Brownie Wise

She was the first woman on the cover of Business Week. Perfectly irrelevant.

Brownie Wise was the brain behind the tupperware party. There was a lot of tupperware in those events, but fun exercises like “write an honest advert to sell your husband”.

She became the public face of the company. Behind the curtains she was a huge force in shaping the tupperware’s culture. So it was fun to learn that when a power struggle with Tupper no less, forced her out, a concerted effort was made to erase her out of history. But this too is irrelevant.

Where advertising fails, much can be taken from her model – contact, warmth, joy and opportunity.

Party Pieces

The world was transfixed by the luminous bride and her coquettish bridesmaid, but Mr. Middleton must have had someone else in mind during the celebrations, his wife, Carole.

British snobbery has kept her firmly in place. It is worth taking a moment though, to see her from the eyes of her loving husband. Not only did Carole Middleton start a multi-million business, Party Pieces, her beauty is such that her daughter actually married a prince.

The Middletons, not the newly minted Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, are the strongest advertisement for marriage and enterprising projects of the sort. They achieved the British Dream.

Wit and Wisdom

“I’ve often thought that Europe is an allegory for the ages of man. You’re born Italian: they’re relentlessly infantile and mother-obsessed. In childhood you’re English: chronically shy, tongue-tied, cliquey and only happy kicking balls, pulling the legs off things, or sending someone to Coventry. Teenagers are French: pretentiously philosophical, embarrassingly vain, ridiculously romantic and insincere. During middle age, we become either Swiss or Irish. Old age is German: ponderous, pompous and pedantic. And finally we regress into being Belgian, with no idea who we are at all.”

A.A. Gill for The Spectator

Tartans of the Scottish Clans, 1906

“Form follows failure”

Henry Petroski

Thanks Pedro

Colors of Nuremberg

Faber-Castell

Stabilo

Staedtler

‘Tis enough that you, our child, should live

Pride

The Harvard Business Review finally invited an expert to give a lesson on management, Ricky Gervais. The creator of The Office, talks about character v. reputation, popularity v. respect, work v. awards.

Zany

Zadie Smith is a vision. Hers is a beauty above race, she is like an artist’s rendition of our ancestral mother. I look for her in men and women. She also has a deeply sexy voice. But how troubling to hear her speak such cowardly nonsense.

BBC Radio 4 gave the writer a full 5 minutes and 48 seconds to vent about cuts in the public funding of libraries. ”If education matters to you, they ask and if libraries matter to you, why wouldn’t you be willing to pay for them if you value them”. Members of cabinet, educated at Eton don’t understand what it’s like not to have money.

Given the UK’s amount of debt, they must be learning fast what it’s like not to have money.

“Community is partnership between government and the people” she explains matter-of-factly, as if there were no alternatives. Most people don’t have the time or money to build public libraries. Zadie Smith is not most people.

Her beauty, reputation and scholarly authority, should be quite enough to find a way to give back to “the community”. Perhaps she could name her venture after her Jamaican mother, whom she credits for her bookishness, The Yvonne Bailey Public Library.

A refined sense of theatricality

In line with her detailed instructions, Elizabeth Taylor was 15 minutes late to her own funeral.

Polish flair

Andrzej Klimowski’s poster for Jim Jarmusch

At the limit of inspiration

Does it matter?

Film poster by Juan Gatti, author of the poster and title sequence of every Almodóvar film before and since Habla con Ella.

Forget marketing

Kellerhouse

Moving on from the classics, Neil Kellerhouse is special in having a dignified approach to poster design. Often he gets it right.

Steve Frankfurt

Absolutely wonderful documentary about the original Mad Man, Steve Frankfurt. It’s part of a series that the BBC did in 1967 on The Lives of Americans.

I just wish the makers of the AMC show had copied more than the aesthetics, he makes some serious statements and because he’s an ad man, he delivers them with wit. I would take him over Don Draper any time.

The man’s work.

Bill Gold: Posterworks

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7 decades worth of iconic film posters

What do I have to sacrifice for the gods of Amazon to send me the book?

Bonjour Tristesse

Original poster by Saul Bass. Not a single star or review, only an image meant to instantly convey the film. How did it ever happen? As the son-in-law of the director, Bass was certainly in a privileged position. More to the point, Otto Preminger had taken total control over the promotion of his film, but only within the US. Have a look at how the film was promoted in some other countries:

Eve

I’m guilty of reading fashion magazines. I like to see what happens when news becomes aesthetic, when it tints our demeanor. I also like photography, but the two rarely meet. In the past they did, Helmut Newton, Mark Shaw, Saul Leiter, Guy Bourdin, to name a few, are perennial favorites. Contemporary fashion photographers, trained at the Fashion School of Photography usually recycle themes from old pictures or produce literal copies of art works. Wherever there is Kate Moss, there is beauty of course, but it’s rarely inspiring or even arresting.

Sean and Seng might have something. The last few editorials that made me pause and blink turned out to be of their authorship. In particular the ones above, published in Numéro. They are obviously fond of natural elements (flowers, fish), the mood is pleasant, almost anti-fashion. Above all, they are extremely generous with the models, it’s safe to guess that they love women. More from duo below.

Caught

Australian mug shots from the 1920s, currently making the rounds. I love the normality of the pictures. Caught in their misdemeanors, some are indifferent, others are clearly ashamed or just tired. Their naturalness predates the defiance of the mug shot pose, the subjects appear as they are at that point in time.

Antarctica in color

Frank Hurley’s pictures of Schackleton’s expedition to the Antarctica in gorgeous color, 1915.

Ladies and Gentleman: The Christian Dior Brand

Moving finale at the Dior show, the “petites mains” came out to thank the audience, teary eyed and rather defiant. The message couldn’t be clearer, as Sidney Toledano put it before the show:

“The heart of the House of Dior, which beats unseen, is made up of its teams and studios, of its seamstresses and craftsmen, who work hard day after day, never counting the hours, and carrying on the values and the vision of Monsieur Dior.”

They took the place of someone whose ego had certainly grown larger than the brand. Toledano’s full speech can be read below.

Another lesson from Taki

“They say that seduction, unlike a marriage proposal, can never occur between equals (….) For seduction to be possible, one person must want sex more than the other—or else have less to lose from it.”

The Comical Dance of Seduction

Wear and Tear

Gorgeous, but above all practical dining chair, by Linda Vännström. Wine safe, husband safe, child safe. Gorgeous because practical.

Great Pyramids

Cheap Monday’s office in Stockolm

Others are more blunt, instead of making the office look like a day care center, they propose to bury you along with the pharaoh.

The Office

Google’s London office

Day Care center

Channel

How wonderful to be proven wrong.

I’m quite fond of the bullshit-crap theory of contemporary art. Instinctively I’m drawn to golden ages. Mu Chen has proven me completely and embarrassingly wrong.

The artist combined a variety of chinese soils into logo shaped forms, which were then overlaid with daring neon colors. Traces of the color – invention, courage, panache, reputation – start to appear on the soil, but it’s yet to seep into the dense earth.

It inspires us, not least the Chinese, to think higher. Behind the brand is the soil and toil of China, we should celebrate the important part it plays in bringing these goods to the market, but we also see in the nuances of the earth that China is far from uniform.

Some of the paint will necessarily seep through, just as it did in Japan in the manufacturing years after the war, they learnt a great deal and went on to innovate (insert here haiku about Uniqlo), but the weight and darkness of the soil tells us that more needs to be done (or undone) to create conditions for ingenuity.

The earth is Chinese, but it could be Indian or even Portuguese, Chen’s message is universal.

 

Eyes and Ears

Elizabeth I is all eyes and ears in this striking painting, Hatfield House.

New York, New York

Sublime view of New York, on route to JFK airport. What you see is a massive graveyard standing tall before the skyscrapers. Caught by Terry Richardson.

On Discovering a Butterfly by Vladimir Nabokov

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer – and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.