intellectual properties

BLACK V fashion event: Saturday May 21 (or: SF Fashion vs. Danielle Steele)

“San Francisco is a great city to raise children, but I was very happy to leave it. There’s no style, nobody dresses up—you can’t be chic there. It’s all shorts and hiking books and Tevas—it’s as if everyone is dressed to go on a camping trip. I don’t think people really care how they look there; and I look like a mess when I’m there, too.” – Danielle Steele, May 7, 2011 in the WSJ

well, MZ. Steele, i think you were hanging with the wrong crowd. perhaps you should have ventured out of your Pacific Heights palace (Spreckels Mansion) and away from the Marina and bourgeoisie once in a while.

San Francisco may have its fair share of REI-worshippers and 24/7 outdoorsy types who wear active gear and/or yoga pants everywhere, all the time, but i’m certainly not one of them and neither are many of my friends. yes, it’s different than new york or paris or milan. yes, we often wear more sensible shoes, because SF ISN’T FLAT. but i digress. i think my photos speak for themselves. and besides…..Danielle Steele dresses like a drag queen. as one Chron commenter wrote:

I can absolutely promise you that in Paris, Danielle Steel (“To all you messes, Danielle bids adieu,” Leah Garchik, May 12) is not chic – rich, yes, chic, no. Chic to the Parisians is simplicity – that means you don’t wear 15 diamond bracelets in the daytime, dress in couture clothing that totally overwhelms you, own 6,000 pairs of $1,000 shoes, wear makeup more suited to your daughter’s age than your own.”

AU CONTRAIRE, this saturday evening there is a FANTASTIC fashion show happening that i encourage any of you interested in the local SF fashion scene to consider: BLACK V:  a night of fashion, dreams and darkness. this fashion show includes some of my own local favorites who design high-end couture. oh, and everything will be BLACK.  so i am very excited.

Black V Fashion Show and Masquerade features established, independent and emerging local fashion designers and boutiques. Black V Fashion Event gives the designers a platform to showcase their designs inspired by the dark side of fashion and still remain chic and stylish.

The event will be held on Saturday, May 21, 2011 at Madrone Studios, a stylish multi-media space in the SOMA district of San Francisco (1417 15th Street.) 6 PM static presentation | 730 PM fashion show.

In its second year, we are incorporating a masquerade to motivate the audience’s participation (READ: Dress in black! Masquerade masks encouraged!) and a pre-show static visual presentation at 6:00PM where guests will be able to see the garments up close on live models (instead of just flying by you on a runway).

Fashion for Fashion: All proceeds of this event ($30 tickets) will be donated to the Fashion Department at City College of San Francisco (501c3 organization). This year, the Department will celebrate the 10th year anniversary of its Fashion Show Production program. This program generates Northern California’s only student-produced fashion event.

FEATURED DESIGNERS:

JAY NICOLAS SARIO | HOMME BY DAHAE KIM | GB SHRIVE| LHC COUTURE | MENK | KEN CHEN SF | PHUONG MY | and CARI BORJA

Accessory: KAATJE DESIGN | GUZEL DESIGN | EUGENE HUANG

SPONSORS:

Hair: Le Burge’t Salon
MakeUp: San Francisco Institute of Esthetics and Cosmetology- A Paul Mitchell Partner School
Media Sponsor: Astonish Magazine

MODELS: FORD | CITY | JE | Look |

WITH SUPPORT BY:
Owen Buenaventura | Del Geronimo | Rick Calao @ Simms Ink. | Emily Sims | Gail Ballesteros-Shrive | Shane Stinar | Virginie Suos | Noor Rasheed | David Bui | Janice Bailon | Nazarena Sadati-Bowring | POWDER | Jo de Mars | Pigment Cosmetics | Ty Olson | Joe Yang | Henri Lui | Jean-Pierre Gueguen | James Reid

(facebook event)

fantasy shopping for summer

this bathing suit

+ these shoes

instead i’ll probably be wearing a bikini from target and my old flip flops. but a girl can dream.

for robert palmer

addicted to love @ lov3sick4 :: 2/14/11 :: photo by del.geronimo

inner black

jay read my last post and asked if all my 2011 posts were going to be overly pronoid and all about expressing my inner rainbow and shit. i said: MY INNER RAINBOW IS BLACK.

on that note, twisted lamb posted this video as “How To Get Ready For A Christmas Party”, and i think that’s effing awesome:

1.1 Negredo: The Raven – Director: Jez Tozer

that is how i get ready for any party of note.

recently

performing with BadUnklSista @ the Black Rocks Arts Foundation ARTumnal fundraiser 11/20/10

49 square miles

a local SF handbag company, 49 Square Miles (referencing the commonly stated area of the city of SF, which is also referenced by the name of the magazine “7×7“, but is actually not quite true), recently had a campaign wherein people were to submit poems of exactly 49 words about San Francisco and post them to the 49 Square Miles facebook page. the prize? a gorgeous $650 leather hobo bag.

like many a young teenage girl i wrote lots of poems in my journals when i was young, and had to write poetry for a number of my poetry literature classes in college. but i was always embarrassed by my attempts at “real” structured poetry, and so if you look back through my “not poems” category here on this blog, you’ll see that my style of “poetry” is very unstructured, free form, and does not follow any of the traditional elements of poetry (meter, rhyme, form, etc.). it’s just a style of writing i use when i want to be obscure, or am finding something difficult to express in complete sentences, or when things are more sensory than logical.  i don’t generally think of myself as a poet.

so i did the challenge not just because i have a thing for leather hobo bags but because i liked the idea of having the extremely bounded challenge to see if i could come up with anything good within the parameters. it lasted a month and you could enter as many times as you wanted. i entered 5 times. i am not going to republish the 5 poems i submitted here, because, it turns out, i am (still) a terrible poet, but all the entries are here.

so i was HUGELY SURPRISED to learn that I WON! *so excited*. you can read my winning entry here.  thx @49squaremiles!

QOTD: style

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.” - Gore Vidal

kreeya.com independent fashion website launch featuring miranda caroligne

me in a miranda caroligne scarf + sweater for kreeya.com, photo by warren@after5media.com

back in september, i did a photoshoot with my good friend Miranda Caroligne for the new independent fashion website, kreeya.com, which just launched TONIGHT!

a lot of small independent clothiers don’t have the time or know-how to manage an online marketplace for their goods. even with the rise of the amazing etsy.com, a lot of my friends struggle to find an easy and effective way to sell their goods online. everything must be bought in-person, sometimes at some crazy loft/garage/basement workspace in a fringe neighborhood that you can’t find. kreeya.com is hoping to become a marketplace specifically for independent fashionmakers in the SF as well as help to promote them, which i think is awesome:

“Each week, Kreeya will feature a new local fashion designer and showcase their unique collection and the story behind it.”

Miranda is currently the featured designer and there are lots of photos of me in miranda’s awesome clothes! (omg!).  definitely also check out the interview with Miranda on the blog.

you can also follow Kreeya on facebook.

Bad Unkl Sista in French Vogue (!!!)

the November 2010 issue of French Vogue has a section on Burning Man (bm-vogue-pdf), which is exciting for many reasons, but particularly since there is, not in the main article (which does feature art by other friends!) but in another section, a photo of our Bad Unkl Sista butoh crew during our white procession at the Temple at dawn on Thursday.

(enlarged below)

L to R: Kyle Hailey, Myana, Calli Beck, Orange, Wanda, Yaella

what you’re seeing is part of a full circle of 16 people. i’m only a leeetle sad that all you can see of me is a slight bit of profile standing on the far, far left, next to/behind Kyle, but *so excited* that as a group we made it into F*ING FRENCH VOGUE. since i’m pretty sure i will never get this close to being in Vogue again, and since i am technically in this photo, i’ll count this as it.

see also: my Burning Man 2010 report + this recent NYT article on BM-inspired haute couture in Paris

Gibbous Love

via kottke, i started reading this NYT piece on Courtney Love and her fashionista cred (it’s way more interesting than you might think) and was about 80% of the way through it when i was completely surprised by this:

After that Paris season, she went through what she describes as a “kook” phase, during which time she cut up her vintage dresses and some of the signature grunge pieces once worn by her and Mr. Cobain, and styled the scraps as ruffles and patchworks in the vein of Gibbous Fashions, a San Francisco collective that specializes in recycled fashion.

whoah! congrats to Selene for the mention!