Central Saint Martin’s annual graduation show has always been a prestigious happening within fashion history, with many of the most progressive designers today  emerging out of this art and design school. The process that takes place in the final year of fashion design study involves an internal show, exhibiting everyones final collection which is judged by industry professional of which then roughly a quarter are chosen to go on and show to the press. These photographs were taken backstage at the internal show before the forthcoming runway show next week. As expected extravagance, theatricality and boundary pushing examples of sartorial design were celebrated and exhibited on the day.  In a world where fashion designers have to focus their energy on making their creations marketable and accessible to a wider audience, graduate collections like these show a freedom where fashion can be created without those pressures. Below are a few of the most eye catching and original examples.

James Theseus Buck‘s collection created bizarre textile combinations of fur and melted beads adorned upon boxy Chanel suits for men which were only more exhilarated by them being worn by the likes of the iconic Andrew Logan and drag performer Jonny Woo.

Ambush‘s ‘NOMAD‘ collection ‘takes on a dystopian anime bike gang theme, with a flair of science-fiction fantasy. Feel the heat, the sweat, the grime, and the incendiary energy that will transform any wearers into road warriors.

This collection is available from June and you can see the rest of the look book here!

Scott Campbell

Things Get Better

OHWOW Gallery

937 N. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069

May 23 – June 22 2013

“The openness of everything can be paralyzing, and it is human nature to look for walls and barriers to push against. Walls help us to know where we are, and what we have; once recognized, we can then begin our work of flourishing and creating within them.” - Campbell

Scott Campbell’s latest exhibition opens today in LA where he has explored the novel objects that are created together to make tattoo machines in Mexican prisons. Illustrating this idea through painting these machines with ink on paper, the famed tattooer and owner of Saved humorous title ‘Things get Better’ alludes to the unexpected nature of collaborating inanimaite objects into another more optimistic focus.

See more of Campbell’s work here

A bruise from a snowboarding accident that involved a collarbone broken in two places and a dislocated shoulder.

May 2nd – June 8th, 2013

LONDON
Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place SW3 3TD

Coinciding with the release of Taschen’s limited edition publication Nobuyoshi Araki.Bondage, a brief selection of the provocative Japanese photographer’s vast portfolio presents his portrayal of kinbaku, ‘the beauty of tight binding’.

‘Women? Well, they are gods. They will always fascinate me. As for rope, I always have it with me. Even when I forget my film, the rope is always in my bag. Since I can’t tie their hearts up, I tie their bodies up instead’

Often citing the erotic nature of his work as outside of the conventions of his conservative culture, the images are pointedly presented alongside 19th Century shunga woodcut prints – the original form of mass produced erotica and part of the Ukiyo-e pictures of the floating world , Japan’s Edo period pleasure quarters – and allusion to the practice’s early conception with delicate floral still life images.

Some great footage of the Czechoslovakian Spartakiad games which were used under Communist rule to oppose and suplement the Olympics. Working as one group effort rather than an individual performance more recent examples of this kind of practice can be seen in North Korea.

A particularly fetishistic Flickr  group named ‘The Women with Very long Hair Pool’  with the sub heading describing it as: ‘Photos of women with very long hair. From thighs to the floor.’

Some bizarre videos of anonymous women with unbelievably long hair can be watched here and here

Maxime quoted in the New York Times on the 10th of May 2013

Read the full interview with Maxime here: http://issuu.com/veinemagazine/docs/veine_numero7

Interview with Maxime Buchi in German L’Officiel Hommes

An indepth interview with Maxime

Photography by Felicity Ieraci
Words by Joseph Delaney

http://www.stampmag.co.uk/maxime-buechi/

The photographic work of a dermatologist in Lyons in the Thirties presented by Gerard Levy and Serge Bramly. Published by Kehayoff in 1999.

Larger scans of the last few pages which detail the Autochrome process that was used to make these photographs as well as thumbnails & notes for each picture are here.

Well worth a look at.

(re-blogging this three years later from its original post because it is just so beautiful!)

And

Gemma Angel is a PHD Student at UCL and the Science museum where she is exploring the skin archives of the Wellcome museum. This interview is about a year old and taken from the Huffington Post but it is well worth a read if you have not seen it yet.

What are people’s reactions when you tell them what you do?

Most of the time people think it’s really interesting, they don’t expect this kind of thing to even be out there. There was one occasion when I was talking to a barman in Manchester about what I did, and he just said, “no, that doesn’t exist”, he refused to believe it. Some people think it’s quite creepy, or strange, but I’ve got so used to handling these things and working with them now that it doesn’t seem that strange to me any more. But I am aware that human remains in museums are a contentious issue. It’s something that really splits opinion.

What was it like the first time you encountered the skins?

They fascinated me from the word go, but the smell of them took some getting used to! Because I trained as a tattooist, I was immediately drawn to the tattoos and I had a specific tattooist’s eye for looking at them. The longer you look at them, the more you get drawn in. It has a strange effect on you – you start to think more about what they really are. You turn them over in your hands and you realise that they’re pieces of somebody else’s skin. Then you start to really look closely at the skin and think about all the associations you have with tactility and touch, and whether you can categorise them as objects at all. Because they have this power of subjectivity, still. A tattoo is a mark of somebody else’s will inscribed on their body, which in this case has outlived the individual, and it’s very, very strange to look at them and think about that.

Do you have a favourite?

The chest piece. It’s more or less the entire torso, from just beneath the collar bones to just above the pubis, and he was clearly a very tall guy, easily six foot. The preservation itself is very well done, the design hasn’t been salvaged in it entirety, but the major parts of it are intact, it’s been preserved with care. The tattoo itself is very skilled, you still have all of this black and grey shading visible around the female figure on the right side, you can still see bits of the red pigment in the dagger and the roses. It’s just a really nice detailed work – it looks like it was done with hand needles, not a machine. It was definitely done by a professional. Of all the Wellcome Collection tattoos I could have come across in a photograph, this would be the easiest to recognise, and I couldn’t have hoped for a better result in that respect.

Because you’ve found a photograph of the tattooed man, haven’t you?

When I turned the page over in the book and I first saw this image I was so overwhelmed, I almost dropped the book. I came across this photograph after I’d been working with the skins for two years. So I had known this tattoo really well, I had handled the skin, they feel as familiar to me as the back of my own hand. So to then see the tattoo, in its entirety, alive, it was almost like seeing the face of a friend who you hadn’t seen for years in a crowd. I just wish his face was visible, I’d like to know who he was. The most frustrating thing about the photograph is that he’s headless.

Do you know why the specimens were collected?

This is the core mystery really. I think certainly there was a lot of interest in the tattoo in medico-legal circles during the late 19th century. There was a lot of debate about what tattoos meant, why people would get them. Amongst European populations, it was considered deviant by many scholars. Criminologists sought to connect it to criminality. But it’s not criminologists’ names that I’m coming up with, it’s anatomists and pathologists. It’s strange – these people had the opportunities to collect them, but their motivations are more obscure. There are probably a lot of different motivations, but it was part of a wider interest in the surface of the body, and what you could read from the surface about the person within. Trying to get to grips with the soul, the psychological workings of the other.

Do you think that attributes to the mystery the collection?

Absolutely. I think these collectors knew they were doing something that was a bit dodgy. I’ve come across references to one or two scandals which came about as a result of particular doctors harvesting and preserving tattoos – you might keep a pathological specimen from a human body for a teaching aid for medical students, but can you really justify keeping a tattoo? It seems there’s some aspect fetishisation involved, of the tattooed image, and the skin itself. It’s complicated, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the bottom of it, but I’ve got some time yet.

To see more of the photos from the original post look here.