LANVIN Keeps Me Up At Night

Sometimes, concepts keep me up at night. Yesterday, I began work on a performance/ installation piece I am doing on the theme of ‘strangers’. Brainstorming ideas from my pillow kept me up all night. And then tonight, as I began to count sheep, I became preoccupied with a shoot that I will be creative directing three weeks from now. The shoot will be conceptual; an experiment in exagerrated layering and proportion. For now, images of Lanvin’s SP/SU10 show are fossilized on the inside of my mental image index. Alber Elbaz, is the master of proportion, and of combining a powerful silhouette with subtle elegance. Phew, now that that’s off my chest, perhaps I can catch some shut-eye?

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Intergalactic Nails / Suburban Dystopia

I have had a reoccurring daydream as of late; I want to get wild, airbrushed nails done. Acrylic, gel, whatever. I don’t even know what those terms mean in the world of NAILZ. I just know that “I wanna get my nailz did”. The look? A pedi/mani like the last one I had in Hawaii to show off well-tanned feet and open-toed Chanel platforms? No no. An infomercial-ready French manicure, mayhaps? Wrong again. Actually, despite living in the heart of Hipsterville MTL, I want something that screams ‘suburban’. I want to lash out against the grain of good taste by going for the nail equivalent of ‘mall hair’; bad chunky highlights, garishly false red tones, or chemically-straightened hair that ends up looking dead.

I think the problem with bad ‘mall vanity’ is that, in its attempt to mask its fakery, it establishes a new norm of falseness that eventually becomes accepted into the fold of sought-after aesthetics. Think: obnoxiously long fake eyelashes, orange self-tanned skin, gravity-defying breast implants and overly hair-sprayed coifs. It doesn’t matter to people that these tacky looks are poor copies of the real so much as they communicate, ‘I got my (fill in the blank) DID!’ which, is to say, ‘I am a lady of luxury; a woman with leisure time and money to spend. I can afford a particular level of vanity.’

When I bike back to my hood from the nail salon, I know most people won’t get my protest in aesthetics or, they will believe that I’m being ‘ironic’. Well, I’m not. I’m thinking of requesting that a whole solar system of planets and stars – heck, maybe even a purple galaxy for good measure! – be airbrushed onto my nails principally because I’ve been re-watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and it’s got my inspiration station ready to rocket to the moon. And, because my friend Jenny said she would do it with me. And we both grew up in a suburb of Vancouver, BC and now reside in Montreal’s Mile End, and as a a curator (she) and a radio host and stylist (me), we’ve got too much cultural caché for our own good. Time to check the urbanism at the door. Suburbia: here we come.

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I was asked by the Canadian designer, Narcissist, to style her morphable ‘Pamela’ dress on the open-minded Montréal editor of Vitamin Daily, Marianne Wisenthal. We had fun experimenting with a number ways to make one dress look so different, (click here for the results). On Marianne’s excellent Editor’s blog, she called me “the fashionista equivalent of matches and a swiss army knife.” I must say that I am puzzled, hypnotized, and flattered by her description.

Whether the Pamela dress floats your boat or not, is less relevant than the style lesson it holds for fashionistas: be flexible with how you wear/style your regular clothes too. Buy LESS, but buy well and mix it up!

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Maya Montage

Photography by Joseph Yarmush. I’m in the midst of designing my new website which will feature my portfolio as a stylist. I’ve just been streaming through fashion shoots that I’ve styled in as I decide what will go up on the site. I’d like to show a range of commercial to avant-garde and conceptual; from creatives to editorials. I came across this one shoot I did with a photographer friend in Montréal that I quite like the mood of; colorful yet subdued with a model of ‘normal size’. Her name is Maya and she’s wearing a mix of vintage, independent local Montréal designers, and of course – some of the stylist’s (your’s truly!) own designer duds and accessories. (Click on image to enlarge!)

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