Fractured Fashion Flickers

Well, this has been a pretty action-packed week at Viva Rebecca. Anybody who thinks that making clothes is for pussies has another think coming, because a lot of it's pretty physical, more physical than banging on a stupid guitar like a fucking chimp. This is a brief summary of what's happened in the past few days:

(Mon): Spent the better part of the day tearing apart a plus-sized astronaut suit for a private client. By plus-sized I mean that the client is 400+ pounds, so this isn't Buzz Aldrin territory we're talking about. All of the components have to be super-sized and accuracy is absolutely crucial. Working in tandem with that is Rebecca's space alien outfit for the upcoming Barbie convention, which utilizes mixed media of leather, vinyl and multi-colored sequins.

(Tues): Went to The Sword and The Stone in Burbank (http://www.swordandstone.com)to do a fitting for three gigantic statues, two male and one female. All three statues are at least ten feet tall and have to be measured on a ladder and then draped with pattern paper and after, muslin. A lot of crawling around and climbing involved. I left my church goin' clothes at home!

(Wed): Got my two pair of pants in the mail from GuyLook (http://www.guylook.com) from South Korea, a great menswear mail order house. One pair was a wonderful checkered thing, and the other pair was a cool green biker jeans. Lucky I fit perfectly in them as the sizes are very Asian (largest size is a 33 waist). Bless you, YMCA.

Girls are calling Rebecca up for a job trying to replace me. Uh, yeah you can replace me when you can sew, serge, baste any kind of fabric, unpick microscopically tiny seams, draft patterns, trace and cut every kind of material including fur, shop for fabric in the Garment District in less than two hours and still shut the fuck up about your boyfriend problems, bitches.

(Thrs): Went swatching for leather at United Leather in downtown Los Angeles (http://www.unitedleather.com), probably the closest thing LA has to SH Frank in San Francisco, a veritable endless cove of leather, suede and even furs. Love the textured leather and the prices were reasonable.

The phone's ringing off the hook from production companies requesting our services, so thankfully business is picking up again. What a nightmare year 2012 was.

(Fri): Los Angeles Magazine ran a feature on Julie Newmar's top 10 favorite places in LA and listed Viva Rebecca, us on it. Here's the link: (http://www.lamag.com/laculture/mylatoz/2013/06/19/my-la-to-z-julie-newmar?fb_action_ids=10151749475153628&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582). And I still managed to find time to make a t-shirt dress for Rebecca and put the finishing touches to my upcoming crime novel - for release in August, 2013 (hopefully).

******************************

Lately I've been going crazy over Jo Ghost shoes, whose men's shoes are beautifully designed and use only the best and most exotic leathers money can buy. Their shoes are colorful without being too fruity (i.e. Miami Vice) and the designs are some of the most imaginative this side of John Fluevog.

The 1788 Inglese Multi-Color is a terrific boot using three different shades of leather with a lace-up front. I also like the Antik Submarine shoe which uses a colored stingray pebbled finish, and there's also the 1838 with its endless rows of eyelets and laces, looking just like roller skate shoes without the plate and wheels.

So why don't I own more Jo Ghost shoes? Well, Jo Ghost, based in Italy, on average sell their shoes for at least $400, much too much rich for my blood. Yeah, you need gold blood to afford these babies. But if you have gold blood run don't walk to get your Jo Ghosts, more commonly found at Haute Footwear (http://www.hautefootwear.com/catalog). They can also be found at Dellamoda (http://www.dellamoda.com).

******************************

Finally got my hands on the S/S 2013 Another Man Magazine, the best men's fashion magazine on the planet, esp. since Homme Essential went Hollywood and preppy in the past year. If you liked The Face Magazine from the Eighties then you'll like this also a lot. There is so much rock & roll style in this fash mag that you'll think you're looking at the hippest rock magazine ever.

Although the cover shows Arctic Monkeys lead singer Alex Turner on the cover there's hipper people to be found inside, like a feature on Nick Cave's sartorial style from his days as grub monster in The Birthday Party to his 3-piece suit look in The Bad Seeds. There's also a photo shoot with Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream and a sneak preview to Richard Hell's upcoming memoirs. I also liked the piece that matched eerily similar quotes on style from Johnny Thunders and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Very cool!

If you like your models either Quadrophenia-style with purple and pink hair or the decadent Seventies Keith Richards beehive boy look, every page just explodes with rock energy, with fashions that include a great Hermes leather t-shirt, Lanvin bondage pants, Jeffery West rocker boots and old Ralph Lauren even has a few rocker threads to show off in here. Another Man is published bi-annually and if you don't mind coughing up $15 an issue it'll sit on your hipster coffee table proudly.

Top illustration: Elvis by Donfeld, from the book "Hollywood Sketchbook".

Springtime For Sweet Tooth

It was just about a year ago today that I blasted out of my nightmare job at the LA County Board of Supervisors and contemplated on my future. After clerking for the County since 1991 and feeling burnout setting in I needed a change of scene. You couldn’t have picked a more radical change of scene than working in wardrobe for the upcoming Sony Playstation 3 game, “Twisted Metal”.

Knowing virtually nothing about the story of “Twisted Metal”, what little I gathered from it, was that it takes place in suburban Anytown USA, where people are granted any wish from someone named Calypso, a sort of anti-Wizard of Oz. An evangelist named Preacher advises everyone to resist Calypso, but like any good conscience gets tossed aside.

One of the main characters is an ice cream man gone psycho killer named Sweet Tooth, a killer clown with a WWF type persona. A scarred model equally gone batshit named Dollface launches a vendetta towards supermodels on the runway. She looks a lot like Bruce Timm’s Calendar Girl from the Animated Batman Series, but I digress. Because this is a game in the driving genre (a la Grand Theft Auto) there are road rage rivals for Sweet Tooth, like The Dead Riders and the black Evel Kneivel father and son team, Grimm and Grimm Jr. Where a lot of this goes, I don’t know, because I don’t own the game or belong to the TM cult (this is the third version of the game). All I know is that the film we worked on turned out beautifully.

Rebecca was hired to work on “Twisted Metal” because she had a long resume of having created costumes for a wide variety of games, including “Infamous 2”, “Batman: Arkham Asylum”, “Saints Row”, “Gotham City Impostors”, and many more.

“Twisted Metal” was filmed at the Sony games sound stage in a suburb near San Diego in the middle of an industrial park (natch). Rebecca fabriced costumes and fitted the actors while I assisted her and grabbed clothes that were needed ASAP. I also had fun distressing ice cream vendor uniforms, mental institution inmate gowns and other uniforms, ironic given I had just shitcanned the most institutionalized government job in the world.

The footage was shot in front of a green screen, like in movies like “Sin City” where backgrounds are computer generated. Some of the costumes we fabricated:

Sweet Tooth– crazy polka dotted clown pants on white soda jerk uniform, held together with bondage-style leather suspenders.

Dollface – Red and black leather catsuit, more Emma Peel than Harley Quinn.

Grimm – Another evil onesie, this time with the Evel Kenivel drag look, but ghastly and ghoulish looking.

The Supermodel – beautiful red draped dress that had to be form fitting for the model that didn’t get cast until the day before shooting. (Yeah, it was a lot like that).

And as I said, for someone who just blew out his government job out his ass I had to distress a lot of uniforms: Doctor, Nurse, Policeman, Security Guard, Asylum Inmates, etc. I must have been the envy of every fetishist in the world! Makeup shared the same tent as we did so we were amused at Sweet Tooth getting fake scars applied to his body, because he had enough real ones to begin with. Paul was a great guy and had a million war stories for every scar he had.

One scene shot showed young asylum inmates cursing Calypso for driving them mad by granting their wish in exchange for their sanity. Every shot had to feature them wearing dirty, stained pajamas and wearing a strait jacket. We could only afford one strait jacket, and it had to look like it had vomit, spit and piss all over it. This required a few cans of creamy soup – Cream of Potato, Cream Corn Chowder, Cape Cod Clam Delite, etc. We debated on which was worse: the look or the smell of the fucking thing.

The asylum inmates were kids who worked in the Quality Control section at Playstation, so the opportunity to be in a game was thrilling to them. It was my job to dress them and for a brief moment I felt like somebody’s Dad. “Don’t forget your wallet”, “How old are you?”, “You have to take your nose ring out!” After the mind fuck of the government, I was going through a whole ‘nother mindfuck.

Just because it was a video doesn’t mean that the egos on set were any different than they would on any TV or movie shoot. There were attitudes, but mostly from the lackeys in the crew. The actors were easy to get along with except for one minor character who had problems understanding the meaning of the word “retake”. I guess he wasn’t used to using a shovel digging graves. He should intern for a month at Forest Lawn Mortuary.

Multitasking brought on a new meaning when Rebecca was called on to play stand-in for Dollface. When she played Dollface she wore the skin-tight outfit for long shots. The crew really woke up when they saw her – they’re probably still looking at the pictures they shot of her. She also played a Dead Rider in the video.

The shoot took about four to six weeks, and if memory serves most of the days were cold and drizzly. The sound stage wasn’t heated at all so our tent was very dark and damp. I could relate to the Crazy Calypso Kids based on our surroundings, so it didn’t take a lot to convince me to run out to the mall 25 miles away to grab stuff from Victoria’s Secret or Neiman Marcus. By the time the shoot was over and done I was ready to get back in bed with some grain alcohol, feeling more than a little bit like Sweet Tooth after scooping too many spumoni-on-pistachio waffle cones.

Fast-forward to the following year and “Twisted Metal” is finally out and it looks amazing, fun to play and cinematic as well. I don’t own any video games and don’t profess to being an expert on them but this is definitely one wild, cool, sickening joystick pounder. And I even got a credit on it. How wild, cool and sickening is that???

Get Twisted Metal here and drive yourself crazy!