Forget those expensive designer fashion bags. Roll out the duct tape and design your own fashion statement.
Long-championed for its utilitarian purposes, people across the country have come up with some creative ways to fashion duct tape, well, into fashion.
Its newest image includes transformation into anything from a prom dress to wearable sneakers to flowers that never die. The colors can be bold if not necessarily beautiful: florescent orange, yellow, turquoise, red, pink and green, in addition to the traditional gray, black and white. But it's been on a roll, with books, competitions and Web sites devoted to the pop culture phenomenon.
Young people locally have also become attached to duct tape fashion.
About a dozen children, ages 9 to 15, recently got a chance to design their own "tacky" bags at a program led by Trish Downey at the Mansfield Public Library.
Downey, who has taught jewelry design and crafts to children in the area for a number of years, has led similar duct tape sessions for Girl Scouts at after-school programs in Mansfield and at the Foxboro Charter School.
At the library session, held during school vacation week, the supplies were spread on the table as Downey explained to the group how to make the bags.
"The only thing stopping you is your imagination on this," she said. "The biggest problem is that the tape sticks to your fingers and scissors.
"If you make a mistake, don't panic - just cover it with more tape."
The students were slow to start, but then went on a tear.
Alida Lefebbre, 12, went with a design of green and black, her favorite colors. Her finished product was a black shoulder bag emblazoned with a large green "A."
Timothy Elofson, 11 and his brother Dave, 13, on the other hand, decided on the traditional gray, gripping extravagantly long strips from the rolls. Their sister Kristen, 9, was busy beside them cutting an intricate design in navy blue and yellow. In the end, the boys, both referees for Mansfield Youth Soccer, decided on designs that included MYS adorning the gray bags they tentatively planned to use for holding sports-related items.
"You don't want to look like you're carrying a Ziploc bag," Downey said.
One girl worked a vertical red- and white-striped design; another intently mixed colorful strips of yellow, turquoise, red and dark blue in a vertical and horizontal pattern on one side, with green and yellow, some turquoise and a stripe of orange and red each on the other.
Caroline Parsloe, 12, completed her work by affixing the letters of her name in yellow, horizontally on her creation.
"I just love working with kids because of what they come up with," said Downey, standing off to the side. "They put colors together adults would not."
Laura Bryant, 12, chose a motif of black with green polkadots.
Sadie Palmer, also 12, stuck with a turquoise- and white- striped design. "It will go with most of my clothes, which are bluish-green."
Asked whether it's like having a designer bag, Palmer smiled and replied "yessss!" - as if it were indeed haute couture.
Want to make a duct fashion bag? Here's what you'll need:
E A Ziploc bag in desired size. (Sandwich bags or paper lunch bags can be used for small handbags or matching wallets.)
E Rolls of duct tape in the colors you want. (Craft instructor Trish Downey says rolls of the traditional gray, white and black can be purchased inexpensively at Ocean State Job Lot; other colors may need to be purchased in craft stores.)
E A large roll of clear tape.
E Scissors.
E Your imagination.
How to make it:
Downey suggests covering the form (the Ziploc or other bag) in one color and then adding designs or other colors over that base layer. Be careful not to seal the “lock” on the inside of the bag, but cover the outside.
For handles, take two pieces of equal length and stick them together, or fold over one piece of desired length and stick it to the bag.
Cover handles in clear packing or other tape. Affix individual designs or letters onto the base layer with clear tape for better adherence.
Carry fashionably.
— SUSAN LaHOUD
SUSAN LaHOUD can be reached at 508-236-0398 or at slahoud@thesunchronicle.com.
Beautiful hair can enhance the looks of even the plainest woman. So is the true test of a woman's beauty what she looks like without any?
This week former glamour model Jordan criticised Sienna Miller and Kate Moss, saying they were not truly beautiful.
The mother-of two was quoted as saying: "You just have to imagine them with no hair and no make-up and see if they'd still look great."
Taking Jordan's lead, we put several famous faces under the spotlight and stripped them of their defining locks.
Can you identify these household names when you see them without their manes? You'll find the answers when you click on each image.
Featuring posing models flashing the peace sign and sucking coquettishly on ice cream, the latest photography exhibition from Mika Ninagawa isn't so much toying with notions of kawaii (cute) as exploiting them to the last drop.
Titled "Girls' Holiday," the exhibition runs through May 7 at Lapnet Ship in Jingumae, Tokyo and coincides with the release of Ninagawa's latest photo book of the same name, published by Index Communications (2,300 yen).
All the photos have appeared in the women's fashion magazine "Soup." Among Ninagawa's 16 subjects are the pop star Kaela Kimura, models Asami Imajuku and Alice, and singer/model/actress Anna Tsuchiya. The exhibition comes hot on the geta heels of Ninagawa's hit movie "Sakuran," a vivid portrait of Edo Period (1603-1867) prostitutes of Yoshiwara that starred Tsuchiya in the lead role. Already a well-established photographer, "Sakuran" was Ninagawa's directorial debut.
Lapnet Ship, Jingumae 1-9-11-1F, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, is a 2-minute walk from Meiji Jingumae Station on the Chiyoda subway line or a short walk from JR Harajuku Station's Takeshita dori. Admission is free. Opening hours are 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
For more information, visit www.lapnet.jp or call (03) 5411-3330.
Consider the frat party: young men sucking beer out of long plastic tubes while standing on their hands on the lip of a keg; pounding tequila shots and swaying, bleary-eyed, while others pound on sticky tables and chant; dancing with construction cones on their heads and slices of pizza held bikini-like over bared nipples — not, to be sure, the most becoming facet of young American manhood.
Enter Peggy Honeywell, the folk singer alter ego of San Francisco artist Clare Rojas. With a sweet, Midwestern face, thick, black curls piled high on her head and eyes that could melt an iceberg, she settles on a sofa in the center of the melee and, without so much as a flicker of irony, launches into an achingly tender ballad called "Bower Bird." (The title refers to an Australian species whose males are known for their remarkably complex mating behaviors, which include building elaborate "bachelor pad" bowers to lure the females.)
The young men pause respectfully — one, perhaps love-struck, begins to harmonize — then happily resume their head banging, now absurdly out of rhythm.
The scene appears in a three-minute video in Rojas' current solo show at Lizabeth Oliveria (a collaboration between Rojas, Ted Passon and Andrew Jeffrey Wright) and epitomizes the show's endearing spirit: an appealing fusion of earnestness, playfulness, technical skill (her painting, like her voice, is delectable) and deceptive conceptual acumen.
In this, as in past work, Rojas has a great deal of fun with the male image. In the largest painting (all are untitled), a nude male figure floats horizontally in the air, guzzling a bottle of beer, his pointed penis arcing skyward, while women poke him with pencils and laugh. (Two more penises, free-floating and anthropomorphized, appear to be engaged in a boxing match nearby.) In other, smaller paintings, nude men adopt silly, contortionist poses, as if emulating female fashion models. The women, by contrast, are invariably clothed — they wear long, formless, patterned smocks — and always seem confidently in charge.
Rojas' folk-y imagery and floor-to-ceiling installation style betray a direct line to the work of fellow San Franciscan Barry McGee and McGee's late wife, Margaret Kilgallen. The most obvious distinction is Rojas' rigorous investment in Americana decoration, particularly quilting. Much of the installation is taken up with bright, blocky pattern — triangles, squares, stripes, flowers and stars, anarchic in its sprawl but taut in design and fabrication.
As with much of the best McGee-school, street-conscious work of the last decade, the show is distinguished by its visual generosity.
Stepping into the virtually wallpapered main space of the gallery is an enlivening, heartening, cheering experience. Given the scale of Rojas' output in recent years — three albums as Peggy Honeywell and a whopping 13 solo shows, three of them at museums, since she received her master of fine arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 — it's clearly the result of fierce effort. Like any good hostess, however, she is loath to let you think so.
Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 837-1073, through June 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lizabetholiveria.com.
Digesting some science fiction
Science-fiction books are filled with creeping, oozing, mucus-y organisms whose primary occupation is to envelop, penetrate and feed on other, less fortunate organisms — typically humans. Andy Alexander's fourth solo show at China Art Objects lends a curious twist to this familiar motif, presenting a species of creature — made from polymer clay but eerily organic — whose modus operandi appears to be enveloping, penetrating and feeding upon worn copies of old science-fiction books.
The sculptural potential of science fiction is something Hollywood has mined for decades — think of "Star Trek," "Dune," "Alien," "War of the Worlds" — with the slimy limbs, dripping teeth and obscene protuberances serving as outlets for the expression of bodily, psychological or social fear and anxiety. Alexander's works tap into the same vein, albeit free from the encumbrance of character or narrative.
They're fascinating objects. In some, the clay form consumes the perimeter of a given book entirely, arching up and around to spin a jungle gym-like cocoon. In one, it smears itself thin across the surface of an open book, leaving the text faintly visible in spots, a single corner peeking out like a smothered victim gasping for air. In another, it bores straight through the book, leaving a gaping hole.
Accompanying these works are a pair of larger works — "The Inside of Out (Mountain Top)" and "The Outside Inn" — wherein Alexander elicits similar effects from bronze, wood and plaster, extending the motif to architectural proportions. The latter involves a model building whose interior is filled with proliferating clay forms and whose exterior is all but subsumed by mounds of snow-white plaster.
The wordplay of the two titles is echoed in a pair of garishly psychedelic prints installed in the same room, one of which reads "Always True Never Real," the other, "Always Real Never True." The contrast between the crisp, graphic quality of the prints and the sensual, organic nature of the sculptures points to Alexander's impressive stylistic — and, for that matter, imaginative — agility.
China Art Objects, 933 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 613-0384, through May 5. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chinaartobjects.com.
From the mailbox to the art gallery
The photographs in "Postscript," London-based artist Veronica Bailey's L.A. debut at Bank, explore one of life's vanishing pleasures: the experience of a personal letter.
Most of the mid-size images in the show depict a single envelope against a flat, slate gray ground, photographed from above the opening looking in. (Some depict a single folded sheet.) At a glance, you might mistake them for elliptical Brancusi- or O'Keeffe-like abstractions, complete with the faint suggestion of female genitalia.
Their magic, however, lies in their material specificity. Shot at close range with an extremely shallow depth of field, the envelopes' fuzzy, torn edges are crystal clear, while their planes descend evocatively into shadow. Glimpses of script trailing illegibly into the folds suggest whispered conversations just out of earshot.
The formal elegance of the work is enriched by the fact that all of the letters belonged to one of 20th century art's most fascinating women, Lee Miller. The stunningly beautiful American fashion model went on to become Man Ray's lover, muse and collaborator; the wife, for a time, of a wealthy Egyptian businessman in Cairo; and one of the first Americans to photograph the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
These letters date to her years as a war correspondent, and most involve her soon-to-be second husband, the Surrealist painter Roland Penrose. Their titles — "Mad With Envy," "I Love You," "Missing You" — intimate the contents. Bailey, who has photographed the pages of books and newspapers for other series, has a wonderfully sensual way with paper that's enough to make one grieve the onset of the Digital Age.
Bank, 125 W. 4th St., No. 103, L.A., (213) 621-4055, through May 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.bank-art.com.
Collectively, they are powerful
If cryptography refers to the enciphering or deciphering of messages in code, then "Cryptofloriography," the title Monica Furmanski gives to the series of prints in her show at Fringe Exhibitions, suggests something altogether magical.
The prints are photographic images, most of which appear to depict some sort of fauna. With roughly two-thirds of each image having been digitally removed, however, it's difficult to tell. All that remains are a few spindly forms floating against a flat, pale green ground.
The effect, which resembles watching a flawed DVD when the pixels begin to drop out, invites an initially unfavorable comparison with the manually perforated photo works of Soo Kim. The crisp cut edges of Kim's works have a sculptural elegance that makes the synthetic blur and flat, plastic texture inherent to digital prints somewhat disappointing.
Step back to consider the images in the context of Furmanski's entire installation, however, and they spring to life. The nine prints in the show range from 17 by 13 inches to 41 by 82 inches, and they're scattered all across the tall walls of the main space.
Two walls have been painted the same color as the background of the prints, which enhances their skeletal delicacy, and the front windows have been covered in a green, translucent film that casts a peculiar light throughout the gallery.
It's an elegant installation that does much to ameliorate the limitations of the central medium.
Also on view, in the basement, is a mesmeric video installation by Kadet Kuhne, "Infinite Delay," in which a straitjacketed figure bobs at the bottom of a swimming pool, bathed in a gorgeous, rippling blue light. The circumstances of the situation are unclear, but the tone suggests a sort of perceptive purgatory between observation and action, restraint and release, sleep and consciousness. The effect is both lulling and unnerving.
Fringe Exhibitions, 504 Chung King Court, Los Angeles, (213) 613-0160, through May 19. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.fringeexhibitions.com.
Mariah Sofia Rudi Hermann, a Year Two pupil of SK Sultan Sulaiman here is on cloud nine since she first modelled for an energy drink, four years ago.
She had since been featured in numerous commercial and television advertisements and appeared in the front cover of a Pakistani fashion magazine, recently.
She was also voted as Best Child Supermodel 2004 by Malaysian advertisement companies.
The little girl was also selected as NTV7's most photogenic model, early this year and won several awards for fashion modelling throughout Malaysia.
Her popularity made her highly in demand and she now has to be selective on invitations by advertisement companies.
Maria Sofia made an appearance clad in resplendent traditional Thai costume during a fashion show held in conjunction with the Thai New Year, Songkhran, at Primula Beach Resort here recently.
“I have been invited by many companies to model for them after I appeared on the cover of the fashion magazine in Pakistan but I told them studies must come first,” she said in an interview.
Maria Sofia, who has another younger sister, is set to model for a Middle East advertisement company during the school holidays.
Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie and burlesque artist Dita Von Teese were poles apart when they arrived in Sydney on Friday morning.
Fergie, whose real name is Stacy Ann Ferguson, looked more like a rock chick than the hip-hop and pop star, arriving in a baggy black T-shirt and bright aqua skinny jeans tucked into black stilettos.
The Black Eyed Peas star, who also recently launched a solo singing career, jetted in ahead of her hosting role at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday at Acer Arena.
Von Teese, the former wife of shock rocker Marilyn Manson, is in town as a guest of Australian Fashion Week and was clad in her preferred colour of black with a splash of red coming from her shoes.
The lingerie model and actor could have been mistaken for a businesswoman as she pushed her own mountain of luggage - Fergie took advantage of help from her entourage - were it not for the mob of photographers grappling for an early morning snap.
Fergie and Von Teese join a long list of celebrities hitting town this weekend.
Rapper Snoop Dogg was a notable absence at the airport on Friday morning after his application for a visa was denied but Australian actor and singer Sophie Monk touched down to play her part as host of the MTV awards red carpet with gossip-monger Perez Hilton.
Laguna Beach star Kristin Cavalleri and Hollywood actor Jared Leto, with his band 30 Seconds to Mars, arrived on Thursday while reality TV star Nicole Richie and pop-punk band Good Charlotte, who will co-host the MTV awards with Fergie, are due to arrive on Saturday.
Next week the attention of celebrity watchers will turn to Melbourne where the Logies will attract stars including pop singer Avril Lavigne.
AAP
On the lacrosse field, Stephen Decatur senior Katie Priestley specializes in the transition game, securing the ball in her own end and dashing upfield. On Thursday, she announced what she hopes will be another smooth transition, signing to play at Division I Towson University.
Priestley is the third Seahawk this year to a sign letter of intent to a Division I school. Lacrosse co-captain Ali Lathroum also will going to Towson, and co-captain Katie Blazer will be heading to Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Priestley hopes to bring to Towson what she contributed as a starter for Decatur the last four years: stability at defensive wing, strong handles, quickness, and a nose for the goal from a position in which the latter is strictly a bonus.
"She's one of the fastest on the team, if not the fastest," Decatur coach Robert Musitano said. "She plays defensive wing, but she comes up and scores."
Priestley's proudest personal achievement and proudest team achievement are one in the same: last season's state final berth. Conversely, it was one of her biggest disappointments. In helping her team win the state semifinal, Priestley received two yellow cards, which disqualified her from playing in the final.
"She was allowed to dress and practice with the team but not play," said Musitano, who noted the second foul was, in his opinion, a bit soft for a yellow. "It was worse than being injured. She was on the sideline and wanted to play so badly."
Decatur went on to get routed by perennial powerhouse Mt. Hebron, which going into the game had won 93 straight.
Despite her obvious talent, those around Priestley more readily praise her work ethic.
"She's a self-starter, a hard worker, energetic and, most importantly, focused," Musitano said. "She leads by example. She's started since she was a freshman, she's a good student, she stays out of trouble. She's a well-rounded kid."
Priestley will go on to join a strong Towson program, currently hovering around .500 and sitting in the middle of the pack in the Colonial Athletic Association. She chose Towson from her many suitors for reasons other than athletics alone.
"I wanted to go [to college] in a city," Priestley said. "My uncle went there. ... When I visited the campus, it just felt right."
At Towson, she will major in business and marketing, though her plans after school include a career in fashion as a designer and model.
At the conclusion of her signing announcement, Priestley went to great lengths to thank former coaches Tim Gilbert, Page Reagan and Sarah Tilghman, as well as friends and family.
"My family and friends have been my backbone," she said.