photographic roundup: miu miu, lady gaga, vanity fair, and a reader request

 today i have a bit of a reader request.  the idea is this: that those who see this post leave a beautiful picture (or collection thereof!) of their own in the comments, or a link to a picture roundup of their own.

shoes by miu miu, source unknown, via shoelust

without a doubt i spend most of my time on the internet looking for beautiful, fascinating, or inspiring images.  in fact i find so many each week that i’ve decided, instead of posting willy-nilly, to pull together my favourites every friday and post a weekly ‘photographic roundup’.  images are pretty much the reason i started using the internet.  i have thousands on my computer, and i organise them more obsessively than i do anything else in my life.  i’m not sure whether it’s the art history background or my own special brand of crazy, but i get terribly upset when i can’t figure out who made an image, where i sourced it from originally, etc., etc..  i have so many fantastic visual pieces on my computer that it seems a shame to let them just gather digital dust.  i feel like they should go back out into netspace for others to look and wonder at.

in the same vein i would love to see what other poeple have stumbled over and wondered at this week, and to create in the comments a sort of digital exquisite corpse.  the beautiful thing about this is that everybody wanders the net differently, seeks out different things, uses different searchwords; i’m fascinated by the bredth possible in an image collection put together by different people and the things they find lovely. 

   

still from alejandro, by lady gaga and steven klein, 2010, via fatshionista 

(i love this photograph.  it is, incidentally, not a photograph at all, but rather a still from lady gaga’s video for alejandro, depicting the artist with one of the actor/dancers in the clip.  it’s such a fantastic image, though.  this incredibly intimate pose, but with assigned gender-roles thoroughly reversed.  i know people make a fuss about the fact that the men in this clip wear heels a lot, but (as i will likely get around to exploring further in another article) i don’t think clothes actually count for that much subversion on their own.  it’s the body language that makes this subversive, not the garments; the publicisation, in a popular forum, of a queer reimagining of nominally heterosexual sex.  plus it’s just beautiful.  i don’t find much of klein’s work particularly engaging, but i have to admit, i love this video.  and i think the madonna comparisons really fail to take into account such blatently queer moments as this.  fatshionista, by the by, has quite an interesting comparison between alejandro and madonna’s express yourself on her blog.)  

 

naomi watts for vanity fair italy, may 2010, via outsapop 

so – any lovely pictures to add?

wearable art: shoes by noritaka tatehana

i would really, really love a pair of these shoes by noritaka tatehana.  they’re like pieces of art.  they are pieces of art.  i would put them on my mantlepiece (when i have a mantlepiece of my very own); i’d stare at them adoringly; perhaps, every once in a while, when i felt like being particularly amazonian, i’d take them out to see a particularly spectacular work of avant-garde dance or fashion.

i am looking forward so very much to seeing what he does next.

wearable art: for the love of libertines

oh (my) dior…how i love your new collection…

 

the hair.  the tule.  the skirts and capes – and hats! – and those slightly blackened lips that just fade out at the edges…

 

and all by galliano, which makes a lot of sense, when you think about it.

some of them get a bit too cheap-boudoire for my tastes, but much of this collection is divine.  i particularly like the influence of a certain schoolboy aesthetic – the long shorts, the tough boots, hats and caps.  i do have a very devout passion for the intermingling of boy and girl in their extremities…

 

galliano’s own runway appearance sadly resembled a rather greasy pirate, rather than his usual gentlemanly deviant, but that’s forgivable.  the rest of the show more than makes up for it.

 

plus…well, anybody who’s spoken to me on the subject knows that i have what i consider to be an entirely healthy predeliction for red boots; and (though i couldn’t find a detail picture of them in the right colour) if they go over the knee (which certain of these do)…that is oh-so-much better…

(all images taken from vogue.com.au)