the most real display of friendsh in a film

and here is Sally winning an award for that amazing acting

How do these images make you feel? I feel extremely inspired, like glowing pink on the inside!

Much of Letinsky's work alludes to human presence, without including any actual figures. For example, in the Morning and Melancholia (c. 1997-2001), and the I Did Not Remember I Had Forgotten (c. 2002-2004) series, Letinsky seems to document the aftermath of a sumptuous gathering or dinner party.^[1] Faded flower petals intermingle with empty glasses and crumbs of food on partially cleared tables, often covered with a white linen that bears the mark of spilled wine. As alluded in the title Morning and Melancholia these scenes are often filled with a fresh, clear light, as though one is viewing from the perspective of the morning after, what the host failed to clean up the evening before. However, the title of the series itself is a reference to an essay by Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," which discusses the human response to loss. The title I Did Not Remember I Had Forgotten also has a literary source; it refers to a line by St. Augustine, commenting on memory, "One would never say I did not remember I had forgotten." Letinsky responded:

I was thinking, "No, that's not right!" Actually, I felt I had just come to this moment where I did not remember that I had forgotten, and it had to do with music. I'd gone for three years without listening to music. I would drive in the car and I would want silence, or I would listen to talk shows. Then for some reason I began listening to the radio, and some of the CDs I had around, and it was almost like drinking water after being really thirsty. I took such pleasure in it. Somehow, I did not remember that I'd forgotten to turn on the music.^[2]

The Somewhere, Somewhere series (c. 2005) explores similar themes of seemingly vacated domestic settings.^[3] Empty rooms and corridors bear only traces of their inhabitants: a scrap of paper on the floor, a lamp left hanging on the bare wall – these photographs might show apartments in the liminal time between tenants, full of old memories on the one hand, and expectation on the other.

A recent exhibition of her work includes the following artist statement: "Still life is unavoidably an engagement with and commentary upon society’s material-mindedness. Laura Letinsky’s photographs of forgotten details such as wrapping paper, plastic containers, Styrofoam cups, cans, leftover food bits, and found trinkets remark upon these remnants of daily subsistence and pleasure. Of major influence are Dutch-Flemish and Italian still-life paintings whose exacting beauty documented shifting social attitudes resulting from exploration, colonization, economics, and ideas about seeing as a kind of truth. But instead of the traditional allure of a meal awaiting an unseen viewer’s consumption, Letinsky photographs the remains of the table so as to investigate the precarious relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plenitude, pleasure and sustenance. What is looked at is "after the fact," what (ma)lingers, what persists, and by inference, what is gone. The photographs in After All veer into darkness; literally, as regards the time of day the photograph is made, as well as emotionally and psychologically. Little bits and pieces hover in white grounds blown flat by blinding light, later lurking in deep inky grayed out pools. Light, through its abundance and its absence, can record and reveal as well as obscure and exaggerate. Formally, through degrees of control and chaos, the domestic scenes Letinsky photographs are redolent with the allures of domesticity (safety, comfort, familiarity) as well as its dangers (boredom, satiation, lack of desire). These liminal images are not intended as accurate visual description, rather aspiring to describe another kind of sensing. What one sees is not always visible and Letinsky explores photography’s transformative quality, changing what is typically overlooked into something splendid in its resilience."

Bianca Balti by Martin Parr for Grey SS 2013

Five minutes with...Bianca Balti

Five minutes with...Bianca Balti at Milan Fashion Week...

by Joely Walker

Strikingly beautiful, the new face of Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue alongside David Gandy and a working mum to her young daughter; Bianca Balti has one of the busiest schedules in the modelling business, but still took the time to have a chat with us backstage at Milan Fashion Week. Her home town, beauty musts and working with Mario Testino. A truly lovely lady who's personality glows just as much as her irritatingly perfect skin...Any bad points? well, no. 

What's your travel beauty saviour? 

'I take so many planes so I need to give my skin and hair a moisture boost. I use a hair oil in the ends before I go on the plane and always spritz a face spray during the flight'.

Which is your favourite big fashion city?

'Well I love Milan because it's my home town. But Paris is the dream city, even when you're stressed out in shows you look around and everything is so beautiful. Then in New York I love the energy of the city.'

What's your earliest call time been? 

'3am was the earliest. When you shoot on location you need the sunrise natural light so you need to be up and ready. I never get used to waking up so early! I love sleep too much.'

Any tips for things to do in Milan?

'I love to take my daughter to the parks around the city. My favourite area of Milano is by the canons - I go to an authentic Italian restaurant around there on a Sunday for delicious food.'

 Favourite make-up artist or hair stylist?

'I've worked with so many brilliant artists that it's impossible to choose. If I tell you one name it would be so unfair on all the others - I'm so lucky to work with such talented people.'

Have you always loved fragrance?

'It was the first side of beauty that I fell for. My mother would never let me wear make-up at school so I used to use fragrance instead. Actually my first perfume was Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue, I still have the empty bottle at my mum's place, it reminds me of being young.'

How would you describe the Light Blue girl?

'Young and beautiful. It reminds me of summer and being on a beach in the bright sunshine. It's a fresh and natural girl, without being too heavy for every day.'

What was it like to shoot with Mario Testino and David Gandy?

'It was an absolute dream to work with Mario. When I was sixteen one day I skipped school to get a train to the city and see one of his exhibitions. I got into trouble but it was worth it. Photography has always been one of my passions.'

'To work with David was a pleasure as a lot of the time male models can be a pain in the … but David is different. He's confident and genuine.'

She is beautiful, smiling, chameleon-like and, above all, a ‘thinking head’. The Italian top model of the moment, Bianca Balti, 28 years old (with a 4-year-old daughter), has reached the heights of global success, conquering the covers of major fashion magazines and becoming the testimonial of the most prestigious brands. Insomuch that Rome has decided to dedicate her a photo exhibition in the Museum of the Trajan Markets (on show up to September 2nd).
The Exhibition Bianca Balti. Immagini di una favola di moda (Images of a fairy tale of fashion) shows in 41 shots, taken by the most important photographers of our time, from Karl Lagerfeld to Patrick Demarchelier, the consonance between beauty, innocence, joy which are among the elements that characterize the top model’s charm.
FROM PARIS TO THE PIRELLI CALENDAR. Bianca begun her career in 2005 as the face of an advertising campaign. The debut on the catwalk was with Dolce & Gabbana as testimonial in 2005. But the real onset was a catalogue for Valentino, as she told: «I’m actually a rebel and I have even said “no” to many job offers. Insomuch that my mother told me I was crazy». The top model has also conquered the Parisian fashion and in 2007 she made her debut in cinema with the movie Go Go Tales, directed by Abel Ferrara. In 2011, the Pirelli calendar: shot by Karl Lagerfeld.
«I CONSIDERED MYSELF UGLY». But be careful: Bianca does not feel to be miraculously saved. «I’m just lucky to be born as I am, but up to High School, because of my thinness, I felt like the ugly duckling. To the young girls I say: be professional whatever work you choose to do. There are not only models, even for my daughter I dream about a career as a doctor».

Style Evolution: Wildfox's Kimberley Gordon

by Rana Good

Today we bring to you our first "Style Evolution" story, a feature where we ask some of our favorite tastemakers' to look back at their outfits from their childhood through their teenage years, until they had become the trendsetters we love today. Our first sartorial retrospective is with Kimberley Gordon of Wildfox , the L.A.-based label known for its irreverent slogans, bright colors and California vibe.

Turns out, Gordon's look wasn't always loud and free. In fact, her first fashion memories involved school uniforms in the UK. Find out more about how she went from classic to crimped to cool.

What was your style like as a kid?
Kimberley Gordon: I wore very matchy-matchy sets when I was in the UK. I think because my mother loved me in them, she has amazing style. When I moved to the U.S. it was a lot of Bugs Bunny T-shirts and jean shorts. I was quite a tomboy because I didn’t really care about my clothes, more about the cartoons on my clothes.

When did you become interested in clothes?
I always loved clothes. My mother couldn’t believe how girly I was — she didn’t know where it came from. The first time I can remember being really obsessed with something was my friend Tammy’s coat when I was eight. It fit like a dress, zipped up and was tight on top then A-lined out. I searched everywhere for one with my mum but to no avail. I remember I wanted it so badly I would panic when I thought about it, as you can see it’s haunted me ever since.

Were you a trendsetter in school?
(Laughs) Not so much, but I always dressed very... differently. I wore bell bottoms and vintage T-shirts in junior high — which was a little daring, but no one emulated me at all. In high school, I sewed a lot of my own T-shirts and made denim leg warmers. I was a bit of a candy raver (JNCO jeans, tiny tanks, scratch-and-sniff  T-shirts, heavy lip liner). I know people noticed my style and pointed it out a lot but mostly because they didn’t understand it. I totally feel them...

Any cringe-worthy outfits to look back on?
Oh yeah, my worst time was probably aged 19, I was the most obsessed with Britney Spears at that point and I showed belly that should never be shown. I also crimped my hair in sections and wore denim hats... Oh lord.

What is the most memorable outfit from your youth?
Probably my tiny Spice Girls T-shirt (it was kids' size) and my JNCO jeans. The boys used to stick their binders in my back pockets, that’s how big they were.

Has anything you liked to wear as a kid made a comeback recently?
That would be frightening. Maybe neon stuff? I hope Tevas come into style, they almost do and I cross my fingers every time. They are hilarious!

What's your favorite fashion piece of the moment?
I'm obsessed with my black Prada platforms, I wear them with little white socks. I cradle them like a baby.

For more images from the past and in-depth descriptions of what Gordon was wearing, click on the gallery below.

Thank you Societe! Very fun interview.

I have attached videos also, I reccomend watching!

Eartha Kitt, who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages, recording studios and movie and television screens in a show-business career that lasted more than six decades, died on Thursday. She was 81 and lived in Connecticut.

The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E. Freedman.

Ms. Kitt, who began performing in the late ’40s as a dancer in New York, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler.

With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of “Faust” in which Ms. Kitt played Helen of Troy.

Ms. Kitt’s career-long persona, that of the seen-it-all sybarite, was set when she performed in Paris cabarets in her early 20s, singing songs that became her signatures, like “C’est Si Bon” and “Love for Sale.”

Returning to New York, she was cast on Broadway in “New Faces of 1952” and added another jewel to her vocal crown, “Monotonous” (“Traffic has been known to stop for me/Prices even rise and drop for me/Harry S. Truman plays bop for me/Monotonous, monotone-ous”). Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in May 1952, “Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame.”

Shortly after that run, Ms. Kitt had her first best-selling albums and recorded her biggest hit, “Santa Baby,” whose precise, come-hither diction and vaguely foreign inflections (Ms. Kitt, a native of South Carolina, spoke four languages and sang in seven) proved that a vocal sizzle could be just as powerful as a bonfire. Though her record sales fell after the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll in the mid- and late ’50s, her singing style would later be the template for other singers with pillow-talky voices like Diana Ross (who has said she patterned her Supremes sound and look largely after Ms. Kitt), Janet Jackson and Madonna (who recorded a cover version of “Santa Baby” in 1987).

Ms. Kitt would later call herself “the original material girl,” a reference not only to her stage creation and to Madonna but also to her string of romances with rich or famous men, including Welles, the cosmetics magnate Charles Revson and the banking heir John Barry Ryan 3rd. She was married to her one husband, Bill McDonald, a real-estate developer, from 1960 to 1965; their daughter, Kitt Shapiro, survives her, as do two grandchildren.

From practically the beginning of her career, as critics gushed over Ms. Kitt, they also began to describe her in every feline term imaginable: her voice “purred” or “was like catnip”; she was a “sex kitten” who “slinked” or was “on the prowl” across the stage, sometimes “flashing her claws.” Her career has often been said to have had “nine lives.” Appropriately, she was tapped to play Catwoman in the 1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role from the leggier, lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing to it a more feral, compact energy.

Yet for all the camp appeal and sexually charged hauteur of Ms. Kitt’s cabaret act, she also played serious roles, appearing in the films “The Mark of the Hawk” with Sidney Poitier (1957) and “Anna Lucasta” (1959) with Sammy Davis Jr. She made numerous television appearances, including a guest spot on “I Spy” in 1965, which brought her her first Emmy nomination.

For these performances Ms. Kitt likely drew on the hardship of her early life. She was born Eartha Mae Keith in North, S.C., on Jan. 17, 1927, a date she did not know until about 10 years ago, when she challenged students at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., to find her birth certificate, and they did. She was the illegitimate child of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white man about whom Ms. Kitt knew little. She worked in cotton fields and lived with a black family who, she said, abused her because she looked too white. “They called me yella gal,” Ms. Kitt said.

At 8 she was sent to live in Harlem with an aunt, Marnie Kitt, who Ms. Kitt came to believe was really her biological mother. Though she was given piano and dance lessons, a pattern of abuse developed there as well: Ms. Kitt would be beaten, she would run away and then she would return. By her early teenage years she was working in a factory and sleeping in subways and on the roofs of unlocked buildings. (She would later become an advocate, through Unicef, on behalf of homeless children.)

Her show-business break came on a lark, when a friend dared her to audition for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. She passed the audition and permanently escaped the cycle of poverty and abuse that defined her life till then.

But she took the steeliness with her, in a willful, outspoken manner that mostly served her career, except once. In 1968 she was invited to a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” The remark reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to a derailment in Ms. Kitt’s career.

As bookings dried up, she was exiled in Europe for almost a decade. But President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House in 1978, and that year she earned her first Tony nomination for her work in “Timbuktu!,” an all-black remake of “Kismet.”

By now a diva and legend, Ms. Kitt did what many other divas and legends — Shirley Bassey and Ethel Merman among them — did: she dabbled in dance music, scoring her biggest hit in 30 years with “Where Is My Man” in 1984, the same year she was roundly criticized for touring South Africa. Ms. Kitt was typically unapologetic; the tour, she said, played to integrated audiences and helped build schools for black children.

The third of her three autobiographies, “I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten,” was published in 1989, and she earned a Grammy nomination for “Back in Business,” a collection of cabaret songs released in 1994.

As Ms. Kitt began the sixth decade of her career, she was still active. In 2000 she received her second Tony nomination, for best featured actress in a musical in “The Wild Party.” Branching out into children’s programming, she won two Daytime Emmy Awards, this year and in 2007, as outstanding performer in an animated program for her role as the scheming empress-wannabe Yzma in “The Emperor’s New School.”

All the while she remained a fixture on the cabaret circuit, having maintained her voice and shapely figure through a vigorous fitness regimen that included daily running and weight lifting. Even after discovering in 2006 that she had colon cancer, she triumphantly opened the newly renovated Café Carlyle in New York in September 2007. Stephen Holden, writing in The Times, said that Ms. Kitt’s voice was “in full growl.”

But though Ms. Kitt still seemed to have men of all ages wrapped around her finger (she would often toy with younger worshipers at her shows by suggesting they introduce her to their fathers), the years had given her perspective. “I’m a dirt person,” she told Ebony magazine in 1993. “I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.”

More, more, more!

This collection is very personal for me and was ignited by a moment under the stars with my friends last summer. We all drank whiskey and stripped down to little dresses and bathing suits, it was a warm windy night in Joshua Tree and we had nothing but blankets and an i-phone speaker blaring music from the inside of a cup (a trick I learned on that trip!) It made me think of my summers camping in High School, my inseparable group of friends and I used to climb the water tower in the mountains of Santa Barbara, toss up our sleeping bags and play truth or dare while gazing out at the twinkling city far below. It's a magical experience and one I attribute to California. I don't think the magic will ever leave me...

We had dreamy Lauren Ward shoot this for a more subtle, quiet feeling (a little different than our other campaigns) and cast muse, Daria Pleggenkuhle, to play the ultimate, High school flashback Tomboy. her cropped hair, lanky body, and bushy eyebrows conjured the feeling of self discovery, hot summers, and dreaming of what the future held.

Another girl who was a major inspiration for me was teen photographer, Nirrimi. Please check out her blog for incredible inspiration!! One of the shirts "Alba" is named after her baby. Please enjoy!! I hope you can find your own magic this summer.

 
As designer Kimberley Gordon describes the inspiration behind the unique pieces, “When I was 11 and moved to California, we started going on camping trips and I haven’t stopped since. From Yosemite, Joshua Tree, tents, ghost stories, campfires, and bug spray, to first kisses, swimming, fishing, home made burritos, and bucket hats! Camping always makes for the most wonderful memories.” Gordon adds, “The open road through the desert with the windows down and heat rushing in or laying under the stars with your friends drinking whiskey and playing spin the bottle; the collection is inspired by all of these feelings and memories.  The last three weeks before school begins, the urgency of cramming in all the fun, and that feeling that you know it’s all going to end soon which makes it all the more magical.”
 
The Daydream group features a selection of unique photorealistic images sublimated onto signature Wildfox bodies. The “Kissing Under The Stars” Cassidy tank is covered in an allover galaxy print featuring a vibrant graphic of luscious red lips on the front. Other styles include images of desert highways, Los Angeles horizons, and swimming pools with phrases such as “The Road is Home” and “Dream On Dreamer”. The “Motel Mirrors” jumper features a lifelike image of a hotel room across the entire body as if the garment had been cut out of a photo.

The Besties group is a pairing of favorite Spring 13 graphics with signature Wildfox tees, tanks, and White Label sweaters, creating an ultimate must-have collection for summer. In addition to popular t shirt graphics like ‘Rainbow Pony’, ‘Meow!’ and ‘Grey Wolf’, signature bodies included are both Desert and Hippy crew necks and Classic v neck tees offered in a palette of soft pinks, teals and yellows. Highlights from the White Label sweater knits are the allover floral print ‘Little Edie’ on a classic Lennon body and ‘Hampton Tennis Club’ on the School Girl V.
 

Photos: Lauren Ward

Make up: Carlene K

Hair: Anna Lee Fiorino

Styling: Kimberley Gordon, Meredith Leyerzaph

Wildfox production team: Emily Siegel, Casey Wisdon, Aurora Rivera, Alexandra Green, Kevin Ramirez

Photo Edit: Kimberley Gordon