Manhattan Records

Minnesotan by way of Mexico, Lila Downs’ diversity is more accurately showcased in her music. From folk and blues to Latin jazz and pop, Shake Away, Lila Downs’ latest release is her most ambitious. Crammed with impressive guests including Spanish flamenco-fusion sensation La Mari, Mercedes Sosa and Enrique Bunbury (former lead singer of Heroes del Silencio) it’s an album that is, not surprisingly, all over the place. But somehow her version of Lucinda Williams’ “I Envy the Wind” blends in with a silly fast-paced ditty like “Los Pollos”. For a multicultural and multi-mood experience, it doesn’t get more comprehensive than this.

Photography by John Horner

Long known for its traditional New England prep, Boston builds on its international pull of masterminds and the Achilles Project fits an important global niche. Part fashion boutique, part restaurant, and part artistic junction conceptualized by Michael Krupp and Shaka Ramsay, AP works as a solution for all those poignant consumer dilemmas we face today: local food, organic clothing, repurposed space, and investment in the community. The end product is several things acting in concert, while promoting sustainability. The space is a refurbished building in the ever-growing art scene of Fort Point Channel. Design team 3six0 lent their inventive solutions to this loft-like and modern setting of wood and steel, creating a shell that morphs from boutique to bar to lounge area.
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Lara Kurtzman, a New York-based jewelry designer, is a fan of accessories that serve many functions. Her signature silk keychain is a perfect example. Made of sterling silver and hand-dyed, hand-rolled silk, it looks equally gorgeous looping out of one’s pocket as it does wrapped around your wrist or even worn as a necklace. Blending elements of European, African, and Asian design, it has a decidedly international aesthetic without losing any rock and roll cred. For hipsters who want to upgrade their look, this is the perfect way to go. You can check out Kurtzman’s jewelry line, KELACALA Q, at kelacalaq.com.

Photography Courtesy of Hartmann Nordenholz

What softens the cultural skin of couture fashion is the fact that we perpetually hyperextend it. Each season, instead of the outgrowths of developed folds, designers are driven to rack the surface of their collections with “new” ideas and “new” inspirations. Meanwhile, no one’s really encouraged to build off of old ones. So much of what’s exciting about the intimate German-Austrian collective Hartmann Nordenholz is precisely their response to this double bind: Simply put, design depth and continuity need not always get the short end of the stick.
Hartmann Nordenholz is the eight-year-old labor of fashion designers Filip Fiska (formerly under Helmut Lang) and Agnes Schorer (formerly under Viktor&Rolf). Although you might not have heard much about the collective, you can count on the duo to follow the wave of its 2002 Austrian Fashion Award (for contemporary design) to an increasingly promising crescendo.
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Photography by Marc Hom

The Danish high-fashion label Noir makes ethical sexy. The company’s motto, “In darkness, all colours agree”, profoundly informs the humanitarian tone the label has chosen to take, along with the humane business model implemented since its establishment in 2006. As a member of the UN Global Compact, the company adheres to human rights, labor safety, and environmental concerns. Not that fashion created ethically is a new concept, but what is most striking about Noir is how much it cares for every facet of ethical business and how much attention is placed on the beauty of the fashion itself. Not a single detail is off.
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Photography by Luke Abiol

With the world changing, exploring the science of clothing as a means for shelter and protection from earthly elements is increasingly in vogue, if not de rigueur. Moisture-controlling, anti-bacterial, and UV-stopping are terms that all of a sudden seem to make greater sense, and perhaps provide a marketing angle as well. Fusing this high design with high-performance technology is Berlin-based Acronym, recognized worldwide for its ahead-of-the-curve men’s fashion. The line, revered by techies, designers, skaters, and globetrotting surfers, hits the mark for durable sleekness. The pieces are intelligent skins ready for action with sophisticated lines and details not typically found in sportswear. Considerable attention is placed on well-executed pockets, hidden zippers, and special compartments for iPod and earphones. The handsome GT-J11 Jacket, a geared-up blazer made of hard-shell Gore-Tex, is still versatile enough to wear on the slopes of St. Moritz and on the streets in Stockholm. Cofounder/designer Errolson Hugh is known in this elusive market for marrying military concepts of armor with utilitarian functionality. His vision of hybridization was an out-breeding of his experience working in the German Special Forces and applying it to commercial lines like Burton and Gravis. His own line far exceeds anyone’s expectations in that marriage of fashion and form. And for this reason the hefty price tag associated with collecting the line works, in theory, as insurance against the prevailing environmental dangers we face today.

Photography by Marcus Palmqvist

In England, they breed their pop ingénues big-haired and boozy, apt to trash their exes with intimate details of drug habits and dodgy new girlfriends. In America, they strap on a Fender Strat and jump around the strip mall. In Sweden, however, they take the high road. Twenty-two-year-old Stockholm singer Lykke Li calls her songs “spaces”. Her full-length debut, Youth Novels, measures the glacial intensity that made her compatriots the Concretes and the Shout Out Louds so fun to eat meatballs to. And it boasts a transcontinental dance flair. Li grew up on the mountaintops of Portugal with two hippie parents before moving to a windowless apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, at the age of nineteen to perform at open mike nights, to no avail. “I was a young skinny white girl without a clue about anything the first time I was in New York, so it was kind of a disaster,” Li admits. “My nickname was Blanquita and my friend got eggs thrown at her because she was white. We had no heat in the apartment even though it was December, so I slept with two jackets on.”

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commecarestaurant.com

It’s hard to understand why, with so many Francophiles running about, there aren’t more French restaurants in Los Angeles. Where are the bistros, those hearty, easy to love spots that seem to be on every corner of Manhattan? David Myer, the brainchild behind Sona, must have asked himself the same question and opened Comme Ça as an answer. Not only is the food, which is on the traditional tip, lip-smacking, but the scene is grand cru people watching. Staples such as soupe à l’oignon share space on the menu with richer partners like roast beef marrow with oxtail jam and arguably the city’s best bouillabaisse. Every dish uses first-class, fresh ingredients that make all the difference. The best spot is the black and white dining room, complete with a small bar, tufted leather banquettes, and a fromager station, but any table will do as long as there’s an order of their addictive fries on it. Sometimes, the place may be a bit loud or crowded, but what kind of brasserie would it be otherwise? Myers has, thankfully, imported a hip, casually French aesthetic to a city that was screaming Allez, s’il vous plait.

8479 Melrose Ave   323 782 1178

Artwork by Boo Saville

Artist Boo Saville isn’t scared of things that go bump in the night. In fact, you could presume an avid fascination beyond moribund. She lingers over the physical embodiment of death, deliberating upon the remaining relic once breath, soul, imagination and bowels have stirred their last. Despite a righteous artistic background — a successful artist for an older sister and years spent diligently absorbing advice from tutors at London’s Slade School of Fine Art — what Saville remains best at is copying. “At art school you are told copying is cheating.” But she insists that it’s neither death nor copying from photographs that she’s fascinated by. “It is the iconography of death,” she says, “the dual quality of violence and redemption a corpse presents. Photographs have already begun that process of distortion, of creating an icon, a lie.” (more…)