Vice Style

Our new columnist Carri Munden is back with a second visually-stimulating post, this time on Paris Fashion Week. Epilepsy sufferers look away now.

When you go to a fancy-shmancy clothing shop, you probably don’t think about the long process that caused your favorite new polyester thong-bottom leotard, or whatever, to get into your hands, but perhaps you should, you selfish little shit. Chances are the manufacturing of said garment resulted in either deforestation, pollution, a bunch of villagers in India being killed by bulldozers, or all of the above. Makes you feel pretty lousy, huh? To make you feel even worse, here are three of the fashion industry’s most harmful practices.

The laws of Saudi Arabia are based on strict Sharia principles, which require genders to be segregated and forbid women from driving, traveling alone, and achieving the same professional status as men. Of course, the effects on civil rights are a total bummer, but perhaps the most awkward Sharia by-product has to do with lingerie. Strangely, almost unbelievably, most of the Saudis selling women’s underwear are men. And in a country where a man and woman dancing together is the Western equivalent of having anal sex in the middle of a nursery, many ladies find it uncomfortable to speak with a dude about panties and bras.

Sometimes you don’t know what’s missing in your life until you see it. Such is the case with earrings made out of koala feces sold by the True Blue Roo Poo Company, an Australian business that specializes in making products out of animal poop. For the low price of around $20 you can own a pair of plain brown drop-style earrings, or you can splurge and get koala pellets covered with 23-carat gold leaf for approximately $35, which is surely the bargain of the year.

Costume designer Christiane Hultquist aka Christian Joy has been collaborating with Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O for over a decade. As the mastermind behind Karen’s outlandish outfits and signature punk-meets-glitter-glam look, Joy has played a major role in shaping the visual aesthetic of the band over the years.

"When I started making clothes, I didn’t even know what I was doing and that reflected the raw energy of the first EP," recalls Joy. "After that, I was ready to push myself and Karen was ready to push herself, too. I think it’s just a natural evolution more than anything else. I’m influenced by the music and she’s influenced by the costume. It’s very natural—let’s just keep trying to break some boundaries and move forward."

As Karen’s constant collaborator, it was almost a given that Joy would be called on to design the costumes for the cast of Karen’s psycho-opera, Stop the Virgens, which debuted at St. Ann’s Warehouse this past October as part of The Creators Project: New York 2011 event. The dark, visually lush spectacle centered around a cycle of nine songs written by Karen some six years prior, arranged into a loose narrative arc that is steeped in mythology and fairytale lore. The plot was left deliberately vague and open to interpretation, with nothing but the music, stage design, and costumes to tell the tale.

Here is the first of hopefully many posts by our newest resident columnist, Carri Munden. You probably know Carri, her label Cassette Playa, and the way it basically rearranged the whole streetwear world, this last half-decade. Thing is, as much as she likes boys—even if she does girl crush every now and then—Carri has amazing taste for women's stuff too, so who better to be our first female columnist?

In the last six months Carri has worked in Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, and Stockholm—now that is some serious research. Have that, tumblr trawlers.

There are approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States and yet hardly anyone is attending to the fashion needs of the prison-industrial complex! To remedy this injustice, we asked Bert Burykill, our recently-paroled penitentiary correspondent, to give us some inmate style tips. If you’re reading this in jail, take heed lest you become a human fifi towel.

The brilliant thing about internet art is that it’s democratized. I mean, how many people have ever had the chance to spin Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel until it became an interactive website? Thanks, Rafaël Rozendaal. Now Sterling Crispin‘s new curated t-shirt line, which launched this Monday, is taking the internet art out of the machine and into our closets. But unlike the free-for-all accessibility of net art, the collection features six original designs—from some of the internet’s most esteemed artists—capped at just 10 pieces each.

“I wanted to provide a common platform for contemporary artists to experiment with and make physical what would otherwise be a digital form,” said Crispin via Facebook this week. “It’s exciting to watch the ways digital art can be translated into physical forms and I think clothing is a fresh and fun take on limited edition prints. Designing clothes, or industrial objects, is something I think a lot of artists think about and I could see the need for this sort of platform for experimentation to exist.”

There’s technically no theme to this debut collection, though each shirt reflects a “post-internet sensibility”. Crispin says all the artists were given free range to create whatever they wanted. Rozendaal’s shirt, for example, was inspired by one of his websites, intotime.com.

Are they physically connected to the internet? Only by concept and style, says Crispin. “I think they act as hyperlinks in physical space to emerging concepts that artists are addressing on the internet.”

Here’s my critical take on this fascinating debut line...

Andy Capper, VICE's global editor in chief, recently co-directed A$AP Rocky's new music video for "Wassup"—an ode to Harlem, 40s, OG Kush, and gold teeth—which is premiering on VICE today. To celebrate that, and partly to revel in how fucking amazing the Harlem rapper and his A$AP Mob are, here are some choice things that nearly made us give up following established fashion magazines and blogs, in lieu of just taking all our style inspiration solely from a 23-year-old perma-stoned MC.     

OK, so most of the time when someone's social status rests solely on the vaguely pleasing pictures on the internet, it tends to make me want to eviscerate them. I definitely don't buy into their lifestyle or some other dumb shit marketing people pretend to think we want. Really we just have to suffer pointless It-Girls and bloggers DJing at parties because, thanks to the their spurious media profile, the marketing guy is now able to convince his boss that the only sexually attractive young person he can afford to have endorse their brand has a following.

Thing is, Japanese model and meme Eriko Nakao is different. For a start, she's so hot she causes me to ask myself if my desire to lick her all over makes me a breeder. She's a big deal in Japan and has legions of fans. She does this amazing make-up trick of painting red around her eyes that sort of makes her look upset and vulnerable and makes you empathize with her soul.