Vice Style

While I was on tour in Osaka—the city everyone says is cooler than Tokyo, to prove how cool they are—with my band T33TH, in between multiple meals of street side takoyaki, I visited two really amazing stores: Excube, a shop/gallery in downtown Osaka selling original Keith Haring jumpers and limited edition Akira laser discs, and Fragile, one of the best t-shirt stores in the world.

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.   

In this installment of Carri <3s, the street fashion futurist runs us through the three current shoots she rates most highly at the moment. 

My only real concern with these lip transfers was that I’d never be able to get them off, or I’d be mistaken for a Marina and the Diamonds album cover. After a brief pep talk, I collected a pair of scissors, a bunch of sopping wet toilet paper, and some really low expectations, and locked myself in the ladies' bathroom at VICE. Not even kidding guys, I emerged a goddess. These lip things are amazing, imagine Ron Paul meets Judy Garland, has a baby and then bathes it in flamboyance. I’m a total convert. 

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One of the Flygirls, Rotterdam, 2002.

Exactitudes, the photo project started in 1994 by Dutch photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek, is probably the best way of crushing any persisting dream you have of individuality, if that's the kind of bizarre, masochistic thing you're into. Spanning almost two decades, Exactitudes is an anthropological study of every social group and subculture the duo can get into their studio, from the Beijing kids obsessed with Scream Records, and fur-loving Italian women, to stay-at-home dads and religious rockers in Rotterdam. Every group is photographed in a super uniform way and placed in a grid, to accentuate their similarities and differences. I spoke to Ari about the project and what it's all supposed to mean.              

Growing up in a conservative town in the American Midwest called Zionsville, with its town hall based in a former church, let's just say I'm no stranger to the strong views many Christians have about clothing. And I can tell you that there is a whole lot more to dressing Christian-like than wearing W.W.J.D. bracelets and the souvenir t-shirt you got from Laguna Beach Christian Retreat in Panama City, Florida.

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 onscreen, 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 counter-culture 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.

Not Carri in 20 years time.

Last week in NYC, I went to see the Cindy Sherman show at the MOMA. Since she basically invented the GPOY and pioneered deliberately grotesque and parodic hyper-materialistic styling and the way a lot of the people really into fashion dress, seeing the show was a big deal for me.

We met Balmung, BodySong, and Runurunu in one of the weirdest buildings in Tokyo. They're in a fashion collective called Dinner, and although they hang out and work together, they make clothes under their own names. They build shrines out of boom boxes, have Japanese contemporary dancers perform in intestine-inspired costumes, and make performance artists wear two-foot tall boat shoes.

We like Primitive because they're really trying to shape a new, not totally boring and predictable fashion scene around their store, which is an unfortunately rare thing in a business built on novelty. They stock insane Japanese labels you've never heard of and really need to see up close, but also stock enough stuff people like you and I can actually afford, as well as weird, techy fashion mags and exhibitions. And, you can always tell when they're having a party, because Kingsland Road near their store fills up with what always looks like dozens of very fashion-forward all black-clad bands. Veronica So's band Teeth is on tour with Primitive in Japan, so we had her ask one half of Primtive, Andrew Green, about the Japanese fashion scene and some more about the store.