A toothpick for connoisseurs
This blog is about toothpicks. Before you move on to something grabbier, consider this: these aren’t just any toothpicks. These are fine — gourmet, if you will — toothpicks made in Georgian Bay from northern white birch, infused with essential oils and (but for the scotch imported from Islay) North American-derived natural flavours such as cinnamon, smoke, salted birch and single malt. Continue reading…
The world’s scariest ride
In this report, from the San Francisco Chronicle, my worst nightmare has come to life. Continue reading…
What could be more humble than the fashion for food trucks?
If fashion as an art form is about expressing the spirit of the moment — and arguably more so when it’s a style that’s trickled up from the street rather than one dictated from the fashion runway — what I’m reading of late from shop windows and street corners is a movement I call the New Humility. Continue reading…
Local Knit tees memorialise Montauk before it was fabulous
One of style’s credibility problems is that it has this unshakeable relationship with money.
Even though you don’t have to have a lot of money to have style (and money alone is certainly no guarantee of having it), it helps when you happen to have a lot of both. Which is why, when you are looking for what’s happening in the world of style, your best bet is to follow the money. Continue reading…
Is Eames’ chair still modern?
Back in its day, modernism was, well, modern. Now, more than half a century later, it is amazing to me that its characteristic tics — dark wood panelling, cubic seating, curtain walls of glass and sober palette — are still being cranked out as the last word in cool. Judging from the stylized lobby lounges of the latest hotels and the sales billboards for the newest condo buildings, it’s as if designers haven’t noticed that Mad Men is set in another era or that nothing else has happened to capture our imagination since Mies van der Rohe designed the Seagram building in 1958. Continue reading…
When it comes to deciding where to open a new store, one would assume a fashion brand would simply adopt the realtor’s mantra: “location, location, location.” Except that sometimes a location isn’t chosen just because it’s smack dab in the middle of the highest-performing mall or gets the most foot traffic.
In the case of Brooks Brothers’ new “Flatiron Shop” at the corner of Bloor and St George Sts.., for instance, the decision was all about expressing a certain kind of style. Continue reading…
The lovely Donisha Prendergast and me
Here I am with the lovely Donisha Prendergast , who just happens to be the eldest grandchild of Bob Marley, a responsibility she takes very seriously. “What it means to be a Marley is that you must push on,” says Prendergast. “you have to continue that legacy.”
Prendergast’s contribution won’t be another reggae album, but a documentary film called Rasta: A Soul’s Journey she has just spent the last eight years traveling the world (India, South Africa, Ethiopia, Israel) shooting with Jamaican Canadian filmmaker Patrica Scarlett that will have its premiere at the Royal Ontario Museum here in Toronto in February 2012. The film is intended to spread the word of Marley’s faith of Rastafarianism, to continue, what Prendergast describes as her grandfather’s “legacy, not as a muisical artist, but a man.”
“I’m a child of reggae,” says Prendergast. “I’m doing good with ‘One Love’ as my mission.”
To that I say, Irie.
Stone and sea
Just back from a magical, if lightning-quick trip to the Amalfi coast, which was blissfully sunny and warm for October. Our white-coated waiter told us we were enjoying the warmest October they’d seen in 150 years. Off season, it felt like we were travellers in another, quieter, more elegant era–a feeling made more acute in the wonderfully ’50s Italian vibe of Amalfi.
Jewelry designer Jane Apor lives to layer
Fall is greeted with enthusiasm by fashion types not only because the stores and magazines are thick with fabulous new clothes, but because the arrival of cooler weather means that you get to pile them on in layers. Judging from store mannequins the logic seems to be, why wear just one blouse, when you can layer a t-shirt, tissue weight sweater, cropped jacket, a tangle of chains and a wound-up scarf underneath and over it? Continue reading…
Sir Winston Churchill park, despoiled
In Beijing, people start their day with aerobics, tai chi or ballroom dancing in the public gardens of the Temple of Heaven. In London, they enjoy an invigorating morning stroll under the green elms of Hyde Park. In the public parks of Paris, or New York, school children sail pretty little wooden boats on ponds, artists stage inventive, caravan-style puppet shows and everyone takes in the scene from elegant, wrought-iron benches and chairs. These are the benefits of green spaces in the world’s great cities: the grandeur of well-planned and maintained urban landscape design on a monumental scale for all to enjoy. In my neighbourhood public space, Sir Winston Churchill park in Toronto, however, the whole grand idealistic enterprise has gone to the dogs.
The beauty of sadness
As of last Wednesday, more than half a million people–many of whom waited in lines of up to two hours, and some who returned for a second visit—will have taken in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum’s blockbuster “Savage Beauty” show of the work of the late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. So popular has the show proved with museum visitors that it’s run has been extended twice– an amazing turn of events considering the show is essentially a presentation of clothes on mannequins not entirely unlike what one might see in the windows of a store. As the show wraps up this weekend with extended hours until midnight, it is worth asking: what exactly did people see in it that proved so compelling?
Pingyao in the morning
After three weeks in China, my visual in-box is full! Here’s some of my impressions of this funky and fabulous land in no particular order.
The new blank G&T
Check out my story on Grand Toy’s mysterious re-imagination in today’s Toronto
Plastic fantastic
Love these completely customisable futuristic booties from Italian designer Gaetano Pesce for the Brazilian footwear manufacturer Melissa. They slip on like a bendable pair of stiff socks. All you need to customise them to your liking is a pair of scissors–although I would take them as is, thank you. Talk about a step into the future.
Copyright © 2013 Karen von Hahn. All rights reserved.
