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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
THE EVOLUTION OF “HEARTBREAK” By Amber Mortensen 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) If you know me, it would make sense that Painfully Hip’s first fashion show would take place on the same stage that Leslie Hall melted my face from a few months previous… and involve dogs somehow. That’s just how I roll.
My inspiration for this show? Prep school kids from the desert with hippy parents. A back to school theme, just in time for all the ASU students to go, well, back to school. Four full days of pulling, sewing and styling later, I ended up with this recipe: 15 models, 6 dogs, two parts buttoned-up, 3 parts buttoned-down, 11 parts hip. Yes, my models were stunnahs, but it was the dogs that really got fierce on the catwalk.
Documentary photos by Andrew Brown
Every Dog Has Its Day Many thanks to Preen Vintage, Buffalo Exchange and Wingflash Designs (who custom-designed a collection of single carved bone feather earrings and necklaces for this show) for contributing to the cause of benefitting Hope Animal Shelter. We raised over $1500 for Tucson’s only no-kill, no-cage animal shelter and for surgery to help save the life of Atticus the rescue dog. Special thanks to Dan Hernandez, Club Congress, Adrienne Lake, Caroline Palmer, David Jon Muse, Aveda Institute and to all of my loverly models and wonderpup owners. 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 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.
Photos by Ryan Mihalyi 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. |
All images were either created by the Painfully Hip Design Collective, used with permission, or found on the web and believed to be in the public domain. If any images that appear are in violation of copyright law, please let me know and i will remove them immediately.
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