Magnetically Grown Fashion

Coffee as Viagra, car crushing, Tokyo in high-def and more in our weekly look at the web

Combining high-fashion and geology, product designer Jolan Van Der Wiel and pioneering fashion designer Iris van Herpen, have “grown” a line of dresses using magnets. To create the garments, the Dutch designers added a mixture of iron fillings and resin to fabric, and then used magnets to pull the particles into a strange texture of spikes and filaments. It took three weeks to grow each …

Coffee: The Original Viagra

Coffee as Viagra, car crushing, Tokyo in high-def and more in our weekly look at the web

We’re all familiar with the day-to-day value of coffee intake. Back in 1652, however, a coffee craze swept England because it was also considered a sexual stimulant. While the “Women’s Petition Against Coffee” referred to the substance as a “heathenish liquor,” reducing men’s virility, the “Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee” made note of the opposite. Men found that it made “the erection …

Becoming Hemingway by Henry Hargreaves

Impersonators pose as "Papa" in the curious Kiwi's latest photo project

Back in 1957, photographer Yousef Karsh asked an aging Earnest Hemingway to sit for a portrait. In what would become an iconic image, the author stares to the right of the camera, white-bearded and gruff. More than any other image, the portrait is the one most in tune with the romantic image of Hemingway as a stern, imposing genius—not to mention, it made famous the …