Aanteni – Rodarte Spring 2010
Directed by Todd Cole
Featuring Guinevere van Seenus
Score by No Age

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Last week, amidst the hullabaloo of New York Fashion Week, The Block team threw a party to celebrate the Fame Issue, and to show off the runway rag dolls Andrew Yang made for our Spring Fashion Preview story. All nine and a half dolls (one is a conjoined twin) hung like paintings on the white walls of the envoy enterprises’ gallery space in the Lower East Side, while hundreds of adoring fans, editors, and bloggers filed by – absinthe in hand – ogling the miniature Lanvin, Rick Owens, Marc Jacobs, and more. Discussions swirled over which doll was the favourite, but all agreed the party was a smashing success.

The Block’s Editor-in-Chief caught up with the dolls’ creator the day after the party to ask him about the process of making these one-of-a-kind beauties…

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Glassy-eyed beauties rolling around in the sheets. Drugs. Money. Religious iconography. No, this isn’t the lost film of Roman Polanski: it’s the amazing little short that artist Ryan F. Kennedy made for The Block’s Issue 20 launch party in New York. The film is called Pethidine, which any of the dolls captured by Kennedy could tell you is the scientific name for Demerol. Warning: watching this video may cause drowsiness and euphoria.

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There’s something about the joyful psychedelia of Animal Collective that gets us all wide-eyed and giddy (and maybe a little dry-mouthed, but that’s a minor side effect). So you can only imagine how excited we are to let the band guide us through a totally immersive sensory experience at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

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Gambling is an unattractive vice. But looking dapper and smart could surely be your redeeming quality, and Adam Kimmel’s fall 2010 menswear collection can help you do just that.

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We’ll miss you, Alexander McQueen.

The ethereal Kate Moss hologram from Alexander McQueen’s 2006 show

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At first glance, you probably think this Hermès Kelly bag is a beautiful use of alligator hide. But you’re dead wrong.

This bag is made of paper.

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Opposites: fascination and repulsion, physical and emotional, personal and mythical. Exhibiting at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal are a trio of Canadian artists – Marcel Dzama, Etienne Zack, and Luanne Martineau – whose latest works explore complex human dichotomies.

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Issue 20 of The Block features a photo shoot by ioulex of costumes designed by Christian Joy, or CJ (as she’d rather be called). The interview accompanying the shoot covers a lot of ground, from CJ’s past in fashion retail to her ascent to indie fashion It Girl while costuming the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O. We talked so much, in fact, that we couldn’t include everything in the magazine.

These are the outtakes.

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Meet CFCF, AKA Mike Silver. By now you may have heard his lush disco-textured debut album Continent; if not, you’re missing out on a lot of time you could be spending lying on your duvet thinking about twinkling stars, raindrops sliding down panes of glass, and people running slow-mo through sun-dappled meadows. (It’s dreamy stuff.) But before CFCF was making his spacey, atmospheric electronic music, the 21-year-old Montrealer was remixing other people (including Sally Shapiro, The Presets, HEALTH, The Teenagers, and Hearts Revolution). That’s why, for our Fame Issue, The Block asked CFCF to create a custom mix tape. Check it out, and just try to keep a grip on reality.

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