Short-to-middling post: (slurp through these ballet, beauty, bag and bling pods in three easy minutes.)
1. Ballet
The Australian Ballet will bring Bodytorque.DNA, it’s marvellous melange of dance, design, music and fashion by stars of the future to Melbourne from Sydney for a limited three show season next month.
Five first-flush choreographers (Richard Cilli, Joshua Consandine, Tim Harbour, Richard House and Alice Topp) have picked their collaborative crews of designers and musicians and, as we speak, are rehearsing their “bite-sized” ballets inspired by the theme “DNA”. (A play on “innovation is in our genes”; get it?) “Bodytorque offers the opportunity to see works from Australia’s best up-and-coming choreographic talent,” says artistic director David McAllister. “It’s also a chance to see our talented corps and coryphée dancers shine in leading roles.” Can’t say fairer than that. Bodytorque.DNA’s three shows will be performed at Melbourne’s Art Centre, State Theatre, June 17, 18 and 24 as part of The Australian Ballet’s Winter Season with contemporary productions Chroma and Imperial Suite on the triple bill. Click here or phone this 1300 369 741 to book.
Bodytorque.DNA
The Australian Ballet
2. Bags
Voxbullet Two comes compliments of the considerable net-trawling skills of Melbourne “It” girl Natasha Stipanov, media relations manager – gaming, corporate, human resources and industrial relations for Crown Melbourne (yes, that’s a real job title). She culls a quirky basket of fashion, arts, pop-cult pods and recipes each week for delivery as Friday’s Stuff to a select list of VIP email-ees. This week, from the webshop of indefatiguably cutting-edge Colette in Paris, Miss Stipanov scooped this Jeremy Scott collaboration for Longchamp. Pliage is joyful proof of fashion’s recent swerve into HAPPY territory (#thankthefrockgoddessandpharrellwilliams) with a bent to boho chic, cartoon ironies and fun in general. Click here for a squiz or purchase. (Price is 220 Euros).
LONGCHAMP X JEREMY SCOTT
Sac “Pliage”, Colette, Paris
Batters
Fashion is fraught with sad wishy facts: the fat wishing to be slim, the skinny for curves, the old for youth and youth for…everybloodything. You get our drift. A fair chunk of the Sad Wishy Facts Catalogue also involves hair: blokes lose it, want it back, girls grow it where it’s not wanted… For a surprising number of women, a particularly sad wishy fact involves the progressive loss of hair – specifically lashes and brows. At 16, they’re lush and long, at 26 still passably thick and still battable, at 36, 46, beyond; where the hell are they..?
Ok, we’re banging on a bit longer than the average Voxbullet to introduce two fab products for the near lashless and browless. Product number one, Magnifibres, ($39.95) is essentially a mascara with tiny fibres that will adhere to natural, even sparse, lashes when deftly applied. Voxfrock recalls a similar product in the 1970s or ’80s, possibly withdrawn from sale for its tendency to shed those very fibres into a girl’s eyes, playing havoc with her ducts. On its website (it is only available online) Magnifibres does not address this tendency of little fibres to shed so we must innocently assume great strides in painless lashfulness have been made in these past 30-odd years. Want some? Us too. Click here for yours.
Magnifibres “brush on false eyelashes”.
Brows
Product number two is concerned with brows, the “quote-unquotes” above the windows to our soul. (Pause a tick to ponder that.) Their lifespan among the estrogenic (female), as opposed the testosteronic (male), is woefully short and ultimately wispy. After a certain age, women (including Voxfrock editor Janice Breen Burns) resort to, literally, drawing them on each day with darkened powder and soft pencils. (With time, the lady’s lament: “I can’t function till my face is on!” is particularly poignant.) The drawn-on quote-unquote is never quite believable. It’s therefore with some joy Voxfrock stumbled upon Final Touch Brows® by Australian beauty entrepreneur Danielle Kurukchi. It’s a tricky technique, done by a professional; colour-matched brow hairs attached, one by one, to existing brows or skin with an adhesive formulated to last about 14 days. “(It’s) perfect for women (or men) who are looking to correct over-plucked, thinning brows,” Ms. Kurukchi says, “Or those who want to fill in gaps and thicken or extend the brow, or for those who have lost their brows completely due to illness or treatment.” Final Touch Brows cost $25 to $85 and are bookable at salons here.
Final Touch Brows, before (below) and after.
Bling
The proliferation of jewellery in recent years is distressing to Voxfrock. In the decade BV (Before Voxfrock) our coverage of this most particular fashion genre zoomed from a handful of professionals and smattering of cheap bling brands, to a glut of both its very best and very worst practitioners. (We are thrilled, we despair, we are thrilled, we despair…..) It is logical and right to abandon the bad. But, there is no time in a season to visit all the goods ones either. More’s the pity.
Kim Victoria Jewels
This does, however, imply the rare significance of any jewellery brand – any at all – featured by Voxfrock. We pick them out, here and here, not very often, like the bright starry blips they are, on contemporary jewellery’s crowded horizon. Melbourne based Kim Victoria Jewels, for example. This brand, in its second season, is the subject of our fifth and final Voxbullet today. Designer Kim Victoria Wearne leaves tool marks in her lost wax rose gold, gold and silver settings. There’s a lilt of the Flintstones about her work and this is not a bad thing. She cures that quirky earthiness with deep set vintage diamonds and semi-precious gems including opals, which fascinated Voxfrock. Opals were cursed, kitsch, a “must have” souvenier of such alligonce and soffistikashun for so many middle-aged tourists to Australia for so long, they were lost to fashion for decades. Decades!
Until now. Miss Wearne dispelled all that icky history for Voxfrock in the first milky opal three-tiered ring (pictured above) we saw from her collection. “Kim Victoria Wearne draws inspiration from the starkly fascinating Australian landscape, geological topographies and the ancient jewellery she has been awed by in museums worldwide,” says her biography. It shows. Ms. Wearne is a Bachelor of Fine Art, Gold and Silversmithing, RMIT, and sometime interior designer whose collections are stocked by the ruthlessly discerning Alice Euphemia and Pieces of Eight among other bricks’n mortar retailers. Click here for her complete collection and webshop. (Main picture, top, Kim Victoria Jewels Opal Peak Ring (stack) in 9ct rose gold and 9ct yellow gold ($440) from Kim Victoria Jewels Opal Princess Collection, spring 2014..)
Compiled by Terry Carruthers, info@voxfrock.com.au, with Emily Pain, intern@voxfrock.com.au and Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
