the blog quebecois

There's been a palace revolt at Autonomous Source! Max and Talia have overthrown their oppressors -- and worse, have figured out how to work the computer!

Oh sure, locking their parents outside in the snow seemed like a good idea at first. After all, they did get to eat all the goldfish they wanted and there was no one to stop them from banging the pots and pans in their kitchen rock band. Plus, they hadn't had to brush their teeth or wash their hands all day. But now Mommy and Daddy were all cold and still. Neither Suzy nor Callie could work the VCR. How were they going to watch their Barney tapes? Not to mention the vast quantities of bloomer pudding accumulating in their pampers. Maybe Operation Get Rid of the 'Rents wasn't such a great idea after all.

Okay, it isn't really Max and Talia. It's from a site called Threadbared, which is a couple of women who put up the covers of dressmaking patterns, knitting guides, etc., and proceed to weave bitchy fun at their expense. You'll be in stitches.

What we wear is a statement about ourselves; about our hopes, our fears; a message to the world. What is this trying to communicate? It is saying, "Beat me up and steal my lunch-money." No jury would convict me.

Taken from this blóg. It's in Portugese, but I get the feeling that these are supposed to be objets d'art rather than everyday clothing. Still.

. . . they're not kidding.

Camouflage fashion by Désirée Palmen.

RalphBorland.net:

Suited for Subversion is a project to create a suit that protects the wearer at large-scale street protests. The suit also monitors the wearer's pulse and projects an amplified heartbeat out of a speaker in the chest of the suit.

I designed and fabricated the first prototype of the suit as part of my Masters Degree in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. The project draws on my work as an activist involved in street demonstrations in New York, and is influenced by the work of other activists and demonstrators who wear protective clothing and make creative use of tools and technologies for protest.

Of particular influence are the 'white' or �white overall� tactics of the Ya Basta, WOMBLES, or the Tutti bianche, who wear white protective-wear to protests. Like the Pret a revolter clothing line produced by my friends Las Agencias, and pictured below, centre, my suit fuses white tactics with more playful, carnivalesque, or 'pink' tactics. As much as my suit is armour, it is also disarming; as much provocation as protection.

Suited for Subversion is part of the exhibition SAFE: Design Takes on Risk at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2005/2006.

What the well-dressed denizen of rabble.ca will be wearing in the Spring Protest season. Far be it from me to dissuade them from running around looking like a bunch of sofa-bolsters, though I suspect it'll just encourage the police to perfect their baton-poking techniques.

They should try something like this. Cheaper, offers just as much protection, and perfect for taking in a World Cup game or two after the demo.

well tell me again what you were thinking
when you got that bruise tattoo
forever black and blue
owen

Dude, dude, dude. Having a badly-done tattoo of Pee-wee Herman is not going to get you any props in your local biker (unless it's of the three-wheeled variety) bar .

More flesh-and-ink atrocities here. SFW, mostly.

Make sure you don't miss "Mr. CooL ICE" (Don't worry, you'll know him when you see him.)

I've noticed that some fashion designers really don't seem to like women very much.

Then again, they exhibit real hostility towards men, too.

Child Toilet costume is a very funny kids Halloween costume. A Child toilet costume is also perfect for every potty mouth kid. Use as a modern day Dunce cap. Young boys love this silly Toilet bowl Halloween costume. One size fits most kids size 7-12.

Years later, you'll be paying for a psychiatrist to pry these happy memories out of your shattered mind. I hope they have that on the warning label.

I happened across a fashion-show photo the other day but it was too small and poorly-lit, so I went looking for a better copy. It was from the Fall/Winter show at London Fashion Week, the work of a hot young designer named Gareth Pugh.

Google found a Gareth Pugh, all right, but it turned out to be the name of a company in England (Wales, actually) that specializes in industrial and agricultural pre-fab buildings, such as the winery storage shed at left. This couldn't be the Gareth Pugh, lion of the catwalks from Paris to Milan to New York, could it?

Plugging gamely along, I finally found the show I was looking for. I must apologize for my initial skepticism; surely only the fertile mind of the man who gave us this:

could have conceived of this.

Pictures purportedly of New Jersey teenagers and young adults in a new (and somewhat alarming) subculture which features spiky haircuts and those bottled tans that give your skin the healthy glow of a carrot.

More pix here.

A commenter at BoingBoing, though, points to a trend that's out of Europe:

The origin of this picture is actually probably not NJ, but rather a techno discotheque in Vienna, Austria, called "NACHTSCHICHT" ("nightshift") whose patrons are primarily from working-class backgrounds.

The habit of using ridiculous amounts of tanning lotion - coupled
with regular visits to the solarium ("soli") - is so commonplace here
that you barely spend a day without seeing at least a couple of these
guys on the streets. There are numerous videos and galleries on the web
that provide you with "best-of" compilations of this absurd trend.

The skin hue is referred to as "Prolo-braun" (Proletarian Brown).
Many of these fashion victims refer to themselves as "Krocha", which is
also the name of the style of dance that they like to practice (related
to the europe-wide "jumpstyle" trend). Note that not all Krocha are
Prolo-braun.

Ah, fuggetaboutit.