What Grows Your Clothes...Who Knows?

While we are on the topic of coffee table books to run out and purchase, here is one to add to the list:  Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow's Wardrobe by Suzanne Lee.

Les Mesdames Chic, Shock et Chausseurs spend oodles of time figuring out how to refashion fashion into unique statement pieces.  This did not start out as an ecological bio-drive toward anything - it was just our collective desire not to be like anyone else and use mainstream fashion and design pieces in odd and creative ways.  However, the eco-pull to recyling and redesigning fashion is relentless - we dare you to create oh, say a Tampon holder out of a Tiffany's Stationery Box and or a ball gown out of old T-shirts and not feel the "aha!" moment of reduce-reuse-recycle. 

Well...behold the newest eco-fashion innovation: bacteria that make clothes.  Vraiment!

BioCouture by Suzanne Lee, for ModeMuseum Belgium

In case you did not immediately click on the arresting image above and/or already purchase the book vite vite, let us explain:  Ms. Suzanne Lee, a London fashion designer, creates couture pieces out of (you won't believe it...):  microbial cellulose.  Quoi, et...pourquoi?  Ms. Lee has found certain microbes that spin threads that can be used to make invisible dresses, the coolest body-armour-style corsets, and more.

She has been featured in Bloomberg News, The New York Times, and was named as one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2010 by Time Magazine.

Ms. Lee calls it BioCouture and we call it encroyable!

Big Nudes White Women Sleepless Nights...Where Were We?

Staggering back into normalcy after the holiday season, dahlings?  Surely you are primed and sassy, eager and bright-eyed, ready to plunge headlong into another year of fashion and DIY creativity.  Non?  Welllll, the Mesdames want to have a cozy, down-home chat about the holidays, with a specific focus on their favorite gifts of the season, so step lively, cherubs!  Eh - Pfft?  Vraiment? Yoo hoo - Hallo?

Big Nudes with Sylvia, First Edition

Ah! Fully recovered now, we see! 

Les Mesdames are not above tossing in some scenery-chewing, jaw-dropping, psyche-searing nudity when more polite entreaties fail.  And it is simply impossible to ignore the photography of Mr. Helmut Newton, d'accord?  Even more difficile to ignore the commanding presence of one of his favorite models, the teutonic goddess Sylvia Gobbel, n'est pas? 

Where is this all going, you ask, other than a fine tour of black-and-white, semi-S&M photography?  Ecoute.  Madame Chausseurs had the great fortune to attend the Helmut Newton exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston this past September, which featured prints from his first three books: White Women, Sleepless Nights, and Big Nudes. 

Featured prominently in the exhibit was none other than the divine Ms. Gobbel (far right, above and below).

Madame Shock et Sylvia Gobbel Nolleau near St Tropez

You see, les Mesdames Chic & Shock bear great love and gratitude for Ms. Gobbel, she having saved them from small-town mediocrity and religious-cult-smothering (would we lie?!) as 19-year-old babes-in-the-woods.  She sponsored them in a fantastic, rock-and-roll summer haunting Parisian nightclubs (Castel! Le Palace!) and French Riviera fun (Le Club 55 et Byblos - bises!) on an elegantly oversized sailing yacht.  We salute Sylvia, in this exhibit and in her current return to modeling.  C'est Magnifique!

Madame Chic et Sylvia circa 1989

And you really wondered what this all had to do with favorite gifts, didn't you?  Ah, ye of little faith!

Aside from the gift of osmotic chic generously shared by Sylvia so many years ago this year's prizes were indubitably the fabulous coffee table books Madame Chausseurs procured at the MFA Houston exhibit:  Big Nudes, Polaroids, and more.  If you don't have any...snap them up at Amazon, vite vite, schatzi!  LOVE!