Fader

Project Runway is probably one of the most epic reality shows on television, mostly because it has all the right ingredients: drama by the bucket load, crazy sleepless bitches, bad haircuts, badder attitude and a panel of steely-balled judges. But good fashion, as far as we're concerned, has never been one of them. Basically, Project R has about as much to do with style as America's next top model has to do with supermodeldom. Like zilcho at all. Hark back a few and you might remember Zulema Griffin, a feisty contestant from season two (as she tells it she was "misrepresented"). There are few Zulema pieces on the show really worthy of any note, although we do vaguely remember a wrap dress in there somewhere that was half decent. But in a recent unrelated YouTube session, we stumbled on Zulema's fall '08 video quite randomly, a genuinely delightful and quietly clever piece of work.

First off, there's nothing more amazingly impractical and awesome than an all-white collection for fall—the big ruffled coat might be a tad dramatic for our taste but those white cropped pants and Victorian blouse have Indian summer picnic written all over them. Oh, and the hats! The hats!! The video stars a trio of black bodystockinged models stumbling around New York, like some fashion version of Toy Story, where all the storefront mannequins come to life and tiptoe around Manhattan while the rest of the city sleeps. Turn down the sound completely (sorry Talib!) second time around and it feels like the silent fashion movie playing right now in our minds that we've always wanted to star in.

Helen Storey’s career as a designer began at Valentino 25 years ago and has landed in the chemist’s lab. In a series of projects emphasizing the importance of sustainability, she has created a dissolvable water bottle, a purifying pillow and in her latest collaboration with chemistry professor Tony Ryan, she has created a line of dresses that are soluble in water. In their exhibit Wonderland, intricately sewn dresses are hung from a small crane and slowly dipped into large fishbowls, creating a silky rainbow effect upon contact and eventually dissolving into a clear sludge. The exhibition, which premiered in London in February, will reopen in Sheffield for all you lucky Brits from June 18th to July 13th and is imagined by Ryan as a way of “stimulating the public conscience in visual and dramatic ways, and empowering people to dream about alternative ways of consuming.” For a video interview with Storey and Ryan, go to SHOWStudio.

It's going to take us long time and many foot massages to forgive Kanye for making us wait nearly three hours last night for his performance at G-Shock's 25th anniversary party. By the time he'd parked the helicopter (for real), taken his seat in the pod-chair and surrounded himself with a troop of bare-chested fembots, the whole thing had drifted into one long and extremely weird Dionysian hallucination. Between the boobs, the lazer show and the armchair raps it's even difficult to tell whether the man on stage was actually Kanye West and not some weird anti-ye hologram or maybe a mis-programmed android here to destroy the planet. Thankfully by the second verse of "Flashing Lights" all was forgiven, the universe was saved, we were on planet Kanye drinking kryptonite cocktails and everything was going to be OK. more...

Sometimes you put two pieces together in your wardrobe and you think, wait, this is too much of the same color, if we wear this we’ll look like that weird lady whose always wearing pink on pink. While on most occasions we’d look at this ‘on the street’ ensemble and be critical of all the red happening, but she pulls it together with multi-toned huaraches and a bright geometric sweater. It’s so messy and not over thought that we’re inspired to take our own fashion vacation and see what we come up with, even a complete vacated thoughts trip altogether where we find ourselves in some strange grunge dream and Marc Jacobs is waiting for us on a cloud ready to drape us in vintage Perry Ellis 'kinderwhore.'

*kinderwhore is the term for Marc Jacobs antique flowing dresses from his infamous Fall 1992 Perry Ellis collection. more...

FADER 54 is an Aaliyahxtravaganza, as the world's beloved Baby Girl graced the cover of our fourth annual ICON issue. We made this issue with as much care and tenderness as we ever have and, accordingly, soon we will post an exclusive mix by DJ Caps to celebrate the very special Ms. Haughton. But! As ever, we also delved into the sparkling waters of newness: we explored Britain's burgeoning bassline scene, trampled Swedish snowcaps with soon-to-be-superstar Lykke Li, and linked up with woozy Tropicalian El Guincho on Barcelona time. We also went deep with dervishy princess Sahra Motalebi, clowned everyone with Chip tha Ripper, ate crepes with Jeremy Jay, and lost our minds just the way we like to with The War on Drugs. Get the essence of all these folks—and approximately 42,000 other heater-makers--on our Issue 54 download, which is totally totally freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (that was a symbol of how free: totally free).

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It was hailing in Olympia when we rang Jeremy Jay at K Records, where he is mixing his new album, a fitting atmosphere for his moody French new wave songs about Chinese dragons and dreaming. An avid Francoise Hardy fan, we chatted with Jeremy about his personal style, dancing and his amazing mirror/prism belt in Texas. Read the interview after the jump. more...

Besides French dudes like Christophe Lemaire, we regularly obsess about the Danes (Henirk Vibsov, Wood Wood) and the Swedes (Acne Jeans, Carin Wester). Carin Rodebjer of Rodebjer happens to be one of our all time human beings/designers and was in town from Sweden a couple of weeks ago for little a work and play. It's Carin's immaculate shirt dresses that first got us hooked—always beautifully constructed with a extra stylee twist thrown in, like the huge pussy bow pieces from her spring 2006 collection featured back in Issue #36. Part of the secret, she confides, is the Italian shirting factory where they are produced. And up at her NYC showroom, she showed us the new custom rope-print shirting she has lined up for fall, as well as some other key pieces, including a double breasted coat dress and a cropped blazer with exposed almost football-esque shoulder pads. What's ultimately most awesome about her clothes is that she has all the best super feminine flourishes (yeah, we're wearing our coat dresses with nothing underneath this fall) without sacrificing any practicality. It's chic with two feet on solid ground. Before we said our goodbyes and Carin went to meet her Swedish friends at a Peter Morén show, she told us her next collection would be all about (wait for it) neat and tidy hippies!!! Like we said, Swedes are the best! more...

Playing hunt-the-peace-sign is our new fashion favorite game, especially since the symbol turned 50 earlier this year (CND forever!). We snapped accessory designer Lizzie Fortunato supporting the cause a couple of weeks ago in a shirt by Sophomore. Although unfortunately we are unable to identify the awesome white tux jacket that she also has on (probably vintage) but the button-studded headband is most definitely one of her own designs. Also the style team actually hasn't bathed since the last hippie post on tie-dye, and half of its members are currently out on the field researching a story on the 50 best places on the planet to buy patchouli oil. Stay tuned. (Click the image to see it full.) more...

See, this is what we miss most about Dipset. We don't even have to explain what's going on here. Coogi cardigans and Swag Splashes. Pure entertainment. Courtesy of SmackTube via Smarten Up Nas.

The word "swagger" comes up in the office a lot, and luckily our style intern Charles has lots of it. On a weekly basis he rolls in wearing the most amazing shoulder padded leather coats, rolled shorts and boots—all styles that could never be pulled off without swagger. To top it all off, dude rolls in all the way from Jersey(!) with these gems. It’s enough to make us pack up and cross the Hudson. Click the picture to see the whole thing. more...

What's happened to supermodels? Like we still watch "Freedom '90" all the time because Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington drink each other's blood in it. And the last time we saw Linda shopping in Soho she had no make-up on and looked fly as hell. Meanwhile, Agyness fell down at Hugs once and nobody put their beer down. We are down for fashion and music co-mingling but it needs to be highfalutin, inspired by coke mania and involve some sort of Eyes Wide Shut vampire shit or it's just some people sitting in a decent apartment.

We don't often make overtures like this, but we have been on Lacoste creative director Christophe Lemaire's website for the last three hours obsessing over his new S/S 2008 collection, reading his bio, Google image searching, pasting ourselves into photos of him, wishing we could live on a website, thinking about him a lot, and we want to put it out there that we are fortunately in search of a new friend. Lemaire, hit us up. And don't worry dudes, if anyone comes up behind you and wonders why you've been looking at a French fashion site half the day, just tell them that you are listening to Lemaire's flawless audio player which includes wisely chosen jams from Ariel Pink, Arthur Russell, Bo Diddley, J Dilla, The Flamingos and more.

We just received mail from the Northwest and at the bottom of the envelope it said, ‘What does it feel like to be on the thirteenth floor?’ Well, it feels alright, a little stuffy at times, but no evil witch voodoo if you know what we mean. Point being that the Northwest is full of these sort of snarky folk. That’s why when our Seattle On-The-Streeter sent us this image, we weren’t surprised by its beret-wearing record store gentlemen. In fact we kinda liked it, even the John Waters mustache. Thing is, you can’t really hate on this guy’s style because it’s like Kanye’s Hadron Collider, he vortexed the universe to fit his look, ‘cool pins’ and all. more...

Whether he likes it or not, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper is an honorary member of the style team. His classic uniform of button-downs, personally worn-in APCs, plimsolls and famous Slept On specs has had a calming effect on the more schizophrenic stylings on our side of the office (80s/90s meets 70s?) for as long as we can remember. So when an invitation to Thomas Pink's "Personally Pink" made-to-order shirt service came in the mail we figured Matthew was the right man to put the service to the test. Could TP make a shirt fit better than one from the MS collection of carefully sourced-out standard fits? more...

"What I might call her élan, her soul," says Rick Powell, Duke University professor about one of Barkley Hendricks '70s portraits of black Americans. It's a funny mashing of experts talking art and some really old rad personal style that we just cannot replicate in current times. We wrote about Hendricks' first retrospective happening now at Duke's Nasher Museum but have yet been unable to make it to North Carolina to see the exhibit (though we—and you—have until July). This video tour of the exhibit is second best, but we'll take it. Because even if we went right now Hendricks wouldn't be there rocking a sweet neckscarf and he is on YouTube. Win some/lose some.

We dropped by the I Heart showroom to pay Jill and Cosmo the cat (showroom moscot and super fluffly Wowch model) a visit last week just in time for the new fall collections from Lonely Hearts, Wowch and PAM. Helene Morris of the label Lonely Hearts gave us an inkling of fall 08 things to come when we spoke to her about the US launch of the line in issue F53 so we were psyched to see the slightly grungy inspiration take shape in moody plaids, bomber jackets with jumbo-sized polka dots and some very intense saturated color dip-dyed shirts. If Cosmo the cat could speak we're sure he would tell us that he is equally excited that Wowch is dipping his animal brethen into a sea of purple and turquoise tie-dye for fall 08 . Of course you can always count on Perks and Mini to get weird, and the new collection looks like a trip down the Nile in a spaceship with nothing but magic mushrooms in your knapsack for nourishment. Our favorites picks for next season after the jump. more...

When we were in high school our math teachers didn't know anything about math because they were really water polo coaches and our english teachers were really german professors but the kids at Newark, New Jersey's Arts High School got real with Parisian art/fashion collective Andrea Crews. AC's art director Maroussia Rebecq taught them to make insane sculpture ensembles out of second hand clothing and this is a (err, crappy ) video of the process, which mostly shows the kids playing musical chairs, spinning into a psychedelic fairy tale of rainbow sucking goblins, and having no sense of adult remorse, which, unfortunately, we have now that we're older.

We get a lot of slack sometimes because we roll around talking about how cool little old ladies are and how we think they may be our best friends (or our style icons.) So this time we're not going to mention them at all, we're just gonna talk about how cool this girl's patent dress boots, lightly patterned rose blouse with gentle frills and loose fitted powder blue slacks are. We're hoping that this little pretty has champagne in that plastic cup because if we could pull it together this much everyday we'd be constantly drunk from celebration as well.

The latest chapter in the Swedes-takeover-NY story went down late last week when Dunderon opened their new store on Howard street. We knew the Swedish were coming (Acne Studio just opened in SoHo a few blocks west), but we didn't know that they would be bringing jams (a live performance by Endless Boogie) or a cluster of stylee folk. Among are favorite adornments of the night were feathers (braided into hair or worn in hats), floor-sweeping embroidered dresses and acid wash skirts.

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