From Mommie Dearest
Photographers Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello
Stylist Samuel Francois, Model Siri Tollerød
For Numéro 97

When I was small, maybe eight or nine, my mother bought me my first makeup kit. A cheap drugstore affair, it would serve the double purpose of keeping me out of her “good” makeup while teaching me how to use the stuff before I took it out into the world. In the last few months, celebrity mom Katie Holmes has been taken to task for allowing her daughter (age four) to walk around in ballroom dancing shoes – essentially child-size high heels. In my mind, giving little girls (or boys) the tokens of adulthood is mostly harmless; an amusing gesture, a little parental indulgence.

Right?

Created in 2001 by a Parisian digital arts collective called Pleix, the video below shows a series of four imagined “Beauty Kits for Little Girls” containing DIY beauty treatments. But rather than the customary cheap-makeup-and-nail-polish combos, these kits promise breast implants, liposuction, rhinoplasty, and cosmetic dental surgery.

Part kitschy vintage ad, part modern infomercial, the piece takes you through step-by-step guides, juxtaposing playful music, simple images and rudimentary drawings with creepy flashes of bloody scalpels and bone fragments. It’s both amusing and disturbing – an apt commentary on an increasing appetite for and obsession with (arbitrary) aesthetic perfection that, at this point, seems to claim its acolytes almost in infancy.

This work is already nine years old (just a little older than its implied target market), but I think it might actually be getting more relevant over time.

- g.

Worn Photo Shoot from Lara Kaluza on Vimeo.

So we are all busy bees here at the Worn Journal office. We’re getting ready for issue 8: the Shoe Issue and overdosing on platforms, pumps, and plimsolls. Marty and Lara, two of our favourite creatives from Montreal, spent last weekend shooting ladies’ legs and vegan shoes from Duckie. They sent me a little movie they made setting it up. Yay!

In the late 60s, Anton Perich ran an underground film program in Paris that screened the early works of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. When he moved to New York City in the 1970s, he freelanced photography gigs for Interview Magazine and ran one of the very first ‘underground’ cable access shows. He was even an ‘early pioneer’ of digital art, having invented in the late ’70s an ‘electric painting machine’ that was a precursor to the ink-jet printer.

Mr. Perich’s most accessible legacy however, lies in is his YouTube channel, and the uploaded classic fashion show footage he shot during that hedonistic Loft Party/Studio 54 era (the above photo is a Perich — see Andy, Jerry, Paloma and Truman). The videos are shaky and even blurry at times, but don’t let that get in the way of your viewing pleasure. It’s a wonderful documentation of how ye old fashion show might have been presented — on a stage, minus the runway. Given the recent inclination for designers to eschew the typical Fashion Week presentation for more creative events and installations, it’s a wonderful reveal that the more things might change, the more they’ll stay the same (ie. let’s put on a show!).

There’s a Kenzo show where the models prance out in high leather boots, twirling with style to the deep disco and if you look closely, you might spot Jerry Hall, Iman, Patti Hansen (cause everyone was there). Perich even caught a few historical firsts, such as Issey Miyake’s 1975 FIT show (his first in NY). It’s high drama via fuzzy black and white video: models coolly stride out (oh my, is that Pat Cleveland?) to wailing Robert Fripp guitars and Kraftwerk blips (a perfect accompaniment for his billowing and transformative windcoat shapes).

My favourite footage? Grace Jones getting her hair cut. Srsly. It’s a quiet moment between performer and hair dresser that’s incredibly intimate. Get thee to Perich’s channel and watch it for yourself.

-Rea McNamara

COMPLEX GEOMETRIES SS09 from JASON LAST on Vimeo.

Instead of a typical runway show, complexgeometries has been making little film shorts of the current line. It’s pretty brilliant, since designer Clayton Evan’s work doesn’t exactly fit in with the whole Montreal Fashion Week look, and it has the potential to reach a much larger audience. Plus the video rules.