Boticellophane

Still kickin, oh yes I am.  I'm working on lots of new things, and there will be posts galore in the coming weeks.  We have lots to catch up on.  

As the curtains opened on the avant-garde opera event of 1934, Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, the audience faced a vast sign of the production's cutting-edge modernity: fifteen hundred square feet of sky-blue cellophane was draped from the sides and ceiling of the stage, creating a semitransparent cyclorama, glittering under bright white lights.  The stark artificiality of the stage design proclaimed its relationship to the modern world and its unsurpassed hold on the new: 'The cellophane set, brilliantly lit to evoke a sky hung with rock crystal, defied comparison to anything the audience had ever seen. 'Some thought that [Florine Stettheimer's] costumes outdid the Ziegfeld Follies, and one quipped that the sets were 'Botticellophane.'" Plastic, that most twentieth century of materials, here transformed the stage into a powerful blend of art, glamour, and the latest technology.  We've lost, in the intervening decades, the ability to read the early-century semiotics of plastics, and particularly of cellophane.

For now:  the spring collection is up at the new shop: shop.indecoroustaste.com .  I know, I keep moving the thing around.  But really, I think you'll find that this is much easier to use/navigate.   Let me know what you think?

- From Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form by Judith Christine Brown

Credits: Thank you Cristin for collaborating/modeling/photographing and putting up with MADNESS.

These are the latest iteration of the (IN)DECOROUS TASTE spiked lucite platforms. This time, I built up a secondary platform for for the foot.  It looks like a mattress, just delightful.

Fend off attackers with panache!

Crystal chandelier harnesses, nude leather harnesses, and clutches available here.

Flesh Flowers

Hope everyone is having a fabulous holiday season!

Somehow, I managed to stir myself from my eggnog induced stupor long enough to shovel myself out of a mini storm and then make these floral harnesses.

Wintry white leather flowers, on glossy black patent shoes.  Not exactly a fruity field of flowers,  they're a far cry from the cakey capo di monte's that served as inspiration, I think.



Here are my beloved capo di monte porcelain flowers.  I could EAT these (and apparently wear them, too) they look so delicious.

Leather flowers are easy to make: Use vegetable tanned leather, cut into pinwheels, soak in water, and then fit them together and form them like this:

The flesh beasts before, and after, I painted them white.  You know, I sort of like them in their natural fleshy state... there's something simultaneously gross and appealing about them.

Mink Tongues

They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue...
Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One


Has anyone read The Loved One? Or seen the film version? (Ohhhh you must if you haven't. Liberace plays a casket salesman and if that isn't enough to make you run to your video store now, then we just can't be friends, okay?)  Certain movies are comfort movies for me (same goes for books, too); and I'm not sure what it says about me, since it's a satire about the funeral industry, but The Loved One is most definitely one of my staples.  I've seen it so many times that someone should do a remake and hire me to play a part, or maybe even 5 parts.

It's part of my capsule film collection like these black leather Converse deals are part of my capsule shoe collection.  This is a recent development, since I used to hate sneakers and until recently, rarely left my house in anything resembling a flat.  However, the Nike shoe project started me on this tangent thinking about sneakers, and I've gone from thinking that these are convenient and innocuous, to thinking of them as a staple.  Amazing the way these things sneak up on me.

When I bought them, they were simple, totally unadorned.  In fact, they were so boring I forgot to take a picture.  Whoops.  You can see them online here.  But yes, I decided I wanted to beef up the tongue.  With jet black mink.

Leather + slick black mink fur + dull black rubbery sneaker trim = ORGY OF TEXTURES.  Very few things excite me more than black on black textural orgies, by the way.  (Aside from Liberace playing a casket salesman, of course.)

Anyway, the end result reminded me of the Loved One, and so here we've come, full circle, back to the black protruding tongue!

Fairly simple, extremely gratifying.

I used an old mink fur collar.  These are fairly common, you can easily find them on ebay or even at thrift shops on old coats.



I cut it down to size so that it could wrap over the tongue on both sides, and finished the edges.  This makes for a meatier tongue, but also a more indulgent shoe.  (Also, because sometimes I fail to wear socks and the mink feels divine against skin. Things I should not divulge...)



I then sewed chamois to the back of the fur, the back of the tongue all the way into the shoe, and then partially down the front of the tongue, as far as I wanted the fur bonded to the tongue.  I didn't want to bond the fur completely down the front of the tongue...this lets you lace underneath the tongue should you feel like styling it that way.



The end result:

The Ruby Sneaker Re-Take: (I)D Shoe v. 2.0

Good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere...in these shoes.  Dorothy would have gotten to Oz so much quicker had she been wearing ruby red sneakers.

Let me explain. Dearest readers, I have a little story for you today.  It begins with Kristin over at Nike contacting me (Ahhh what?! Nike? Right?) to essentially rebuild (jack up?) a sneaker.  The conversation went something like this: "I like your insane heel with spikes in it, do you think you could do something like that with a sneaker?!" (That's an oversimplification, a little.)  Ahh, YES! ...

 Above, the sneaker in its finished glory.

But sneakers? About that.  I'm not sure whether this was out there, but it might as well be now: the only athletic shoes I actually owned prior to this project are ones I've had since, well... too long to remember, and I used them exclusively for running, which means that I used them, oh, never.  (Who actually likes running? I never run!!) 

I am was not a sneaker girl.  Never say never.

As I sat in front of the nondescript brown parcel that arrived at my door, and that mismatched hodgepodge of rubbery, Skittle-colored, sample-size (which incidentally look like munchkin shoes to this owner of 4-sizes-larger-than-sample manfeet, ha) kicks stared back at me, I remembered why I am was scared of sneakers. Ahh, I thought, "Alien shoes!!" 

I remembered why I don't didn't do sneakers.  Blocky toes, bulbous rubbery bits... I like shoes slick and sleek and preferably enough so that they can (visually speaking) SLICE THROUGH THINGS. (And make you legs look like razors)  Slicey-dicey.  Why shouldn't sneakers be like that, you know?

I love a challenge. And I loveloveLOVE things that I hate, things that scare me.  You know that.  Sneakers? Turns out we're a perfect match.  

Here's what I was faced with (minus a few that got away somewhere). Okay, so I'm into this red. It reminds me of Dorothy's ruby red slipper.  (I was also feeling the black pair that somehow disappeared from this shot, more on that in a later post...)

Why was Dorothy wearing slippers anyway? They're sweet, but is this really a prudent choice for a girl running from lions, tigers, bears, monkeys and a wicked witch? Perhaps the better question is: Why did the witch even own kitten heels with almond toes??!!!!

Ruby red slippers? Try ruby red sneakers, a shoe with... TEETH. The wicked witch would have been into these. 

Here, I've torn the uppers off the soles and removed the insole.  There's all sorts of weird stuff they put in these things, no?  On the right, you see I've trimmed the toe into a sharper shape.  Much better.

Below, I'm building the platform (okay, you didn't think I was going to make them flat, did you?) from a foam soling material.  The pattern for the platform actually consists of seven separate patterns, each a bit smaller than the one before it.  I made the largest by tracing the insole of the shoe.  I then bonded them and sanded/ sculpted the living daylights out of it, until it was smooth and had the shape I wanted.  Here, you can see 1/323123 of the mess I managed to make with this disgusting foam dust.  I wore a face mask and an eye mask, and yet, still managed to cover myself in an occlusive layer of black foam rubber until I looked like a rubber monster. I should have taken a picture, but vanity got the best of me. Oh well.  On the left, you can see I've decided to add another 2 layers to the five I'd already sanded.  It's necessary to bond each layer one or two at a time, and then sand, as it makes shaping a lot easier.

Here, I'm rebuilding a leather midsole to attach to the leather. This was necessary because I needed to cut the upper from the sole, and then slice off the toe to change the shape of the shoe.  The third picture in is the leather I cut to make the pointed toe-box, after skiving (shaving), but before wet molding.  On the right, you can see I've begun to mold it.

Oh! And the sequins.  The ones on the shoe, I sewed by hand, to every bit of mesh that the sneaker had.

Below, the toe box is covered in sequins, the upper is bonded to the platform (after lots of sanding), and I'm covering the platform with ribbons of red sequins.  These red sequin ribbons were life-savers. Doing this one sequin at a time would have been impossible.



FINISHED PRODUCT. Dorothy's red ruby sneakers, (I)D x Nike style.

Ding-dong the witch is dead...

Melting... Melting... (no wait, combusting?)