Graduate Charts

1. Andrew Sauceda CSM BA Graduate Collection

2. Michael Griffin CSM BA Graduate Collection

3. Ed Lee CSM BA Graduate Collection

Transgender aunts in strapless bustier gowns, workwear denim and floppy heads. The sexual revolution of a farmer's confused son (Andrew). The circus is in town and every male prostitute is going. An oriental silk costume drama with eruptive ending (Michael). Working 9 to 5 at the redlight wallstreet. Where horny investment bankers wear pinstripe suits and dragon tattoos, mixing business with pleasure (Ed).
/HORST

Image credits Vogue

Tokyo Diaries XIII

A mental travel preparation.




Artworks Roy Lichtenstein

Around 1996 something changed. Viewing the 'other' side abruptly infused 'another' kind of painting: ink-screen printing. Dotted brush strokes that turned American pop art Japanese.
/HORST

Tokyo Diaries X

A mental travel preparation.

Artworks Gekko Hayashi

The homo-eroticism of sexotism. A world of 'ukiyo-e' and 'shin-hanga', of 'hentai' and 'hard yaoi'. A place where the word 'stroke' exploits the full potential of its double meaning.
/HORST

Tokyo Diaries IX

A mental travel preparation.




Hedi Slimane Vogue Hommes Japan, 2008

The eroticism of exotism. The beauty of revealing truth within a cliché. The kimono as pop artefact. The modernity of tradition. The moment when opposites merge. This day is approaching.
/HORST

Tokyo Diaries VII

A mental travel preparation.




Benetton Kokeshi Dolls, 1999

An early introduction to Japanese street style, rapidly westernized as inflationary virus. Yet, one wishes to encounter its true and sincere form when putting the first step on Tokyo ground.
/HORST

Tokyo Diaries

A mental travel preparation.




Comme des Garçons Fall/Winter 1993

Documenting a world before arrival. The aesthetic pleasures one seeks to find. The consumerist mega-structures one desires to wander about. The conceptual fashion one wants to buy.
/HORST

Post Milan II

A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with Alex Fury, discussing:
Prada Spring/Summer 2014

Tropical prints, looser, loucher shapes, a twenty-first century re-imagining of a twentieth-century American vacation. It was the fantasy rather than the reality of a Hawaii holiday that Prada was articulating for summer, I reckon.

Toting those suitcases longingly with your office drone suiting, trousers loosened up, that forties feel. Burnt umber and burgundy and evergreen and slithery satin bomber-jackets, all all those carnation and hibiscus prints plastered over everything. There was something of the land-locked, Tikki-tourist, those mid-century, middle-class middle-Americans who never made it to the tropics, but dreamed ceaselessly about it nevertheless. The sweaters with sunset scenes intarsia-knit into them were postcards - 'wish we were there', rather than 'wish you were here'. Just like the cheesecake pin-ups they'll never have, and those good-looking girls they'll never get, flouncing after them in flirtatious, diamanté-strewn showgirl dresses.

Mrs Prada's kick was unattainable fantasy. Except, it was her fantasy of that unattainable fantasy. And you can have it, at a price.
/ALEX

At least the sleeve layering added a moment of abstraction within an über-literal collection that got stuck in 1940s nostalgia - when the exotic image of Polyn-Asia was Americanised in memorabilia and gas station postcard kitsch. Here, irony reveals itself as not 'pretending to pretend' but 'being what is': derisory, pathetic, mediocre (to quote Mehdi Belhaj Kacem). I'd like to burn those memories.
/HORST








1. Prada Spring/Summer 2014
2. Elvis Presley Blue Hawaii, 1961
3. Businessman 1950s
4. Rolf Armstrong Sunny Skies, 1953
5. Roy Lichtenstein Sunrise, 1984
6. Wassily Kandinsky Tension In Red, 1926
7. Ed Ruscha Burning Gas Station, 1966
8. Prada Spring/Summer 2014

All about Alex Fury

Now & Then VIII

1. Prada Spring/Summer 2013
2. Prada Spring/Summer 1999

Miuccia's Asian infusion. The submissive clichée of 1960s exoticism modernized and re-fetishized by means of asymmetry and the silk kimono side slit. Temporarily reducing power woman to house maid - as part of an intellectual role play.
/HORST