Monthly Archives: April 2007

Italy’s 3D Fashion Peep Show

Posted on by
Reply

3-D FashionGet ready for a department store peep show. IBM’s only dedicated fashion division, based in Milan, has launched a prototype “multisensory cabin” for shoppers that’s reminiscent of a coin-operated viewing machine equipped with a projector.

About 10 fashionistas can gather in the small, dark box to see what’s behind the latest spring fashions. Wearing fold-up polarized 3-D glasses, people watch canned scenes from the world’s top-tier catwalks. As images of gazelle girls on runways waft by, viewers see flyby close-ups of real-world fashion items. In other words, the stuff (think bags and shoes) that actually comes off the catwalk for plebes.
Full story & video by zoomata editor Nicole Martinelli on Wired

Italian Cow Parade

Posted on by
Reply

Cow Parade MilanMooo-velus, darling: 100 life-sized cows, each hand decorated by an artist, are grazing around Italy’s fashion capital.
This one is by Thomas Berra (title: “There’s Confusion in the Meadow”) and makes its stance at Arco della Pace near Sempione park.

Billed as the world’s largest public art event, the cattle started meandering in Zurich in 1998 before heading for new pastures including New York, Tokyo, London and Sydney.
The cows are also an early warning sign that Milan’s design week, the largest in the world, will kick off in a few days. Every year brings some much-needed public art to town, last year there was oversized Ikea furniture…

Milan’s artsy bovines will be around until the end of June when they hit the auction block for charity at the Triennale art museum.

Super-sized Memento Mori in Milan

Posted on by
3

A skeleton nearly 80 feet long reminds tourists and passersby of their mortality as they snap pictures of the Duomo or eat gelato.

The installation is part of the city’s art fair, MiArt; the leg bone is connected to the hip bone in the courtyard of Palazzo Reale.

Artist Gino De Dominicis, obsessed with his own mortality, created this work called “Cosmic Magnet” (Calamita Cosmica) in 1988. Ten years later, he died at age 51 on April Fool’s Day.

The skeleton has what looks like a giant knitting needle piercing the right hand, meant to represent meetng point of cosmic energy and the human element.

Made out of polystyrene, them bones weigh in at eight tons.

After it is dismembered in Milan May 1, the macabre reminder will be haunting cities around Europe including Hamburg, Brussels and Paris.