See you at the Pow Wow!

Terry the iconoclast! PH Terry Richardson via terryrichardson.com

So sorry but TI is really having a Japan moment. I really want to wander the streets of Rappongi to this song.

Sam at NY Models is a late breaking rising star

"The Carvey's" custom vinyl cutting service is too sexy!

How TI loves this concept! The record label 'The Carvery', provides a one-off, small edition, vinyl cutting service which enables you to transfer music onto 5", 7", 10" or 12" vinyl records.

The art stance has proven to be very lucrative for I&V

The Hiss Squad's Paris Chapter (our favorite) beamed some fascinating news in this weekend. Seems there was a summit of some sort between the increasingly self-assured Frida Gianni and the power photo-duo of Inez and Vinoodh regarding the next Gucci campaign. The first time I&V visited Gucci, it was Tom's house and the result was the "coffin" series with a cropped blonde Kate and a fascinating passing fancy named Elenora Bose . Now it is looking to be a longstanding part of their iconography. The team has been on a campaign and editorial rampage with amazing edits in Vogue Paris and Vogues Hommes International that is -may we say it one more time- run to the newstand brilliant. And what can you say about this incredible Adriana Lima GQ cover currently riding the NY newstands.

Bless Celebrates 10 years of Themelessness and that's inspiring!

I can't call it "Current Reading" because I just finished ordering it 30 seconds ago, but I can't wait for this retrospective of this Paris and Berlin based design team. Bless first surfaced on the fashion radar in the winter of 97/98 when Margiela used some of their wigs for the show. Since then the trajectory of the Bless team has been a blur. Though what they do seems to be defiantly anti-commercial, it has also proven to be very influential and incredibly rewarding (even in the financial area). Bless slides from fashion to beauty, interior decoration to art exhibition, to collaborations with other brands to stylized advertising. I love that and find the ideas from Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag to be a big influence on the multi-disciplinary way I've been forced to think these days.

Edited by Desiree Heiss, Ines Kaag, Manuel Raeder.

With contributions by Thimo te Duits, Elein Fleiss, Nakako Hayashi, Stéphanie Moisdon, Ulf Poschardt, Pro qm, Adriano Sack, Barbara Steiner, Olivier Zahm

Interviews by Manuel Raeder with Nobuyoshi Tamura Shihan and by Jan Winkelmann with Bless.

New York Photo Festival 2008

I love photo-festivals. If only to dream. I mean they got Martin Parr on the premises. It ought to be fun, right?

You may ask yourself, why the man in the video below is wearing Princess Diana's (RIP) old hair-do. You might wonder why he's wearing Nick Rhodes make-up and sounds like Simon LeBon of Duran Duran. Let the record show David Sylvian (not his real name, it's a tribute to a member of the New York Dolls) was the source that Rhodes took from for his look, down to the pout. Sylvian was the source of that odd vocal yelp that became Simon LeBon's style but TI thinks it sounds a lot more true coming out of Sylvian's mouth. At a time when the Western World is waking up to the inherent chicness of China as an idea (or ideagram if I were to be fancy about it) , Japan's strange tributes to that nation in the late 70's and early 80's makes the band pioneers. I'm planning a trip to Tokyo and Japan's music will be my soundtrack. They were so chic I probably need fifteen "i's" to give their version of the word phonetic justice.

The Memoirs of Duc de Saint Simon takes places in the hot-bed of intrigue which was the French 17th century court.

They say it is a seminal influence on Proust's "Remembrance Of Things Past". They say you'll have to wade through pages upon pages of tedious reportage about 17th century French military campaigns to get to the yummy gossip about life in Louis the XIV's court. The duke is accused of being frequently long-winded and terribly ungrammatical in his sentence structures (sigh). But the soap opera of the machinations and power struggles and the aura of a certain era dwindling into the twilight of myth.... It' s a hot read!