The Kingpins

I went by Incu tonight to visit a friend who works there and found that Sydney art collective and COFA graduates The Kingpins had broken into the world of fashion with a new label called Birthday Suit, a range of costume/performance inspired clothes (for girls). There is a giant window display in the Incu storefront at The Galeries Victoria (same hip building where Post Mortem was).

From what I gather - they had also outfitted The Gossip on their recent tour, and now those pieces are for sale in limited editions at Incu. Things like custom tights, jackets, huge t-shirts, and HEADDRESSES. Random note, the drummer for The Gossip is Jordan Blilie's twin sister, Jordan Blilie was one of the two lead singers of The Blood Brothers aka BEST BAND EVAR.

Back to The Kingpins, I grabbed the catalogue and there is a nice breakdown of the themes in their performace work at the end - which is a wonderful marriage of art and fashion - which is really refreshing because most times when people try and combine art and fashion it involves just printed t-shirts sold at a market stall but these guys are actually making garments etc. Not to mention I find the concepts behind The Kingpins' work eg The Undead, Mythology, Crazy Art really interesting.

Another thing that I really dug was their collaboration with Indian cinema-poster-painters to create surreal paintings of Azaria Chamberlain as a half-dingo-half-human the Queen of the Outback - AMAZING. Kind of reminiscent of the paintings that Miguel Calderón got Mexican cinema-poster-painters to make of him and his buddies shirtless wearing animal masks, Wes Anderson owns a few and they are hanging in Eli Cash's living in a scene in the Royal Tenenbaums.

The whole thing has re-ignited my ambition to make custom leather jackets based on the ones my characters wear(a major endeavour). And also to start sewing the Lucha Mask series I have had planned since like Honours (2006).

I have an overwhelming list of projects to accomplish. I wish I had more time to just sit down and finish them all. A lot of them are overdue by years. It would be great to finish everything so I would have nothing to do and go on hiatus for a while and stop thinking, maybe then I could finally get some sleep or do my tax return.