Japan!

Wow, a whole month without a post... things have been kinda busy in my world. The Ivana Helsinki/Love Contemporary store closed, sadly, because they were not able to hammer down the terms of their lease. They are hoping to reopen, but in the mean time I am going to help them with social networking stuff and magazine coordination. I also started working at Greenpoint accessories store Old Hollywood, which is a really rad place (more on that for another post), and am working part time at a non-profit org. on Wall Street. Between all those things, I managed to squeeze in a trip to Japan, where I have been wanting to go pretty much for as long as I can remember.

The discussion about Japan started because my friend Heather was about to get a new job, and I had just lost my hours at IH/LC, and I had received an email alert in my inbox about round trip tickets to Tokyo from NYC for $450, an unbelievably low fare. I forwarded it to Heather with a casual remark along the lines of "if only you got your new job, we should go, but we'd have to go like next week." Heather took me seriously, but unfortunately, she didn't find out about the new job till about a week and a half later, at which point, the cheap tickets were gone... but were still not outrageously expensive, so when she finally did find out that she got the job, we restarted the conversation. Before we knew it, Monday afternoon we purchased the tickets and Friday morning we were on a plane! It was the most spur of the moment, spontaneous trip that either of us had ever taken, but we both decided that it was the best impulse buy we ever made.

I am fortunate to have family in Tokyo, my cousin and his wife live there with their two kids Kio and Aki, who are ridiculously cute, and they had a big, centrally located apartment in a neighborhood called Yotsuya with a guest bedroom and bath. Better than a hotel, for sure! We bought Japan Rail Passes which give you free rides on all JR trains for a week, so we decided to take a couple days to explore Kyoto and Nara as well.

A long post about what we did will probably never get finished, so I'll say this about Japan...

-People there are incredibly friendly, courteous, and nice. Americans might see this as being a bit phony, but honestly, I have to believe that most of them act this way because that is how they genuinely are. When on trains everyone would ask us where we were from and how we liked Japan. When we were looking at our maps and trying to figure out where we were, often times people would come over to us and ask if we needed any help, and more often than not would walk us to our destination. When I misplaced my camera while getting off a train from Nara to Kyoto, everyone on the car got up out of their seat to help me look for it, and the train security guard ran down the platform to give it to me as someone had found it and turned it in. Everywhere is very safe, bikes are unlocked, there is very very little crime. We were never sexually harassed or made to feel at risk. Apart from the language barrier, I felt really comfortable there.

-Getting by without Japanese was ok. While its true that it can be difficult to travel without knowing Japanese, in the main tourist cities (i.e. where we went), it was not a huge problem. Most people spoke a little English, and its amazing how far hand motions and a Japanese phrasebook will take you. We had very little misunderstandings and were able to figure things out. The most difficult thing was trying to find vegetarian food for Heather, and often times she ended up just getting udon soup with tofu. I usually did not know what the hell I was ordering and would just point at something on the menu and hope for the best! Usually everything I got was delicious.

-Japan is weird! The weirdest thing we did was we went to a neighborhood called Akihabara and went to a maid cafe... Akihabara is the "anime" neighborhood and guys there are really into girls who dress as maids. You come into the cafe and they say "welcome home master!" and do all sorts of weird stuff. You can read about them here. There was lots of other things that we perceived as weird, such as the toilets which were either super high tech with buttons and heated toilet seats and bidets and music to cover the sound of you doing your business, or they were "japanese style" holes in the ground which were essentially female urinals. Weird!

Anyways here's a little movie I took of our trip, it sums everything up pretty well. Enjoy!

Heather and Rachel in Japan! from Rachel Hill on Vimeo.

Going once, going twice, SOLD!

By a stroke of luck, I was browsing some blogs Tuesday night and found out about an auction being held the following day of items from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection. The Brooklyn Museum had decided last year to integrate their collection into the Costume Collection at the Met, and thus items that were perceived as duplicates or not valuable to the collection were set to be auctioned. I was totally unaware that the Brooklyn Museum even had a costume collection! According to the NY Times, the collection was considered one of the best in the world, but had not been on view in more than a decade, and the cost of maintaining the collection had become too great.

I had the afternoon free (well, there were probably better things I could have been doing) so decided to go check it out, especially as there were some absolutely stunning items that I just wanted to look at and be lucky enough to see in person.

Sadly because I am lazy I did not get there in time for the preview, wherein I could have tried on some of these amazing vintage dresses. Fortunately the company running the auction, August Auctions, had a catalog online of many of the items very well photographed.

I got there just as the auctions were getting underway and got my paddle (my first real live auction! Much more exhilarating than ebay!) and took a seat. The audience was filled with many professional vintage dealers as well as other enthousiasts like Lyn Yaeger. The first hour or so was vintage textiles, many of which were hundreds of years old... very very beautiful items, but not really something I was interested in for myself. You would not believe how much money some of these things went for! A confederate flag went for something like $10,000. As soon as I heard some of these figures people were bidding I knew I was in a little over my head, but I hoped maybe I would get lucky somewhere down the line once they started on the clothing, especially on the non-designer stuff.

I came close, a couple of times. I nearly won this beautiful 30's beaded dress for $175, but then someone went to $200 and I was out. It sold for $200.

I'm most bummed about the two following auctions... one was a lot that I did not bid on which was a lot of 4 vintage kimonos that went for $100... I almost bid but the gavel came down too fast. Bargain! The other one was a lot that I did bid on and lost, for two Zandra Rhodes dresses. Zandra Rhodes was a famous British designer in the 70's and her stuff, as I understand it, is very hard to find. I went up to $200 but was outbid, and I think they went for $250. In retrospect, I only wanted the black one for myself, and probably could have sold the blue one for the price of these two combined. But that's the thing with the live auction, its all over in the blink of an eye and there's no time to hesitate. I've never been much of a gambler so as soon as stuff got over $200 I started to shy away.

Overall, there was a bargain here and there (a 60's Pierre Cardin pantsuit went for $90), but most everything else went for obscene, obscene amounts of money. Still it was tons of fun and a great way to see some amazing historical pieces. I highly recommend checking out the auction galleries from the Augusta site. There's also a few, not that great photos on my Flickr.

Workin' for the weekend

My time is up at Erin Fetherston and after a week in California I now have a new job at the Ivana Helsinki/Love Contemporary concept shop. What started out as a pop-up has now become a permanent location. The space functions as a retail fashion store for Finnish designer Paola Sahonen, a sex toy shop, and an event space... all brought together by the new magazine Love Contemporary for which Paola is the creative director. I'm so excited to work there! The clothes are great and are all made in Finland.

Like Erin, for every collection Paola does a video which encapsulates the story of the collection. I am loving this video for the Spring/Summer collection. Also, I want that pouffy polka dot dress. And the romper.

I'm not dead

It has been a while, hasn't it? There's so much I want to post but I've been extremely busy working and have gone out of town and we had a death in the family and lots of other stuff... so no time to write. I've been working w/Erin Fetherston for the past couple months and its been a really great learning experience, albeit long hours and lots of stress. We had our show last night, and, if I do say so myself, the design team accomplished a thing of beauty. If this was my wardrobe for the next 5 years I think I could die happy (although they didn't put a lot of my favorite pieces in the show).

I also started another blog to vent frustration that I am running with my friend Heather, but even that one has been suffering due to lack of time. When winter is over hopefully I will come back to life.