If you’re in Milan, drop by POMO to see “Dapper Dan: Not Here”, a photographic exhibition from the magazine’s archives. Opening tonight, Monday the 13th January at 18:30 at via Giuseppe Sirtori, 6, Milan. For more info click here
Dapper Dan 08 out soon!
Dapper Dan 08 is coming out soon featuring, among others, AA Bronson, Aldo Maria Camillo, Consuelo Castiglioni, Simon Costin, Maxine Doyle, Pat Murano and Herbert Huncke. More soon…
Harry Peccinotti talks to Filep Motwary
In the visual world, Harry Peccinotti is the epitome of a Renaissance man. As an artist, graphic designer, art director and photographer, he created a distinctive style in the 1960s that feels as fresh as ever— and is as mimicked as ever—today. His work captures women’s bodies and faces in a graphic, almost abstract way that has earned him the nickname “Mr Close-Up”. Despite a career that has spanned the art direction of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, the creation of iconic title sequences for films including Alfie and Chappaqua, the founding of the groundbreaking magazine Nova, the almost single-handed introduction of models of colour into the fashion mainstream, and photographic commissions from the Pirelli calendar to the Vietnam War, the London-born, Paris-based legend was a bit shy when Dapper Dan visited him at home. Continue reading “Harry Peccinotti talks to Filep Motwary”
Light A Match, Start A Fire: Michael Gira Talks To George Skafidas
Slow-moving and punitive; visceral and crushing; dour and blatant; repetitive and atonal; never played the same way twice; constantly trans- forming into whatever is next; a process of discovery for its creators as well as its audience: the music of Michael Gira, and in particular his creative output with Swans—the band he birthed, bore, buried and brought back to life over the course of three decades—is disorienting and destabilising. With themes that plumb the depths of human depravity, it even touches on the horrifying. Yet for those who imagine music as a redemptive, transformative, epiphanic experience, Swans occupies a sort of holy space in the artistic cosmos. Continue reading “Light A Match, Start A Fire: Michael Gira Talks To George Skafidas”
Romeo Gigli talks to Filep Motwary
Romeo Gigli is utterly charming and undeniably Italian, yet also, at times, a solitary nomad. He is one of the very few European fashion innovators who turned the late 1980s and early ’90s upside down with subtle shapes that defied the aggressive angles of the time, and ambitiously eclectic collections whose mysterious origins and destinations prefigured the global influences that have now become standard. It was hard to find Gigli, as he swore distance and silence from the media after an acrimonious takeover and the subsequent breakdown of his company in the mid-’90s, and an ensuing dispute over the copyright to his own name that continues to this day. Yet his recent capsule collections for Joyce, the eminent Hong Kong- based group led by his old friend Joyce Ma, who, as a buyer for her eponymous boutique, bought his very first collection in 1985, are undoubtedly a success. It is proof that the romantic creator has a soul of steel. Continue reading “Romeo Gigli talks to Filep Motwary”
Exit Sanity And Insanity
In Dapper Dan’s seventh issue, the legendary couturier Romeo Gigli emerges from self-imposed exile to share an intimate history of his roller-coaster career; the photographer Harry Peccinotti revisits the heady days around the founding of the iconic 1960s magazine Nova; Angelo Flaccavento peeks inside the personal archive of the pioneering tailoring and textiles master Nino Cerruti; and the Brazilian designer Paula Gerbase explores a utopian future with her new label 1205. We also open our ears to the abrasive, transcendent sounds of Michael Gira’s venerable art-porn-noise collective Swans and Scott Soriano’s underground punk and archival releases as S.S. Records; and our eyes to the existential angst of Aristomenis Theodoropoulos’ acrylics and the glacial beauty of Henning Bock’s landscapes.
Buy online or follow this link for stockist details. Continue reading “Exit Sanity And Insanity”
Dapper Dan 07 coming out next week
Dapper Dan 07 features among others, interviews with Romeo Gigli, photographer Harry Peccinotti and Swans leader Michael Gira. More soon.
Mr Matsushita And Me
A personal tailor is the height of luxury, for one reason: freedom. Having garments adjusted according to one’s desires sets one free from the hassle of trends that come and go—shoulders that inflate or deflate, hemlines that rise and fall, trousers that get narrower and narrower. (Lest you think this applies only to womenswear, consider how dramatically the shape of the tailored jacket has morphed since Mr Slimane arrived at Dior, or how ridiculously trousers have shortened thanks to Mr Browne.) Personally, I can’t stand it. Maybe it’s a matter of grumpy severity, or the result of a militaristic upbringing, or simple laziness. Whatever the reason, I have a fondness for the perfect stillness of the uniform, and a tailor can help you get one that really works. It is a fantasy—an old-world one, with heavy SM traits. A tailor makes you the master of your own wardrobe and I like being in control. Continue reading “Mr Matsushita And Me”
Abstractless Codes: Non-generalised Speech and the Upending of Contemporary Linguistics
If language, and its representational or coding function, makes up the world, or if, as Wittgenstein said beautifully in his Tractatus, ‘Reality is the shadow of grammar,’ what kind of world would we have if we spoke a language that allowed of little or no abstraction, generalization, descriptions of the past or the future? A view of reality that is ‘intensely and only immediate’ seems puzzling and impractical. Yet there are Amazon tribes, notably the Piraha, who speak of and view their experience in just this way. If a man goes around a bend in the river, no observations about him can obtain except for xibipio—he has gone out of experience.’ They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers—the light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ Continue reading “Abstractless Codes: Non-generalised Speech and the Upending of Contemporary Linguistics”
François Halard talks to Filep Motwary
François Halard graciously agrees to an early-morning interview over the phone from New York. The French-born, continent-straddling photographer has been one of the world’s most highly regarded interior and architectural photographers practically since his teens, and his collaborative résumé is a roll call of legendary American and European artists, editors, fashion designers and art directors. The critic Vincent Huguet’s description of Halard’s work needs no translation: he photographs “en liberté, avec gourmandise, mais aussi avec une forme d’urgence, de nécessité”. Continue reading “François Halard talks to Filep Motwary”