Le Sportsac Truffle Dot Ryan Baby Bag
Oh baby! How cute is this Le Sportsac Truffle Dot Ryan Baby Bag? The company is certainly not new to designing functional bags like this, but a few stand out in the pack thanks to their ebullient prints. The charming polka dots on this partner well with the brilliant pink backdrop, and the bag itself is versatile enough to carry now, during summer and even into fall. Loaded with functional details, like pockets, an adjustable strap and changing pad, this bag is a great gift for a new or overwhelmed mom on the go. Available for $128 at Shopbop.
Happy Memorial Day
While we just got home from enjoying a wonderful Memorial Day cookout with my family, Vlad and I wanted to take the time to wish all of you a Happy Memorial Day! Memorial Day is a day to remember those that have served and given their lives for their country.
Memorial Day also marks the beginning of summer! We hope you had great weather, great food, and great company while remembering all those who died while in the military service.
Linea Pelle Lola Large Tote
Not just your ordinary carryall Linea Pelle delivers a bag with flair – the Lola Large Tote. Usually when you are in the market for a large tote you have to settle for a shapeless bag with handles that bear a remarkable resemblance to a shopping bag. This tote has classic style that makes it the go-to bag no matter what season it is. Available in black washed Italian leather this oversized tote (17 ½” wide by 14 ½” high) sports a zebra fabric lining, an inside zippered pocket and top magnetic closure. If you order this striking handbag for yourself it will come with a signature Linea Pelle dust bag for storage. Give it as a gift and it’ll be gift wrapped for free. Available at Linea Pelle for $495.
Megan Fox with her Linea Pelle Lola Large Tote
Anya Hindmarch Ipanema Straw Clutch
The Girl from Ipanema was clearly a stylish gal if she inspired pieces like this Anya Hindmarch Ipanema Straw Clutch. Adorned with an assortment of cool green gemstones and lightly embroidered, this chic straw clutch shows just how glamorous an earthy bag can actually be. It’s perfect to wear with everything from sundresses to cutoffs and T-shirts. Also in black and orange. Available for $264 at Nordstrom.
L.A.M.B. Signature Zip Satchel
Coack Kristin Woven Leather Clutch
Now that Memorial Day is here and we’re all free to start wearing white again (seriously, does anyone even follow those fashion rules anymore?), it’s time for a nice white handbag. The Coach Kristin Woven Leather Clutch is a sweet little piece perfect for holding summer necessities. The woven leather has a nice texture that’s similar to a woven raffia bag, but much more classy. The interior of the clutch is a sweet blush pink, which kind of reminds me of bunny ears. There’s a zippered pocket inside to help keep things organized, and the bag closes with a simple clasp. Available at Coach for $348.
Alexander Wang Jena Laser-Cut Leather Clutch
It’s not edgy in the most obvious way, but Alexander Wang’s Jena Laser-Cut Leather Clutch boasts a rough-and-tumble quality nonetheless. Maybe it’s the weathered looking leather, which plays well with the angled zipper details on the wide flap. Zipper details have lately been everywhere, so seeing them here is no surprise. They add a jolt of hardware to simple outfits, especially those utilitarian-meets-downtown-chic styles like minidresses and sharp booties in monochromatic hues. Available for $525 at Net-a-Porter.
HandbagsMaMa.com Interview with Graphic Designer Michael Rock Part 2
HandbagsMaMa.com Interview with Graphic Designer Michael Rock Part 2
Today’s feature—Louis Vuitton handbags HandbagsMaMa.com Interview with Graphic Designer Michael Rock Part 2
HandbagsMaMa.com: Whose views come first in your design for cultural institutions: audiences, artists, curators, trustees even?
It is a typical design project, you always have a divided and multiplied audience, although maybe it is even more complex in a museum. You are dealing first and foremost with the public who use the museum, but then you have the artists who show there, the curators, the board of trustees, the director and his or her staff. Ideally everyone keeps the absolute end in mind, but this is often not the case. The public are probably the last people to notice the design, but ultimately it must function for them.
Have your designs been subject to focus groups?
Not so much in the museum context, it is more typical for them to have gone through some kind of branding exercise before they approach us. But I have yet to find one of those that is that useful. They are usually full of suggestions that you could probably have thought up on your own if you had had a couple of minutes, such as people don’t like to go to the Brooklyn Museum because it is in Brooklyn! The result is usually along the lines of ‘our goal is excellence’ — pretty generic statements.
Do you personally regret the developments that have made cultural institutions behave more like businesses?
No, I think it’s the nature of our times.
Do you see your input as part of this process?
Absolutely, we are an integral part of that. I tend not to get nostalgic about some time when culture was pure, because I doubt that there was ever such a time. In general, culture doesn’t work that way.
Do you me design to distinguish cultural institutions from commercial ones?
To a certain extent, I think that cultural institutions are a bit softer in terms of what they can do. They don’t nec¬essarily want to be as crass in presenting their organiza¬tion and they may be more accepting of certain visual ideas, but these are all generalizations.
Did you ever feel that you are protecting a cultural institu¬tion through design?
No, in my experience directors of cultural institutions see them as extremely flexible organic organizations. They are not to be protected, but perfected. We improve on, focus or sharpen, rather than preserve.
Have you ever felt that your work has been compromised by a corporate sponsor?
No, but a lot of organizations we work for are privately funded and that raises interesting questions. For instance we just completed the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, a museum that was paid for by one person. It is an institution that anyone can go to, a gift to downtown Dallas of a sort, but it is sponsored by an individual who has total say on what happens there. Personally, I don’t think the public are compromised by that. It was the condition of creating the museum.
Are there any institutions that you do feel are compromised? Many people would cite the Guggenheim …
The Guggenheim is seen as the dark knight of museums and Thomas Krens as a figure who has destroyed culture by the introduction of commerce, but I don’t agree. He’s operating a kind of experiment, exploring what happens when you use the cultural value of a very well known organization as leverage. I can accept this because I don’t believe art was ever pure. It has always been used politi¬cally, as status and leverage. High art was first intro¬duced to American consumers through department stores in the nineteenth century. The idea of a pure cultural space is a myth. Conditions are different now, but they are not any better or worse than before.
Have directors and museum boards become more aware of the issues around identity design over the period in which you have done this kind of work?
In general, the overall awareness of identity and branding has increased immensely. I think that this has been influenced by a couple of things. One is the devel¬opment of the Internet — websites have made people aware that the way something looks is part of the product — and, at the same time, branding started being taught in American business schools as part of the curriculum. Anyone who has been through Harvard Business School in the last fifteen years has had a long, very evolved discussion about the meaning of branding. They will probably have had a lecture from Martha Stewart. Businessmen have become much more aware of the value-adding quality of the visual.
Do you look at other institutions in the field? Do you feel you are placing your product?
Yes, very much so. Over the years we have collected a huge database of information about different cultural institutions, that is part of our expertise. We have a design presentation that starts with an exhaustive survey, encompassing the naming of institutions, their look, how they use colour and typography and so on.
In terms of the Brooklyn Museum, which institutions did you include in your comparative survey?
We started off comparing it to all museums worldwide, looking at 300 different logos. Then we narrowed it down to museums of the city and other museums with ency¬clopaedic collections. We also looked at different strate¬gies for naming, full names, acronyms and so forth. As a counterpoint, we also compared it to other kinds of institutions that aren’t cultural, like Target or Nike.
Are there any of your own cultural identity projects that you would pick out as particularly successful?
Different ones stand out for different reasons. A while ago we did the identity for P.S. 1, which is a contempo¬rary art institution in New York based in an old school building in Queens. I think theirs has been an extremely successful graphic programme. It is really simple and works in a very straightforward way.
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Lady Gaga Implements the Stud Trend on her Hermes Birkin
I have decided that Lady Gaga performs makeovers on her Hermes Birkins just for us. She wants the handbag lovers of the world to get a rise out of what she is doing to her bag. And how can you not? Her last Hermes Birkin was taken over by what looked like a Sharpie marker with a message to her Japanese fans.
This Birkin has been taken over with studs, and not just any studs, seemingly sharp studs. The kind of studs that can poke you and get an “Ouch” reaction from your mouth. And when you inspect the bag closely, they are not perfectly set apart, rather tried to be somewhat in pattern but it is a bit of a free-form design.
What I wonder is if Lady Gaga sits in her spacious first class seat as she flies from location to location with a glue gun and a bag of studs working on her handbag-art-project. You know, with anyone else I would be shocked, but this is Lady Gaga. What else can you expect? Her outfits and her entire persona is there for shock value, so at least she is staying true to herself and making sure each and every item she wears gets the attention she is seeking. Oh yea, her shoes look like horse’s hooves… I’m just saying.
What do you think about Lady Gaga customizing her Hermes Birkins?
In defense of Sex and the City 2
If you have the ability to read, a functioning internet connection and at least a passing interest in female-focused pop culture, you’ve probably read some truly and utterly scathing reviews of Sex and the City 2. I certainly did before going to see it with my best girlfriend on Saturday night, and when you combine their description of the movie with the residual anger that I’m still having over how face-numbingly awful the first SATC movie was, my expectations were so low as to be almost nonexistent.
And then, a weird thing happened: I sorta liked it. I grinned for almost the entire two-and-a-half hours, laughed out loud on more than a few occasions, and may or may not have gasped something along the lines of “OH MY GOD IT’S THE DIOR NEWSPRINT DRESS” loud enough for several rows of women to turn around and look at me, even though I already knew that particular item was going to be in the film. And it all made me wonder – what were all of those critics so angry about anyway?
Don’t worry, there won’t be any spoilers in my review. I promise.
Let’s be clear: I have an emotional attachment to Sex and the City. I watched the series for the first time in the months before I left home for college and re-watched it dozens more times in the months after. Without the show, I don’t know if I would have made it through my first year away from home or my first real broken heart.
I’ve never met someone that could beat me at Sex and the City trivia, which is a real board game that I actually own. I wrote a 20-page research paper on gender norms in the series for one of my last classes in journalism school, which means that if it hadn’t been for Sex and the City, not only might I not have made it through my freshman year, but I quite literally might not have graduated. The way that the first movie deviated from the heart and intelligence of the show in favor of upping the Sparkly Shoe Factor made me want to punch people (and when I say “people,” I mean Michael Patrick King) in the face.
And, in fairness, there were a few loathsome things about the sequel as well. Those that criticize the film’s run time are correct to do so, as are those that find its Orientalist depiction of Middle Eastern culture offensive and lazy – it was both. The movie, set mostly in a technicolor version of Abu Dhabi that was apparently dreamed up by someone that had never been there, showcased four grown women acting like entitled, xenophobic, slightly racist a-holes and managed to validate almost every Ugly American tourist stereotype except for the old socks-and-sandals trope. If they had managed to scrap most of the trip to the UAE and cut the run time by about 45 minutes, the movie would have been infinitely better.
Parts of it, however, were still pretty great. Grown women talking intelligently to one and other about the changing face of marriage and the difficulties of modern motherhood is still a rare thing in mainstream entertainment, and both of those subjects were central themes in the film, as is the pressure often faced by those women that choose to remain childless. A lot of it may have been covered up at times by hacky slapstick and Charlotte’s inability to stay on her camel, but the serious stuff was all there, just as it would have been during the series. That any of those subjects can make it into a big-budget summer flick is something to which I’ll gladly raise my glass.
Then there’s the fact that, at it’s core, the movie was simply a lot of fun. The clothes were gorgeous (not to mention a very effective commercial for Halston), as we all knew they would be, and there were enough winks to the details of the series that any serious fan could have been easily entertained by them alone. I even like some of the things I knew I shouldn’t have – all four women got up to sing “I am Woman” at an Abu Dhabi karaoke bar and I enjoyed it, no matter how hokey it was. And Liza Minnelli doing a cover of “Single Ladies” with two Liza impersonators as backup dancers? I hope that I one day go to a gay wedding that fabulous. In its best moments, Sex and the City 2 was a high-gloss romp through a certain version of female fantasy land.
Therein lies the problem with the reviews: most of the movie reviewers out there are male. The overwhelming majority of them, in fact. They’re people that don’t have a personal history with these characters like the one that I shared above or the ones that most of you certainly have. There’s no recognition of the emotional significance of a particular Dior dress when they watch the film – it’s just another weird outfit from Patricia Field that seems contrived to a lot of men because it’s not the way that the women in their lives choose to dress. And those are the most reasonable of the critics – I prefer to not even mention the ones that wholeheartedly dismiss “female” problems as petty or movies designed to appeal to women as inherently awful, implying that women aren’t interesting.
As far as I can tell, though, the reason that a lot of male reviewers hated Sex and the City 2 is the exact same reason that a lot of them loved Transformers but I thought it was the worst movie that I’d ever seen in my entire life: Transformers isn’t my fantasy world. Sex and the City 2 isn’t theirs. The difference is that I don’t have the power to call their fantasy stupid in any meaningful way, yet they’ve taken every opportunity to dump on mine and disguise it as critical acuity.
Not that the movie is without major flaws – it’s far from it. I wish that the writers had depicted the women (and the Middle East) in a more positive and truthful way, and I wish that the nuance and guts that were present in the show were more often present in the films. We all know that when movie studios and big budgets get involved, however, things usually end badly, and Sex and the City 2 ended somewhat less badly than I had expected. Here’s to low expectations and pleasant surprises.
