We Interrupt Fashion Week To Bring You...

...The VMAs.

Here are my thoughts:

1) Kanye, how many times a day would you say you kiss your own ass? Like, a million? How dare you embarrass Queen B like that! She looked shocked and disgusted by your ridiculousness. Also, you and Amber looked a little...how do I say this delicately? Oh, that's right. I don't need to say it delicately cuz' yer kind of an ass...trashy. Maybe it's the Henny?

2) Nelly Furtado, you looked fabulous!




3) Someone's getting fired!


Although, it's hard to imagine that this sort of double dress thing would happen to two huge stars at a huge event by accident in this day and age. Maybe it was planned because they knew they would get tons of press off of it.


4) AAACK!!!


I read this interview with Lady Gaga where she said she would do lines of coke and dance around her apartment in front of the mirror for hours while writing her songs. Maybe that's why she dresses like this? Believe me, I'm all for freedom of expression, but she has absolutely no sense of humor about herself and that makes me uncomfortable when I look at her in get-ups as freaky as the ones she donned tonight. I mean the Lady sings songs about disco sticks and then fakes her own death as serious as a heart attack with backup dancers donning face thongs. It's just strange. Also, she's besties with Perez Hilton. That make me suspicious of her.

5) Madonna and Janet did an amazing job of eulogizing MJ. Madonna let her cyborg melt just enough to squeak out real, moving, human emotion and Janet rocked it out like a champ at the 4 minute mark of this tribute:

Janet Jackson - MTV Shows

I almost cried when she did the Scream dance with Michael's video image. It was perfect.

That's all I have to say about all that.

One/One-Thousand: Elaine Constantine

Elaine Constantine's photographs were a shiny, happy lifeboat for fashion photography back in the latter part of the '90s. In a dark sea of grunge and heroine chic, Constantine's color-saturated, smiley, energetic images were a healthy shock to a system that needed to wake up from last night's party. I was so taken with her editorials for mags like The Face and Vogue when I was younger that I plastered them around my room and would spend hours daydreaming about joining the party they seemed to peek in on. Look how much fun they are having:















They are like an energy drink and candy meal. They make me remember the sugar high of preteen sleepovers. Looking at them, I kind of want to put someone's bra in the freezer just for the hell of it and dance around to old school Janet Jackson. That's just me. What do they make you want to do?

Elaine Constantine is represented by Santucci & Co. and you can see all of these images, plus more from her portfolio, on their site.

The Fabric of Their Lives

Portraits of Malians by Seydou Keïta.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting a special exhibit entitled The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End. It explores the storytelling aspects of fabrics in African life. There are people who can read an African garment like a biography book. One look at a certain print, and a trained eye can tell you the wearer's status, heritage, and so much more. The exhibit showcases textile samples, fabric-based art, paintings, and photographed portraits. The show's portraits shine as unbelievably gorgeous records of proud people.

Pictured with their prized possessions and loved ones, the subjects of featured photographer Seydou Keïta's black and white portraits are supremely stunning. By creating scenes for his sitters with their own radios, cars, musical instruments, friends, and family members, Keita showed the unique personalities and ways of life of the newly financially secure urban elite who commissioned his portraits. They were products of a rare period of prosperity in Malia beginning in the late 1940s and early '50s, and they dressed to impress.

Keïta's work in the exhibition is not to be missed. If by some chance you need more convincing than the samples pictured above, take a fresh look at wonder-director Mark Romanek's 1997 video for Janet Jackson's "Got Til It's Gone," which directly and beautifully quotes Seydou's iconic imagery.

The amount that I love that video is actually too much for words.

Click images for source information.