Olivia Batchelder

Olivia Batchelder is an incredible artist and designer living in Laguna Beach. Her style is as laid back and artful as her incredible spirit. She is wearing one of her wonderful hand painted silk jackets in the photo above. Check out more of her fantastic work HERE.

An English Gentleman

This man is the definition of dapper!

Isabel

 I asked Isabel about her style and she responded, "I'm too old to think about what other people want me to look like. I just wear what I wish. I'm a woman and its a pleasure to be  a woman and to have fun with fashion, like with my blue hair."

"Personality and Jewelry Will Conquer Everything"- Zandra Rhodes

I few backs I met  Zandra Rhodes, one of my childhood heroes, at my book signing in London. I told her how my mom first introduced me to her work and how we were always on the look out for her when we would go shopping in San Diego. Last week Zandra invited us over for dinner at her place. We had a splendid time and got some great photos by the beach. When I asked Zandra about her style secrets she exclaimed, "Personality and jewelry will conquer everything." The Advanced Ladies and I wholeheartedly agree!

Like Mother, Like Daughter, Like Son

 I can't go to San Diego and not meet up with one  of my favorite ladies and stars of my book, Ljubica Bogic. I originally met Lubi while she was visiting her daughter, Ivana, in New York City and found out that she lived in my hometown of San Diego. I have since photographed her on almost every trip back to see my family. Lubi and Ivana have a wonderful bond and a shared passion for art and fashion. My mother and grandmother were a huge inspiration on my own style development. They allowed me the freedom to dress up and colorfully express myself at a young age. I asked Lubi to share a little  about how she has influenced her daughter's style. Check out her response below and a photo of my mom and I wearing coordinating colors!

Fashion and design are not my profession, nor a part of my formal education. As a scientist in molecular biology, with a specialization in molecular medicine, my professional life and interest evolve around creative work in the medical/scientific field, which has diverse and numerous limits/constraints. The scientist is a creative explorer; however, there are set rules and even stricter standards that must be followed—by the book. In fashion, as my hobby, it is quite the opposite: I feel fully FREE, and I am never judged by the critics in the field.  Nevertheless, my best critics in fashion are my husband, daughter and my dog….Ha! Ha! Thus, my interest in fashion as an art form allows my creative thinking to materialize into full freedom, or at least the illusion of a full freedom. In my mind there is no existing scale in fashion; at least not to the same extent as in science. How would I define my own style: simplicity, comfort, a clear-cut silhouette, monochromatic, colorful accessories and else!

     

 I guess my style has rubbed off on my daughter. I always supported her own creative thinking, yet I probably did shape her style to some extent.  She grew up into a sophisticated young person with her own unique style…..but fashion still continues to be our special bond that translates into the formation of an additional dimension of our friendship. As we go different ways in style, our fashion interests bond us in a distinctive way. We often exchange fashion opinions, build exceptional creative dialogs, and review the art of fashion. My daughter lives in NYC, and I am in San Diego. Very often she sends me a phone picture of a window display in the city, or a fashion piece worth the attention. Then, we usually build a discussion around our opinions and ideas of a piece. Often, she asks for my advice. If I do not like something, it does not mean that she won’t get it. However, our connection to fashion links us in an interesting way, and broadens our friendship.

Did I influence my daughter’s style? I do not know. Maybe to some extent I did. Most importantly, I encouraged her to develop her own creative style. I am happy that two of us can play and dance through life together at many different levels.As for my Borzoi…..Ha! Ha! I do include her in my most recent fashion expressions. This is my new puppy that I refer to as “my black and white design”………so I try to match her color patterns….. CRAZY? Maybe not, because BORZOI – “They are truly living and breathing works of art” (Joseph B. Thomas).My freedom of expression translates into my fashion style. At present, I take inspiration from the elegant, yet simple markings of my Borzoi. CRAZY? Maybe not, because “Only great minds can afford a simple style” (Stendhal).

[Mom and Me]

Lanvin Casts 62-Year-Old Tziporah Salamon in Their Fall 2012 Campaign

Now that Vogue.it has released the full Lanvin campaign, I am excited to reveal the fact that 62 year old Tziporah Salamon is one of the stars of this ground breaking ad. Tziporah is a well known personal stylist, fashion consultant, and performance artist living in New York. A favorite of Bill Cunningham's and one  of the stars of my book and upcoming documentary, this is Tziporah's first appearance in a major fashion ad campaign. I asked Tziporah how it feels to be recognized by a major fashion label and she told me," I am totally honored, jazzed, and thrilled. I am so grateful for this opportunity. In my early 20s I would have never realized that I could do something like this. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I began to see my beauty. By then I felt that there weren't many opportunities for older models.  How ironic is it that i am having my big break as a model in my 60s? This is a great day!"

Bravo to Lanvin for recognizing advanced beauty in this wonderful campaign!!!

Shocking Red

I met this stunning woman at a Jazz concert with my parents in San Diego. Her shocking red hair and long eyelashes reminded me of a mix between Ilona and Carol Burnett!

Lanvin Features 82-Year-Old Jacquie Tajah Murdock in Fall/Winter Campaign

I have been keeping this secret for a while, but now I can reveal that Advanced Style's Jacquie Tajah Murdock is one of the latest stars of Lanvin's Fall/Winter 2012 campaign! I helped cast Jacquie and another Advanced Style model in the campaign and can't wait to see the photos in print.

Jacquie has even more to celebrate with her 82nd birthday approaching next week. 

Jacquie told me,"This campaign is a dream come true. I grew up in Harlem always wanting to be a model, but in my day there were very little opportunities for women of color to work in fashion. At 18 I went from agent to agent looking for jobs, even as a hand model. I have finally made it and I will never give up. Hopefully some day I will get to Paris!"

One of the best things about starting Advanced Style has been seeing so many opportunities open up for these amazing older women. For the last three years,Lina Plioplyte and I have been filming the Advanced Style ladies for our upcoming documentary. I can't wait for you to see more of Jacquie's story including her first visit to the Lanvin casting. For more information about Jacquie CLICK HERE and watch the videos below:

Sally Thornton in San Diego

I am in San Diego for a little while to visit with my family and capture a bit of California's Advanced Style. Yesterday I caught up with Sally Thornton at Thornton Winery. I have admired Sally's fantastic style since I was a little kid. My mom and I would see her shopping at Neiman Marcus all the time and always enjoyed seeing her wonderful outfits. Although I am based out of New York City its great to see that there are people with Advanced Style in every city!

Hatitude

Every Advanced Style lady knows the transformative power of a great hat. Hats not only provide great frame for the face and protection from the sun, but they can shift your attitude as well. Debra Rapoport describes the  feeling she gets when she puts on a hat as "Hatitude". Everywhere she goes people comment on her wonderful creations. Check out the video below and if you are interested in any of Debra's marvelous hand made hats email her at Debrathenutritionista@gmail.com

Fire-Walking New York City

[Image: Combustible City by Common Room].

The New York-based group Common Room will soon be publishing and displaying in their space a series of walks around the city, walks that, in their words, "demonstrate, at four different spatial scales, the agency of combustion in shaping the city’s architecture, infrastructure and imaginary [sic]."

Devised and authored by Adam Bobbette, the tours will include sites and experiences such as walking "the perimeter of the great fire of 1835," exploring the "former sites of fire towers in Manhattan," and more:

Additionally, the tours recount the history of the fireproof building, the epistemological relationships between panoramas, hot air balloons and fire towers, the changing shape of water in the city, and the hyperreality of prevention. Together, these tours reveal another city nested within New York City, a city in plain view but rarely considered; this city is constituted by and through the management and care for its own inherent fragility, this city is named Combustible City.

I'm reminded of a recent book on my wishlist for the summer: Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World by Greg Bankoff, which describes itself as "the first truly global study of urban conflagration." Bankoff "shows how fire has shaped cities throughout the modern world, from Europe to the imperial colonies, major trade entrepôts, and non-European capitals, right up to such present-day megacities as Lagos and Jakarta. Urban fire may hinder commerce or even spur it; it may break down or reinforce barriers of race, class, and ethnicity; it may serve as a pretext for state violence or provide an opportunity for displays of state benevolence. As this volume demonstrates, the many and varied attempts to master, marginalize, or manipulate fire can turn a natural and human hazard into a highly useful social and political tool."

Bobbette's fire walks of New York City will be on display at Common Room from July 16-August 16, and I believe more information will be available soon on their website.

(Previously on BLDGBLOG: The Fires. Thanks to Carlos Solis for the tip!)

Summer in The City

 I saw this woman walking her dog near Madison Avenue and loved her fresh and fun summer look. The Advanced Style ladies know how to look their best for any season.

Fields of the Future

Peter Brewer, an ocean chemist at Monterey, is working on what Nature Climate Change calls an "underwater aquarium."

[Image: A diagram of Peter Brewer's "underwater aquarium," via Nature Climate Change].

It is, Brewer explains, "a 10m-long flume with an experimental chamber that sits on a patch of sea floor containing animals whose response to ocean acidification is to be tested."

Brewer's artificial chemical microclimate—a partially enclosed carbon dioxide bloom—is framed by an architecture of buoyant bricks and mixing fans. "At present, it is on the sea floor about 850m below the ocean surface and 25km offshore," he adds.

The use of this technically enhanced architectural device to test undersea creatures—with its M.C. Escher-like logic of an aquarium surrounded by water—brings to mind other experiments for spatially probing the limits of life, including modified-atmosphere aviaries or even the Duke Forest, a forest-within-the-forest dotted with carbon dioxide-emitting masts.

[The "Aspen FACE," or Northern Forest Ecosystem Experiment].

The Northern Forest Ecosystem Experiment in Wisconsin, pictured above, is another example of using spatial tools to frame and demarcate an augmented ecosystem.

Further, there is an interestingly asynchronous quality to these experimental terrains: in each case, they are technically enhanced landscapes for the production of a speculative future biome, these and other "fields of the future" simulating what regions of the earth might be like in 50-100 years' time.

Blogger Love: Superbytimai

A few months ago a wonderful French blogger and beauty expert named Timai asked me if she could get in touch with Advanced Style's Debra Rapoport to make a video. I love when other bloggers take an interest in these incredible ladies and couldn't wait to see what Timai would come up with. I finally met up with her in Paris for my book signing event and we immediately hit it off. While in Paris Timai had the chance to make another great video of Joyce. Check out her wonderful website HERE and the two videos of Joyce and Debra.

Joyce in Paris

Here are some shots I took of Joyce, at the Palais Royal, during my book signing event with L'Express Styles. At 80 years old, Joyce is an inspiration for us all to live life to the fullest. You can see more of Joyce in the video interview above.

In other exciting news, Advanced Style is featured in the August issue of O Magazine. It's so wonderful that people are finally taking notice of these incredible older women! With all this great press, the first edition of my book is already in its second printing, with more copies arriving early August. If you want to buy a copy, pre-orders are available through  Amazon. Thank you to everyone for all the amazing support.

It

Urban Target Complex National Monument

[Image: Yodaville, via Google Maps].

Yodaville is a fake city in the Arizona desert used for bombing runs by the U.S. Air Force. Writing for Air & Space Magazine back in 2009, Ed Darack wrote that, while tagging along on a training mission, he noticed "a small town in the distance—which, as we got closer, proved to have some pretty big buildings, some of them four stories high."

As towns go, this one is relatively new, having sprung up in 1999. But nobody lives there. And the buildings are all made of stacked shipping containers. Formally known as Urban Target Complex (R-2301-West), the Marines know it as “Yodaville” (named after the call sign of Major Floyd Usry, who first envisioned the complex).

As one instructor tells Darack, "The urban layout is actually very similar to the terrain in many villages in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The Urban Target Complex, or UTC, was soon "lit up with red tracer rounds and bright yellow and white rocket streaks," till it "looked like it was barely able to keep standing":

The artillery and mortars started firing, troops advanced toward the target complex, and aircraft of all types—carefully controlled by students on the mountain top—mounted one attack run after another. At one point so much smoke and dust filled the air above the “enemy” that nothing could be seen of the target—just one of the real-world problems the students had to learn to cope with that day.

In a recent article for the Tate, writer Matthew Flintham explores "the idea of landscape as an extension of the military imagination." Referring specifically to the UK, he adds that what he perceives as a contemporary "lack of artistic engagement with the activities of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is perhaps principally due to the relative segregation of defence personnel, land and airspace from the civil domain."

Flintham points out—again, referring to the UK—that "today’s MoD has its own vast training estate with numerous barracks and an enormous stock of housing, all of which are detached from public scrutiny. The public are prevented from accessing many areas of the defence estate for two reasons: the extreme danger of live weapons and hazardous activities (and related issues of potential litigation), and the restrictions on privileged, strategic or commercial information in the interests of national security." This has the effect that these sorts of military landscapes not only fall outside critical scrutiny—and also remain, with very few exceptions, all but invisible to architectural critique—but that their only real role in the public imagination is entirely speculative, often based solely on rumor and verging on conspiracy.

While Flintham thus calls for a more active artistic engagement with military landscapes, exploring what he calls the "military-pastoral complex," I would echo that with a related suggestion that spaces such as Yodaville belong on the architectural itinerary of today's design writers, critics, and students.

Given the mitigation of the very obvious problems Flintham himself points out—such as site contamination, unexploded ordnance, and national security leaks—it would be thrilling to see a new kind of "fortifications tour," one that might bring these sorts of facilities into the public experience.

[Image: Photo by Richard Misrach, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, from Bravo 20].

An interesting possibility for this sort of national refocusing on military landscapes comes from artists Richard and Myriam Misrach. The Misrachs have proposed a "Bravo 20 National Park"—that is, "turning the blasted range into a National Park of bombing," as the Center for Land Use Interpretation phrases it. "When the Navy’s use of Bravo 20 was up for Congressional review in 1999," CLUI continues, "Misrach made one more heroic, quixotic, and failed attempt to get his proposal seriously considered. Instead, the Navy has increased its use of Bravo 20, and the four other ranges around Fallon, and has been authorized to expand their terrestrial holdings in the area by over 100,000 acres."

So what, for instance, might something like a Yodaville National Park, or Urban Target Complex National Monument, look like? How would it be managed, touristed, explored, mapped, and understood? What sorts of trails and interpretive centers might it host? Alternatively, in much the same way that the Unabomber's cabin is currently on display at the Newseum in Washington D.C., could Yodaville somehow, someday, become part of a distributed collection of sites owned and operated by the Smithsonian, the National Building Museum, or, for that matter, UNESCO, in the latter case with Arizona's simulated battlegrounds joining Greek temples as world heritage sites?

In any case, bringing spaces of military simulation into the architectural discussion, and reading about Yodaville in, say, Architectural Record instead of—or in addition to—Air & Space Magazine, would help to demystify the many, otherwise off-limits, landscapes produced (and, of course, destroyed) by military activity. Better, this would reveal even the cloudiest of federal lands as spatial projects, nationally important places that—again, given declassification and appropriate environmental remediation—might hold unexpected insights for design practitioners, let alone for critics, the public, and national historians.

(Thanks to Mark Simpkins for the Tate link).

Summertime in Provincetown

I came across this stunning lady on my way to dinner with Ilona in Provincetown. Her look was perfect for a Summer evening on Cape Cod!

Happy 4th of July from Advanced Style

 I just got to Seattle after visiting Ilona in Provincetown this past weekend. Ilona and I decided to take some photos by the shore near her Summer apartment and art studio. She looked as wonderful and lively as ever in a re-purposed blue and white sundress and vintage sunglasses. Ilona and all the Advanced Style ladies want to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday weekend!