July 19, 2011

Bargain fashion tricks its way onto the catwalk

Filed under: Fashion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:56 pm

(video in Dutch) at 3:00, the audience finds out they’ve been fooled. Imagine this was Walmart or some other cheap brand.

Bargain clothing and household linnen brand Zeeman pulled a guerilla move that has the whole Dutch fashion world buzzing. At the recent Amsterdam International Fashion Week, they posed as a ‘serious’ fashion brand, Frank (my guess a play on words for ‘frank’ or ‘straight up’), and made it onto the catwalk.

The whole point was to show that fashion does not have to be expensive. However, I can tell you that although this is a valid point, Zeeman clothing often falls apart after a few washes. I have no qualms about their towels, and their stores are ghastly. But yes, they are cheap, although they had bucks for this one prank.

And the fashionistas blogs are pissed because they were fooled. Be sure to look at their faces in the video.

Apparently, while the work of independent designers is judged beforehand, no demands are made of companies which cough up the full fee of 15,000 euro for a show with lighting and make-up thrown in. “We’re just pleased to get the money,” [event director] Mr Maussen admits. “But maybe we should be a bit stricter in future.”

Money talks and cheapness walks.

(Link: rnw.nl)

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July 7, 2011

Lady Gaga goes Dutch design

Filed under: Design,Fashion,Music by Orangemaster @ 1:24 pm

Bart Hess, 27, from Eindhoven was asked to design a ‘slime dress’ (pic) for Lady Gaga. “I was given free reignrein. It had to have something to do with the album title ‘Born This Way’. The trick was to make sure that the colours were perfect and that it would also stay in place that way.” He went to New York to the photoshoot to slime Gaga into her dress.

Lady Gaga is also rumoured to have been asked to open an exhibition about her at the Groninger Museum, Groningen. Museum director Kees van Twist managed to get singer Bono of U2 to open the exhibition of work by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, so I bet he’s confident he can pull that trick off again.

(Link: ed.nl, Photo of Lady Gaga by TJ Sengel, some rights reserved.)

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May 31, 2011

Dutch beer ads with Playboy bunnies and famous guys

Filed under: Fashion,Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 10:39 am

Bavaria beer ads on Dutch television currently feature two commercials with Mickey Rourke (see one below) playing upon his reputation as a major drinker. Besides the usual reasons for putting Americans in Dutch commercials, including sexing up your product, appealing to the youth and trying to be more international, Bavaria does sell 65% of its beer abroad, so it has good reasons for using heavy hitters. Although not a huge brand in the Netherlands, Bavaria is apparently sold in more than 120 countries and was caught up in controversy during the World Cup in South Africa 2010 with its Dutch dresses. The dresses were seen as advertising another beer brand than the main sponsor and some good looking blondes wearing the dresses got arrested, a fantastic marketing moment in retrospect.

I guess I like the Rourke ones better for the simple reason that the Dutch don’t censor English swear words no matter what time the ads come on television.

Here’s a funny Dutch ad with Snoop Dogg and Dutch singer Marco Borsato (a family man Neil Diamond, schmaltzy but much more ‘modern’) that anyone outside the Netherlands couldn’t have seen. It’s about having some choice when choosing a mobile phone, from a few years back.

(Link: reclamewereld.blog.nl)

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May 6, 2011

Art student = 1, Louis Vuitton = the big goose egg, (O)

Filed under: Art,Design,Fashion by Orangemaster @ 10:42 am

The verdict is in: Amsterdam based Danish artist Nadia Plesner who attends the Rietveld academy in Amsterdam successfully defended herself against major French brand Louis Vuitton. Plesner used a depiction of an LV bag in a painting entitled Darfurnica for which Louis Vuitton tried to sue her for 5,000 euro a day for using their image.

“The court in The Hague ruled that Plesner’s right to freedom of expression through her work weighed more heavily than Louis Vuitton’s right to protect its property. The use of the bag in the painting is both functional and in proportion, the court said,” according to Dutchnews. Case closed.

(Link: dutchnews.nl, Photo: Nadia Plesner)

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April 29, 2011

Successful film has German tourists invading small town

Filed under: Dutch first,Fashion,Film,Music by Orangemaster @ 11:32 am

Last year we told you that white trash was the new cool and that it was contagious. The film New Kids Turbo is a huge hit in the Netherlands, but New Kids fever has hit Germany so hard that tourists are ‘invading’ Maaskaantje, Brabant the actual town where the film was shot. As of yesterday, 186 film theatres in Germany are featuring New Kids Turbo, an absolute Dutch record. The Dutch actors dubbed over their own film into German, and I agree, it adds more comedy to it.

In true Dutch style, people are seeing an increase in German kids and even families hanging out drinking beer and swearing like in the movie in Maaskantje, but the tourists are spending money locally, which probably makes up for it. The local tourist board is offering special hotel deals boasting a bike tour along the places the New Kids hang out: filling station and the snack bar.

The video above is the official German trailer and some of you will recognise the Dutch accent the kids have when they speak German.

I for one am enjoying the irony of two recent postings about how cool the Dutch are in Germany.

(Link: depers.nl)

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March 31, 2011

Miffy gets a collection of new designer dresses

Filed under: Comics,Fashion by Orangemaster @ 1:31 pm

The Dick Bruna House in Utrecht is celebrating its fifth anniversary on 1 April, offering free admission from 1 April to 3 April, as it is also National Museum Week. Dick Burna is the creator of Miffy (‘Nijntje’), one of the Netherlands’ biggest export products.

For the occasion Miffy will be dressed by top designers from the Netherlands and abroad, including Saskia van Drimmelen, Claes Iversen, Jan Taminiau, Britian’s Boudicca and Japan’s Minä Perhonen. The dress will be fitted on a 40 cm statue of Miffy and can be admired as of 1 April in the Dick Bruna House.

(Link: depers.nl, image: nijntje.nl)

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March 13, 2011

What Louis Vuitton does not want you to know about Darfur

Filed under: Art,Design,Fashion by Branko Collin @ 1:30 pm

French bag maker Louis Vuitton has gotten itself a so-called ex parte judgement against Amsterdam based Danish artist Nadia Plesner, forcing her to cough up 5000 euro per day or stop using images of Vuitton’s Audra Bag.

Plesner had incorporated an image of the bag in her painting Darfurnica. On January 27 judge Hensen denied her the chance to defend herself in court, so that by the time she returned from a trip to Denmark she had already racked up tens of thousands of euro in fines. She will contest the judgement (PDF).

Plesner has already received a judgement against her for a similar ‘offence’ in France. Under Dutch copyright law she is unlikely to be found against, but this was a case about community design law, and I don’t know if that law has free speech exceptions.

Vuitton’s actions seem an obvious attempt to control the conversation about them. You cannot really blame a wild animal for being a wild animal, the fault lies clearly at the feet of the state giving it the means.

An ex-parte order is a travesty of justice. In order to obtain one you just shop at the judge without the other party getting a chance to defend themselves.

Judge Hensen is slowly building a reputation for issuing strange verdicts in intellectual property cases. In 2007 he/she/it concluded that legal downloading is illegal downloading (the case revolved around the question whether rights associations could collect money for illegal copies, which required a definition of illegal copies).

(Link: Trendbeheer. Photo: Nadia Plesner.)

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February 19, 2011

Exhibition about Princess Máxima and her ten years in the Netherlands

Filed under: Fashion,General,Music by Branko Collin @ 4:51 pm

On 19 January 2001, Crown Prince William Alexander of the Netherlands asked Argentinian Máxima Zorreguieta to become his bride, and on March 30 of the same year, the engagement was announced to the public. To celebrate the ten years of Máxima’s presence in the Netherlands, the Loo Palace in Apeldoorn will hold an exhibition about the princess from 8 May to 4 September 2011.

The marriage was controversial as Zorreguieta is the daughter of a minister of the murderous Videla regime, and could only go through once it had become clear that her father would stay away from the wedding. At the wedding, Dutch bandeononist Carel Kraayenhof played Adios Nonino, written by tango composer Astor Piazzola in memory of his father.

(Photo by Wikimedia user Prolineserver, some rights reserved)

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February 8, 2011

Jan Boelo, a designer to watch out for

Filed under: Fashion by Orangemaster @ 10:53 am

From the small village of Heiligerlee, Groningen comes a young man, Jan Boelo Drenth, 22, who is in the process of hitting the Dutch fashion world by storm, straight out of school.

Just being good is not enough, you need connections. Jan Boelo had met Dutch icon Edgar Vos (who died a month ago), got inspired by his passion and left to study Fashion Design at the Utrecht School of Art. Already in secondary school he won an annual art competition organised for a few schools schools in the area with a dress he had designed. The rest is history in the making.

Jan Boelo started his own label in 2010 and has been dressing Dutch celebs such as Victoria Koblenko, Carice van Houten and Ellen ten Damme. His style mixes rock and gothic elements with sexy and original modern elements. All I really know is that we want to be able to say ‘I told you so’ when he’s hugely popular.

(Link: rtvnoord, Photo: janboelo.com)

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January 15, 2011

Pays Bas Cycle Chic, life from the slow lane

Filed under: Bicycles,Fashion by Branko Collin @ 2:40 pm

You’ve got your -izes on the one hand, and your Chics on the other. The former are websites that showcase how cities become liveable by making cycling easier, and the latter are websites that just show how good people can look on bicycles. The point seems moot—but there are countries where cycling is equated with danger, exertion, and an almost criminal lack of fashion sense, and their inhabitants crave a constant stream of examples of the good life.

So now there is a Dutch Cycle Chic—Pays-Bas Cycle Chic to be precise, because things just sound so much more ooh-la-la if you write them at least partially in French. Run by a lady called Marleen (now that name just sounds two-clogs-in-the-mud Dutch again—I suggest: Marlène), the blog started showing fashion on bikes in the Netherlands in October last year.

The -izes and the Chics started with Danish film maker Mikael Colville-Andersen who is running Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic. A local -ize is produced by Amsterdam-based Internet strategist Marc van Woudenberg, Amsterdamize.

(Photo: Pays Bas Cycle Chic/Marleen.)

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