Dark Tide

Alina B by Steven Chee in Oyster
Styled by Rachel Squires and Paul Bui

A moody summer spread - the perfect antidote for all those happy happy fun fun editorials that can get a bit exhausting. The location makes me want to escape back to the tide pools on Fraser Island. I love how the stylists focused on the use of fabric, leather, chains, and rope to create the clothes from their basic elements. My favorite is the tobacco leather net used as a shawl/belt over the deep blue dress. I imagine this girl has a use for everything she's wearing - and I wouldn't be surprised if she has mastered some rare form of martial arts or could adeptly spear anything that crosses her path...

Tide Pools on Fraser Island, Australia

Louise Pedersen by Camilla Akrans

I cannot wait to start riding again this fall! If only I had such a pretty horse...

Abbey Lee Kershaw and Catherine McNeil

Photographed by Greg Kadel

Vogue Australia September 2009

Hands down this is my favorite spread in a while.
Those days that are neither fall, spring or summer.
Pebble beaches and sea salt spray.
Sandy dirt road through the woods and endless fields of grass.
but best of all, spending time with a partner in crime.

Sophie Srej by David Bellemere for Marie Claire Italia
September 2009

I'm totally in love with this lighting trend.

image via stompface

The first phrase that popped into my head when I saw this was "Stairway to Heaven." What a great photo - what an amazing song.

Kate Moss

V Magazine

September 2009

Hello Handsome



Henry James Pallett in RUSSH September 2009

Handsome? Hand some? Such an odd word. It got me thinking - why are men handsome and women beautiful?

Handsome is attributed to someone marked with a sense of skillfulness, and has a pleasing and unusually impressive or dignified appearance. There's something about proportions that allows for a graceful, maybe more utilitarian, way of bringing themselves into action. Beauty, on the other hand, is more about aesthetic pleasure. Beautiful applies to whatever/whomever excites the keenest of pleasure to the senses and stirs emotion through the senses. Handsome is an active attribute, beauty is passive. Handsome becomes so when that person is in motion, beauty is something that can exist in suspended animation.

This got me thinking about fashion editorials. More often than not, women are posed to evoke beauty. The emotions or characters that they are asked to portray are often best expressed with very little movement. Editorials with men are generally more successful when they are dynamic - the characters and emotions are active, expressed best through movement and change.
Not that this is a bad thing - it simply fits with our (or at least my) ideas where beauty is to women as handsome is to men.

All this from a photo of a guy with a rifle.