Suddenly breaking my recent skirt habit, PANTS! Ah, the miracle of pants. Pants this beautiful, however, are a rarity – whipped up from a just-sheer-enough chiffon-like substance with a mesmerizingly fluid pattern. Liquid pants! With pockets and pleats! Whoever designed these was a genius, namely Elin of Stylein in Sweden. Her latest collection was very “Lykke Li Goes to Saudi Arabia” in the most perfect way (I’m just swoony over this leather scarf)!

It would be possible to remain inert with the way this fabric moves.

I may or may not have worn these for a week straight.
Blast Pants from Stylein (thank you, Elin!)
Shoes – vintage 9West, thrifted in Tucson
Earrings – H&M, LA

photos by Rian Flynn

You guys! Kate Bosworth and her stylist have come up with a sweet-as-gold jewelry line called JewelMint, which “gauges your style and recommends a curated collection for you.” Yeah. Nevermind that each piece is less than $30! Ridiculous. Their editorial team asked if I could style a few pieces for them and I couldn’t keep my claws off this sherbet tasseled necklace set and scarab ring, so we had at it. In return they gave you guys a not-f&%$ing-around discount! 50% off with code PainfullyHip50! It’s only good for one week (ends Wednesday, Sept 7, 2011), so get thee to thy wallets!

Oh, to always shoot with a team like this. Heaven.

Photos by Trumbo+Flynn
Model – Beck Trumbo, CAST Images
Styling by Amber Mortensen
Clothing by Van Der Neer

I can say without a doubt that the following shoot was the most death defying to date… and that’s including the time we shot in a haunted antiques warehouse in the bowels of the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Oakland!
After we were forced to abandon our original plan of shooting on top of nearby Mount Lemmon because of severe fire conditions (didn’t think it would be cool to be running a smoke machine up there – we prefer to prevent mass hysteria when possible), we drove wayyyy out into the desert in search of a few trees.
Following several miles of meandering dirt roads we came upon this ominous cracked crater of a pond bed surrounded by sparse mesquite trees in the middle of a known smuggling corridor and thought, “Well it’s no forest, but it’ll do.” Amongst the storm of gunshots we kept hearing with disturbing consistency, this location afforded some pretty amazing captures. David Olsen, the editor of Zocalo, seemed to like it too, he made the first one the cover shot for the June issue! Worth it? You tell me…

Fire Warning:
Summer’s Hottest Trends, Adapted for Life in the Desert
By Amber Mortensen, Painfully Hip

It’s June in the desert. The sun is relentless, cicadas are celebrating, and temperatures are rising, but what’s this? Hemlines are descending, modesty is rampant, and …black is the new black? Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but pretty much every trend you’ve come to associate with summer (sundresses, shorts, mini skirts, color, color, and more color) have been sent to trial by fire this year. So how do Tucsonans keep cool when fashion publications are telling us that long sleeves, trousers, ankle length hemlines, and black are haute stuff this season? Anything loose and floaty has risen to the top of my wish list. Especially chiffon, the textile equivalent of whipped cream. It’s cool, breathable, and just plain sumptuous. American Apparel (988 E University Ave) offers loads of the stuff. Maxi skirts, cropped blouses, long-sleeved button-ups and even pants in delicious sheer chiffon.
As far as these allegedly low hemlines go, skirts are especially versatile this season. I recommend the high-waisted variety, paired with a fluttery, cropped top or a fitted tank. I love a billowy maxi skirt as a swimsuit cover-up (as seen at the TYP/TFG runway show last month at the Fox Theater), but really anything below the knee is hip for summer. Just don’t forget to add an airy pair of gypsy-esque trousers to your closet while you’re at it.
Black is in, but so is nude. Now with this list of trends, it would be understandable to just decide to translated this to streaking, but first let me explain. Nudity (as far as I know), is still illegal in downtown Tucson, but anything wearable from light peach to pinky beige to tan is so hot, it’s barely legal. All the way down to your toe nail polish, nude is the new black, at least for us desert-dwellers.
And of course there is always room for color on my spectrum, especially for accessories like skinny leather belts and hats. Mindlessly pairing saturated blues, greens, purples and turquoise with your nude, black and otherwise neutral separates will make you appear as though you’ve got this color-blocking trend on lockdown. The point however, is to take whatever trends you’re into this season and make them your own somehow. That’s something we Tucsonans are best at.

Couldn’t resist including this hotness in conclusion (Abraham was the best fog wrangler in tarnation):

It was the day after the hottest day in the known history of Los Angeles, and the weather was finally behaving. The wetlands’ wind flicking up the model’s wavy wheat hair, the perfect temperature for combining jackets with hot shorts. Nicole Hill is an incredibly talented photographer and we were very excited to work together. The spoils…

Photographed by Nicole Hill
Styled by Amber Mortensen, Painfully Hip
Clothing is vintage. Blue top and shorts by Sapphire Cordial

Remember Painfully Hip’s very own Jamaica Cole? Some of the most riveting articles on this site were written by her. Well, she is also a true-ass fashion designer. Always looking for a way to promote real talent, I wrote this article about her latest collection for Zocalo Magazine. Accompanying is one of my favorite Painfully Hip Design Collective shoots to date! Enjoy.

THE EVOLUTION OF “HEARTBREAK”
JAMAICA COLE SEWS HER HEART ON A SLEEVE

By Amber Mortensen
photos: Ryan Mihalyi

Fashion designer and founder of Sapphire Cordial, Jamaica Cole, has been sewing almost since she could walk. But as we saw at Tucson’s inaugural Fashion Week last month, it takes more than just knowing how to sew to be a designer. So how did Cole go from sewing amorphous cow-patterned potholders at 7 to designing entire collections of elaborate dresses without patterns twice every year?

“Trial and error,” she says plainly, “emphasis on the error.”

Sewing without patterns is not only difficult, but yields one-of-a-kind pieces that don’t allow for exact duplication. But Cole has been doing it this way for every Sapphire Cordial collection since 2006. She compares her process to a musician selling only a single copy of his album.

“This has not been incredibly lucrative. Imagine a musician rehearsing all day all night for an album release show. He plays the songs! The audience cheers! People want to buy the album! But then they get to the merch table and there is only one copy of the CD. Someone buys it and takes it home, and the musician forgets how to play the songs. Such is the life of an independent clothing designer.”

On the other hand, why would an artist want to paint the same painting twice? Before moving to Tucson one year ago, Cole lived, showed and sold her ready-to-wear collections in Northern Californian boutiques, inspired by flowery visual influences ranging from New Orleans architecture to Edwardian luggage.

However, Cole’s Tucson Fashion Week collection was something else entirely. Based on her very personal interpretation of the grieving process, the Anatomy of Heartbreak was her first haute couture collection and her most costly and labor-intensive to date. Echoing themes of human anatomy, transformation and death, this collection was not designed to be a crowd-pleaser or quick-seller. This was art for art’s sake.

“2009 was an exceedingly dry year for me artistically, but since moving to Tucson last year, I’ve launched my website (SapphireCordial.com), shown at the Tucson Museum of Art and Preen Vintage, and created my first couture collection for Tucson Fashion Week. I don’t know if it’s returning to the land of my birth, all the wonderfully sincere people I’ve met here, or just something in the desert air, but moving to Tucson has completely recharged my creative batteries and I’m very content for the first time in years.”

The rest of this amazing shoot:

(click the full screen button in the bottom right of the player to zoom)

Photos by Ryan Mihalyi
Clothing by Jamaica Cole
Modeled by Katie Palmer
Art Direction/Styling by Amber Mortensen
Hair and Makeup by Danielle Cushing
Special thanks to Abraham Cooper, James Grip and the Rialto Theatre, Tucson

The internet gasped audibly when Fuco Ueda launched her website last year. Ueda’s works of in-exhalable beauty (acrylic and powdered mineral pigments on paper, cloth, and wood) are cloaked with an intangible darkness which is sometimes cloyingly subtle. However, in Fuco Ueda’s earlier works from 2000-2001 themes of stripey socks, incandescent sea creatures and schoolgirl honey drool give way to lost innocence, vulnerability, clutched skulls, and defenseless goldfish. A period so dark, it would best be described in the voice of Werner Herzog. I’ll shoot him an email.

Fuco Ueda’s prolific portfolio
via My Modern Met

Fuco Ueda’s prolific portfolio
via My Modern Met

I love working with jewelry designer, Laura Kepner-Adney of Wingflash Designs. Nevermind the fact that her prolific collections consist of the most gasp-worthy, covetable objects I’ve ever ogled, she’s actually grateful to me when I borrow them for extend periods of time. Sometimes I think I must have secretly assassinated Hitler in my past life.

In addition to the jewelry, there were a lot of things that made the following shoot awesome. And that brings me to yet another reason I love working with Laura. She comes up with these genius ideas about snow machines and a Painfully Hip 20% OFF everything (until June 30th 2010) if you mention this post! The male model, however, was my idea.
You’re welcome.

Photos by Ryan Mihalyi
Models – Asher Caplan, Ashley Geiger, and Sandra Solial
Jewelry by Laura Kepner-Adney, Wingflash Designs
Hair by Addam Moreno, ISO Hair
Makeup by Lauren Malanga
Styling by Amber Mortensen
Special thanks to Abraham Cooper for his assistance, Lauren Malanga for going on a mad hunt for white mascara and saving our lives, and Adam Lehrman for being late to a wedding in the name of this shoot.

You’ll want to check out Part 2 of this shoot up tomorrow… but only if you’d like to see the aforementioned models in various states of undress.

I thought so.

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