How are you all?

OK. Enjoying the summer. I'm out in Texas at the moment-  on a road trip seeing minimalist sculpture in a desert town called Marfa. Its hundreds of miles from anywhere and there's loads of Donald Judd instalations and some Dan Flavin works, but no phone reception so communication with the band has been minimal. I am sure they are enjoying themselves wherever they are.

Who am I speaking with?

Rob Skipper, singer/ guitar player / fiddler.

You’re a band of incredible musicians with huge achievements. Was this luck or a planned venture?

Lady luck has definately had her way with this project as far as the formation goes. I knew Susannah (Austin, vocals) from school when she was a little girl and I used to hang out with her sister. Fast forward 7 years and we met again and her singing knocked me for six and I asked her to join this group I was starting.  Slinky also knocked me out. Our first meeting was on a paintball range (it was Bryn from my old band The Holloways and Josh Weller's birthday party) he shot me in the face at point blank. Guess that bad luck turned out to be good in the end.

Who are some of your early inspirations?

My mum played guitar while i was in the womb and introduced me to a wide variety of music. I used to try and teach myself old boogie woogie piano music like Albert Ammons and Fats Domino, as well as rock n roll like Chuck Berry, Beach Boys, Kinks and Hendrix (he's the reason i picked up a guitar, then chipped my teeth on it trying to copy him).

Who do you like at the minute?

Eagles of Death Metal. Credence Clearwater Revival. Violent Femmes. These fall into a category i call 'Road Trip Music'.
Gorrilaz new album is great, i got to see their Roundhouse show. Their visuals blew my mind. Most visuals these days look like vomit. Theirs have Bruce Willis being a badass chasing the Gorrilaz through the desert!
Performers I like watching are Babeshadow and Eliza Doolittle as well as stand-up act The Marvellous Dorians who've all been helping us with our monthly club night which we call THE HUNT

I think Rob and I had a discussion about band names very late on in the night… Why was Hares confirmed as the name?

It comes down to imagery and ideas. Hares are always cropping up in folk lore and mythology and always seem so emblematic of fickleness, wit and rebirth (not to mention rampant fucking). Seemed like a name that summed us up better than the previous name which was The Musical Differences.

Who directed your video?

A fine art filmmaker called Oscar Oldershaw.  Its his first go at a music promo and he did a cracking job. I saw his video 'Heavenly Mane' at an exhibition and was drawn to the colours and beauty... a kind of 40's South Pacific feel. I convinced him to have a go at directing and we ended up using a clip from the film as a background projection in the video.

I liked Piers’ Beggin song on the YouTube. That’s not a question, just a holla.

Look him up: Piers Sherwood-Roberts, there's much more where that came from. Thats a very late night drunken duet with the lovely Natalia Tena from Molotov Jukebox, who's also known as 'Tonks from Harry Potter films'!

When are you heading out on tour?

A.S.A.P!

Is Slinky still streaking? Or leaving canned goods outside people houses?

Does wandering around 93 Feet East wearing nothing but a jock strap and an accordion count as streaking? If so, yes.

How’s the album coming along?

We're currently writing songs and chosing a producer and record label that suits us. There'll be some further single/ep releases before the end of this year and an album early next year.

We’re thinking of getting an office pet, any creatures we should look out for?

An african lion.  I just bought a book about these 2 guys that bought one from Harrods in the 60's and kept it as the mascot for their clothes shop. They'd take it for walks down the kings road and play with it in the park. Eventually he grew too big (haha, no shit?) so he was too big for Chelsea and so they liberated him in South Africa.

What do you think of bald people?

Bald people should stand tall. Baldness is in my genes. It hasn't struck yet, though i am ready for the war to begin. My 'hat armoury' is loaded, the latest addition is a big black Stetson.

Anything you’d like to share with our readers and your fans?

Well i've just mixed up a huge pitcher of margarita, Texan style, and would love to share it with y'all.

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Fashion is very good at providing its own fashion's-eye view of proceedings, but what is it like being at the very eye of that fashion storm, the undeniable focus of the world's attention? Few creatives are as well-placed as Lady Gaga to explore those ideas, as... [more]

I'm sure the saying is that a pictures can paint a thousand words, it might not be but like, whatevers, so instead of me waffling on, here's a video that the amazing Today Is Boring team did.

A massive giant slobbery kiss and huuuuge thanks to Illamasqua and Patron. If I hadn't drank 300 Patron XO Cafe Runaways (yes coffee tequila) I might be able to like, move today.

Jimmy Choo takes steps to possible IPO (FT)
“The private equity owner of Jimmy Choo plans to appoint investment banks to advise on strategic options for the maker of stilettos for the stars, including a possible initial public offering valuing the company at about £500m.”

Affluent, Generous Young Women Lead Recovery (Marketing Daily)
“When it comes to power-shopping our way toward economic recovery, a new report from American Express says well-heeled young women are leading the charge.”

Should luxury brands use twitter? (Luxury Society)
“Luxury is an intricate web of emotions… can it be captured in 140 characters (and that too with a shortened link of some sort if the company is trying to drive some traffic to a specific webpage or website)?”

Taking a page from Wal-Mart, Holt Renfrew hires greeters (Vancouver Sun)
“The luxury retailer’s new president, Mark Derbyshire, is chagrined at the mention of the company’s reputation for having sales clerks with a chilly attitude that may intimidate potential customers.”

Fashion Week Preview: The Faces (NY Times)
“Now that we’re practically on a first-name basis with Doutzen, Lakshmi and Anja, it’s time we meet Bambi, Fei Fei and Kat. They are some of the new and almost-like-new faces we’ll be seeing next week at the New York fashion shows.”

Gregory Crewdson :Image via artpaperinvitation.com

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer

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High 70's chic, 90's Tank Girl...an imaginative stylist,photographer or designer could really carry on

I met Allegra last night at an IMG New Faces brief

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The images of Jaded are part of a larger body of work called "LIVE! From New York", shown in NYC, Rio, Berlin and Novo Mesto.

It would be a really lovely respite from all that fa-shion. Press Release post-jump

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See the full story in V67-The New York Issue.

Once considered the cinematic heir to Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini, Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky shocked and amazed audiences with his films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, which tell mythic, mind-blowing tales of spiritual transformation. “When I saw them,” says Mario Sorrenti, “I was inspired not only to reference them in a fashion story, but they also made me want to make films one day. The imagery is amazing, and his commentary on society, religion, politics, and art is something that is still relevant today.”

See the complete story in V67–The New York Issue, on newsstands today.

For those who have about an hour to kill, the Dave Hickey lecture above is worth a gander both for his ideas on the development of art viewing, and his thoughts on the Internet. To begin, Hickey describes the American art discourse as informed by a conflict between ideas proffered by the 15th century church — that the existence of an image needed to be validated by god — and Paganism, which at its heart is about imbuing objects with power. As such, the prevailing belief in the US that works of art need to be validated finds its roots in religion.

I’d suggest this is a simplification of America’s relationship with art though Hickey adds to a little to his thesis as he goes on. “Stupid money” — that which supports sameness and mediocrity because it knows no better — is a thorn in the side of the artist who wishes to challenge the status quo, he tells us.  This leads to the idea that engaging in commerce is an object’s validation in the United States, though Hickey never explicitly makes this generalization.

The most severe criticism of American cultures offered comes near the end of Hickey’s talk though by this point he’s barely talking about art. Now the subject is validation within dysfunctional communities, and the writer unleashes on the Internet:

We are at a point now where the primary benison of this democracy is being challenged. I refer you to federalist ten James Madison. Madison’s great insight was that small republics always fail by faction. Athens fails by faction, Rome fails by faction. What Madison understood was that the sheer size and distribution of a culture across the American Continent could not fail by faction. There were regional interests, there were local interests, there were local religions, it was splintered. Or it was, until we had the Internet. Now we can fail by faction. Now motorcycle gangs have websites, couture has websites, so we reorganize ourselves into a nasty little mediterranean republic that will collapse of its own organization. And it’s all communitaze, because what we have done is turned the city, the vast city of the world into a village. And if it’s anything culture needs it’s not a village. Have you ever lived in a village? Where the smartest person cleans the sewers, have you ever lived in a village where the biggest business man runs the harley shop. Have you ever lived in a village in which your neighbors go through your garbage every night to see how much you’re drinking?…So what I’m saying is that at this moment, when the organization of American culture is collapsing through shear faction and so when the vast republic of complex statistical distribution that James Madison imagined is being run by Rush Limbaugh and people of even more virtue perhaps we might just leave culture alone and let people people run it themselves and try to fix a cure for this problem.

Long monologue short: communities are healthy when they are diverse, and the internet not only promotes sameness, but has anyone and everyone performing menial tasks. There’s some truth to this even if the latter isn’t typically cast in a negative light. Interestingly, yesterday I spoke with Tomorrow Museum’s Joanne McNeil about how many community based websites are now finding themselves crippled under their weight communities. Like Hickey’s village, websites like Threadless and etsy spend large sums of money on community moderaters, the loudest voices within those crowds often receiving the most attention regardless of the merit of their opinions. (See also: Jerry Saltz’s facebook page.) In this light Facebook’s much criticized stance that users need to be told what they want, may have its advantages.

Our latest intern at SHOWstudio.com is Barbie, joining the team from this Sunday for twenty days in the lead-up to London Fashion Week. Throughout her time at SHOWstudio.com, Barbie will post live video updates to the SHOWstudio.com BLOG documenting her experiences - including ticket requests for London Fashion Week, studio... [more]