Shoppin' | Topsy Design

Jared and Sam - the stylish Los Angeles-based couple behind the great vintage retail blog Topsy Design (with the world's greatest logo and some sultry, well-styled home videos!) - are offering 15% off to any readers who buy something from the site in the next week.  Just enter HH during check out when you buy one of those hunting caps (retail $45) and they'll hook you up!

Fishing net with bamboo pole, $65

Leather gun case, $85

Paolo Ventura's Toy Soldiers

Italian artist Paolo Ventura uses dolls and mixed media to evoke the life and psychological horrors of war.  It's sort of Michel Gondry meets Wes Anderson meets Marcel Dzama. These are from his 2005 War Souvenir series.

Shooters | Alexandra Catiere

Russian photographer Alexandra Catiere has a wonderful spread of Dutch portrait-inspired fashion shots in Please! magazine this month (and her bio also indicates that she shot for The Gentlewoman, the magazine I'm dying to see, but will never because too many others died to see it first.  Honestly, it's nowhere!). But these other shots offer extra evidence that she's no stranger to painterly photography.  (Above is a shot for Kenzo).

From a spread in Crash Magazine...

(Kenzo)

Voyage Dans Ma Tête, La Collection de Coiffes d’Antoine de Galbert

Some collectors have shoe fetishes (see below), others like La Maison Rouge founder Antoine de Galbert lust for head gear.  His collection of ethnic hats and helmets are on display at the Paris gallery until September 26.

(All of these are similar to the great collection at the Peabody Museum at Harvard)

Art Shoes

Twenty years ago, Veerle Swenters and Pierre Bogaerts started writing what would be over 1,000 letters to artists, requesting – their shoes. After hours and hours and hours of toiling and begging, these Dutch shoe collectors amassed quite a collection (of specatular espadrilles - and other great togs). Check it – and others of ethnic footwear and designers own shoes – on Shoes or No Shoes.  Above: Peter Collien, Germany. (Many thanks to reader David Williams for the heads up! So cool!)

Manilo Caropreso, Italy

Eva Lootz, Spain

Curtis Anderson, Germany

David Nash, UK

Daniel Dezeuze, France

Ex Libris!

The Pratt Ex Libris Collection of 19th. and 20th century book plates from public and private libraries is just a gold mine for fonts, heraldry and logo design.

A rare stylish moment for my Alma Mater (not even remotely known for anything related to design or the arts, minus Cy Twombley's father). The bird and the squirrel fell by the wayside over the years...and the first part of the Latin...and the shape of the crest.

(So cool)

Harry Worcester Smith...a WASP?

The Last Resort (or Philo, D'Oh!)

Phoebe Philo continues to knock 'em out of the park at Celine (above). The number above looks like it was made for Ali McGraw.  Alber Elbaz continues to sew up and accessorize perfection at Lanvin...and the boys at Proenza Schouler aren't doing too badly, either.  At least they all remembered that when escaping the winter blues, we might want to go somewhere summery (unless you're me and then you go to Prague).

Lanvin

PS

Lanvin

Giambattista Valli

Celine

Jonathan Ames' World Dominance Continues

HHH Shopping Guide | Asia Fetish

{1} Illesteva Frieda Black Sunglasses, Gargyle, $180

{2} Robert Clegerie Naya Raffia Shoes, Zappos, $355

{3} Draped Sack Dress, JoDemontis Etsy Shop, $130

{4} Robert Geller/ CA4LA Straw Hat, Blackbird, $150.99

{5} SIWA Paper Briefcase, Sweet Bela, Unknown

{6} Bamboo Director’s Chair, Grandin Road, $89.00

Jack of All Trades White

(Thanks for the heads up, Preston Brigham)

The Best of Etsy | TheSimpson's Eenie Meanie Dress

Pure perfection - and only $68. May all smallish-flat chested women now whip out their credit cards.

Eenie Meanie Dress, TheSimpson Etsy shop. (It also comes in a bunch of Japanese-friendly, natural looking colors like grey and brown and black).

Best of Resort 2011: One Ensemble from YSL

The shows continue, but so far, this is all I like (being a bit hyper-critical and picky, yes). It's YSL. It's French-looking. It's chic. It's appropriate for a summery vacation.

(The Chanel show was terrifying...Burberry Prorsum had some great looking outfits, but they made me sweaty just by looking at them...Donna Karan had sexy dresses, but they look just like everything she's been doing lately...and Bottega Veneta, my usual can-do-nothing-wrong label, has some neon Balenciaga/Prada scuba knocks offs that just don't match anything else in the entire BV world and will not even be able to hang at the flagship without raising eyebrows).

Fragile Flora

In the mid-19^th c., Bavarian glassmaker Rudolph Blaschka and his son Leopold decided that they could make sea creatures look a helluva lot more realistic formed in glass than they did dead, shriveled in formaldehyde inside glass jars.

Frustrated that dead flowers, like squids, don’t exactly look the same as they did alive after a couple days, Professor George L. Goodale, the first director of Harvard’s Botanical Museum, figured that glass models would work as well for flora as they did for the sea’s fauna.

So, in 1886, Goodale popped to Dresden to convince the Blaschkas to switch their focus and whip out 3,000 glass flowers for Harvard’s botany students.

By 1890, the father and son were under full contract. They worked to complete it until 1936 (Leopold finished after his dad died in 1895, when nearly three-quarters of the collection had been finished).

They’re on permanent display in the Ware Collection at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

(Many thanks to Dr. Hypercube for the hyperlinks that led me here)

26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Mass

(All photos by Hillel Burger for the Corning Museum of Glass of specimen's from Harvard's collection)