![]() ![]() Just down the road is Mission Chinese Food, the restaurant that became famous for its hip take on Asian cuisine, as well as countless galleries, a handful of antique shops and an indie movie theater. Her store is located on the first floor of a gallery on Hester Street in the Lower East Side, in an up and coming neighborhood devoted to art galleries and small boutiques. Therefore, I think it’s important for me to explore a little bit of contemporary China and Chinese culture.”Īnd what better way to do it, she thought, than to showcase her own favorite bits and pieces of China’s quickly expanding independent design scene. That’s not to say I know an awful lot, but I don’t think the old stuff really fully represents who I am. “If you ask someone what they know about China now, most of them have no clue. ![]() “What people know about China is mostly the very traditional stuff,” she said. Fashion designer Sean Suen marries Western menswear styles with silhouettes from Chinese fashion into his collections. ![]() Pillowbook founder Irene Lu gives padded bras the boot, replacing them with the silky traditional Chinese lingerie otherwise known as the dudou. Jewelry designer Ejing Zhang’s painstakingly pieced-together scenes of tiny fibers have incorporated leftover wool threads from a fellow Chinese designer’s womenswear collections. Jiang curates brands and designers that she feels represent aspects of Chinese traditions, culture or philosophy through their design aesthetics: Shanghai-based eyewear brand CHairEyes does this through frames handcrafted using Chinese materials like Chinese liuli, or colored glass, jade, and turquoise. Unlike the famous dish, whose origins aren’t quite known, the products for sale in Chop Suey Club-the eyewear, lingerie, home décor, accessories, and clothing-are made in China, and proudly so. “I like having a big range of things to show a whole lifestyle, and I can’t really pick and choose. “There is kind of a contained chaos in it,” founder and creative director Ruoyi Jiang said. John and Weber talking about working with Jan Michael Vincent.Chop Suey Club takes its name from the vegetable medley dish found in Chinatowns across America in the ’60s, and someone observing the boutique’s contents during its official launch party this week in Manhattan’s Two Bridges neighborhood might see why. Other highlights include Robert Mitchum singing a duet with Dr. Teri Shepherd, manager and long-time partner of nightclub favourite Frances Faye, shares endearing stories of their exciting relationship wrestler Rickson Gracie and surfer Christian Fletcher discuss what it was like becoming (homoerotic) sex symbols as seen through Weber's lens aging explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger and his book ARABIAN SANDS are featured and former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland allows Weber in to shoot her fabulously tacky apartment. The film goes all over the place, but every side adventure is a worthy one. Starting off as a film about model Peter Johnson, whom Weber snatched from a high school wrestling team and turned into a star for Ralph Lauren and other fashionistas, CHOP SUEY is a tasty mix of vintage colour and black-and-white footage, still photos of everyone from Alfed Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe to Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable, and insightful narration by Weber and Johnson about modelling, family, and the cult of celebrity. Filmmaker Bruce Weber, whose last feature-length documentary was the award-winning LET'S GET LOST in 1988 (about jazz great Chet Baker), returns with this fascinating look at his life and career. ![]()
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