Tokyo Kamon Girls

Tokyo Kamon Girls

Tokyo Kamon Girls

The cleansing oil line feature five different formulations…

The High Performance Cleansing Oil Classic is the original cleansing oil by Shu Uemura. The bottle is designed with leaves and vines and a Tokyo Kamon girl named Tsuruha.

The High Performance Balancing Cleansing Oil Enriched is for skin that is dry and dehydrated. The bottle is an eye catching orange check pattern and adorned with a Tokyo Kamon girl named Tamaki.

The High Performance Cleansing Oil Fresh is a light cleansing oil that will leave skin looking and feeling refreshed. The bottle is girly pink with chrysanthemums and a sweet Tokyo Kamon girl named Sakurako.

The Brightening Cleansing Oil will leave skin even-toned, translucent and smoother. The bottle is designed with purple and green colour with a coquettish Tokyo Kamon girl named Katsura.

The Limited Edition Cleansing Beauty Oil Premium A/O is a best seller. It’s has anti-aging and anti-oxidant properties to thoroughly cleans and purify the skin. The artwork on the bottle is of an elegant Tokyo Kamon girl named Matsuno on a green background with red pine trees.

Shu uemura Limited Edition Tokyo Kamon Girls Cleansing Oils are available from the Shu Uemura website while supplies last. / Shu Uemura

WUYONG Cover

Make useless things into useful, statement of anti-fashion shown on the last day of Haute Couture week, Chinese designer MA Ke staged on again in the green gardens of Palais Royal with her paradoxical concepts.

Theme: “Luxurious Qing Pin 奢侈的清贫”, which explains an immaterial statement of ancestral spirit.

Scene: One alley of the city’s Palais Royal gardens transformed into a fashion production chain straight out of rural China. The line went from boxes of cotton seed, to weavers and dyers, with people actually spinning and working looms, and on and on until the final product, modeled by a group “dancers” more like choreographic performance than a fashion show before departing in a single file.

Soundtrack: a wailing voice accompanied with water flow from time to time for half an hour from NA Ren, a Mongolian singner as well as the role of dyer on the scene.

Top models: from youth to grizzled middle aged, no frontier men and women.

The result, homespun loose fitting trousers, gathered skirts and big shirts, made up of naturally dyed and hand-woven pieces resembling functional earth tone garb worn by Chinese peasants, worked as a moment of far-flung fashion poetry.

To cloture the Paris Haute Couture week, MA Ke and her under-design “WUYONG” are obviously contrary to the rest of lavish and extravagance runways.

Buoyed by the success of her “Exception de Mixmind” label, which is sold in around 50 boutiques across China, she has launched her couture line, from 2006, “Wuyong” (which means “useless” in Chinese.) with her first exhibition last year on the Paris fashion week.

An UFO landed on the roof of Star Ferry Car park nearby Hongkong bay, 27th Feb (till 5th April). It is in this futuristic, shiny, white, curved pavilion that Chanel launched its first stop of modern art exhibition called ‘Mobile Art’.

The strange futuristic pavilion as itself an artwork is created by British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Made of 300 blocks of FRP (Fiber Reinforced Plastics) and assembled in 4 weeks, the exhibition venue becomes the pearl shining in HongKong Central skyline. When night comes, it is covered in neon blue.

The modern art exhibition consists of artistic interpretations of the iconic Chanel handbag. Visitors are encouraged to wear headphones to listen to music by Jeanne Moreau specifically designed in mandarin and cantonese to voyage in « ce film en 3D, ce paysage qui bouge » (a real landscape and a 3-dimensional film which comes to life) promised by Fabrice Bousteau, Mobile Art Exhibition curator.

The exhibit features works by 20 international artists from China, France, South Korea, Iran, Belgium, Russia and the United States among other countries. A giant sculpture of a black Chanel handbag that encases a video, by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury; two stuffed pigs next to encased Chanel handbags called “Jesus Love and 2 Handbags”, by Belgian artist Wim Delyoye. Japanese artist Tabaimo designed a black hole with graphic animation. It’s her interpretation of unlocking the secrets hidden inside a handbag. We can also find the creations of french artists Daniel Buren “Untitled 2008″ and Sophie Calle, the shanghainese filmmaker Yang Fudong. A black poetic room under Paris touch by Argentine artist Leandro Erlich; a bouquet of flowers in mosaic by Taiwanese artist Michael Linn with the crystal clouds by Italien artist Loris Cecchini; gag videos of Russian Blue Noses and bondage photos of Araki with chaines of Chanel handbag.

Bousteau says the exhibit is intended to be experimental and to move art away from the more traditional museum setting. “Mobile Art in my view is an expression of utopia and the future. It’s a completely weird architectural project because it’s the first building in the world which will travel, which will circulate and which is nomadic.”

The exhibition will travel through Asia, the U.S., London, Moscow and arrive in Paris in 2010. The next stop after Hong Kong is Tokyo.