Meant to post this earlier, but now that the April issue has arrived I better hurry it up. I am obsessed with the styling for this story. It shouldn't all work together so seamlessly but it does; a perfect high-low mix. Jane How may just be my kindred spirit.
Karmen Pedaru shot by Mario Sorrenti 
Cover of the catalog for the groundbreaking exhibition opening at the Met a month from today, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations. If you missed Judith Thurman's article "Radical Chic: Clothes on the Cutting Edge" in the New Yorker a few weeks back, I highly recommend it checking it out.Schiaparelli was thirty-seven and Prada was thirty-nine when they delivered their first collections. But experience of the real world, which was a man’s world for both of them, made them intolerant of female passivity and desperation. They don’t really care what makes a woman desirable to men. Their work asks you to consider what makes a woman desirable to herself.Visit newyorker.com for the whole article.
Maiyet SS12 | Daria Werbowy by Cass Bird from M A I Y E T on Vimeo. Music by Feist.
Maiyet.com
One of my most favorite of the many classic photographs by Arthur Tress, who I first learned of from a great show at Clampart back in 2003 or so. A new show at the De Young Museum, Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964, exhibits seventy of his early photographs. Click here for a slideshow and short review by Ted Loos at the New York Times.
Gilding the Lily, 2012 (fiberglass and glitter
Wilson Peak (banquet), 2009 
(Bike by Jeffrey Schad, paint by Vincent Szarek)
Cecilia Roth in the Spanish film Arrebato ("Rapture"), featured in Spanish Cinema of the Early Post-Franco Era (1975–83), a ten-film series opening tonight at Anthology Film Archives in New York. From the Times:The flowering of film after [Franco's] death in 1975 . . . was something of a coming-out party for all things underground and repressed: drugs, raucous experimentation and, of course, sex. A gay sensibility flourished, not only in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, represented here by Pepi, Luci, Bom y Otras Chicas del Montón and Laberinto de Pasiones, but also in movies like Ventura Pons’s Ocaña, a 1978 documentary portrait of José Pérez Ocaña, an artist who walked around Barcelona in a peek-a-boo dress.Info at anthologyfilmarchives.org.
Ferdinand A. Porsche, designer of the 911, died yesterday at the age of 76. I'm really not a car person – in general I just don't care that much. But the 911 (and for that matter, the 912), transcend "car." They are some of the most beautifully designed objects ever made.
In 1963 the new model, originally designated the 901, was introduced at an auto show. (The designation was changed to 911 after the company learned that in France, Peugeot had a claim on three-numeral designations of passenger cars with a zero between two digits.) Slightly longer and narrower than the 356, more powerful, with a six-cylinder, rather than a four-cylinder, engine, the original 911 also had more legroom, more rear seat room and bigger doors for easier entrances and exits. Mr. Porsche also modified the body of the 356, rendering the signature sloping back end and extended hood into a sleeker silhouette. It was a remarkably simple design that helped create Mr. Porsche’s reputation as a designer who prized function above all.Read the rest here.
“Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained,” he said.
Eugène Durieu, [Seated Female Nude], 1853-54
Brassaï, Nude, 1931-34
The progress of the naked body through photography is the subject of [this] resonant and illuminating if sometimes fraught exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art....Through Sept. 9; more info here.
Made mostly in Europe and the United States between 1850 and the present, the selection is rife with both unfamiliar names and old standbys — Nadar, Eakins, Muybridge, Brassaï, Mapplethorpe — and also with strange, unexpected and sometimes unsettling gems. (An 1860 image of a hermaphrodite, for example, from no less than Nadar.)...
Over all [the curator's] selections show how photographs of the body have intersected with the histories of painting, medicine, forensics, erotica, commerce, Surrealism and feminism, and how they hint at the advent of Conceptual, appropriation and performance art.
