2012 August | The Blogazine - Contemporary Lifestyle Magazine

31/08/2012

Well-dressed in Stockholm

Inaugurated by H.R.H. Swedish Crown Princess Victoria and with a larger than ever presence by both Swedish and international press, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week captured Stockholm for three days with its Swedish minimalism, tailoring and style. Giants and well-rooted designers like Filippa K, Whyred, J.Lindeberg, Cheap Monday, Hope, Dagmar and Tiger of Sweden shared the runway with couture design by Fadi el Khoury and international hopes like ALTEWAISAOME (and about 20 other designers). The Blogazine followed MBFW Stockholm to see the Swedish fashion scene’s contribution to the S/S 2013 collection.

The official opening show was honoured to the name of Fadi el Khoury, one of Sweden’s few couture artists. If you have ever visited Château de Versailles, you recognize the soft tones of ivory and golden details that he brought to the collection. Less couture but always as safe and precise were the well-made collections from Filippa K. With quality and accuracy of fit the brand’s Nordic minimalism leaves every women as well as man well-attired. Tiger of Sweden brought up the baseball cap matched with a trench coat or slim fitted jacket and J.Lindeberg worked the short length trouser suits for men, and what will become a must-have leather jacket from the women’s collection. Whyred showed a few it-items, Hope continues to attract both the forty something woman as well as the young it-girls and The Local Firm brought top model Emma Wiklund back to the runway.

Cheap Monday showed out in the open, and gave all of their fans the opportunity to partake, a democratic choice by the brand that flirts with every young Swede. Instagram got to be part of the mood board when the photo application got its filters on the show by Ida Sjöstedt, who created a dreamy S/S13 runway under a rainbow. Two designers coming from Italian fashion houses and now showing their fourth collection in Stockholm are the girls behind ALTEWAISAOME. Mixing Scandinavian simplicity with international high fashion, they might be one of the young brands with most expectations from international visitors.

No matter how many or how few brands one mentions after a few days in Stockholm, the sum of impressions will end up about the same; a minimalistic take on each season with the style, class and prestige in doing things well always present. In the same time, the Swedish fashion scene makes sure that there is just a leap between office chic and street cool.

Lisa Olsson Hjerpe – Image courtesy of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Stockholm

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30/08/2012

Architecture Biennale 2012 – Giardini

This year’s Architecture Biennale has officially opened its gates to the visitors yesterday, while the real news of the day in the architecture world was who the Golden Lion would be awarded to. Trying not to be influenced by the jury’s choice, we have visited all the pavilions in the Giardini choosing our personal favourites.

Before visiting the various countries, we headed for the second part of Chipperfield‘s curatorial show which surprised us even in this section. One of our favourite entries was Olafur Eliasson‘s Little Sun lamp, which was displayed both in an installation as well as a video, showing the artist’s wit through an ingenious but simple object. Seen that we can’t stress enough about their work, we have to mention the beautiful installation showing Airports by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Photography was one of the most frequently used medium in this show, with artists like Armin Linke or Candida Höfer showing their artworks in relation to other architect’s work. One of the most beautiful entries in this year’s Biennale was Gabriele Basilico‘s interpretation of the national pavilions around Giardini, both for its incredible photography as well as the way the photographs were displayed around the room.

As far as the national pavilions are concerned, the ones that shouldn’t be missed are the British pavilion, together with its German neighbours who involved the designer Konstantin Grcic for creating the set-up for the show.

When the national participation award was handed to the Japanese pavilion, we must admit we were quite surprised. Guided by Toyo Ito as curator, the pavilion proposed a series of solutions for the area destroyed last year by the tsunami. While among the “Common Ground” exhibitors, the Golden Lion went to Urban Think Tank and Justin McGuirk, one of our favourite installations mentioned in the previous article.

Even though it was wednesday, on its first day of public opening, the Biannale venues were full of curious visitors. Maybe we are now ready to say that the Architecure Biennale, with its 13th edition can compete intellectually with its older Art sister. Common Ground is on show until the 25th of November.

Rujana Rebernjak

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29/08/2012

Prinzessinnengärten: Berlin’s Urban Garden of Eden

Like a quintessential utopian oasis, the Prinzessinnengärten was in 2009 one of the first urban garden projects to be initiated in the capital city of Germany. Since then it has become a cherished sanctum where one can unwind from the stresses of the city, enjoy a first-class organic meal or come together, to experiment and learn the ins and outs of city farming.

Robert Shaw, a filmmaker, and Marco Clausen, a bar owner and photographer, spearheaded this “pop up farming” project in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, after an inspiring visit to agriculta urbanas in Cuba. Along with the help of an extensive populace of volunteers, this former fallow wasteland was converted into a mobile farm of transportable organic vegetable plots. Today, the 6,000 square meter pasture consists of a highly diverse range of locally produced herbs and vegetables, all of which are grown without use of pesticides or other artificial substances. Furthermore, the fruits and veggies are cultivated in portable rice bags, baker’s boxes or milk containers. Additionally, there is a honey-cooperation with a fellow beekeeper and at the little sheds, the reaped foods are available for purchase. When necessary, a change of location is fairly easily realised, due to the dynamic, mobile system that is created.

With all the labour-intensive harvesting and tending of foods and plants on this urban farmland, a devoted community has been established. It has become a collective that is first and foremost premised on urban agriculture and sustainable living. In view of this, the Prinzessinnengärten provides an attractive haven for anyone with aspirations to seed, weed and exchange knowledge on organic food and nutrition, biodiversity, planting techniques and even climate control. Yet with the same zest one can also choose to retreat in the wooden ready-made library or in the cafe under the dotted willows, while enjoying a freshly prepared vegetarian meal.

If anything, this urban gardening project illustrates the feasibility to go green amid endless blocks of grey, converting abandoned urban lots into small green beds of fruits, fauna and veggies. As such, it is a good reminder of how small scale interventions can kindle active citizenship to collectively ignite a new, greener lease of life.

And although the word on the streets claims that real estate developers have set their eyes on this green city lung, thus far this local Garden of Eden continues to flourish, evolve and cultivate a greener consciousness.

Claire van der Berg – Images courtesy of Prinzessinnengärten

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28/08/2012

Scandinavian Fashion Battle

Beautiful shows, extravagant parties, exhibitions and events – fashion weeks bring the glitz to the industry and everyone is fighting for their share of the publicity cake. Scandinavia’s two largest fashion cities, Copenhagen and Stockholm, both gain attention internationally, but the approach to the fashion week differs. Copenhagen just finished its turn a couple of weeks ago, while Stockholm is just entering its second, and final, fashion week with Mercedes-Benz Stockholm edition. Which is the right way to go, and – who is the customer to please?

With over 2 700 brands represented, Copenhagen Fashion Week can count themselves as the second largest fashion city after Paris, if one solely measures it on the number of brands. By creating an all-in-one week, where the designer runway shows and four competing trade fairs are getting along and are sharing the attention of press and buyers, the biannual fashion week in Copenhagen surely is Scandinavia’s largest fashion gathering. Though, even if Stockholm’s fashion events might be minor to numbers, the city isn’t far after when it comes to publicity for its fashion scene. Stockholm has become famous for its sleek design aesthetics, recognizable all around the world.

That Stockholm doesn’t reach the same numbers of attending brands, buyers and press in one single event, might be the fact that Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Stockholm has just started, just over a week after the Stockholm Fashion Week ended. Add a special week for retailer collections, and Stockholm is counting six fashion weeks per year, in comparison with most cities doing only two. Which is the right or wrong way of carrying out fashion weeks and events might be up to the individual stakeholder to decide, or the amount of actual business carried out, but it remains to ponder if the separate weeks are a strategy of dividing the scene into more manageable blocks, or is it a sign of organizations not being able to collaborate? “We’re proud of being based and showing in Stockholm, but it is for sure confusing that Stockholm chooses to organize multiple fashion weeks. Not only for the press and buyers coming from abroad, but for the own market as well,” said two designers that The Blogazine spoke to.

Copenhagen’s well organized and collaborative intense one-week, or Stockholm’s separated events arranged by different organizations with slightly different focuses; if the ending point is all about business, who gains the most at the end of the day? The buyers who are getting it all-in-one or the brands sharing the time and space? Or is the most important thing to bring attention to the cities and their fashion as a whole? Whichever is right and whoever wins the battle of numbers, both cities are bringing a large amount of publicity to the growing Scandinavian fashion. This week, The Blogazine is following the runway in Stockholm while preparing for a month of nothing but fashion. September is almost here.

Lisa Olsson Hjerpe

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27/08/2012

Architecture Biennale 2012 – Common Ground Arsenale

Architecture Biennale 2012: Common Ground Arsenale

After the long hot summer and the holidays we have all been longing for, the time for this year’s fall/winter exhibition season has come. While we were all relaxing under the sun, David Chipperfield and his team were working on this year’s edition of the Architecture Biennale. Named Common Ground, this year’s show is a nice treat for all those interested in architecture.

As the curator explains in his introduction to the exhibition, the title, and therefore the theme, guiding this year’s selection – Common Ground – was chosen in reaction to the current “professional and cultural tendencies of our time that place such emphasis on individual and isolated actions, instead of making the case for common and shared ideas that can have a positive impact on the city”. Even though it was impossible to completely avoid the cult of personality, seen how the work of some superstar architects impacts our society. But still, the common thread Chipperfield tried to pursue was the idea that it is often the context, the citizens and a series of other ‘invisible’ influences that actually form a ‘piece’ of architecture. Thus, making those relations visible, moving away from a monographic display kind of shows, was one of the curator’s primary intentions.

In this sense, some of the highlights of the show were Herzog & De Meuron’s project for the concert hall in Hamburg, Elbphilarmonie, which has shown both the enormous models of the architecture in question, as well as all of the newspaper pages treating the controversial political and cultural background that followed its realization. Another successful example is FAT’s collaboration with other architecture firms in the realization of the Museum of Copying, thus showing a huge model of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, one of the world’s most copied constructions. While Urban-Think Tank and Justin McGuirk’s reproduction of a famous Venezuelan restaurant was a pleasantly amusing installation, Zaha Hadid’s portfolio-like space was the one that least impressed us.

After the sunny morning filled with brilliant architecture, the pouring rain in the afternoon has prevented us in our planned tour-de-force of seeing both Giardini and Arsenale in a single shot. Maybe it was all for the better, since every show of this scale – the hectic Biennale in particular – should always be properly digested.

Rujana Rebernjak

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27/08/2012

Summer 2012: Wrapping Up

Well, well, well… it’ a wrap! Summer twenty-twelve is dead, her ashes strewn lovingly along sandy beaches and upon the streets of faraway cities. In train cars, dive bars and motel rooms. Oh, she shall surely be missed. But despite her killer heat waves, the never-ending London games and a psycho Batman mass shooting, she brought no rapture, no armageddon. The messiah didn’t even pop in for tea.

So, count your fingers and toes, kids, and snap snap! Chop chop! Out of the bomb shelters and back to the grind with each and every one of you!

Gently, of course. Don’t hit that hamster wheel without some serious coffee. Look around you – you’ll need it.
Perhaps it’s just us, but the light of summer has the darndest tendency to bring into harsh focus exactly those big picture problems we’re all part of. Escape brings perspective, after all. And perspective is the first step towards a solution. And assuming the Maya got it wrong, we’ll be here for quite a while. Now is prime time to make it count.
So as you wake from your summer siestas, we hope you’ll join us in soaking up the seriousness of the season: Elections! Climate change! Censorship! Poverty! Russia’s run amok! Syria’s in shambles!

Nothing we can’t handle together.  Big cheers to a productive and hopeful new season.

Tag Christof

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26/08/2012

Summer 2012: Polaroid Detroit by Tag Christof

Much like every summer, I explore the ruins of my own country. Interstate, fleabag motels and running on a diet of pure roadside grease, I’m convinced there is no beauty as sublime as the sprawling squalor that is America. And since I don’t live here, I can share Baudrillard’s detached disdain for the place while also being wildly, reverently in love with its endlessness, its absurdity, its contradictions.

So after six weeks of hard labor in a Los Angeles architecture school, I set out (by muscle car, of course) with a bag full of vintage film stock and an arsenal of click-click cameras to burn some serious petrol through the sprawling landscape. Destination: Detroit. That down-and-out fighter in the midst of a full-blown cultural renaissance. (More on that later.)

Below are some instant shots, mostly on old Polaroid 669 from the 23-state, 14,000km trek. I can’t wait to see what comes back from the lab.

An idyllic scene of likely genetically-modified crops somewhere in eastern Nebraska.

 The ghost of modernism past. An enormous, shuttered shopping mall in St. Louis.

Home sweet Detroit.

 Exploring the eerie, abandoned Brewster-Douglass projects – once the home of Diana Ross.

The Blue Whale, smiling since the 1970s in a lovely little bog outside Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Tag Christof

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25/08/2012

Summer 2012: Morocco by Matthew Mattia

The typical ramadan swim. Essaouira.

A grid between human and divine. Rabat.

Romantic walk inside the house. Marrakech.

The classic animal beach. Tanger.

From the same point of view there’re different perspectives. Essaouira.

Matthew Mattia

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24/08/2012

Summer 2012: Pasman by Rujana Rebernjak

When you go to Pasman Island in northern Dalmatia, by the size of the ferry that hardly fits more then 15 cars, you can easily figure out you are heading for a lonely and relaxing vacation. Pasman is a small island where time seems to have stopped. Besides a few houses and five or six fishermen’s boats, the only thing you can see is the sea, some rocks and the olive trees. But the beauty of the sea makes up for everything, being one of the cleanest Croatian islands.

That’s why these images show only small bays and the nature surrounding them, a green and blue collage. Get ready for tough roads and lots of walking, maybe on sunrise or sunset, seeing the beautiful light on one of the most incredible Dalmatian islands.

One thing you have to remember if you ever visit Pasman – be sure to make friends with someone who has a boat, that’s the only right way of experiencing it.