fashion designers

Francesca Eastwood, spawn of Clint, has prompted a minor brouhaha thanks to her involvement in an art stunt that involved a $100,000 Hermès bag being chainsawed and set on fire. It’s essentially a reality-show re-run of the KLF’s notorious Burn A Million Quid event, albeit on a smaller budget, and some of the aghast responses are pretty similar – Ms Eastwood should, we are informed, have put the money...

Plenty of you will have seen the news snippet about the man who had a tattoo made of the passage in Leviticus that forbids homosexuality, oblivious to the fact that a few lines on there’s another passage condemning tattoos.I would have thought that serious believers might be very much in favour of tattoos, because if there’s one thing I associate with permanent body art, it’s absolute certainty –...

An interesting article in the Independent introduces a couple of artists who call themselves Damien Hirst. Inevitably, it’s not just a straightforward case of fakery or passing-off. These ersatz Hirsts claim to have aesthetic motives for their appropriation, one turning Hirst’s name into a Duchamp-style readymade, the other commenting the lack of originality in the echt artist’s work, and his own...

In a piece of research that will startle very few, mathematicians at Dartmouth College have shown that modern writers are far less influenced by “the classics” than their predecessors were. Well, yes, um, maybe. Of course, nobody reads Walter Scott any more; or, more to the point, nobody feels the need to pretend to have read Walter Scott any more. The canon is still there, but like a football team...

After I deployed those Klout-related ramblings, I was wondering why employers and marketers are starting to pay so much attention to a metric that is apparently so easy to manipulate by retweeting gossip about Pudsey the dog or getting on the right side of someone on that bloody Observer list. And I realised that Klout doesn’t really measure the subject’s online influence – instead, it measures the...

Oh dear, Klout’s everywhere all of a sudden. It’s a service that aims to quantify your social media influence, deploying algorithms that translate to a score out of 100; the bigger cheese you are on the interwebnets, the higher your score. This might have some validity if Klout were to operate with the ethos of an old-fashioned gentleman’s club; those who push their claims for membership too loudly...

No, it’s not a Torchwood storyline. The Malaysian owners of Cardiff City FC want to change the club’s strip from blue to red, and replace the bluebird on the crest with a dragon. The argument is that the new image will be more helpful to marketing efforts in Asia, the importance of which to European football has escalated in recent years. They may have a point. Glancing at the car stickers on the...

Hot Spot | The Scotch By JULIE EARLE-LEVINE| May 10, 2012, 1:00 pmLocated in St. James, London’s newest and coolest night spot, the Scotch has already hosted the likes of Kate Moss, Jay Jopling, Stella McCartney and Scarlett Johansson. Not surprisingly, the club has a tough door policy. I was given a password on my recent visit: “punchy,” which I mistakenly morphed into “jumpy.” The doorman...

When I acquired a Kindle, I wondered whether I might never buy a book again. But then I remembered that when I bought my first CD player, some time back in the early 90s, I didn’t stop buying vinyl. OK, so if a new album came out, I’d probably buy the small expensive version in the case that cracked, rather than the larger, slightly less expensive version in the sleeve that bent at the corner and...

HB Australia, May 2012Enigmatic, mysterious, often perilous, Burma has been closed to travelers for decades, but this unsung Asian hero is now open for business. Julie Earle-Levine rolls up the shutters Burma, now known as the Republic of Myanmar, has always drawn adventurous travelers, designer Donna Karan among them, despite being shrouded in secrecy and under military rule for 50 years until...

When I’m not here, pontificating about French theorists and Japanese novelists and Charlotte Rampling’s legs, I’m often to be found on Twitter. Have you heard of Twitter, by any chance? There’s so little coverage of it in the mainstream media, sometimes I rather think I might have imagined it.I’m being sarcastic, of course; one of the modes of discourse that Twitter isn’t very good at conveying, to...

My recent ambles through the ones and zeroes have thrown up two nicely judged slabs of wording, separated by 400 years or so. First, Grace Dent, in The Independent, characterises the qualities required to be nominated for a Turner Prize as a “dogged determination to grab fanciful brainfarts and build them.” Which is, if you think about it, the same tenacity required to do anything that isn’t tedious...

I’ve never been a big fan of positive discrimination, mainly because it doesn’t work; inevitably it’s easier to base quotas on empirical criteria such as race or gender or disability, rather than things that are harder to quantify but no less real, such as socio-economic status class, there, I said it. But I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the choice of acts for the gig marking the beginning...