For those of you following along at home, you may recall that Gather is the creation of one, miss Katie Kay, whose former occupations include being a co-designer at Skingraft, business partner to Amanda Palmer, and Lucent Dossier performer. She first opened Gather in Downtown LA back in July of 2010, and this summer the LA Weekly fashion issue had this to say about it:

Nearly everything in the store is an expression of what Kay calls the “slow fashion” movement, which favors one-of-a-kind pieces over mass production in China. Slow fashion is about creating a lifestyle as a designer rather than building a “career” it’s about being indifferent to “trends” because, most likely, you’re making them. “This may be fashion, but I’m very open to being genuine about things,” Kay says.

I first met Katie when we were both living in San Francisco over a decade ago and our lives have been intertwined in some strange and wonderful ways since. I came on board with Gather just as it opened its new location, at the intersection of Hollywood and Sunset, a couple of weeks ago. More than just a store, Gather is an articulation of a new kind of relationship we have with the things we buy. Our lives have become ever more like art galleries, both physical and virtual. And we are the curators. The pieces we select tell the story of who we are and where we’ve been. These things, the things we buy, are no longer consumed… they’re gathered.

Images courtesy of Los Angeles, I’m Yours, which had some very nice things to say about the opening.

Visit: Gather

*Totally Fucking Crazy

Right now all across America there is a feather shortage. In April, The Billings Gazette reported:

Jewelry-makers and hairstylists have been snatching up the premium chicken feathers used in standby trout-fly patterns, creating a sudden run on a market that’s ill-prepared for significant fluctuations of demand.

“Supplies are just decimated,” said Jim Cox, co-owner of the Kingfisher fly shop in Missoula, [Montana]. “We just can’t get the premium feathers. Even the (sales) reps for the suppliers can’t get them for themselves.”

What began a couple of years ago as a scattered interest in feather jewelry has erupted into a full-on fad for hair extensions made out of long, slender feathers — the exact same feathers used in the vast majority of traditional dry-fly patterns.

The feathers most valued both by fly-tiers and, lately, fashion mavens come from specific types of roosters that are selectively bred to produce long, slender feathers. Such chickens typically take almost a full year to raise before slaughter. What’s more, they’re rare: Only a few dozen commercial breeders exist in America, and most are small operations.

The situation’s getting so dire, American Public Radio’s Marketplace reports, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association is lobbying lawmakers about conservation. Tom Whiting, owner of Whiting Farms in western Colorado, one of the world’s largest producers of fly tying feathers, a third of whose sales now go to fashion, says, “We have orders far in excess of what we have in our system.” With the demand, the prices are skyrocketing. Last week the Oregonian reported a rooster neck of feathers that would have normally cost $29.95, is now selling for $360. A 300% – 700% jump in rooster saddle feather price is now typical.

In fashion parlance, feathers are in. Steven Tyler has been wearing the avian accessories as he judges American Idol contestants. Pop singer, Kesha, rocks feathers, too, even sticking one in Conan Obrien’s hair during a recent appearance on his show. Between Los Angeles’s mercantile meccas of Melrose Ave. and the Beverly Center you can get feather hair extensions, earrings, necklaces; feathers on boots, shoes, tops, skirts, hats, bras, anything. In the summer of 2011, feathers have become a staple of every sartorial and tonsorial aspect imaginable.

The other day I was asked my opinion as to where this current ubiquity of feathers has come from. But as it turns out, I happen to have something better than an opinion: I have an explanation.

Our story begins almost 12 years ago, in a little town in Oregon, by the name of Ashland, where a group of kids came together to start a circus performance troupe called, El Circo. The group would gain recognition within the Burning Man culture for the extravagant parties they threw at the festival, featuring lavish fire performances, a large, geodesic dome venue, and a top-notch sound system that attracted world-renowned music acts to perform there. In a 2005 San Francisco Bay Guardian article on the effect that the various groups within the Burning Man community have had on San Francisco nightlife — an impact which now extends to the entire west coast’s, and arguably global, dance culture — the writer paid particular attention to the influence of El Circo:

El Circo has fused a musical style and a fashion sense that are major departures from the old rave scene. [They are credited] with creating the postapocalyptic fashions that many now associate with Burning Man. Most of the original El Circo fashions, which convey both tribalism and a sense of whimsy, were designed by member Tiffa Novoa.”

Here are some of the El Circo costumes from their 2005 shows:

That same year, just two years out of college, I stumbled into the role of production manager for a newly-formed, L.A.-based vaudeville cirque troupe called, Lucent Dossier. Through that initial involvement with Lucent I would meet many other circus groups, including El Circo, who were by then based in San Francisco along with The Yard Dogs Road Show and Vau De Vire Society. There was also March Fourth Marching Band in Portland, Clan Destino in Santa Barbara, and Cirque Berzerk, and Mutaytor in L.A. As these acts grew, the I-5 Freeway became a central artery of culture, pumping a distinct combination of art, music, fashion, and performance up and down the west coast. A social scene evolved around these circus troupes the same way the punk subculture sprang up around the bands that defined it. For lack of another term, I’ve referred to this subculture over the years simply as “circus.”

In Freaks and Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus, J. Dee Hill delves into the history and sociology underpinning the alternative culture circus resurgence:

Traditional forms of the tribe, like the village, have almost completely disappeared. Fewer and fewer people live in small communities where their daily interactions bring them in contact with the people they are deeply connected to, either spiritually or economically. Workers in modern corporations are replaceable and no longer bound to each other by the experience of a shared interdependence. The modern individual is preoccupied simultaneously by isolating, immediate concerns of personal survival and the larger, often intangible concerns of war, terror and economic change as transmitted by a now-seamless global media network. The intermediate space of community is not easily reached.

Not by accident, many of the newer, emergent forms of culture include a specifically tribal aspect. A return to tattooing, sacrification, fire performance and drumming, as well as a renewed interest in ritual, has occurred side-by-side with the formation of intentional (if temporary) communities such as the Rainbow Family gatherings and Burning Man festival.

It was at these kinds of festivals, in clubs and at underground raves, that alternative circus acts began appearing in the early 90′s. The performers were young, crazy “freaks” without any formal training who used circus costumes, skills or themes as performative means for expressing their own exaggerated personalities. Many went on to gain formal training or to study the history of the genre, but essentially their relationship to conventional circuses resembled that of outsider art to mainstream art circles. They didn’t really relate to the modern-day circus. They took their cues from something much, much older: the caravan-pulling gypsies.

The phenomenon of alternative circus performance can be seen as the theatrical dimension to one generation’s wholesale rediscovery of the concept of tribe.

And the inexorable feather trend is inextricably linked with this trajectory.

Novoa co-founded El Circo along with Marisa Youlden, a jewelry designer whose pieces accompanied Novoa’s costumes from the beginning. Youlden first used feathers in her pieces in 2000 and recalls this was when Novoa began creating elaborate feather headdresses for the performers. “At first, this was all costuming,” The 2005 Bay Guardian article quoted Matty Dowlen, El Circo’s operations manager, and performer, “but now it’s who I am.” The aesthetic Novoa first envisioned for the El Circo performers evolved into the prêt-à-porter of the circus subculture and became its signature style. Feathers, which had come to define El Circo costumes, became an integral component of the subculture’s street fashion:

Yup, that last one is me. You can’t see the feather in this shot, but trust me, it was there. In the early to mid-aughts (when the photos above were taken) the feather was as de rigueur a cultural signifier within the circus scene as the safety pin was for punks in the late 1970s and early 80s. In fact, back before it was so commonplace as to lose meaning (or induce a national feather shortage), condescending terms for those sporting the look sprang up within the subculture: “Feather mafia,” was one I heard thrown around; “Trustafarian peacock” even made it into UrbanDictionary.com. And then, something else began to happen.

In 2005, Mötley Crüe picked circus as the concept for their comeback tour:

The next year, Panic! At the Disco won an MTV Video Music Award for their circus-themed, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” video:

A theme they then extended into their “Nothing Rhymes With Circus” tour:

And in 2008, the reigning queen of pop herself at the time, Britney Spears, came out with an album titled, Circus, and ensuing tour of the same theme:

Throughout pop culture, traces of circus’s influence would keep surfacing. The same year as Britney’s Circus album, this was the ad for that season’s America’s Next Top Model:

Or take this ad for the launch of Microsoft’s short-lived Kin mobile device from last year:

The proliferation of circus within pop culture has been directly tied to its growth in underground culture, and being in an underground circus troupe during the height of this infiltration offered backstage access to the proceedings. For example: The circus featured in the Kin ad is March Fourth Marching Band. The circus performers in the Panic! At the Disco music video and tour were members of the troupe I managed. The performers who went on tour with Mötley Crüe would become Lucent Dossier members, as well. Last year, Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t be Tamed” music video featured a winged Cyrus alongside a troupe of be-feathered backup dancers inside a giant birdcage:

Which bears a distinct resemblance to the birdcage (not to mention the aesthetic) Lucent Dossier used prominently in aerial performances during their 2008 residency at the Edison nightclub in Downtown LA.

Especially in Los Angeles, where the Downtown underground and the Hollywood pop culture industry coexist within such proximity of one another, their crossover was inevitable.

Which brings us back to fashion. In 2002, designers Cassidy Haley and Evan Sugerman, who’d met at Burning Man the year before, founded a fashion label called, Ernte. Two years later, Novoa joined Ernte Fashion Systems, parlaying the aesthetic vision she’d first developed for the circus stage into high fashion. Tragically, in October, 2007, at 32-years-old, Novoa suffered a fatal drug reaction while working in Bali, Indonesia. By then, Ernte had become a globally-renowned haute couture label, retailing in high-end boutiques like Maxfield in Los Angeles, Collete in Paris, and Loveless in Tokyo. Below are some shots of Novoa’s work:

In 2005, Haley went on to form a new label, Skingraft Designs, with Jonny Cota, and later Katie Kay, who was a partner from 2007 – 2010. All three had circus pedigree. Cota and Haley had performed with El Circo, and Kay was one of the original members in Lucent Dossier, for which Haley and Cota would occasionally moonlight. Some of Skingraft’s early work is pictured below.

Since opening their flagship store in Downtown L.A., in 2009, Skingraft’s “post-apocalyptic couture” has graced the celebrity skins of Adam Lambert and The Black Eyed Peas. Rhianna wore a custom Skingraft headdress in her “Rockstar 101″ music video:

And both Britney Spears’ and Beyoncé’s most recent videos are dripping in Skingraft designs. As Skingraft has evolved into an established name within the vocabulary of Los Angeles fashion, countless other apparel designers with circus origins have sprung up in the wings, as it were.

Over the years since Tiffa first put feathers on the bodies of circus performers, inspiring others to follow suit, hundreds of thousands, if not millions have been exposed to the style at Burning Man, and the E3 gaming convention where El Circo would perform; at Coachella, and the Grammy’s afterparty, where Lucent Dossier performed; at countless night clubs stretching from the depths of Downtown L.A. up the length of the Pacific coast. Hollywood stylists partying on Saturday night woke up on Monday with new inspiration. And circus costumers became famed fashion designers. In the end, this cross-pollination laid the foundation for the exact kind of tipping point Malcolm Gladwell describes in his seminal, 2000 book exploring the social mechanics that lead trends to “tip” into mass, cultural phenomena. The Tipping Point begins with the words:

For Hush Puppies — the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight crepe sole — the Tipping Point came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives — Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis — ran into a stylist from New York who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan. “We were being told,” Baxter recalls, “that there were resale shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were going to the Ma and Pa stores, the little stores that still carried them, and buying them up.” Baxter and Lewis were baffled at first. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback. “We were told that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes himself,” Lewis says. “I think it’s fair to say that at the time we had no idea who Isaac Mizrahi was.”

By the fall of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. First the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies in his spring collection. Then another Manhattan deisgner, Anna Sui called, wanting shoes for her show as well. In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound — the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand — on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique. While he was still painting and putting up shelves, the actor Pee-wee Herman walked in and asked for a couple pairs. “It was total word of mouth,” Fitzgerald remembers.

In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs of the classic Hush Puppies, and the next year it sold four times that, and the year after that, still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple of the wardrobe of the young American male. In 1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner at Lincoln Center, and the president of the firm stood up on the stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and accepted an award for an achievement that — as he would be the first to admit — his company had almost nothing to do with. Hush Puppies had suddenly exploded, and it all started with a handful of kids in the East Village and Soho.

How did this happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren’t deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. Then the fad spread to two fashion designers who used to shoes to peddle something else — haute couture. The shoes were an incidental touch. No one was trying to make Hush Puppies a trend. Yet, somehow, that’s exactly what happened. The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. How does a thirty-dollar pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters to every mall in America in the space of two years?

Right now, the roosters know, but they’re not telling.

__________________________________

Special thanks for helping fill in the details and history for this post go to: Arin Ingraham, Siouxzen Kang, Marisa Youlden, and Cassidy Haley.

MirrorLAnd is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, except Alice is now in her 20s, just out of college, and falling down the rabbit-hole working as an assistant in the film industry. Until she lands in the wonderland of LA’s underground circus. Plus, there’s free music, and lots of fashion and art. This is a project I’ve been working on for years and am thrilled to finally share it with you!

Get to MirrorLAnd….

If you’re just joining us, here’s the top 5 things that happened here this year:

1. Why Iron Man Is The First 21st Century Superhero
For the past 70 years we have been living with a 20th century version of the superhero. Until now. Though the Iron Man character was originally created in the early 60s, his most recent incarnation is really the first Millennial superhero. (Then Jon Favreau, the director of Iron Man, retweeted it!! Craziness!)

2. The First 21st Century Vampires
Just as the new Iron Man has broken the mould constricting the superhero archetype, True Blood’s vampires offer a compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman relationship to it. (MetaFilter gave it love, too.)

3. How The Internet Killed The Rock Star (…Not The Way You Think)
At this point, to say the Internet’s done away with anything else when it comes to music is, admittedly, a cliché, but, nevertheless, there’s one more, less-publicized casualty: the rock star. Zoe Keating agreed.

4. Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience
“Transmedia” has become the new buzzword for multi-platform narratives, but in the digital age, transmedia isn’t just how we consume entertainment narratives, it’s how we experience the narrative of our lives. This post later became the basis for a panel with me, Marta Kagan, and Jan Libby, at the FutureM conference in Boston.

5. How To Stand In the Face of Powerlessness For A New Generation
As a generation, mine has not known powerlessness. We’ve had so little practice at facing situations where we couldn’t just do something; at fighting them, at living through them. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is my generation’s unfortunate turn to figure out how to stand in the face of powerlessness.

Honorable mention:

The Glitch Mob Drops The New-Tron Bomb
This happened so late in the year that it didn’t quite have time to catch up, but my idea for a Tron:Legacy remix video scored to The Glitch Mob’s music and edited by Khameleon808 is still the 7th most popular thing that happened on Social-Creature in 2010. (It even got into Wired.com.)

Ps. Thanks to Boston Innovation for naming me one of “Five Fresh Faces Leading Boston’s Creative Revolution.” Though I seem to be splitting my time between Boston and LA the past couple of years, (I wish Facebook would let you put “It’s complicated” under “Current city”), it is, of course, an honor to play even a little part in any Boston-based revolution.

See you next year!!

Enjoy!

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True Blood’s Anna Paquin wearing SkinGraft blackbird jacket in the current Venice Magazine.

If, in the course of watching True Blood, you’ve found yourself thinking “damn, those vampires look hot,” — and, seriously, who hasn’t? — here’s (well, one reason) why. The stylist for the “postmodern” vampire series has been consistently dressing its characters in the sartorial creations of “post-apocalyptic couture” design house (and long-time homies): SkinGraft.

There’s more shots out there, but you get the gist. You can’t really be a vampire if you’re not rockin the rockstar-wear, and SkinGraft is it: Adam Lambert is a well-known SkinGraft devotee, as are the Black Eyed Peas, and Rhianna even wore a custom SkinGraft headdress in the video for her song, literally titled, “Rockstar 101.”

I’ve written about True Blood’s seriously brilliant “transmedia” marketing campaigns before (1, 2), created by Campfire Agency, which have sought to bring the fictional world of the show off the screen and into reality, and I’ll even admit I’ve done a double take seeing a guy wearing one of those subtly faded “Bon Temps Football” t-shirts out on the street. Now, I’m hearing there’s rumblings of a plan underway to sell not just show merchandise but some of the real-life designer clothes the characters wear — including SkinGraft’s, of course — through the show’s website. Pretty awesome!

If you can’t wait that long — and you really shouldn’t, even if you’ve got forever — you can find SkinGraft HERE.

And P.S., if you’re in LA, keep an eye out for the upcoming opening of Gather, a new boutique by Katie Kay, partner and former co-designer at SkinGraft, located at 630 S. Main St. in downtown.

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]]> http://social-creature.com/skin-blood/feed 0 http://social-creature.com/greed-is-good-sex-is-easy-youth-is-forever http://social-creature.com/greed-is-good-sex-is-easy-youth-is-forever#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:33:22 +0000 jenks http://social-creature.com/?p=1131

Just saw the trailer for the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation: The Informers – Check it (if you’re seeing this in a reader, click HERE to see the video).

Ellis is one of my favorite writers. There’s a lot of people out there who enjoy his writing in a disturbingly literal way (particularly the people who like American Psycho the best of his work), but I think he’s one of the most explicit satirists around. He’s like the modern Evelyn Waugh. There’s an irony that’s as sharp as Patrick Bateman‘s  machete cutting through all of Ellis’s books. His condemnation of the modern, over-privileged, narcissistic, instant-gratification obsessed yet terminally insatiable, superficial, alienated, self-destructive, overindulged, psychologically damaged society, is wrought precisely through a celebration of its most hyperblolically psychotic, emotionally anesthetized elements.

And for some reason there’s something inexplicably captivating about these stories about these characters for whom inhumanity comes effortlessly. I’m no psychologist, so I have no clue why THAT’s the case, but that Ellis’s stories–the seminal of which are some 30 years old now–continue to resonate with each new generation, is a testament to the persistence of this pathology.

Watching the Informers trailer I remembered my first introduction to Bret Easton Ellis: renting Less Than Zero back in high school. At the time the story was  already a decade old but its glimmering bleakness was still just as compelling. Looking back on the preview for Less Than Zero, which came out in 1987, it’s kind of a trip:

In contrast to the Informers, Less Than Zero’s version of pretty much the exact same story, told three decades ago, seems so sincere! Almost quaint. And yet Less Than Zero was considered so controversial when it came out. Perhaps in that time we have steadily been moving more and more towards the society Bret Easton Ellis always envisioned as a satirical cautionary tale. After all, the Informers isn’t just an 80′s “period” film. As unimaginatively literal as I thought the film adaptations of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction were, Informers looks like it might actually deliver on the kind of phenomenally allegoric treatment an Ellis tale deserves! Can’t wait to see it.