News From the Bog #7

Here in the northern hemisphere we can finally feel spring in the air. Every year we forget that just a little bit of warmth (10°C+), some sun peeking out from behind the clouds and the scent of phytohormones in the air gives you a feeling that can really only be likened to coming up off a pill. And now it’s back. Thank the lord. Everyone survive the winter ok?

In other news, apparently it’s been (london) fashion week. We usually miss most things, which is not necessarily on purpose but more because we’ve never really been tapped in, avoiding any fashion week responsibilities like the plague (ok so a little bit on purpose). What we do love, though, are all the interesting satellite things that happen around it these days. And we did manage to seek out a couple of these.

We piggybacked on an appointment to Townwear. Which means we must admit to you all that we are now eating our words about it being AI and the brand is very real and incredibly good. Not AI. None involved, apparently. The man behind it, Greg Chester, is heavily involved with One of a Kind, that ancient vintage shop on Portobello market that used to have all those Chanel bags in the window (haven’t been in a while, maybe they still do?) with his brother(?), James (who is behind Another Kind).

We remember they were very early players in the scans of stuff and archival fashion/art imagery on Instagram game, and probably have an encyclopaedic bank of references tucked away. Hence the imagery for Townwear being so unbelievably slick. Hearsay says that Greg has teamed up with a woman called Xinyuan Zhang and got some financing to start a label. He’s been working on it for three years, and they were showing it for the first time this season, beginning to drip feed it out. They said they weren’t even going to do a showroom, but they’d had so much interest they thought: ‘fuck it’.

The clothes themselves are very real. Almost everything is double faced, and the idea has been to make everything as beautiful on the inside as the outside. A tuft of organza inside a structured silk shirt; ultra-fine merino wool doubled over on itself; lyocell-nylon duster coats whose finish had a peachy soft fuzz. Greg mentioned he’d started designing the collection from the pieces he loves to throw on if he’s in a rush to get out the house. It certainly had that: the ease, but also the lavishness of those pieces you feel make you look really good and are likely to garner a few ‘where did you get thats’. Highlight of the visit, though, were the crumbling Adel Rootstein mannequins partially dressed in the odd piece. Kinda terrifying? But terribly fab.

Then, this week, we thought we’d deep dive slightly on the November Books exhibition-slash-event at Tenderbooks. This consisted of a very tantalising window display of issues 1-30 (1985–1990) of STREET mag (which we’ve been thinking about writing about for a sec because we are major fans) plus sheets from a 1980s trend forecasting binder. Apparently the acquisition of nice big long runs of STREET is more common than you think, and lovely Paul from November sold his last run to the creative director of Cèline. Whether that was Miss Phoebe, Hedi, or Michael Rider, we didn’t manage to establish as we were interrupted, but we think it’s probably Phoebe or Michael just judging by their general vibe.

We really love STREET, and we turn to it whenever we feel like we’re a little underinspired in terms of dress. STREET was started in 1985 by Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki, the guy who would go on to launch FRUiTS which obviously became a whole phenomenon for documenting the street style in Harajuku in the 1990s and 2000s. STREET from the 1980s and 1990s is hilariously underrated in our humble opinion, and if you can’t afford to buy the early run from November, you can get yourself a few PDFs direct from Shoichi Aoki himself via this link here.

The trend forecasting binder was, really, the pièce de résistance, featuring shoes from Paris and Tokyo snapped by some sneaky photographer’s lens. Paul told us he’s had it in the shop for a long time, but hasn’t felt able to sell it yet, so he’s taking it home after the show. A quick look at library holdings and google showed us that these are not things that tend to be preserved very often (at least not in publicly-accessible archives, maybe company archives would be a better bet), reminding us just how important all these dealers are in preserving stuff from the past that is treated as ephemeral. Alas, we dream of a world where commerce is unnecessary and we can all just collect and collate for a giant library of things.

Last night LA Timpa’s show opened at Cell Project Space. Sorry we didn’t make it! But we will be going ASAP. Lots of beautiful discarded, ancient analogue technologies creating mystical sounds and a video about a fictional spy rebuilding a relationship with his daughter. Sounds cool af.

We did manage to get to Julie Velut’s gorgeous zine launch at twos. They were raising money for Mind, the British mental health charity, and from what we’ve heard it was quite successful.

Our friends @ Galerina opened a permanent space!! They used to do shows in one of their bedrooms in council flat, then graduated to temporary moments in other galleries, but now they’ve set up shop in Clerkenwell with a group show ft. DeSe Escobar, Andrea Fourchy, Stuart McKenzie, Alan Michael, Sophie Reinhold, Coumba Samba and Vivienne Tétaz. Fun fact we found out when googling the gallery to check the address: galerina is also the name of fungi that have tiny brown mushrooms. Cute!

We interviewed Dr. Noki, the iconic textile artist who came up in the Shoreditch scene in the 1990s + 2000s for a piece we are writing, and the whole time we were talking we saw this fab canvas in the background. After the chat he sent a photo of it (as per our request). It’s called ‘Wrapped and Weaved into Society’. J’ad!

Ciao for now!