Johan Palme

"I never want to distract from the simplicity of a garment, everything has to balance," explains Mohsin Ali in between sips of sweetened tea as he sits in his East London studio and reflects on his design principles. From built in thumb pieces to quilted linings, Mohsin Ali's debut collection was an exquisite showcase of the true beauty of menswear. Fuelled by his love for both traditional and technical fabrics as well as his fascination with cut and silhouette, we were seduced by his approach early last year. Driven by form, fabric and function, Ali's designs are ever simple yet effective and ultimately beautiful objects. It was, without doubt, one of the standout collections of the season and we've kept an interested eye on him ever since. The unveiling of his AW12 collection earlier this year sent through a ripple of excitement. Whilst continuing down his focused and well crafted path, Ali introduced print for the first time. We were left dazzled by geometric shapes. The Autumn/Winter season often offers a muted palette but Ali managed to create subtle impact with bold hues and delicate combinations. 
A few months on and as production draws to a close, we dropped by the designer's studio to take a closer look. Before we share our shots with you, I'll allow the designer himself to introduce the prints and talk through his inspirations...
"The prints evolved from researching Josef Albers work from the Bauhaus. I was originally drawn to his philosophy on industrial design and began looking in to his visuals. I didn't really know about his body of print work before I began finding it. It's simple but the sizing, colour and proportions all work together. The work that sparked it all off was actually a full triangle, a three block colour way triangle and it was a great starting point for us because I wanted to experiment with graphics. 
I'm not keen on researching something and using it literally, it has to be done in my own way. The result was actually a mistake in parts. When it went to the printers it was originally meant to done as two screens but he felt that the triangles wouldn't match up so felt it would be best to do them as one colour. When it came back it after being done in one colour it had taken on a camo like appearance. It was a good mistake, a happy accident really..." 














"I really enjoyed working with graphics this season. I want to return to it this coming AW13 season and add embellishment and embroidery but still in a masculine way. It has to be masculine for it to work. I  think I'll reintroduce geometric prints but in accessories. For me,  the key thing is for people to be appreciate the products on their own."

I've appreciated Mohsin Ali's products from the moment we first encountered them and it's a pleasure to watch this design talent continue to grow. Everything is so well considered, so well made. There's a real balance to everything that he designs. I for one am excited to see what AW13 will bring.

Is it Fair for Chefs to Cook Other Cultures’ Foods?:

Accidental Chinese Hipsters recommended reading, seen first on one of my favorite blogs: Asians Not Studying.

asiansnotstudying:

This is great! And a whole lot of fun!

And so we talked, immigrant son to immigrant son, food-lover to food-lover, Chinaman to Chinaman. (It isn’t the preferred nomenclature, but it works for us.) We had an honest debate over whether it’s right for chefs to “take” someone else’s culture and sell it, what responsibilities writers and chefs have to make sure people understand where cuisines come from, and, in the end, what it means to be an immigrant in America. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. It’s long and there is some tough talk in there, but we felt it was worth sharing.

Chris Suspect

Mountbatten Leisure Centre hosts many events every year, including Robot Wars. So when Saunders Architects got hold of the brief for this beauty, they decided to make a weird, wavy alpine roof with a giant piece of pipe smashed into it, in homage. It's basically an innocent wooden shed getting fucked by a giant robotic cock.
I know that you guys love the sections that architects like Saunders draw, so here it is - the 'concept drawing'.
Brilliant. It really 'emphasises the vibrant nature of the city of Portsmouth', to my eye.

Factoid of the day: Richard Nixon liked to work while listening to Richard Rodgers' (and Robert Russell Bennet') score for the early 50s television series Victory at Sea.

As I write in my chapter on performances that remembered the Pacific Front, Senator McCarthy was also fond of dressing up and playing soldier, a role he called "Tailgunner Joe." He even received a belated Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952, largely on the basis of falsified records. His famous war injury was actually, biographers believe, the result of a hazing ritual.

BLOCKED BALCONIES

“What’s truly strange to me is how divorced these guys seem to be from the old-school music notion of writing “a hit” — a song that moves units, yes, but also moves asses (and hearts) — while simultaneously being baffled by why their songs aren’t played on the radio.”

- Please read this if you do anything that might be considered “art” but then also might be considered “entertainment.”

'Early in 2011, in the depths of social and economic crises characterized by radical inequality, common sense seemed to dictate that we trust the decisions and guidance of the ruling powers, lest even greater disasters befall us. The financial and governmental rulers may be tyrants, and they may have been primarily responsible for creating the crises, but we had no choice. During the course of 2011, however, a series of social struggles shattered that common sense and began to construct a new one. Occupy Wall Street was the most visible but was only one moment in a cycle of struggles that shifted the terrain of political debate and opened new possibilities for political action over the course of the year...

Each of these struggles is singular and oriented toward specific local conditions. The first thing to notice, though, is that they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyptians, of course, clearly moved down paths traveled by the Tunisians and adopted their slogans, but the occupiers of Puerta del Sol also thought of their struggle as carrying on the experiences of those at Tahrir. In turn, the eyes of those in Athens and Tel Aviv were focused on the experiences of Madrid and Cairo. The Wall Street occupiers had them all in view, translating, for instance, the struggle against the tyrant into a struggle against the tyranny of finance. You may think that they were just deluded and forgot or ignored the differences in their situations and demands. We believe, however, that they have a clearer vision than those outside the struggle, and they can hold together without contradiction their singular conditions and local battles with the common global struggle.

Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, after an arduous journey through a racist society,developed the ability to communicate with others in struggle. “Who knows,” Ellison’s narrator concludes, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle communicate on the lower frequencies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower frequencies are open airwaves for all. And some messages can be heard only by those in struggle'.


Source: Declaration by Antonioi Negri and Michael Hardt, 2012

(see also Revolution as Resonance)

Following on from Negri and Hardt's recent reference to 'low frequency' communication between struggles, here's another example of bass as radical metaphor:

'Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. A insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire – a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their ownvibrations, always taking on more density' (The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 2007)