3G Fashion

Today, more than ever, it's evident that almost everything around is in a state of flux--technological innovations are coming faster than ever, increasingly avant-garde forms of art are being passed around and probably most significant of all, the way we communicate is transforming: talk, Tweet, type, text, Facebook, sign, blog, Yelp, comment, Skype, IM... the list is almost endless. It's mindboggling.

The medium of communication I'm particularly knowledgeable in is the magazine; I spent more or less all most of my freshman year at the University of Michigan laboring under every division of SHEImagazine, the campus fashion & pop culture publication, culling the knowledge of my classmates and learning how the fashion/media biz works in the Two Hands.  It's been quite educational, in a very underfunded, high-aspiring, time-sucking, nerve-wracking and giddy experience (<-- roundabout plug for recruitment & more funding).

The two issues this year I worked on as part of SHEI. Click on each image to flip through the issue!

I got so involved, I was anointed Marketing Director after a semester. And when some of my friends decided to expand from a collegiate base to the funky, wonky, awesome world of Ann Arbor and start up FORMzine, an online magazine, I decided to tag along and contribute, too.

Being so involved with magazines (to the detriment of the parents, yes), every time I go online or come across a magazine, I'm analyzing and admiring and critiquing.  With fashion magazines, especially, there's an evolution that's in progress, which is really, really... cool.  (Yes, my thesaurus of a mind decided on "cool").

Let's go take a super-fast, super-short look at the different generations of the modern fashion magazine:

1G} The Print Magazine

The first Harper's Bazaar issue, and the first modern fashion magazine, published in 1867.

Over the last 140 years or so, the fashion magazine has changed quite a while, but the defining feature is that it is a print magazine by a publishing house, with a staff and editors coming up with and executing ideas to bring a stylized view of fashion to the masses. The most input readers get is their dollar--choosing which magazines to purchase--and the occasional publication of a letter to the editor, but the main point is that the magazine is another broadcasting* medium: the transmission of a message to a wide audience.

*Broadcasting is generally applied to television and radio, but in my opinion, the basic definition is applicable to print publishing. I believe in the power of print!

2G} The Online Magazine (1.0)

The Net really came of age in the late '90s, with the masses taking to the new medium in the last fifteen years. With basically infinite space available, fashion publications really found their niche in acting as archives and updating with occasional plugs of "Hey, we've got a new issue out; here's what the cover looks like, please subscribe!!"

Obviously, as you can see by the Teen Vogue screenshot, some sites aren't really subtle at about wanting online visitors to subscribe to the Print Magazine--you've got to close that pop-up before you can start clicking on any of that content-y goodness behind subscription invitation.

The Online Magazine 1.0 is more of a companion to the Print Magazine, providing coverage that would be too expensive to print, giving previews of content included in the magazine, providing a larger forum for reader commentary, and more recently, the introduction of exclusive content, such as editor blogs or behind-the-scenes videos. What it really, really wants, though is for you to still buy the Print Magazine.

Screenshot of Style.Com. Browse through fashion shows by season, show, year, designer... it goes on.

And even Vogue has blogs. Andre Leon Talley gives you an "inside look"!

For about the last ten years, the online magazine has been basically that--the magazine, put online. Content still run by editors and staff, but much of it much more casual and colloquial in style. And readers can now comment!


3G} The Digital Magazine (Or, The Online Magazine 2.0)


And now, we get to the content that I've been giddy about--the 3G Modern Fashion Magazine!  First things first--the 3G MFM is NOT the downloadable, iPad version of <insert favorite magazine>. As one iPad reviewer said of Interview's app, "The App is basically a PDF file/style of a normal print issue."

The awesome-ness of the Internet has not developed so publishers can basically scan a print magazine and pawn off the PDF to the public as revolutionary and mind-blowing; we have bloggers doing the scanning and distributing the contents for free (and illegally) already.

Recently, though, I came across FIASCO Magazine. This may be over-excited on my part, but I find founder & editor-in-chief Vincent Nord's new publication really ushering in the Digital Magazine, or what I like to call the Online Magazine 2.0.

Yes, that's Frankie Godoy from Make Me A Supermodel. Bravo, give me a Season 3!

There is no print issue yet, but they're working on it, and in the mean time, the ENTIRE issue (there's only one so far, but it's AWESOME) is available for browsing and download online.  But that's only partly why it's awesome, and not what defines it as the third-generational modern fashion magazine.

Screenshot of the table of contents. So snazzy!

What makes FIASCO the real Digital Magazine is its interaction with the Internet--right on its front page, there's a call for submissions from readers and visitors. Taking a page from the curating nature of many blogs, not everything submitted is selected or published, but there is content from whom they like to call "young talent" as well as "established creatives."  It's up to readers to provide a large portion of the content, with the editorial staff just sifting through selecting what goes in instead of creating it themselves, a new dependency and empowerment of the audience.

There are requirements, of course, so that submissions are at a certain professional-level of quality and fit a selected theme, but it is no requirement that the submitter him/herself be a professional; Google many of the names under the credits of FIASCO and you will not find links to agencies and previously published editorials.

And that's pretty cool.

Lacking Imagination

This article by Phil Perrier made me laugh; currently working on a case study of FIASCO Magazine (if you love fashion + photography + free content, go read it), but here are two snippets of "If You Don't Like TV, You're a Bad Person" to titillate some neurons:

 ...who needs TV? I mean, when Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder onto the moon, a charcoal etching was good for me. Who needs to see Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot or Kobe Bryant hitting a three pointer at the buzzer, when a friend can describe it to you? "Yeah, and then this dumpy guy in a suit comes outa' nowhere and shoots Oswald!" Isn't that satisfying?

...In truth, if you don't like TV, you may just lack imagination. Which brings to mind an old Chinese proverb in which a young man moves to a new village and he visits an old wise man (this was when old people were respected for their knowledge and not just medicated and sent to a "home." Weird, huh?) and asks, "Old wise man, what are the people like in this village?" And the old wise man says, "What were the people like in the village you just came from?" And the young guy says, "They were petty and spiteful and dishonest." And the old man said, "The people are the same here." Meaning, that we see what we expect to see. Or, possibly that the old man and the young man both lived in a village fulls of dicks. But I'd rather go with that first thing.

In a way, TV makes me sad that people don't invest time the same way they did before the Internet to reading and becoming engrossed in words that can show you something amazing without presenting a picture. But my eyeballs do appreciate TV giving me other people's visual constructions, because it widens my perspective.

(On the second excerpt, after twelve years of Chinese school, getting my native culture drummed into my head & missing the network broadcast morning cartoons every Saturday, I have no idea where Perrier got that 'old Chinese proverb.' It must be an American thing, to attribute every random, somewhat educational adage to an 'old Chinese proverb.')

The Differences Between Seeing, Looking & Watching

There's a lot of television out in the world, and there's a lot of flak about watching too much television, that it's dumbing down America and we're all wasting our lives, vegetating away in front of giant plasma screens with our super-sized soft drinks and jumbo bags of deep-fried, thinly-cut bites of artificial goodness. Mmmmm. Noming our way to a slow, sleazy and squalid surrender of sloth and gluttony.

Image via NerdFitness.

Next time you're watching a television show, though, take a closer look at what you're watching--what kind of nuances are there? Do you understand all of the jokes? Do you get all the references made by the characters in their dialog, or search for hidden clues as to discover who exactly is the villain or where the plot is going?

I'm not going to argue that television is a wholly educational or completely cognitive-challenging medium--it's really not. There's a lot of crude exploitation--of humor, of stereotypes, of human nature and of controversial subjects--but there's also a new wave of 'intellectual' programming that should not be put down, just because it's surrounded by simplistic padding.

The incredibly intelligent television show that immediately comes to mind nowadays is irrefutably, Lost.

Season 6 promotional poster. Image via IMDB.

I've never watched it (but as soon as school lets out, every episode's available on Hulu!), but when in the first episode, you have a plane crash, a mysterious tropical island and polar bears and a smoke monster, it's mind-boggling and intriguing. Reading Time's James Poniewozik's article on "TV After 'Lost,'" I discovered that Lost is more than a Gilligan's Island or Cast Away, but some funky, time-traveling and very philosophical drama that is confusing, even with a handy summary. Lost is about a lot:

...Lost would not be about tribal elections, digging wells or devising systems of coconut-shell currency. It would be a weird mystery involving time travel, the butterfly effect and conspiracies within conspiracies. It would be a spiritual journey about characters seeking redemption. It would be about big ideas: free will and predestination, science and faith, mankind's essential good or evil. Through this prism — and through narrative flashbacks, flash-forwards and flashes into an alternate reality — it would be about, well, everything.

Lost doesn't attempt to answer those eternal questions. What it does instead is challenge the audience to ponder such mysteries themselves. Cuse and Lindelof have dropped plenty of guideposts along the way. Several characters are named for authors or philosophers (Locke, Milton, Rousseau, the Zen master Dogen) whose concepts play into the story, and classic works of literature sneak into key scenes. The writers say they use these references as "a tip of the cap" to their influences, as Lindelof puts it, "as opposed to saying, 'Hey, we came up with this idea for the first time.' " Also, says Cuse, "it's usually meant to say, If you want to go deeper, here's something that you can explore." Lost is like a TV show with footnotes.

What do you see when you see this promo pic? If you said The Last Supper, you've got brains.
Image via IMDB.

Lost is part of a new wave of television watching where it's more interactive than ever, and not just because you can Tweet or update your Facebook status in real time as you watch an episode; there are fan sites and forums where viewers congregate, and it's all part of "a multimedia experience of which the show itself is the first component." Watching TV is now a really complicated thing.

A case study in Media & Culture analyzes the new wave of television:

...In contrast to older popular programs like Dallas or Dynasty, contemporary popular layers "each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads." Johnson argues that younger audiences today--brought up in the Age of the Internet and in an era of complicated interactive visual games--bring high expectations to other kinds of popular culture as well, including television. "The mind," Johnson writes, "likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system."

The author referenced by the case study, Steven Johnson, wrote 2005's Everything Bad is Good For You. In a pull quote, Media & Culture highlights specifically Johnson's view on the Internet's impact complicating television.

The Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like Lost or Alias is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.

I think media does a lot for us, and there shouldn't be a definitively one-sided 'television is horrible for you' kind of broad statement made by critics or parents, because it really isn't.

Smarty Pants, Redux

Seth Freeman just wrote an awesome article on The Huffington Post titled 'Gifted and At-Risk,' which provides a much more cogently-worded article than mine on the 'tragedy' that befalls the ingenious.

Notable excerpts, for those who don't want to read the whole thing:

Everyone is aware of the dire straights in which our school systems currently operate, but as bad as things are generally, they are sometimes even worse for our students with the greatest potential. It turns out that this population, the very people our society will most need in the future to be competitive with other countries and to solve our toughest problems, is one of the most underserved. Less than 1 percent of the funds for special programs in our schools goes to meet the needs of gifted kids.

What may be less obvious is that gifted children often have a tougher time in school specifically as a consequence of their intelligence or talent or unique way of seeing the world.

In our schools, which are presently struggling to educate so many children to a basic low standard of knowledge and skills, the curriculum can be so boring and inane for bright kids that they become restless, occasionally disruptive but more often tuning out or not even showing up. A gifted kid who comes from a family living in poverty, or from a discriminated against minority, or who is burdened with other social disadvantages, faces a double dose of adversity. And yet, despite facing these difficulties but precisely because gifted kids are capable of understanding the material and keeping up with the work, they frequently receive less attention than their peers.

It is a tragic situation for these kids. It may be an even greater tragedy for our country's future. 

I'm Yellow

Partly out of laziness, and partly to celebrate the end of another Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM), I present an essay I wrote last year in applying for a scholarship sponsored by the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA). My heritage has been something I have always grappled with, both the good and the bad, but in writing this essay, I really explored and determined what being Asian-American has really meant to me and how I have developed into the person I am; reading popular literature, watching popular television and movies, listening to popular radio--I am always struck by how little representation there is on behalf of Asian-Americans, and that's a real shame. For not only the Asian-American community, but for the larger American community, I am really grateful to the OCA for providing me the opportunity last year to really elucidate on youth, on history, and on growth:

As part of the age class commonly known as Generation Y, I am pampered by excess, nurtured by technology, and in general, different.  Social scientists categorize me, and my fellow members of the “Millenials,” as possessing a feeling of entitlement wholly unknown to the generations before: we expect—and feel entitled to—a wealthy, instantaneously gratifying lifestyle of mentally invigorating work and easily accessible leisure.  Attending college is no longer symbolic of being gifted, but another expectation for us to meet.

As an Asian-American and having a cultural background of high expectations, attending college—specifically, and stereotypically, Ivy League—has been the milieu of my past fourteen years being educated.  My own parents did not set my life before me at the beginning of my academic journey, but growing up as an ABC (American-born Chinese), I was nonetheless sucked into the mindset that I would eventually grow up, finish high school, go to college, go to medical school (or law school or engineering school), and live the rest of my life as a some kind of professional.

The manufactured dream ended when I was nine and in fourth grade, the first year schoolteachers gave us letter grades instead of checks and pluses.  I opened the envelope on the bus ride home, anxiously excited to see the beginnings of a wonderful future as the bus rumbled through the neighborhood; the As, in Mathematics and Reading and Social Studies excited me, especially the A+ next to the Math.  I had an A- in English, but that was livable.  Workable.  Improvable.  But the B+ in science?

I was an absolute disgrace; how was I supposed to get into Harvard with a B in science, of all subjects?  My mouth was dry, my legs trembled, my head spun—really, it did—and I knew then that I would never be a doctor or an engineer or a pharmacist.  I couldn’t.  I had a B+.  No, no no no no.

To be pithy, I got over it.  Retrospectively, ruling out those three occupations prematurely has led me to go beyond the bounds of expectation.  I have met my parents’ basic expectations, which have become my own: high standardized test scores, high GPA, and a schedule filled with academically challenging classes.  I have also defied their inherent demands of me to pursue my own visions: instead of participating in Science Olympiad, I have done labor—physical, not mental—in building a school in Nicaragua.  Instead of becoming a piano prodigy, I quit my lessons to become competent on the viola, and instead of pursuing mathematics—the one fourth grade subject I was “outstanding” in—I quit the Mathletes to begin, and never finish, writing seven books.

Being an Asian-American has, must frustratingly, placed me within a category to which I do not wish to conform.  My parents and my culture, even my appearance, bring about stereotype and discrimination; conversely, those very same aspects have given me the necessities to which I can pursue any path of my choosing wholeheartedly, even rebellion.  I am a confident, competent, cultured and conscious girl—I’m still seventeen—and soon I will be a confident, competent, cultured and conscious collegiate.

I could say all that confidence, competence, culture and conscience are intrinsic, but my heritage has taught me to be humble; who I am, and who my peers are, has been wholly crafted by our ethnicity, whether in acceptance or defiance of the expectations placed on us by the community, and recognition and appreciation of my roots is the slow product of maturation.  By cultural standards, comprehension should be instantaneous and credit given where credit due; by reality’s course, people are obtuse and slow to realize value.  I’ll assist them.

Smarty Pants

I'm smart. It's undeniable, and may sound more than a bit narcissistic and egotistical (I am both), but it is also a true, scientific fact. I have a high IQ, faster than average neural reaction time (leading to faster comprehension), high test scores, and a (relatively short) lifetime of cognitively stimulating environments thanks to Mom and Dad.

When somebody tells me I'm smart, though, that kind of flippant remark makes me very angry. It may seem very complimentary, on the complimenter's side, but what exactly does it mean to be on the other side?

For me, personally, as I've said, I'm angry. I'm annoyed. It's like pigeonholing me with a single word, reducing me to a single aspect that implies I have no depth beyond understanding what goes on in class. It's like, Wow, it must be great, to be soooo smart. Except for, of course, the stereotypical schoolyard bullying and lacking adequate social skills.

If you wanna try and treat me like Millhouse, I'll eat you.

Image via HiddenGlasgow.

I am decidedly not your stereotypical 'smart kid.' I'm a pretty normal kid who interacts pretty well within society, and what really sucks the most about being smart is just that--in school (K-12 for the purposes of my commentary), being smart meant I was rarely challenged by schoolwork and I could get by relying, more or less, on my short-term memory or natural sponge-like quality for absorbing information passively. On the rare occasion I had to study for a subject--'studying' being defined for my peers as poring laboriously over notes taken in class in addition to amending the notes handed out by a teacher--'studying' for me meant sleepily flipping through the notes handed out the ten minutes before I sat down for an exam and got somewhere in the 90s, no sweat.

Seems great, right? Less time studying, better results than 90% of the other students and more time to lounge around and do anything I wanted... but no, being smart has backfired, and no, it may not be as saddening or heartbreaking as those who don't have the opportunity or the cognitive potential for a great education, but it stinks to be smart.

For the smart kids, but not genius-level students, average schoolwork is still not challenging enough such skills as perseverance and focus, such skills that are a). important for life in general, and b). really, really hard to develop nowadays, regardless of intelligence level, a long attention span when the television, the cell phone, the Internet are all calling out simultaneously. Instead of actively working to develop study skills and learning to apply oneself at the time where the mind is most fertile for learning, I didn't.

In college, this has definitely bit me in the ass. Focus, yes, should largely be on improving opportunities for the under-privileged to get the education they need, but don't forget about the students who aren't being adequately challenged by school-material and are floating by in life, because that's not preparing them for the future either.

Mike Teavee, Move Over

I watch an inordinate amount of television; in the context of being GenY, it's another facet of my overwhelming consumption of media, and looking at myself, it's kind of freaky and slightly ridiculous how much I watch. Ironically, for my Communications class, our professor is constantly urging us to watch more TV.

Here is, in a roundabout table, a compilation of my TV schedule from the last year:

Yeah, I know.

Intersperse with various filler episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims' Unit, beginning to watch many of the shows halfway through Season 3 and lots of catching up, pretty regular catch-ups of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the occasional disgusted/fascinated screening of Jersey Shore and watching through two seasons of Dirty Sexy Money in half a hectic week, and the hours of television I've consumed over the last nine months is probably well into the hundreds.

Left, Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report (e.g. favorite newscaster ever), and right, Dirty Sexy Money, favorite now-defunct/cancelled-TV-show-that's-got-both-Billy-Baldwin-and-Donald-Sutherland-squee!!!!-yay. Images via IMDB.

One genre of television that you don't see in my schedule, however, is the game show; I've got nothing against game shows--Jeopardy ftw!--but being narcissistic and thinking better of myself than the people who are on these shows, I don't like to 'waste' my time failing (or kicking ass) on questions I ace at home.

Running home in the afternoons between classes to have a swift lunch, there's only one program my television receives that isn't an infomercial, a shopping channel, a soap opera or episode of Sesame Street--'Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?'

ARE YOU? HUNH? ARE YOU? Image via Fox.

This show is really, really well done production-wise, but what about the basic premise of this show?

Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Are you smarter than a prepubescent elementary schooler who still has recess breaks? Are you smarter than a child whose hairline is barely past your pelvis? Are you smarter than a kid who has spent the last ten years of their life sleeping, eating, crying, and occasionally flipping through picture books and scrawling through arithmetic worksheets?

True, the questions on this show are sometimes extremely specific, giving an unfair advantage to the pint-sied "assistants" of fifth-graders who are featured on the show, but there's still a large number of basic questions that are common knowledge and are relatively easy to answer. Take a quick peek below:

To the contestants on this show--are you proud that you're smarter than a fifth grader? Really? Does the fact that you're proud you're smarter than a ten-year old make you feel awkward? Or are you ashamed that you're not 'smarter than a fifth grader'? Or do you even care?

I understand why people go on this show--$$$.

But what does this television show say about America, the good ol' US of A, that this show is not only on the air, but (somewhat) popular and that people clamor to compete on air to claim that, yes, they are middle-aged, balding, fatting but still 'smart'?

Sue Sylvester, Dance on Air

My apologies for the lack of updates; school is revving up to the final stages, and I am writing currently to avoid studying. Today's focus:

You betcha. This lady is indubitably one of the driving forces behind Glee, the hit musical-comedy television show on Fox that if you don't know about, you're clearly very, very behind on what's current in pop culture; played by Jane Lynch, Sue Sylvester, cheerleading coach extraordinaire, leading citizen, Madonna fan and blackmail expert is the driving force behind many of the evils that befall the students of an Ohio high school glee club as part of her mission to stay top dog. She is unabashedly rude, racist, elicit, terrifying, egotistical... you get the point. She's ballsy, she's out there, she's the biggest, baddest, best bitch of them all--and still very much three-dimensional. Even in the most seemingly-insensitive of speeches, there's a wit that makes you laugh and adore her:

Sue Sylvester is an extremely endearing character, however, whenever she's around her Down-syndrome-affected younger sister, and in this last week's revealing 'The Power of Madonna' episode, you learn why she always rags on Will Schuester for "[having] enough product in your hair to season a wok." Earlier in the season, her brief crush on a local newscaster also brought forth a softer side that hopefully, we'll see again in the future. Jane Lynch really pulls forth the perfect combination of outrageousness and believability in crafting her character, which is why Sue Sylvester has so quickly become a pop culture staple.

Sue claims to be... 29, but whatever her age, she can really pull off a tracksuit--she knows that any kind of full-length sportswear in velour is just fugly, and you can check out a gallery of best outfits @EW. Or read some of my favorite lines:

• If I have a pregnant girl doing a handspring into a double layout, the judges aren't going to be admiring her impeccable form, they're going to be wondering if the centrifugal force is going to make the baby's head start crowning.
• I, for one, think intimacy has no place in a marriage. Walked in on my parents once and it was like seeing two walruses wrestling.
• I empower my Cheerios to live in fear by creating an environment of irrational, random terror.
• I like minorities so much, I'm thinking of moving to California to become one.
• I don't trust a man with curly hair I can't help but picture little birds laying sulfurous eggs in there, and it disgusts me.
• GLEE CLUB! Every time I try to destroy that clutch of scab eating mouth-breathers it only comes back stronger like some sexually ambiguous horror movie villain. Here I am, about to turn 30, and I’ve sacrificed everything only to be shanghaied by the bi-curious machinations of a cabal of doughy, misshapen teens!

• I’ve always thought the desire to procreate showed deep personal weakness. Me, never wanted kids. Don’t have the time, don’t have the uterus.
• When you hear your name called, cross over to my side of this black shiny thing. Santana, Wheels, Gay Kid. C’mon, move it! Asian, Other Asian, Aretha, andShaft. See, Will, I don’t want to participate in a group that ignores the needs of minority students.

My personal favorite line from 'Glee'? Brittany's, "Did you know that dolphins are really just gay sharks?" Your favorite lines? Why you love Sue?

Wired May 2010

It's not a fashion cover, but Wired's May cover is ballsy in a somewhat similar way to those provocative haute couture ads you see stuck in the pages of Vogue & Elle. What's intriguing is the blatant use of 'geek,' not only embracing the stereotypical idea of the smart four-eyes at school with a sweater slopped over a collared shirt, a pocket protector & always a calculator... in his head, but connecting it with the word 'power,' implying... well, power, which, admittedly, in our world, generally brings up an image of a testosterone-driven buff guy.

Of course, another reason why this works so well is that Wired knows full well who their customer base is--the younger, savvier crowd of the 'Me Generation' that, like the title, fully embraces their geekery, and really, revels in it.

If you, ironically, can't read, that's Bill Gates & Mark Zuckerberg, the former an awesome brainchild, founder of Microsoft and the world's most epic billionaire philanthropist, the latter responsible for why you're addicted to the Internet, as he created/runs Facebook.

Here's the full cover:

Liu Wen for Estee Lauder

Estée Lauder just signed models Liu Wen (left... duh) & Constance Jablonski (right); congrats to both, as they're the first from either country to be signed to the cosmetic giant.

The signing of Wen is what really makes this a great move--beauty ideals are really taken seriously, almost to an extreme, on the 'Eastern' side of the world; whereas in Western countries there are pages devoted to facial regimens and skin care, in countries like China, Japan, and Korea, you have entire magazines devoted to a single aspect, such as nail art, painting the perfect pout, and especially whitening the skin.

Wen's success as a model on the international front--the first Asian to walk for Victoria's Secret, the first Asian face for EL & 49 shows this last season!--has definitely resulted in major props & pride on the home front in China; for Estée Lauder to sign an Asian face for representation is a definite sign of the globalization of 'beauty' and a sort-of affirmation of the beauty of Asians, which will undoubtedly up their cache in Eastern countries against brands that have not 'held out,' so-to-speak, in not featuring Asian models, such as Shiseido or SK-II (which are also based in Japan).

Essentially, a European company embracing a Chinese gal = happy Chinese people & even more Chinese girls aspiring to be like Liu Wen = saaaaaaaales & $$$$$$.

Via StyleList.

Louis Vuitton & the Cosmic Blossom

Louis Vuitton has most certainly tapped into the eerie obsessiveness with cuteness that is undeniably Japanese, and the new prints and collection from their collaboration with Takashi Murakami screams 'kawaii (kah-wah-ee).' The cuteness definitely aims towards the younger demographic, especially with the eye-popping colors & sweeping, sports logo that the 'Louis Vuitton' imprinted on the bags has been reinterpreted in, and seeing Daisy Lowe prance about surrounded by beaming, adorable... daisies is an extreme fashion fairy tale for any girl/feminine boy under eight. The bright monochrome wash of much of the collection brings more elegance to the table, though, allowing it to still appeal to the older crowd (as well as the older crowd that pretends to be younger than it is).

FORM//Via Cadmus.