Fashion Monday with JJ Lee

Over the last 18 months I've taken pictures for a personal photo-project Everybody (in New Westminster). The goal of the project is to...well, you can figure it out. Please look forward to additional images. Comments are welcome.

The Vancouver Art Gallery opened this week with an exhibition that wants to change the way people think about comics, animation and video games. It's called KRAZY! Bruce Grenville curated the show with the help of a squad of guest curators who are distinguished practicioners in the fields of manga, comics, graphic novels (aren't these three categories all the same?), animation and video games, including Art Spiegelman - the creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic, Maus. KRAZY! is built around the premise that it is time to reconsider the importance of popular "visual culture", ie comics and all, with culture as a whole. And the act of hanging on the gallery wall the work, be they original comic pages or animation cels, will somehow provide the critical space to assess the phenomena. Spiegelman in his opening remarks that felt more like an apologia to the media that the artists included in KRAZY! was "just the tip of the iceberg." But Spiegelman and thi...

Flashing fannies makes for a fashion faux-pas Love this season's renewed ardour for minis and high hemlines. But the now-dead trend of wearing jeans under dresses (finally) still reaches from its grave to deliver a deleterious after-effect on women. Some of this city's beauties have forgotten how to move in a short skirt without flashing the pan. Twice this week, I've had the displeasure of viewing the undercarriage of fellow female pedestrians as they've stooped over to pick up a Georgia Straight (today) and dropped change (yesterday). Now I know how crotch stitching on a set hoses comes together. It does not look good. Jocasta...pass me your brooches. I need to gouge my eyes out. It is incorrect to bend at the waist to reach down. The right way is to bend at the knees and slowly lower your erect torso so that you may pluck something off the ground. With such a maneuver, a woman can display decolletage and honey calves at great advantage and avoid embarrassment.

“Tailor Made: Chinatown’s Last Tailors” has won the prestigious Golden Reel Award for Best Short Film at the 2008 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Directed by Calgary director Leonard Lee and Vancouver filmmaker Marsha Newbery, “Tailor Made” follows 80-something brothers Bill & Jack Wong for one year as they face the reality that they’re getting too old to run the little tailor shop their father opened in 1913…and letting go isn’t easy. With tailoring being a dying trade, finding someone to take over the family business has proved impossible, but Bill refuses to give up. From taking on a fashion journalist as an apprentice, to selling the shop to a young hot-shot corporate tailor, Bill becomes especially determined and pulls out all the stops. Catch TAILOR MADE on The Lens on Tuesday July 15th at 7pmPT (10pm ET), 10pm PT (1am ET) and 1am PT (4am ET) – Newsworld.

Professional photographer Kris Krug offers some pointers on how to make your snapshots works of art... Follow these tips and you'll have great wedding photographs worth posting! (Originally aired in December.) Listen to it through Google Video.

Okay. If you read my last blog about pulling off black tie well, I presented the safe, not-sorry option. But there are always exceptions to the rule. Zac Posen's Met gala outfit is one of them. His shiny blue suit and red bow tie captures perfectly the spirit of dressing up and smartly reflecting the theme of the current exhibition at the Met's Costume Institute, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy . The fashion designer must be a fan of comic books like writer Michael Chabon. Chabon wrote in the New Yorker recently: a superhero’s costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist’s sleight of hand. Posen's look is graphic, colourful and it bears classic suit details of the 1940s (low button stance, a ticket pocket and wide peaked lapels). It seems he was inspired by Superman's earliest issues, where you could find Clark Kent in a sharp blue double-breasted, a red ti...

It's about trying but not trying too hard. My recent visit to Toronto to stand as a groomsman coincided with the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute Gala . And despite the fact that my close childhood friends are just a bunch of regular Joes (Sean Ingram, left, and F. Galiana), as yours truly, they handled their sartorial responsibilities with aplomb. The same can't be said about the celebrities who attended the grand New York event. With overly long sleeves, long ties and boring notch lapels (shame on you, George Clooney, just stop wearing those bloody notches), the grandees at the ball looked sloppy. In the search for individual expression, many of them ruined a near perfect form of dress. It's always far better, like when one plays the blues, to innovate and improvise within the set structure of a particular form. One can choose a batwing, butterfly or a nifty straight bow tie. There are myriad styles of cuff links and pocket squares as well. Put together right, ...

Hunt and Gather is a one-woman boutique run by Nathalie Purschwitz. She's a former fine artist who has found self-expression in couture and coining clever fashion formulas. Her emphasis is on unique ... one .... or two'ishes-of-a-kind. I wanted to find out what's behind the ideology of her style but first I asked Natalie about why she picked Vancouver's Gastown to establish Hunt and Gather.

Is there life after reality TV? Carlie Wong thinks so. Carlie - who left far too early from Slice's fashion-design-to-the-death, Project Runway Canada - didn't leave the fashion designing to just the show's winner, Evan Biddell. Last month, she put together 32 looks for Toronto's L'Oreal Fashion Week. All the dreeses were made by her industrious hands and they're back-in-black gorgeous. Hear from this promising Vancouver designer on Monday, April 14 at CBC Radio One Vancouver's On The Coast. If you using the radio tune in at 5:50 PM on AM 690. Or listen live by visiting CBC Radio One Vancouver .

( image courtesy of Viola Blanca/Shane Ward) from STRAIGHT.COM Femme tie girls show boys how neckwear should be done This spring body-hugging, white shirts with structured collars will be paired with black shorts or skirts. Expect the tops smartly opened down by two, even three buttons. Women will be tempted to fill the space with cleavage, jewellery or, may it be suggested, with a Femme Tie ($60 at Hum Clothing, 3623 Main, and at Urbanity at 207 Abbott Street). They’re crafted of silk organza by Katherine Taylor. Taylor is a textile artist based in Montreal who, under the Viola Blanca label, smartly turns her art into beguiling fashion by making ascots, ties, and scarves that double as belts under her line... READ the rest in THE STRAIGHT .

CBC Radio 3 host Lisa Christiansen just sent me this story . Starck has either found religion or global warming or a mid-life crisis. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant ... The future, indeed.

The Straight asked me to write about being a Straight Eye evaluating Queer Guys. I wrote about Darren Bruce (above, from Vancouver's Next Gay Top Model ) and his rise to the top 12 and also about my own hang-ups... "Yes, one may suppose I am at the border here. It could be “Goodbye, het-land” and “Hello, homo country” for the Georgia Straight ’s sexually anxious menswear writer." For more, read the Straight .

Call him David the Tailor. And then drop your jaw in awe. David Wilkes is of a rare breed: a young man willing and able to hand sew men's suits so that the fit and stylings are perfect. He was featured in the CBC documentary, Tailor Made, as was I (see below). I had a chance to talk to him about the unique menswear he creates...but first I asked, "How old are you?" Listen .

"A naïve apprentice and a hot, young master tailor are both interested in taking over a legendary tailor shop in Vancouver's Chinatown, but they'll have a hard time convincing the hard-working Wong brothers to retire." I'm the naive one! And I also have a story development credit (whatever that is). But regardless, "hurrah" for Len Lee and Marsha Newberry, the directors. The Globe and Mail just declared it: "One of the sweetest , most tender docs in years , Tailor Made is more than just a record of the closing of a long-time Vancouver landmark business. It's a beautifully fashioned story of passion, tradition, family and letting go." Airing on Tuesday, February 12 on CBC Newsworld: The Lens. Check local listings for time.