Improv Everywhere is devoted to “causing scenes of chaos and joy in public places”. Over the years, they have invited anyone-who-wants-to to participate in their missions which have included Cell-Phone Symphonies to No Pants Subway Rides. In the latest, they instructed their agents to appear at Coney Island dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns bought at thrift stores or other cheap venues.
“We covered a mile-long stretch of beach with a diverse group of people of all ages (from babies to sixty-somethings) laying out, playing games, and swimming in the ocean, all in formal wear.”
We find this video curiously liberating to watch. (It totally changes the look and vibe of black tie in the best, most unexpected way possible..).
We have a whole list of things that fall under the heading of “Practical but Ugly”, and wonder why it can be so hard to find good-looking, affordable versions of certain everyday items…dish racks, for example, or file cabinets. USB Flash drives are one of those handy items whose ugliness we’ve marveled at and put up with because we need them. Then we saw LaCie’s wonderful flash drives shaped like a key, and thought “want one!” Like many well-designed objects, they cost more than the norm – roughly $10 bucks more by our figuring. And since we’re hard-pressed to hack our own usb flash drive design, we just might treat ourselves to one…
For sure, we will buy them to give as unexpected little gifts to give..say to the host of a dinner party, or a friend we want to thank…about $18 for 4 gigabytes, $27 for 8…and up, in round, square or triangularheads. (The connectors come with a cover.)
Whenever we need a business card to introduce ‘the improvised life’ or ourselves (with address and phone), we peel off a printed-at-our-local-copy-shop sticker and stick it onto…something. Pamela Hovland dreamed up the idea one day when we were trying to figure out an alt-business card that would say what ‘the improvised life’ is in a flash, and get people curious enough to go to the site. We began to imagine things that would be cool made into cards, like the oddly-printed discards and tests that printers routinely put in the recycling bin, or cereal boxes…or leather, bits of fabric, thin sheets of metal, used subway cards. Our favorite so far is the ribbon we bought at Hyman Hendler in the garment district, that we originally bought to make the ribbon on the Surprise Box. read more…
For the yearly fashion show given by Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, Isabel Cohen wired together hundreds of metal washers to make the halter top for her floor-length attic insulation skirt (inspired by jellyfish tentacles). It was her answer to the show’s challenging theme: “Create an outfit made of anything but fabric”.
The show is the mastermind of Nancy Fried, the school’s sculpture teacher, who wanted a project that would really engage her twelve students. Now in its seventh year, it has become the event-of-the-year at Fieldson, with many students – and even some teachers – taking on the challenge to create outfits out of dot-candy papers, beads, condoms, fake and real money, Legos, Tic Tacs…
Everyone should have a teacher like Fried who encourages them to go way beyond the expected…
We also love Anne Kunstler’s jelly bean outfit… read more…
Makeshift is a wonderfully expressive term for “making a shift”: shifting your thinking to come up with a creative solution that accomplishes the task at hand in a unexpected way. When you find you don’t have something you need, you improvise a substitute or “shift” what you are making to accommodate it. Makeshift is one of our favorite words.
So, of course, we LOVE the blog Makeshift, which documents the daring, ambitious art-and-research project of Natalie Purschwitz. For an entire year starting September 1, 2009, she’s wearing ONLY things she has made herself: clothes, socks, shoes, underwear, coats, jackets, hats, bathing suits, accessories, and…
“….anything else I might need to protect my body from the elements while trying to lead a fulfilling life. It will be an investigation into the relationships between ‘clothing’, ‘making’ and ‘living’.”
Even her shoes! We can’t begin to imagine the amount of work and thought that goes into each day’s outfit but we love seeing the results: everyday a new picture of her standing there forthrightly in her new outfit. We also love seeing the evolution of ideas, some of which Purschwitz writes about…like these amazing yellow shoes, which evolved out of a technique for making Christmas ornaments: read more…
“ I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing it. Over the years that have passed since then, it has become clear that I was preparing my travelling shoes. I’ve been around the world in them a dozen times.”
We love that he did it not knowing why, and gradually the answer was revealed. There’s a man who listens to himself and the signs around him…
Rheingold published a great How To of his technique which he learned from Jessica “the mother-goddess of the paint your shoe anarchult”. He gives the thinking behind shoe-painting, which is helpful when improvising, and also gives suggestions for How To Paint If You Can’t Draw, which we appreciate. For inspiration, check out his Gallery of Painted Shoes and his Flickr series of his painted shoes in venues all over the world…
We find ourselves inadvertently collecting images of fabulous dresses made out of unlikely materials, like this beauty made by Cristina Liedtke from discarded peanut M&M wrappers. It’s on display at TerraCycle’sGreen Up Shop, a pop-up shop set up in empty retail space in Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
“To create the gown, more than 1,800 flowers were individually cut and sewn from 600 Peanut M&Mwrappers, a time-consuming process that took over 100 hours of labor. (Five yards of silk charmeuse and silk shantung were used for the lining.)
Liedtke’s wearable artwork depicts flowers in bloom: The top of the dress displays the initial budding, while the middle portrays a ‘landscape of blooming vibrant poppies,’ according to the designer. ‘Finally, the bottom of the dress expresses a collage of fully bloomed mature flowers,’ she adds.
Terracycle is a company who makes useful products out of garbage, like an Oreo Wrapper Kite and planters made out of crushed computers and fax machines. They package the products in “garbage” as well: used/recycled bottles, boxes etc. Terracycle seems to have figured out ways of recycling that have stymied city governments.
Our friend Fern Berman told us how she’d gone into a sunglass store and started trying on glasses; like everybody, her mind got boggled by the selection. So she devised a way to get advice from her spouse, Faith Middleton who was in another state preparing to host one of her in-depth interviews on public radio. With each new possible candidate Fern tried on, she took a picture of herself with her mobile phone and emailed it to Faith at the studio. Every few minutes an email would interrupt Faith with the latest emailed photo of Fern in a different pair of glasses. “No, honey” those aren’t quite right…”Naahhh”….”Keep trying”….Faith emailed back several times. Fern’s strategy of instant-eyeglass-store-photo-consult-with-a-trusted-advisor seemed to be working until it was air-time and Faith couldn’t be interrupted for the next two hours; Fern was left on her own… read more…
Oven mitts are an example of a good idea with serious design flaws: shaped like a giant mitten, they are unwieldy and stiff, and don’t really allow for grasping hot things securely with one hand. But it never occurred to us to envision an alternative, other than ordinary pot holders. That is, until we got an email from Stephen Peters who wrote:
“Why do people use oven mitts when there are perfectly good inexpensive welding gloves with FOUR fingers per hand available?”
…my wife uses welding gloves I gave her, and loves them… The simple thin leather or goatskin style work fine. “
Stephen is an electrical field service technician who travels around Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Virginias and the Carolinas installing and repairing battery backup systems…and who obviously thinks outside-the-box.
We poked around welding glove possibilities. On the whole, they are way more stylish than oven mitts, and make grasping searing-hot pots and casseroles, or odd pieces like baking stones oven racks, MUCH easier. Stephen recommends read more…
Vicki Beth Lynn has an eye for jewelry. She’s bought and sold lots of it over the years, especially the work of interesting designers from past and present. She knows dealers and jewelry-makers in Paris and London, and sells regularly to television shows and movies. (She also runs a multi-media production company but that is another story…)
Vicki and I were walking around Manhattan the other day when she stopped and pointed to a huge brass chain lying on the street, securing a bike to a post. “Look, Sal.” she said,”Wouldn’t that make a great necklace?”
And I looked and saw something I’d never have noticed before (but do now, thanks to Vicki): possibilities for jewelry in all sorts of everyday things, even in the street. Translate the look of that bike chain to a wearable version (real bike chains are HEAVY), and you’d have a dramatic and startling necklace…
…there are teachers all around us, sharing what they know…
Designer and contributor-of-brilliant-ideas Pamela Hovland recently improvised wonderful wrist-warmers out of an old pair of wool socks. Here’s how this inspired bit of repurposing came about, in her own words and photos:
“I often wear wrist warmers while I’m working away at my computer as my hands are cold from the fall to the spring. I first saw them in northern Sweden; someone was selling hand-knit versions at an artisan’s market in a remote village. I remember that I didn’t know what they were; I was simply attracted to the colors and patterns. Once I figured it out, however, I bought a pair knit from beautiful charcoal grey and burnt orange wool and ended up wearing them nearly every day last winter.
A few months ago I washed some beautiful (and expensive) wool socks in the washing machine by mistake, and as a result, they shrunk. As I couldn’t bear to throw them out, it occurred to me that perhaps I could repurpose them somehow. read more…
After reading yesterday’s post ‘the safety pin (and other everyday object) improvisations’, Lydia Wills sent me photos from fashion designer Junya Watanabe’s 2005 collection, where he used zippers and snaps in the most beautiful way: layers of gold zippers become something totally other. Look closely and you’ll see that, aside from the gold plating, these are essentially standard-issue 8-or-so-inch zippers with their fabric siding in a gorgeous color – lots of them – stitched snugly side-by-side and overlapping. One of the most dazzling permutations of this playing-about with zippers is this sensational collar… read more…
Every great invention, from the Murphy bed to the bicycle, started as an improvisation: an elegant solution to something someone needed or just plain wanted. But an improvisation never stops there. The improvised invention gets improvised upon, and that improvisation gets improvised upon, and so on, and so on. Viewing the everyday objects around us as improvisations makes for endless inspiration.
Take the safety pin, the ultimate emergency tool that holds up hems without thread and makes possible all manner of instant repairs. read more…
After reading Anni Albers ‘Common Object’ Jewelry, Lydia Wills wrote an inspiring email that is a perfect, if inadvertent, post for ‘the improvised life’. It’s like a bedtime story for grown-ups (with an amazing ending in bold.)
“The lesson of Anni Albers’ jewelry is her ability to look at everyday objects and see just how they can be re-imagined on the body, how their shape and curve and sheen will look when worn. A simple object, not only seen in a new way, but taken a step farther. It’s only improvisation when it goes from the mind’s eye , passing through your hands, and out into the world.
This is exactly the lesson of my favorite jewelry designer, the truly great Vivianna Torun Bulow-Hube, who was born in Sweden and went on to design for Georg Jensen. She set out early to make “anti-jewelry,” that is, jewelry you don’t store in the family vault until the fancy night arrives, and then snap shut in the vault. She worked with materials that lived and breathed out in the open–rocks, stones, pebbles, silver and saw how they could be shaped to fit the human form.
When she was broke in the 50s in France, she used to go to the beach and look for stones and pebbles that she could work into her simple silver wires and hand-hammered necklaces. read more…
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heads. (The connectors come with a cover.)
