hang loose

Put them worries on the shelf man!




aps xx

you tell her, juergen teller!

"We’ve got things in common, smoking drinking and women. Photography just gets us out of the house."
                               -Juergen Teller

If I could be one fashion photographer Juergen Teller is who I'd be. (Yeeeeah sorry Terry Richardson).

Check here for a short interview with him on Nowness (thanks Sandy).

xx
Lou

a couple of my favourite things

Hydrangeas are my favourite! And making cakes too! Hydrangeas + cake = AHHH. Gorgeous tutorial here for a hydrangea cake by i am baker. One day I will attempt this. Probably not anytime soon, but one day...


xx aps

Girls, father, son, holy ghost

I must have blogged about the band Girls before. Er, actually come to think of it... maybe I didn't. Sometimes I get confused with what I put on my mental list of things to blog, and what I end up remembering to blog.
Anyway.... Girls most definitely should be blogged about, and here I am finally getting round to it, because they are AWESOME. Girls is quickly becoming a favourite band of mine. One of my favourite songs ever is their song Lust for Life (its so catchy and happy!) from their 2009 debut album (appropriately named Album), and I love their super stylish music video with sunny colours, pretty people and pretty dresses.
This song Honey Bunny is from their 2011 album Father, Son, Holy Ghost. I LOVE IT.




 aps xx

much love monday

photo from muchlove

Happy much love monday!

I love Hel Looks, its the first street style blog I ever came across and my long time favourite even next to The Sartorialist and NZ's local Street and City Photos. Its based in Helsinski, and is the sole reason I often wish I could run away/elope to/live in Finland.



What do you love today?


aps xx

new wardrobe staples

  

 

Moochi! I love Moochi!

aps xx

girls

 

Kelly Thompson is one of my favourite (and local NZ) illustrators.

aps xx

tom ford knows sex appeal

I am studying for my Visual Culture exam at the moment and was researching some of my favourite clothing/fashion ads. Tom Ford came to mind immediately. If you browse through his campaigns his use of nudity to sell is explicit and also fantastic.

Featured above are my a few of my favourite photos from Tom Ford's eye wear campaigns. The signifiers are simple, as are the denotations, as are the connotations. We are a dangerously fast paced world- if anything is too complex we will grow bored and utter "poo poo".

The young woman is model Freja Beha Erichsen and the young man is the much adored Nicholas Hoult (from 'Skins' and 'A Single Man' etc). Hoult (especially in the last image) seems very much like a young Tom Ford. I just love Ford's eye for colours (yellow, blue, black) here because they are slightly off mainstream elegance. As academic Raymond Williams states, "we do not buy an object but social respect...beauty...success". These ads are not about the eye wear itself but what purchasing these Tom Ford brand eye wear means for us. It is a search for obtaining a real object that embodies our ideological "webs of significance" (Clifford Geertz). Once purchased we have the hope that we will be the envy of others however, all this is FALSE, FALSE, FALSE as you cannot BUY social class . Advertising is a "magic system" built on "myth"...unfortunately.

The connotations of youthful elegance and sex appeal that many of us will find in these ads reveal society's generalised ideals and wants. Many smaller signs within the ad create the one global signified. It's pretty fantastic how much these images tell us. Yet, at the same time, does this mean we are a highly superficial society, focused on looks and money and youth?

Ha. Tom Ford knows it, you know it and I know it.

xx

Lou



H for hydrangea

Have you ever seen flowers so lovely and bright? Okay, yes, most flowers are brighter than these...but hydrangeas - they are the ultimate flower of peace, love, happiness and even fashion (see, look at them in the Mulberry campaign!) My hostel doesn't have any so at night I used to pluck some from a large and under-appreciated bush off a front lawn of some student flat. Flowers are free, it wasn't stealing.

aps xx

running songs

If sometimes you feel like running away from everything, these songs are an ideal soundtrack.

aps xx

we never did too much talking anyway

aps xx

the state i'm in

FRIDAY!

aps xx

favourite things

 I love markets. For various obvious reasons, the coming together of the community, the friends, food, music. And finding perfectly different pieces not sold in physical shops. I also love my necklaces - some of the ones pictured are ones I picked up at a market recently. There's another market near us coming up on thursday and I am soo there. Markets! Excitement!

aps xx

no i won't

aps xx

don't stop me now

one of my favourites.



aps xx

a dose of life affirmation

aps xx

of west egg, east london

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Great Gatsby

aps xx