So I'm sure you've already come across notcouture, fashionable offspring of favorite design site, notcot. Well this week notcouture is celebrating their official launch! Be sure to check out both of the sites, and take notice of special discounts for notcot readers from some of your favorite retailers (hint hint hint). And start submitting some of your favorite items on notcouture!
We received a message from blogger vintage thrift & craft. The author and her 14 year old daughter, Paige, saw some of our fitting room artwork on our blog. Paige was inspired to a mural of her own! Her mom let her take over a wall of their hallway, and this is what she came up with. Awesome, right?
PingMag just did this entry featuring Japanese wind bells. Every July in Kanagawa, people visit the Kawasaki Taishi Wind Bell Market. Can you imagine how magical and peaceful it would be to walk through an entire market filled with these bells? These photos are my favorites, but check out PingMag for more pics and info...
Take a listen...
Attack of the giant tomato pincushion! No, it's a bean bag chair, and you can make it. Spotted on love forever and find the tutorial on how to make your own at etsy labs. I wanna take a field trip there!
I spotted these on poppytalk and just had to share! I love these silkscreened chair pads to make any seating area a lot more interesting. Get your own on etsy...
As promised, here are photos of the new fall store display. The team made these trees out of chicken wire, fabric and yarn.
One of the main display concepts were these fabric covered bricks. The display team made about fifty of them in the home office and the rest were stitched in India. The bricks serve as an interesting visual element that are stacked to make different structures and patchwork effects. They contrasted the bricks with lucite boxes used to house the vignettes. The large shapes in the window below are large medallion cutouts from felt and fleece. They were somewhat inspired by the effect of postage stamps. What do you think of the new display??? Go check it out in the stores!
The creativity exhibited in this music video is awesome. The entire video is animated t-shirt graphics. From French group Justice...
Just wanted to share a few photos I snapped in the display team's workshop. Doesn't that first picture look like the most girly hardware store you've ever seen? So out of all this madness comes our beautiful displays. Our fall store displays are being installed now, so I'll get you some photos and the inside scoop later this week!
The New York Times has made made an announcement. Craft is cool. Check out this article highlighting some of our favorite craft pioneers like Debbie Stoller and the folks at Etsy. Obviously, we're way ahead of the NYT, and the fancy designers officially making crafts fashionable. But I always like to see what the big dogs are making a fuss about. And it's nice to see some of the people we support getting such attention. So check it out.
Photo above is from the article, featuring a sewing class at Make Workshop in the Lower East Side in NY...
I checked out prada.com and browsed their production videos. It looks like a bunch of fashion scientists working in a lab! They all wear white coats and work like robots. I like the way they put the videos together and the text running along the bottom. It's worth checking out, Prada fan or not...
This is a cake. Yes, a cake. I found this while browsing on desingersblock. How amazing?
Want s'more behind the scenes info on our new catalog? Well, I've told you that the trend concept is Grunge Princess. This idea is how the inspiration for the artwork came about. All of the little drawings and color swatches are done in crayon and colored pencil. They are slightly juvenile looking to me, the way I might have doodled in my notebook the first time grunge was cool. Very Sassy magazine like. And the swatches of color also relate to the idea of patchwork and afghans. Then there are all the scrolling designs and flowers, to meet up with the "princess" part of the trend.
Our photo team took a bunch of cool photos with a Holga camera just for fun. The photos turned out really cool and we ended up using them to border a lot of the pages. These are all the negatives and the images with the blurred edges you see along the sides and in the backgrounds throughout the catalog.
The July catalog is coming! We called the trend concept "grunge princess" The video is already up on our site, so check it out. Our assistant creative director wrote this little note for you, to tell you all about the shoot...
ironically enough, it was a posting that our fpgirl put on the blog that led us to vintage vacations. (remember??)
that’s the name of the “camp” on the isle of wight – just off the coast of southern england – where we shot our grunge princess catalog...
helen, the woman who runs vintage vacations along with her husband, bought an airstream trailer from ebay and had it shipped to her.
and then vintage vacations was born.
situated on a plot of farmland (owned by farmer ted, I think) on the isle, the property now hosts 5 trailers which folks can rent out for friends/families/photo shoots.
we spent a lot of time photographing on vintage vacations’ property, in and around the airstreams which helen kitsched up herself with help from local flea markets/shops.
she and her uncle drove us out all around the island, too...full of hills of sheep, endless fields of flowers, beautiful rocky cliffs.
it’s an amazing place, for sure.
and no day was complete without helen’s tea and scones with clotted cream (absolutely delicious).
We get a million girls asking how we cast our models. Well here it is, from our team that holds the castings...
about every 2 or 3 months, we at free people host a model casting to check out new faces for our upcoming web and catalog shoots. we start by contacting modeling agencies - usually based in new york - and ask them to send girls to our showroom.
then, for anywhere from 4 to 6 hours on a given day, we'll sit and meet with whoever visits.
the girls (and once in a while, guys) bring their comp cards for us to view...these cards usually show 4 or 5 photos, along with the models' measurements, contact info for the agency who represents them, etc.
and then we'll flip through their portfolios...
it gives us a chance to see their versatility, how they've been styled in the past, what magazines they've appeared in...
and then we'll snap a few pix of our own, which we usually take back to philadelphia and look at with our bosses before deciding who we want to hire!
we get a lot of emails from folks who want to model for us...
we love your enthusiasm to work with free people! but, please know that we use only models from those agencies who we've contacted.
if you're interested in modeling, feel free to contact a local agency; or, look some up in the bigger cities - new york, los angeles, miami - and they can help you get started!
On Monday, we opened our newest store and the first store ever on the west coast! Visit us in Del Amo! The store design is completely new. Our designers planned this store to reflect the California aesthetic and lifestyle, making the space more airy and "modern". Even the store front is a new design.
The store front is inspired by a vintage kimono print. We'll be using this same print on other store fronts, but for this store we had a mural artist actually paint the print. I talked with one of the girls from our display team that was responsible for finding the mural artist. She seriously found him on muralist.com! The internet rules. Anyway, check out the store!
The last time I thought about scrunchies, I was watching Sex and the City. Carrie was criticizing Berger's latest book because he portrayed a fashionable New York woman wearing a scruchy. At the time, no true hip New Yorker would wear a scrunchy in public. We think it's time to bring back the scrunchy. Check out our Tanzania Scrunchy in four tribal prints. There's a little extra FP touch with multi colored yarn detail...
Have you seen this? French musician Camille's video for her song "Ta Douleur". Check out a little blurb from wikipedia...
"This album incorporated an avant-garde concept - a string, or thread ("le fil"), which was a drone that persisted throughout the entire course of the album. All of the songs in this album are based on the exploration of the voice, with only a double bass or double bass and keyboard as accompanying instruments."