Global Graphica

The bald mannequin in the display window at designer Vivienne Tam’s Mercer Street store in SoHo,  in New York City.

There’s a new set of Argentina-themed Opening Ceremony flags and banners hanging in front of the influential clothing retailer’s original New York City store on Howard Street in SoHo. one of the banners say “Visita Argentina.”

The exterior shop signage at the Alexander Wang store on Mercer and Grand streets in SoHo, in New York City. The shop occupies a massive ground-floor space that until recently was the home for many years to Japanese fashion designer Yoji Yamamoto. Both the old occupant (Yamamoto) and the new (Wang) share a black-on-black-and-white minimalism in the SoHo retail space and in their fashion aesthetic such that from a distance, the shop could be mistaken for that of the other if there was no sign, if there were no branding.

Was Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s killer a New York Yankees fan? Was his executioner partial to graphic t-shirts?

The dramatic newspaper pictures and headlines of the late Libyan leader’s capture and captors suggest so (in typical hyperbolic New York style). Check out the pix of various New York City newspapers below. Compare the covers and headlines of the irrepressible New York Post versus the Daily News and the Times.

In any case, it’s unlikely, we think, that Qaddafi’s killer was into baseball. As for the graphic tee, well, the kid’s got style.

The Yankees hat, we suspect, has more to do with the global influence and mutations of American hip-hop culture and  its fashion signifiers in its most trickled down, distilled, re-encoded ways. That is, it’s code. It’s style.

There’s some symbolic irony and cognitive dissonance in the images below, given the clothes, the gun, and political and historical and, of course, the cultural context.

Some journalists have speculated that the Yankees hat and t-shirt are being worn as a matter of some  accident, that Qaddafi’s captor is wearing these specific clothes as a result of private charitable clothing donations ( a la World Vision ) to third-world countries such as Libya, which may be an explanation. But, in this case, we think it’s more about style.

Mykita is a maker of high-quality, high-end eyewear. The company has built a much-loved brand around the design and manufacture of edgy, stylish hand-made frames that sell globally to a loyal following. (We have to admit, we are among the brand’s devotees, with a couple of pairs of Mykita glasses already to our name and, perhaps, another set.) Below are a couple of futuristic pairs of eyeglasses in the display window showcase at the beautiful flagship Mykita boutique in the Scheunenviertel neighborhood of Mitte, in Berlin.

During a private invitation-only tour with Vogue magazine, Global Graphica publisher Van Corsa took a few pix of the recent Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The show was a large retrospective of  McQueen’s work. The late fashion designer  was an extraordinary creative force of singular (and, at times, controversial) vision. “Savage Beauty” closed last week but the highlights can be seen online at the Met’s website.