Friday, January 11, 2013

these are not floral jeans


There's a lot more than an ass-widening botanic buffet going on here, and I'm not talking about the gold toe socks.  Learnding is about to happen so assume the position, cocktail in hand, medical marijuana at the ready, and dig...
Katharine Hamnett, the cause of this carnival for the lower extremities, is a British designer who graduated from Central Saint Martins School in London, and is best known for her ethical, environmental and social campaigns, http://www.katharinehamnett.com/Campaigns.  Burma, life, organic cotton, solar power, no nukes, child labor and pollution are just some of the things she's taken on using her designs as a billboard. If I turned around, I think the message would have been clearer -- something about saving the vast rolling tropical rainforests of the Amazon. There's a really good interview with Ms. Hamnett here, http://www.katharinehamnett.com/Biography/EIGHTIES-FASHION//, although again I warn you, there's a photo of Boy George that is just uncalled for.  In this interview, she cops to launching the careers of photographers Ellen von Unwerth, Jurgen Teller and Terry Richardson, and models Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer and Nadia Auermann, so her Buddhist faith hasn't completely cleansed her of ego.  Yee gads.  Also Jurgen Teller has contributed to more hideous photography than a basement-full of 1970s home videos, so I'm thinking it might have been more socially responsible to have launched Idi Amin. 
I'm not sure of the date on this denim but it's a departure from her big white slogan t-shirts, perhaps falling somewhere between the No Nukes and Wear A Condom campaigns,  miraculously conveying both environmental concern and safe sex (the 47-button fly is like a three-day cooling off mandate). There it is friends, more than you ever wanted to know about Katharine Hamnett. Except that in 2011 she was knighted a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for service to the fashion industry.  Those Brits really know how to do pomp, don't they?

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