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gjepcindia · 1 year

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Marissa Collections Focus Only On Design-Driven Labels

Meet Jay Hartington, the CEO of Marissa Collections, the Florida-based store and boutique business that is celebrating more than four decades as a family-run enterprise in the competitive US marketplace. Their affinity to promote high-end designer labels, including some Indian brands, forms the basis of their success story.

Solitaire International is publishing a series of interviews profiling independent US jewellery retailers. Some of the jewellers featured so far in this series include London Jewelers on Long Island, Mayfair Rocks in The Hamptons, and Sydney Garber, the Chicago-based jeweller that donates all profits to charity and non-profits.

This time we focus on Marissa Collections, the Florida-based boutique. Dedicated to helping clients find their own style, Marissa Collections opened its doors in 1975 when life-and-business partners, Marissa and Burt Hartington, opened shop.

One of a handful of family-run businesses in the US to have stayed the course, perhaps their success lies in family teamwork?

Marissa is the creative half of this luxury operation whilst her husband manages the business side of things.

Their son Jay Hartington serves as CEO. The second generation in the family to continue the business, Jay oversees marketing, jewellery and menswear at this multifaceted boutique.

Today, Marissa Collections is located in a 10,000-square-foot property in the Third Street South shopping district of Old Naples in Florida.

Marissa Collections originally operated out of a store front boutique, selling items hand selected by Marissa, including accessories and shoes.

It has recently expanded to include fine jewellery, as well as menswear. Jewellery brands it carries include Messika, David Webb and Emily P Wheeler whose funky cabochon chunky ring retails for $9,800 at Marissa Collections. Other jewellers selling at the boutique include Irene Neuwirth, Katherine Jetter and Studio Renn. Indian designers Marissa admires and works with include Saboo, Arunashi, and Sutra — these include Arunashi’s $28,800 abstract pear earrings, and Sutra’s black ceramic fancy diamond bracelet retailing at $155,000.

Jay Hartington throws more light on their business.

What defines your company?

Marissa Collections is defined by its curated shopping experience that allows staff and guests to create timeless pieces from a wide variety of designers. What started as my mother, Marissa, hand-picking and personally styling pieces for each individual has grown into so much more, while still holding true to its family-owned, personal shopping relationship. Marissa’s original, artistic vision is brought to life using personal stylists and jewelry experts on site, making it a one-of-kind company.

What was your route into jewellery?

It was a natural progression to provide head-to-toe styling to our clients so they wouldn’t have the need to go anywhere else.

How is business in the US?

We are fortunate to have experienced tremendous growth. Since the beginning of this business, we have consistently invested in smaller, up-and-coming designers. By doing so, we have grown alongside those designers and developed great relationships. Our stylists incorporate our exquisite jewellery with casual clothing, creating even more options for jewellery wear. Our efforts have paid off as we have been able to expand and add an additional shop in Palm Beach, Florida; the shop is doing very well and was just awarded Best New Business in Palm Beach.

Do you sell more online or in store?

Both online and in-store sales have been doing equally as well. They truly balance each other out and support each other. Our boutiques have consistent loyal fans that love to shop in person, more for the experience and attention to detail from our staff. Although, since the pandemic, our online sales have done exceptionally well. In 2020, e-commerce sales went up 110%.

How have you adapted to the pandemic?

We were growing faster than normal online, so we revamped the website and made sure sales associates were easily accessible to online shoppers. We would also go live on Instagram with designers to showcase their collections. These few small measurements paid off by being able to connect virtually with local clientele and with our international buyers. Also offered to our local clientele was same-day delivery in our well-known Marissa Collections pink van. Our jewellery sales increased, as people were spending less going out and more on valuable jewellery and possessions.

What smaller brands do you carry?

We continuously seek out emerging designers that are new and upcoming. Often, our smaller designers can’t be found everywhere else, and it gives us the chance to shine a spotlight on emerging designers.

Who is your clientele?

We are consistently growing and reaching new clientele, especially online and across the globe. Locally, we have generational clients who have been with Marissa Collections since we started decades ago. We hold many in-store events, such as our Piercing Party, that bring in waves of younger clients. They can walk right into the boutique for the same personalised, one-on-one shopping experience that their mother or grandmother has had.

How much do they spend?

We host a wide variety of price points, including fashion, fine, bespoke and high jewellery.

Do you do business with India? How is your experience?

We do plenty of business with India and have a few direct suppliers that we have a great relationship with.

To know more: https://gjepc.org/solitaire/marissa-collections-focus-only-on-design-driven-labels/

#Solitaire & Jewellery Magazine

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dippedanddripped · 4 years

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As the number of abandoned storefronts and closed retail outlets continues to mount, the once unremarkable activity of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores can feel like reality askew — like a stroll through the Twilight Zone. As this glum new normal becomes, well, the norm, signs of life can be almost as jarring.

Take, for instance, a pair of storefront windows on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood. Just recently they were lifeless reminders of an upscale furniture store, now defunct. Then, in August, they began to fill with seemingly unconnected objects: bluejeans piled in a chest-high mound, a lounge chair upholstered in denim, a mannequin in a jumpsuit with an eyeball for a head standing amid a sea of paint-splattered drop cloths.

Hand-painted signage in the other window offered only that this “Appointment Only” storefront with the cryptic displays, and the 6,000 square feet of retail space behind them, are the domain of Gallery Dept.

Despite the name, Gallery Dept. isn’t a gallery or a department store but a hybrid clothing label that sits somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap between street wear label, denim atelier, neighborhood tailor and vintage store. Just as accurately, you could call Gallery Dept. the personal art project of its founder Josué Thomas, a designer whose own creative urges are just as disparate and layered.

With so many small brands in a state of retreat this summer, Mr. Thomas’s label has not only weathered these spirit-crushing conditions but thrived. In less than two years, Gallery Dept. has moved from a crowded workshop a few blocks down Beverly Boulevard to its new space in part because its hoodies, logo tees, anoraks and flare-cut jeans — each designed and hand-painted by Mr. Thomas on upcycled or dead-stock garments — have become unlikely objets d’art in a crowded street wear market.

This corner of the fashion industry is a crowded one, and in recent years there have been a glut of collaborations and merch drops that have taken on a corporate cadence. In contrast, Gallery Dept. is something of a bespoke operation, offering street wear basics that are blessed with an artist’s (in this case Mr. Thomas’s) singular touch.

Mr. Thomas began to cut jeans and screen-print shirts as the mood struck in 2017, and since that time Gallery Dept. has grown from an underground cult label for collectors to one with atmospheric clout after being worn by Kendall Jenner, LeBron James, Kendrick Lamar and two of the three Migos (Offset and Quavo).

Those lucky enough to enter the appointment-only space, now booked with up to 20 appointments a day, are greeted inside by a 20-foot-tall span of wall that reads, “Art That Kills” in a large crawl text, and the occasional reference to Rod Serling’s seminal sci-fi program.

Throughout the sunlit store, Mr. Thomas’s abstract paintings and writings fill the spaces between clothing racks and bright brass shelves heavy with the brand's thick hoodies and sweatpants. Over the chug of sewing machines, one can hear snippets of bossa nova Muzak, a vinyl-only mix also made by Mr. Thomas. (There are also plans to release music by other artists, including the New York rapper Roc Marciano, under an Art That Kills imprint.)

Gallery Dept.’s new space was financed on the strength of e-commerce sales from this past spring, and not with the help of venture capital or outside investors, Mr. Thomas said on a recent walk-through. This freedom gives him and the label, which now employs 12 people, the freedom to operate on its own esoteric terms. And there are a few. In the store’s dressing rooms, there are no mirrors to survey a fit. (“We’re going to tell you if a piece works or not,” he said.) Nor are there price tags on its garments.

“If the first thing you look at is the price, it’s going to alter your thinking about a piece,” he said. “I’d rather people engage with the clothing first.”

The Gallery Dept. does not indulge pull requests from stylists or send its pieces to influencers, a practice Mr. Thomas explains with a trace of punk indignation.

“Kendall doesn’t get a discount,” he said. “We don’t seed. I don’t care who it is — we don’t cater to different markets.”

Wearing cutoff carpenter pants and a white T-shirt, each dusted in a fine rainbow splatter, Mr. Thomas looked every bit like an artist roused from his creative flow, complete with paint-stained hands and individually colored fingernails. Standing in a mauve-carpeted room, Mr. Thomas pointed out his latest ideas: pewter jewelry in eccentric shapes, like an earring in the shape of a zipper pull, made in collaboration with the Chrome Hearts offshoot, Lone Ones, and shorts cut from dead-stock military laundry bags — while explaining the origins of his own style.

“I liked my parent’s clothing growing up,” Mr. Thomas said. “As a teenager, I was able to fit into my dad’s leather jacket. The beat-up patina on it was perfect, and I realized that that was personal style. It was something you couldn’t go to a store and buy.”

Mr. Thomas, who turned 36 in September, never studied fashion or garment making, and he can’t work a sewing machine. But growing up as the son of immigrants from Venezuela and Trinidad, he watched as his parents subsisted on their raw artistic skills to create a life in Los Angeles. And he now uses those same talents as an artist and designer: sign-painting, tie-dying, screen printing. For a short time, his father, Stefan Gilbert, even ran a private women’s wear label.

Similarly, in his early 20s, Mr. Thomas worked at Ralph Lauren. As one of the few Black people in creative roles in a predominantly white company, he soon realized that the only way to survive in the fashion industry would have to be with a project of his own making.

“I was the ‘cool’ Black guy, but there was nowhere for me to go,” he said. “Best case would have been sourcing buttons for women’s outerwear or something.”

Gallery Dept.’s spontaneous inception came about in 2016 when Mr. Thomas sold a hand-sewn denim poncho off his own back to Johnny Depp’s stylist. At the time Mr. Thomas was focused on making beats and D.J.-ing, but after selling all of the pieces he’d designed for a small trunk show at the Chateau Marmont, he realized he’d discovered a new creative lane.

It had less to do with ponchos, which were dropped from subsequent collections, and more to do with old garments being remixed in the heat of artistic paroxysm, with as little second-guessing as possible. With the help of Jesse Jones, a veteran tailor, Mr. Thomas began churning out made-to-order pieces for customers who often were unaware of what, exactly, they had stumbled into.

“We were creating pieces while we were selling them,” he said.

Working with heavy vintage shirts, hoodies, trucker hats, bomber jackets, whatever was at hand, Mr. Thomas would frequently screen-print the brand’s logo, adding paint or other flourishes as the feeling struck.

Today that extends to long-sleeve tees, sweatpants and socks. At the time, he also began blowing out the silhouette of vintage Levi’s 501s and Carhartt work pants into a subtle flare, accented with patches and reinforced stitching, resulting in a streetwise update of the classic boot-cut jean.

Mr. Thomas christened this style of jeans the “LA Flare.” And where denim has so historically hewed to “his” and “her” categories, the LA Flare is the zeitgeist-y “they” of street wear denim. (The label labels its items as “unisex.”)

The jeans come with a luxury item’s price tag, with a basic version starting at $395. Custom tailoring and additional touches by Mr. Thomas, can push the price upward of $1,200. One early collaboration with Chrome Hearts, a pair of orange-dyed flares patched with that brand’s iconic gothic crosses, has gone for $5,000 on Grailed.

“There is nothing like Josue’s repurposed jeans,” said George Archer, a senior buyer at Mr Porter. “They are both a wearable piece and a work of art. No one else is doing what he’s doing.”

For Mr. Archer, who first noticed the Gallery Dept. logo popping on men in Tokyo in March, Mr. Thomas “interprets and creates” clothing as if it was an end in itself — and not a commodity to be monetized. (Nonetheless, Mr Porter hopes to monetize a collection of Gallery Dept. pieces via its e-commerce site later this year.)

“You can feel the warmth of Josue’s hands on each of the pieces,” said Motofumi Kogi, the creative director of the Japanese label United Arrows & Sons. An elder statesmen of Tokyo’s street wear scene, Mr. Kogi found the label on a trip to Los Angeles last year. It’s not only Mr. Thomas’s artistic touch that stands out to him but his vision for remaking a staid garment into something that Mr. Kogi believes has not been seen before.

“He took this staple of hip-hop culture and refreshed it,” he said, referring to Carhartt pants.

Getting the people who make that culture to buy in was another matter. “The first year we did the flare, in 2017, skinny jeans were in,” Mr. Thomas said. “Rappers would come into the shop and say they’d never wear a flare. Now, everyone is wearing it.”

On Instagram, fit pics by rappers like Rich the Kid, along with the aforementioned Migos, Quavo and Offset, Gallery Dept.’s flare has become a familiar silhouette, skinny jeans breaking loose below the knee, usually coiled up at the ankle around a pair of vintage Air Jordans.

One fan of the jeans, Virgil Abloh, sees Mr. Thomas’s “edit” of the classic garment as the next chapter of its history.

“Their flare cut is the most important new cut of denim in the last decade — since the skinny jean,” Mr. Abloh said. A self-described Levi’s “obsessive” who owns more than 20 pairs of Gallery Dept. jeans, he walked into Mr. Thomas’s workshop one day after a routine stop at the Erewhon Market across the street.

“I thought: ‘This is amazing. Here’s some guys editing their own clothes in a shop,’” he said. “It reminded me of what I was doing when I started out, painting over logos, making hand-personalized clothes.”

Mr. Abloh considers Mr. Thomas’s work to be the fashion equivalent of “ready-made” art, and he offers Shayne Oliver of Hood by Air as a distant contemporary. He suggested that he and Mr. Thomas come from a lineage of Black designers that is still in the process of defining itself.

“He’s a perfect example of someone creating their own path from a community that hasn’t traditionally participated in fashion,” Mr. Abloh said. “I see Josue as making a new canon of his own, showcasing what Black design can do.”

Mr. Thomas didn’t argue with that. But he was also a little preoccupied with whatever was taking place at the tips of fingers to get lost in the thought. The future of his brand, after all, depends on his ability to stay in that moment.

“People want things that aren’t contrived,” he said, pulling at his own shirt to drive the point home. “This paint came from me working. I wanted to recreate this feeling. Once something is contrived, when you can see through it, it’s ruined. There’s only so much you want to explain.”

#design #gallery dept #streetwear blog #upcycle designers

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artificialqueens · 4 years

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Mateo's Eight 1/8 (Branjie)--athena2

Summary:

Con artist Vanessa Mateo has just been released from prison, and she’s planning one last heist to erase her debts and start a new life for herself.

But for this to succeed, she needs the help of the very person who ratted her out to the cops: her ex-girlfriend, Brooke Lynn Hytes.

(An Ocean’s Eight AU).

A/N: I’ve been planning this for a while, and I’m excited to start posting! You also don’t need to see the movie to read this. It follows the main points of the movie, but I did make some changes here and there. Thank you so, so much to Writ, for letting me throw this idea and all my plans for it at you, for always supporting this, and for beta-ing! I’ve never done a full-length movie adaptation like this before, so I would really appreciate any feedback you have!

—

The first thing Vanessa does when she gets out of prison is get a slice of pizza.

Standing on the sidewalk in the black shirt she’d been wearing six months ago, too thin now for the late-winter chill, Vanessa gratefully burns her mouth on the cheese and lets grease drip down her wrist. She never thought she’d miss grease so much. She gets another slice and eats it in a few bites, crunching on the crust as loud as she can, breathing in the oregano and oil like it’s oxygen as winter sun warms her shoulders.

She’s home. She’s free.

There’s enough money in the box of her just-returned things for a cab to her mother’s, where she’ll have to live now that going back to her old–their old–apartment isn’t an option. There’s a heart necklace in there too, but Vanessa doesn’t want to think about that. She shoves it in her pocket to sell later, because she might as well get some money out of the betrayal.

She knocks on the apartment door with still-greasy fingers, and the sight of her mother’s face, so much brighter without the Plexiglass barrier in between them, has her instantly sobbing in her mother’s arms. Vanessa hasn’t been able to touch her for six months, and finds her fingers moving down her mother’s skin, the same caramel color of her own, starting to wrinkle from stress more than age. Vanessa is hit with a surge of guilt that most of the stress is probably from her.

“I’ve missed you, Vanjie.” It’s her mother’s old nickname for her, and Vanessa breaks down further. It gives her some glimmer of hope that everything will be okay, despite the medical bills she knows are lying around somewhere. Those thin pieces of paper have been following them for a year now, weighing down on their shoulders like a ton of bricks.

“I’ve missed you too.”

It’s nice to just be Vanessa for a few minutes, to be her mother’s daughter, the girl who had Rihanna posters on her walls and acted out soap-opera storylines with her dolls and ran around the apartment dodging bedtime.

She lets her mother kiss her until her face is more sticky lip gloss than skin. A loud yipping sound rings out, and something furry launches itself at her legs. Vanessa steps back and scoops up her dog, Riley, his tongue slobbering all over her and tail wagging fast enough to take flight.

She’s home again. She’s normal again. Maybe she’s not returning home to anything exciting, but everything smells like the perfume her mom wears, and the couch cushions are broken in just right, and the walls are still a soothing cream color. It always felt like time stood still here when she was a kid, everything always the same, but now she appreciates the stability, the sense that nothing has changed even if she’s been missing from this world for six months.

Her mother heads to the store so they can have Vanessa’s favorite foods for dinner. Vanessa wants to go, wants to do something as normal as grocery shopping, but she walks outside and gasps, heart hammering.

She can’t do this. Everything seems too big after such a small cell. The massive gray-blue sky is large enough to swallow her up, the buildings like giants looming over her, the street as wide as the ocean. She resigns herself to the soft pink walls of her childhood bedroom. She resented this room as a child for being the size of a shoe-box, wanting the massive rooms kids always had on TV. She has never been more grateful for it than now, secure in its narrow walls. It’s like she can breathe again.

The room is incomplete, missing most of her clothes, her makeup stuff, the fluffy bathroom that usually hangs in her closet, the old silver jewelry box that was her mother’s. Those things were all in their apartment, the apartment Silky and A’keria were supposed to go to and get the stuff for her, because Vanessa knew as soon she was hauled into the cop car that she wasn’t going back to that apartment again.

She doesn’t want to do what she’s about to do, but she has to.

She plugs in her long-dead cell phone and calls Silky and A’keria, who barge through her apartment door 10 minutes later and sweep her into a suffocating group hug. Vanessa’s not surprised to see A’keria wiping her eyes after, and her body burns with love for her two best friends.

“You meet any hot lesbians like on Orange is the New Black?” Silky asks eagerly, and it’s just the thing to break the awkwardness of not knowing what to say, of the realization that Vanessa missed months of dinners and movies, that everyone’s lives moved on while hers was trapped in a cell.

“Not one,” Vanessa says around a laugh. “But this one guard was totally into me. I coulda won her over, I bet. Had a little reunion on the beach, Shawshank Redemption-style.”

“You got game even in prison,” A’keria says, smiling, and Vanessa is just grateful no one’s mentioning the person that landed her in prison.

“I miss anything good?” Vanessa asks.

“A’keria broke up with her bum-ass boyfriend,” Silky reports.

“Even threw his clothes out the window,” A’keria says.

“Damn.” Vanessa sighs.

“You didn’t miss much else, though. Oh, and I got your stuff at my place.” A’keria reassures her.

“Thanks.”

“It’s good to have you back, Vanj.” Her warm hand settles over Vanessa’s shoulder, and she’s not going to cry, she’s not–

“How’s it feel to be free again?” Silky asks.

“Good.” It’s all Vanessa can really manage, the fact that she can wake up and eat and even pee whenever she wants now something she’s still struggling to grasp. It only makes what she’s about to say even harder.

“I have something planned,” Vanessa begins, bracing herself for the reaction.

“Are you out your damn mind?” A’keria yells. “You’re on parole!”

“Say it louder, those people down the street missed it,” Vanessa bites out.

“Look, Van–” Silky says.

“No,” Vanessa cuts her off. “I need to do this. I spent six months on this. I know who the mark is gonna be, I know the people I need to scout and get involved, and I know this can work.” This plan is the only thing that got her through the past six months, working out the details and practicing the exact words needed to build her team while she choked down food that tasted like Styrofoam and wrecked her back on a sorry excuse for a bed. She needs to do this, because otherwise the past six months have really been a waste.

Vanessa plows on, laying down the words she knows will get them. “It’s even bigger than the last one. Money I need. Money you need. Enough to set us all for life.”

Silky crosses her arms and stays silent. It’s no secret Silky is constantly in danger of losing her teaching job with all the budget cuts the school faces. She’d taken up street scams and pickpocketing–skills she taught Vanessa–to pay off her student loans and buy supplies and snacks for her classroom, which have to come out of her own (or some unsuspecting person’s) pocket.

A’keria lowers the index finger she was about to wag in Vanessa’s face like some old schoolteacher, no doubt thinking of her home jewelry business that never took off, the dead-end jewelry store job that keeps her home with her overbearing mother and asshole stepfather. With the money Vanessa’s talking, A’keria can buy her own damn island.

“We’re listening,” Silky says finally.

Vanessa fights her grin as she runs through the basics, alive with the familiar buzz of laying down a plan, watching it come to life from her mind. She doesn’t mention the full price tag but tells them both all their financial problems will be solved in one night.

By the time she’s done, they’re both onboard, and the fun begins.

—

Vanessa has to take deep breaths, her nails digging into A’keria’s arm as they walk down the sidewalk to get her next member in.

“You good, V?” A’keria asks gently.

Vanessa just nods, because this breathless fear of being outside when it was all she dreamed of for six months isn’t something she expected, or knows how to deal with. All she can do is keep breathing, keep moving, keep focusing on her plan.

She’s chosen all the players carefully, people she knows herself or knows through others. They’re not all scammers, just people with enough to lose, who can be easily persuaded into her plan and can be trusted to carry out their end of the plan.

The storefront is outlined in red, flowy dresses in reds and pinks and golds filling the window, some brightness on this dreary street. A bell chimes as they open the door, welcoming them to Red Hot by Scarlet Envy.

Scarlet is perched behind the counter, twirling her bright red hair. Vanessa’s only met her once at a party, but she hasn’t changed, still happy with her up-and-coming celebrity design label despite the debt and shady loans she buried herself in to make it happen.

After a hug from Scarlet, Vanessa begins just as she planned. “How would you like to dress Plastique Tiara for the Met Ball?”

Scarlet’s eyes widen. “Are you kidding me? I’d love to! But she’s Plastique, and I’m, well…” she gestures to her small store with its water-damaged ceiling.

Vanessa smiles. “I can make it happen. I just need one small favor. One small favor for me, and you dress Plastique Tiara, you get a bigger store, and”–Vanessa lowers her voice– “all the money troubles you got yourself in are gone.”

Scarlet blinks, mouth falling open, not even bothering to deny Vanessa’s information.

“Okay,” she agrees.

Yvie takes mere seconds, despite being the only person Vanessa has no dirt on to coerce into it. She’s an old friend of Silky’s who does stuff with computers, so far beyond Vanessa’s basic social media stalking skills that she doesn’t even try to understand it. They meet at some internet cafe and Vanessa is only one sip into the overpriced coffee she missed so much when Yvie agrees, saying she’d love to stick it to the man and asking if there’ll be snacks at the meeting tomorrow. Vanessa makes a mental note to buy chips.

Nina is a little harder to convince. She has a nice house in the suburbs, working over-the-phone scams and hijacking deliveries from transport trucks–blenders, coffeemakers, designer suitcases, bikes, air hockey tables–that she keeps or sells for profit.

Aside from the scamming, she’s goodness personified, the last person you’d suspect of anything, perfect for what Vanessa needs from her.

“Well,” Nina says, “I could use a little excitement.”

Vanessa puts a check mark next to her name.

—

Vanessa scrapes her plate clean at dinner, her mother’s cooking the last thing that truly makes her at home, comforting and cozy like a warm blanket. The joy continues as she slides into bed, on a real mattress, ready to fall asleep with the hope of the freedom she’s getting herself, until she remembers the last name on her list. She doesn’t want to call this person. She can’t call this person, and instead she calls A’keria to see if there’s a way around it.

“Tell me the truth,” Vanessa begins. “Do I need to call her?”

“Who? You mean Br–”

“Don’t say her name to me,” Vanessa snaps.

“I know things didn’t end well with you two–”

“She ratted me out to the cops! I went to prison because of her!” The anger burns through her, fresh on the thought that she went to prison by not just anyone, but by someone she had slept with and kissed and even loved. Six months of itchy clothes and a freezing cell, of having to see her own mother through a screen, of feeling absolutely worthless, of missing family dinners and not seeing her friends, all because that bitch couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

“Hey,” A’keria says calmly. “I know that. I know. But you have to call her, Vanj. She’s your right-hand woman. We can’t pull this off without her. You know we can’t.”

A’keria is right, which only makes things worse. Vanessa needs to call her. No one can keep things organized like her, stick exactly to the schedule like a human clock. Vanessa can pretend all she wants that this plan will work as it stands, but she knows in her heart she needs to make that one last phone call.

—

Vanessa strides to the counter confidently, trying not to act like the coats in her arms are worth a whole month’s rent. Being calm is the key, like she buys coats with three zeros in the price tag all the time.

“Hello.” She keeps her voice soft and polite as she approaches the counter.

“Hi,” the cashier says. She’s around twenty and Vanessa has been watching for a few days to make sure she gets this specific cashier. One who’s new, but not new enough to need a manager.

“I’d like to return these.” Vanessa plunks the coats on the counter, rehearsing her answer for the next inevitable question.

“Do you have your receipt?”

“I don’t, but I never wore them. They still have the tags and everything.” She even grabs one and shows it to the cashier, who smiles sympathetically, having no idea Vanessa just grabbed it off the rack a few minutes ago.

“We really need a receipt to return them. Do you have an account with us? Or the credit card you bought them with?”

Now is the time. Vanessa has seen enough middle-aged white ladies with expired coupons in her own retail days to get this next part right. She purses her lips and straightens her posture. “I’ve been shopping here for years, this is ridiculous! I just bought these.” Just a touch of anger, not enough to attract attention.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. If you’d like to speak with customer service—“

Vanessa loosens her shoulders, putting a smile back on. “You know what, I’ll just keep them. Could I trouble you for a bag?”

Vanessa walks away from the counter with her coats neatly folded inside the bag, heart racing and giddy with joy. She did it. She can sell two and start working on her father’s medical bills, and maybe give the third to her mother; her worn coat can’t offer much warmth in this November chill. She’s so lost in her excitement that she doesn’t notice where she’s going and walks right into a wall.

“Shit.” She takes a step back. A very tall, very blonde, very green-eyed wall. “Oh, sorry, I…” she forgets every word in the English language, forgets even her own name, at the blonde’s shy smile.

“You were good. Really good,” the blonde says, and something in her reluctant tone suggests she doesn’t give compliments often, that this praise truly means something.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Vanessa tries to stay cool, even as the blonde’s flashing green eyes set her whole body on fire. She had only prepared for getting caught at the register, not by strange blonde women.

“A cashier who wouldn’t need a manager. Waiting towards the end of a shift, when no one gives a shit anymore,” the blonde continues. “Even the coats. Expensive, but not enough to have security tags on them.”

She’s caught. Caught on her first real con, aside from the street scams she’s done. Vanessa swallows hard, considering her chances of outrunning the blonde’s mile-long legs in their slim red pants. Damn, Vanessa really needs to stop staring at those legs if this lady is about to bust her…

“Hey, I’m not gonna rat you out,” the blonde says, like she’s reading her mind. “I’m just saying you’re good, and if you ever want a partner…” She pulls a piece of paper from her glittery silver blazer and scribbles something down.

Vanessa reads a phone number in tiny, neat handwriting.

“I’ll consider it,” Vanessa says, though she’ll probably have to sit on her hands to keep herself from calling the second she gets home.

The blonde smiles. “I’m Brooke.”

“Vanessa.”

—

Vanessa holds out as long as she can, until it’s nearing 1am, moonlight arcing through her window. It’s almost like she’s purposely sabotaging herself, waiting and waiting to lower the chance that someone will answer.

Her thumb hovers over the phone. The contact name is still in there as it was before prison, with a bright red heart emoji after it. Vanessa remembers deliberating over putting it there, finally deciding it was okay after their second date.

Aside from her mother’s cell and the really good Thai place down the street from her old apartment, it’s the only phone number she has memorized. She could probably dial it in her sleep. She used to double- and triple-text that number, sending pictures of dogs she saw on the street, selfies in bed with the comforter revealing just enough skin, rants about how slow everyone in front of her was walking, goofy pictures of herself trying on enormous sunglasses bigger than her head.

And the replies used to come just as fast, Vanessa’s heart leaping with each one, her fingers flying to the phone to see what texts she’d gotten back.

She presses the call button, breath caught in her throat, half hoping there won’t be an answer and half-hoping there will be.

All she gets is a robotic monotone telling her this number is no longer in service, and Vanessa releases her air, unsure if she’s relieved or not. She really doesn’t want to hear that voice, but she’s going to need to if she wants this to work. Should she try to Google her? Or maybe…

The burner phone.

They had both discussed business through those old Nokias. The odds that she still has hers, and still has the thing on, are slim to none. But Vanessa thinks of how hard it will be to find a job now, how hard it will be to start over after prison. She thinks of her mother working too hard in her hospital shifts, the medical bills still unpaid. She thinks of all the people she had promised this would be a success, all the debts that would be repaid, all the freedoms won. She has to try.

Her fingers move without thought over the phone, like just another day, and she almost drops the phone when it rings. The rings trill in her ear for what feels like hours, her heart racing. She’s about to hang up when the line clicks.

There’s a pause, a sharp intake of breath on the other line. Vanessa remembers those gasps of air, had pulled them out of soft lips as her hands tangled in that blonde hair…

“Who is this?”

The nerve. Vanessa’s fist clenches in anger. If it wasn’t a Nokia, she probably would’ve bent her phone in half. The nerve for that voice to be so soft and hesitant, when it had caused her half a year behind bars. The nerve of asking who it is when she knows damn well it can’t be anyone else.

“You know who this is, Brooke. We need to talk.”

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tlatollotl · 6 years

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Mirror-Bearer

Date: 6th century

Geography: Guatemala or Mexico, Mesoamerica

Culture: Maya

Medium: Wood, red hematite

This Mirror-Bearer figure is the best-preserved example of portable Maya wood sculpture and one of the highlights of the Early Classic period (ca. A.D. 250–550) Maya art. The artist created this figure out of a solid piece of hardwood from the genus Cordia, known locally as bocote. Research determined a radiocarbon age for the wood of 1425 years before present (± 120 years), or a range of A.D. 410 to 650. It was said to have come from the border region between Guatemala and Tabasco, Mexico. Most likely, to judge from its extraordinary preservation, the findspot must have been a dry cave or well-sealed funerary chamber. The damage on its left side is the result of some wear or decay in that context, perhaps from resting against a surface or being subjected to varying passage of air. The person, a male, wears an elaborate knee-length woven skirt with ties that cover his navel. The waistband of the skirt shows a braided and fringed design with circular rosettes on the hips and at the spine. The hem of the skirt displays a jagged starburst-like pattern bordered above by a twisted braid and below by flaring fringe. The square knot at the figure’s stomach accentuates the realistic portrayal of the garment that sags between its slightly splayed knees. In addition, the Mirror-Bearer dons a shawl that goes around his neck and falls through his arms to connect to the rear rosette and is gathered in a bunch that sags away from the figure’s back.

Clearly defined notches in the skirt and under the arms would have held a removable plaque approximately 5 inches square, probably covered in a mosaic mirror of pyrite or obsidian. The plaque would have been inserted under the arms and then hooked into the skirt notches. In fact, the artist thinned the shawl under the figure’s right arm by chiseling. This enabled a better "fit" for the plaque, which, at a roughly 60-degree angle, matched the pitch of the figure’s face. The Mirror-Bearer wears a distinct hairstyle or headdress and is shown with a curled moustache. The eye sockets are carved out, possibly to hold eye inlays of shell and obsidian. He arches his back, his head slightly tilted upward, his upper arms parallel to the ground, and his feet, which, though eroded, are folded under his body. He is shown holding his fists tightly to his chest, clutched under an elaborate pectoral. The pectoral ornament depicts an anthropomorphic portrait, with a headdress, ear flares, and a wide collar of jade beads. The elaborate multi-tiered ear ornaments of the figure consist of a flare through the stretched lobe, with two other jade discs hanging below it, terminating in a graceful portrait of a jawless reptilian creature. Such luxurious jade jewelry would have only been reserved for a high member of the elite. Surviving reddish iron oxide pigment on the surface indicates that he would have been brightly painted and vivid in effect. Although the artist seems to have depicted this individual at a small scale but with normal bodily proportions at approximately 1/3 scale, he is most likely a royal court dwarf, as seen in many palace scenes. The unusual facial hair, bulbous forehead, and profile are consistent with Maya artists’ depictions of individuals with achondroplasia or other types of genetic dwarfism. In Maya art, dwarves represented a type of antithetical beauty in contrast to the graceful Maize God. They were also very special in the eyes of Mesoamerican societies; they had divinatory powers and were sought after as entertainers in royal courts. The mirror-bearer to the ruler was an important role, sometimes filled by a woman, but more often by courtly dwarves. Their primary function was to reflect the image of Maya lords and ladies as those dignitaries preened in self-regard. Many of these mirror plaques have been found in Mexico and Central America, especially from the Classic Maya and Teotihuacan cultures. They are usually rectangular or circular ranging from 7 to 30 cm. in diameter. Mirrors are also known as objects for divination in Mesoamerica. The mirrors themselves were planes of luminous reflection, conceived as portals. The semi-permanence of a mirror held by a stone or wooden character implies that a mirror needed to be aimed at the ruler at all times when he was on the throne. There may be a connection with the wooden Mirror-Bearer and K’awiil, the Maya god of lightning, who is closely associated with mirrors or highly polished stones in artistic representations. When excavators at Tikal, Guatemala encountered a tomb they labeled Burial 195, it was flooded with sediment, allowing them to detect voids in the mud. When injected with plaster, the voids revealed small wooden deity figures covered in blue-green stucco from which the wood had rotted away. These wooden K’awiils are seen as holding a square elements in front of them, much like the Mirror-Bearer. Only two other wooden mirror-bearers are known. The first, in the Princeton University Art Museum (y1990-71), is of similar scale to the Met’s figure. The bearer is shown with standard bodily proportions but bears traces of an abnormal hairstyle and raised bump representations of scarification on the chin. Probably a youthful courtier, for young men also did much service to kings, he is adorned with a plain loincloth tied in the back and also exhibits vestiges of red pigment and stucco on the weathered surface. The only archaeologically excavated example of a wooden mirror-bearer comes from the site of Becan, Campeche, Mexico. It was recovered from a disturbed funerary chamber within the elevated tiers of Structure IX, the largest pyramid at the site. Along with the wooden sculpture, excavators found a conch shell (Strombus sp.), a frame with mosaic tesserae of hematite, three obsidian blades and fifteen Early Classic ceramic vessels. The wood was also identified as of the genus Cordia, perhaps chosen for its sturdiness but light weight relative to denser woods. Carved from one piece, the bearer is a standing male dwarf, leaning forward with his chin slightly raised and his arms held bent at the side of his body, which was originally covered in red pigment. There is other evidence that the Mirror-Bearer of the Metropolitan Museum would have been placed in the center of scenes of feasting, tribute, or other rituals. A wooden mirror-bearer may appear on a cylinder vessel in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (NGA 82.2292), originally made in the mid-8th century at the Ik’ kingdom of the area of Lake Petén Itza, Petén, Guatemala. The central figure is a portly king surrounded by his attendants, musicians, and even a hunchback and a dwarf drinking out of a large bowl. The key figure of this composition is the small dwarf holding the mirror: this is possibly an object of wood. It has a markedly differential color and scale that contrast with that of the nearby drinking dwarf, and resemble more closely that of the wooden mirror bearers from the Metropolitan. Though painted roughly two centuries after the creation of the Metropolitan’s Mirror-Bearer, this object appears in the company of other courtiers. Thus there was continuity through generations of portraying a wooden object in a group of humans as an equal participant in courtly life, gesturing and interacting with the king. James Doyle, 2016 References Alonso Olivera, Alejandra, and Khôi Tran. Nueva tecnología aplicada a la restauración y estudio de una escultura arqueológica de madera. Mexico, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2010. Art of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas from the Museum of Primitive Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969, 614. Easby, Elizabeth Kennedy, and John F. Scott.Before Cortez: Sculpture in Middle America. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970. Ekholm, Gordon F. A Maya Sculpture in Wood. New York, The Museum of Primitive Art, 1964. Fields, Virginia M., and Dorie Reents-Budet. Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship. London and Los Angeles: Scala Publishers Limited, 2005, 9, 106–107. Gallaga Murrieta, Emiliano, and Marc G. Blainey, eds. Manufactured Light: Mirrors in the Mesoamerican Realm. Boulder, University of Colorado Press, 2016. Newton, Douglas, Julie Jones, and Kate Ezra.The Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Americas. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987. Pillsbury, Joanne. "The Pan-American: Nelson Rockefeller and the Arts of Ancient Latin America." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. Vol. 72 (2014), p. 24. Further Reading

Just, Bryan. Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012. Stone, Andrea, and Marc Zender. Reading Maya Art: A Heiroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. New York, Thames & Hudson, 2012. Taube, Karl A. Through a Glass, Brightly: Recent Investigations Concerning Mirrors and Scrying in Ancient and Contemporary Mesoamerica. In Manufactured Light: Mirrors in the Mesoamerican Realm, edited by Emiliano Gallaga M. and Marc G. Blainey, pp. 285–314. Boulder, University of Colorado Press, 2016.

The Iconography of Mirrors at Teotihuacan. In Art, Ideology, and the City of Teotihuacan, edited by Janet Catherine Berlo, pp. 169–204. Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 1992.

The Met

#archaeology #arqueologia #maya #mesoamerica #guatemala #mexico #wood #hematite #art #arte #history #historia

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gothify1 · 5 years

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“Despite how externally positive I might have been, I was internally at war with myself throughout a lot of my 20s.” Shailene Woodley and I are on a cross-country phone call talking about our impending “Saturn returns.” As common a Southern California expression as “June gloom” or “pilot season,” Saturn return describes an astrological event that takes place when Saturn moves back to the position in space where it was when a person was born—approximately 29.5 years later. “I’m not one for dogma or doctrine of any kind,” Woodley qualifies when I ask her how closely she adheres to astrology or spiritual ideology of any kind. “But I deeply believe that if things have been around for thousands of years, then there must be some wisdom in there.” Woodley and I, both 27, seem to agree that while the planets may not be directly impacting our destinies, there is an undeniable change that occurs in one’s late 20s. At this age, we seem to move past all the aimless tumult we experienced at the beginning of adulthood—a time of professional unpredictability, financial instability, and the awkwardness of still not having your look quite figured out. Woodley describes 27 as the start of her pilgrimage back to a more relaxed, almost childlike state. “I feel a resurrection of the freedom that I experienced when I was about 17—this beautiful 10-year cycle,” she continues. “Despite the raging hormones and not-so-great boyfriend I had at the time, I still had a sense of wonder. I feel like I allowed that wonder to be crushed. But it’s being brought up from the ashes at the moment.” Today, Woodley is best recognized for her role on the hit HBO series Big Little Lies , in which she stars alongside Hollywood powerhouses like Nicole Kidman , Reese Witherspoon , and, as of season two (premiering June 9), Meryl Streep. The Simi Valley, California native first rose to fame in 2008 as the 16-year-old protagonist of the ABC Family TV drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager . Lead roles in big-screen blockbusters like 2011’s The Descendants , starring George Clooney; the sci-fi action Divergent trilogy; and The Fault in Our Stars positioned Woodley, with her openhearted quality of performance and charm, as one of the most prominent ingenues in mainstream entertainment. But offscreen, Woodley was cultivating a quirkier reputation. Throughout her early 20s, the actress flummoxed reporters and talk show hosts with her bohemian, profoundly un-Hollywood approach to beauty and lifestyle. Flower child–ish, Goop-esque practices like oil pulling, DIY'ing toothpaste from clay, and using spirulina as eye shadow were among the Woodley-isms that made the news. “Are Shailene Woodley’s Natural Beauty Hacks Safe?” a 2017 StyleCaster headline read. “‘Divergent’ Star Shailene Woodley Is a Queerish Hippie Who Believes in Trees,” read an Autostraddle title from a few years earlier. It was challenging for Woodley to experiment with her ideologies and aesthetic (in the way that all 20-somethings do) knowing that a snarky headline might result. In her public appearances throughout the mid-2010s, she was always bubbly and smiling, but Woodley wasn’t immune to the criticism—from the press, certainly, but mostly from within. “I’m an optimist by nature,” she says. “But in my 20s, a lot of my internal speak became more aggressive and negative. I knew I could always make someone else’s day better, but I didn’t know how to make my internal world better.” What didn’t help Woodley along her path to self-discovery was the pressure from stylists to temper her look on red carpets. “When I became really successful in the public eye, my identity felt compromised,” she explains, “because I was thrown into a situation where I would show up to a room, and there would be 13 dresses, and I had to pick one of them. They were beautiful, but I never felt like any of them represented my style.” Woodley would try suggesting they add a funky hat or some interesting jewelry but largely felt ignored, so she stopped trying. “I am the queen of saying no,” she swears. “But for some reason, with fashion, it took me a long time to be able to stand up for myself, to express myself and my personal identity, in the way I do in every other facet of my life.” Woodley recalls one red carpet event when she was practically forced into a couture gown. “I felt like a mannequin, like a fairy princess,” she describes. “I got on all the best dressed lists, but it felt gross to me.” Over the past couple of years, improving her internal narrative has been Woodley’s main mental health focus. Her career, relationships, and style are all the better for it. Woodley credits talk therapy , spending time in nature, and reading religious and spiritual scriptures (“I find myself becoming more attracted to people of faith,” she says) to her serener homeostasis. “I am finding that my internal world and my external world are slowly morphing into one, which is really reassuring,” she says with relief. “It doesn’t mean that it comes without obstacles, trial, or tribulation, but it does allow for a more peaceful existence and kinder self-talk.” Woodley says her fellow Big Little Lies cast members have also had a profoundly positive impact on her life and career. When asked to name a piece of wisdom she’s gleaned from each woman—Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz , and Meryl Streep—she answers: “With Nicole, I feel like I could stare into her eyes for hours and leave all the wiser and more grounded simply because of the energy she holds. Reese is one person who I know, despite what may be thrown at her, is going to forge through and powerfully fight for cataclysmic change with a certain grace—even if it’s not initially interpreted as grace. Laura is someone who knows how to make every single person around her feel as if they’re the most important person in the room, as if they’re someone who deeply matters. Meryl has an infinite supply of passion and humility, and that’s wisdom I gained just from watching her. (I’ve often found in this industry that people at the top, the ones who are the most successful, are also the humblest, the kindest, and most generous.) Zoë: I grew up next to her. We have done five projects together now between the Divergent series and Big Little Lies . We have gone through most bumps that any normal friendship goes through when you’re in your 20s, but we’ve still been able to find love for one another. And I think that there is a wisdom in that.” Woodley categorizes where she is now, mentally and aesthetically, as “a completely different space.” Her past two years of red carpet looks serve as evidence, albeit surface-level, that the actress has truly come into her own. After ditching her old stylists and putting herself through a minimalist wardrobe detox, in which all the clothes she owned personally could fit into a small suitcase, Woodley decided to revisit the world of fashion. “My relationship with clothes has changed so much,” she gasps. Recently, Woodley began attending fashion weeks and familiarizing herself with designers. She came to appreciate couture as a form of artistry instead of the identity-crushing behemoth it once was. “I became blown away by designers’ process and completely moved by the art,” she says. Woodley began working with stylist Micaela Erlanger, who she says totally grasps the playful, eccentric public image she’s trying to create. (Check out the red-feather Attico number she dressed her in for the Scarlet Night party earlier this year, or the sunny yellow embellished trench she wore to Carolina Herrera’s show at NYFW.) Underneath Woodley’s chic exterior, however, the offbeat hippie remains. In fact, approximately eight minutes of our phone conversation are spent discussing her favorite tree (a massive oak in her hometown). Woodley wears the tree-hugger label with pride. “I don’t hug a tree for no reason,” she says. “There’s an extreme exchange of energy and wisdom that happens when you spend time in nature, and it’s not something to make fun of. It’s something to revere.” Even as her Big Little Lies fame continues to explode and her Saturn return locks into its cosmic place, Woodley maintains that her journey to self-realization soldiers on. She’s still in an ongoing process of negotiating her identity; she’s simply a little nicer to herself than she once was along the way. “It’s a curious time for me,” Woodley tells me wistfully. “But a beautiful one.” Photographer: Rebekah CampbellStylist: Rachael WangHairstylist: Keith CarpenterMakeup Artist: Nina ParkManicurist: Elina Ogawa. Next: See our cover story with Zoe Saldana. Photographer: Rebekah Campbell ; Stylist: Rachael Wang ; Hairstylist: Keith Carpenter ; Makeup Artist: Nina Park ; Manicurist: Elina Ogawa ; Location courtesy of NYC Film Locations . Next: See our cover story with Zoë Saldana .

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ishikagupta3796 · 5 years

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OffSet’s Ric Flair Pendant at Jewelry Unlimited – Styling Like a Rapper

If you are a fan of rap and haven’t being eyeing Offset’s Ric Flair Pendant, are you really a hip-hop fan?

Jewelry Unlimited has been designing all the cool stuff for top rappers, and recently, they designed the Ric Flair chain for offset, gifted to him by the CEO of his label, Pierre ‘Pee’ Thomas.

Ric Flair is all the rage in US and now this chain. Donned by Offset, this chain is made of 27 carats on the chain and 25 on the pendant and designed by Wafi Lalani of Jewelry Unlimited.

Rapper chains have been very popular. Other than the Ric Flair Pendant, several other rappers have wore chains that have been difficult to forget. “Neck frozen.” “Ice on my neck.” These are common declarations laced within rap lyrics. Whether it’s VVS stones, platinum or 18k gold pendants, or their record label’s logo, the chain announces a status to solidify your standing on how much dough you bankroll. It’s an extension of a personality.

Purchasing a custom piece gives the artist a platform to test their design skills while a jeweler translates their vision into reality. This experience may not always turn out as planned. Do you really need a cereal box covered in stones?

But there are those who execute their piece so perfectly that the chain becomes a standalone figure in hip-hop. There’s the Jesus Piece; NIGO’s artillery that was the equivalent of eight Rolls-Royce Phantoms on his neck; and the simple double Cuban link chain that was referenced like its owner’s famous moniker. Anyone can drop some insane cash for jewelry, but it’s these ten gems that are cemented in history through imagery and song lyrics. They are classics in their own right. Here is a list of the most interesting chains wore by rappers over the year.

SLICK RICK – SCALES OF JUSTICE

No one exuded cool like the British transplant from the Bronx. Slick Rick’s smooth bravado and witty delivery cemented his Art of Story Telling as a hip-hop classic. But like his album, it’s Rick’s class and flat out indulgence in obnoxiously large gold chains and pendants that hold their own in rhyming lore.

Never to be outdone, Rick always made sure the ‘80s were a time of catch up when he flossed his jewelry game. Before NIGO was NIGO, Rick wore every single accessory he owned. Not noted for just one chain, but for the way he wore it.

FLAVOR FLAV – CLOCK

While Chuck D prophesied the revolution to “Bring The Noise,” the eccentric, downright obnoxious yelling sidekick, Flavor Flav, would lace the track with ad-libs as his clock bounced to the beat. To match his quirky persona that balanced Chuck’s seriousness, Flav would rock a clock you would normally gaze at while in detention as his “chain.”

Flav’s clock chain rotation was plenty and was synonymous with the man’s identity. Whenever you came across a circular clock, you couldn’t help but say his name the way he would deliver it. Flavor Flaaaaaaaavv!

Nigo Dollar Sign

Strutting onto the scene as the silent Japanese counterpart to Pharrell in the mid-2000s, NIGO made sure his presence was felt with the glistening factor of a disco ball in the form of five chains. Many who were clueless about the BAPE storm that had taken over Japan’s fashion scene and the proponent who led the charge were in for a treat, as his threads would soon take over hip-hop with Skateboard P’s help.

During his reign, no one dared — or could even afford — to reach NIGO’s swagger. Diamond-studded BBC Ice Cream cone chain? Check. BBC moon man head? Yes. And for that dollar sign that was nearly the size of an average man’s face? NIGO reportedly shelled out $4 million for that piece — fast-forward seven years later and that chain would run a cool 4.6 million stacks today.

2 Chainz Cuban Links

After changing his alias, the Atlanta-bred rapper took on the ingenious use of the name 2 Chainz as a quirky alias that suits the typical number of chains he wears. Even creative house DONDA used his name as an inspiration to drape Cuban Link Chains atop a black base for his upcoming album cover. Now, when people wear two chains, you can’t help but echo his voice when he says, “2 Chainz.”

NOTORIOUS BIG - THE JESUS PIECE

Many rappers throughout the years have accessorized their style with the famed Jesus Piece. The homage to the higher power above is a staple in hip-hop, and most likely the G.O.A.T. for its classy appeal. For one Brooklyn-born-and-raised legend, the chain was the subject of numerous photos and even lyrics. “Cubans with the Jesus Piece,” proclaimed Biggie in “Going Back to Cali.”

LIL JON - CRUNK AIN’T DEAD

The innovator of the now-defunct Crunk tried to stretch the sub hip-hop genre as much as possible — even commissioning a lofty suburban home in the form of a chain stating that “Crunk Ain’t Dead.” Each letter was paved in diamonds that amounted to 3,756 in total as it hung from a pain-inducing gold “dookie” rope chain.

Carrying an estimated value of $500,000, the accessory was usually in Jon’s hand instead of dangling from his neck — a safety precaution to avoid strain. Unlike the scene he popularized, his chain holds its own among the greatest pieces to be donned.

TUPAC - DEATH ROW

Tupac was very adamant of the coast he backed and the crew he rolled. During Death Row Records’ reign as king of the charts and streets, their logo was startling and carried weight with those who wore it. The pendant was worn by its owner as well as his label mates and affiliates as a marker of who they represented. Like Tupac, the chain is remembered as a reminder of a time when the West Coast ruled all

ERIC B. AND RAKIM – DOOKIE ROPE CHAIN

In the ‘80s, everyone was rocking the shell toes, jump suits and Kangol bucket hats; however that outfit wasn’t complete without a thick “dookie” rope chain or a Mercedes-Benz logo. The most recognized figures rocking those chains? Eric B. and Rakim. Each had two just to make sure the presence on their necks was on par with their beat and rhyming skills.

The chains were a staple of the era when the rhyming art form was beginning to blossom from the streets to the mainstream. The pieces have since made their way onto the likes of Pusha T, Kanye West, and Nas, as homage to the era when platinum’s popularity quickly waned for something even the FED can’t back.

KANYE WEST – HORUS

Forever outspoken and on a destructive path that walked the line of his creative genius taking over the rap game, the Chicagoan “sophisticated ignorance” was fully embodied in his Horus chain. Ye’s fashion statement lifestyle was on display with every single accessory of clothing he wore.

At a time when West was trading in his lavish affinities for a minimalist aesthetic, the Egyptian-themed jewelry was the equivalent of wearing an outrageous ensemble on the red carpet. Horus was known as one of the most significant beings in ancient Egyptian times. It’s no secret that the Good Music boss chose this piece to state his ignorance and where he stands musically — ahead of everyone else and himself.

RUN DMC – DOOKIE CHAINS

Responsible for nearly everything that is rooted in hip-hop culture, the two emcees and one DJ from Hollis, Queens created movements. For all the rappers who have worn the rope chains, they owe many thanks to the originators, Reverend Run, DMC and Jam Master Jay. Everything about them was New York: the Adidas track suits, the shell-toe sneakers, and the rose gold dookies.

How Can You Were Chains like Rappers?

By now you know that you can get all the cool rapper chain styles at Jewelry Unlimited, but you still may not be sure how to style yourself. Hip hop jewelry looks all cool and stuff, but it is not so easy to style. With tons of different neck wear, it is a must to gain a better look for yourself. We are not talking about just big gold chains here, We are talking about small chains, dog tags and other neck wear you can use to make yourself look like you actually know how to dress. When you look like you know how to dress yourself people will take you more seriously as a rapper.

How to dress like a rapper? For this, let’s first go over the types of neck wear.

No one cares if they are fake

We are at a time where the richest rappers have been called out for wearing fake jewelry. Plies (who was infamous for buying big ridiculous chains) said after his run in Hip Hop had slowed down that buying those chains were the dumbest decisions he ever made. The fact is, if you have the confidence to wear it, they think - Yo, what if that’s real though? Who the hell is that person and how do they have the confidence to wear that?

They can’t prove it’s fake unless they steal it and get it tested which you know isn’t going to happen. Unless they rob you and later feel stupid when they try to pawn it. If you are really into gold chains, you can get good quality Hip Hop Chains at Jewelry Unlimited with financing available up to 5 years.

How To Determine The length of a chain online

How to determine the length of a chain online chart is above. The most common chain sizes are 20″ 24″ 30″ 36″. The highly recommended one is 24″ as it is not too long and not too short.

How To Determine The Thickness of a chain online

In order to determine the THICKNESS of a chain on the internet here is a chart for you compared to an item you are very familiar with.

It is recommended to start with a smaller MM chain and move up in size and length. A good starting size would be 24 inches and 8MM in thickness.

Pro-tip: ALWAYS Check the clearance section of websites. You get the stuff for like 80% off. You can also always get great discounts at Jewelry Unlimited.

Dog Tags

Dog tags are a cool way to get started with Hip Hop jewelry. You can get custom ordered Dog Tags with custom text. A dig tag with a cool text makes a lot of difference in the appearance and the impact. It adds to the image of the person wearing it. Custom dog tags also make you look richer and do not give the feel that you are wearing something off the shelf.

Image and style is all about accessorizing. The clothing outfit is just the base of everything. After that it is all about the accessories (chains, bracelets and rings) to really make everything pop. You can draw inspiration from your favorite rapper but no need to copy them. You create your own style and can set the trend for others. You got this! you will find your look and grow more everyday over time. Just be conscious that you have an image.

To explore your own style or but jewelry worn by top rappers, visit Jewelry Unlimited. Here you will find the coolest stud worn by top-the-chart rappers.

#Cuban link chain #Ric Flair chain for offset #jewelry unlimited #gold #Diamond Jewelry #gold chains

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gjepcindia · 2 years

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Marissa Collections Focus Only On Design-Driven Labels

One of a handful of family-run businesses in the US to have stayed the course, perhaps their success lies in family teamwork?

Marissa is the creative half of this luxury operation whilst her husband manages the business side of things.

Their son Jay Hartington serves as CEO. The second generation in the family to continue the business, Jay oversees marketing, jewellery and menswear at this multifaceted boutique.

Today, Marissa Collections is located in a 10,000-square-foot property in the Third Street South shopping district of Old Naples in Florida.

Marissa Collections originally operated out of a store front boutique, selling items hand selected by Marissa, including accessories and shoes.

Jay Hartington throws more light on their business.

What defines your company?

What was your route into jewellery?

It was a natural progression to provide head-to-toe styling to our clients so they wouldn’t have the need to go anywhere else.

How is business in the US?

Do you sell more online or in store?

How have you adapted to the pandemic?

What smaller brands do you carry?

Who is your clientele?

How much do they spend?

We host a wide variety of price points, including fashion, fine, bespoke and high jewellery.

Do you do business with India? How is your experience?

We do plenty of business with India and have a few direct suppliers that we have a great relationship with.

To know more: https://gjepc.org/solitaire/marissa-collections-focus-only-on-design-driven-labels/

#Solitaire & Jewellery Magazine #Solitaire Jewellery Magazine

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donamirnda · 4 years

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JRK Washington highlights fun yet COVID-19 compliant events in and around Tacoma

The local event scene in Tacoma, WA is one of the many bright spots of living in Boulders at Puget Sound. But with the current pandemic, some of them had to be postponed or canceled. Don’t fret, though—many have been modified for this new normal era, allowing people to enjoy them without worrying about their well-being.

JRK Washington, the luxury apartment’s developer, says that, like everybody else, many of their residents have been eager to go outdoors. That said, most also understand the risks involved, so they choose to participate in virtual or modified public events instead. JRK says: “It’s true that necessity is the mother of invention. Given the shelter-in-place orders, organizers were quick to adapt the format of their events for the current circumstances. Our residents eagerly look forward to experiencing them despite the changes.”

Fall Events for Boulders at Puget Sound Residents

There’s never a shortage of fun things to experience in Tacoma, WA, which remains true even today. JRK Washington says that the lively community and colorful local culture were among the reasons they chose to build a luxury apartment in the area. From community markets, car shows, and art exhibits, there’s plenty to be excited about. Below are just some of the events happening in the month ahead:

In the Spirit Contemporary Native Arts Exhibition Runs until October 25th

Started in 2006, this event celebrates the best emerging talents in the native arts field. An esteemed jury handpicks all exhibited pieces from hundreds of submissions. For its 15th edition, In the Spirit Contemporary Native Arts Exhibition will be held virtually for the first time. There will be 24 exquisite pieces on display this year, all of which are accessible for free through the event website. Many of the artworks are for sale, and people can learn more about the process of creating them through the artist statements.

Tacoma Farmers Market 925 Broadway (between 9th and 11th), Tacoma, WA. Runs until October 29th

This long-running farmers market is now in its 30th year and is home to over 80 vendors who provide the best fruits, vegetables, seafood, and artisanal crafts in Tacoma. If you’re looking for the freshest, healthiest ingredients, this is the place to be. In light of the pandemic, the organizers are implementing some changes to the shopping experience. Buyers can now prepay for purchases so they can pick them up at the venue. People will also be required to wear masks and properly observe social distancing while shopping.

Virtual Interactive Basic Wine Tasting 101 September 17th

Visiting a vineyard tour might be out of the question now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a wine tasting at home. Château de Pommard in France offers a virtual interactive event where you can sample three world-class wines from its vineyard. The lessons cover everything from how to read wine labels, taste wines properly, and store wine bottles. Sign up for the event and pay for the wines, and they will deliver to your doorstep. Links to the virtual chat group will be sent via email before the event.

Virtual Harry Potter Location Tour of London September 20th

The kids (and kids-at-heart) also have a virtual event to look forward to, and it features one of the most beloved book characters of all time: Harry Potter. This activity takes participants on a virtual tour of key locations for the Harry Potter movies, such as King’s Cross Station, Covent Garden, Millennium Bridge, and Borough Market. Keep your camera and microphone on as this virtual tour is interactive—you’ll even be sorted into one of the four Hogwarts houses!

Beyond the Backyard: A New Habitat Challenge September 26th

Part scavenger hunt, part dare: Beyond the Backyard is an interactive fundraising event designed specifically for the new normal. Participants form a group of three to eight members, and they have to complete timed challenges under four categories: Physical, Find, Skill, and Fun. All the challenges can be done separately by participating teams in their backyard or neighborhood, following all the state’s COVID-19 safety guidelines. The challenges are delivered via the event app, and people send in a photo to prove they’ve completed the tasks. It’s ideal for all ages and all ability levels.

Caffeine and Gasoline: Race Cars Griot’s Garage, 3333 South 38th St, Tacoma, WA. September 26th

Griot’s Garage holds themed car exhibits on the first Saturday of each month, and for October, it’s putting the spotlight on a particular type of vehicle: the race car. As the event name suggests, Coffee and Gasoline starts early, but you can expect free freshly brewed coffee and fresh-off-the-oven donuts to get your motor running. But what will send your heart racing are the tons of race cars on display. This is one of the rare events you can find supercars, street rods, tuner cars, and racing machines all on the same lot. Note though that standard safety protocols will be implemented during the event, such as wearing masks and observing proper social distancing.

Tacoma Holiday Food & Gift Festival 2727 East “D” Street, Tacoma, WA October 22nd – 25th

Because of the pandemic, it’s easy to forget that the holidays are just around the corner. During this time, it pays to start early with your holiday shopping. Luckily, the Tacoma Holiday Food & Gift Festival is an annual event that showcases the best holiday presents you could hope to find. Over 550 vendors sell handmade items, specialty foods, glass & woodwork, holiday & home decor, jewelry, clothing, and more. There are even demonstrations where you can learn new holiday recipes from chefs. Of course, what’s a holiday convention without a giant Christmas tree and a photo op with Santa Claus.

JRK Washington is confident that brighter days are ahead

JRK Washington believes that the future holds even more enjoyable activities—whether virtual or real-life. The developer also announces that they have vacancies in Boulders at Puget Sound. These include one- to three-bedroom units that are perfect for empty nesters or young families. The luxury apartment also has deluxe amenities such as a 24-hour gym, a resort-style pool, and a full-size basketball court.

Interested parties may send their application through this online portal.

BOILERPLATE COMPANY DESCRIPTION: JRK Washington offers attractive and modernized apartments and hotel rooms to rent and reserve throughout the United States. JRK believes that tenants and guests deserve convenience, comfort and a place they can come home to. You can count on friendly, exceptional staff and their personalized service.

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antoniorid · 4 years

Text

JRK Washington highlights fun yet COVID-19 compliant events in and around Tacoma

Fall Events for Boulders at Puget Sound Residents

In the Spirit Contemporary Native Arts Exhibition Runs until October 25th

Tacoma Farmers Market 925 Broadway (between 9th and 11th), Tacoma, WA. Runs until October 29th

Virtual Interactive Basic Wine Tasting 101 September 17th

Virtual Harry Potter Location Tour of London September 20th

Beyond the Backyard: A New Habitat Challenge September 26th

Caffeine and Gasoline: Race Cars Griot’s Garage, 3333 South 38th St, Tacoma, WA. September 26th

Tacoma Holiday Food & Gift Festival 2727 East “D” Street, Tacoma, WA October 22nd – 25th

JRK Washington is confident that brighter days are ahead

Interested parties may send their application through this online portal.

###

The post JRK Washington highlights fun yet COVID-19 compliant events in and around Tacoma appeared first on JRK Washington.

JRK Washington highlights fun yet COVID-19 compliant events in and around Tacoma appeared first on https://jrkwashington.com/ JRK Washington highlights fun yet COVID-19 compliant events in and around Tacoma posted first on https://jrkwashington.com/

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wilbrdavis · 4 years

Text

JRK Washington highlights fun yet COVID-19 compliant events in and around Tacoma

Fall Events for Boulders at Puget Sound Residents

In the Spirit Contemporary Native Arts Exhibition Runs until October 25th

Tacoma Farmers Market 925 Broadway (between 9th and 11th), Tacoma, WA. Runs until October 29th

Virtual Interactive Basic Wine Tasting 101 September 17th

Virtual Harry Potter Location Tour of London September 20th

Beyond the Backyard: A New Habitat Challenge September 26th

Caffeine and Gasoline: Race Cars Griot’s Garage, 3333 South 38th St, Tacoma, WA. September 26th

Tacoma Holiday Food & Gift Festival 2727 East “D” Street, Tacoma, WA October 22nd – 25th

JRK Washington is confident that brighter days are ahead

Interested parties may send their application through this online portal.

###

The post JRK Washington highlights fun yet COVID-19 compliant events in and around Tacoma appeared first on JRK Washington.

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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Dior Debuts Exhibition and New High-Jewelry Collection in Shanghai – WWD

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SHANGHAI — It was a rare night at the unveiling of Dior’s “Designer of Dreams” exhibition to see more than 700 guests gathered in one place.

As China has slowly recovered from COVID-19 over the past few months, fashion brands have put on cocktails, intimate dinners and even a concert here or there. But the Dior opening at the Long Museum was the first truly large-scale fashion event of the year here, a full seven months into 2020, and the crowd turned out with gusto.

The exhibition was originally planned for May, but finally made its debut on Friday. Shanghai is the third destination for the retrospective after Paris and London — officially open to the public on July 28 and running until Oct. 4 — allowed by the fact that the city has managed to dodge the second and even third COVID-19 outbreaks that have cropped up in cities like Beijing and Hong Kong.

All in all, it has been a very busy week for the French house. The day before the exhibition opened, the brand showed digitally its cruise collection inspired by Puglia and right after the opening, it had planned its largest showing of high jewelry for its VIP clients, also in Shanghai.

Exhibition curator Oriole Cullen, speaking by phone due to ongoing travel bans, laid out just how much of a logistical feat it was to set up while the team was spread across China, Paris, London and Montreal.

“The team at Dior created nearly 80 individual films for colleagues in China to explain how the archives needed to be dressed,” she said. “It was 10-hour Zoom calls every day with China in terms of the install.”

Because the Chinese audience is most familiar with the modern-day Dior, Cullen said it was a purposeful choice to place a piece from Maria Grazia Chiuri at the front to greet visitors along with the facade of 30 Avenue Montaigne. Inside, 275 haute couture dresses are on show, arranged in 14 themes ranging from the New Look, Christian Dior’s life, highlights from the six subsequent designers that have led the house, and conceptual favorites like Versailles, the atelier, gardens and the label’s many moments created with Hollywood stars and royalty.

Dior’s “Designer of Dreams” exhibition in Shanghai. Matjaz Tancic/WWD

To adapt the exhibition to the market, Cullen said the brand consulted with Hung Huang and tapped into its collaborations with Chinese artists such as Xu Bing, Lin Tianmiao, Gao Weigang, Wang Guangle and Yan Peiming, and editorial photography over the years featuring Dior by Feng Hai, Leslie Zhang and Gangao Lang.

While some artworks like Lin’s “Procedure” installation had been commissioned by Dior for earlier shows, Gao, for instance, had created an installation art piece inspired by the J’adore perfume that involved creating a tiered, gold pyramid-like structure atop which sat a spherical moon, representing the feminine.

Christian Dior’s personal exploration of China was also showcased, manifesting in looks named Pékin, Chinoiseries, Nuit de Chine, Hong Kong and Bleu de Chine. The founder also paid homage to Chinese calligraphy through ideogram-printed dress and his use of jacquard.

On Saturday though, the house changed tack to pamper its high-jewelry VIPs at the Amanyangyun. Over the next three days, ensconced in the neoclassical Chinese resort located on the far outskirts of Shanghai, the brand planned to entertain more than 100 guests with cognac and tea tastings, yoga, Ebru workshops, and origami making.

Come evening, the jewelry would be presented beside the resort’s river in a cocktail presentation format on models in 16 flowy Grecian couture looks designed by Chiuri and followed by a dinner in a long gazebo re-created to resemble a French garden.

Dior presented 16 new couture looks at the presentation. Matjaz Tancic/WWD

But some VIPs were not waiting for the full effect. By afternoon, pieces from the colorful tie-dye-inspired jewelry collection were already being snapped up and taken out.

“The inspiration was tie-dye fabric, a pattern that has been used quite a bit at Dior by various designers of the house. I thought it was interesting to replicate the effect with jewelry,” explained the house’s longtime jewelry designer Victoire de Castellane, also by phone interview.

“I love working with color, I love imagining movement with color,” continued the designer, who has explored new combinations of stones over two decades in the position — building a vast fan base along the way. Many pieces in this collection focused on one color, offering it in various gradations, including a deep blue ring in white gold that carries a cluster of diamonds, tanzanites and sapphires or a similar one anchored with a prominent emerald with various hues of tsavorite garnets gathered around one side, adding asymmetry — and lightened with a row of diamonds.

Dior’s high-jewelry collection presentation in Shanghai. Matjaz Tancic/WWD

“I played with the idea of dye, as if the stones were dye that introduced streaks of color and gradations of color,” she explained.

“With tie-dye, there is white space — I did this with diamonds, the white part is symbolized with diamonds,” noted de Castellane.

“I found it quite amusing to do this with jewelry,” she concluded.

The designer agreed that the new jewelry recalled a previous examination of color, the “Gem Dior” collection, which worked bright stones into stark pieces meant to represent pixels. But here, the exploration of color is more gentle.

“It’s a bit softer, with different movement, as if the colors mix and move, whereas the previous one was more mineral and more static,” she noted.

Conveying this softness were pearls — a key element of the collection.

“It was the first time I used pearls,” laughed de Castellane.

“I am fascinated with pearls, in antiquity, they were called the tears of Venus — the symbolism of the idea that Aphrodite, or Venus cried in the sea and the tears became pearls. I find it such a lovely story,” she said.

Dior’s high-jewelry collection presentation in Shanghai. Matjaz Tancic/WWD

A pair of earrings had a large white pearl — perched on the top of one side, and set on the bottom of the other earring — offsetting a cluster of small diamonds and a large ruby.

“I’m also fascinated by the roundness of pearls, they’re like small, silky spheres, next to the gemstones that are bursting with color,” explained de Castellane.

“I find it very beautiful to set them against one another — the softness and tenderness of the pearls with the forcefulness of stones,” she said.

She also used colored pearls—including pink, golden and pistachio pearls — to bring new forms of color. The golden pearls served as the focal point for a pair of long earrings, with rows of various cuts of diamonds snaking around them, fixed with yellow gold.

“When it comes to the size of the stones, I always like to maintain a lot of freedom, I enjoy mixing different forms and volumes — this is what makes things more lively, and less static,” said de Castellane.

“I like the idea of mixing cushion cuts, oval shaped stones, round cuts — there were a lot of small, round stones — bringing them together in a way that creates movement and turns,” she explained.

While pearls normally sit at the center of traditional jewelry, the designer rearranged them, nudging them to one side of a ring, or plopping them on top of a cluster of stones, including a pink sapphire the same size, like the proverbial cherry on a cake — but on an earring.

“In traditional jewelry, the pearl is often at the center of a piece — here, I put it to the side, to show that it is something more than just a classic centerpiece,” noted de Castellane.

As for colored stones, she said she drew on the whole range customarily used by the house, rattling off a few — emeralds, rubies, various-colored sapphires, tanzanites, tsavorite garnets and paraiba tourmalines.

There were no opals, however.

“It’s funny, I didn’t use them this time — I didn’t need them,” she said.

Dior’s high-jewelry collection presentation in Shanghai. Matjaz Tancic/WWD

Commenting on the abstract nature of the collection, which contrasts with some more figurative ones in the past, inspired by the architecture of Versailles or daisies drawn by Christian Dior, to give just two examples, de Castellane noted she enjoys exploring different styles.

“Some clients like figurative pieces while others like abstract ones,” she noted. “I like a mix. In life you can have different personalities, different desires depending on the moment — I find it’s important,” she said.

“There are some things I might love at a given time, but then I will look for change, and maybe come back again to the things I liked before,” she said.

Making jewelry helps to serve as an antidote to anxious times, suggested the designer.

“It allows people to dream a little,” she said.

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ladiesfashion25 · 6 years

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ricardosousalemos · 7 years

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X-Ray Spex: Germfree Adolescents

Who is Poly Styrene? On January 20, 1979, the BBC endeavored to find out. “I chose the name Poly Styrene because it’s a lightweight, disposable product,” Styrene stated, with an absurd serenity, while scrubbing her teeth on national television during a 40-minute special on her London band, X-Ray Spex. “It sounded alright. It was a send-up of being a pop star—plastic, disposable, that’s what pop stars are meant to mean, so therefore I thought I might as well send it up.” Only two months had passed since the release of X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents, a brash, vivid masterpiece of the germinal punk era. An incisive 1977 interview with the fanzine Jolt, penned by one Lucy Toothpaste, was revealing in other ways. “She’s a girl and she’s half-black,” goes Toothpaste’s introduction. “HOW OPPRESSED CAN YOU GET?” (Caps Lucy’s.) “Doesn’t seem to keep her down though,” Lucy added, before quoting a patch of Poly’s more impressionistic lyrics: “‘Yama yama yama yama yama yama.’”

Poly Styrene was born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, the daughter of a Scottish-Irish secretary and a dispossessed Somalian noble, in 1957. While UK punks were screaming about cutting ties with their pasts, Poly spoke of her fascination with her own history, her uniquely multicultural family tree; plenty of punks played Rock Against Racism gigs, but Poly was one of few active participants of color. After working in fashion in her youth, she ran away from home between the ages of 15 and 17 and spent a year touring Britain’s hippie music festivals, including the Trentishoe Earth Fayre—after the fest, she lived with fellow travelers in the countryside, where they brewed dandelion tea and bathed in streams. This wandering all stoked the ecological consciousness that would fuel her ethos in punk. Armed with her itinerant background, Poly Styrene became one of the most original pop stars in music history—trained in opera, acutely anti-authoritarian, braces cemented across her teeth—and she was indeed the sharpest punk lyricist that Britain ever saw.

She rolled her Rs over supercharged riffs with more tenacity than Johnny Rotten. She yabbered gibberish more wildly than the Ramones. She naturally did punk-reggae better than the Clash or the Slits, and she was upending the notion that “cleanliness is next to godliness” when Kurt Cobain was in elementary school. With guttural, soul-cleansing, full-body wails, Poly sang of our sanitized culture’s lethal obsession with sterile perfection long before pop culture had sniffed “Teen Spirit.” Poly Styrene’s prescient lyrics could serve as epigraphs to scholarly books about identity politics, commodified dissent, or consumer society. They are also fun.

On her 19th birthday—July 3, 1976—Poly saw the Sex Pistols at Hastings Pier and was changed. She swiftly put an ad in Melody Maker seeking “young punx who want to stick it together.” X-Ray Spex—name inspired by ads in True Detective mags, and brilliantly evoking punk’s impulse to dissect life below the surface—was managed and produced by one Falcon Stuart. Sixteen years her senior, he was also Poly’s boyfriend and produced her pre-punk reggae single “Silly Billy,” released on GTO—the UK label that put out Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” One of the “young punx” to reply to that ad was 16-year-old Lora Logic, a Bowie-child who wrote and performed the band’s definitive sax arrangements before getting unceremoniously chucked out (allegedly for claiming too much of its spotlight). “Poly just wanted some men that would blur into the background,” Lora once told me, and she got a formidable lot in guitarist Jak Airport, bassist Paul Dean, drummer BP Hurding, and later sax player Rudi Thompson. They released four singles before EMI put out their only album, Germfree Adolescents, in November ’78.

X-Ray Spex is what I consider capital-P Punk—meaning, of the original movement—more than lowercase-p punk—meaning, by current vernacular, an action. Though raw, strange, and legitimately subversive, the songs of Germfree Adolescents have traditional structures. There are persistent verses and choruses and swaggering solos, steady beats and percussive hip-shaking claps; there are overdubs, candy hooks, chiseled little flourishes in the form of “oh-oh”s and (on “Highly Inflammable”) even some galactic synth shimmer. Germfree Adolescents holds up, in some sense, like pop music, albeit pop that is equally scorched and joyful, liberationist, charged with intellect and insurrectionary zeal. It inspires in ways that transcends genre, which explains why an artist like FKA twigs has called Germfree Adolescents her favorite album ever. Its musicality is honed; the musicians here are obviously amazing players. Its chugging faster-harder chords accelerate by the second, like the culture Poly describes. It is steely, shit-kicking, and bright; like an unbreakable machine, its build reflects the industrialization at hand. Germfree Adolescents’ singular sax-punk sound is, to borrow a word from Poly’s lyrics, “bionic.”

Along with her hippie inklings, Poly devoted much of her teenage years to watching fringe theater groups, and so she was visually inclined. This manifested in her striking and unusual sartorial choices—such as a green tin army helmet or a lipstick-red conductor’s jacket—as much as in X-Ray Spex’s music. The riffs were tonally fluorescent, but Poly’s language also made immediate appeals to the imagination. Her images—of “warriors in Woolworths,” of her mocking desire to turn into a “dehydrated” “frozen pea”—become 3D in your head. And Poly is refreshingly funny. “I am a poseur and I don’t care!” she sneers on the galloping “I Am a Poseur”; sarcasm vivifies “I Am a Cliché”’s pogoing titular chant. On the vibrant, almost-slapstick “I Can’t Do Anything”—“I can’t read and I can’t spell/I can’t even get to hell”—Poly cheerfully fights back against a guy called Freedom who tried to “strangle” her with plastic jewelry. Each word is an embodied exclamation point: “I hit him back!/With my pet rat!”

The prevailing theme of Germfree Adolescents is the inescapable horror of daily life in consumer society. Poly’s voice and the music—always peaking, always cranked to 100%—is persistently in-your-face, just like the most garish excesses of capitalism. “There was so much junk then. The idea was to send it all up,” Poly said in England’s Dreaming. “Screaming about it, saying: ‘Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of styrofoam, I am your product. And this is what you have created: do you like her?’” The original tracklist opened with revving drums and Poly roaring “AAARRT-I-FIIICCIAL,” a reverbed rallying cry. “I know I’m artificial/But don’t put the blame on me,” she blazes. “I was reared with appliances/In a consumer society.” There is a scene in Who Is Poly Styrene, set among the modern industrial wasteland of the supermarket aisles, where Poly is pushing a shopping cart beneath the glare of fluorescent lights, grabbing at products: Daz laundry detergent, Special K, Anadin painkillers, Comfort fabric conditioner, Sunlight lemon liquid cleaner. The Raincoats’ Ana da Silva once told me she wrote her 1979 song title “Fairytale in the Supermarket” after watching it and realizing that Poly’s songs were like “fairytales, but in a consumerist society.” In 1978, Joe Strummer was lost in the supermarket; Poly Styrene stared its offerings dead in the eye.

Anthems like the unsparing “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” and “Plastic Bag” anticipated the anxieties of a world made of hidden cancerous chemical detritus. “Day-Glo” has an ominous gravity, but it’s catchy, sneaking into you like a sweet, hastily-torn packet of Splenda. Poly explores the toxicity of daily life in excruciating, relentless detail: our homes (“nylon curtains” and “perspex window panes”), our infrastructure (“the acrylic road”), our transport (“my Polypropylene car”), our fake food (“a rubber bun”), irradiated air (“the X-rays were penetrating through the latex breeze”). It culminates with an image of fake plastic trees years before Thom Yorke sang of a “cracked polystyrene man” (“synthetic fiber see-thru leaves fell from the rayon trees”). X-Ray Spex songs are like musical Andy Warhol soup cans; they find a spiritual predecessor in Warhol’s pivotal 1964 exhibition The American Supermarket. Look around, both whisper to you: Everything is plastic.

On “Plastic Bag,” Poly coupled her eco-critique with an incendiary indictment of advertising: “My mind is like a plastic bag/That corresponds to all those ads/It sucks up all the rubbish/That is fed through my ear/I eat Kleenex for breakfast/And I use soft hygienic Weetabix/To dry my tears.” Her sly reversal—Kleenex for eating, Weetabix for crying—underscores the interchangeability of these artificial products. Poly knew advertisements were inescapable, were rewiring brains; look out, they are coming for you right about now. But she was also genius enough to speak their mass language: “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” was an unlikely chart hit in the UK, reaching No. 23 in April ’78.

In an age of burgeoning A.I. and rampant outsourcing, the sci-fi poetry of “Genetic Engineering” is even more prophetic, as Poly declares that “genetic engineering could create the perfect race… could exterminate/introducing worker clones/as our subordinated slave.” Her grim propositions have lost none of their daunting edge. Punks were screaming “NO FUTURE,” and fair enough, but Poly went further, deeper; her songs dared to imagine just how bad hellish normalization could be. And here we are.

Words like “disinfectant,” “Listerine,” and “sterilized” have never sounded so oddly seductive as they do on the postmodern love song “Germfree Adolescents,” the era’s greatest punk-reggae ballad. “I know you’re antiseptic/Your deodorant smells nice/I’d like to get to know you/You’re deep frozen like the ice,” Poly beams through this dubby, surreal waltz. In her futuristic tale of boy-meets-girl, purity reigns; “he’s a germfree adolescent” and “cleanliness is her obsession.” “Cleans her teeth 10 times a day,” Poly sings, “Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away/The S.R. way.” Both “deep frozen like the ice” and “the S.R. way” (sodium ricinoleate) reference a promo for Gibbs S.R. toothpaste, the very first television commercial broadcast in England in 1955. As Poly’s voice cracks out with each repeat of “10 times a day,” the desperation—the casual corner-store apocalypse of unpronounceable additives—pierces through the song’s swirling veneer. “Germfree Adolescents” became X-Ray Spex’s most successful single, reaching No. 19 on the charts in November ’78.

Somehow, Poly’s two most radically feminist statements—debut single “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” and a later B-side, “Age”—were left off the original Germfree Adolescents tracklist, only added back to the 1991 reissue. All punch and bounce, “Age” takes on ageism, body dysmorphia, and the beauty myth perpetuated by Hollywood in a fell swoop: “Age/She’s so afraid/Age/She’s not the rage.” (Check the mellow, reggae-tinged version of it on Poly’s lovely, misunderstood 1980 solo album Translucence.) The iconic “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was, and is, like dynamite to patriarchy. It is a succession of lightning bolts, dizzied with ideas, as Poly’s profoundly unhinged voice skyrockets into the red to cap each chorus line. “Bind me, tie me, chain me to the wall/I want to be a slave to you all,” Poly seethed. It’s the ultimate punk song, and also intersectional feminist scripture: “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard/But I say oh bondage, up yours!”

In 2005, excerpts from Poly’s “diary of the seventies” appeared on her website. Poly muses on Superwoman, on vegetarianism, on reading about genetic modification in the glossy pages of Time. But she also reflects on Lucy Toothpaste probing her regarding “Oh Bondage! Up Yours.” “Is it about women’s liberation?” Lucy asks, and Poly replies vaguely, mentioning bondage trousers she saw at Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique. Then her entry continues forth, tracing the DNA of each line. She alludes to The Sexual Revolution by Wilhelm Reich, to images of “Suffragettes chained to the railings of Buckingham Palace,” to “pictures of ball-and-chained African slaves stored in my psyche.” Poly Styrene would often deny that her songwriting was autobiographical; six months before Germfree Adolescents came out, she told NME, “You have to be detached from everything in order to write. I have to observe… I can’t get too directly involved.” But you can’t escape yourself. The glimpse into Poly’s inner life shows just how innately distinct her perspective was from all around her in UK punk. Transcending time and place, though, in Shotgun Seamstress—the indispensable zine by and for black punks founded by Osa Toe in 2006—the author repeatedly dubs Poly “Captain of the Brown Underground.”

Poly did not have to try to be this different; she simply was. At the core of Germfree Adolescents is a mantra that could summarize all of popular culture in 2017: “Identity/Is the crisis can’t you see.” Just over a year ago, Wesley Morris in The New York Times Magazine declared 2015 “The Year We Obsessed Over Identity,” situating our world “in the midst of a great cultural identity migration” where “gender roles are merging” and “races are being shed,” and of course this is felt at the turn of any axis. But a migration has a destination; identity is always fluid. On “Identity,” Poly wisely presents these dilemmas of personhood as perennial question marks: “When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?/Do you see yourself on the T.V. screen?/Do you see yourself in the magazine/When you see yourself does it make you scream?” Eviscerating and empathic in equal measure, “Identity” is a most logical anthem for today.

When X-Ray Spex imploded in mid-’79, they cited creative differences, but there was a darkness churning below the gleeful surfaces, which boiled over before Germfree Adolescents was released. The wages of Poly’s exuberance had a cost; she lived, to some degree, within the extremities of the hyperactive mindset she sang from so intimately. (It was not until 1991 that she was diagnosed as bipolar.) In the mid-2000s, Poly referenced a “traumatic experience of a sexual nature” she’d endured in ’78; she had a breakdown, went to John Lydon’s flat, and shaved her head (if she ever became a sex symbol, she promised early on, she’d shave her head). On tour that summer, she claimed to have seen a UFO fly past her hotel window “like a fireball.” (“I wasn’t mad, but I went into the hospital after that,” she said.) Lydon wrote of Poly in his 2014 memoir: “They used to lock her up occasionally… She’d break out and always make a beeline for my house… She was good fun until the ambulance turned up for her.” Poly soon remembered chanting with Hare Krishnas during her teen hippie years, began reading The Bhagavad Gita, and aligned with the movement. One need only look at the muchness of what Poly writes about to understand the potential sources of her struggle. In England’s Dreaming, Poly said she wanted Germfree Adolescents to be like “a diary of 1977.” It is also a diary of survival in a world closing in on us all in ways that can go hauntingly unseen.

Elsewhere in her journal, Poly meditates on her own ascending fame with three quotes:

“We will be famous just for one day.” —David Bowie “Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” —Andy Warhol “I am a cliché.” —Poly Styrene

But clichés do not hold. They dissolve. Poly Styrene is solid; Poly Styrene lasts. With her inclinations towards Eastern spirituality, perhaps she would relish in how the status of Germfree Adolescents now feels sky-like. Poly Styrene is the future, and she is now.

#reviews-albums

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gjepcindia · 2 years

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Marissa Collections Focus Only On Design-Driven Labels

One of a handful of family-run businesses in the US to have stayed the course, perhaps their success lies in family teamwork?

Marissa is the creative half of this luxury operation whilst her husband manages the business side of things.

Their son Jay Hartington serves as CEO. The second generation in the family to continue the business, Jay oversees marketing, jewellery and menswear at this multifaceted boutique.

Today, Marissa Collections is located in a 10,000-square-foot property in the Third Street South shopping district of Old Naples in Florida.

Marissa Collections originally operated out of a store front boutique, selling items hand selected by Marissa, including accessories and shoes.

Jay Hartington throws more light on their business.

What defines your company?

What was your route into jewellery?

It was a natural progression to provide head-to-toe styling to our clients so they wouldn’t have the need to go anywhere else.

How is business in the US?

Do you sell more online or in store?

How have you adapted to the pandemic?

What smaller brands do you carry?

Who is your clientele?

How much do they spend?

We host a wide variety of price points, including fashion, fine, bespoke and high jewellery.

Do you do business with India? How is your experience?

We do plenty of business with India and have a few direct suppliers that we have a great relationship with.

To know more: https://gjepc.org/solitaire/marissa-collections-focus-only-on-design-driven-labels/

#Solitaire & Jewellery Magazine #Solitaire Jewellery Magazine

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