Vice Style

Dan next to his landlord's pigeon coop

Dan Szor is one of those multidisciplinary artists who can call himself a multidisciplinary artist without sounding like a complete tool. His work spans sinister, bugged-out video lookbooks for designer Rael Stone, seizure-inducing gifs and poetic, text-based projects, all of which radiate the suburban banality and creepiness that he says interests him. Besides producing his own art, Dan regularly contributes to Russian magazine, Hooligan, lectures at Salford University, and is currently studying for a master's degree. He also used to be the art director and deputy editor of Super Super magazine. Yeah, he's a busy dude. Dan lives and works above a car-servicing garage in Peckham, where his bedroom overlooks a coop of homing and racing pigeons that his landlord keeps at the end of his garden, which, unsurprisingly, have featured in some of Dan's past work.   

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, vibing hard at Pyongyang Men's Fashion Week

In 2004, the late Kim Jong-il's North Korean state government put out the snappily-titled TV show, Let's Trim Our Hair In Accordance With The Socialist Lifestyle, which outlined how citizens should dress if they didn't want to be despicable human beings and sub-standard socialists. A kind of light-hearted take on Joan Rivers' genre-defining Fashion Police, if you will. The show mainly consists of a film crew shaming various men because their hair slightly covers their ears–a BIG fashion no-no–before displaying their address and workplace on screen, because, duh, they're never going to bloody learn unless the whole country knows where they live.

Of course, this was almost a decade ago, but judging from the outfits and hair going on in the recent nationwide audition for North Korea's most bummed-out socialist, the proletariat still don't appear to have gone through their counterculture revolution quite yet. Fingers and toes crossed that 2012 will be the year capri pants finally reach Pyongyang. All we can do is dream, and keep checking what's on trend through a pair of binoculars from the demilitarized zone. For now, though, here's a guide on how to dress if you want to look like the hippest cat in the land of the free.

Hey guys, wanna learn about make-up? Thought so! No, but seriously, this isn’t going to be me painting Drake’s face onto my face or any boring YouTube bull. Together we’re going to conquer the have-me lip, the have-me eye, and loads of other important but essentially have-me things. Please don’t ask me what primer I use or where I have my eyelashes tinted, because I don’t do that or care. What I do care about is how hot and skanky lip-liner is. I also care about Tajazzle, but that’s not appropriate for week one.

Do ya’ll pine for tweendom? I totally do. Last week, I was at my parent’s house and I found this little red plastic handbag I had when I was 12, all sparkly and everything. I was all like, "Oh shit, this bag’s never seen a condom wrapper or a cigarette lighter in its life”, and I looked in the inside pocket and there weren’t even any tobacco grains in there. Cute! Instead, everything was saturated with sticky fruit scented lip-gloss, glooping all round the inside like beauty queen spit globs. It made me feel really nostalgic, in a baker-boy-cap-and-matching-knee-socks kind of way. I think it’s time to admit I kind of miss make-up that smells and tastes like a candy tampon. So for week one, let's bring sexy back, in the way only a 12-year-old virgin can. Delicious.

Kit sporting some mounted human teeth he picked up at a Philadelphia flea market.

Everyone's forever asking designers about what specifically influenced their current collection, where they drew their inspiration from, or which particular seventeenth dynasty Egyptian prince played a part in the shaping of their new shoe design, and the designers usually play along with it, unless they're completely antisocial bastards. Thing is, photos are generally better than words when it comes to picturing the groundbreakingly mind-blowing stuff that's going to make your bum look sexy next season, so in this new series we'll be in the studios and workspaces of fashion designers, photographers, and art directors. It will be a bit like Cribs, but with less Cristal and bathing R&B monstrosities.    

First up is Kit Neale, the designer responsible for putting guys in allotment-inspired all-over print outfits last fashion week. Kit's studio is in an industrial block near Kingsland High Street in Dalston, home to a ridiculous amount of chicken shops and a store that sells a massively debatable "authentic collection of Moschino, Ralph Lauren, and Versace".

A few months back, Stefan Schwartzman sent us this rather peculiar little "shoot". I say "shoot" because it isn't a real shoot, as Stefan used Photoshop to dress the porn guys he likes to wank over. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the Adobe Phasion Shop shoot in our recent Fashion Issue was based on the same idea. As Stefan sent his shoot mere days before our annual fashion issue came out we thought we'd wait.

Stefan said: "When I make these composites I try and cram as many different foreign pieces into one thing to try and get a really original picture, something that gets closest to how things look in my head. Yeah, all the people are either porn guys—usually Russian—or people from stock photos, because I don't want to use models—their faces annoy me—and I think the gay pornstars are weirder and cuter."

Late last month, I went to Hyper Japan, a three-day Japanese culture extravaganza at Earls Court that promised a street fashion show, a cosplay contest, lectures on Japanese fashion, sushi, sake, gadgets, and loads of mind-blowingly hot Japanese babes.  

Stüssy top, FRESHJIVE top, Nike sweater, adidas track pants, Swatch watches

My colleague was mildly disturbed by the avocado in one of the below shots in this VICE Italy shoot. When I explained the nature of still life shoots in fancy fashion magazines and how they're designed to display products like watches, belts, and perfumes in a vaguely artistic way, he was more chilled about it. Enjoy.

December is a special time of year in the Peruvian state of Chumbivilcas. The girls all braid their hair and put on their finest brocade skirts and hats. The boys put on their nicest ski masks and leather chaps and affix a dead bird to the top of their noggins. Then everybody young and old, male and female, gets together on Christmas morning and beats the living crap out of each other.

Art is gay compared to Ed Hardy.

In 1982, photographer and ex-model Lucille Khornak put together a book called Fashion 2001, which contained 90 photos from 90 of the world's biggest womenswear designers predicting what they thought clothes would be like in the distant year of 2001. Turns out the majority of them thought that in 2001 women would all be fierce, power-suited vixens covered in latex and living in space, which would have been awesome. Sadly, the only people who seem to be living out those dreams nowadays are the Black Eyed Peas, which isn't really what Issey Miyake et al would have wanted. 

Here are some comparisons between the projected and the eventual reality.