Antoni&Alison for Glamour Uk!

For the big fan of Antoni & Alison I am, this is such a mind-blowing exclusive to be hosting - for my side of the world at least. Seems like Glamour UK is planning to start Autumn with a fun, local approach and if you put fun next to fashion, there's none better to work with than the House of Mr & Mrs Antoni & Alison.

Eight limited edition tees have been designed by the UK based duo for Glamour's first ever regional issues. Specially created to reflect the mood of each city and modelled on the cover by Katy Perry in her own special way, they will be among us this September - or late August, glossies are early birds.
The special tees will be available from Antoni&Alison's website for one month only and are made to order. Got a favourite certain part of the UK? Here's a brilliant way to show your love in style. Love A&A? Start collecting! Here's how they went from drafts to flesh:
Presented to the Glamour team (from left to right: Alison, Antoni, Claudia, Jo, Helen & Charlotte).
Some finalised sketches. Simple, clear and loud:

*Looking forward to seeing how regional approach works out for print.

Comme il Faut, window glance

Stopped by the window of 'Comme il faut' the other night at Karitsi Square, Athens. Nostalgic to some, maybe a reminder of how it used to be, imaginative for sure.

Memoirs of Mariah's experiment

About half a year ago, and with temperatures twice as high, a very exciting email arrived in my inbox (from a very exciting sender): Mariah Carey would release her new album in Autumn 2009, titled "Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel". Exciting part: her record label Island Def Jam Music Group had decided to incude a booklet, a mini Elle magazine all about the artist.
Considering the current poor state of the CD market, this seemed to me as quite a clever move to boost sales. I mean you can buy pirate copies and download as much as you like, but only the original copy would come with the special little mag. In days when the CDs come with newspapers, they thought of trying the exact opposite. Moreover, they'd include ads which would nicely support the release financially.

The fun and promising experiment would be out in 1 million copies to start with at the U.S. and 500,000 overseas. So how come I am bringing this up now? Before answering this, I'll let you check out some of the pages of the booklet, fished here.

Where was I? Ah, yes. The reason why I am bringing this up now, half a year later, is because somehow I bumped on that email again and was wondering whatever happened to that whole thing. For the come-back of such a popular idol and the mini-mag including ads from Elizabeth Arden, Angel Champagne, Carmen Steffens, Le Métier de Beauté and the Bahamas Board of Tourism, things have been TOO quiet.

And then I looked at the sales: 300,000 CDs out of that 1 million were sold in the U.S. by December 09 whereas London reported 67,347 pieces sold up until now, nowhere close to 500,000. My, oh my. It didn't go that well, did it? Were the songs that bad? Can we conclude that print fashion did not work well with music? Either-or, the company is dropping the promo of the album.
Oh well it was a good effort.

Freestyle Magazine (part 2)

Magazines. It's all been done before. Or has it?
Holding Freestyle Mag you realise there is always space for more. It's not just the unusual shape, but also the choice of content, the challenge of placing it into a circle and the even greater one of working with people scattered across Europe. It sure is " Game on!" for this biannual new comer.

Alecca: What new is Freestyle mag bringing to the world of print magazines?
Freestyle: First and most important is the round format and the challenge to create/photograph/design within/for it and the experience of lecture of this format.

A: Why bi-annual?
F: Everybody in our team has another job/profession we need time for as well. Beside that we are a young magazine and could not afford more than two productions a year right now.

A: Are you keeping the round shape in the future? What difficulties did you have to face because of it and in what ways you think it's better?
F: We will definitely keep the round format in the future. We consider Freestyle Magazine a collectable design object consisting in the magazine and the limited edition professional Frisbee which each issue is a different model, designed by a different designer. We had all kinds of difficulties that we prefer to call challenges; technical aspects as cutting and binding as well as creative aspects. We wouldn't like to call the round format better, more likely call it different.

A: Your team is spread across Europe! How many countries is that and how do you manage to put an issue together without ever being in the same room?
F: Our headquarter is in Berlin, Germany, art direction and graphic team are based in Milan, Italy, fashion team and web designer are in London, England and our copy editor is based in Paris, France.
We communicate a lot via Skype, mail and telephone and of course the spatial separation of the team is quite a task.

A: In times when everyone is moving towards the web, you are make an (admittedly wicked!) print magazine. Do you see the www as a threat to print?
F: This question cannot be answered with yes or no. Of course the www has taken a part of importance of printed publications. Magazines (pretty much) lost their informative character, the news are online first. Being a bi-annual publication means that our value of reporting news is almost non-existent, we use the web for that in the form of our Blog.

Still, printed publications have their own qualities that have a clear luxury character. As for example in case of FSM, you cannot play Frisbee in the web and it is not the same experience to see a round page design digital then to flicker through our FSM in real time.

Or as Jan Joswig writes in his article in Game On!, “magazines teach you style.”

(Mark Eley from Eley Kishimoto, dj-ing at Freestyle's launch party in Berlin. Photo: Marina Rosso)

A: Why did you choose Eley Kishimoto to do the design for the Frisbee of your launch issue?
F: Freestyle Magazine is a magazine for creative people who like to play. Eley Kishimoto represents that way of freestyle life and freestyle work perfectly. Beside that their flash design looks fantastic on a spinning Frisbee.

A: Best moment whilst putting together "Game On"?
F: Without a doubt the best moment was when almost the whole team came together for the launch in Berlin.

(Overview of Freestyle's launch party in Berlin. Photo: Marina Rosso)

(DJ Cristiano Spiller sipping a cocktail at Freestyle's launch party in Berlin. Photo: Marina Rosso)

(Party people checking out the first issue of Freestyle. Photo: Marina Rosso)

(Freestyle lovely Nele Schrinner -right- made sure this interview reached you. Photo: Marina Rosso)

Freestyle Magazine (part 1)

Presenting you my summer cooler: Freestyle Magazine (and ice cream). It has just come out, this is its very first issue. It is round shaped and came inside a ...frisbee. Not any frisbee: the print is Eley Kishimoto's "Electric Lightning", in a hypnotic, super-fly version.

Here is moi, catching sun at the balcony whilst learning how to make a Gay Cake. Other contents include a frisbee retrospective, some seriously cool editorials, tips on how to do a flawless manicure, monkey faces(!) architectural gems and street art, even the twitter chronical of how someone ended up killing someone (!!).

(photo by Marina Rosso)
I discovered Freestyle at Bread & Butter, in Berlin. It was hard to miss their frisbee covered van and all the frisbee activity around it. Wasn't sure what it was but it looked fun. "A magazine for creative people who like to play" is how they put it and indeed that's what it is.

Made sure the issue was in my suitcase, went to their smashing Berlin launch party and asked them a question (or five) about what they do. You are so gonna love this. Soon to be posted.

Kiss them good-bye

Those of you reading Global Hipster, you know as of last Thursday that DIVA magazine has just closed down. As a matter of fact, the issue out at the moment is the last one. Surprised? Apparently so were the employees of Daphne Communications when the were told they are jobless one fine day.

It is really sad to see a Greek magazine closing. Slowly we are being left only with franchise titles... DIVA has always been special to me as it was the first fashion magazine I worked for since I was still a student at Central Saint Martins. I had chosen it particularly for that reason, being Greek. I feel sorry for everyone who got fired that way.

Same goes for everyone working at Eleftheros Tipos and City 99,5 FM, announced to be closing down too today due to constant losses.

Are we bad readers/listeners? Were they bad handlers?
Times are changing.

*enter*

Usually I talk about others. Glamour and Amalia Agathou gave me a push to talk about myself.

Amalia spotted the emerging force of fash-blogging in this country, a medium that's been bubbling abroad for quite a while now. "FASHION BLOGGERS GR - the guys that change fashion by hitting enter" is how she puts it on June issue's cover. Not sure if that's what we do, sure as hell though we offer an independent view of things under stitch right now.

In this piece you can get to know better the bloggers behind streetgeist, fashionarchitect, thesohosymposium and queenkatbee. Have a look, it's all so fresh.

Vogue Italia Anar-chic

Small break from the Fox Fair Finds as the April issue of Vogue Italia has come to my attention. I have never seen anything like it, let alone on a Vogue cover: it is a sephia, grainy print of the actual shoot, title as part of the photo too, and for all the more vintage effect, the photo was folded in two before scanned and printed as a front page.

I am so used to Vogue covers internationally being so sleek, picture-perfect and glossy, that this mat, purposely imperfect one is such a pleasant rebellion to my eyes. Rightfully deserves the title it's been given by the editor: Anar-chic.

The commentary talks about the liberty of the absolute creation. R-e-s-p-e-c-t.

(credits: make-up - Pat McGrath, fashion editor - Karl Templer, photo - Steven Meisel)

Otherwise, this issue is literally a collection of expensive ads. Aquascutum's is worth sharing. I can almost hear the photographer say "lights... models... now start kissing". What a Spring theme.

buybuy...you are kidding me

I am stuck. I cannot close the bowser of buybuy.com* for the last couple of hours. This has got to be the best flash animated online fashion mag I've ever clicked on...

Style>Elle>2.Createurs/peintres
Style>Elle>6.La mode en 3D
Beaute>1.Portrait Peter Gray

JCDC, editors and flash magicians who did this, vous avez mon respect le plus total.

*just in case... that's only Castelbajac's tongue-in-cheekiness, it doesn't really sell stuff, dah.

Turn it off

It's Sunday. Just shut down your pc and go catch some sun.

January Issues in... 'Gifts'

Only they are not. You do pay for them, obviously: Elle cost me 6.50 euros, L'Officiel 5.90, Vogue 4.90 and InStyle 3.90 (u do the maths in USD and pounds). Anyways, here's what came with January's issue:

My friends in London simply love the whole gift idea, they even make me buy them and send them over. They collect them. Me on the other hand, I simply believe gifts are there to boost sales as the content itself is so indifferent. They are not even gifts! You pay for them for G'd's sake...

Still I'm not done with this, but plz do let me know if you live somewhere where anything similar comes with ur glossy.

January Issues

This is what they look like over here.
This year though, I find them all particularly boring...

They all have these supplements on expensive jewelery, editorials saturated by couture dresses and other stuff which even if I could afford, where the *ell would I wear and are obsessed with lifting and plastic surgery.

Em. How about a little inspiration for the year soon to come? Respect to Elle for its clever shopping feature, served as 57 ideas to survive the recess, as well as to InStyle to its little book of online shopping.

I am not done with this, I'm just taking a break to check out the xmas 'meet' market.