The Autumn/Winter 2010/11 shows at Paris Fashion Week come - for better or worse - leather bound. Also, “tribe” and “tribal” are words that often get tossed about in reference to this season’s collections. Sarah Mower of Style.com quoted Rick Owens as saying that his women are, ‘a sect of nuns with inner discipline’. Well, naturally I think Dune:

Punk Bene Gesserits at the Rick Owens A/W 2010/11 show

All photos from Style.com

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I meant to write about Lois Nesbitt’s Brodsky & Utkin: The Complete Works sooner, but until recently it was buried in one of my “to be processed” stacks of reading material (easily confused with my “to sit and collect dust” stacks, but I know the difference). Russian paper architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin formed a partnership in the late Seventies that lasted roughly a decade. Their fantastic work, according to Nesbitt, “constitutes a graphic form of architectural criticism” of the dehumanizing effects of Soviet utilitarian architecture.

Doll’s House 1982
from Nesbitt’s Brodsky & Utkin: The Complete Works (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003)

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Living in Atlanta for three years helped to dispel many myths (no, the Tara Plantation has never been real and no, there aren’t any peach trees to be found in Atlanta) and reinforce a few stereotypes (yes, southern folk are hospitable and yes, it’s called the Dirty South for a reason). I miss the humid summer nights, live oaks, the curious ability of kudzu to engulf anything within a couple of weeks if not tamed and the steady stream of pleasant surprises. Coming across Oxford Comics was one of those pleasant surprises, and it still has my vote for best comic book shop. Through the owner’s well-organized, comprehensive inventory I stumbled onto many wonderful finds, like the fashion manga, Paradise Kiss.

Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss Volume 4, Los Angeles, Tokyo: Tokyopop, 2003. The cast of characters from left: Arashi, George, Isabella and Miwako - caged is “the heroine”, Yukari

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Even under a microscope, Nature’s lessons in design range from simple structures to complex patterns. German (Prussian) zoologist Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature was originally published around the turn of the 19th century and influenced practitioners of Art Nouveau such as René Binet and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Haeckel’s artistic rendering of the “structural peculiarities” of organisms emphasized the ornamental aspects of natural forms. Browsing through Art Forms in Nature provides me with all manner of design ideas for garments, interior decorating, character sketches and sci-fi landscapes or architecture.

“Discomedusae” from Ernst Haeckel. Art Forms in Nature Prestel Publishing, 2004

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