Link About It: This Week’s Picks
Glowing snowboarders, TED Quotes, DIY Airsoft machine guns and more in our look at the web this week
1. Isabelle Azais
Just when we thought we couldn’t take another feather bauble, Belgian designer Isabelle Azais wins us over once again with hers, done in fur. Her whimsical and decadent earrings, brooches and other accessories offer a rich little puff of embellishment.
2. 78 Boxers
Nicolai Howalts photographs this series of teenage boys between the ages of eleven and seventeen. The underdeveloped bodies appear hopeful and energetic as they stand in oversized boxing gear. Pre-fight shots are starkly contrasted with the changed visages in the post-fight portraits.
3. TED Quotes
To better highlight the brilliant minds taking the stage each year at TED, the idea-sharing conference came up with TED Quotes. The new feature promises to make TEDTalks easier to spread through social media in a more digestible format.
4. Whitney Houston
In the wake of her death, tributes abound. The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones offers a heartbreaking examination of the troubled superstar, down to her remarkable voice’s command on vowels and her always worried, enraptured public.
5. Zap’Ados
Paris’ Bang Architectes converted an old peanut factory in Northern France into a sleek skateboard park called Zap’Ados. The renovated building now features an orange mesh facade and a spaciously airy interior with an undulated ceiling that reflects the freedom of rolling on wheels.
6. Illustrator Sachin Teng
NYC-based illustrator Sachin Teng gently combines beautiful figurative drawings with data symbols like QR codes in perfectly balanced, abstract compositions. His knack for harmoniously blending colors and forms leads to subliminally striking works that only truly reveal themselves upon further inspection.
7. Inside a Chinese Sex Toy Factory
Photographer Jason Lee goes inside the plastic toy factory Ningbo Yamei—located on the edge of Fenghua, Zhejiang province in China—where he captured quality control checks on vibrators, rubber nipples being painted, inflatable dolls packaged for transfer and more. The resulting series reflects a simultaneously provocative and banal workplace.
8. Thom Browne Women’s Fall 2012
Staging his Fall/Winter 2012 presentation in characteristic zany fashion—a candlelit room filled with coffins housing girls who’d “died for fashion”—Thom Browne revealed a less-expected line of toned-down womenswear. Still pushing his apparel to extremes with exaggerated bustles and seemingly non-sequitr joints and angles, Browne incorporated classically tailored elements for a wearable, but still wantonly indulgent approach to the season.
9. DIY Airsoft Machine Gun
The deceptively simple construction of this homemade airsoft gun produces an intimidating fire rate from the plastic soda bottle compartment. Certain to create headaches for parents and educators across the country, the design can be realized with $15 and a basic tool kit.
10. Glowing Man
Fashion photographer Jacob Sutton cast Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes in a glowing short film shot on the slopes of the French resort Tignes in the region of Rhone-Alpes. Hughes coasted down the mountain in a customized L.E.D. suit by electronics designer John Spatcher, saying “Filming in the suit was the most surreal thing I’ve done in 20 years of snowboarding.”
11. Leanne Shapton Studio Visit
The graphic novelist and Paris Review contributor invites the publication into her light-filled studio north of Manhattan to talk about her brilliantly organic work process.
12. Boa Mistura
Five Spanish artists take graffiti and mural painting to the streets of Vila Brâsilandia in São Paulo, Brazil. The favela’s winding streets are given a 3D effect with brilliant colors and words that are legible from specific points of perspective.
