Tokyo Diaries XVII

A mental travel preparation.

Joseph Beuys Nikka Whisky, 1984

And then you suddenly realize that 'Lost In Translation' should have been based on German Fluxus super artist Joseph Beuys. Politically engaged posing with a glass of whisky amidst a snowy forest, advertising for the good cause of protecting nature.
/HORST

Tokyo Diaries VIII

A mental travel preparation.

Kenji Sawada Water Skin (Parco View 6), 1980

Parco, the department store, liberated a country. With pubic hair and nudity dominating the campaigns and visual identity created by the likes of Eiko Ishioka and Harumi Yamaguchi. One should come prepared.
/HORST

Tokyo Diaries V

A mental travel preparation.

Ikuo Amano Shiseido クレ・ド・ポー

Intensity is what I expect. Purity is what I assume. There is nothing but pink lipstick - the world and every human being immersed in its lucid gloss. I want to be blinded by artificial beauty.
/HORST

Paths Towards Modernity V

1. Versace Fall/Winter 2014
2. Richard Prince Untitled (Man's Hand On Pocket With Watch), 1980
3. Richard Prince Cowboys & Girlfriends, 1992
4. Versace Fall/Winter 2014
5. Versace Fall/Winter 2014
6. Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy), 2001
7. Richard Prince Untitled (Original), 2009
8. Richard Prince Untitled, 2008
9. Versace 1980s
10. Versace Fall/Winter 2014
11. Versace Fall/Winter 2014
12. Richard Prince Nurse With Wings (Detail), 2003
13. Versace Fall/Winter 2013
14. Versace Fall/Winter 1994
15. Richard Prince Untitled, 2007

Richard Prince created the art practice of 'appropriation'. Regarded as one of the main players/actors of The Picture Generation he took pictures of pictures and declared them artworks of their own. With motorbike cowboys and vinyl nurses as subject, Prince plays with stereotypes and superstages them as cult of popular mainstream culture. And when cliché and sexism collide, Gianni and Donatella are not afar.
/HORST

The World's Sexiest Homoerotic Fashion Campaigns

1. Terry Richardson Sisley Fall/Winter 2009
2. Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott DSquared Spring/Summer 2011
3. Terry Richardson Gucci Fall/Winter 2001
4. Mario Sorrenti Lanvin Fall/Winter 2001
5. Mario Sorrenti Dolce & Gabbana Spring/Summer 1994
6. Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott Givenchy Fall/Winter 2010
7. Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott Givenchy Fall/Winter 2009
8. Craig McDean Prada Sport Spring/Summer 2008
9. Terry Richardson Tom Ford Spring/Summer 2008
10. David LaChapelle Patrick Cox, 2003

After the celebrated and never forgotten The World's Sexiest Male Fashion Designers, it is time for a sequel. Who is pushing same sex boundaries? Depictions of wishful thinking, 'sex sells' and the provoked side effects of luxury. Everything for journalistic, humanist and historical reasons.
/HORST

Post Paris XXXIII

A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with John-Michael O'Sullivan, discussing:
Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014

It's a boy/girl thing.

Before Raf Simons became boldface RAF SIMONS, he was just a shy Belgian student, hanging around with the cool kids - kids like his girlfriend, Véronique Branquinho, who would go on to collaborate with him at Ruffo, and to teach at the same fashion school in Vienna. And though Simons' star quickly outshone Branquinho's, you get the sense that he's never entirely shaken the vestiges of that outsiderish-ness, that lack of the intrinsic cool which Branquinho so effortlessly had.

The surfaces of this collection were so alive with associations to the past - the neon-pink shoulders from AW09, the rainbow stripes from Jil Sander Spring 2011 - that you had to pick away to get to the nancy-boy softness of thigh-grazing polo shirts, pinafore vests and fluid tees. Increasingly, his own-label collections seem as much about the flesh left exposed - the lean, gangly legs and arms emerging from cropped shorts and sleeveless shirts - as they are about the garments themselves. And the barrage of slogans (like the Jean Prouvé house, and the Calder mobile, and the Warhol illustrations stamped onto his last Dior womenswear collection) felt like semaphore; appropriated shorthand for a message that Simons won't, or can't, quite articulate.
/JOHN-MICHAEL

Undeniably, there is some kind of excitement attached to Raf Simons. And when you divide its parts, there is nothing exciting about it. Maybe it could be called 'Analytic Pop'. Ordinary things we know, signature ideas we crave, irritation we surrender to. Rave and advertising. Subculture and commerce. Raf is selling himself, selling out, selling dreams. A mass-media machine, a masturbation factory, a perpetuum mobile. The TV station that will exceed MTV. We have to admit the 'happy yeah' and swallow the pill.
/HORST








1. Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014
2. Jean Prouvé 1962 & Alexander Calder 1957 & Raf Simons 2011
3. Helmut Lang Spring/Summer 2004
4. Raf Simons & Véronique Branquinho Ruffo Research, 2000
5. Andy Warhol Four Dollar Signs, 1982
6. Damien Hirst Lullaby, 2002
7. Dior Fall/Winter 2013
8. Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014

All about John-Michael O'Sullivan