Randomness

[Chinorlz]

mothafucking Juggalos!

ICP records are still damn hilarious though. Callin everyone ninjas... love it. I think I have The Great Milenko cd around here somewhere...

[Chinorlz]

uzairh you can't get it in Seattle even with a decent asian population? Sometimes Indian stores/restaurants carry it too. There's this Indian supermarket in Dallas with a food court and they fresh press sugarcane with a piece of ginger and lime and it's delicious.

[DHC]

*****

[doldrums]

anyone see that Lost finale? WTF man. I missed the whole Egyptian beginning of time good evil motifs all this time but finally everything is starting to make sense...at least for the next year.

[Servo2000]

i couldn't take more than about a season-and-a-half of lost's meandering but it sounds like it's gotten so much more interesting of late. I don't know if I can catch up on that many seasons at this point, though.

[Servo2000]

I'm also kind of secretly saving it for when I have some more big projects next year so that I'll have something that will occupy huge amounts of time. Easier to just roll through a series than constantly finding different movies to watch.

I'll definitely have to give it another shot.

I've got pretty high standards, though.

[SHYE_POSER]

anyone see that Lost finale? WTF man. I missed the whole Egyptian beginning of time good evil motifs all this time but finally everything is starting to make sense...at least for the next year.

You should remember back to season 2,when they where in the hatch.
Once they failed to "push the button",hieroglyphics would appear on the wall.
Great end to the season,but what to do till next year?? Abandon television untill then i suppose.

[philip nod]

to say 'mind blown' would be something of a catastrophic understatement. its pretty much the best show on television.

fixed. join the list of people ive convinced in the last year to watch the show. all love me more than they did before

[doldrums]

You should remember back to season 2,when they where in the hatch.
Once they failed to "push the button",hieroglyphics would appear on the wall.
Great end to the season,but what to do till next year?? Abandon television untill then i suppose.

Yea I remember that part and certainly the hatches are very tomb like and all but didn't expect the jacob and his biblical twin brother playing a game with humanity, free will vs. fatalism, god of life vs. destruction and all that seemed to surface with the last episode. Kinda unfortunate that these kinds of shows always turn religious at some point for extra oohs and aaahs but I still eat it up...

[SHYE_POSER]

I think some elements of religion have always been incorporated to some extent.Like Mr.Eco for example,and ofcourse the heroin filled statues of the virgin mary.
Sometimes you can over think what is happening in the show,but that is why i follow it religously!

[zamb]

Copycats: A Tale of Two Jackets
by Nathalie Atkinson

Exhibit A, Spring 2009:
I am flipping through March Teen Vogue (hey, the average age of its reader is 25!) and enjoying the fashion editorial about pajama dressing trends called Beautiful Dreamer when I notice a sequined cocktail jacket that seems vaguely familiar. It's something about the shredded silk neck sash and the particular blouson of the sleeve. (Spread and photo are online, here.) The credit says it’s by Diane von Furstenberg, whose design offices are in New York. Soon afterward I spot it on Jessica Alba, in the spring fashion issue of ELLE (that sash is unmistakable) and shortly after it's featured in the storyline of an episode of The City, pulled by Whitney Port for said cover shoot. A cursory search at ShopStyle.com locates the jacket at Neiman Marcus, Matches and at Bergdorf Goodman for US$875 (it's already sold out at Net-a-Porter and Barney's). Called the Zaria jacket, it's one of several looks from the legendary New York designer's spring 2009 collection, a floral sequin fabric called ‘rainbow garden’ that also comes in tap pants and a longer coat.
Exhibit B, Spring 2008:
Acclaimed Canadian indie label Mercy’s Spring 08 collection featured a series of dresses, tops and jackets in a vintage-look rose print. The feminine, soft-shouldered jacket was especially popular and carried at several of their New York retail clients, including Phoebe Cates’s Upper East Side boutique Blue Tree (where it quickly sold out) and downtown boutiques TG170, Destination NY and Dumbo’s Blueberi. The jacket also featured, prominently, in print and online in a shop photograph from Lucky magazine’s Montreal city shopping guide (pictured above, price about $280 at Montreal boutique Lola & Emily).
Bemused, I hold up last year's model by Mercy and compare it to the DvF version in both the Teen Vogue and department store images. The resemblance seems too uncanny to be coincidental. See for yourself:


(Left: Spring 2009 Diane von Furstenberg; right, Spring 2008 by Mercy)

The Testimony:
“It was a unique, custom pattern,” Mercy co-designer Jennifer Halchuk explains when I inquire about the design (Mercy have been producing thoughtful, beautiful clothes and selling them at cool boutiques from L.A. to Tokyo for over a decade, and each garment always has an interesting backstory). “It wasn't based on any vintage piece, I developed the pattern from scratch myself. We wanted it to look like a little bed jacket, like a little lounge coat. It came from an idea from a MAC Cosmetics campaign Danse we had worked on [the duo often create the outfits featured in MAC’s merchandising and marketing].” She and design partner Richard Lyle used a copyrighted floral print cotton voile (from Ascher) that they first tea-dyed, then custom-quilted for the bedjacket (and coordinating tops and dresses); the raw-edged, silk charmeuse sash around the neck edge was also tea-dyed. "It was very popular for us, that entire group but especially the jacket with the silk sash," he says. "It sold out for us, although we only got one editorial shoot out of it, in Flare."

The Defence: So what, right? Fashion copycatting happens all the time, whether it's Giorgio Armani up in arms over D&G's pant legs or Kate Moss copying much of her own wardrobe for her Topshop collection. (And sites like Counterfeitchic chronicle examples of the phenom daily.) A few years ago, Toronto milliner Wildhagen alleged that Gap copied one of its hats sold at Barney’s Co-Op, and Topshop ‘was inspired by’ one of Jeremy Laing’s signature spring dresses after it appeared on the cover of Thursday Styles during New York Fashion Week. Shouldn't our more obscure Canadian designers simply take it as imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?

The Prosecution: Actually, no. And the reason DvF jacket's uncanny "similarity" to lesser-known Mercy label especially rankles, besides the injustice of someone profiting from another's talent, or that when paying lofty designer prices one expects original design, is that designer Diane von Furstenberg also happens to be president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The very organization leading the charge against rampant rip-offs of original fashion ideas. In fact in early 2007, the designer herself sued fast-fashion chain Forever 21 for copyright infringement over a yellow printed shift dress called the Cerisier. That's after von Furstenberg and several other designers had already been to Washington (update: and Mrs O's favourite designers just paid the Capitol a second lobbying visit) in support of intellectual property of fashion design and made headlines championing a new American bill called The Design Prohibition Act. And I quote:

“Design Piracy describes the increasingly prevalent practice of enterprises that seek to profit from the invention of others by producing copies of original designs under a different label....[The act] was initiated with two main objectives: to protect both the established and the up-and-coming designers whose development, growth and success helps to support the $350 billion U.S. fashion industry; and to preserve intellectual property. The current U.S. laws are only explicit with regard to counterfeit goods (i.e., any that infringe on a registered trademark or falsely purport to be authentic), but legislation to protect the unauthorized replication of designers’ actual ideas has already been enacted in Japan, India and throughout Europe.”

After checking out the DvF version, Mercy's Halchuk believes the current DvF jacket to be virtually identical to Mercy's original bedjacket sold last spring, too much to be mere coincidence. “The sleeve head [the way the cap of the sleeve is sewn in], the exact same darts at the inner elbow, the puff shape and the elastic in the bottom edge of the sleeve,” she enumerates, plus the interior drawstring and distinctive bias silk charmeuse collar piece, with its floppy asymmetrical bow detail. Only the printed fabric is different. (Perhaps von Furstenberg did learn something from her failed Forever 21 suit: at the moment, only the original fabric prints or graphics of a garment can be copyrighted in America, because they’re considered artwork). Or maybe for all their protesting, American fashion brands think intellectual property applies only to major, established designers with international profile. I mean, why else would Marc Jacobs have similarly appropriated the design of an obscure vintage souvenir scarf from Linsell, Sweden, figuring nobody would notice? (Except they did.)

[zamb]

The Verdict: Whether intentional or accidental (and isn't plagiarism by mistake still plagiarism?), in the case of Mercy 2008 v DvF 2009, the resemblance is just too close for comfort. Particularly coming from a designer who’s president of a national organization with an entire site, Stop Fashion Piracy, dedicated to the principle of intellectual property and the "difference between inspiration and plagiarism." And you have to wonder what recourse DvF would take if the situation were reversed

[AKA*NYC]

Yea I remember that part and certainly the hatches are very tomb like and all but didn't expect the jacob and his biblical twin brother playing a game with humanity, free will vs. fatalism, god of life vs. destruction and all that seemed to surface with the last episode. Kinda unfortunate that these kinds of shows always turn religious at some point for extra oohs and aaahs but I still eat it up...

heathen that i am this never occurred to me

[Fade to Black]

damn....wish i had the means to fly somewhere like japan and just get a whole new wardrobe, start from scratch...one of those days

[SHYE_POSER]

ZAMB: Great article,and the links offer another great read...thank you for this fella