When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole? For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.

Images: © Mustafa Sabbagh, 2010
Text: Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943)

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me

I’M FREE! – I’m free,
And freedom tastes of reality,
I’m free – I’m free,
An’ I’m waiting for you to follow me

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you
Lay your body down

Images:
© Jan Durina
Text No1:
Joss Whedon, The Ballad of Serenity theme, Firefly, performed by Sonny Rhodes
Text No2:
Pete Townshend, in I’m Free on Tommy by The Who
Text No3:
Stephen Stills in Find The Cost Of Freedom on 4 Way Street (1970) by Crosby

Images: © Jo Jankowski

She resisted the conventions of her craft and the politics of her business for one year. Every new film propagated her image of beauty and lust with unrestrained promiscuity. Every man who watched her on celluloid became enamoured and jealous, possessive and demanding. A saviour to all, she was. The women saw a threat but none could forget the agency of her ingenuity in the few moments she was allowed to show it.

Her range of emotions increased auspiciously with every new middleman she dealt with and all the ambitious female allies she made. Fame was almost close enough to touch and she could feel it. One, two, then infinite lies took her to new levels of achievement. I watched, amused.

When she bowed out of her screen self at the end of rehearsals we used to meet at my flat between Franklin and Ivar avenues to drink shots of Jack’s. She would always ask: “Lucius, do you think I will be a star someday?” In the Oracle of my mind, my answer came back as multiple distorted echoes through barely-used synapses to help me understand she belonged to her public and the end of our intimacy was nigh.

In the spring of ’89 she entered the elite group of actors who can control their public image and projects after a masterful performance that earned her domestic and foreign awards. She mentioned me in her acceptance speeches! I was proud and full of joy for her.

One night, after celebrating yet another award, she turned to me, still smiling for the cameras and made me promise never to tell anyone about her childhood. She had finally entered the safe haven of wealth and its power to intoxicate her out of sad memories. Our friendship had become a dangerous part of the past she had been relentlessly escaping from because she was being born again.

The last time we met, she chose Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. We walked in the afternoon arm in arm. We laughed, then quarrelled over Champagne memories and finally stopped on the corner of La Brea and Sunset Boulevard. Tears fell from behind her cat’s eye framed dark sunglasses and gave me one last kiss, to remember what we were. She called a taxi and left me in the final act of her wondrous live performance. I was in the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Text: © Lucius Bod, 2010
Images: © Neil Krug

To begin, I carry out excavations. Like an archeologist, I dig out from the family albums and the shoeboxes full of photographs, the pictures that represented me. I choose snapshots because they are related to memories and to loss. I order them, classify them, scan them, sometimes I crop them, then I print them. Once all these elements are combined, the work of interpretation comes up. I turn my attention to my own history, sometimes with 30 years of distance and the experiences of real life that change the perception of events. The past of a human being, unlike the remains of an antique temple, is neither permanent nor finished but recontructed in the present time. With this objective, I’m using needlework: embroidery and beads. Embroidery is a specific feminine activity. In the past, the embroiderer was a paragon of virtue. Waiting was tied to this activity: women embroidered, hoping for the return of the man to the home. There is nothing subversive to this activity, but I pervert it with my words. I use its decorative function to re-interpret my own history and to expose its failings. The two activities come together again in a kind of dispute: embroidery is the sign of a good education and the words that I speak don’t make me what I was supposed to be: a well behaved girl, a wise spouse and a loving mother. The beads chosen for their sheen and their fragility stress the decorative side and create a gap. I introduce a traditional gesture in this series and tie up again with my previous occupation as a fashion designer. The writing comes in too. It’s like a key to unlock the mystery. The sentences are thought or said, like an automatic writing. This precise and slow work is a metaphor for the work of making oneself and for the passage of time.

Images & Text: © Carolle Benitah

Images: © Kimiko Yoshida

“Since she fled her homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, Kimiko Yoshida – through what is called “self-portraits” – has refined and amplified a feminist stance of protest, cultivated and distanced from “current affairs”: against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against “identity” defined by appurtenances and “communities”, against the stereotypes of “gender” and the determinism of heredity.” [text by Jean-Michel Ribettes, 2009]

American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity is the first Costume Institute exhibition drawn from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Met. It explores developing perceptions of the modern American woman from 1890 to 1940 and how they have affected the way American women are seen today. Focusing on archetypes of American femininity through dress, the exhibition reveals how the American woman initiated style revolutions that mirrored her social, political, and sexual emancipation. “Gibson Girls,” “Bohemians,” and “Screen Sirens,” among others, helped lay the foundation for today’s American woman.

The exhibition features 80 examples of haute couture and high fashion primarily from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was transferred to the Met from the Brooklyn Museum in January 2009. Many of the pieces have not been seen by the public in more than 30 years.

Visitors walk through time as they enter circular galleries that reflect the milieu of each feminine archetype. Period clothing is brought to life with hand-painted panoramas animated by music, video, and lighting. The first gallery evokes the ballroom of the “Heiress” (1890s), filled with ball gowns by Charles Frederick Worth. Scenes of the great outdoors showcase the athleticism and physical independence of the “Gibson Girl” (1890s) as characterized by bathing costumes, riding ensembles, and cycling suits.

An artistic rendering of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studio in New York provides the backdrop for the “Bohemian” (early 1900s), an archetype represented by Rita Lydig and featuring her signature silk pantaloons by Callot Soeurs. The “Suffragist” and “Patriot” (1910s) have backdrops of archival film footage revealing the gradual political emancipation of women after World War I.

“Flappers” (1920s) are evoked through simple, practical chemise dresses for day by Patou, and heavily beaded styles for evening by Lanvin and Molyneux, shown against a mural of New York City inspired by the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka. Cinematic representations of the “Screen Siren” presented in a gallery resembling a 1930s cinema, showcase body-cleaving, second-skin bias-cut gowns, including a dress designed by Travis Banton for Anna May Wong in the film Limehouse Blues (1934). In the final gallery, projected images of American women from 1890 to the present explore how American style has evolved from characteristics represented by each of the exhibition’s archetypes.

Designers in the exhibition include Travis Banton, Gabrielle Chanel, Callot Soeurs, Madame Eta, Elizabeth Hawes, Madame Grès, Charles James, Jeanne Lanvin, Liberty & Company, Edward Molyneux, Paul Poiret, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jessie Franklin Turner, Valentina, Madeleine Vionnet, Weeks, Charles Frederick Worth, and Jean-Philippe Worth, among others.

Until 15 August 2010
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10028
USA

It’s surprisingly easy to accept the calls of those who call me grandmother
Even though by 28 I had never felt the stretch of children
And there is nothing supernatural about how the waves call to me they always called to me
When I woke, I could hear the sea speak to me

I had to be silent to taste her on my lips
How else could I have been open to her welcome

But she is a fickle thing and I am lucky to have escaped her whims
Perhaps I was her child on loan
Perhaps the red smoke in the presence of my birth was
Her blood in mist rolling in from the shore
Perhaps that’s why I did not speak ,
Already one month old
Born into this land family
Having come from the sea
That’s why my presence will call her
That’s why she loves to see me

Is that why she took my dear earth bound brother
My sweet brother helping my father
We didn’t know then that that I was her daughter
And that I could have
Perhaps
Saved them
If only my land mother had not brought me back
My brother
Sweet boy
My sadness
Every boat that leaves, I see his hair fall over his face – sparkling in the salty air
crystals of her ownership beginning their journey over his skin

Now they dress me in in the flat topped cap I’d never even seen in my lifetime
The beads that hang down so delicate, so precious
And gold and jewels encrust the garb I wear
Handed to me in-lieu of the treasure my water mother took
from men and boats year after year after year

I wear them in love of all those I could not save and all those I can

Favourite daughter
That’s who I am
that I can quell her servant demons and cool her passions in the winds and waves
the drops of seawater that are my eyes penetrate her intention
the shells that catch the whispers of untold breezes that are my ears
penetrate the fog and cloud over crashing rocks I hear them call to me

Exclusive Poem: © J. L. Nash, 2010
Images: © Chen Man for Vogue

Within the world of fashion photography, Wendy Bevan is an unexpected unique curiosity. Her rich and painterly works of art draw us into a world of ambiguity and uneasy narratives. Perusing her portfolio, one is led through a labyrinth of antique film sets in which dramatic silent performances are taking place, with disconcertingly beautiful femme fatales acting out their memories, bittersweet feelings and repressed emotions.

Bevan has worked for many leading magazines. Publications include; Russian Vogue, Italian Marie Claire, Harpers Bazaar, Muse, Financial Times: How To Spend It, The Independent, The Observer, Self Service, Big, 10, Lula, Nylon, V Magazine, Qvest, POP Magazine, I-D, Grey and online Magazine TEST. Through these commissions she has worked with a number of top Fashion Directors and Stylists, namely Simon Robins, Katie Felstead, Fran Burns, and Jacob K.

Images: © Wendy Bevan, Muse Magazine – A/W 08/09

Images: © Alexandre Dieval, Evol, 2010. A selection of images from the series Evol, 2010, published in the latest issue of Sang Bleu magazine. Courtesy of Alexandre Dieval.