Vanity Fair pay tribute to the past 103 years of distinctive female pop star style in a two minute time-lapse starting with the full-body fashion of Nora Bayes in the early 20th century to the contemporary style of Rihanna today. Wow, how times have changed.
What kind of man reads Playboy? Well, if you believe the vintage ads for the magazine published between 1958 and 1974, the readers of Playboy are all young men, most caucasian, handsome, rich, talented, adventurous, athletic, intelligent, and always surrounded by beautiful women. In reality, it seems this advertising series was primarily intended to market the magazine to advertisers and convince them that readers were not just interested in photos of naked women. Ummm…ok sure 😉
Stephen Vuillemin: We love the work of American illustrator Stephen Vuillemin, who specialises in funny editorial illustrations and has turned them into awesome animated GIFs. Usually creating illustrations for publications like the New York Times, Bloomberg, and GQ, Stephen Vuillemin brings an extra dimension to his work with this fun batch of animations. Great stuff! 🙂
Bernard Hoffman: Photographed for LIFE magazine by Bernard Hoffman, Canadian entrepreneur Lawrence Freiman imagined the future of retail by creating the Vis-O-Matic, an innovative store where customers could view and make purchases via a futuristic system of photographic slides. Long before the birth of the internet and online shopping, bicycles, dresses, shoes, toys, hats and much more could be ordered by customers and then received via home delivery. Wow, this guy was way ahead of his time – awesome stuff! 🙂
CNN: Transporting us back to the golden age of aviation, CNN have compiled a selection of vintage photographs from a time when airlines were selling globetrotting dreams and high-end luxury. The exact opposite of today’s low cost carriers, these photographs from the 50s and 60s remind us that air travel was once synonymous with fashion, cocktails, luxury, glamour, gastronomy, and social status although it did come at a price – a Sydney to London round trip cost the equivalent of thirty weeks wages! Happy Flashback Friday 🙂
The Daily Splice: Loving the clever creations of British artist Adam Hale, aka The Daily Splice, who uses free newspapers and magazines around London to create a new collage every day, cutting up assorted photographs and assembling them by hand. Awesome stuff! 🙂
Gabriel Moreno: We LOVE the creations of Spanish illustrator, graphic designer and artist Gabriel Moreno, who imagines colourful and captivating compositions made with a mixture of watercolour, pen and digital painting. Gabriel Moreno has also worked for many brands and publications, such as Nike, The Wall Street Journal, Rolex, Victoria’s Secret, GQ and Rolling Stone. Awesome work!
Coco de Mer: Under The Skin writer Walter Campbell and legendary photographer Rankin have paired up for X, a short film about sex that’s something of a sensory overload, made in partnership with underwear and sex toy brand Coco De Mer. Using a combination of found footage, seductive acting and an at times brutal soundtrack, X invites you into an otherworldly erotic realm; mixing danger, violence and sex. “The film embraces the sense of the ambient mind and what it might be inspired by, the transgression from banality into wonder”, says Campbell. “More and more I feel we enter the hinterlands of that dream state simply because the mind seeks something wilder, that unpredictable thing, the surprise moment. The film speaks about the morphing of these possibilities, and evokes Coco de Mer’s evolution of erotic thought. Coco de Mer embodies those wonderful flights of imagination that steer the mind to more extraordinary, more vital energies, and this campaign is an exciting platform for the brand to open up the erotic conversation even further.” It’s contemporary, erotic and a lil bit naughty, check it out – LOVE! For the official Coco de Mer website, click here
Alex de Mora: So you think that “old people” dress like old people? But have you ever thought about what our generation will look like when we get older? ‘Leisurewear’ is a series of fashion photographs created for Vice Magazine by photographer Alex de Mora, who likes to imagine the elderly of a not too distant future. Alex de Mora notes ‘I was inspired by the character I saw when taking personal photos of my Grandmother, and I thought why not transform this into an fashion editorial, so I pitched the idea to Vice Magazine. I had been wanting to shoot a “leisurewear” series for a while, and wanted to give a hip hop angle to the idea. I thought of Snoop Dogg going shopping in his velour tracksuit. The shoot itself took place in my studio in London and we decided to colour match the background, clothes and set for each shot, to give it a surreal, stylised tone. My amazing team of Kylie Griffiths (stylist), Penny Mills (set design), Sami Knight (hair) and Lydia Warhurst (make up) helped me to make this idea the reality.’ Alex de Mora is a highly regarded photographer based in London, UK who specialises in fashion, commercial and portrait photography. Over the years, De Mora has created some amazing images and his editorial clients have included VICE, i-D, Oyster, Dazed & Confused, and Crack while his commercial work has been for brands such as Nike, Red Bull, Atlantic Records, Liberty, ATP Records, Converse, and Johnnie Walker. This fantastic shoot took place in Alex de Mora’s London studio, and features streetwear icons ranging from Champion and adidas Originals to Le Coq Sportif and Moschino, all worn by old-aged pensioners. To see more of Alex de Mora’s amazing work, be sure to visit his website.
Cosmopolitan: Of course, everyone knows of the cheesy romance novel – the novelettish and sentimental literature made to tickle the senses, covers emblazoned with virile young men and young ladies in search of fierce love that are clearly marketed to woman with ‘healthy and active’ imaginations. Well, world renown and bestselling women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, has recreated these covers using real, everyday people in an clever and amusing series that will definitely make you see their funny side. The ‘romance novel’ or ‘romantic novel’ is a literary genre. Novels of this type of genre fiction place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. Some scholars see precursors to the romance novel in literary fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries, including Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and the novels of Jane Austen. British company Mills and Boon began releasing escapist fiction for women in the 1930s. Their books were sold in North America by Harlequin Enterprises Ltd, which began direct marketing to readers and allowing mass-market merchandisers to carry the books. In North America, romance novels are the most popular literary genre, comprising almost 55% of all paperback books sold in 2004. The genre is also popular in Europe and Australia, and romance novels appear in 90 languages. Most of the books, however, are written by authors from English-speaking countries, leading to what is deemed an Anglo-Saxon perspective in the fiction. Despite the popularity and widespread sales of romance novels, the genre has attracted significant derision, skepticism and criticism. Erotica is a term used to describe scenes in the novel that are risqué but not pornographic and ‘Romance erotica’ seems to be on the rise as more women explore this new sub-genre – You only have to look at the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey...enough said. Enjoy!
