“I’m interested in designing for posterity. People who buy McQueen are going to hand the clothes down to their children, and that’s very rare today.”
—Alexander McQueen (Harper’s Bazaar)

images taken from nytimes.com

all images taken from www.exergian.com

natalie portman is featured in the febuary issue of Elle UK and she looks simply gorgeous. i hate that sophisticated magazines (and by sophisticated, i mean magazines that serve a higher purpose than celebrities without makeup and this omgz! teen talk that so many magazines are falling prey to) are focused on celebs but at least mags like Elle (and her international sister editions) are featuring actresses with talent, a brain and that reflect an traditional ideology of what it means to be a performer and a woman. These women are not flash-in-the-pan crap actors. They are not featured in OK! or any brand of American trash mags.

And the interview/writing skills of the Elle staff members are admirable and (aside from the giddy writer that interviewed Alec Baldwin a couple of months ago) intelligent. They don’t go all “OMGZ! NATALIE!” in gaudy font and they don’t harass about diet routines or drama…they treat the celebrity interview like any other journalistic piece–with respect.

liya kebede, elle italia. the third image is my favorite because of it’s tiny glimpse of a rollerblade underneath her gown. art with a surprise. to me, this is what fashion editorials should accomplish. it should be more than the dress, the price, the model; rather, it should be artistic all the way around—what do i look at first, the model, the dress, the shoes, the background, etc? Hidden surprises would keep readers guessing/assuming/analyzing and make fashion a more approachable yet continually stylized art form.

source: concreteloop.com

Source: Oh No They Didn’t and en.rian.ru/culture

very reminiscent of old hollywood. bryce dallas howard has a little vivian leigh in her.

the young victoria

emily blunt is always gorgeous.

Here’s the first look at How I Met Your Mother’s Jan 11th, and 100th, episode, “Girls vs. Suits” which will feature the show’s first-ever musical number. 65 dancers! A 50 piece orchestra! Neil Patrick Harris singing and dancing! Love, love, love this show.

Harris says the episode feels like “an old MGM musical” and the show’s creators hint that viewers will get big time clues to the identity of “the mother”. Finally!

Source: USA Today
Images: Cliff Lipson, CBS

I believe that this is a step in the right direction for Disney and its “princess” film phenomenon. This film finally shows a true working class girl (not a technically rich girl like Cinderella reduced to poor servitude by a wicked stepmother) who has a dream beyond a prince: she wants to own her own restaurant. After hearing the same fairy-tale story as her white upper-class friend, she wants something more out of life than a happy ending. She wishes on a star for her father’s dream (and hers) to come true. Even after working two jobs over the course of her lifetime, she saves every penny towards that dream. The message behind this, as clearly stated by her father, is that you can wish all you want but ain’t nothing gonna come true without a little hard work. Sounds good and it certainly is true; it’s just sad that it takes a black character to bring this side/message of Disney out.

The film is almost made for all the little girls who grew up watching all of the Disney Renaissance films (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, etc) as there are moments where they hint at inside jokes that viewers of these films would get or (worse so), provide a dark element of voodoo and graphic companions that certainly is frightening. It’s clear that Disney is trying to age with its audience so it will be interesting to see where this will end up.

The characters are stereotypes and it’s bothersome at some level, but every Disney film has that and I don’t think it’s interrupting to the story. What is interesting is whether or not the “prince/frog” is African American and whether or not that matters. What does this say to little African American girls about African American boys/men? About their prince? About whether or not they deserve to have one?

The “princess” isn’t really a princess…and in the end, she changes her dream. I don’t want to give away spoilers…but is this expected? Is this what we want?

The production also will be offering “audio and caption devices, known as D-Scriptive and I-Caption, free to blind, low-vision, deaf or hard-of-hearing audience members.” The new technological additions added an additional $30,000 to the production, but it will be completely worth the expensive.

I love inclusive theatre.

nytimes.com