“If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence”

How cool are these! 

If you've ever come across work by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat then you'll recognise the work on these fabulous dr martins shoes (they do boots too:) 

“If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence,” he said of his process. “It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.” Born on December 22, 1960 in Brooklyn, NY, 

Basquiat never finished high school but developed an appreciation for art as a youth, from his many visits to the Brooklyn Museum of Art with his mother. 

His early work consisted of spray painting buildings and trains in downtown New York alongside his friend Al Diaz. 

The artist’s tag was the now infamous pseudonym SAMO. After quickly rising to fame in the early 1980s, Basquiat was befriended by many celebrities and artists, including Andy Warhol, with whom he made several collaborative works. At only 27, his troubles with fame and drug addiction led to his tragic death from a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 in New York, NY. 

What a great way to bring back to life his work! Check em out at drmartens.com/uk

http://www.artnet.com/artists/jean-michel-basquiat/ 

Björk: The Gate

For the first release from her forthcoming new album, co-produced by Arca, Björk has teamed up with a super-troupe of contributors to create a hallucinogenic new video. Director Andrew Thomas Huang lends his tech-savvy hand to envision a kaleidoscopic world inhabited by the singer-songwriter, who is clad in an iridescent otherworldly garment designed by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele.

https://www.nowness.com/story/bjork-the-gate-alessandro-michele-andrew-thomas-huang-james-merry

Kit Miles

ABOUT THE FOUNDER

After completing his MA in textile design at the Royal College of Art, Kit Miles formed his own studio, steeped in the values of quality, exquisite draughtsmanship and a futuristic, often surprising use of scale colour and imagery.

DRAUGHTSMANSHIP

One of the most important values at Kit Miles is excellence in quality and draughtsmanship in each and every design.

The studios ability to render fine and at times surrealist imagery have enabled Miles to form a unique language of design, under the core ethos that freedom to evolve and re-form is ever present in the application of marks onto paper.

The process of hand drawing enables the studio to render an imaginative and ‘super-real’ world into a reality, revealing a glimpse into the ever expanding printed universe of dynamic shapes and images.

http://kitmiles.co.uk

Tibor Reich: Nature Designs In Fabric

Tibor Reich, who was born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1916, escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna for Leeds in 1937, becoming a pioneering interior designer of 1950s and 60s Britain. It was a Reich designed woollen fabric chosen by a young Queen Elizabeth as her wedding present in 1947, and in a career that lasted three decades, his vibrant, deeply textured designs would decorate the interiors of royal palaces, embassies, 10 Downing Street and even the first Concorde.


http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/resources/textilefashion/

Jo Malone & Marthe Armitage

Most people, by the time they reach their 70s, have begun to wind down – at least when it comes to work. But for artist and printmaker Marthe Armitage, her eighth decade was when things really started to get going career-wise. Marthe has been producing her exquisite scenic wallpapers since the 1950s, but it has only been over the past 12 years or so that they’ve truly taken off.

Now in her 80s, she is still designing and printing papers from her riverside home in Chiswick – including a new, bespoke pattern for the fragrance house Jo Malone – and is finally enjoying the recognition her work so richly deserves.

Watch Marthe on Youtube 

Ai Weiwei

Celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has launched an enormous exhibition of fantastical paper figures, but rather than showing at one of the cities iconic art spaces, his giant creatures are on display across the historic Le Bon Marché department store, Paris.

http://aiweiwei.com

Abstract

Abstract_ is a brand which creates customized fashion. Customers are involved in the design process by generating patterns from their own personal stories. 

The web design tool analyzes what the customer writes and how it is written and transforms this data into a visual representation of the abstract. 

We will transform the customer’s personal pattern into a textile and a unique piece of garment.

Interaction: Bjørn Karmann. Fashion: Julie Eriksen Textile: Kristine Boesen

Mister Finch

Little curled up velveteen rabbits, wide-eyed owls, soft hedgehogs and fairytale mushrooms all play a part in Mr. Finch's imaginative story-world. The range of expression and skilled handiwork is evident in all of Mr. Finch's pieces, giving an uncanny sense that these creatures were once alive. 

http://www.mister-finch.com

The Next Black: A Film About The Future of Clothing

With the objective of anticipating future washing needs and contributing to making the clothing industry more sustainable, ‘The Next Black’ is a 45-minute documentary that explores the future of clothing, produced by home appliance manufacturer AEG together with production company House of Radon. Some of the most innovative companies express their opinions on clothing and its future whilst answering questions such as: Will the mass consumption of clothing continue to escalate? Or will we return to creating quality and caring about what we wear? Will the future be centered around smart clothing and new technologies? Or will we find innovation within organic and traditional methods?

The progressive people that are answering these questions include Rick Ridgeway, environmentalist, mountaineer and Vice President of Environmental Initiatives at Patagonia one of the most sustainable companies in the fashion industry,Nancy Tilbury, co-founder and director of Studio XO, a company that specializes in the area where fashion meets technology, Matt Hymers, project manager of Team Elite System, one of adidas’ latest inventions (who demonstrates the system of woven sensors in the shirt that send real-time data of the players’ performance), Suzanne Lee, the founder of Biocouture Ltd, which works with materials grown from living organisms and lastly, Sophie Mather, Innovation Director of the Yeh Group which has pioneered a new way to dye clothes using zero water.

Natsai Audrey Chieza

Here's a new approach to pattern-making from Zimbabwe-born London designer Natsai Audrey Chieza one that uses specially cultured herb soil bacteria. Chieza has discovered how some bacteria, when extracted from herbs like sage, bloom into rich, unique colours when they are cultured. 

Applying these to fabrics, a pattern is created that clings to the individual microbes. Chieza is now exploring whether or not it's possible to use bacteria for creating programmable patterns for fashion brands.

Natsai Audrey Chieza

Christa van der Meer

Christa van der Meer is a Dutch fashion designer and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Experiencing with different mediums she now works on projects to find ways to connect her portrait drawings to her fashion designs. Her graduation collection she portraits the fact that drawing is essential for designing. The drawings form the base of her fashion collections and is an instrument to create a new perspective both visually and emotionally.
Christa van der Meer 

BOLON

Swedish carpet manufacturer BOLON has announced the launch of its new Silence collection with a video by Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman. Titled ‘The Contradiction of Silence’, the video tastefully combines the rhythms of BOLON’s carpet looms with the coordinated movements of the dancers, creating a poetic metaphor of ‘woven’ dance and ‘dancing’ machines.
http://www.bolon.com

Loes Veenstra

For 50-odd years Loes Veenstra sat in her street in Rotterdam, needles clicking away. In total she has made 556 hand-knitted jumpers but not one has been worn…until now by a flash-mob...




The flash-mob and accompanying book was recognised with a Dutch Design Award in October 2013. The last part of the project will see Veenstra's jumpers finally fulfil their purpose, as they are sold in an auction in Rotterdam in the new year.

Elisa Strozyk

"The world around us is becoming increasingly immaterial. We are now used to write emails instead of letters, to pay online, to download music and touch virtual buttons on touch screens. We live in a society of images, a visual culture full of colours, advertisements, television and the internet. There is not much left to feel. Giving importance to surfaces that are desirable to touch can reconnect us with the material world and enhance the emotional value of an object. 
'Wooden Textiles' convey a new tactile experience. We are used to experience wood as a hard material; we know the feeling of walking across wooden floors, to touch a wooden tabletop or to feel the bark of a tree. But we usually don't experience a wooden surface which can be manipulated by touch." Elisa Strozyk

www.elisastrozyk.de/seite/woodtex/woodentextiles.html

Botanical Layers is the creative brainchild of Masha Reva and Syndicate. The collection juxtapositions immersion in the rapid pace of contemporary life, gadgets and social networks with a yearning for our natural environment, explored as a metaphorical botanical garden of Photoshop layers and loading bars. Check out their websites for more – Mesha Reva and Syndicate. 

Dash Magazine

DASH Magazine is the London-based illustrated magazine on fashion and fashion art. Published biannually and distributed worldwide, DASH is aimed at opinion formers of all genders with an interest in fashion and art-related fields. It is its strong focus on fashion illustration. DASH Magazine provides seasonal coverage as well as a launch platform for emerging talent from the fields of illustration, photography, the arts and journalism to showcase, and thus gain exposure, for their work.

Patternbank

Patternbank aims to keep you up to speed with the rapidly evolving world of print, pattern and apparel graphics.   

Carnovsky, aka the artist/designer' duo Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla, are famous for their RGB love and exploration of the ''surface’s deepness''.  By overlapping three different images, each one in a primary color – in RED, GREEN and BLUE, the blend of lines, shapes and colors is unexpectedly beautiful and surrealistic. The final result of this colorful mix resembles an experience that is so alive that it is akin to watching a 3D picture with special 3D glasses, where reality blends with fantasy. They recently decided to translate their RGB principles from interior to fashion producing a limited edition of silk scarves, which are digitally printed, numbered and signed.  

CARNOVSKY

Andrew Huang

Andrew Huang is a Los Angeles based commercial and music video director who graduated with a degree in Fine Art and Animation from the University of Southern California. After his dark sci-fi short film called ''Doll Face'' which went viral on YouTube, numerous films, and awards followed and his worked has been featured at Cannes Emerging Filmmaker Showcase, SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theater, the Annecy International Film Festival, MOCA Taipei, ZKM Media Museum, as well as the latest 2012 Slamdance Film Festival where he proudly won the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short category with his 'SOLIPSIST film which according to the jury won this category ''for its unique blend of live action footage of the human body, puppetry and computer animation that creates a colourful and insightful fantasy world.'' SOLIPSIST is a three part psychedelic fantasy short film about otherworldly beings whose minds and bodies converge into one entity. Filled with elaborate costumes by Lindsey Mortensen, visual effects, and underwater puppets, the film is a non-narrative experience designed to transport viewers through a hypnotic, dream-like journey...FULL Screen recommended!

SOLIPSIST from Andrew Huang on Vimeo.

Melanie Bowles

Melanie Bowles is a London based textile designer working in the field of digital textile design. Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design and author of Digital Textile Design publisher Laurence King.

Melanie’s work explores new concepts for digital textile design developing systems for emotional durable and sustainable design through bespoke digital print.

A practicing designer and researcher and member of TED Textile Environmental Design, TFRC,Textile Futures Research Center and The Slow Textile Group.