INSTAGRAM PURGE: THE NEW SELFIE QUEEN

Bieby's Selfie with pants

Bieby's purported Selfie's rather real looking

Instagram's stupid purge of supposed fake accounts from their site, has taken a toll on many follower lists. It has meant a huge decrease in followers for some, particularly some questionable celebrities who have so far been chalking up amazing numbers. As a result of this purge, Eg: Justin Bieber is no longer the King of Instagram. The new most-followed person on Instagram is (roll eyes) Kim Kardsashian West. 
It's hard (pun unintended) to believe that there are more people who want to look at Mrs West than Bieby - but there you go - all sorts of perversity etc.

WHAT IS NORMCORE? DO YOU CARE?

NOTES TO THE NEW HIPSTER

Is there to be no end to the indignities to suffered by the chronically clued-in? As the new “Normcore” trend breaks into our collective consciousness, here are some notes on how to be, or not to be.

1. Firstly, don’t worry too much about precisely defining Normcore; Just take it that a silly fashion director somewhere decided to spell Hipster with an ‘N’, and go on making your lunch. It’s only fashion jargon and you have a living to make.

2. The guiding principle for fashion jargon seems always to be on a need to know basis and you, a mere non-fashion professional, need only know this: The fashion pendulum has swung yet again, and now, the epitome of cool is the anti-cool.

3. Normcore is about affordable, bland, functional anti-style. It’s conventional and nondescript drag, stuff you can pull out of your dryer drum anytime and wear with devastating buff nails. 

4. Examples given of this trend seem marked by white sneakers, dull zip-ups and not-skinny jeans, in other words, stuff you wore when you were in NUS. A Normcorer dresses like an undergrad seeking to blend in, rather than stand out. 

5. According to "experts", Normcore is a reaction against the aggressive coolness that relies on vivid difference (studded trophy platforms, K-pop type synchronized dancing, nail art) to a post-cool of authenticity and sameness. To me, this “sameness” thing is troubling. If all around you are synchronized dancing in studded and screaming prints, the Normcorer will not fit in – she will stand out in her discreet denims, plaid shirt-dress and trainers. Is Normcore grunge spelt with an N?

6. The horribly termed Normcore was coined by K-HOLE, a New York-based trend forecasting group. They define it as “a desire to be blank.” But this concept and its assumption that the average hipster isn’t blank would immediately present a challenge for those for which this is relevant. What if you were already blank, as so many hipsters naturally must be? What if you didn’t fundamentally have any identity or persona at all and studied fashion in Perth? What if shopping at Givenchy actually gave your life purpose? Then how do you adopt the Normcore?

7. Who are you if your clothes are brand-free and logo-less? Wouldn’t you be a complete nonentity without a single label signifier? Since Normcore has nothing to do with flashy fashion and more to do with character, it would present a particular challenge to those who would most want to embrace it. The Singapore fashion scene is after all filled with an inhuman army of the vacuous. 

8. So. Instead of scratching your head over every last trend, perhaps you should take a cold shower and then go out there and do something useful with your life.

A version of this piece appears in Style: June 2014.

AUDI FASHION FESTIVAL 2014: IS SINGAPORE A FASHION HUB?

The Audi Fashion Festival this month kicks-start Singapore’s busy roster of fashion festivals. But do these retail-centric events make Singapore a true fashion hub? 

There are times when it seems the shows are staged just to make it harder for you to run your errands. If you have a legitimate reason to be in the mall, say to pick up your dryclean, or pop down to the supermarket to forage for food, there’s bound to be women’s magazine editor blocking your path and insisting that you look at how she’s balancing her Blackberry and Starbucks while clutching her trophy handbag and stumbling on her bizarre platforms. 

She can’t walk properly because she's not wearing her prescription glasses and can’t Whatsapp through her gigantic shades while simultaneously pretending there are street-style bloggers snapping at her heels. 

This caricature of a fashion creature is just symptomatic of the derivative nature of our fashion festival scene. They saw it on a blog, and then it slowly dawned on them that they could borrow that sample and toss it together with something from River Island. Same concept writ large: Our fashion festivals are retail events that have all the sound and fury of a real fashion week (read: season-making ones in Paris and Milan) signifying nothing more than our ability to furiously self-promote, and maybe sell a dress or two.  

Surely to be a truly influential fashion capital you need to show newsworthy, influential and groundbreaking collections and not just glorified trunk shows no matter how many red carpets you roll out for C-list celebs and “couturiers”? Peopling the front row with socialites dressed to attend a gala and “editors” whose only ability is shopping, at ticketed consumer events with warmish sponsored cocktails, does not a fashion hub make. It does make for a busy shopping mall, and a great hindrance to real shoppers but that’s about it – otherwise any city with a fashion week (and its attendant pretentious fashionista) can call itself a fashion hub. Bear in mind that places as far-flung as Mongolia and Dakar have fashion weeks too. OK, they probably do call themselves fashion hubs, just as their denizens have Blackberrys and Starbucks.

According to organizers, our shows are in part (a big part) staged for consumers who otherwise might not get a chance to attend a show in London, New York, Milan or Paris. In other words, our fashion shows are obviously ticketed entertainment — just like rock concerts or the circus (if it looks and sounds like a circus, then it probably is one). It is time that our fashion festivals take fashion seriously and promote the local designers and labels that need to be recognized by the tiny pool of influential international editors. We have the talent. We just aren’t pushing them enough. Originality, intelligence and creativity make fashion, not an ability to emulate and “recreate”. Zeal is wasted on pushing that lowest-rung recognizable name as if a gift was being bestowed on the city. So-and-so will close the festival at midnight after a heavy prolonged black-tie supper. Such and such a celebrity will grace the catwalk. How much was he paid? Really? Who cares? Anyone who cares about fashion, any professional whose business it is to care about fashion, would have seen the original show a few months ago, probably in sweatpants on his sofa.

For the rest, there’s Cirque du Soleil Amaluna. 

A version of this essay appears in the May edition of Style magazine. 

LOUIS KOO, THE BURNT CARAMEL TOFFEE TWIST

Firstly, Louis Koo's bizarre waxen caramel toffee colour has been much commented upon, leading many to speculate that he sleeps on a tanning bed; But that doesn't explain the waxen Madame Tussauds quality that he has, does it? 

Nong Poy and The Burnt Toffee Twist

But the caramel colour and waxen quality didn't put off Thai transsexual actress Nong Poy who had reportedly foamed over Louis Koo while shooting film The White Storm with the caramel-coloured actor. Poy had even apparently dumped her long-time boyfriend for the actor (Hong Kong media reported). Although, bizarrely, Poy had declined to shoot "intimate" scenes with Koo for the movie "for fear of frightening her parents". 

This ambiguous latter bit is really hard to understand, and if you think about it, has no logic whatsoever. It does leave one rather wondering what Poy's parents might have objected to. 

My guess is Koo's unnatural colouring. 

Poy and Koo were rumoured to have developed a romance, and caused Poy to have broken up with her boyfriend of five years. Poy admitted that she and her boyfriend had split, but denied that Louis was the "third party". She said: "He treats me like a younger sister, and I feel that he has never courted me before. I don't want to tarnish his reputation!"

Robert Pattinson's Halloween Special

This may not strike you as a particularly happy marriage but Robert Pattinson has reportedly (LA Times) signed on as the new face of men's fragrances for Christian Dior Parfum. The alleged deal would fetch the always greasy and unshaven Pat Pat around $12 million over three years for multiple ad campaigns.This would be the first significant endorsement for Pat Pat, as he's focused primarily on staying as white as a lump of unwashed whale fat sweating is a dank underground chamber. Let's hope Pat Pat will do a Mrs Brad Jolie in those Chanel No 5 ads and give us another good reason to turn up our noses. I can't wait.

Naked Men Exhibition Causes a Reaction

If you've always suspected that the nude male form is a work of art, you're more unique than you think. Vast swathes of the world are still afraid of the nude male body - which seems rather strange given social media and fashion mags which proliferate with such images.

Elmgreen & Dragset, Shepherd Boy (Tank Top), (2009)

The prestigious Leopold Museum in Vienna has sparked controversy with Naked Men, an exhibition on the theme of... naked men. Posters advertising the show around Vienna have been covered up with red gaffer tape and some have been removed altogether.

The show includes works spanning the period from the Enlightenment until the present, supplemented by important reference works from ancient Egypt, Greek vase paintings and works from the Renaissance. In other words, nothing that you won't immediately see once you log onto the internet. Beginning with Ancient Greece, the exhibition addresses the depiction of men through the ages. Another focus is on the nude self-portraits of the Expressionists Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl as well as the change in the perception of naked men after 1945. On display are works by Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Giovanni Giacometti, Egon Schiele, Maria Lassnig, Andy Warhol, Alfred Hrdlicka, Günter Brus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Heimo Zobernig and others.At the turn of the century, Klimt believed that nakedness and truth coincided and Egon Schiele began to make his own body the object of his paintings. Expressionism brought with it a radical examination of the self, which saw the artists exposing themselves both physically and existentially and exploring the use of their own nudity.


The exhibition unites examples of many different genres and is on until January 2013.

Aunty Karla's Chocolate Fix

Dessert in bed, anybody?
As promotion for Karla’s new short films about Magnum Ice Cream, she is pictutred in a chocolate fantasy suite, complete with a candy bar headboard, dark chocolate armchair and cocoa dusted sculpture of his Beloved Baptiste Giabiconi. Isn't it all kinds of weird to make a chocolate replica of Beloved Baptiste (albeit one that got the eyes un-crossed)? Isn't it all kinds of creepy-crazy?
And Magnum paid for it!
“I like chocolate. I don’t eat it, but I like the smell of it. People can drink with their eyes; I can eat with my nose. I would love to have a perfume based on chocolate.” - Karl Lagerfeld

Does Not Read

I bet this ad was workshopped at a big conference table: It's completely meaningless and actually quite crazy. Firstly, the styling is bizarre - why the pink tights with the sparkly ballet pumps with the trench? To what does it allude? It's certainly not "strong".
Secondly, the backdrop clearly says "concrete jungle" - therefore Karlie Kloss swinging on a rope is supposed to allude to Tarzan? That's where the "strong" comes in I suppose, she's the lord of the concrete jungle, and yet her outfit and pose is more "circus"?
Perhaps I give it even more meaning than was meant. It's just STOOPID.

Fall Dolce Boys

These boys have been cast for this fall's Dolce ads (well, there were a couple more which I refused to include due to ugliness - not that I completely approve of Noah Mills but there you go).On a different note, the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana hosted an after-show party for Justin Bieber at Gold Restaurant following his concert in Milan on April 9.I'm quite sick of this obsession with spectacles. Don't they look stupid?

Yee-Ha!

Anna Dello Russo in her perfume ad looks like Jeff Bridges in drag!

Drag Attack

Gathering momentum: Fashion magazines are really making a case for drags and freaks. Is it the end of the decade thing?Isabelli Fontana in Western Drag. Acid washed stretch jeans anyone?Giselle in Cher Drag. That's a Bob Mackie if I ever saw one.Last but never least, the Goddess of Good Taste herself, Anna Dello Russo, who appears to be in Victorian Drag. Her mobile phone looks mighty like a purse, does it not? Hullo, hullo, are you there Good Taste? These, and other atrocities, appeared in 10.

The Grumps

Anna Dello Russo has taken to bed with a serious case of the Grumps just a day after learning that Vogue actually had the nerve to award Kate the Best Dressed Woman of the Decade. I think she forgot that she's not a woman.
Her new year's resolution: Wear even more stupid things... yes, even in bed. (In this case, it's Philip Treacy/ Valentino)

Leopard Preen

...Steve Tyler is that choo?

Spotted

Anna Dello Russo very jealous, she also want.

Drivel

"She’s a risk-taker unafraid of taking chances. She doesn’t suck up. And she’s been very good to me on a personal level as well. When I was having some personal problems, Anna was always there for me. She’s very maternal and caring to people she cares about."
- Marc Jacobs

Anna Wintour a "risk-taker"? Has he seen Vogue? "Maternal"? How frightening an idea! Anna and Marc, my two absolutely fave fashion people...