material concern

popomomo’s giving away a date with ned dress at the awesome site EcoSalon….check it out here.

i love the oscars!

mitra had a party and i brought (among other sillier things) the mixed drink of the evening: The Inglorius Bastard (wine + juice =strong juice….strong jeeeewws: get it:) with the possibility of a shot of peach (brad pitt) juice.

here are my thoughts on the oscars:

YES!

YES!

YES YES YES!

and for the outfits: Eh.

so: military style is here with a vengence: on the runway, in jcrew and the gap…forever21 is still showing last season’s military look (that horrible band jacket thing) so pretty soon they’ll have military in all doors and the streets and highschool hallways will teem with army green and people who don’t read fashion magazines will worry about the growing youth and hot girl militia.

you may have noticed: its been a while since a fashion idea struck and struck hard to the extent that it’s everywhere. and with this one strking with such virility, its hard to imagine it won’t fizzle out soon in kmart and mandee’s within a couple months.

that’s called a trend.

trends come from a lot of different places: the world, politics, the economy, art, literature, imagination…and it’s not hard to see the evolution of this one, especially from Balmain’s (horrid) band jacket from last season and our feelings of perhaps needing to protect ourselves and maybe even a little tongue in cheek or overly obviously reference to all the wars we are in that we appear to have forgotten we are in.

In a $-fueled, crazed economy: we saw trends go like hotcakes: prints, embroidery, platform shoes, pants style (low waisted skinny, no high waisted, no boyfriend!) and other aspects happen almost in hyperspeed.

In a bad economy like the past two years: we’ve seen a return to classics (plaids, navy, black), occassional shoe or accessories mix-ups, but pretty much, you could be wearing whatever you were wearing when you lost your job and your real estate portfolio and you still wouldn’t be OUT.

A return of a highly visible trend says, to me: we’re getting back to business.

My friend Lauren, who does the awesome jewelry line MANU (and who did all the great jewelry for the popomomo runway show), had some great new bracelets in nylon this week:

vintage craft ideas….

loving this faux-wood keyboard and mouse.

spotted on seamsters.net.

mitra showed me this super cute glasses site: warby parker.…

there’s a couple new ad campaigns out that make me feel like some corporate suit types don’t know their clientelle and some celebrity types  don’t understand their own image.

the first one: Ellen Page for Cisco. she’s young and I’m guessing computer network systems like young people: but honest to blog: WTF?

She’s all weird and awkward in the commercial: and its badly written and awkward. she seems a little young to be selling out for a not cool company. Like, Ellen Page for keds: sure, or Gap, sure, or Ikea or something cute, classic and quirky.

next up:

liv tyler for gstar.

i understand she has a bit of the rockstar thing because she’s steven tyler’s daughter and she was married to a rocker i had never heard of…but…ummm…her appeal has always been her simple beauty and dorky/pretty schtick. she looks silly in gstar and gstar looks silly on her.

Liv’s perfect for the Givenchy perfume ads as they are obviously going for a pretty but younger than usual clientele, but the gstar look (I thought) was supposed to be tough and kinda modern/tech denim.

maybe not.

i talk about eco fabrics and green design and so does samantha pleet, the Samantha Pleet, JoAnn Berman, Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart of Vaute Couture, and Melissa Kirgan and Xing-Zhen Chung-Hilyard of Eko-Lab.

philly is funny.

there is a piazza in northern liberties which has apartments and shops and where there were murders the first week it opened: which is pretty classic philly. But also classic philly: there’s a bunch of actually cool lines and stores in the shop part of this strangeness.

I stopped by to check it out and was happy to run into my friend Jamie Dillon.

He and Nick Paparone are the minds behind Print Liberation, and did the moveon.org obama tees and several others you’ve probably seen a millon times. They have a store in the piazza filled with tees and items by them and friends.

I loved this tee by Lizzy Jansen:

also i saw this Mike Kelly toy that prominently features our friend Ahrum modeling.

\

which was a shock:)