Now I, too, can look just like Joseph Gordon Levitt and Sherlock Holmes...?

It's a while since I wrote a genuinely stupid post (see also: my immortal treatise on the topic of wallpaper in BBC Sherlock), but I got some new shoes today and they're OMG totes amazing, you guys. OK, "new" may not be the most accurate word, but believe me when I say that when it comes to spending £20 on men's shoes, going vintage is infinitely better value than buying something new from, say, Primark. These particular shoes are in a style I've been vaguely admiring for a while, now: a kind of cross between desert boots and wingtips.

I've never written a post about Inception (one of my very favourite movies for contemporary costume design) because the topic has already been covered very skillfully by someone else. But I will say that one of my favourite details in the movie is the pair of boots worn by Joseph Gordon Levitt's character, Arthur. All of the main characters in Inception are snappy dressers in their own way, but Arthur is definitely the most dapper and fashionable of the lot. And in almost every scene in the movie he's wearing this particular pair of John Varvatos spectator boots:

Arthur's style is neat as a pin and very tailored, but these boots are clearly a favourite of his because not only does he wear them in the "real life" scenes, we see him wearing them during the dream sequences as well. As an extractor, Arthur is on the run for the duration of the movie, so it makes sense for him to have a relatively limited wardrobe. But since Arthur is kind of a clotheshorse, that wardrobe is very carefully coordinated and the boots must fit in with his palette of brown, green and beige. In the real world he's restricted by that palette because that's all he has to work with, but when he's performing an extraction he has the option of wearing whatever he likes -- and yet still often dreams up his beloved old spectator boots. I like seeing characters who genuinely enjoy their clothes, and I think this is a great bit of characterisation -- particularly since the boots are so appropriate for Arthur's job. As he regularly has to take on the role of a corporate spy, it's useful that the spectator boots can easily pass for wingtips when worn with a formal suit. But they're still practical enough for running or fighting when the going gets tough.

At the other end of the scale we have Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock Holmes, another character who only owns one pair of shoes -- although in this case it's because he doesn't care about clothes at all. Seriously, Holmes' costuming in Elementary is a walking example of "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap". Money from the costuming department, that is, because I'm pretty sure the character himself bought all his clothes in bulk from the local Goodwill. I'm certain that a lot of thought has gone into how scruffy he looks at all times, particularly since it's now been acknowledged onscreen that Holmes sees absolutely no point in dressing up to align with other people's standards. While his shoes aren't exactly the same as Arthur's, I enjoy the way two such similar items of clothing can mean completely different things -- stylishly scuffed vs lazily unpolished, favourite accessory vs the first thing he could lay his hands on, and so on.

I don't usually post pictures of my own clothes, partly because I'm a shiteous photographer and partly because it feels kind of awkward to put oneself up for public scrutiny on a blog dedicated to overanalysing clothes. But in this case: whatevvvvs, because I love these shoes. They're scuffed as hell, but I'm chill with that. Also, they go with my pewter trousers, which I wear constantly. A similar style to Holmes and Arthur's shoes, but with a little Adam Lambert thrown in for good measure. ;)

Link: Costume design in CBS's "Elementary".

Read More

The Edinburgh Fringe.

This is going to be the kind of What I Did On My Summer Holidays post that seldom appears on this blog, mostly because I've been living in what amounts to a gigantic artists' commune for the past two weeks and am consuming about 1% of the geeky pop-culture stuff I usually do.

Some background, first: The Edinburgh Fringe is an alternative theatre/comedy/music/art festival that runs throughout August, in conjunction with various other arts-type festivals around the city. This year's Fringe programme includes 2842 "official" shows, most of which are stand-up comedy and experimental/indie theatre, plus tons of street performers and unofficial stuff on the side. Basically, for the duration of August every single building in Edinburgh that could conceivably be turned into a theatre venue, is. Up to and including lifts, taxis, and peoples' bedrooms. I'm currently living in the lap of luxury because I have an actual bed to sleep in (thanks to my lovely friends Grace & Hector!), which is more than many of the performers get.

(As an experienced Fringe-goer, I sensibly reinforced my programme with duct tape as soon as I got my hands on it. People may smirk, but WHATEVER. By the end of the month I'll be the only one whose programme hasn't had to be replaced at least once.)

I'm going to as many shows as it's humanly possible to fit around my work schedule, covering as wide a variety of genres as I can. I assume that it's rather obvious at this point, but I LOVE THE FRINGE. There's something for everyone here, from cheesy mainstream stand-up comedy to weird experimental theatre to circus acrobats to jug bands to Tibetan Book Of The Dead: The Musical. Picking what to go to is very difficult, particularly in the first week when reviews haven't come out yet, but the way I see it is that if you're there for the entire month it's almost a good thing to see some terrible theatre in the first few days -- it's an interesting experience, and it provides a kind of palate-cleanser for the rest of the month. (I'm especially sticking to that philosophy this year because the first show I saw was without a doubt the worst piece of theatre I have seen in my entire life.)

Aside from the sudden influx of artists, musicians and theatre folk, the main major change Edinburgh experiences in Festival season is the closing down of the Royal Mile, the highstreet that leads up to Edinburgh Castle. During the Fringe, the Mile is a free-for-all for any performer who wants to advertise their show, meaning that all day every day the streets are filled with professional outdoor performers like jugglers and magicians, plus hundreds of people in weird costumes trying to entice passers-by to come to their shows. It's unfortunate that I don't have my camera with me at work, because these few tourist snaps really are the thin end of the wedge when it comes to weird shit you see on the Mile during Fringe season. My favourite so far is probably the moment when I was helping a fire-juggler set up his stuff while a row of voluminously "pregnant" schoolgirls watched on in the front row. I turned around just in time to see a giant 10-foot sperm advertising Sex Education: The Musical walk along behind them.

This lady is one of the Sundaes, a girl group who I unfortunately haven't seen perform yet because one of them had a wig malfunction when she was meant to be performing on my stage. There are several performers that you get to recognise very quickly if you're living in the main Old Town section of Edinburgh, purely because they're so ubiquitous. Then, of course, there are the ones who aren't so much "performers" as just Fringe-season fixtures. Edinburgh is a small and insular city at the best of times, with a weirdly strong divide between the Old and New towns, but during the Fringe this intensifies because people are so much more recogniseable when they're walking to and from the same venues every day, wearing the same costumes.

Probably the most famous of the non-performer Festival people is Lewis, the self-proclaimed King of Scotland. He wasn't around on the day when I took these photos, but if you're from Edinburgh you'll probably recognise him. He has a long grey beard, carries a pink suitcase and always wears a kilt and several brightly-coloured shirts. He's such a Fringe fixture that most of the Street performers don't mind if he decides to go for a brief a brief stage invasion.

The Pleasance Courtyard is a typical example of ridiculous seasonal venue organisation. It's a set of stables and random rooms that for the rest of the year are mostly empty, but during the Fringe become an incomprehensible warren of bars and mini-theatres. The signpost in the middle of the courtyard seems to be well aware of this:

Another entertaining feature of the Pleasance Courtyard is the number of "theatres" there that are literally just porta-cabins. This one houses Peep, a specified venue that hosts three short plays performed in the setting of a peepshow booth.

I considered writing a more formal guide to the Fringe, but by now it's kind of a moot point since we're already halfway through the month plus most of the readers of this blog are in different countries, never mind "not in Edinburgh". This is only the second year I've been at the Festival for the full duration, but I do have a few guidelines for general survival and/or picking and choosing between the dazzling multitude of performances.

Youtube footage of this "Macbeth" -- fingerquotes non-optional -- can be found here.

One of my most solid rules is NEVER SEE MACBETH, which is mostly founded in bitterness because there are always at least (AT LEAST) ten Macbeths on every year and more often than not they'll be put on by an American youth theatre group or some kind of vaguely embarrassing musical-theatre company. Of course, rules are made to be broken and this year I've already found myself going to see one of the Macbeths, a Polish production that involved a lot of fire, nudity, violence and stilt-walking, and the minimum possible quantity of actual Macbeth. The other day I came up with a possible solution to the Macbeth issue, though: DRUNKBETH. I don't have the time or wherewithall (or masochism) to do this myself, but hopefully someone else will one day. The gist of it is: Go to as many Macbeths as possible in a 24-hour period (at least six or seven should be do-able), drinking continuously throughout in some kind of as-yet undecided Macbeth drinking game.

These guys set up some kind of courtroom/electric chair scene in the middle of the road. And I love how the tourists in this next picture decided that the best person to ask for directions was the 10-foot-tall, stilt-walking ukulele player. NBD; just another day at the Fringe. You can get photos like this pretty much by pointing your camera in any direction and taking a picture at random, to be honest.

Trying to converse with a living statue is always disconcerting because they tend to stay in character and it's like talking to some kind of Doctor Who character and/or steampunk automaton. Yesterday I was trying to explain a performance schedule to a living statue (not this one) and felt like an unwilling participant in some kind of performance art while various tourists took photos of our joint one-way conversation.

These two girls were advertising a variety show featuring Frank Sinazi, a Frank Sinatra/Hitler combination impersonator. They seemed quite surprised when they handed me a flier and I told them I'd already seen him a couple of nights ago. Anyway, were it not for the swastika, this lady's skull headdress would be pretty damn awesome.

The show I went to this evening was a circus/physical theatre retelling of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which had the added bonus of being hosted at Summerhall. I don't know if it's just my own ignorance showing itself or if it's a matter of bad advertising on the part of the venue, but I had no idea how varied and straight-up BIG Summerhall is. It plays host to several performance art and dance shows, but is also the main venue for the Edinburgh Fashion Festival (!!!) and a ton of Art Festival stuff that practically seemed like it was being hidden from the general public. For example, located next to one of the bathrooms was this:

And almost every room in the huge, hive-like building was home to some other piece of unadvertised installation art. A fascinating venue to explore, but their marketing department clearly needs some help if both me and my companion (who is an artist based in Edinburgh, for god's sake) were unaware that most of that stuff was there in the first place.

The show itself was in what seemed to be some kind of museum (also mostly unlabeled), upstairs from "the dissection rooms" (this particular block was a former vetinary hospital/school) and between a couple of disused labs. One of my many favourite things about the Fringe is the random nature of the various performance spaces, which are often totally bizarre and unexpected, and can have a significant impact on the staging and tone of the shows for which they are used.

On Sunday night I went to An Evening With Amanda Palmer And Neil Gaiman, which is sure to be one of my highlights of the month. Amanda Palmer's music and career has been my #1 fandom since childhood (back when it was still The Dresden Dolls' music and career), and every time I see her she seems to become more entertaining, thought-provoking and beautiful. Right now I'm rending my clothes just a little because she's going to be making a surprise appearance at the Boom Boom Club cabaret tonight, but it doesn't start until 12:30am and I have work tomorrow. TRAGEDY. The idea of having an Amanda Palmer concert take place in the same city as me and me not going to it = torment and agony

I'm glad I made it to the Amanda & Neil show because it's so different from what I presume most of her gigs will be like for the next couple of years. Her new album is about to come out, at which point she's going to be touring for at least a year with her new band, on a more traditional touring schedule of album-track performances. An Evening With Neil And Amanda is more relaxed, with appearances from unexpected guests (the hilarious Andrew O'Neill and Michael Pope) and a combination of original Amanda songs, semi-obscure covers, and readings from Neil Gaiman's poetry and as-yet-unpublished next novel.

Oh, and as a postscript, here's a picture of my friend Dan. I occasionally get people asking why I don't post more pictures of my own outfits, and the real answer is because I don't have a decent camera, I'm a terrible photographer, I don't have a full-length mirror, and I'm too British to get other people to take photos of me to conceitedly post on the internet. So instead, here is a photo of Dan. He has great dress-sense and I can get a good photo of him without ending up with a Myspace Arm situation occurring.

Read More

Bill Cunningham New York

After A Man's Story, my next fashion film at the Glasgow Film Festival was another documentary about a workaholic fixture of the fashion world. Aside from that similarity, though, Ozwald Boateng and Bill Cunningham couldn't be more different. Bill Cunningham New York is an affectionate and respectful look at a man who finds happiness in his work to the extent that it frees him from the restrictions of everyday society. At over 80 years old, he's been photographing people on the streets of New York City for four decades, and is a familiar face at the various Fashion Weeks. He isn't interested in the money -- in fact, he used to tear up his Details Magazine paycheques back in the day when his photographs were taking up 40 pages per issue. As long as he gets to take pictures of peoples' clothes, he's happy.

This is a film about a true egalitarian, something that's about as common as a unicorn when it comes to the fashion industry. Bill Cunningham doesn't know or care who the celebrities are when he photographs them at charity functions or fashion shows: he only cares about their clothes, and treats everyone he's photographing with the same shy, smiley respect. He's such a widely-loved figure -- both because of his sheer likeability and for the slightly more cynical reason that appearing in one of his On The Street columns is an honour -- that people can hardly complain if he fails to recognise the cast of Gossip Girl. Even Anna Wintour, the Lady Macbeth of fashion, says that it's a real blow when Bill Cunningham ignores you at fashion week, and seems almost friendly during her interview.

I have mixed feelings on the subject of street-style photography. The evolution of street style as a force as strong as the dictation of high-end designers is fascinating, and people like Bill Cunningham and Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist) are very good at documenting it. But taking pictures of people on the street is far from difficult, meaning that these days there are unnumbered blogs, Tumblrs and newspaper column inches devoted to street style. Unfortunately, they often come across as either filler (in the case of the endless reams of newspaper spreads I've seen of people looking flattered but mildly puzzled that someone wanted to immortalise their rather generic outfit) or as masturbatory celebrity puff-pieces (as seen during the London Fashion Week surges of models and fashion writers/bloggers posing self-consciously outside Somerset House). In recent years I've even noticed a few mentions of people in the industry starting to get stressed out during Fashion Weeks because of the pressure to catch the eye of street-style photographers.

Bill Cunningham, photographed by The Sartorialist.

The great thing about Bill Cunningham is that he doesn't have a calculating bone in his body. He finds beauty in 80-year-old society matrons and workmen's overalls and Prada-clad supermodels and teenage skate punks alike. He's carved a life for himself that seems to adhere to all the advice given out by Buddhist monks and people who live to a hundred -- work hard, get up early, don't get too attached to possessions, do what you love, respect everyone equally. Somehow, in amongst the angry and competative pace of New York fashion, he's managed to create a little oasis of calm and happiness for himself. Bill's apartment is tiny and filled with filing cabinets of old photographs, with no kitchen because he eats out at diners for every meal and only comes home to sleep and change clothes. He wears the same blue smocks every day, the sort that French garbage-men wear. Those smocks have enough pockets to hold all his film, you see. At one point he mentions, smiling as always, that he's on his 29th bicycle -- the first 28 were all stole, but he doesn't really mind.  

The film crew follow Bill as he cycles around New York, but also takes a look at his career all the way back to the 1960s, when the concept of street style was only just emerging. Various famous and connected talking heads are brought in to talk about him, and the main thing they all seem to have in common is a sort of affectionate protectiveness towards him, everyone clearly recognising that his near-unique levels of unselfishness are not always practical. This is a truly cheering documentary, not because it attempts to follow the story arc of a feelgood movie but simply because of the subject-matter. Bill Cunningham is a charming and fascinating individual, right down to the happy "Oh!" of excitement he makes when he spots something he thinks is beautiful.

Links
Rotten Tomatoes review summary (98% fresh)
Bill Cunningham New York movie homepage.
Bill Cunningham's On The Street slideshow/audio reports for the New York Times.

Read More

Dubiously competent fashion photography at the National Museum's Ancient Egypt party.

Yesterday I went to the National Museum of Scotland adults-only night, because anything that puts sarcophagi and booze in the same locale is A-OK by me. Compared to some of the late-opening museum parties I've been to in the past it was a little underwhelming, partially because tickets weren't free, but since this is only their second event I'll let that slide.

The theme was Ancient Egypt, which meant gold, jeweled body-art, mummies, and the sort of Egyptian-themed cocktail only a Scot could make up -- the Tutankhamorangie, a Glenmorangie whisky promo. To my disappointment not many people had come in costume, outside of a few performers and the dressing-up area.. However, having my camera with me I decided to do a spot of extremely amateur fashion photography. The Sartorialist I most definitely am not.

I'm kicking myself over not getting a better photo of the jacket worn by the guy on the right, a formal iteration of what has been sweepingly and inaccurately called a kimono jacket for the last few decades. Sadly, I'm far from adept at approaching strange men and saying, "Can I take a photo of your back?" when I'm so clearly not a "real" photographer.

My friend and I were both very impressed with this dude, both because of his great style and because that length of ginger wizard-beard takes dedication. That + pink combat trousers + earrings + assymetrical layering = 10/10.

This person is beheaded because they are me. Vain enough to smugly photograph my own outfit, yet unwilling to show my face on the internet. This is my all-pink embroidery ensemble for when I want to look needlessly eye-catching, including a waistcoat obscured by my brocade jacket. I'm pretty impressed with myself for managing to find so many semi-matching clothes by accident, all from charity shops.

This enormous coat was some real Edinburgh style, otherwise known as wrapping youself in blankets from head to toe until the icey wind no longer feels like it's flaying you alive. I enjoyed the pattern-mixing among this lady's accessories and cane.

Utilikilt? Yes, people in Scotland do wear them, plus his lack of tartan on the bottom half seems somehow balanced by the plaid on top. And I loved the contrast between the purple-laced sneakers and the kilt. All he needs is a neon skean dhu! This couple's outfits complemented each other very well, intentional or not.

'I love your shoes! Where did you get them?" "Prada." Right, then. Metal reinforced toes: all the better for kicking you in the bank-balance.

 Obviously my favourite outfit of the night. Shave 300 years of aging off this and I'd wear it every day.

Millennia-old Sarcophagus and empty liquor containers: an accurate summation of how our evening went.

Read More