The French magazine Stiletto asked SOFTlab to work on a project for their December edition of the magazine. The theme was Utopia.

As architects, this is of course a pretty loaded theme. We were given free reign but the theme had to incorporate 6 different pairs of stiletto shoes/boots, part of course of the overall theme of the magazine itself. The city was thought of as a pattern, and as a bow and counterpoint to Superstudio, it is a distorted, continuous grid that is both landscape and infrastructure, city and world, nature and artifice.

The shoes then, became the towers that break the pattern. Fashion as a liberator you might say?

The team were:
Mike Szivos, Jose Gonzalez, Jason McGee, Masami Ueki and Anjas Maroef.

SOFTlab has just been featured in the latest issue of Stiletto Magazine, a high end fashion / culture quarterly French magazine. We met Laurence Benaim, the founder and Director of the Publication / Chief Editor of Stiletto at our studio back in November 07.

I’ll translate the article later on and post it here.

John Maeda’s collaboration with Reebok has produced the Timetanium Ventilator. Only 100 of them were produced and of course, already gone.

Visit the Rbk site here.
See the YouTube video after the jump.

Japanese experimental fashion designer Aya Tsukioka has come up with new concept in urban camouflage, as a response to Japan’s fears of crime (although actual crime figures are shrinking, according to the NYT article). By lifting a flap and revealing a vending machine, women can hide behind their skirts and blend into the urbanscape. Not quite Thermo-optic camouflage but pretty close.

“It is just easier for Japanese to hide,” Ms. Tsukioka said. “Making a scene would be too embarrassing.” She said her vending machine disguise was inspired by a trick used by the ancient ninja, who cloaked themselves in black blankets at night.

Read the article here and view the slideshow here.