Where the seventies went to die

Leaving aside the black lipstick and Ziggy Stardust makeup (oh, dear!), this dress from Los Angeles-based fashion collective Beauty Is Pain is made of old vinyl 45s, each one carefully cut into just the right shape to impale the poor model when the she finally succumbs to the toe-crushing pressure of her high-heeled platform boots and tries to sit down. Truly an outfit for only the most dedicated of fashion victims…

The rest of the photoset at LA Weekly is well worth viewing, too, ranging as it does from the “Oh, that’s nice!” to the “Oh, my god!”, and all points between.

Oh, no, my hayfever!

Seen on the glossy fashion blog ecouterre (too hip to have a capital letter, it seems), a “living dress” spawned by the unholy mating of a clothes designer and a landscape architect.

Made from recycled bicycle inner tubes and whatever blooms can be stolen from gardens and window boxes, the creators intend that the dozens of water-filled “vases” are populated with the flowers of the season, leaving me to ponder not only what one does when summer fades into autumn, but also the excitement that is sure to come from the inevitable attentions of bees, aphids and passing hummingbirds.

Now, if somebody would please pass me a Claritin?

Victoria’s Secret take note

Wikipedia continues to impress as the ultimate fount of all knowledge and wisdom, a reputation reinforced by an article on 19th century Vaudeville act The Barrison Sisters, billed as The Wickedest Girls In the World.

“In their most famous act, the sisters would dance, raising their skirts slightly above their knees, and ask the audience, "Would you like to see my pussy?" When they had coaxed the audience into an enthusiastic response, they would raise up their skirts, revealing that each sister was wearing underwear of their own manufacture that had a live kitten secured over the crotch.”

I’m not sure there is anything that I can add to that.

Thermoplastic Chainmail

3D printers (sometimes called replicators or fabricators) use various techniques to create complex shapes from molten or powdered plastics, and now their operators are turning their attentions to the ripe possibilities for couture.

In best Star Trek fashion replicated garments are created in exactly the right size and shape, without need for tailoring or wasted materials, and as with most emerging technologies we are assured that the possibilities are endless. Current techniques either use knotted “stitches” that are an affront to the gods of topology, or linked pieces resembling chainmail - assuming that medieval artisans had access to wire in disco-era dayglo colours, that is.

Making clothes in this way is not a new idea, even outside science fiction, with work by pioneering designhaus Freedom Of Creation dating back ten years or more, but as the fabricators themselves are spreading from the big R&D labs to the basements of physics geeks, there is a growing chance of encountering homebrew implementations of such couture at the cons and fairs. The reception that these pioneers receive, of course, will remain to be seen…