Photography Courtesy of Raquel Allegra

Even your ex-boyfriend’s tattered tee, with its stains and faint smell of Old Spice, can’t tell a story like a Raquel Allegra garment. The Los Angeles-based designer makes her couture using shirts from the County Jail, weaving tales from a dark but quintessential reality of the city. “It definitely felt strange at first,” says Allegra, “but I took to recycled prison shirts out of necessity. I’m a textile shopper — when I shop I touch everything. So I was just hunting for that perfectly distressed feel.” Oddly enough, her meticulous sense of touch led her to the clink.
    As remarkable as the personal stories behind the shirts themselves, Allegra’s intricate handpicking, hand dying, and thread-by-thread deconstruction process can take weeks to complete. But for Allegra, the resulting piece — more reminiscent of cobwebs than prison garb — is worth the painstaking effort. Her labor of love seems to satisfy customers who, like herself, have a taste for clothing made with originality and thought. So it’s not surprising that tastemakers have gravitated to the brand of draped, sexy shirts, dresses, and scarves. Each item different from the next, Allegra’s creations are given new life by the wearer in a unique convergence of past, present, and future.

wonderland-sheffield.co.uk/

Recycled clothing usually connotes trips to Goodwill or hand-me-downs, and recycled couture typically has its shining moment walking down a red carpet. But over the past three years, London scientist Tony Ryan and artist/design professor Helen Storey decided to tackle our notions of ‘recyclable wear’ and turn it completely on its head, making couture gowns from dissolvable textiles. The duo’s Wonderland exhibit ups the ante on both couture and sustainability – which, let’s be honest, have been pretty mutually exclusive as far as aesthetics go. The exhibition of their “disappearing gowns” gradually lowers dresses into large bowls of water, where they dissolve to create “vibrant underwater fireworks.” The Wonderland team hopes to introduce their “practical solutions to current ethical issues,” to the masses, interpreting their ideas into ingenious uses. Their developments (like intelligent packagings that dissolve into a gel in which seeds can be grown) have garnered numerous awards, and could revolutionize the issue of plastic waste. You really have to see it to believe it, so if you didn’t make it to the last stop in London, check out the video by Nick Knight on the Wonderland site. Super sci-fi.

Astralwerks

The title track from Empire of the Sun’s debut is already being hailed as one of this year’s best songs, a seemingly lost, yacht-rock gem that leaves you wanting more when its chorus fades after just three minutes. It’s the zenith of a breezy sound this Aussie duo, comprised of Sleepy Jackson’s Luke Steele and P’nau’s Nick Littlemore, render through simpatico keys and drum machines. While occasionally lacking in sonic cohesion, the album easily makes up for it with memorable, bouncy songs. Don’t let the “Neverending Story in Space” album cover convince you this is a nerd-only affair. What’s inside is well worth a listen.

Because Music/Nonesuch Records

Since we first wrote about Amadou and Miriam in 2005, we’ve remained enchanted by both their music and their affecting story – that of two blind Malians meeting at the Institute for Young Blind People in Bamako, Mali nearly thirty years ago, becoming friends, falling in love, making music, and becoming their nation’s most celebrated contemporary musicians. Their first album, Dimanche à Bamako, was made in close collaboration with Manu Chao. For their second album, Welcome to Mali, just released last month, Damon Albarn produced the opening track, “Sabali”, a mesmerizing blend of Gorillaz-style electronica and traditional Malian music, which you can listen to below.

This summer the duo will tour with Coldplay in the U.S. and play a number of festivals, including Bonnaroo in June.

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Photography Courtesy of Mute Records

The moon is up somewhere over Stockholm and the sun’s been hiding behind cloud cover since September or October. Karen Dreijer Andersson, one sisterly half of electronic master planners The Knife, is settling in for the evening after another dark January day of studio seeking. She’s on the lookout for a new spot to work in. The space, she says, must have windows. “I think I’m old enough for them now,” she jokes quietly via telephone. “Light would be good.”
     In March, Andersson released her first physical recordings under the newly minted Fever Ray moniker. Juiced from a similar sonic vein as The Knife’s 2006 Silent Shout, it’s a self-titled solo debut that boasts much of the same inky tones and nightshade textures as that landmark album. Born during the cold months of late 2007 and early 2008, it’s as much an audible byproduct of sunless Swedish winters as any form of haunted creative wandering.

Issue 21’s Earth By was contributed by MIKE PERRY, a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. A true creative dynamo, Mike makes books, magazines, newspapers, clothing, drawings, paintings, illustrations, and teaches whenever possible. His first book, titled Hand Job, which explores and celebrates hand-drawn type, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2006. His second book, Over & Over, hits shelves this fall, and he is currently working on two new books. In 2007 he started a magazine called Untitled that explores his current interests. The second issue is out now. He has worked with clients from The New York Times Magazine, Dwell, and Microsoft Zune, to name a few. Doodling away night and day, Perry creates new typefaces and sundry graphics that inevitably evolve into his new work, exercising the great belief that generating piles is the sincerest form of creative process. His work has been seen around the world including a recent solo show in London titled The Place between Time and Space.

thelincoln.com

“Give me the luxuries of life, and I will gladly do without the necessities,” said Frank Lloyd Wright. These words aptly sum up the Lincoln, a den of luxury and comfort housed in a former strip club. The neighborhood of King’s Cross, traditionally Sydney’s red light district, has gone upscale, and the Lincoln, which was re-done last year, can take a lion’s share of the credit. The joint is three levels of decadence, from the basement’s NYC-style club — Prince’s former DJ Ricky Albert is a resident — to the deck bar which has the feel of a 1930s ocean liner. Don’t forget the restaurant, manned by ex-Bibendum chef Richard Duff, with its exclusive Krug room. The Art Deco décor works to create a special environ with the octagon-shaped dining room, the black and gold color scheme, the Calcutta marble bar, and the black timber floors. The joint is spacious, inviting, and diverse. True, you can’t get a lap dance anymore, but if you’re lucky you can get much more.

36 Bayswater Road     +02 9331 2311

What's Your Rapture?

Sweden’s Love Is All made indie-philes quiver with their 2006 debut Nine Times the Same Song, a frenetic party-crasher that delivered perfect punky breakup anthems in three minutes flat. With cymbals that clatter and fall, bristling synthesizers, and the crazed vocals of Josephine Olausson (who sounds like The Concretes’ Victoria Bergsman covering new-wave chanteuse Cristina), A Hundred Things buzzes with a broken heart stomped out all over the dance floor. But when a saxophone teases out nursery-rhyme melodies on the slowburner “Giants Fall”, it could be Jesus and Mary Chain headlining a high school battle of the bands.