Worship! Homage! Penance!

M/M (Paris): Tree Of Signs: A Collaboration with Gabriela Frioriksdottir

Arena Homme Plus Signature Font

Some of Marc Atlan's Greatest Hits

From I-phones to limited edition Nikes, why has design become this much of a market force? Is it that we're experiencing an on-going visual evolution of contemporary culture in the same way we are under-going a technological revolution? I'm not trying to write a master's thesis. (Part of the discipline of The Imagist for me is to learn to be...succinct). I'm just trying to figure out how the hell the whole world got to be so design sensitive. When did American product packaging start to overwhelm its content? To personalize the issue a little bit... I was out out to dinner last night with a pal from an ad agency, when the subject turned to Fabien Baron and his powerhouse agency Baron and Baron. Its not a company anymore it seems.Its a brand in itself, if you'll pardon that dirty word..."brand".
Baron you know from the firm's traditional image management of magazines : Paris Vogue, the 90's Harper's Bazaar- which obviously I've been looking at a LOT- Interview magazine, Arena Homme +, as well as fashion ads -most notably Calvin Klein. We gossiped a little bit about the influence Le Baron and Karl Templer now had over the direction of Calvin, down to the models, in which that team seems not to be as personally invested in. Certainly not the way Calvin the man invested in Kate Moss and Brooke Shields and now no girl or boy for Calvin is allowed to be a bigger story than the clothes.

Inventory/Inventoire

Who misses the controlled extravagance of the M/M (Paris) pages of Paris Vogue? Who didn't buy extra copies of V Man 1 to archive that landmark "Alphabet Story" that turned the leading male mannequins of that moment into letters of the alphabet? . The Imagist is guilty on all counts and is planning to pay penance by buying Alphamen,a limited edition box set of 27 one colour silkscreen prints (in an edition of 26 at aprx. $8,000). That is, unless you beat TI to the punch. If you do we're just going to have to settle for the book Inventory/Inventoire (multiple edition at aprx $20).