Photography Courtesy of Olsenhaus

Growing pocketfuls of designers have taken on the challenge, but it still takes a lot to impress on the green fashion front. Eco-friendly fashion has found a worthy competitor in Olsenhaus, a new line of vegan shoes that definitely don’t sacrifice aesthetics for ethics. Designer Elizabeth Olsen’s artful metallic paint-splattered booties, pumps, and flats make reducing your carbon footprint that much more stylish while still providing shopping addicts with a little (enjoyable) guilt. Olsen draws inspiration from her own vegan upbringing to make designs concerned with “consciousness, purpose, function, and art,” she says. One hundred percent ‘cruelty-free’, and made with high standards in both animal and human rights, Olsenhaus declares “the revolution will be accessorized.” With shoes like these, we’re ready for that revolution.
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With Flowers and Open Wings III, 2007

Over the ages, people have looked to visual art to do many things. Whether the images they made, studied, and revered represented their cosmological beliefs, recorded the ins and outs of their survival systems, delivered them from banality to a place of fantasy, or simply sniffed out hidden beauty in the world around them, these classic aspirations have preceded and outlived the trappings of so-called postmodern art, and have more recently infused it with new tenor. Ernesto Caivano’s work reaches each of these art historical golden rings.
     In the summer of 2001, after a long trip to Europe, the artist began After the Woods, a series of drawings made with ink gouache, watercolor, and graphite on paper that can only be described as epic. At the time the contemporary art world was busy decrying the end of irony (an ironically befuddling death sentence) and dismissing classically beautiful work as “low brow”. Caivano had the fortitude to work against the grain and the foresight to launch a series that still keeps him engaged so many years later. Nonetheless, it’s a surprisingly complex project to define. “I’ve been trying to come up with a one-liner for eight years now,” says the artist. His work revolves around a master narrative he wrote at the beginning of the project.
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Photography by Kyu Che

Many of us like to get out of the city and enjoy the nature that remains. San Francisco based Architect-Artist Kyu Che’s sustainable Lifepod looks a lot like an iPod dock turned camping tent, but it’s Che’s artistic interpretation of the traditional Mongolian ‘ger’ or ‘yurt’. An environmental enthusiast, Che has recently improved upon his 1997 design of a highly portable capsule for nomadic living. In what could eventually be prime real estate, the futuristic prefab uses advanced nautical, automotive, aeronautical, and RV technology, allowing it to meld with nearly any environment and provide a perfectly off-the-grid nature-dwelling habitat for any wide-eyed wanderer. With the option to add screens or glass doors, this capsule has the potential to function as a backyard retreat or an outdoor office.
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Photography Courtesy of Drone

Playful party frocks aren’t what you’d expect from a Brooklyn-based label littered with images of “a lot of vomiting and decay,” but irony helps the Death by Drone medicine go down. “Vomit is a representation of the soul,” say designers Tiff and Deb, and, metaphorically speaking, the Drone upheaval is comprised of cakes, cookies, and green-tea icing. This Drone ideology definitely teeters on emo, and that might be attributed to the duo’s love of music. After an admirable attempt to explain through various sounds, and words like ‘fuzz’, Tiff and Deb concede: “Nobody gets Drone,” (the music-term and label’s namesake) “but it helps us do the weird stuff we do.”
     Once stifled by traditional education, they took to the class-time doodling that runs heavily throughout the line. “They don’t let you draw stick figures in art school,” Tiff says, “and said our printing process would never work.” But they made it work anyway. The best thing they got from their time at Parsons? “Each other! We met in the dorms.”
     While Drone may be darkly whimsical, don’t call it morbid. Says Tiff: “It’s not morbid, it’s poetry! One day we’ll do a kid’s book for adults.” But until then, it’s pretty clear: Death by Drone is bringing daydreams back.
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Photography Courtesy of Established & Sons

The Swarm Chandelier is just another example of Zaha Hadid’s genius. Once again the Iraqi-born, London-based architect pushes the boundaries with a piece that defies convention. This time she’s created a chandelier that isn’t technically a chandelier — it has no internal light source — but more of a hanging sculpture. Her Swarm Chandelier, limited to an edititon of eight, resembles a flock of birds or a swarm of insects moving together yet separately. It seems to capture their busy motion in a snapshot, suspended in midair. This still sense of transience is achieved with 16,000 suspended black crystals, each strung by hand on individual wires. The subtle interplay of light reflected on the crystals makes this chandelier come alive, like a hive bustling with activity. Always inventive, Hadid’s designs race on ahead of the pack, surprising us with their extraordinary beauty.

Photographs by Richard Avedon (c) 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation. Sean Penn, actor, San Francisco, 2004

Although a life-long photographer who preferred his images to speak for themselves, Richard Avedon had a remarkable way with words. His ability to cut through things with a few short, incisive lines could often make him seem more like a sage than a lensman. After all, he’s the photographer who famously said that every photograph is a lie — a chosen lie at that — not “The Truth”, as was the artistic conceit of the day. There’s a perfect example of this ability in an Avedon quote inscribed at the beginning of Performance, a collection of well-known images of performing artists he took throughout his career, published in October by Abrams: “We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.” It’s this insight into humanness, and his never-ending fascination with it, that made Avedon such a great photographer. After all this time, and four years after his death, it’s nice to rediscover how much I truly enjoy looking at his pictures. Truth? Lie? Chosen reality? These are impertinent questions in the face of images that achieve exactly what Avedon intended them to. So open your eyes, look, and enjoy the show.
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Photography by Stephen White

If Mother Nature is the master designer, then Tara Donovan must be her direct descendant. Allowing her materials to lead the way, Donovan stacks, piles, heaps, and mounds as they see fit, letting the natural laws of chance and gravity rule her process. Each material’s own limitations and natural abilities rule the outcome of her sculptures — works composed of synthetic, man-made materials that resemble nature at its most ethereal.
     For instance, in Haze, she stacks millions of clear drinking straws against the full length of a gallery wall in what resembles a hazy blur or rolling fog bank. Nebulous, a twenty-foot installation formed from thousands of looped rounds of Scotch tape, appears like a soft mist emerging from the museum floor. Transplanted, composed of ripped and stacked tar paper, evokes the smooth, arid landscapes of the American Southwest.
     The simple repetition of her work makes sense the way nature makes sense. In fact Donovan, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow, is continually amazed by the places tar paper, buttons, plastic cups, and Scotch tape have taken her. “I’m completely relying on the physical properties of the material before me going where it naturally, inherently wants me to go,” she explains in an interview with Lawrence Wechsler in the volume Tara Donovan, “so things always wind up mimicking nature in a way.”
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Photography by Zandy Mangold

Let’s face it, not every “club kid” even has a résumé, let alone one that includes YSL, Calvin Klein, Francisco Costa, and Narcisco. Since moonlighting as one-third of the infamous costumed club troop SixSixSick, designer Feng-Feng Yeh (appropriately pronounced Fun-Fun Yeah) has struck out on her own to produce a stunning Spring collection for her debut label Savant.
     Inspired by “medical braces at the turn of the century,” the collection plays beautifully with metaphor, a fleshy palette, ribcage-inspired looks, resin buttons molded from Benadryl tablets, and a bold necklace that mimics a jawbone with pearl teeth. From beneath the neon party flier abyss, Yeh has emerged as the talented party-monger-cum-fashion-designer to watch. While learning the trade through myriad internships, Yeh credits her experiences abroad with teaching her to channel out-of-the-box thinking into her work. Though she studied at FIT, it was her studies abroad at Polimoda in Italy where Yeh did “projects I probably never would have done in NY.” Curriculum vitae aside, boasting Leigh Lezark front row and Ben Cho as mentor pretty much makes you the coolest chick downtown, right? “I’m glad I partied,” Yeh says of her nightlife past. “I had fun, but also networked with a lot of creative people who are helping me now.” With her first collection still riding high from rave reactions, Yeh’s thoughts are drifting to the next. “One of the inspirations next season is black-figure Etruscan pottery — I can’t wait to play with that.”

Photography Courtesy of Galerie Kudlek van der Grinten, Cologn

In our electronic age, the book doesn’t have it easy. It’s up against so many gadgets designed for instant gratification, it’s no wonder reading is on the decline. But the book will persevere; it’s been through much worse — burnings and bannings, for instance. With this kind of history, it makes sense that a visual artist would choose an object so fraught with meaning to drill holes in, bolt down in layers, and inject with silicone rubber.
Jonathan Callan, who burst onto the London art scene during the Young British Artists sensation of the early 1990s, has been creating sculptures from old, discarded books since 2003. One of his intentions in these sculptures is to explore language’s fundamental shortcomings, so he puts his tomes to the test. Callan’s books nestle, cluster, and cling to each other; their vibrant pages bend and swerve, coming together like a meeting of the minds. His larger pieces resemble the cross section of a huge tree while some of his smaller sculptures conjure up Hanta’s book bundles in Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, a 1976 Czech novel celebrating the power and indestructibility of the
written word.
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Photography by Eric Heranval

Skate Study House seamlessly blends a passion for mid-century design, skateboard culture, and California lifestyle. Taking its name from the Case Study Houses built mostly in the Los Angeles area from 1945-1966, its furniture designs immediately bring to mind the work of Charles and Ray Eames. However these 21st-century pieces come with a catch: they’re made out of skate decks. Designed and handcrafted in California, Gil Le Bon De Lapointe and Pierre Andre Senizergues’s products use recycled and second hand products mixed with custom parts. Sometimes skate decks are stacked to form the base of a table, while other pieces use them as the planks in a chair; it’s amazing how utilitarian a wooden skate deck can be. Now with a showroom in both Newport Beach and LA’s Echo Park, the word has spread.