image from the website for the movie
Last weekend I went to see the documentary Bill Cunningham New York about New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham (obviously). It was really great and I highly recommend it, even if you aren't interested in fashion and style he is still a really fascinating person. At eighty something years old he still rides his bike around New York city to take pictures of street style and the movie really goes into how the idea of photographing normal fashionable people wasn't something that was really done before him. One of my favorite things he says in the movie is that fashion is just the armor that people need to get through life. Sometimes it seems really self-involved and silly to take pictures of outfits all the time and post them online and to spend so much time shopping and thinking about clothes but I think it really does help to get through the day. Someone once asked about my clothes and why I dress up a lot and I told her that because I'm so tall people I stick out all the time and people are going to look at me so I might as well look cute. It took my awhile to realize that because for many years I just wanted to blend in and tried to wear clothes that wouldn't make me stick out (although I usually failed because even what I picked out as being normal generally wasn't). I promise I don't always think of it in such a high school angst way, normally I just wear what makes me happy! So my other favorite thing is that he never takes pictures of people for negative reasons (like a do/don't thing) and he actually left one of his jobs because they used his pictures in a magazine spread to make fun of women wearing the clothes. I always find it mean to look at those pictures in magazines and sometimes I actually like those outfits better. In summary go see it! Or at least check out the website which has lots of great slideshows.
Yesterday I saw Vidal Sassoon: How One Man Changed the World with a Pair of Scissors. I had heard about this movie like a month ago and was really excited to see it but I was disapointed in it. It's funny because both this movie and the Bill Cunningham movie are about 80 somethings who changed a lot about how people think of fashion and appearance but this movie was really heavy handed with how great Vidal is. I love his haircuts and I really thought the movie was going to touch more on how his styles really changed the way women did their hair because before it all about hair-dos and going to the saloon to get your hair teased and set and it would stay that way for a week and then you would go back to the saloon. But with his cuts they were about wash and wear and you didn't have to go back to the saloon as much and you didn't need to spend so much time on your hair. I would really be interested in learning more about the feminism of fashion but unfortunately this movie didn't get into that. Also one thing that really bothered me was the people in the movie talk about how he was influential all over the world, especially in Asia, but they never show his influence or really how he changed the world exactly (I mean it's right there in the title). If you're interested I would recommend the interview Vidal Sassoon gave with Terry Gross on Fresh Air (listen to it here), it gets into the interesting parts without all the hype and there is a slideshow of the famous cuts.
And just now I watched a movie about Robert Moog the inventor of the synthesizer, it was just Moog. It was okay, I probably enjoyed the soundtrack more then the movie. I wanted it to go more into the history of the Moog and electronic music but it was just like a look back with Moog and people he knew. There were some interesting parts and it's pretty short (a little over an hour) so it's still worth watching.
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