Daily Archives: March 16, 2012

Day 71: Laver’s Law or the Rule of Fashion

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Day 71’s assignment was: “Time travel. make something that seems like it came from another era in history.”

I decided I wanted to illustrate Laver’s Law. James Laver was a writer and a fashion expert. He developed a rule of fashion that is “an attempt to compress the complex cycle of fashion change and the general attitude towards any certain style or period into a simple timeline.”

To do this project, I first did some research into various fashion trends of the 1900’s. Originally I was going to do the flapper style dress from the roaring ’20s, but decided to make it slightly more relevant by choosing an ’80s style of acid wash denim instead.

As you might of recognized, this is a picture of Robin Sparkles taken from the video “Let’s Go to the Mall” ( from the show How I met your mother)… It was hard to find a good picture of acid washed denim so I used this spoof instead.

I complied this all in Pixlr.com, which is pretty awesome for a free version of photoshop. However, I ran into a few problems when I tried to rasterize the texts layers (the position of the text moved around so that it didn’t line up like it was supposed to.) It was very annoying and took longer than it should have to go back and fix it. :/

It’s funny how my project  correlated with what I saw at Macy’s yesterday. One of the styles from the 80’s was wearing high heels with ankle socks. I laughed about that, thinking how ugly that looked and that no one would EVER wear that again.

But what do I see at Macy’s?

 

A mannequin wearing high heels and blue ankle socks!  Definitely you can see the revival of the ’80s coming back into fashion.

 

I think for me high heels and ankle socks is possbily a style that will never seem fashionable again much like shoulder pads… WHY?

 

Day 72: Let’s fix some shoes

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Day 72’s assignment was “Use all of the shoes in your household to make something, or work on a single pair of shoes that were destined for the thrift store.”

The people who know me well know that I own a fraction of the number of shoes most girls own. Oh, I do have a lot of shoes, especially compared to most guys.  But in general, I don’t care that much about the shoes I wear as long as they are comfortable.

Except for these. I love these shoes.

 

They don’t look like much after 4 years of wear and one year sitting in my closet. But again, I have to say I love these shoes. My feet are kind of big, but thin, which can make finding the right evening-out sandal difficult.

I had been looking for shoes like this for a while and it  was fate that lead me to Target the day I found these perfect silver sandals in my size. Not to get sentimental or anything, but it was like God himself came down from heaven and decided that these were the ones destined for my feet.

Isaac Mizrahi sandals

I loved these so much that months later I scoured ebay looking for the gold twin of this very same sandal (Target stopped carrying the brand Isaac Mizrahi which made it quite difficult to find the gold version of this in my exact size.)

I’m obsessed. I’ll admit it. I wish you all the best finding your own perfect sandal.

But back to today’s assignment. My silver sandals were toast. They were falling apart, the color was fading, I lost my right heel and they had no traction. A year ago I ended up replacing these with an inferior silver sandal and put these in the closet. My perfect shoes were meant for the trash bin when I could finally get the heart to throw them out.

Today however, was a big day. With nothing to lose, I decided to see what would happen if I spray painted my shoes black. I am in need of black sandals and figured this would be an interesting experiment.

It actually turned out better than I expected.

 

The black look is a great improvement on the faded out silver. I still have the problem of the crappy soles, but I might go see how much it would cost to re-sole them. If it’s cheaper than buying a new a pair of black sandals I will probably do it just so I don’t have to retire these re-vamped shoes.

Once again I am indebted to this 366creativityjournal project which makes me do the things I have procrastinated on!