Bling

Conspicuous Consumption and Conspicuous Altruism (no less a form of display).

Brooch Diplomacy

Highly dexterous in symbolism, Madeleine Albright made speeches out of brooches. The bee pin was used whenever she felt talks amounted to “something like a sting”; Mandela called for a zebra trot and after Saddam Hussein’s government called her a serpent, she wore a golden snake pin.

Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection is at New York’s Museum of Arts & Design

Evolution of a film poster

Jane Russell, 1943, The Outlaw, Howard Hughes

Aping Evolution

Steve Jones, the UCL biologist, Darwinian proponent and media darling, challenges the assumptions of Evolutionary Psychology, on BBC Radio4. Nice walk through the latest research, with commentary from leading academics.

Evolutionary Psychology or EP does not hold the monopoly of Darwinian studies among social sciences. It’s in open, often violent, competition with other fields, namely Sociobiology and Behavioral Ecology.

After Psychology, I actually studied ‘Human Evolution and Behavior’ at UCL’s anthropology department (memorably, while chatting with Steve Jones, perfectly oblivious of his stardom, a handsome young professor remarked his absence the day before…. “couldn’t make it, lunch with the Queen”). The main difference in their approach to evolution is that psychology holds that the human mind evolved in a static environment, what they call the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, thus all their stories begin with a naive “Once upon a time, in the EEA, a Homo ancestor….”, in contrast, anthropology correctly assumes the environment is changeable across time and space, which makes the story infinitely richer.

Being neither a psychologist, nor an anthropologist, Steve Jones brings an educated impartiality to the game.

Kelly is a dolphin

“All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification.”

What’s next, mutual funds? fat bonuses? The Guardian has a full article on dolphin intelligence, considerably more interesting than a live dolphin show.

That was October

Britain’s better off with the conservatives

How will Cameron out-Saatchi Saatchi? The advertising agency that followed Thatcher to power in 1979 and in two more victories, is, since 2007, campaigning for the Labour Party. So much for moral conviction. Meanwhile, after divorcing Saatchi & Saatchi, the Tories have enlisted help from a number of agencies. It will be interesting to see the upcoming battle.

McSapiens

Another excellent Banksy.

Herzog’s reading list

Operatic improvisation, hellish amazonian settings and fiendish actors, Werner Herzog is a film director’s director. However interesting, these are just footnotes. That both his parents were biologists is perhaps more relevant trivia. What’s amazing about Herzog is the consistency and philosophical focus. He is concerned, indeed fascinated, by the survival of men in extreme environments. This universal theme is patent throughout his films, in different guises.

To talk with the man himself, you can join the Rogue Film School, an informal seminar group, open to aspiring film-makers that share his philosophy. In preparation for the Rogue gatherings, Herzog suggests the following works:

Virgil – Georgics

Hemingway – The short happy life of Francis Macomber

The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress)

Bernal Diaz del Castillo – True History of the Conquest of New Spain

Mrs. Logic

“Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new, she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers:

“Tell me your premises.”

Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth—the whole Objectivist catechism”.

Ayn Rand makes a surprise appearance in the New York Magazine. The article totally misses the point, by suggesting that the woman herself was torn by the impracticalities of objectivism. She wasn’t really like the heroes of Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead, impossibly beautiful and infallible, quite the contrary, she was human. I believe it is called fiction. How much simpler it is to judge the artist by his personal conduct, rather than ideas.

City Branding

Woody Allen has been offered $2 million to lift Rio de Janeiro from its cultural rut. Like Barcelona and London, Olympic cities themselves, Rio is looking for some New York veneer, that combination of safe and edgy, consumption and culture. If the project goes through, the director, famously allergic to sun, will shoot a film set in the city, in an effort to highlight its cultural attractions.

By comparison the ‘Incredible India’ campaign cost about $4 million a year. So did Portugal’s ‘West Coast of Europe‘. City branding is not cheap. But while an advertising campaign is eventually forgotten, a film remains. Most importantly it does not look like advertisement. Did a film like Match Point, Woody’s first attempt at branding London, succeed in improving recall, likeability and purchase interest?

Think big

Design thinkers are very kind, empathetic, people, they share their thoughts on TED so we don’t have to purchase the book. Though judging by the long-winded talk, I might not.

Another introduction to the subject is Roger Martin’s new book The Design of Business. Martin, the dean of Rotman School of Management, defends this idea that design is the key to success. Together with Brown’s Change by Design, they were meant to create some kind of momentum around the philosophy. But neither the FT reviewer, nor, I suspect, the audience at TED, were convinced this is an original approach.

(art) work

It is the dream brief for a designer, “I leave it in your capable hands to do what ever you want… and please write back saying how much money you would like.” is how Mick Jagger discussed an album cover with Andy Warhol. No proposals or prototypes, just the graphic solution. This is exactly what Paul Rand proposed to a stunned Steve Jobs, when he was commissioned to design the logo for NeXT.

Design wisdom seems to suggest that the best kind of work is collaborative. Yet, here you have the exact opposite, the designer cooperates, rather than collaborates, with the client. “In my short sweet experience” designers are usually more committed to a fair day’s work, than effective problem solving and, despite artistic pretensions, you forced to participate in the process, deliberating on proposals and what not. By taking on the responsibility, Warhol and Rand traced the natural limits of collaboration in design.

Perfect match

Marilyn Monroe and Groucho Marx – the beauty and the clown.

Pure Vogue

Clockwise, French Vogue: Helmut Newton 1975; Terry Richardson, concept Carine Roitfeld, July 08; Steven Klein, concept Emmanuelle Alt, October 09 and Mario Testino, also Roitfeld, July 08

In this month’s French Vogue, the voluptuous Dutch favorite Lara Stone, is entirely black. A beautiful ebony. Just like a black model, except she is not black. Courting controversy? Most certainly, but then so was the Italian Vogue when they ran an issue featuring only black models. Both have generated enormous publicity, which increased sales among their (predominantly white) audience. The western editions of Vogue, just like their South American and Asian counterparts, can rightly be accused of discrimination. Vogue discriminates between brands, photographers and models, to excite the imagination and pockets of their readers.

By American standards, French Vogue is politically incorrect. It was so when Helmut Newton took that famous picture on the Rue Aubriot in 1975 and it is today, under the helm of Carine Roitfeld. I loved the “Just Married” spread, where a glamorous gold-digger poses with a feeble nonagenerian and the “up-yours” fur piece. These spreads connect with their European base. Gratuitous and often of bad taste, but also fun and dead honest! Libertinage, opportunism and fur are just that, politically incorrect.

Have we lost the art of dressing up?

“There has been a huge shift from wearing clothes to please your man to wearing clothes to impress other women. The old notion of glamour falls into the former camp. Young women love dressing up, but it is a very different glamour from the outdated, man-pleasing version.”

The Telegraph reviews Joan Collin’s docu-show for ITV Joan Does Glamour.

Maybe… Yes… On Second Thought, Maybe… No…

“I think, I’ll…” by Ed Ruscha, one of the paintings chosen by the Obamas to decorate the White House. It deals with indecision and confusion, an embarrassing joke or the key to winning a Nobel peace prize?

The Most Fun You Can Have With Your Clothes On!

BBC Radio 4 caught the Mad Men fever. In a two part show, a British Don Draper traces the history of advertising since the start of his career in the 1960s. Guests include Maurice Saatchi and Richard Dawkins.

I too watch Mad Men. Even though each episode is no more than a combination of disconnected cliches about 1960s America – suburban housewives were bored, philandering men were in reality dissatisfied, parents were cold and unresponsive, everybody was a racist – as if we were an entirely different species today. Mad Men, those who worked on Madison Avenue for the first advertising agencies, were all this, but worst, because, as the BBC explains, they “worked inside your head, playing around with words, to embed brands in your brain”, their job was to “manage minds”. It is a nice, almost endearing, conceit. If only it were that easy to sell products and people that stupid.

Mad Men is in a sense a eulogy to the belief that a commercial message alone can guarantee success. When one man, a telepathic genius like Don Draper, Maurice Saatchi or Richard Dawkins, could change minds. I suspect that was never the case.

NB. You have 4 days to hear this program (starting now!). The BBC likes to archive stuff and does not allow you to pay for content on demand (woe betide).

Antidote for the recession: fun

Finale of the Spring 2010 Chanel show. A gorgeous man and two women frolicking around in a barn.

Inscription on Andrew Carnegie’s tombstone

Here lies a man

Who knew how to enlist

In his service

Better men than himself

Kind? Sometimes

Frans de Waal asks, in the WSJ, “Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?” Really that answers the question. Humans are supportive of one another, precisely because they are ruthlessly competitive. For social animals, and nobody would deny that human beings belong to this category, it pays to be cooperative. We descend from people who were exceptionally successful in hunting in teams, sharing mothering duties and trading. I groom you for hours, you help me next time that bully comes along. Chimpanzees and even Marmoset Monkeys have an innate sense of fairness. Socially inept individuals with a poor sense of fairness are ostracized by society.

De Waal, a brilliant primatologist, knows very well that sociable primates benefit from altruism, indeed it is an expression of selfishness, yet he persist in misrepresenting this behavior. For years he has preached the notion that humans are closer to our fun loving cousins, the Bonobos, than the more violent common Chimps. Yet both are driven by the same instincts – survival and reproduction.

The discovery that Ardi, our new 4.4 million year old ancestor, had smaller canine teeth than chimpanzees is a perfect subject to caricature. Unlike Chimps, they must have been peaceful says de Waal, disingenuously. That just means they were brainy. Instead of thrusting its claws at an enemy, the Ardipithecus ramidus would have taken him for a walk to philosophize about the future of mankind, then unexpectedly pushed him of a cliff. We are capable of such machiavellian actions because we can grasp people’s emotions and predict their behavior. Empathy enhances altruism and aggression. It did not evolve, as de Waal, suggests, only to do “good” (in an abstract 21st century sense). In times of plenty, I’m sure Ardi would have been a model of peacefulness. To a large extent environments dictate the shape of empathy.

Redefining Design

“Designers now also tackle intangible strategic and behavioral issues, such as helping businesses and government to organize themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly. Mr. Brown describes this as the shift from old-school “design,” which he regards as “technology-centered,” to the “human-centered” discipline of “design thinking”.”

The NYT on Tim Brown’s new book Design by Change.

That was September

Inaugurating a monthly series of collages, highlighting key events and moods.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens Kane

Best of New York Fashion Week? Christopher Kane. Best of London Fashion Week? Christopher Kane. Best of Milan Fashion Week? Christopher Kane. Mind you, the designer didn’t even show in New York. Yet his first collection, a dashing display of tight dresses in neon lace, presented in 2006, continues to reverberate. It finally trickled down to this year’s ready to wear collections. His previous collections, shimmery nudes and textures with tribal undertones, were no less patent.

The Spring 2010 collection, presented in London, was all Gingham dresses in soft pinks and blues. Overtly feminine cocktail dresses for women, as the designer himself explained “I always imagined my designs being worn by older, really confident women. Older confident women with really fantastic bodies . . .’ In this, he is the heir to Gianni Versace. His Donatella is sister Tammy, an older confident woman, who also collaborates on the label. The parallel as not gone unnoticed. Kane was enlisted to revive Versus, the more youthful side of Versace. The collection unveiled in Milan is as much Kane, as it is Versace.

Christopher Kane seems to idolize women, though not in a detached, fetishistic way. He empathizes with women. While his figure hugging shapes may seem prohibitive for most silhouettes, that’s hardly the case.  The dresses look daring, but are in fact extremely forgiving and artful. Transparencies, while hinting at flesh, also conceal. Clefts reveal as much as hide. Modest tricks that give the illusion of undress. Lines often embrace the chest and converge at the waist, dramatising the female shape. As do frills applied around the shoulders and hips. In every collection, he offers a range of designs to achieve this idolized shape. He is a sculptor, who invites women to sculpt their own image.

There is such a thing as a Christopher Kane woman, but she is universal. She is Nefertiti and the Venus of Willendorf. The Christopher Kane woman is a primeval seductress – a strategic dreamer and a cool tactician. That he has a thing for primates, not only human females, but also other great apes, is integral to his commitment to design. Female design. His clothes are still fashionable (pale colors and minimalist makeup were perfectly synchronized with other Spring collections), but beyond fashion, they are fit for purpose.

Christopher Kane and Fay Wray in King Kong

I love you sugar Kane

Clockwise: Christopher Kane for Versus Spring 2010, Christopher Kane Spring 2010, Fall 2009, Fall 2008. See all collections here + Topshop.

I’m back again in love, I’m back again a dove
Where’d you get your light, your smiling sugar life
Another lover’s day, another cracked up night
Every night I say, the light is coming

*Sonic Youth

Deep Empathy

We yawn, when we see others yawning. It is a display of empathy. Evidently, we can relate to their emotional state. By we, I mean primates. Notice how the star of this video, responds empathetically to the yawns of other chimps. The discovery being that social primates, like chimpanzees and by extension our distant ancestors, experieced social emotions. Apparently the primatologist Frans De Waal has a new book on the subject, ‘The Age of Empathy’. Sounds like compulsory reading for anybody interested in design, marketing or humanity in general. Hopefully it’s better than his previous books, which consisted of reproductions of his classic ‘Chimpanzee Politics’. Hardly empathetic, Frans.

The WSJ examines some recent studies on empathy. “However it began, human empathy has evolved into a divining rod that enables us to understand other people’s feelings and sensations even if we have never experienced them ourselves.”

Mon Paris

Talking about Carla Bruni and Parisian diplomacy, I should really share with you Ben’s map of Paris. Benjamin Guilbert is a sophisticated Parisian and the author of the Economic History Blog, where you can find such hits as ‘Fornicating with nuns (in fifteenth century Bologna)’ and, my favorite, weekly depictions of Saint Catherine, the blog’s patron saint. It was assembled in preparation for a week-long visit that I made to Paris a while ago. Thus, with me in mind there are English language bookstores, shoes, independent cinemas, macaroons and other bakeries, bistros and restaurants, fine lingerie boutiques, photography galleries, white shirts…. Some of the finest first order goods.

Idem

If common sense does not suffice, Mrs. O should get a stylist with a PhD in political science. It’s a nice picture though and she does look lovely, for a ‘Take Kid to Work Day’ or an ‘Organic Pie Day’ at the White House.

A peacock tale

UN General Assembly, a somber occasion to discuss such hefty issues like climate change, security in the Middle East, nuclear arms… Perhaps a chance for the US to display a sober, more cooperative image. Not so, judging by Mrs. Obama’s choice of outfit, a gaudy red suit with a flirty bow, it’s yet another opportunity to draw all attention to yourself, thereby overshadowing your guests (in this case, the world) and your husband (the president of the US). Contrast Michelle’s peacock strategy with Carla Bruni’s elegant diplomacy. In a simple black dress, the French first lady managed to distance herself from the spotlight, while still being every inch the beautiful wife.

Culturecide

In the past 18 months, 23 France Télécom employees have killed themselves.

Suicide notes point to “overwork” and “management by terror”. The Times offers another explanation:

“The spate of suicides at France Télécom is indicative of le mal français.More than 60 per cent of its workers are civil servants who joined the company when it was a state monopoly in the belief “that they would be carrying out a noble mission to serve the public,” according to Debout. But since its privatisation in 2004, they have found themselves in a competitive business driven by productivity and cutting-edge technology, with human resource programmes called — in English — Next and It’s time to move“

Before privatization, in 1990, the organization had a mission and a set of values, however utopian, which was to serve the country. Today, their code of ethics merely states that “The France Telecom Group is founded on a simple idea: we believe that communications is about enabling people to feel connected, whenever, wherever and however they choose.” Obviously they are mistaking services for ethics. It is a case of culturecide. Ironic that one of France’s largest companies would lack culture.