Living Colour Fully In NYC

Hello everyone, I'm back! And I was glad to leave in some ways, to get back to my home, my friends and a proper computer for blogging, but Texas and New York were a welcome break and I really enjoyed the trip. But I am not going to ramble on forever about the sentimental values of holidays, I am going to talk about the advert above. I found this Kate Spade perfume ad on a wall in the arty Chelsea district of NYC, and it really caught my eye with its neon colours, and the checkerboard design between the hashtags (they look a bit too much like Keep Calm And Carry On posters, but hey, they're neon!!!) and the neon-dressed models. 

However, it was the hashtag slogan that really got me hooked and made me make my latest fashion post, "Live Colour Fully". Too many people wear just grey, black and white these days and claim they look "minimalist", but the real stars of the fashion of the streets are those who go all out and really attract positive attention from passersby. The ones who wear a bright-coloured gem among regular, "minimalist" clothes. The ones who "Live Colour Fully". And here is my photo collection of the LCF population of New York City (good, bad and ugly!). (N.B. These are discreet photos of actual people on the street. If you happen to see this and you don't want your picture here, please comment and I'll take it down).

This is one of the more subtle takes on LCF. Not sure about the matchy-matchy theme going on here, but the blacks and navies of their trousers are a good, tasteful contrast to the lemon yellow t-shirt/camisole.

Another yellow (it seems to be a popular LCF colour!) piece, and this woman has chosen well. The yellow jeans are engulfed in the beige of her cardigan and shoes in an eye-catching way, and they bring a good sort of attention to an otherwise boring outfit.

I like mint green, but only when it's worn with the right accompaniments. Which I think it is here. Mint green works not with black and other dark colours (ugh!), but with pastels and paler colours, like these floral trousers. They balance with the light green colour to make a milky, airy feel.

Blue and yellow requires guts, but sometimes it can work. Like red and blue, it's a clash that isn't shocking but a pleasant surprise, the clash you're starting to see more and more often. I also like the sleeveless-jacket-over-hoodie look, which is a versatile one that can be worn by anyone with pretty much any style. Oh, and like everyone else in the "good" section of this post, this guy has paired his look brilliantly with plain trousers and jacket-matching hi-tops.

Ah, now for the first of the bads. I don't know what it is, but pink doesn't work with greys and browns like yellow and blue do. There is a repulsive clash here, and I say, if you wear neon pink, either wear all pink if you're brave enough, or pair it with a fitting colour such as white. Just not grey. Or brown.

This woman went all out on colourful patterns, and I don't think she pulled it off. She's the first on the list to wear entirely LCF, and she has every neon colour under the sun on that dress (plus the fluorescent backpack). And it's a bit too much. If there was a dress with just one of those patterns on it would be fine (my favourite is the red optical illusion on her top), but all of them in one? With enough clashes to fill a catwalk? You look like a clown with an unqualified stylist. 

Thank you for reading, and take inspiration from the photos (maybe not the bad ones :))!

-DP :)

PS Last day of Easter holidays today :(. Had three school friends round today, made a short movie which is still in the editing process, but I hope to post it soon!

New York's Attempt At Graffiti: The Good, The Bad And The Random

OK, here's the deal. Right now I'm sitting in the lounge in Newark airport, but as you can probably guess, there is not much to blog about in an airport lounge. So I'm going to carry on blogging about New York. On our last day, when my dad wasn't working, we decided to go somewhere different, outside of Manhattan and a bit more similar to home.

I've posted about our graffiti at home in London before, so you've probably gleaned how much I love these spray-paint works on the wall. So I was enthralled about what the borough of Queens, just east of Manhattan, would bring to street art, and how it would be similar to and different from London. And Queens definitely didn't disappoint, with its walls plastered in art (we even saw a work in progress on the roof).

I think the main difference between the two city's art was perhaps the more sinister side to the New York graffiti. From the angry-faced lightbulbs (these were a lot more frequent than my photos of them) to the blue girl sitting outside her spaceship that reminds me of the aliens in "Avatar" to the various alieny images mercilessly dropped onto the wall, New York graffiti seems a lot more about the horror and sci-fi genres than the humour (ours, of course, is a different story: see my "This Proves Graffiti Can Be Awesome" post for our wall cockroach and the ubiquitous rats). As for that scowling face in the tree, that looks like it could be in "Lord Of The Rings", and they mess up the slightly funny story with the skull guy as a cowboy by introducing his face on a "Wanted" sign. Totally unnecessary.

However, every cloud has a silver lining (cliché, sorry) and they were some more remarkable works around the part of Queens I like to refer to as the "Graffiti Block". They make up for pressing too much on the sci-fi button by spraying lighter designs like the girl with coloured stalks coming out of her back (wings, maybe?), the tribute to the legend that is Amy Winehouse (I thought that one was one of the most technically good, unlike those random pink hairs sprouting out in odd places) and the adorably cute little monster saying "You no love me?". They return to old themes with the dystopian bluetits, but dystopian bluetits? I can feel an award-winning novel coming on.

Reminded of home by that random Union Jack on the Queens street, I am just about to board the flight, so although there will be more NYC posts, they will be written in London!
-DP :)

I Finally Have Some Cowboy Boots. Oh Yeah.

Yup, the title says it all really. But the ironic thing is, we go to New York and Texas, and you'd expect them to be bought in Texas, and sure, we did see a lot of cowboy boots there. But they were all too enormously big or they were really cute little ones meant for little kids. No size 5s. So where did we eventually find them? A New York thrift shop.

I guess I should feel pretty lucky that my mum found a street full of thrift shops last night when we were walking home from dinner (I was initially gloomy; despite them being the subject of one of the best songs currently in the charts, I never really find anything worth having in thrift shops). But you're all screaming right now, why did you ever want cowboy boots in the first place? For several reasons:

1) How can you ever leave Texas without owning cowboy boots? It's cowboy country, come on. I was in despair when we got on the domestic New York flight. Now, even if I never wear them, they'll still go nicely in my room as a memory of this trip.

2) Forget Converse, cowboy boots are the best type of footwear to go with jeans. I mean, they're what jeans were invented to go with! Literally, Levi Strauss (who designed clothes for cowboys) wouldn't have invented jeans had it not been for cowboy boots. So to justify owning jeans, logically you should need cowboy boots. And I have some dark blue jeans I need to be more inspired wearing.

3) Taylor Swift wears them. Bit of a shallow one that, but it's one step further in my everlasting quest to be the new Taylor. Actually, the real reason for number 3 is the whole country singer association. When you wear them, you feel like you stepped right out of your banjo-playing slot in the barn in Nashville (even if you don't play the banjo in the first place). If you prefer, you can imagine yourself in a Chevy truck, that has a tendency of getting stuck (if you think I've gone absolutely crazy, that last bit's a lyric from Taylor Swift's "Tim McGraw"). All because of the amazing cowboy boots you're wearing.

4) They will go down an absolute storm at school mufti day! After my entirely red (I mean entirely, even my socks were red) outfit at Red Nose Day, it would be a good next instalment in the Over The Top series, as my classmates call it. Watch out 7T!

5) They are awesome, to be frank. What other boots have an interesting hem, pretty embroidery, a small but walkable heel and many a legend behind them? That cannot be said of another boring ol' pair of trainers.

Those are my five reasons behind buying these (they were $25, a relative bargain for real leather). I hope you see them as justifying the purchase. If you don't, I'll cheer you up by leaving you with a picture of Taylor Swift in some amazing blue cowboy boots I wish I had (but hey, you can't have everything) – they used to be her trademark back in her country days, but they've now been mercilessly replaced by downgrading to pop (much as I love her pop songs, they just aren't as good as her early country ones) and Louboutins. And, of course, I'll also share a picture of my own new boots!
-DP :)

If I Were In The Gutai…

"In New Yoooooork, concrete jungle where dreams are maaaaaade of, there's nothing you caaaan't doooo!" Yeah, bit of Alicia Keys there. You've probably guessed where I am right now, unless you either think I'm being enormously cryptic or you're pretty stupid. But I'm going off topic right now. I have good news and bad news. The good news is we got upgraded to a suite because the receptionist liked us! And we have a view of the Empire State Building from the room! But you know what the Empire State Building looks like, I'm not going to post a picture. And the suite isn't really relevant to you guys out there, so on to the bad news. The bad news is that my mum forgot to print out all her notes about things to do here (we've been before when my dad goes on business, so we've already been to all the tourist sites), so she's forgotten all the interesting places I was going to blog about :(.

But we did go somewhere interesting today, we went to the iconic Guggenheim Museum. Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture is really awesome there, and I got the most zoomed out picture I could without stepping into the road :). And inside the only thing you were allowed to take a picture of were these tubes with coloured plastic inside. Apparently once you were allowed to go on to the upper floors and tip the tubes and watch the plastic inside run about, but Health & Safety deemed it unacceptable because you had to lean over the rails (damn you risk assessor!).

But the real highlight of the museum was the Gutai exhibition. The Gutai were a Japanese art group in the 50s and 60s, who tried to make art less about abstract expression than the actual process of the art and interaction with the audience. And their avant-garde lack of expression is why I find it unnecessary to show pictures of their work here (you weren't allowed photos anyway); they made the kind of work that you can simply describe and still provoke interest. Such artworks include the man who ran through twenty one screens of paper and got concussion at the end, the woman who made a dress from light bulbs (Ha, Lady GaGa, youre not the first one) and the bell that the audience could ring that sounded like a fire alarm (again, Health & Safety made us only ring it once every hour. GRRRR.). To put it like the exhibition brief, the Gutai "mentally reframed the commonplace", which you'll see is in my new blog description.

So I was inspired by the Gutai, and decided to make an avant-garde work of my own. Just my luck that when we were walking back to the hotel through Central Park (one of my favourite parks in the world, it's good to be back after two years), someone had written on the street a list of exercise drills, and been stupid enough to leave the chalk around. I had a brain wave that perhaps this could be an interactive piece, that people could come along, pick up the (washable) chalk and write a new, funny or serious, exercise drill on the list. I started it off with a silly drill and a spot of blog promo (see picture)! Oh, and people in New York, if you go to Central Park, keep an eye out!
-DP :)