Pictures. A large part of my brain has always resided with the world of images and the emotions that lay behind them. After a long day at work analyzing nums and compiling large powerpoint decks, a simple photograph on the front page of a newspaper, or the angle of a person's face as she sits at a cafe talking with a friend can easily bring a smile to my face. So, with that said, I am going to start a series of commentaries upon the visual world - advertisements, pictures, art, images, movies, anything counts... The world offers too many not be inspired.
To start, lets move across world to Japan. UNIQLO is one of the coolest retail operations I've run across in a while (next to Abercrombe of course - terrible stuff, but boy is their brand clear. Think model runway star and walk into one of their stores - genius. I should hit myself for saying that.) Uniqlo is one of the largest retailers in Japan and from the limited amount of info I've gathered, pretty good at what they do. But, to the content. 1. Use of space and time in their advertising reflects a flexibility with the boundaries of physics that I have rarely seen in the U.S. (My guess is that a lot of it stems from the prevalence of martial arts in their culture - think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon...but this is purely a guess.) This manifests itself in a mold between the mechanical and the graceful. Nike is the closest to this style in the U.S. but still far from capturing it. 2. While an initial impressions may lead viewers to think that UNIQLO's style organically grew from martial arts and athletics (including myself), upon further study I reach a different conclusion (and contradict myself). A large part of their style comes from extracting beauty in the ordinary. The pictures suggest that every part of you hold powerful beauty, that at each and every moment of you life...you can be a hero. They find the nugget of beauty in someone walking down the street or watching a play, extract it, blow it up, and put it front and center. Take a look at their website (http://www.uniqlo.com/), the picture of a girl in a hoodie is a good example....doing her hair anyone? One last thing for discussion next time. We'll just call it redonculous for now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j67wgWqZ5U
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