YUM!!

Famous Portugese EGG TARTS... i normally dislike EGG TARTS..but these ones were YUM...


BEFORE




AFTER





GO HERE.

Buena Vista Social Club - Chan Chan (1998)

i finally got round to watching this again... For those that know me.. i LOOOOOOVE cuban/ brazilian beats/spanish .. and i am totally in love with the Buena vista social club... these guys are almost a century old.. and even though this documentary about them and their last concert at carniege hall....was made about 10 years ago... ( TIME FLIES ).. the music is fantastic... and now some members are gone....its upbeat, sad, rhythm, instrumental, percussion, melodic ...and most of all it is real....honest music...it's their culture and life.....flows thru their veins....makes me wanna dance.



Here's a clip from one of their songs..
CHAN CHAN...

METAMORPHOSIS..

These are actually my favorites.. there was something very organic about these.
When i paint small experimental works like this.. i am more interested in where the paint and media are going.. it's very natural.. and i love the fact you can't really know the outcome of them until you get to the end of the piece.

was it a slug.. a butterfly.. ?? felt like something transforming...mother nature calls.

METAMORPHOSIS I





METAMORPHOSIS II

HAPPY V - DAY!!

HAPPY HAPPY

V - DAY

to EVERYONE!!!

abstract city..

THIS is ABSOLUTELY BRilliaNT... dunno why i likeee so muchie.. but it's a fun perspective. Fellow And'er bought this to the table.. it's from Christoph Niemann's NY times blog.. he's an artist.

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/

www.christophniemann.com

I AM VERY AMUSED...

I LEGO N.Y.

During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.

After Hours sess...

just read my chinese horoscope.. and my best hours are from 1am to 3am.....is it a coincidence that i have been up during these hours since before christmas....and it's my most productive time?? it's becoming a bad habit.
Gonna start the afterhours session. OPEN at 12AM for food, drinks at 1AM and peeks at 2AM, hit the sack at 4AM.

PEACE

THIS IS WHAT'S UP!!

As many of you have been wanting to peek into my world. I have been spending the past few months cleaning out my mind and looking at things with a honest and fresh approach.

Since i left the corporate structure a few months back and decided to live with my gut feelings rather than against them. I started a project focused more ethical fashion and fair trade initiatives based here in Asia to try and empower local communities and help keep some traditional spirit and craftsmanship alive.

Alot of my recent blogs have been boosting awareness of the waste and issues in fashion that many of you may not be aware of as it may not be a part of your direct path.

We are working on our little contribution to try and make this better... and do our part as the designers behind the product to bring to the consumer. It's a responsibility.

It's that familiar START UP project... but more like shoe box project right now when you realise how much has to be done and trying to stitch up all the different parts is quite overwhelming.

so we will continue updating you with the progress in the fashion industry for ethical fashion.. and i hope that you can all support us when we finally get this project rolling.


xxx

Pauline

ADIDAS NEW LINE...SLVR

SLVR WELL THE BRANDS ARE GETTING IN THERE....LOVE IT...ECO LINE FROM ADIDAS ...

FROM http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2009/02/adidas.html?mid=fashion-alert--20090204#

Despite the buzz-kill of cutbacks this Fashion Week, Adidas is launching a new line called adidas SLVR. Billed as a sibling label to Y-3 and adidas Originals, the debut collection touts minimalist, eco-chic designs focusing on fabrics like sustainable organic cotton, soybean fiber, bamboo, and water-resistant nylon. While the mostly black-and-white basics aren't going to stop traffic, we like the creative, waste-conscious concept behind some of the key looks: The draping Zero Waste Tee is made of one swath of fabric stitched with a single seam, and the 7 Piece Shoe scales back the 25-plus parts that make up a standard sneaker. The SLVR apparel, footwear, and accessories will be unveiled in a new store opening at 108 Wooster Street on February 17. (A new line and a new store? Take that, recession!) New York gets first dibs — after Fashion Week, the label will be rolled out globally.

The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name

featuring TONi BASIL... WANNA beat DA DRUM!!!

SLOW DOWN the FAST FASHION.....LIVE BETTER.

This is gonna be a long blog... but something that needs more awareness.. as a designer.. it's quite hypocritical... as it's also been my livelihood....

Sure clothing should not be super expensive but at the same time it shouldn't be dirt cheap.. companies that produce FAST fashion like H&M, Zara, Walmart, Target, GAP... are all mass producing and we are all loving....but i guess we should think twice before making that decision to buy.. we should understand what kind of fabric that tee shirt/ hot dress is made from...and force more fashion companies to start taking a more proactive role in their choice materials and be responsible in the cycle before it lands in the stores...to the consumer. There is a cost involved..but its a cost to the future generations and the now environment. I am not saying stop shopping..it's in our blood...right down to the vinyl figures!!but we should just take a step back and question how something is made and is there an alternative. As the designers.. i think it's important to find solutions to reduce packaging.. choose materials that can be recycled without further toxic waste....it all begins to make a difference if we work together.

Here's an article from the TIMES in London by Hannah Fletcher.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/fashion/article5332366.ece

December 15, 2008
Disposable fashion: for sale, hardly worn, two million tonnes of clothes
As discount fashion stores flourish, second-hand clothes sellers and charities are drowning in cheap, low-quality textiles
Clothing for recycling and reusing arrives in huge piles at LMB in Canning Town , East London

In his textile recycling factory on the industrial outskirts of East London, Lawrence Barry wades across a floor feet-deep in other people's discarded clothing. Above him, precarious fabric dunes lean against the walls and reach up to the corrugated iron roof. The air is heavy with mothballs and the sweet, cloying stench of stale sweat.

There was a time, 58-year-old Barry says, when the clothes coming into his warehouse reeked of love, instead. “People used to buy a good-quality suit and that was it. That was their suit,” he says. “The clothes that ended up here were worn to death, treasured, loved.” Now the 100 workers at LMB Textile Recycling spend their days sorting through the detritus of our addiction to throwaway fashion - cheap, synthetic, often unworn, rarely loved. And Barry and his employees have unwittingly found themselves at the cutting edge of British eco-policy.

Textiles have never been a great concern for keen-to-be-seen-to-be-green governments that get more brownie points from an easy tonne of glass or paper. But the textile problem has become too vast to ignore.

In February the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will launch a “sustainable clothing roadmap” to try to reduce the environmental impact of our clothes. In preparation, it has commissioned a series of studies in which the true extent of our shopping habit is revealed in stark detail.

In the past five years, with the rise of “value retailers” such as Primark, H&M and TK Maxx, and supermarket fashion ranges, the price of clothing in the UK has plummeted by up to 25 per cent. At the same time, the amount of clothes we buy has increased by almost 40 per cent to more than two million tonnes a year.

Instead of two annual seasons for clothes - winter and summer - we are now offered, and can afford, new apparel every few weeks. We buy fresh holiday wardrobes, which we wear for a fortnight. Our style icons are celebrities who are never seen in the same outfit twice. And as our high street stores reel from the credit crunch, still we are cashing in - packing out the shops, desperate for discounted clothes.

As a result, textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. About 74 per cent of those two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester, viscose and acrylic blends.

On a recent fact-finding trip to a waste-disposal site in Croydon, South London, MPs from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee learnt that the proportion of textile waste to other rubbish at council tips across the country has risen from 7 per cent to 30 per cent in five years.

Staff at the tip call the problem “the Primark effect”. Less than ten miles away, in Central London, the budget retailer's 70,000sqft flagship store flogs piles of ever cheaper, ever more disposable clothes. Even in a year ending with the most severe economic downturn in recent history, Primark recorded a 21 per cent sales increase in 2007/08.

Meanwhile, the poor quality of our cheap fashion fixes has caused the bottom to drop out of the recycled textile industry. The value of recycled material has fallen by 71 per cent over the past 15 years. Factor in collection and sorting costs, and many rag dealers and charities, forced to find outlets for donations that are too shabby to sell in their shops, find themselves paying out to recycle.

Furthermore, far less second-hand clothing is recyclable in the first place - a mere 3.5 per cent of that looming two million tonnes, or just under a third of the paltry 13 per cent of waste textiles that are recovered through charities, textile banks and rag dealers each year. (The remaining 13 per cent - clothing neither recovered nor sent to landfill - is incinerated.)

Lawrence Barry is no eco-warrior. He came into the business to make money. But back then, the trade was built on recycling. “When I started I was recycling 90 per cent of the clothes that came through,” he says. “Today it's down to 30 per cent.”

He speaks wistfully of the hard-wearing, workaday fabrics of yesteryear - linsey-woolsey and gabardine. They may have been coarse and drab but they were natural products and enjoyed second lives as industrial wiping cloths, insulation and stuffing.

Today, about two thirds of the fibres, yarns and fabrics coming into the UK are synthetic. They are blended into every conceivable combination - sometimes rendering them dangerously flammable in the process - and are nearly impossible to pick apart after use. Barry's recycling figure of 30 per cent is the norm across the second-hand clothing industry.

Most of the remaining 70 per cent is sent abroad, to Africa and Eastern Europe, where a booming industry has grown up around our unwanted exports. Critics have long condemned the practice for distorting fragile markets in developing countries. The donating public, too, has sometimes found it difficult to reconcile the friendly image of charity shops with the necessarily hard-nosed businesses behind them.

But the problem is of our own making. We are offloading more and more clothing to charities and textile banks, but more and more of it is unsellable in the UK. A negligible 1.7 per cent of our annual clothing purchases will end up being sold second-hand in Britain, and on average charity shop sales account for just 10 per cent of a charity's income.

“The rise of discount clothing and a culture of discarding have led to a clear reduction in the quality of many donated textiles,” says David Moir of the Association of Charity Shops. “This has put some pressure on donated stock for sale.”

“We have noticed more and more cheap clothes coming in but we can't sell them in the shops,” agrees Rob McNeill, a spokesman for Oxfam. “Who would buy a second-hand Primark T-shirt for a quid when there's a Primark down the road selling them new and probably cheaper? We can't compete.”

Instead, Oxfam sends the clothes up to its recycling centre, Wastesaver, in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, where a team of 45 women sorts through 120 tonnes a week. Their manager, Tony Clarke, says that their weekly record is 160 tonnes: “We're pushing for 24-hour sorting lines. We get more than we can possibly process.”

As at LMB in London, about 30 per cent of the garments sent to Wastesaver are recycled. Oxfam receives £50 to £60 a tonne for them - less than the cost of sorting and transport.

The rest are sent abroad, mainly to Africa, in huge vacuum-packed, cellophane-sealed blocks of compressed trousers, jackets and shirts. Each item has a market price. Bras are the most valuable items, fetching £2,500 a tonne (“Africa lacks an inexpensive, good-quality bra manufacturing industry,” explains Clarke). This may sound a lot to pay for our old underwire and padding, but it bears no comparison to the profit that Oxfam would make if it could sell more good-quality items back to us.

“In the UK we sell retail,” says Clarke. “When we send clothes overseas, it's wholesale. Lots of other people are making a profit along the chain. The difference for us is astronomical.”

What is more, in the past few years Chinese and other Asian clothes exporters have begun cutting out the circuitous route across Europe, through our wardrobes and back again, and selling directly to Africa, pushing prices for second-hand clothing down even farther.

This has led to another, arguably more fundamental, problem. As profit margins have tightened, charities and rag dealers have been forced to cut corners. Unlike LMB and Oxfam, most of them now ship out clothes unsorted, trusting that any costs incurred will be borne by the developing world - and knowing that what cannot be recycled will end up in their landfills, not ours.

The Salvation Army Trading Company, an arm of the charity that deals solely in second-hand clothing exports, operates almost a third of the textile banks in the UK and collects some 75 million items - 34,000 tonnes - of clothing a year. All this is sent to Eastern Europe. None of it is sorted.

“We scan it for overt waste,” says Paul Ozanne, the trading company's national recycling co-ordinator. “The rest goes out unsorted.” The Salvation Army claims that once the clothes reach their destination, 94 per cent will be reused or recycled. The rest go to landfill. “Of course, that landfill isn't in this country,” Ozanne laughs.

Yet for every tonne of polyester clothing that ends up in a landfill - whether in Poland, Uganda or the UK - large amounts of energy will be used to produce new items to replace the gap in our collective wardrobe.

As well as using up resources, the production process itself adds to the world's landfills by generating waste by-products. As a nation we buy 460 million new T-shirts a year. Every one that we chuck on the tip will join the almost half a kilo of waste that it took to create it.

Nearly 300 organisations in the clothing and textile industry have already signed up to Defra's sustainable clothing roadmap, pledging to reduce waste, increase energy efficiency and source materials ethically. The initiative will be launched with plenty of shiny pamphlets and snappy marketing.

But the real solution is surely far simpler, and closer to home.

“I had a wonderful e-mail from an American supermodel,” says Dr Julian Allwood, a lecturer at the Institute of Manufacturing and co-ordinator of the Institute's Sustainable Manufacturing Group. “As a British male academic, it was the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me.”

She offered to fly him to New York to discuss what could be done about sustainable clothing. After much soul-searching he declined the offer and advised her, instead, simply to stop changing her clothes.

“Female celebrities need to demonstrate that it's possible to be happy while wearing the same thing,” he says. “It's where we were 20 years ago. Lives weren't ruined by lack of clothes. It's a habit that we could break.

“If we spent exactly double the amount of money on each garment and bought exactly half as many garments, nobody would be impoverished by that.”

BACK to BASICS

Imported from my AnD blog in response to a fellow AnD'ers comment to a video that i had posted

From Marie JOST www.alivenotdead.com/mariejost
An Open Letter to Fashion Designers and self-styled Fashionistas

It is good to see celebrities taking this seriously. Time that the culture of conspicuous consumption get a reality check. Pauline, I know you work in the fashion industry, so don't take this personally, but I feel like in the last 7 or 8 years the industry has gone completely off the rails. All of this focus on having the IT bag or the IT shoes or wearing the right edgy designer, the silly one-ups-manship, the toxic footwear, the ridiculous prices and the overall snobbery that permeates not only the creators but the consumers (the very, very visible and vocal consumers) of fashion is so far from the vision presented in this video. I have to admit that I feel a certain amount of smug satisfaction that many of the top snobs based in and around New York City have seen their high-paying jobs evaporate like the morning dew or, if they still have jobs, have lost those obscene multimillion dollar bonuses. It is time that everyone take stock of what really counts in life, for themselves and for the planet. I am not sure a $1,800 (US) pair of shoes or a $10,000 day dress, or a $5,000 bag are the answer. Design cycles resemble the REM cycle of a hamster these days and change monthly. We are encouraged by the industry to continually buy new and ever more expensive clothes to stay "in style". Styles are suited to only a single body type and age. Women of all ages want to look attractive and confident in their clothing. Give those of us over 40 something we look good in, whatever the price point (and that suit what is now referred to as Plus-sizes--anything over US size 6!). Designers, use your creativity to create inexpensive clothing lines that will benefit the majority of consumers who realize that we will never spent $1,000 on a dress or $500 on a pair of shoes. Unless, that is, your goal is to fuel the ridicule of those who are not young, thin and rich that our society so delights in. Everyone has to buy clothes (unless we are an Indian in the Amazon or an African Bushman). This is an opportunity for designers to make a real difference in the world. Design clothing for the people, all people. Help everyone look their best and feel good about themselves, whatever their size, shape or age.

http://www.alivenotdead.com/paulinec/FASHION+thoughts.-profile-485178.html

The Fashion industry is one that i have had a lifetime of a love and hate relationship with. It's full of fulfilment as it is cynical and empty. I like to keep the point of view simple. Fashion is there to give joy as it is to help you feel good and be functional so you are not running naked down the street.. unless you really want to. True that it doesn't neccessarily fulfill all of us without a priceticket attached for the latest IT item... be it clothing or the IPHONE. But it's human nature that we all desire more..and the IF ONLY I HAD syndrome or we want to look/ feel great for whatever reason. It's a crazy vicious never ending circle of need and desire. A basic human instinct. There is a psychology to it and IT IS a business.

With the Vid. these role models to many are reiterating the basic important fundamental DO's that we should be doing just to respect one another and the environment in which we live in and amongst. Some of these actions are so basic that generations forget.

For myself - the latest fashion itself is not so important as seeing a beautifully designed piece that is crafted with skill which to me should always be timeless. I got lucky and loved the craft of it and decided to make 3D things called clothes. I love shape/ line/ form. It's an art not so different from other disciplines. I live in clothes that i feel comfortable in. Some might think odd or stylish... but for me - i don't really care - i live by the basic rule - that you gotta feel comfortable to face each day, the clothes are a tonic...It can be as simple as waking up and throwing on your favorite pair of jeans.. or a dress/ top in a color that uplifts your spirits for the day or if you want - you can run around naked.. whatever tickles your fancy. Sure for some of you out there.. fashion is a complete blank. My attitude and personal style might not fly in industries whereby - daily clothes becomes a "uniform" but is necessary and at the same time i do have my own personal style loves and desires which comes at a price of appreciating an artform, which some might think off the wall.

True that also that the fashion industry should support bodies of all ages, shapes and sizes...there are brands out there that do...it comes at a price either becomes mass, cheap and undesirable or because it is not so mainstream there is the cycle in the cost of make that makes an item more expensive. Everyone wants to make a profit. Some target markets are more of a niche. It cannot be explained or reasoned as why simply an advertising image of a lean voluptuous, young women is going to look more convincing for sales to the masses than an older fuller woman..or an jeans on a weighty grungey guy is not going to look as hot as a young dude with a six pack. It's the image that the industry - whether it be cosmetics, fashion, fitness portrays to give us all something to work towards...mind play.... personally - i look the other way and have been in the industry so long.. i don't really notice the face anymore.... eeeK..even worse.. i am just looking at the clothing on the body and how it's styled out! I do think it is great that some fashion companies are using more mature models to represent and at the same time it could also be a face that we have spent the last 20 years looking at and has kinda grown with us that we can relate to. This is a much smarter and more real approach.

However aside of this - fashion is an industry which can help to pioneer and support important causes as there is already an audience. It can be a strong voice and initiate change. There is change going on in the fashion industry worldwide to be more ethical and responsible at every step of the way from the moment that a design is conceived, fabric selected, where it is manufactured... to the end product being in the store. It's a handful of companies doing what they can to make a difference.

It's not going to change overnight, but we are all pulling together make it better as with other industries. I hope. My thoughts go out to the larger companies - the ones who are over producing so much that industries can no longer recycle enough of it .. because items of clothing got too cheap that the fibers cannot be recycled and sit in landfills. That disturbs me. These are the companies that really need to address it.. but as long as people are buying the 99$ item because it is cheap and fast fashion then there's a market and critical issues may not necessarily be resolved. Sending excess merchandise that cannot be recycled to a continent as Africa or just buying an organic tee to feel "ECO" is not the answer. .. but it is a beginning.

Fashion does come with a price. I would say less quantity is more and quality is important. Thought should go out to who actually made that item.. and how the proceeds of what you buy - whose pocket is it lining or benefiting??

We as the consumers need to be responsible and aware in the daily choices that are made.

Peace.

Fashionable start.

Time to make a personal mark. Gonna share my daily thoughts on here and let you follow the trail of my fashionable life. So many bloody blogs... so here's my attempt...Spread the word...grassroots level... ground up. For those of you interested in my previous life. Check my alivenotdead blog. Support HK artists!