeslot. He’s not. He’s moved his show up to 2:00 PM. Be careful and double check the designer’s website and/or social media feeds.
Speaking of social media, you need them all. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are must-haves. If you don’t have accounts on all four, get busy. You’ll have to follow your favorite designers on every platform possible. There’s no way to know which designer is going to favor a specific platform. Set alerts for the designers you care about and keep everything open.
The Indiana Connection
Anyone can show in New York who has the money to pull off a show. Each season, I have someone contact me who is all excited about their show in New York. I go to check the official schedule, though, and they’re not present. Sorry, kids, if you’re not on the office NYFW schedule it doesn’t count.
This season is different, though. I was excited when I got the message from Indiana-based designer Marlene Thomas that her Marlene H Couture collection is on the schedule for Thursday at noon. Okay, so that puts her up against Creatures of the Wind which is a favorite of the fashion editors. Still, she’s actually there and she’s in a prime spot on the first day’s schedule! How incredibly awesome is that? Marlene is showing at 404 NYC, conveniently located at 404 10th Ave. The space is fantastic and I’ve no doubt she’ll fill it wonderfully.
In addition to Ms. Thomas’ presence in New York, Indianapolis-based LModelz is sending at least six models (possibly more) to walk in various shows. Of course, models don’t wear signs telling us where they’re from and by the time they get through hair and makeup it can be difficult to tell who’s who. Still, we should be proud that Indiana is so very well represented at NYFW this season!
All The Reviews
Watching all the shows is impossible. Catching all the streams and Instagram feeds is impossible. Even major magazines who can deploy multiple staff members don’t manage to cover everything. That’s why we write reviews. We cull through all the clutter and do our best to cover the shows that matter. For the sixth season, we’ll be posting all our reviews on Pattern at least twice a day, more if I can manage the time. No, it’s not real time, especially when we move away from New York and are trying to cover shows at 2:00 in the morning. We are expecting some incredible shows over the next four weeks and do our best to catch all the important moments.
Let’s be honest, Indiana is never going to be a fashion capital. Fashion doesn’t need nor want any more capitals. Indiana is a strong fashion participant, though, and there are a lot of people here who are eye-ball deep in the stuff. Therefore, it makes sense to give NYFW an Indiana perspective. We’ve made a lot of progress here in the past ten or so years. I think there are probably a half-dozen or so designers who have what it takes to follow Marlene’s lead and jump onto the official schedule. I see more people actually paying attention to what they’re wearing.
Watching NYFW from Indiana isn’t the same as being there in person, but it does have its perks. Grab a cup of coffee and a piece of sugar cream pie and follow along. Oh, and should you happen to want to send over a dozen donuts or so, I won’t complain.
If at first you don’t succeed… so much for skydiving. —Henny Youngman
See-now, buy-now sounds like a great idea, but can designers make the concept actually succeed?
My reading list is full. My to-do list is packed with confirming sources I’m going to need over the next month. There is shopping to be done. We’re low on chocolate and there’s no way we have enough coffee to last through the weekend. The September women’s ready-to-wear fashion season is upon us. While NYFW doesn’t officially start until Thursday, my work begins tomorrow. If I’m going to succeed in providing Pattern with the best possible reviews, I need to be on top of my game right from the beginning.
Why am I starting a day early? Because this season is different. Normally, I’m rather selective in choosing which shows to watch and review. That hasn’t exactly changed, I’ll ignore more than I watch, but the criteria is different. There are players making a shift in the fashion week agenda that could end up dramatically impacting the entire industry. Regardless of how I might feel about some of the styles, I have to pay attention.
What’s happening is that a significant number of designers are moving to a see-now, buy-now model. Instead of consumers having to wait six months before the clothes on the runway are available in stores, many labels are making their clothes available immediately. You see something you like on the runway, swipe your card, and it’s yours. While the concept sounds simple enough, the change is severe and there’s no guarantee it will succeed.
Something Had To Give
Not everyone is on board with this new concept. The Italian Fashion Council outright denied any support of see-now, buy-now and Italian labels have largely followed that philosophy. In New York and London, however, the idea has caught on and is getting a lot of attention. Luxury brands in both countries have been struggling to keep their heads above water the past few years. Everyone acknowledged that something had to be done, but no one was quite sure what.
When Rebecca Minkoff and others first announced that they were shifting to an immediate-purchase model, there was a collective gasp throughout the industry. How could designers source materials and change production schedules to meet the requirements of a current-season collection without risking millions of dollars? After all, everyone knows that not everything that makes its way down a runway is consumer ready. The six-month difference allows for revisions as buyers place their orders. Real-time runway sales eliminate that safety buffer.
Consumers, however, never really understood the reasons for delay, especially since fast-fashion shops such as H&M and Zara churn out whole new collections every few weeks. Demand for current-season shows has been growing the past few years. So, a significant group of designers are giving it a go. The big question on everyone’s mind, though, is will it succeed or be a flaming disaster?
More Than One Path
While several designers are giving see-now, buy-now a try, almost none of them are taking the same approach. At 10:00 AM Wednesday morning, Misha Nonoo will be taking to the streets of New York to show her fall/winter collection. If you want to see it, you’ll need to be watching Refinery29’s Snapchat, though. The event is not streaming anywhere else and will only be available for 24 hours.
Tom Ford, who brought major attention to the movement when he announced in February that he would be waiting until this week to show his fall/winter collection, presents his runway tomorrow as well. However, you’ll be staying up late to watch it. Preshow starts streaming at 9:15 PM EDT. That likely means that the actual presentation won’t start until 10:00 or later. I know we’ll be making sure to get a nap in tomorrow afternoon so we can be alert. You can watch the show on Tom Ford’s website.
Another major US adapter is Tommy Hilfiger. I’m accustomed to Tommy’s show hitting mid-day, normally near the time I’m thinking about lunch. This season is different, though. The runway presentation moves to 7:00 PM EDT and is part of a two-day event that includes games and carnival rides. I don’t even want to think about the price tag on this one. How can this approach possibly succeed?
Tommy Hilfiger’s chief marketing and brand officer Avery Baker tells Business of Fashion:
It’s hard to say, because it’s not an apples to apples comparison. Because of the shopping elements and all of the interactive aspects that go way beyond just that moment of the show and relate to collections that will be for sale for the next several weeks, it’s not easy to make a direct comparison. Yes, it’s an increase from where we were, but in terms of exposure and partnerships and platforms, it actually will go significantly farther.
All We Can Do Now Is Watch
In many ways, consumers are getting what they’ve wanted. There’s more spectacle, fewer industry-only events, and more creative experimentation than we’ve seen around fashion weeks. In my memory, I can’t remember a season that was more eagerly anticipated by the public. There is a tremendous potential lurking in the next several days.
Still, despite all the effort and creativity, there is no guarantee that any of it will succeed. The danger of immediate availability is that if customers don’t like what they see, especially if shopper’s favorite fashion bloggers pan a collection, they won’t buy. There’s no six-month gap to help them forget how much we didn’t like the clothes. Inventories end up sitting in warehouses rather than making their way to retailers or online customers. Millions of dollars are at risk and the whole thing could end up going right down the toilet if customers don’t respond.
So, I’ll be on Snapchat at 10:00 in the morning. I’ll take a nap and be watching at whatever time Tom Ford decides to unleash his presentation. We’ll try to be judicious and fair in our reviews on Pattern. The rest is up to you. Buy. Don’t buy. The entire fashion industry is watching.
We live in a disposable society. It’s easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name – we call it recycling. —Neil LaBute
Recycling old clothes to create new fashion addresses a big problem, but is it enough?
Sitting near my back door are two trash bags full of clothing waiting to be donated to … something. We’ve thought about different charities, but looking into them we were disappointed by the number of clothes still ending up in landfills. There are a few stores around that will give you store credit (minimal as it may be) for donating your used clothing to them, but they still end up throwing much of those donations into the incinerator. Actual recycling of clothes doesn’t happen as much as we’d like to think.
As we prepare for the onslaught of new clothing that arrives with the beginning of a month of fashion weeks, we need to stop and take a moment to consider what we’re doing with the things we cast off. As (hopefully) wonderful new designs come down the runway, we’re likely to see a lot that we want hanging in our closets. The problem is that our closets are already full. Our dresser drawers are already overflowing. Before we buy new, we have to make space by tossing out the old.
Some people religiously donate to charitable resale shops. Others try to make a dime back at consignment shops. Too many others don’t want to be bothered and simply throw things in the trash. In doing so, as much as we might think we’re doing something good, we are creating a problem.
Fast Fashion Is A Dirty Business
We’ve talked about it before, how much fast fashion generates more clothing than can be worn. By some accounts, fast fashion is the second dirtiest business in the world. Only the oil industry produces more pollution. For the better part of the past decade, environmentalists have warned about the tremendous impact of fashion’s overwhelming waste. Between the harsh chemicals used in fabric production and the amount of material deposited in landfills, the negative impact of fashion is greater than its economic benefit.
And that’s not even taking into consideration the immoral use of animal hide and fur.
Both the producer and the consumer are at fault. Garment manufacturers are under pressure to produce materials at increasingly lower costs in order to feed fast fashion’s discount-oriented machine. Recycling these materials is difficult because the chemicals used in their creation destroys fibers making it difficult for stitching to hold up over any length of time. Fabrics begin to fray, become discolored, and start to fall apart after only a few washings.
Consumers don’t treat clothes any better. We use fabric softeners and harsh laundry detergents that not only pollute the water but further erode the quality of the fabrics. Simply by trying to maintain our clothes we are destroying them. Then, not liking the damaged condition of our wardrobe, we throw them away, by the ton. We don’t even consider recycling in many cases because the condition of the clothing is just too poor.
A Possible Solution
Answers to big problems sometimes come from unlikely sources. In this case, one of fast fashion’s leading retailers, H&M, is at least trying to find sustainable solutions. An article in WWD yesterday takes a look at the retailer’s efforts at recycling used clothing by turning them into new fashion. H&M partnered with the London College of Fashion in creating a contest urging design students to use donated materials as the central element in a capsule collection.
Fabrics for the project came from H&M’s policy of allowing customers to bring in castoff clothing, regardless of origin. The program, which began in 2012, promises consumers a discount on a single item in the store in exchange for their donation. Shoppers are told that their donations will be recycled or used for new garments. The contest is an important step toward fulfilling that promise.
33 teams participated in the project aiming to waste no material in the production of new fashion. Eight winners were announced, though there is no mention as to whether any of the collections might be considered for production. The message sent to design students, however, was pretty clear: recycling materials gets you hard-to-find attention.
Will It Really Work
Cecilia Brännsten, H&M’s sustainability business expert, told WWD:
We will need a holistic approach to circularity. It will include the whole life cycle from design, what chemicals we put into our products, material choice, production processes and new ways of enjoying fashion by reuse, rental, and repair.
Such an attitude is necessary if fast fashion is going to survive. Without it, there is a place in the near future where the mountains of cast-off and unsold clothing become a burden that cannot be ignored. The current model of fast fashion is simply not sustainable.
However, recycling solutions require consumer participation at a much higher degree than what is currently taking place. While we are pleased to see design students thinking of recycling, making the leap from contests to actual production requires that those mountains of clothes be available to garment manufacturers rather than in landfills. If consumers don’t participate in recycling programs, there is no source for the new designs.
Doing Your Part
I’m going to stop short of actually endorsing H&M’s clothing donation program. I think it is going to take more than a one-time 15% discount for them to procure enough usable fabric to actually turn recycling into a viable fabric source.
At the same time, though, those who shop fast fashion retailers like H&M need to share in the burden of finding a sustainable solution to all the waste they’re creating. Perhaps if there were a requirement for shoppers to donate at least one item before buying a new one then recycling programs might stand a chance. I don’t see that happening, though, as it would cut into the impulse shopping that accounts for the majority of fashion purchases in the first place. Consumers, people like you and me, have to be motivated to do more.
Unfortunately, if a problem isn’t causing us adverse pain we tend to not care about being part of the solution. We want other people to do the work for us. Too many people think that their participation doesn’t matter. If we’re going to put a dent in the amount of fashion waste created then we all have to participate in recycling programs, whether at H&M or elsewhere. Stop putting fabric in the trash. Either find a way to reuse materials yourself or make it available to someone who can.
I sincerely believe H&M and other fashion retailers want to be responsible. Doing so is good for their bottom line. Nothing changes without your participation, however. You need to be fashion responsible. Before you swipe your credit card for that new Dior blazer, consider donating something from your closet to a recycling project. We’ll all be better for it.
Sometimes, if you aren’t sure about something, you just have to jump off the bridge and grow your wings on the way down. —Danielle Steel
Making the jump to a new career sounds tempting, but what if you are already poor?
Kat and I were both sitting in the living room reading Sunday when I looked up and mentioned that I was having to be careful about what I read. Too many articles and books and studies pique my interests. I could jump down any number of rabbit holes and waste untold hours of time chasing a topic that has no application to anything I do. The problem is that I enjoy learning new things far too much.
“Would you like to go back to college?” she asked. The expression on her face told me she was serious. That’s Kat, though. She’s all about tackling challenges head on, embracing one’s passion and hanging on as tight as possible.
I gave her my standard set of excuses. I wouldn’t know what to study. My GPA is too low. Most importantly, I don’t see the benefit of going $60,000 or more in debt at a point in my life where I’m not likely to ever earn enough to pay it back.
We are, by government standards, poor. No, we’re not destitute, but the last thing we have the money to pursue is some random jump into a career or field of study that may prove to be impossible. Our general situation improves only with the careful management of our limited funds. Chasing other interests is a fantasy.
When To Jump
Earlier this month, the Huffington Post started a new section specifically aimed at people pondering some of the same questions I ponder. The description of the section sounds appealing:
When to Jump™ is a community dedicated to exploring the fundamental question we all think about: when is the right time to go do what you really want to be doing? HuffPost has partnered with When to Jump founder Mike Lewis to curate the stories and ideas of people who left something comfortable to chase a passion. Whatever your jump may be, this is the place to help inspire you to make it.
The stories have headlines that sound incredibly encouraging. This Would-Be Doctor Switched Paths To Help People In An Entirely Different Way. How A Former Pre-Med Student Found Another Way To Build Healthy Communities. I Left My Successful Career as a Doctor to Become an Art Student.
Wait, are you noticing what I’m noticing? There’s a trend here, at least early in the community’s inception, to focus on those abandoning the medical field. Reading through these three articles, I could feel happy for each person’s story. They took the risk, made the jump, and it worked. Yay them! I couldn’t help noticing, though, that these people come from a much higher socio-economic class than I do. Financial challenges have a much different meaning for them than it does for me. For the OB/GYN cum art student, there didn’t seem to be any severe challenge beyond her own self-doubts.
Is this whole career jumping just for the affluent? Thousands of people my age who lose their jobs to acquisitions and mergers, economic downsizing, or technological advancement are told to “make the jump” into something they love doing. But when each month is a challenge to keep the lights burning making a blind jump into something that could, at least for a moment, involve a substantial investment, that move isn’t so attractive.
Let’s All Be Astrophysicists
Over the past few years, I’ve taken quite an interest in astrophysics. Neil deGrasse Tyson has done a great job of making this incredibly complicated field of study seem relatable and even obtainable. Being an astrophysicist sounds like an incredible amount of fun, even if the amount of math is intense. I’m sure I would do better with math now than I did back in 9th grade. I think I could come to love astrophysics.
I’ve had arguments similar to this before, though. Back in 1988, I was all in turmoil over whether to go back to school and get my master’s degree in something music related or chasing this photography thing and seeing where it took me. We know how that debate ended. Finances played a large role in that decision, too. Photography meant having a paycheck right then, even if it was small. Going back to school meant not knowing if there would ever actually be a paycheck. In the end, the decision wasn’t all that difficult. Paycheck wins.
This takes me back to the article from a couple of weeks ago, Stop Doing What You Love. I might really like astrophysics from an amateur perspective, but does it really make sense to jump into the field with any hopes of being successful? Probably not. In addition to all the cost for additional education and tutors, there’s the fact I would be well into my 60s before achieving the level of education necessary to become employable. Better I stick with what I’m good at doing.
Stuck To The Ground
Personally, I don’t even know if I really want to jump. I still love photography. I’m not yet done taking all the pictures I want to take. As I look into the future of the profession, I cannot help but wonder if my days are numbered. Once everyone can take pictures with the contact lying on their eye my usefulness decreases considerably, Imagining a day when there are no more professional photographers isn’t terribly difficult.
But to jump requires having money. Money to go back to school. Money for equipment and books and materials. Then, there’s that matter of paying bills, feeding a family, while in the course of such a jump. When people have some kind of financial backstops, those worries are not so large. For those who have none, however, such concerns are a roadblock. We have to take care of our families first. Making a jump may put our careers at risk, but we can’t put our families and their well-being at risk. We’re stuck.
Such is the way our country works, though. Anything is possible if you have money. If you don’t, those who do go out of their way to make you feel like a burden on society, no matter how hard one works or how hard they try to fit in. Being poor removes one ability to jump.
I don’t expect anything to change. I might investigate the choices a bit, but I’ll see a price tag and probably back off the idea of making a jump. After all, I’m not a doctor or pre-med student. They get to jump. The rest of us just dance in place. Our feet are too poor to leave the ground.
Fashion doesn’t look good only on models; it can look good on different people of different ages and different body shapes. —Alber Elbaz
The next round of fashion weeks is just around the corner and the whole system is changing its look
We are now less than a month away from New York Fashion Week. One of the most frequent statements made back in February was, “we’ll have to wait until September.” Many of the changes that were announced early in the year com into fruition with next month’s set of shows. Not only have designers swapped seats, attitudes about the shows themselves have changed. Even more, the economy surrounding fashion has changed. What we experience through the fashion shows this season is likely to be a very different look than what we saw this time last year.
Change is a given in fashion. We wouldn’t need to do these dog-and-pony shows twice a year if fashion wasn’t always changing. We complain if we see two collections in a row that look too terribly similar. What’s important this season is the degree of change. Major wheels were set in motion back in the spring that change not only what we see now, but how we see it. The very structure of the presentations is changing and that may influence our perspective of the shows as well as our buying habits.
As I type this, schedules for New York are being finalized. There are some names we’ve come to expect that we won’t see on the roster this year. London, Milan, and Paris are getting ready as well and it’s just not the same as it was back in the Spring (if you can call February Spring). The whole attitude is different. Let’s consider some of the changes.
Designers Swapping Seats
The number one topic at the beginning of each season is always which designers have switched to different labels. We didn’t see a tremendous amount of significant movement back in February, but we’ve certainly had some major changes since then and now all that jostling around has to prove its worth. These are going to drive changes in look for a number of labels.
- Raf Simons has moved to Calvin Klein. You had to be hiding under a rock to miss this announcement. Everyone knew Raf was moving almost from the moment the first phone call was placed. The timing could have perhaps been a bit better. Simons works fast but it would be out of the ordinary even for him to create a full set on his own by September 15, which is when CK is likely to show. Still, he’ll be anxious to demonstrate the direction in which he wants to take the line. Anxiety and anticipation are very high here.
- Peter Copping left Oscar de la Renta. What the fuck? This one almost knocked me out of my chair when the announcement was made last month. It’s been less than two years since Oscar de la Renta named Copping as his successor and then promptly died. The match looked perfect. The past two season’s shows have been well received. What the fuck happened? No one on either side is talking. Copping promptly moved back to the UK. De la Renta will run with a design team for the time being. We are very confused and very sad.
- Bouchra Jarrar makes her debut at Lanvin. This looks to be one of the most highly anticipated shows of the season. Jarrar brings a different look, a more feminine look, back to Lanvin. That being said, shareholders are watching for a collection that resonates with buyers and increases sales. Will it work? We’ll see.
- Anthony Vaccarello takes over at Yves Saint Laurent. The whole attitude has changed at YSL. Vaccarello comes from Versus Versace and almost certainly is going to bring some of Donatella’s influence with him. Expect a sexier, more defined, and perhaps even a little edgier look than YSL saw under Hedi Slimane.
- Maria Grazia Chiuri changes things up at Dior. Following Raf Simons isn’t going to be easy. Dior took its sweet time replacing the famed designer and makes a bold statement in appointing the label’s first female creative director. Chiuri makes the leap from Valentino where she was co-creative director. Pierpaolo Piccioli now has sole authority over there.
Spending this season on the sidelines, still, are Alber Elbaz and Hedi Slimane. One really has to wonder why they’ve not been snatched up.
A Little Less Fur
Fur has long been a mainstay of luxury fashion and Angora has been the go-to fur for quite a while given the endangered status of wild sources. Then, Peta, the animal rights group, took aim at the Angora industry in 2013, claiming harvesting methods were cruel. Now, it seems Peta has won. Orders for the fur dropped dramatically for this season after more than 100 major labels suspended use of fabric. Other types of fur have seen dramatic declines as well. I have to admit that I’m curious as to whether Dennis Basso is reducing his use of fur at all. Historically, he’s been unapologetic about using fur and animal skin in general.
What’s next? Wool. A recent op-ed takes aim at the ubiquitous fabric, claiming that large-scale harvesting methods are just as cruel as those used on angora rabbits. Will this movement catch hold? The atmosphere certainly seems to be ripe for it, but the global use of wool peaks for the fall/winter season. We’re not likely to see any change until February.
What Season Is This?
We talked back in February about designers skipping the fall shows to go real-time this September. Well, September is here and we get to find out whether that strategy is going to work. Be sure, all eyes are watching Burberry, Tom Ford, and Rebecca Minkoff, among others, to see how they handle the straight-to-stores approach. Critical to this new look is whether consumers are confused by seeing both fall/winter looks and spring/summer looks in the same season. The seasonal look has been muted the past few years, with coats in spring and shorts in the fall almost being normal.
This change may work well, though, as designers look for alternative presentation methods. Criticism of the traditional runway approach grew rather heated back in February, but we’re not hearing much talk about the alternatives leading up to this season’s shows. Will Gloria Vanderbilt return to a runway approach or will she go with another fashion event that confuses the hell out of everyone? Talk back in the spring held that we would see more such presentations this fall, but as budgets have been trimmed to match declining profits much of that talk has disappeared.
A Little More Security
For people in Paris and London, the world feels less safe than it did back in February. Organizers in Milan and New York aren’t taking any risks, either. Whereas some designers had been flirting with the idea of open-to-the-public presentations, more care is being taken this fall to ensure the safety of everyone involved. Invitation requests are vetted with increased scrutiny and press credentials are more difficult to obtain. Guests lucky enough to attend an event will find security lines longer than ever. Restrictions on what guests can bring with them, including nail files and hair spray, are taken seriously.
Paris saw dramatically increased security last season but it didn’t seem to interfere with the overall spirit and celebration of the events. This season, though, there is a palpable difference in the tone. Multiple attacks across Europe have everyone looking over their shoulder. Supplier lists are under greater scrutiny. Location accessibility is a concern. In some cases, labels who might have traditionally sought a larger audience are scaling back a bit to reduce the risk.
Everyone wants fashion week to be fun and exciting, but the shadow of terrorism is impossible to escape.
Side Glance To Retail.
Macy’s is closing 100 stores. The announcement wasn’t a surprise. In fact, the retail conglomerate said earlier this year that store closings were coming. Yet, the impact was still like dropping a ton of bricks across the fashion industry. At the same time, China’s luxury market, which had been the one strong point in the industry, has begun a decline. No one is sure yet how much a hit global fashion brands might take but the Chinese government is making it clear they want those Yen to stay at home.
Meanwhile, both H&M and Lululemon are anticipating continued growth. Low-priced fast fashion is eating away at the luxury sector and forcing major labels to make changes to their corporate look. As much movement as there has been among designers, there’s been even more seat swapping among fashion’s corporate CEOs. Even Burberry’s Christopher Bailey had to take a back seat in the boardroom over the summer. No one wants to make a knee-jerk move that spooks the fragile market, but if sales don’t improve we may see even bigger shifts in the look of fashion by next February.
We Can’t Stop Watching
All that being said, interest in fashion is as high as ever. Fashion schools are experiencing prime enrollment numbers. Fashion magazines have retooled their look and enjoying higher numbers than this time last year. Instagram and Snapchat are full of fashionista-wannabes taking selfies of their latest look. Interest in fashion hasn’t waned one bit.
Everyone is being cautious, though. With so many changes hitting at the same time, this could be a very exciting season. We are hoping for a very exciting season. Strong interest in shows next month could do wonders for a slumping retail market. Don’t expect anything that looks like last year, though. This fashion look has changed dramatically. You may need to clean out your closet and start all over.
Prep your credit cards now. NYFW begins September 9.
Photo credits:
Model: Presley Stewart (LModelz)
Makeup: Danelle French
Hair: Jenise Norgaard
Styling: Nativa (Allyson Brooks and Lila Palomares)
Photography: charles i. letbetter
In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense. —Kevin Systrom
Fighting against asking the question, “What have I done with my life,” I look back at old photos and respond, “Oh yeah, I did this.”
I am having one of those moments of extreme self-doubt this morning. Even the dog didn’t want to stay up and play as he usually does after his morning walk There’s something about Tuesday where I anticipate bad things to happen and the day rarely lets me down. In order to brace myself for whatever devastating news may come or difficulties take place, I try to keep Tuesdays low key to temper the emotional impact of today’s inevitable disaster.
This morning seems to be taking care of itself, however. I grind my own coffee for use in a french press each morning. Today, though, I look as I’m pouring hot water into the pot and realize I didn’t get all the coffee. I left half of it in the grinder for some reason. My coffee is weak.
Then, looking around for something to occupy the morning munchies, I pick up a piece of toast that might have been leftover from last night’s dinner. Wrong. It was stale beyond palpability. I tried eating it anyway, but no, two bites were all I could handle. The brick-like texture gave way to the taste of sawdust that coated the inside of my mouth with a mush to horrible to swallow.
5:00 AM and today already sucks.
Once Upon A Time …
Life wasn’t always like this, you know. There was a time when things were better, at least from a creative standpoint. Here’s where we put on the rose-colored glasses for the sake of sanity and encouragement. I look back at old photos, pieces that were once in my portfolio but have been dropped due to age, and find some encouragement. As I fight back against this overwhelming feeling of worthlessness, the old photos give me a reason to smile. Maybe everything hasn’t been for naught. After all, I did this.
Of course, that line of thinking only works if I ignore the fact that while I was playing with one of the first print-viable digital cameras and taking hundreds of photos almost every day, the rest of my world was crumbling. One disaster came in after another, usually on Tuesdays, though Wednesday and Thursday couldn’t necessarily be trusted. Employment? Gone. Parents? Dead. Marriage? Kaput.Security? Dissolved.
But now is not the time to dwell on those things. Right now, we need to focus on what was good, what worked, and those images that made me feel good about myself. Something to take my mind off the fact that if this coffee were any weaker it would be water. I hate weak coffee, it’s almost as bad as decaf. I’ll have to make more. Too bad I can’t just say that about the photographs.
Creative Perspiration
Old photos remind me of how much work it is to be creative. I had more energy when these were taken, more drive, and perhaps more motivation. I would sometimes put weeks of effort into researching materials to make sure what we were going to do would actually work. I’ve lost that drive and I’m not sure how to get it back.
What bothers me is that I have more resources at my disposal now in many ways. I have plenty of materials already on hand and know when they’ll work and when they won’t. My need to experiment isn’t quite as great. I can tell Kat what I’m thinking in terms of hair and makeup and know that she understands what I’m wanting.
Other pieces are missing, though, pieces that are difficult to describe and impossible to replace. Perhaps part of what makes me proud of these old photos is how hard I had to work to get some of them.
It’s Still Tuesday
My intent this morning was to share some of those old photos that still inspire me. I thought I would put them in a nice gallery displayed in a slide show. It’s Tuesday, though, so the plug-in that enables that capability has decided to not cooperate. All I can do is post the photos here and hope the mosaic works. I apologize for making you scroll through them all.
While you’re looking at pictures, I’m going to make fresh coffee, strong coffee, and maybe some fresh toast. Or maybe I’ll just have cereal.
Remember when cereal was great? Yeah, let’s not get started with that one. Old photos are enough reminiscing for one day. Good luck with your Tuesday.
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- Wicked Orchid. Body art by Pashur
What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything. —Aaron Siskind
While camera makers talk about breaking the 100-megapixel threshold, fashion editors are turning to film for their editorials
Film photography is wonderful, and in many ways, I still prefer it to digital. There is an artistry to using a film camera that is lost with a digital box that does most the thinking for you. Clients have to trust their photographer more, a lot more, and the photographer’s own talent and skill set actually matter. Working with film requires a bit more imagination, a bit more creativity, and a lot more precision. I love it.
So, you’d think that when Business of Fashion publishes an article headlined, “Fashion Photographers Return To Film,” I would be thrilled, right? Get out the old analog cameras, drop some Kodak TMax in the back, and let’s get rolling, right?
Hold on, not so fast. There are some issues here before we all dump our digitals. As enticing as the article makes film photography sound, and it does do such a good job of highlighting the positive aspects of using film, We have to consider whether this trend is sustainable and, beyond that, whether or not it even makes good sense. Let’s take a look at the issues the article doesn’t mention.
- The article highlights the work of four very talented but nonetheless young photographers. This looks like fashion photography’s hipster movement and, like everything else hipster, just because the elements are “retro,” doesn’t mean we “old folks,” you know, the ones with all the experience in film are invited to participate. Nevermind that we begrudgingly made the switch to digital some twelve or so years ago. This is a youth-focused retro moment and just because we old guys can do film better doesn’t mean anyone is going to pay attention.
- The retro styling of film photography matches the retro movement within the fashion industry itself. Void of any serious creativity for the past several seasons, fashion has gotten stuck looking back, especially at the late 1960s and 70s stylings. The film look works for those fashion lines because it matches the clothing lines. Should fashion ever decide to snap itself out of this ridiculous trend and actually do something creative, that film look isn’t likely to be as appropriate.
- The support system is no longer present. When photographers made the switch to digital, and we all did it pretty much within the span of three to five years, we killed off a lot of people’s jobs. Prepress shops are virtually extinct now. There are still a handful of color houses running around the country, but the dramatic decrease in volume has forced them to severely increase their prices. No one even makes black-and-white paper anymore and the film options themselves have severely diminished. 20 years ago, AGFA and Kodak were invested heavily in imagesetters, but neither company even sells those behemoths now (though you can still pick up used devices if you’re really desperate). While I suppose that support system could be revitalized if everyone started using film again, there’s no indication that’s about to happen.
- Even if one shoots on film, magazine layout is still digital. Again, the extinction of prepress shops is critical here. Everyone uses digital layout methods now and going back to analog just to accommodate a photography style doesn’t make sense. That means, even if the image is shot on film, it still has to be scanned and digitized and is likely to be photoshopped. That means the images being used are no more “pure” than those shot with a Canon EOS 5D. Bodies can still be reshaped, colors can still be manipulated, errors can still be fixed. So, what’s the point in using film, again?
- The photography industry, as a whole, no longer supports film for general professional use. Canon has been showing off a 120-megapixel prototype that could, allegedly, be on the market later this year. Hasselblad’s H6d also offers a 100-megapixel option in full-frame medium format. Meanwhile, Sony continues pushing mirrorless options that grow increasingly sharper with each new update. Even the quality of cell phone cameras is growing rapidly. The photography industry is done with film and has moved on. I don’t see it backtracking. Ever.
I gotta admit, though, the lure of going back to film sure as hell sounds enticing, doesn’t it? To hear that click/whir of an auto film advance, the ability to get really creative and do multiple exposures on camera, trading backs from polaroid to TMax, and just the way a good, solid film box feels in your hand are all pieces of photographic nostalgia that I sometimes miss.
But without prepress and color shops, we’d all have to do our own processing. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t have room to safely set up a dark room anymore. Even if I did, do I really want those highly-flammable chemicals in my house? Yeah, I know we didn’t give it a second thought 30 years ago, but once we came out from under the influence of those fumes we started seeing just how dangerous an improperly ventilated dark room could be. Then, there are the costs. Products more difficult to find, there aren’t as many options, paper is horribly expensive, and you still have to pay for a high-end drum scan to have the image digitized at sufficient quality. My estimates are a final price tag of about $150 per 8″x10″ image! I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s well outside my budget!
I love the idea of using film for fashion shoots; it certainly fits a number of different styles currently on the market. I fear it’s little more than a pseudo-hipster, anti-establishment, anti-capitalistic trend, though, and like all trends, this will pass. The world is digital now. The world relies on digital imagery and the information a picture can carry in its data packets. As much as we love film, we’re not going back.
Sob.
All too many Muslims fail to grasp Islam, which teaches one to be lenient towards others and to understand their value systems, knowing that these are tolerated by Islam as a religion. —Abdurrahman Wahid
What if Native Tribes were as xenophobic toward Puritans as Americans today are toward Muslims?
xen·o·pho·bi·a
[ˌzenəˈfōbēə, ˌzēnəˈfōbēə]
NOUN
-
intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.
America, we have a problem. The name of that problem is xenophobia. We can no longer ignore our problem. We can no longer tolerate the blatant and distasteful exhibition of our problem. We need to address this matter head on and put it to an end. Muslims are not inherently bad. Immigrants are not inherently bad. Believing that they are is not American and is not acceptable in an intelligent and progressive society.
I realize that these are tough words to start on a Monday morning, but we need the focus and determination that Mondays provide. Xenophobia has gotten out of control and needs to be stopped.
A prime example of xenophobia was made public in court documents last Friday when it was revealed that a North Carolina man (why is it always the Carolinas?) on a Southwest Airlines flight decided he needed to rip the hijab off a Muslim woman and scream, “Take it off! This is America!” The man was convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime, but this is just one small symptom of a wider disease.
After reading of this account, I began to wonder: What would have happened if native tribespeople had been xenophobic toward the Puritan separatists that landed at Plymouth in 1620? We know the Powhatan tribe that initially encountered these strangely dressed white people were suspicious, and they had good cause to be. European-based diseases left behind by Columbus and his crew had already made their way up the East coast from Florida and were wiping out millions of native peoples. In fact, some have wondered that, had the tribes not been decimated by disease, they might not have been willing to tolerate the newcomers at all.
When we think about it a bit, one can see similarities between how the Powhatan might have viewed the Puritans compared to how many people today view Muslims.
- The Puritan separatists who followed William Bradford were refugees. They were considered traitors in England and unwelcome rabble rousers most everywhere else in Europe. Only the very liberal Holland offered to take them in, and Bradford found the social structure there too “ungodly” for his brand of religious extremism. They had nowhere else to go. Many Muslims know exactly how that feels.
- Puritan women dressed funny, at least in the eyes of the Powhatan. Puritans were very concerned about modesty and a woman could be imprisoned, whipped, and even killed for dressing immodestly. Puritan women wore no fewer than ten different pieces of clothing and having too few petticoats or not covering her head in public was considered scandalous. For native peoples looking on wearing little more than deer skin, such costuming certainly seemed ridiculous. Similarly, few Americans today understand why Muslim women dress so modestly.
- Puritan women had no rights; they were considered the property of their husbands. They could not own property or speak in church, and they dare not challenge their husbands. Native peoples who respected and elevated women found this treatment quite strange, just as modern Americans find the different relationships of some (not all) Muslims to be unusual.
- Puritans had a strange religion that native peoples did not understand. Native tribes were spiritual to be sure, but they saw their deities as benevolent whereas the god these Puritans worshiped was fearful and angry. Likewise, large numbers of Americans view Islam and any other non-Christian religion as “strange” and some would even deny Muslims the right to worship openly.
- Puritans didn’t speak the native language. Communication was difficult and challenging. Muslims and other immigrants struggle with English now. Is there really any difference?
The similarities between the Puritan separatists we know as Pilgrims and modern Muslims immigrating to these same shores is striking. Both chased from the lands of their birth, neither understood, both disadvantaged, and both trying to hold true to their spiritual beliefs while surrounded by a people and culture that did not and does not understand them.
What if the response of the Powhatan had been to turn Bradford and his followers away? Certainly, there were more than a few opportunities to completely wipe out these pale settlers and be rid of them. What if the tribes had decided to build walls, fencing the pilgrims off and limiting their access to food and water? Perhaps the Powhatan might have forced the immigrants to learn their language. If so, we might all be speaking Algonquian languages now.
Had the Powhatan been as xenophobic as we’ve become, we would not be the country we are now. While speculating on how we might have developed is futile, the willingness of the tribes to tolerate those early religious refugees in the strange clothes, to the point of the tribes’ own doom, was critical in shaping what we have become.
In his commencement address at Rutgers University this past weekend, President Obama addressed the problem of xenophobia in our country.
Isolating or disparaging Muslims, suggesting that they should be treated differently when it comes to entering this country. That is not just a betrayal of our values. That’s not just a betrayal of who were are — it would alienate the communities at home and abroad who are our most important partners in the fight against violent extremism. Suggesting that we can build an endless a wall along our borders and blame our challenges on immigrants — that doesn’t just run counter to our history as the world’s melting pot. It contradicts the evidence that our growth and our innovation and our dynamism has always been driven by our ability to attract strivers from other parts of the globe. That’s how we became America — why would we want to stop it now?
[You can read the full text of President Obama’s address here or watch it here.]
If we are going to continue to be the America we think we are, if we are going to continue to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, if we are going to continue to be the world’s leaders in economics and innovation and science and discovery, then we cannot tolerate xenophobia within our ranks. We must challenge those who speak disparagingly against immigrants, against those who do not speak English, against those who think we must all be Christian, and against those who would turn people away and erect walls along our borders. We must embrace those who are fleeing from political and religious persecution. We must welcome those who come in search of hope. We must put our arms around those looking for the success we have already found.
We cannot live in fear, any fear, whether it is fear of Muslims or Jews or Hindu or Southern Baptists. We cannot live fearing people who arrive on our shores from Syria, Honduras, Mexico, or Guatemala. We cannot live in fear of change, of different cultures, languages, and styles of dress.
We are Americans, damnit. Fear has no place here. Stand up and welcome them to their new home, just like the Powhatan did for a bunch of sea-weary religious extremists in 1620.
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. —Plato
When a task is clearly defined and repetitive in nature, research from Applied Ergonomics suggests that music is consistently helpful.
When I first graduated college and entered the adult office environment, the work environment tended to be pretty damn quiet. Only when I went down to the press room, where the large Heidelberg machines cranked out newspapers with deafening volume, was there much noise. Upstairs, teletype machines had been moved to the corner and rarely emitted their machine-gun clatter as even then computers had already started taking over the job of distributing wire news. While I’m not aware of any explicit rule against music, it just wasn’t done.
Now, walk into almost any office and one is likely to find music playing. In some instances, it can even be overwhelming. Indianapolis-based Simon malls (there’s one near you) pipes music both inside and outside their facilities during shopping hours. Once quiet offices often have corporately approved playlists and there’s rarely a cubicle dweller that doesn’t pop in their ear buds before turning on the computer for the day’s work. Music is pervasive in our society, no matter where one is.
The question asked recently is whether all this music is actually helping our productivity, or is it noise providing a distraction?
Those of us who are most musically oriented, find the answer obvious: of course, music helps our productivity! I’m listening to a playlist now and I cannot imagine sitting here doing most anything without music playing in my face. Not too many people would disagree, but should someone happen to walk through the door about the same time Parliament Funkadelic (who’s in town tonight) brings down the funk, you might just find me up moving around, which those boss-like people might consider unproductive. Some folks are no fun at all.
A study from Applied Ergonomics says yes, music is a consistent aid to productivity, even in manufacturing situations where the sounds of machines might competing for sound attention. The research finds:
A series of experiments has investigated the relationship between the playing of background music during the performance of repetitive work and efficiency in performing such a task. The results give strong support to the contention that economic benefits can accrue from the use of music in industry.
That research has had some challenge, though. Canadian researcher Theresa Lesiuk published research showing that:
… positive affect and quality-of-work were lowest with no music, while time-on-task was longest when music was removed. Narrative responses revealed the value of music listening for positive mood change and enhanced perception on design while working. Evidence is provided of the presence of a learning curve in the use of music for positive mood alteration.
In other words, music itself may not necessarily help productivity. Rather, the right music puts one in a better mood so that we are more inclined to work better and focus longer than we might with no music or, worse yet, with music we expressly do not like. If we are forced to listen to Kanye West all day, for example, our productivity might plummet as we spend far too much time in the restroom throwing up. Whereas, with a reasonable mix of artists, our mood is likely to improve to the point we really don’t mind the fact that what we’ve been asked to do makes absolutely no sense at all.
So what, then, should we choose for work music that will keep us focused and on task? A couple of different studies come into play here. Research just last year published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that the music needs to be at a moderate level for us to maintain creativity and pay attention to what we’re doing. Anything too loud, thumping base, screeching treble, or with too fast a rhythm is distracting and can actually interrupt the creative process. That’s not exactly what we want to hear, but if we look at the matter practically we have to admit that it’s true. If the music makes us want to stop what we’re doing, it’s not helping.
Second, the Acoustical Society of America found that pure ambient noise is actually the best at helping us focus and aiding in creativity. If we’re mouthing along with the lyrics, or even worse, standing in our office chairs singing along, we’re not as focused on our work. Ambient noise can be quite musical, but that steady, consistent, quiet sound is what’s going to help us to be more productive and actually get things done.
What, then, should be pumping through our ear buds as we try to make it through the rest of this Friday? According to one fairly specific study, Baroque music is your best bet. I would tend to challenge those findings, though, as some elements from the baroque period can be rather tumultuous and its minor-oriented tonalities could actually put a person in a bad mood. The ambient nature of Electronica is more likely to be a better option, as long as you’re not a pure acoustic snob. Electronica offers more subtle soundscapes that aren’t likely to surprise or overwhelm at any given point.
Interestingly enough, video game soundtracks and some movie soundtracks can be really helpful. I have a list of favorite soundtracks that do a very good job of keeping me focused on editing when I’m feeling rather tired and run down. I also keep a playlist of quiet standards nearby when I’m working on a large set of images that need simple, consistent processing. Even though the songs have lyrics, they’re not of a nature that I’m likely to get caught up singing along. I can focus on what I’m doing.
Everyone likes music and it makes sense that we would want to listen to something while we’re working, especially on Friday afternoons where the sun is just begging you to come out and play. What we listen to matters, though. Take a look at your playlists and maybe consider making some adjustments to help you make your work more productive.
I think children are like pancakes. You sort of ruin the first one, and you get better at it the second time around. —Kelly Ripa
This is why we don’t throw things away. Sometimes we can fix things on down the road.
Ask the cats and they’ll tell you I’ve spent the past 30 minutes yelling and cursing at the computer. Right in the big middle of trying to edit some photos that require detailed attention, another application decides that it needs to update RIGHT FUCKING NOW and takes over the desktop until it’s done. My response was sufficient to send all three cats running for cover under the bed.
Since I was momentarily disabled, I grabbed the laptop and decided to play with some old images that have been bugging me for years to see if we could give them a second chance at life. This is the advantage of being connected to the cloud. I was able to access my archives and pull down the offending images just as I would on the desktop and Photoshop pulled in all my presets so that everything I use was available on the laptop. No problem. The only issue is that I’m lousy at detail work on the laptop and I really didn’t want to go to the trouble of connecting the Wacom tablet. So, I limited my work to the changes I could enact globally without destroying the image in the process.
What has always bothered me about these images is the amount of noise. I didn’t have all the equipment necessary when these were shot and as a result they are so full of noise that I’ve not been able to render a satisfactory image out of the entire set. I thought this would be a good chance to try out some new noise reduction filters that would allow me to pinpoint the problem areas. The good news was that they did better than any previous attempt at reducing the noise. The bad news was that there was still a level of noise beyond what I prefer.
Second step: use a different black and white conversion process. When I was shooting film, I was rarely a fan of FOMAPAN because it had a higher grain spread. For this set of images, though, that seemed to be a perfect match. The amount of noise left after the filter was on par with what FOMAPAN naturally produces. After making that adjustment we then put the images through our LAB process and came out with something much closer to being acceptable.
Note that we still didn’t mess with the details. There’s one image where some foreground stuff is visible and others where little shadows or other inconvenient details were ignored for the time being. Should we ever decide that we’ve reached a quality of production where we might print these I would need to clean those up. I don’t think we’re quite there, though. They don’t look horrid on screen, but I’m not convinced they’re ready for print.
Philosophical note: People, like old photographs, often deserve a second chance. Given some time and application of different circumstances, the person you thought was a complete asshole may not be quite so bad. Not saying they’ll be perfect, but some of them definitely deserve a second chance. The exception would be the serial abuser. Kick that jackass to the curb. They don’t change.
Anyway, the fucking update is done now, so here’s the pictures we managed to get finished while we were waiting.
I like coffee because it gives me the illusion that I might be awake. —Lewis Black
Either the coffee is right or everything is wrong
Competition is everywhere. We compete for time, we compete for attention, we even compete with ourselves when it comes to matters such as losing weight or going to the gym. We understand competition both from a personal and commercial perspective and we typically don’t think too much of one product throwing a little shade at their competition. We rather expect that. After all, they have to compete for our attention before they can compete for our dollars.
Coffee is a competitive business, to be sure, but at the same time, it is one of the things that unites a lot of people. Meeting over coffee is one of my preferred ways of getting together with people. How people drink their coffee, or whether they drink coffee, tells me a little bit about them.
Where we don’t necessarily expect competition, though, is among dictionaries. Certainly, it has always existed, with each claiming to be either the most precise or the most complete. The dictionary business has changed dramatically, though, as the Internet has developed. People are buying fewer dictionaries than ever before, and major search engines now provide the definition of a word simply by typing it in, so we don’t even need to visit a dictionary’s website. Spell check doesn’t help the dictionary business, either, though that function isn’t always reliable.
I’ve just given you three very different and distinct topics within three paragraphs, loosely tied around the concept of competition. Yet, what brings all these together this morning, and the only reason I’m writing about them in the first place, is the shade one dictionary threw at another over coffee, which thereby highlights just how competitive the word business can be.
The whole thing started when the top-ranking dictionary.com posted this tweet:
— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) April 11, 2016
Seems a rather appropriate tweet given this is National Library Week, doesn’t it? A gentle hint at how our word choice carries basic emotions. But look carefully at the picture. Do you see the problem? The folks at Merriam-Webster, you know, that more traditional dictionary that folks my age used all through school, caught the error and were quick with a comeback.
.@Dictionarycom There’s no cream in that coffee.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) April 11, 2016
Oops! Major shade thrown. By a dictionary.
If ever there were an example of needing to not only double check but triple check one’s work, this is it. Even in the dictionary business,where competition tends to be more elevated and subtle, if one makes an obvious error in public be sure that the competition is going to pounce on the opportunity to take advantage of your mistake, even if it’s one most people probably didn’t even notice the first time around.
And most people didn’t notice. No one had said a thing about the fact that the coffee in the picture didn’t have any visible signs of being creamed until Merriam-Webster brought it to our attention. Most people tend to skim their Twitter feeds anyway and we actually pay attention to less than ten percent of what we see there. Had the competition not been watching, chances are that even if someone caught the error they likely wouldn’t say anything. After all, who wants to take on people who work for a dictionary? For most mortals, such a challenge could end badly.
The other lesson to be learned here is that pictures have meanings and definitions just as much as words do. One can’t just take a random picture and slap it with a set of words that have no relation, or worse yet, contradict the image. You’ll notice that in the picture we used here the coffee does have cream. Uhm, you did notice that she’s holding coffee, didn’t you? Maybe I’m expecting too much of some, but I’m sure one or two people caught on without having to scroll back up and check. My point is, though, that matching the right picture with the right words can be quite challenging. It took over an hour of wading through the archives before we found a coffee picture that actually had cream in it. Imagine what the challenge would be like for someone who didn’t have such a collection at their fingertips. Finding the right picture can be every bit as challenging, and every bit as important, as finding the right words.
Which brings me to my final point: this is what happens when marketing departments use stock photos rather than buying original imagery. Dictionary.com was slammed because someone in the marketing department, possibly an intern, was instructed to pair a stock image with a literary quote [we’ll just assume that dictionary.com has permission to use the image and didn’t steal it from the Internet]. Business is too competitive to be risking your image with stock photography, especially when the photo doesn’t match the message.
In the end, this isn’t a huge, earth-shattering or career-ending faux pax. I doubt anyone lost their job and this isn’t the type of thing that is going to sway anyone’s opinion about which online dictionary to use. There are lessons to be learned from the situation, though; lessons we all should remember so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.
And we all could probably do with another cup of coffee.
The technologies of convenience are making our sphere of exploration and experience smaller. —Robert Englund
Modern convenience saves time, money, and wear and tear, but are we missing something greater?
This is one of those Monday mornings where I am having considerable difficulty finding any motivation. I hit the snooze on my alarm for a full hour this morning before pulling my feet out from under the covers. After a trying week with long hours and too little sleep and too much anxiety, I would just as soon spend the entire day in bed. What’s a little disturbing is that I almost could. Modern convenience gives me the ability to write from anywhere I can manage either a WiFI or cell phone signal. The software and settings on my desktop computer can be easily duplicated on my laptop. My image files are shared on the home network so I can access them from any room in the house. The only reason I would have to get out of bed is for food and coffee.
I am happy to be living in a period where such convenience is possible, and there is even more. I have the world’s information at my fingertips, no matter where I am, no matter what time of day it may be. My middle son, the Marine stationed in Japan, would have been difficult to contact a mere ten years ago, but now we can Skype and chat in real time without inconveniencing either of us. I can watch fashion shows around the world live without ever having to board a plane and sit next to someone wreaking of perfume for 17 hours. I can take a picture and not have to drop film off at the lab. The convenience of living right here, right now, is nice.
With such convenience, however, comes some responsibility, I think. If the universe is going to give us all these advantages, do we not have an obligation to use them for the greater good? If our lives are somehow made easier by the things around us and the abilities we have been given, does that not obligate us to not only improve our lives but that of those around us? Being the beneficiaries of convenience means that we are compelled to learn more, to understand at a deeper level, to be involved to a greater degree, and to speak more when the time is appropriate. Convenience is wonderful but we are indentured to the universe for using that convenience in ways that make a difference.
When I first sat down at my desk this morning, there were a number of news stories that caught my eye. These were among them:
- Designer Raf Simons Questions The Pace Of Fashion
- Weather Patterns Could Change Dramatically By June
- More Continental Bird Species Are Going Extinct
- No One Needs An Apple Watch
That such a diverse amount of current information and opinions from around the world is available at my fingertips this morning is amazing. While they do come from several different sources, they were delivered as curated links so that I wouldn’t lose time sorting through all the different publications. Everything is right there waiting for me. The convenience is astonishing.
Yet, for that convenience, there is a necessary response. I cannot, morally, just read those articles and not respond. Each demands some form of response that alters my life and my schedule in some form. Consider:
- The questions Raf asks, though seemingly esoterical on one level, are applicable for every aspect of a very broken fashion industry. This impacts not only how I view current fashion events, but also influences my own shopping habits. To the degree that I take advantage of the convenience of fast fashion, I endanger the creativity that pushes the industry forward.
- If the weather patterns develop as predicted, we could see a colder winter here in the Midwest. Therefore, we would do well to plant a garden of food that can be easily preserved and hold throughout the winter. Challenging weather patterns lead us to take actions now that make us more self-sufficient.
- While the extinction of birds in South America may seem to be inconsequential, we know that the world is interconnected and that such events make the world less sustainable. We need to be more aware of purchases we make, especially those regarding paper and plastic products, that impact the areas where avian species are most rapidly dying.
- Disappointment in the Apple Watch, and how people are not using it even after spending so much money on them, will inevitably affect the future of smart wearables. This is an important lesson in how design can only push society forward so far. When the technology exceeds societies ability to adapt it to their lives, the technology fails. This is going to slow further technology integration. I need to keep a look out for how the industry as a whole responds.
Those may seem minor, perhaps, but they ultimately matter in how I shape my day and what decisions I make. Convenience generates awareness to things that we might have totally missed as little as five years ago. Convenience also makes it easier to respond in an appro
Convenience also makes it easier to respond in an appropriate way. When we know that portions of Asia and India are more likely to face devastating floods later this year, we can begin giving to relief agencies in advance rather than waiting until an emergency strikes. The plethora of financial options available to us now allows us to manage our finances in such a way that we are better able to save more and thereby help more than did previous generations. These conveniences give us an edge in helping to make the world a better place. We direct our creativity and innovation more precisely because it is convenient to do so.
Let’s face it, we would all be lazy and lethargic if it were an option. For 99% of us, though, we have to work to make any progress and anything that makes that work and our living easier is to be appreciated.
A trailer for the new Harry Potter movie was released over the weekend. Being able to see trailers without needing to go to the theater allows us to decide in advance which movies we might want to see. In this case, though, it also raises another question. We have a seven-year-old who is reading rather voraciously. He’s going to find the new trailer interesting, so the convenience of seeing the trailer now, at home, gives us the opportunity to not only discuss whether it is appropriate viewing fare, but also whether his reading level might be at a point where we could introduce him to the first of the Harry Potter books on conjunction with the release of the film.
It also allows us to do this:
Enjoy the convenience you have this Monday.
It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. —J. K. Rowling
Having all the latest bells and whistles sounds like a good thing, but how many choices do we really need?
Imagine walking into an ice cream parlor and there only being three choices of flavors, none of which you liked. Would you walk out? Perhaps we might imagine walking into a restaurant that advertised an all-you-can-eat buffet, but would only let you pick five items from which you could consume your fill; that wouldn’t be exactly what we expected from a buffet, would it? We like having choices and, a significant portion of the time, the more choices we have the more in control we feel of our situation. Yet, we do well to ask the question: how many choices is enough?
Yes, I know, the answer depends primarily upon the topic and perhaps even the circumstances, but in whatever the situation might be, it seems only logical that, at some point, the number of choices one has begins to deteriorate one’s ability to actually achieve anything. If for example, Baskin Robbins were to suddenly expand their selection to 438 flavors, one might very well spend such a long time deciding as to no longer be interested in ice cream at all and go elsewhere for a nice burger. There is in all things a point of diminishing returns where the number of choices becomes too many.
When talking about the post-processing of digital imagery, the list of potential choices seems endless. Even if one only uses Photoshop on its own, with no third-party plugins or filters, there are still more than a sufficient number of choices to address pretty much every situation imaginable. I’ve not yet found any critical artistic or necessary adjustment common to photography that couldn’t be performed in Photoshop in some way. With choices abounding what matters is whether one knows how to actually access and implement all the choices available. The preponderance of choices is so great, in fact, that a third-party industry has cropped up around creating Photoshop actions to help save on post-processing time by automating some basic choices.
Like most photographers, I have certain tools that are my favorites. I reach for them often and, at times, even shoot specifically for a given set of tools. I have what I need, or, at least, I thought so.
Last month, Google released it’s Nik Collection of Photoshop plugins. Free. I’m not sure how much the collection had cost previously, somewhere between $300-$400 I think, but now the collection is totally free and they’re even giving refunds to those who had recently purchased the set. I found the move interesting from a marketing perspective but didn’t think much of it beyond that because they didn’t sound like something I would need to use.
I take the same approach to the full Adobe Creative Suite. Are there some really valuable and incredible tools in the set? Yes. Can I see a potential use for those tools? Yes. But I don’t own all those tools because I don’t need them. They would just sit here and cost me money that could best be spent elsewhere.
Then, Friday evening, a colleague who had downloaded the Nik collection was telling me all it had in it and especially emphasized its ability to reduce noise. Noise is an issue for me because of the age of my camera. In low light situations, noise can ruin an otherwise good shot. He convinced me that the noise filters in the Nik Collection could fix my problem. So, first thing Saturday morning, I downloaded and installed the full collection.
When I next opened Photoshop, I groaned. There were so many choices I hardly knew where to start! I had watched the tutorial on eliminating noise, so I could find what I wanted, and it does work quite well. But what am I supposed to do with all this other … stuff? These tools expand my capabilities immensely or at least make a number of things easier. But with so very many choices how am I supposed to determine which ones are best for any given situation? Insert scream of panic here.
Take a look at the pictures at the top of this page. Both are composites of a photograph processed multiple different ways to demonstrate, I hope, just how confusing and complicated the number of choices can be, especially for someone who is already creative and always looking for something different. Which method I think is best is going to change based on what other art has influenced me lately, what kind of mood I’m in, and how much coffee I’ve had. I am sometimes criticized that my work lacks cohesiveness because I’m always moving on to try something new. Giving me these many choices hardly seems like a good thing! Consistency just flew out a window I didn’t have open.
Returning to our ice cream analogy, creatives are the type of people who walk into an ice cream parlor and, at least, consider all the options before making a choice. I know some who would have to actually taste all the options first. Given a certain budget, a specific amount of time, and sufficient desire, we run through all the options in our minds. Waffle cone or plain? One scoop or three? Or maybe a banana split? Or that brownie sundae looks good … Only when we have pondered all the choices do we make a decision, and even then we may spend the next three days second-guessing ourselves. If we do that with a limited number of ice cream choices, how do you think we respond when our creative choices number into the thousands? It’s a problem!
I understand why software developers put so much into a single package. How I use a piece of software is going to be different from how another person uses the same software. I’m not a product engineer so I’m not likely to use a lot of the 3D rendering tools available in Photoshop. My interest in graphic design is limited, so I don’t utilize the drawing tools as often or as proficiently as someone else would. Creative software has to be robust to speak to the myriad ways in which it can be used.
Still, it would be nice if there were a way to limit or perhaps turn off more of the choices so that they wouldn’t be sitting there looking at us, begging to be used. I don’t have time for this level of temptation. I’m four weeks behind on editing as it is! Too many choices are the bane of productivity.
Maybe we should all just go back to analog film.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. —Karl Marx
The violence seen at political rallies this week remind us of a time that was actually worse. As history repeats itself, are we in for a violent summer?
The scenario is all too familiar. A political event in Chicago. Police and Secret Service highly visible with instructions to keep protesters from interfering with the event. Protesters interfere anyway. Police react. People are hurt. Several are arrested.
But wait, we’re not talking about events of this past week. I’m referring to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. If you think this year’s political cycle is the craziest thing ever, then please allow me to give you a brief history lesson. While we are still relatively early in the year, and yes, history repeats far too often, things will have to get a lot worse for this election year to equal the chaos of 48 years ago.
1968 was, by any account, a watershed year. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered on April 4, setting off unrest around the country. The war in Vietnam was not going in our favor, with the North Vietnamese having launched the Tet offensive at the first of the year. Pop artist Andy Warhol was shot April 3 (he recovered). Anti-draft protests were already common and continued to intensify. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite aired a special, Who, What, When, Where, Why? directly contradicting official accounts of how things were going in Vietnam. President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.
Political scheduling back then was more condensed than it is now. Candidates were still making up their mind whether to run as late as April and May, completely missing the early state primaries because they could get at-large delegates through backroom dealings. Care was taken to craft a strong anti-war platform to distance candidates from President Johnson’s policies that had dragged his popularity down to something in the neighborhood of 32%.
Then, California happened. Senator Robert Kennedy won the state’s primary rather handily; it looked like he could unite factions and take the nomination from Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He had been celebrating with supporters at a rally in San Fransisco and as he is leaving the stage, just after midnight on June 5, Kennedy is shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan. The split in the party was now unreconcilable.
While the nation mourned, summer grew hot as Richard Nixon slugged it out with Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan for the Republican Nomination. On the Democratic ticket, Vice President Humphrey considered himself a shoe-in, but still faced strong competition from Senators George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy. In the middle of all that, Alabama Governor George Wallace was running an independent campaign that seemed to have all the Southern states sewn up.
By the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago, hard lines had already been drawn. Using a system, not unlike the super-delegates available today, Humphrey had already clinched the nomination, but several states threatened to change their votes. Abbie Hoffman had mobilized some 100,000 young people, ostensibly members of the Youth International Party (YIPPIES) with the specific goal of disrupting the convention. McGovern and McCarthy had their protesters as well, both inside and outside the convention center. Infamous Chicago Mayor Richard Daly, a supporter of Humphrey, responded to the threats by, among other things, calling out the National Guard and surrounding the convention center with fencing topped with barbed wire. Allegedly, troops and police had been given the order to “shoot to kill,” but that was never directly proven.
Wait, it gets worse. In the hot August heat, the air conditioning at the convention center kept going out. Taxi drivers went on strike. Telephone operators went on strike, and in 1968 that really was a big deal. Phone service could not be guaranteed. Television was limited to broadcasting from either inside the Conrad hotel or inside the convention hall, so they would have to use film, which had to be processed, to cover the riots outside.
The convention was a literal bloodbath, with both protesters and delegates running afoul of police and National Guardsmen. Lincoln Park, where many of the Yippies were camping, was bombed with tear gas which then contaminated the hotel rooms of delegates staying nearby. Free-for-alls erupted on the convention floor as delegates argued over platform planks. The worst day of rioting, August 25, came as delegates argued over the peace plank of the platform. As protestors attempted to march on the convention center, they clashed with police and Guardsmen resulting in hundreds of injuries, including reporters and doctors attempting to help. Nothing like it has been seen since. Chicago police recorded almost 600 arrests, including reporter Hal Bruno who is now political director for ABC news. Everyone widely considered the possibility that the United States was on the brink of collapse.
We didn’t collapse. We know how the election, and the war, turned out. In hindsight, we can see where the mistakes were made and wish things had turned out differently, but the point is that through such a dark and divided time in our history, we survived. If history repeats, we have that success on which to build.
As I watch the campaign rhetoric float across my social media accounts, I see concern in many voices that we are widely divided as a nation and many wonder if we can survive the deep differences of opinion. The scenes in Chicago and St. Louis are frighteningly familiar for those of us old enough to remember. The frustration of young people who feel the government has let them down is exactly what allowed Abbie Hoffman to mobilize so many thousands. Racial tensions are also every bit as high now as they were in 1968 and who would be surprised if we were to see Gloria Steinem leading a National Organization of Women (NOW) march on either Cleveland or Philadelphia. Seeing CBS news journalist Sopan Deb manhandled and arrested by Chicago police was chilling.
Yet, we’ve not hit that tipping point, and I hope we don’t. The death of Robert Kennedy played heavily into the subsequent violence in Chicago. Fortunately, violence this year has not reached the point of homicide. After 1968, Secret Service agents were assigned to leading candidates and we’ve already seen them at work. However, we must also remember the attempted assassination of George Wallace during the 1972 campaign, which the Secret Service was not able to stop.
We’re just now hitting mid-March. We’ve summer yet to go and climatology forecasts predict it could get hot. Perhaps it’s comforting to know that if history repeats itself we’ve survived such turmoil before. Let’s hope this isn’t that year. We don’t need another 1968. We don’t need another President Nixon.
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5 Things You Should Know: 01.12.2017
04:31:02 01/12/2017
Some days you need a compass
Wow! Here it is Thursday and the wind is back as it blows us toward a weekend of freezing temperatures and possibly icy conditions across the Midwest. The Northwest is still getting pummeled by rain and snow in record-setting amounts. In fact, they’ve had so much snow that officials closed Crater Lake National Park due to avalanche concerns.
Trying to look at the world through media reports is confusing as hell. When there’s no actual news, we get a lot of news-looking articles that don’t really tell us anything of value. Sometimes you have to piece the information together to get the full picture. That’s what we’ve done this morning. We’ve sifted through the actual facts and have 5 Things You Should Know.
Making corporate crime personal
Americans are known for having notoriously short-term memories so don’t feel too bad if you thought the whole mess over the Volkswagon emission-cheating scandal was over. Nope, far from it. These things take time to wind their way through the court and it gets all the more complicated when multiple countries are involved. The US can’t just reach across the Atlantic ocean and demand that someone from another country follow our laws. So, the fact that we’re just now seeing a resolution to the scandal really isn’t that surprising.
What we’ve seen in the past two days is that VW has pled guilty to criminal charges after installing software in diesel engines on nearly 600,000 VW, Porsche and Audi vehicles in the U.S. that activated pollution controls during government tests and switched them off in real-world driving1. The software allowed the cars to spew harmful nitrogen oxide at up to 40 times above the legal limit. As a result, the US has fine the company $4.3 billion, the largest fine against an automaker ever, and yes, VW is going to pay the fine.
What you should know, though, is that the Department of Justice also indicted six high-level VW executives yesterday, which is seen as a major step in holding individuals responsible for corporate crimes, something that has been extremely difficult in the past. Now, since all six are German citizens, actually arresting them is difficult. Germany doesn’t extradite their own citizens outside the EU. However, it effectively prevents those executives from traveling outside Germany. This is a huge win for consumers and the Justice Department.
They China Syndrome
While everyone has been distracted by possible spying and interference from Russia, another larger and potentially far greater danger has been growing in the South China Sea as China has made some very strong and deliberate moves that the US should find more than a little worrisome. Earlier this week, Taiwan was intimidated into launching fighters and naval vessels as China’s only aircraft carrier sailed through the Strait of Taiwan in a very obvious display of power2. This is just the latest in a series of military events where China essentially shakes its fist at the small country.
Then, yesterday, Secretary of State nominee and former head of Exxon Mobile, Rex Tillerson, told the Senate Confirmation Committee that China should be denied access to the islands it built and then militarized in the South China Sea3. Tillerson didn’t state what legal justification the US might use in interfering in matters in the South China Sea, but it puts further stress on the relationship between China and the incoming administration.
What you should know now is that earlier this morning China launched a new electronic intelligence ship4. Care to guess where they put it? That’s right, the South China Sea. The activity we’ve seen in that region over the past few months is some of the strongest China has made in the past 50 years. We need to remember, though, that China is also deeply embedded in the US economy. Any action we might take against them would likely be met with a response from Beijing that could send the US economy into a tailspin. The ramifications are extremely troubling.
Redefining the press
If it seems as though every media outlet on the Internet is talking about the president-elect’s news conference yesterday5, the reason may be because not since the Nixon administration has the relationship between the press and the White House been so strained. While I strongly agree that the exchange between the Great Orange and CNN’s Jake Tapert was one of the most childish displays of narcissistic bullying we’ve seen to date, the fact remains that he is the new reality and media needs to adjust to deal with him more effectively.
One of the ways that is happening is that Facebook has decided to take on a larger role in journalism6. What makes this something you should know is that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was very adamant in defending the social media powerhouse against charges that fake news posted on the site may have contributed to the outcome of the presidential election. What we now know is that roughly 40% of American adults get their news from Facebook7. What we see on Facebook we generally consider to be true, whether we admit it or not.
The Facebook Journalism Project, which was announced on the website yesterday, works in three ways:
Exactly how legacy media outlets will respond to the project is still uncertain, but at least Facebook is stepping up and recognizing its role in the dissemination of news. This won’t make presidential press conferences any less vile, but hopefully, it will prevent the kind of unsubstantiated news stories at the center of that exchange from becoming a problem.
Up, up and away
So, with all the stress and anxiety going on across the US at the moment, perhaps you’re thinking it might be nice to get away for a while, maybe enjoy a Spring Break somewhere different, even if you’ve not been a college student for 30 years or more. The problem is, you’re an adult. You have too many responsibilities and too little expendable cash. How can you afford to go anywhere? The Icelandic airline WOW would like to solve that problem for you by offering tickets from the US to Europe for as little as $708.
Oh yeah, there are some catches to that price. What you should know is that not every seat on the plane qualifies for the severely discounted rates. You’ll pay to check your bags and if you want anything to eat or drink during the long trip you’ll need to bring those yourself. WOW is only offering the service from LAX and SFA to Stockholm, Sweden; Bristol, England; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Edinburgh, Scotland. Oh, and there’s no Wi-Fi on the planes, either.
Still, this low-cost discounted rate for international travel may be the wave of the future. WOW’s CEO Skuli Mogensen thinks that eventually you might not pay for a ticket at all and that airlines will make their profit through ancillary costs and fees. Norwegian Air plans to make similarly discounted flights available later this year when it adds new planes9. This particular sale only last through April 5, though, so if you’re going you might want to make that reservation sooner rather than later.
And finally …
I’m beginning to think that there’s not anything that Taco Bell won’t try to stuff into or wrap around a taco. The fast food favorite of munchie-ridden stoners and college students everywhere has announced, and I swear I am not making this up, that it plans to go nationwide later this month with a taco shell made entirely of—are you ready?—fried chicken9. You may now take a moment and pick your jaw up off the floor. This is really coming to a Taco Bell near you.
This new culinary curiosity is being called the Naked Chicken Chalupa and, according to the chain, the entire shell is made of all-white seasoned chicken. They then fill that thing with lettuce, tomatoes, cheddar cheese and avocado ranch sauce. Apparently, this mess has tested well for two years in Bakersfield and Kansas City, though I don’t know that I would necessarily consider either of those places culinary capitals by any stretch of the imagination.
There’s no word yet as to how much this new source of indigestion might cost you. Remember that you’ll want to eat the thing immediately and not let it sit on your dashboard or coffee table overnight. Being chicken, it should be consumed hot to avoid any chance of contracting salmonella. Of course, if you’re eating at Taco Bell you’re probably not too worried about food poisoning in the first place, are you?
That’s all the time and space we’re willing to commit to this morning. If you’re in the Midwest, watch out for possible Thunderstorms midday. Wherever you are, please stay safe. We like you. Both of you. Until tomorrow, good day!
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