Steven Alan Spring/Summer ’11

When I lived in New York, Steven Alan and A.P.C. became two of my favorite stores to browse– both for their store design and because I’m just a sucker for their understated looks that generally skew either tomboyish or retro ladylike. (Plus who can resist the cute undies Steven Alan always hangs in the window?)

Here, three favorite looks from Steven Alan’s spring/summer lookbook.

Outstanding in the Field

What happens when you combine the concepts of a pop-up shop and a food truck? A pop-up dinner party! Pop-up shops and food trucks are already fun– isn’t anything that is only limitedly available and fleeting more exciting than their permanent counterparts?– and the idea of a pop-up dinner party in the middle of an outdoor location is enough to make me giddy.

That’s exactly what Outstanding in the Field does. They travel around the country with their bus and put on events in gorgeous locations, featuring both local ingredients and local talent, pulling in well-known chefs of the region in each respective area they visit.

I also love that they use long tables– there’s something so much more exciting to me about one long table in place of a bunch of round 8-person tables. And it looks awesome in photos!

Events are open to anyone, all you have to do is buy a ticket (fairly well in advance, they sell out!). Also, isn’t their name brilliant? One of my favorite double meanings in a name ever…

The Pantone Diet (and Public Art Project)

What you’re looking at above are Pantone matches to the colors of the fruits and vegetables that Tattfoo Tan (not Tattoo Fan, which is what you thought if you’re like me, and I thought it was a pretty cool moniker) brings home from his frequent trips to the Union Square Greenmarket in New York.

Tan, a Malaysian-born artist living in New York, is interested in using art to address social issues, and for this project, called “Nature Matching” (The Pantone Diet was my name… I just love anything Pantone so I thought it was catchy), he created a color-coding system to visually show people the colors they should be eating everyday. He put the Pantone squares together in murals that are being hung publicly in places with high volumes of walking traffic.

Another piece of this project were the fruit stickers he created with the clear patch showing the color of the fruit (image above in banner), which he used as guerilla art, going around to produce sections and sticking them on fruits and veggies in addition to the FDA/brand stickers. I also learned this highly useful piece of information on his site about the normal stickers you see on fruit:

“Did you realize there are these numbers on the fruit labels? What did they means? Well, you just need to look at the first number. Remember (9) is good, which menas it is organic. While is (8) means the fruits is Genetic Modify. (4) is bad, it is conventionally grown. That means with synthetic fertilizer and pesticide.”

Genetically modified anything freaks me out so I’m glad to know to avoid anything starting with 8!

I love this concept and the use of public art to encourage healthy eating habits, and for me anything visual is easier to learn and remember, so I think this “Pantone Diet” could go big (don’t you think he should re-name it that?)!

Hopefully it will inspire people to fill their plates with pretty produce (and hopefully they won’t notice that a lot of these colors look a lot like French fry and chicken nugget colors!).

The City of Lights at Night

This video, by Luke Shepard, combines two of my favorite things: stop-motion animation and Paris. Composed from 2000 photos of Paris at night and set to a song by the XX (why is their music so sexy??), the video takes you on a mesmerizing journey around the city.

I also loved the answers (below) Shepard gave in this interview with one of National Geographic’s blogs– they gave the video an added endearing, personal quality, knowing that the video was inspired by his love of exploring the city at night. And it made me want to start going on long bike rides through San Francisco at night just to discover a new dimension to the city.

Connect with Wonderlust!

Hi Wonderlust Friends,

I just wanted to remind you to follow Wonderlust on Twitter and Facebook if you’re not already! Here’s why:

1) I come across a ton of stuff I would love to post on Wonderlust but I just don’t have time or it’s just not quite right for the blog, and I use Twitter to share all those other things.

2) I want to hear from you! Become a fan on facebook and use the wall to give me feedback on what you do and don’t like, or what you’d like more of.

3) Receive updates when new posts go up, right in your Facebook news feed.

You can click the links at the very top of the page to get to the Wonderlust pages on Twitter and Facebook.

If you’re curious, here’s a few examples of links I’ve posted recently on Twitter:

+60 bizarre and creative business cards: http://bit.ly/ekZrAX

+Love this pavement-crack street art! http://bit.ly/h19iLv

+Reading the first date stories in the comments on this post by @joannagoddard is pretty entertaining/cute! http://bit.ly/hcWEU1

+Google dissects its own management style/effectiveness, NYT reports on the surprising results: http://tiny.cc/a7o4j

Recently On Editor’s Chair

For more visual inspiration, click over to Editor’s Chair.

The Lion

This is by no means new news, as it opened almost a year ago, but I still love the design of The Lion in New York and had to share. Owned by John de Lucie of the Waverley Inn and Mark Amadei of Delicatessen, The Lion was born for success.

Meg Sharpe, a former employee of Kelly Wearstler, designed the English hunting estate-meets-Paris salon-meets-Gentleman’s Club interiors, which are finished off with works including a Basquiat (“on loan from a friend”), a David LaChapelle portrait of Andy Warhol, prints of old “New York’s Most Wanted” photos, and antique oil portraits.

I also love this story about The Lion, via New York Social Diary:

“The space in its previous incarnation was a restaurant called Village. In the early 1960s it was a gay bar called … The Lion. It had a cabaret show in those days, and once the club’s hatcheck girl won the amateur night contest. The prize was a two week booking at … The Lion. That little girl was called Barbra Streisand.”

Middle Brother

I haven’t done a “listening to” update in a really long time, I’m not exactly sure why that is, but today I felt like I definitely needed share this gem of a band: Middle Brother. Middle Brother is made up of the three frontmen of indie-folk favorites Delta Spirit, Deer Tick, and Dawes– Matthew Vasquez, John McCauley, and Taylor Goldsmith, respectively– who trade off roles throughout the album.

I’d been in a phase of more electronic indie stuff for a while, and in need of something different, I discovered these guys, who immediately tapped into my deep-seated love of rock tinged with folk (what can I say, I’m from the South) and anything resembling Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, or Neil Young (all of whom they proclaim their love for). In addition to loving their sound, their lyrics are some of the best I’ve heard in a while– there are currently more than a couple clever lines rolling around in my head.

I loved this bit from a very well-written piece on NPR about them:

“There’s a singer-songwriter intimacy in many of the songs on Middle Brother, as though band members John McCauley, Taylor Goldsmith and Matthew Vasquez were sharing secrets and anecdotes and decided to set them to music. All three men belong to bands — Deer Tick, Dawes and Delta Spirit — that trade on folk, blues and country traditions; even their up-tempo songs are less rave-up rockers than hand-clapping foot-stompers.

This being a group composed of thoughtful guys with guitars, there’s a certain amount of bad behavior to be chronicled — bouts of drunkenness, hangovers, one-night stands and a general air of doomstruck melancholy. Sometimes it’s maudlin, but more often, as in Matthew Vasquez’s song “Theater,” it can describe dreams with a precision that matches the sharp snap of the drum beat.”

I’ve posted these live videos here since videos were the only embed-able material I could find, but the quality isn’t that great and their sound is pretty different live vs. on the album (more acoustic, softer, and refined on the album), so I’d recommend listening to the streaming clips here. I’m pretty sure you’ll want to download it… and then download the albums of all of their respective bands!

PS- SF people, they are playing here on Sunday! Everyone else, check their tour dates, they’re out and about after SXSW!

Modern Love

Yesterday I was telling my roommate the story of my parents’ engagement, which involves a telegram, and I couldn’t stop thinking afterward how much the world has changed since then.

Not so long ago, my parents got engaged via telegram, the only method of communication available to them, and in the dating world of today we are all constantly connected to the ones we love (or the ones we met Saturday night, or the ones we wished love us) via Facebook, texting, email, Twitter, etc. Add to that the ever-present potential to find love from your couch while surfing online dating sites, and the array of forms of modern dating becomes potentially overwhelming.

Chas, via the above personal ad (for lack of a better term, though I’m sure Urban Dictionary will coin one soon), has created another potential route to love, one that also capitalizes on modern technology and communication, but adds crowd-sourcing to the equation. Ready to settle down and with some extra cash to help him do it, Chas has set up a website describing himself and offering $10k to whomever introduces him to his future wife.

It’s just so clever. Sure, it might seem crass to offer money to find a wife, but if that is what will motivate the crowds to source a wife for him, and the point is that he’s ready for love but can’t seem to find it, isn’t it also quite romantic? All this work in the quest for the right woman?

I’ll admit, there’s a chance I’m also just swayed to argue on behalf of this guy’s efforts because of how well the website was done, because this guy executed the same concept in a very different way and the whole thing really grosses me out! But on Chas’s site, the storytelling style of the photography is excellent, the site itself is very clean and cool, and the copy is amazingly endearing considering what it is. Simple, witty, charming, and refreshingly not overwrought. Even the name of the site is funny.

I did a little investigating on this guy, and he is actually an advertising exec, which makes perfect sense, since he created such an impressive advertisement for himself! Surely if he doesn’t find love, he’ll at least get a lot of freelance work out of this!

And one final note, his last name is McFeely. So I’m hoping if this thing goes viral, he’ll be the new McDreamy/McSteamy… First there were the hunky guys on Grey’s Anatomy, now there’s the clever ad exec committed to finding love. Could the name McFeely be any more perfect for his mission?

Spain’s Micro-Coasts

I love the look and idea of these “microcoasts” along the rocky Mediterranean shores of Vinaros, Spain. How fun if one day all of a sudden you were able to take advantage of a nearby beautiful natural asset that had hitherto been mostly unusable?

Apparently the microcoasts were an instant hit, as locals and weekenders headed to the “beach” for sunbathing and picnicking. I know I’d be there all the time if I’d always lived in a town with an amazing shoreline that had previously been too rocky to sit around and enjoy!

I also think it’s cool that these were funded by the Vinaros City Council. Perhaps not the most practical use of funds, but why not an occasional project purely meant for the enjoyment of a local asset? It doesn’t hurt that it’s incredibly well-designed and is also probably drawing tourist dollars as people come to check them out. Brilliant!

Designed by Guallart Architects.