Fashion Copious

The Sartorialist: Closer [Books]

After the enormous success of The Sartorialist, Scott Schuman is back with a completely new collection of beautiful images of the men and women who have caught his attention. His much-loved blog, thesartorialist.com, remains one of the most-read in the fashion world and continues to grow in popularity as Scott travels further and more widely. This book emcompasses the diverse style and visual attitude of people as far afield as Japan, Korea, London, Milan, New York, Paris, and beyond, and includes nearly forty exclusive images.

In The Sartorialist: Closer, Scott Schuman looks deeper and with great breadth at human style, and the way it is expressed across the world. Always reacting to an inspirational moment, the images in his new book continue to reflect Scott's unique sensibility and vision.

This limited-edition hardcover features a gorgeous slipcover, colored endpapers, and sewn pages and is individually numbered.

Available Aug 29.
Limited Edition ($225)
Men Cover ($30)
Women Cover ($30)

Side observation: Though the same book, the Men cover is discounted, on Amazon, 41% (to $17.64), while the women cover is discounted only 22% (to $23.52). The Limited Edition is discounted 39% (to $137.26).

Saveurs Sauvages

The book Saveurs Sauvages is old world extravagance balanced by colour and texture. French cuisine lovers and artists collaborated to create these stimulating images shot by Carrie Solomon. The book features twenty eight French chef’s and their wild main courses, Saveurs Sauvages brings forth an intimate level of storytelling by way of portrait photography In addition to the still-life food shots featured in the book, chefs share their fondest food memories.

More images here. [Amazon]

Cleaning Mona Lisa

 

Created by Leonardo da Vinci, “Mona Lisa” is perhaps the most recognized piece of art in the world. Unfortunately, for all its celebrity, the painting isn’t much to look at in person thanks to 500 years of wear and tear. Welcome to the interesting world of “Cleaning Mona Lisa,” a new e-book arriving for iBooks on Tuesday, May 29.

Authored by art historian Lee Sandstead and created by Tapity, the e-book looks at the unique process behind art restoration. It grew from Sandstead’s experience of seeing da Vinci’s work at Paris’ famed Musée du Louvre, which he described as an utter disappointment.

That visit led to a decade-long search through museums across the world to uncover the true meaning behind “Mona Lisa,” and her dirtiest little secret: the girl needs a bath. [AppAdvice]

*

“We tried to really enhance the story with it,” says Olson, who is also an app designer and does the company’s marketing. “I’ve seen other interactive books where they have a lot of widgets and things, but it almost seems arbitrary sometimes… With these books it’s really like making nothing else we’ve ever made before. It’s really like making a movie.”

Building an app like “Our Choice” would have cost in the range of $100,000, Olson estimates, but Tapity was able to produce “Cleaning Mona Lisa” for just a few thousand. That in part speaks to the power of Apple’s still-emerging and, by some accounts, flawed iBooks Author program. It also represents a small step closer to a future of digital publishing, outlined by Craig Mod in his essay Books in the Age of the iPad, that to date has been far from fulfilled. [PandoDaily]

cleaningmonalisa.com

Good Reads | The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity

Books / Interview

If the self is not what it seems, then what is it?

For most of us, the sense of our self is as an integrated individual inhabiting a body. I think it is helpful to distinguish between the two ways of thinking about the self that William James talked about. There is conscious awareness of the present moment that he called the “I,” but there is also a self that reflects upon who we are in terms of our history, our current activities and our future plans. James called this aspect of the self, “me” which most of us would recognize as our personal identity—who we think we are. However, I think that both the “I” and the “me” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors.

I think it helps to compare the experience of self to subjective contours – illusions such as the Kanizsa pattern where you see an invisible shape that is really defined entirely by the surrounding context. People understand that it is a trick of the mind but what they may not appreciate is that the brain is actually generating the neural activation as if the illusory shape was really there. In other words, the brain is hallucinating the experience. There are now many studies revealing that illusions generate brain activity as if they existed. They are not real but the brain treats them as if they were.
Now that line of reasoning could be applied to all perception except that not all perception is an illusion. There are real shapes out there in the world and other physical regularities that generate reliable states in the minds of others. The reason that the status of reality cannot be applied to the self, is that it does not exist independently of my brain alone that is having the experience. It may appear to have a consistency of regularity and stability that makes it seem real, but those properties alone do not make it so.

Similar ideas about the self can be found in Buddhism and the writings of Hume and Spinoza. The difference is that there is now good psychological and physiological evidence to support these ideas that I cover in the book in a way that I hope is accessible for the general reader.

Sam Harris: The Illusion of the Self: How the Social Brain Creates Identity —An Interview with Bruce Hood

I was looking for a book. Out May 29^th. [Amazon]

Chas Ray Krider’s Motel Fetish [Books]

Pas Un Autre: Taschen is releasing the second edition of erotic photographer Chas Ray Krider’s Motel Fetish.

[Images from the book]

Lolita Recovered

Among the problems Nabokov’s Lolita poses for the book designer, probably the thorniest is the popular misconception of the title character. She’s chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years. “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,” says John Bertram, an architect and blogger who, three years ago, sponsored a Lolita cover competition asking designers to do better.

Now the contest is being turned into a book, due out in June and coedited by Yuri Leving, with essays on historical cover treatments along with new versions by 60 well-known designers, two-thirds of them women: Barbara deWilde, Jessica Helfand, Peter Mendelsund, and Jennifer Daniel, to name a few. They don’t shy away from frank sexuality, but they add layers of darkness and complication. And like Jamie Keenan’s cover—a claustrophobic room that morphs into a girl in her underwear—they provoke without asking readers to abdicate their responsibility.

I talked to Bertram about contending with Lolita's complexity and ethical baggage, and why the novel is cited by so many female designers as their favorite book.

...

What makes Lolita such rich source material for designers?

As Alice Twemlow notes in her essay about the covers, Lolita is an “embarrassment of riches”: complex, stylistically brilliant, structurally perfect, with an insidiously charming, delusional, psychopathic narrator and a dreadfully cruel and terribly bleak plot (“a threnody for the destruction of a child’s life,” as Ellen Pifer puts it) that also manages somehow to be deeply amusing. For obvious reasons, of course, it remains as controversial a novel as it was a half century ago, if not more so. And, probably helped along by Kubrick’s breezy film, and many very terrible covers, the term "Lolita" has come to popularly mean something quite the opposite of the novel’s namesake, so a designer has that to contend with as well. On the one hand, then, designers face the very real challenge of communicating some of that complexity in a cover, which can easily become overwhelming. (When John Gall weighed in on the competition, he was quick to say that he “wouldn’t give this as an assignment in a million years” to his cover design class.) On the other hand, I think there are also important ethical considerations that require careful negotiation since, whatever people may think, we are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core. Peter Mendelsund, in his wonderful blog Jacket Mechanical, discusses quite eloquently the ins and outs of designing a Lolita cover and addresses many of the pitfalls to be avoided as well.

Print Magazine: Recovering Lolita

Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down [Books]

A self-described Francophile, Rosecrans Baldwin always dreamed of living in Paris—drinking le café, eating les croissants, walking in les jardins—so when the opportunity to work as a copywriter for an advertising agency in Paris presented itself, he couldn’t turn it down. Despite the fact that he had no experience in advertising. And despite the fact that he wasn’t exactly fluent in French.

Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down is a nimble, comical account of observing the French capital from the inside out. It is an expedition into the Paris of Sarkozy, smoking bans, and a McDonald’s beneath the Louvre—the story of an American who loves Paris all out of proportion, who loves every beret and baguette cliché, but who finds life there to be very different from what he expected. At first, it’s just the joy of running across the lingerie section in the hardware store, but over the next eighteen months, Rosecrans must rely on his American optimism to get him through some very unromantic situations—at work (where he discovers a shockingly long-honored Parisian work ethic), at home (where his wife, who works at home, is dismayed not just by his hours but by the active construction that surrounds their apartment on five sides), and everywhere in between.

An offbeat, up-to-date, surprising entry in the expat canon, Paris, I Love You is a book about a young man who witnesses his preconceptions replaced by the oddities of a vigorous, nervy city—exactly what he needs to uncover a Paris of his own, and fall in love with the city all over again.

[Amazon]

Part of an excerpt, from GQ:

In a new office, you tried to play it clean. You kept your head down and went about your work while attempting to fit into the groove, pure and cool. Except here in Paris there were rituals beyond my understanding.

First off, I did not know whom to kiss.

Each day I'd wake up at five a.m. to work on my novel, eat a small breakfast with Rachel at seven, and be out the door in order to arrive at my desk by eight-thirty and be ready, fretting with low-lying dread, to give and to receive les bises (kisses).

Office culture in Paris held that it was each person's responsibility, upon arrival, to visit other people's desks and wish them good morning, and often kiss each person once on each cheek, depending on the parties' personal relationship, genders, and respective positions in the corporate hierarchy. Then you moved on to the next desk.

Not everyone did it, but those who did not were noticed and remarked upon.

So first a polite bonjour, walking through the room and repeating it at each chair, bonjour, bonjour, salut, bonjour. If someone arrived late and needed to get straight into a meeting, they might let out a big bonjour for the group. For example, André did this a lot, blazing through the office at ten a.m. with his collar popped, shouting a giant, angry BON-JOUR, like a battle cry. And the room would reply in one voice, BON-JOUR, at the same time that he slammed shut his door.

But then there were the bises, which were conditional.

In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don't know. In kissing, some people were ripe, others were not. Whole groups could be off-limits.
It definitely wasn't appropriate to kiss your boss, except when it was, though it was correct to kiss your underlings, except when it wasn't. Young men generally didn't kiss other young men, unless they were friends outside work. But older men did, sometimes. You never knew. Also, these kisses were intended not to touch the cheek but to glance it. People kept their eyes locked on the middle distance and seemed, while kissing or being kissed, very bored.

Honestly, I had no idea how it worked. There was one woman, an Italian down the hall, who visited us at ten-fifteen each morning, making loud smooching sounds even before she entered the room; then she'd deliver long-drawn, suction-fueled bises all around: on Julie's cheeks, Françoise's cheeks, Tomaso's cheeks, Olivier's cheeks. Even my cheeks, once we were introduced. But it wasn't always done. Maybe four days out of five, but that fifth day . . .

September found me frequently biseing inappropriately. Male clients, IT support workers, freelance temps. Any female who came within ten feet. They'd return my weird kisses reluctantly, or else back away and attempt to ignore the gaffe. I asked Pierre how he knew whom to kiss, whom not. Pierre said there was no way of knowing this unless you'd grown up in France, then you just knew. He himself preferred to shake hands.

André overheard Pierre saying this and suggested, in that case, Pierre should move "the fuck" back to New York.

Gradually I learned to bise in the local mode. There weren't any guidelines, just intuition. It required months of calibration. I mimicked Pierre and Chloe, the way other young people around Paris went into kissing each other: regretfully, with a forced, resigned air, as if playing out an obsolete ritual. The procedure by which teenage athletes in America lined up to shake hands: nice game, kiss kiss, whatever.

A longer excerpt at GQ.com

Design Is A Job [Books]

By Mike Monterio, Co-founder of Mule Design.

Running a design service is hard. Most fail, be they agencies or individual freelancers. They fail to consistently satisfy clients, and they fail to function financially. (Trust me, I know.)

When someone actually gets one off the ground and finds a way to keep it up in the air, they know that they’ve got something rare and valuable, and so they keep their strategies and practices secret. What makes this new book by my friend Mike Monteiro so unique is that it plainly and honestly describes how a successful design shop actually works. I’d have killed for this book when I was doing freelance design. —John Gruber

Purchase.

Second Skin: The Erotic Art of Lingerie [Books]

A body clad in satin and lace is more erotic than nudity. Women have always known it and men probably will not disagree. Lingerie has an inspiring effect. Also on designers. They dedicate all their finesse to a tiny piece of nothing, the fabric dreams are made of. Patrice Farameh, specialist for exquisite lifestyle products, has set out on an voyage of discovery and discovered the 30 most exciting labels. Skilfully put in the limelight by the best photographers, fragile sensual masterpieces unfold in the shape of 160 large illustrations. The book offers deep insights into the world of clinging enticements that presents itself, radiant and sexy.

Featured in this book:

Andres Sardá, Angélique DeVil, Blush, Capricine, Damaris, Eternal Spirits, Fred&Ginger, French Cancan, Guia La Bruna, HMS Latex, Hopeless, I.D. Sarrieri, Jean Yu, Gonzalez, Keiko, Kiki de Montparnasse, La Perla, Lascivious, Le Boudoir de Marie, Malu Monteiro, Maya Hansen, Morgana Femme Couture, N De Samim, Nichole de Carle, Pleasure State, Strumpet & Pink, The Lake & Stars, Undrest, Valisere, Velda Lauder

Foreword by Renata Mutis Black and Kim Hoedeman, Seven Bar Foundation Founders.

$85

[Amazon] [Daab]

Good Reads | Age Of Insight

Art / Books / science

Your book is filled with fascinating explorations into the nascent science of neuroaesthetics. If I were a working artist, I’d want to know all about this new field. But I’m curious: do you think scientists can learn from artists? If so, what sort of collaborations would you like to see?

KANDEL: Why would we want to encourage a dialogue between art and science, and, in a larger sense, between science and culture, at large? Brain science and art represent two distinct perspectives of mind. Through science, we know that all of our mental life arises from the activity of our brain. Thus, by observing that activity, we can begin to understand the processes that underlie our responses to works of art: how is information, collected by the eye, turned into vision? How are thoughts turned into memories? What is the biological basis of behavior? Art, on the other hand, provides insight into the more fleeting, experiential qualities of mind – what a certain experience feels like. A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

What would the benefits of such an exchange be today, and who would gain from it? The gain for brain science is clear. One of the ultimate challenges of biology is to understand how the brain becomes consciously aware of perception, experience and emotion. But it is equally conceivable that the exchange would be useful for the beholders of art, for people who enjoy art, for historians, and for the artists, themselves. Insights into the processes of visual perception and emotional response may well stimulate new expressions of artistic creativity. Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, and the Impressionist artists learned about color mixing from the study of color by physicists, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to the revelations about how the brain works. Understanding the biology behind artistic insights, inspiration and the beholder’s response to art could be invaluable to artists seeking to heighten their creative power. In the long run, brain science may also provide clues to the nature of creativity, itself.

You, Jonah, yourself, have pointed out in your first book that artists are psychologists. They have insight into the human mind that often precedes the insight that scientists have, because scientists need to design experiments, and then carry them out in order to do it. They cannot do it by intuition, alone, as can writers and painters. So, I would not necessarily say that scientists and artists need to collaborate with one another, but it would be helpful for them to talk to one another to, perhaps, give rise to specific ideas that may or may not be carried out together. For example, we, at Columbia, under the strong support of President Bollinger, are thinking of starting a Ph.D. program in Science and Art, in which psychology and neuroscience students will learn more about the biological response to art, and encourage some students of art to get involved in this, as well. In fact, David Freedberg, who is an art historian interested in these problems, is going to participate in this.

Wired: The Age Of Insight

This will be my next read. [Amazon]

Schiaparelli & Prada [Books]

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition 'Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute (10 May - 19 August 2012)

Although separated by time, Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli - both Italian, both feminists - share striking affinities in terms of their design strategies and fashion manifestoes. Presented as an intimate "conversation", Schiaparelli and Prada aims to tease out formal and conceptual similarities between the two designers.

Striking photographs and insightful texts will illustrate the parallels between the two, including their preferences for interesting textiles and prints, eccentric colour palettes, and a bold and playful approach to styling and accessories. Schiaparelli, in the 1920s through the 50s, and Prada, from the late 1980s to today, exploited the narrative possibilities of prints, sought out unconventional textiles, played with ideas of good and bad taste, and manipulated scale for surrealistic outcomes. Contemporary art plays a major role in the work of these inventive women - Schiaparelli in her famous collaborations with Dali and Cocteau, and Prada via her Fondazione Prada. Blending the historic with the contemporary, new technologies and unconventional modes of presentation will bring the masterworks of both designers together into a grand conversation between the most important women fashion designers to ever emerge from Italy.

[Yale Books]

PS: Kate Upton starring in the Prada Schiaparelli Met catalogue

enough by Patrick Rhone [Books]

What is enough?
Enough is a very personal metric. Like our center of gravity, each of us must find what is enough by swaying from less to more until a comfortable medium is found.

The goal, then, is not to find what is, or will be, enough forever. That is impossible. The goal is to discover the tools and strategies you need to find what is enough for you right now and provide the flexibility to adjust as the conditions change.

The series of essays in this book explore many of the ideas and strategies needed to meet this goal.

 

Purchase

 

Steal Like An Artist

 

10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator

This is a new book by Austin Kleon targeted for young creative people. Here is a deeper look into the book. You can also watch the trailer he's done for it, below. It would make a great gift to a teen, who's still trying to find their way.

 

Simple

Three items addressing simplicity.

1.

Life is messy. Simplify, with Clear
With Clear, there are only a few gestures you need to in order to use the app: pull down on a list to add an item, swipe to the right to complete an item or to the left to delete it, pinch apart two items to insert a new one in between, and pinch vertically to close the current list and see all the lists in the app. Lists are also color-coded with a heat map to show the most pressing tasks at a glance. (See video below).

That’s it. It’s a quick learning curve, and what’s more, doing away with buttons can actually speed up the process of using to-do lists once you realize that’s how it’s done. Clear even pushes you to simplify here, too, by limiting to-do items to just 30 characters. [TechCrunch]

Clear website. [iTunes]


2.

Audience, a simple Google Analytics App
Audience is a simple Google Analytics App for the iPhone. It displays only the most meaningful statistics in a beautiful interface with big numbers and joyful colors.

If you want a quick access to the stats you care about, avoid cluttered charts, too many settings or dull interfaces then Audience is the app for you.

Audience website. [iTunes]


3.

Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success
Apple is the world's most iconic company. It creates products that people fall in love with - and then markets them with spectacular success. Ken Segall has been behind much of that marketing for many years. He created the 'i', encouraged us to 'Think Different', and in the process played a key role in Apple's resurrection. Now he gives us a rare insight into one of the core principles that drive's Apple's success: simplicity. Inspired by Steve Jobs, this is an obsession that starts at the top of Apple and cascades throughout the entire global organisation. It dictates the way Apple is structured, the way it innovates and the way it speaks to its customers. Simplicity is a guideline, a style, a goal and a measuring stick. In "Insanely Simple" Ken brings the principles of simplicity to life in the context of milestone moments in Apple history. He explains how the religion of simplicity led Apple to enter new markets and humble competitors many times its size. And he provides principles that readers can use in their own careers and companies. We can all learn something from Apple. The power of simplicity can help anyone stand out in a complicated world.

[Amazon]

Paris versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities [Books]

A chic and humorous visual homage to two of the world's most iconic cities.

When Vahram Muratyan began his online travel journal, Paris versus New York, he had no idea how quickly it would become one of the most buzzed-about sites on the Internet-it garnered more than a million and a half page views in just a few months, and the attention of savvy online critics. Now Muratyan presents his unique observations in this delightful book, featuring visually striking graphics paired with witty, thought-provoking taglines that celebrate the special details of each city. Paris versus New York is a heartfelt gift to denizens of both cities and to those who dream of big-city romance.

 

[Amazon] Some images from insdie the book.