Archive for January, 2008

I was just in LA looking at a potential project…this staccato, Spanish colonial house with tile floors and dark wood beams – a truly beautiful property. It got me thinking back to a house I saw awhile ago that was decorated with this amazing Monterey furniture. Monterey furniture ties back to the Spanish Revival movement and the romantic qualities of Monterey, Mexico, which I love. The furniture has this great sort of western, Arts and Crafts quality that’s full of character. The pieces are very well made and have a wonderful hand-made quality. I own a lot of Cushman furniture that is somewhat similar, but this is a wonderful, less expensive alternative.

I’ve found a few noteworthy pieces on eBay –

Monterey Classic Leather Club Chair Saddle

1940s Deco Monterey

This week I’ve got my eye on the 2
GB Eye-Fi wi-fi SD card.  OK, so what the heck is that?  The ScanDisk Eye-Fi
card essentially eliminates the need to ever hook your digital camera up to your
computer to get the images off the memory card, or even take the card out of the
camera!  The card itself is actually wi-fi enabled.  This means that you can
take a picture, and as long as your PC is powered on and online, your images can
be sent right to your computer.  The other rad way you can use this baby is to
configure the card so that whenever you take a shot that you want to post on
your website or mobile blog page, like a Flickr page, you can do it right from
the camera.  Genius.

I’ve put my bid in on this one –
we’ll see if I win!

Eye-Fi Card.

Once I get mine I’ll let you know how easy it was to use.  I’d like to know, do
you think this is a cool concept, or a headache waiting to
happen?

-Cat

Were the SAG awards a little dressier than usual?

All that pent-up celebrity fashion energy waiting to safely explode on a red carpet somewhere came out at the 2008 SAG Awards. Celebrities having missed the Golden Globes and perhaps thinking ahead that there might not even be an Oscars, got glammed up for the SAGS.

Strapless dresses, not new since there were plenty at past awards shows- are hot. Angelina Jolie, Cate Blanchett, Vanessa Williams, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer (in Versace), Amanda Bynes, Marion Cotillard and Jamie-Lynn Sigler (in Calvin Klein), all bared their shoulders which must be the new erogenous zone.

But wouldn’t it have been nice to see “Juno” star Ellen Page in something super cute or youthful? Instead the young actress went deadly serious in a short, black Zac Posen. Ditto for winner Edie Falco, who would have done well to channel the style of her alter ego Mrs. Soprano and jazz up that yawn of a sheath dress she wore.

Tilda Swinton looked fabulous. Cate Blanchett was sublime in Balenciaga by Nicholas Ghesquiere. Eva Longoria Parker scored in metalllic white from Naeem Khan. Tilda Swinton, Glenn Close and America Ferrera were sophisticated in gray. In fact, grays & whites were a counterpoint to the color guard led by Vanessa Williams, Kate Beckinsale and Kyra Sedgewick in electric blue or bright yellow

Both Tilda Swinton’s choice of jacket over dress and Julie Christie’s feminine tux are inspirations for women out there looking for an alternative to the ubiquitous, skimpy, red carpet gown.

I was helping a friend pick out paint colors the other day
and while I love traditional powder blues and greens, I think they’ve been
exhausted and there are much more interesting ways to use wall paints.

I’m starting to use a lot of deep color tones like emerald
green, wine, dark slate blue, and burgundy in the homes I’m working on. These
paint colors are wonderfully warm and luxurious, and serve as a great balance
for grays, beiges and off-whites, which are better suited for more public areas
of your house/apartment. When it comes to your master bedroom or even a kitchen
I love the idea of doing something more adventurous and original. You don’t
even need to ditch lighter tones all together—pairing a softer color with a
dark chocolate trim, for example, can be beautiful.

It’s important to remember to be relatively cohesive. Don’t
paint every room a different color or your living space will turn into one big
color story of a mess!

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was pretty impressive
this year! I saw enough cool stuff to keep me blogging all year long. There
were many trends that are going to be popular this year, including the
elimination of wires. I’m talking wireless HD signals, wireless digital music
to any room in your home, wireless home network and so much more. Also, there
were a few companies doing this whole voice-mail-to-text translation thing, SimulScribe

It’s not a 100-percent-new concept, but it’s pretty cool.

Going green through better battery power was big, and of course the unofficial winner of the HD DVD war, Blu-Ray, definitely made some buzz around the show.

Now for specifics. First was a pretty rad, umm, I guess I’d define it as a technology, called Jook. It’s basically attempting to become a universal MP3-player accessory that will let everyone, regardless of the player they’re using, stream tunes to the peeps around them, as long as they too have Jook-enabled headphones, ear buds, or whatever. Great concept! Think about it—you can actually all be rockin’ to the same song as anyone within a 10-meter radius. The music is completely uncompressed, and the system supports stereo sound.

People were buzzing about the new product from Texas Instruments, the Pico Projector. Basically it’s a tiny 1.5 inch DLP movie projector that can beam DVD-quality images onto any flat surface. The rad thing is that you can actually attach this bad boy to an existing cell phone … so you can be the life of the party! Plan on seeing this tech incorporated into cell phones out of the box next year.

The Squeezebox
Duet from Logitech is next up. This device allows you to stream your digital tunes to any room in the house. A base attaches to whatever source your files live in—at my house, it’s in my bedroom on my desktop. The other portion attaches to my great speakers in my living room, as well as the Net. Through the magic of Wi-Fi you can walk around with this pretty amazing remote that has a color screen with album art and info, accessing your tunes as well as over 10,000 online music stations. Rock on.

Alienware kinda blew my mind with the unveiling of this insane-looking gaming
monitor that’s curved. It’s sick. The gigantic wraparound DLP rear-projection monitor has an amazing-looking image, and because the game is literally all around you, you really feel like you’re in the game! Sorry, you can’t score one till later this year … way later, I bet.

Last but not least, my favorite piece of swag was hands-down my Qualcomm circuit board that is also a notebook. It’s made of two pieces of circuit board that are wrapped in see-through plastic. The paper in it kind of bites, because pages kept falling out once I flipped to the next one, but I love how heavy the little thing is and how the pen is just the right size for my tiny fingers.

I lucked out this year by getting to go to the show. It was truly eye-opening and got me pumped for what’s to come this year. I look forward to sharing it all with you. OK, gotta jet. Keep coming back—it works if you watch me work it!

What’s hairy, scary and hiding in the back of the closet?
Uggs. They’re still here.

They started out as UGGly boots worn by celebrities and then
women on the street. Uggmania is said to have peaked around the winter of
2006.

But I’m seeing more Uggs on the feet of young women and
children now, than I did two years ago. Believe me…ugly as they are, I
understand the allure. I never stopped wearing mine — a baby blue pair which
are now wrecked. Nothing, I mean nothing I have ever put on my tootsies are as
warm and as soft.

Teenagers are pairing them with tight jeans or pajama pants
and a few like their Uggs with tights and mini skirts. Women put them on with
not-so-tight jeans and a parka to keep out the elements. Black seems really
popular with the over-30 set. High schoolers favor brown as well as black.

Uggs new crochet line was heavily advertised over Christmas.
I’ve only seen one person in them though, despite making the gold-standard list
of “Oprah’s Favorite Things”.

With winter kicking in here in the North East, I thought this would be the perfect time to talk about how to deal with dirty boots covered in snow, mud, slush and all that other stuff you want to avoid dragging into your home.

I’ve started using a long skinny black tray—about three feet long—like the one I found on eBay below.  I think it’s a great way to keep your entry dirt-free. A classic Martha Stewart trick that I love is to line the tray bed with pea-size gravel rocks…the kind used for landscaping (you can find them on eBay or your local gardening shop). This allows the gravel to absorb all the snow/mud or anything else you might have dripping off your boots.

Boot Tray

Pea Gravel

Well obviously, these glamorous people weren’t at the Golden Globes either; they were on the other side of the Atlantic with dozens of American menswear editors and retailers who make the trip twice a year.
Was it business or pleasure for Jay Z and his lady-love Beyonce, as they visited with designer Donatella Versace after her fall men’swear show in Milan over the weekend? The two entertainers own fashion companies. Kelly Rowlands made it a crowd - a beautiful one, but a crowd nonetheless.

Men’s shows are underway in Milan and Paris and in a few weeks there will be more men’s shows than ever in New York. No word yet on if Rocawear, Jay Z’s fashion label which is much bigger and older than Beyonce’s House of Dereon, will be among them.

I like this grown-up look from Jay Z - both a consumer and seller of fashion. While Jay Z sells the crazily printed hoodies that kids and young men are wearing on the streets, it’s good that unlike some music and fashion moguls I know, he’s not stuck in his m.o. of 15 years ago.

Having Hillary Clinton and all the other presidential candidates in my face the last couple nights has been riveting.

I’m a little on the defensive going into this blog entry, though. It’s not sexist and I don’t mean it to be, but one has to mention the style (and any obvious or hidden meanings) of our first serious (we can’t forget Shirley Chisholm) female presidential candidate. To avoid any mean labels or attacks and just to do the right thing, any critic of the former first lady’s style should endeavor to be an Even Steven and scrutinize the guys, too.

From here on I will keep tabs on what John McCain pulls out of the closet. An early note to John: No one ever got hurt (dirty, maybe, but not hurt) by taking the low road. Campaigning in Army fatigues, the very ones you wore in the Vietnam War if you still have them, would be ideal—beyond breathtaking, actually. I mean, why not? Much more visual, YouTube-ish and sure-to-make-the-late-news than the standard red tie and Oxford blue shirt.

John Edwards was just right. Not too lawyerly or aw-shucks-my-Dad. But it’s fair to say he will be checking for hidden cameras every time he combs his hair.

I liked Hillary’s choice of separates rather than a suit for the occasion of her New Hampshire win: green jacket, black pants. It went with her softer image. At close to midnight, in the softness of my gaze and the coziness of my bed, the outfit looked so on-trend, with its Puritan neckline, whimsical florals and mossy ground…. I wondered dreamily…Dries Van Noten? And drifted off.

The next morning, with The New York Times front page spread out on my kitchen table and illuminated by harsh sunlight, I faced reality: 1990s First Lady Fashion and further evidence that trying too hard to be safe always makes you sorry.  The missed opportunity was clear. The fuzzy, pea-green and black jacket looked like a bad tapestry. Nice shoulders, though.

Hillary could benefit from a tighter embrace of fashion. Like McCain, she can make it a potent weapon in her campaign by simply doing this: Change her look everyday, or at least every week. Politicians change their positions all the time, so there’s plenty of precedent for this. Just do it with styles rather than promises. One need only look to Madonna to see how extraordinarily successful this strategy can be for a powerful female.

Knee-jerk chauvinist editors and news directors would lick it up as her strongest message yet. Headlines would scream, “Hillary Is All About Change,” “Hillary Changes Again,” “Hillary, Candidate of Change.”

Where would this leave Obama?
Exactly!

As for Obama, who has staked out the change territory to great effect, he should stick to his present course, however rocky it becomes once Hillary launches her fashion-change offensive. As the campaign rolls on, we should not see the senator from Illinois in a white button-down shirt and paisley tie. This would not represent change.

I hope everyone had a great New Year!

I’m back at work and excited to finally report on my trip to
Miami for Art Basel I went down with eBay a few weeks ago because it’s such a renowned fair
and in the past three years, with the creation of Design Miami, I think it has
truly become a center for design.

In short — it was pretty amazing and completely
overwhelming!

You definitely need more than a day to comb through it.
There are some very well known, established artists and it was wonderful to see
the work of such great talents.

One of the best things about all the attention Art Basel has
garnered is that there were a bunch of little satellite shows. One of my
favorites was Scope…very young, hip — truly inspirational. They had a
wonderful artist named Yong Ho Ji (showed with Gana Art Gallery), who made these amazingly
weird/creepy animal sculptures out of recycled tires that upon closer
inspection are unbelievably intricate and gorgeous. I also loved Vee Speers
(showed with Leo Bahia Arte Contemporanea). This Australian artist had some
incredibly moving pieces that I think were summarized best by a quote I read
from Karl Lagerfeld who said that “she sees beauty where beauty can be terribly
absent.”

As would be expected with such prominent galleries, prices
are pretty outrageous, but I have to say I thought the works by the newer
artists were absolutely the most exciting and for those able to afford it, they
would no doubt make great investments.

When it came to trends as exhibited by Yong Ho Ji, recycled
and reusable were big, as were themes of dolls and child-like references
(particularly interesting I thought was Aneta Grzeszykowska, who had a
hand-sewn full-scale doll sculpture she said referred back to her childhood).

I also noticed a surge in the offering of limited edition
pieces, which just reiterated for me how important it is to make smart
purchases. Just because something is a limited edition doesn’t make it worth
the hefty price; pieces should be innovative, beautiful, and most importantly
appeal to your personal style and sensibilities.