Style Icon: Lou Doillon

When I first discovered Lou Doillon I was in awe with her ability to look so disheveled yet at the same time so put-together. While her mother Jane Birkin and sister Charlotte Gainsbourg keep it simple and stick to the basics, Lou is more like a fashion tornado. Her wild hair, signature hats, and mix of designer and vintage pieces always seem just a little bit off, but in the fashion world where there is a constant search for the next great thing, a little bit off can be right on.

As the daughter of French icon Jane Birkin and film director Jacques Doillon, Lou’s upbringing included both elements of a bourgeois and a hippie lifestyle. As she grew older Lou began rejecting her bourgeois side, pretending to have no money and shopping at thrift stores. By age nine her style included dread locks and Grateful Dead t-shirts and just two years later she had her first tattoo and tongue piercing. According to Lou in a 2001 Interview Magazine article, “When I was about 15 years old, I was living in Paris and I was insane, very wild. I had red hair and piercings all over my body. I was taking drugs and not really caring about anything. My papa thought that putting me in one of his movies might help settle me down, so I did his movie Trop (peu) d’amour and I just loved it. And he was right: it calmed me down. It made me a new person.” Lou continued her career in film and is today considered a European cinema star.

The following year Lou entered the fashion industry as a model. Always the provocateur Lou quickly took the fashion world by storm and just three years later became the face and muse for the Givenchy fashion house. Although Lou had gained the respect of the elite in the fashion industry her wild-child reputation lingered, earning her a spot in the 2007 edition of the infamous Pirelli Calendar and a pictorial in the March 2008 issue of French Playboy.

Lou’s upbringing, career success, and personality on and off the runway garnered her it-girl status, however, she was more interested in furthering her career than idling in her fame. In 2007 she was approached by the iconic denim brand Lee Cooper to design a line that would add a fresh point of view to the 100 year old company. After negotiations Lou earned a three year contract allowing for extensive creative freedom, and the new title of fashion designer. Her first collection featured high-waisted trousers and tiny jackets inspired by the Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist and was a hit in the fashion world. And with only a year of designing behind her Lou Doillon’s presence in the fashion world is just beginning.

Click here to read a Nylon interview with Lou Doillon

Live Painting from San Francisco

In conjunction with Upper Playground, YouTube invited artists Alex Pardee, Sam Flores, David Choe, and Jeremy Fish to supply some live-painting as part of the pre-show event for a concert held in San Francisco. Although the video makes it hard to tell, the artists were only given a few hours to complete their pieces yet the work still looks refined and well-executed. David Choe painted four entire pieces during that time, one on top of the other, which was described by Pardee as being “pretty amazing”. We agree. Enjoy.

posted by: Harold Johns III

“Center for Urban Agriculture” by Mithun

Many people know that the Northwestern coast of the United States, with cities like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, is a hotbed for liberal and civically progressive initiatives when it comes to environmentalism and sustainability. And the Cascadia Region Green Building Council (GBC) is no exception. Its parent organization, the USGBC, is a non-profit organization pushing to foster interest in green building technologies in hopes that all construction will be sustainably built within a generation. These are lofty goals indeed, but with areas like Cascadia setting the example the end result does not seem so far out of reach.

The Cascadia GBC also hosts the Living Building Challenge, a project that presses architects to find new, creative and affordable ways of enhancing our built environment with sustainability in mind. A few characteristics of their ideal building include: generating all energy with renewable resources, capturing and treating all water, and operating efficiently while maximizing beauty. For projects to attain living building status they must cater to six performance areas, or Petals as they say: site, energy, materials, water, indoor quality and beauty + inspiration.

In 2007, the Center for Urban Agriculture by Seattle-based design firm Mithun won “Best of Show” at the Living Building Challenge, and for obvious reasons. It is an entirely self-sufficient urban farm that will grow both vegetables and chickens for local consumption. While its footprint occupies a mere 0.72 acres on the site, the 23-story building contains 318 one- and two-bedroom apartments and produces enough food to feed 450 people annually. The building is also sheathed in over 34,000 sq ft of south facing solar panels that will theoretically match 100 percent of the building’s energy consumption. The ground level features an organic café that will serve food grown on the site to reinforce the importance of travel-free food consumption. As famed suburban polemicist James Howard Kunstler quoted in a 2004 TED Talk, “the age of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad is coming to an end.”

by: s.a.johnson

Free Music Archive

Free music is something we have grown accustomed to in a post-Napster world. Peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent and Gnutella continue to help millions of people download free music every day. However, doing so is technically illegal, could lead to a lawsuit, and ultimately takes money from the artists who made the music.

WFMU, a renowned freeform radio station out of New York, has the perfect compromise for those still want free music but with none of the guilt. This December, thanks to a grant from the New York State Music Fund, WFMU will unveil the Free Music Archive. “An online digital library of music that will allow music fans, webcasters and podcasters to listen, download, and stream for free, with no restrictions, registration or fees. And it will all be legal.”

Inspired by Creative Commons and open-source software, the Free Music Archive utilizes special copyright licenses that allow musicians to waive some of their rights to the public while still retaining ownership of their work.

As a preview, WFMU has already selected 40 tracks by artists like Silver Jews, Vivian Girls, and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti from their Free Music Archive, repackaged them into two sampler cds, and made them available on their website as free downloads.

What could be better than free, legal music?

posted by: Brent Carter

Seid Madr Recap

Another weekend and another art opening equals more great photos from The Rathaus. This week’s installment features Ostaf Heller’s opening at DotDotDot Artspace entitled “Seid Madr”. To create his work Heller uses various levels of heat from a blow torch to “paint” abstracted elements onto copper plates which act as his canvases. We may not understand all the science behind Heller’s work but we know we dig it.

photos by: Tricia Rock
posted by: Harold Johns III