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Today the new Bob Dylan album, Tell Tale Signs , a collection of rare and unreleased material from 1989-2006 was released to rave reviews.  The album is part of the Bootleg Series, Volume 8 and received a glowing write-up with a four and a half star rating from Rolling Stone Magazine.

A bearded man with a preference for plaids sits next to me at the office.  His name is Mitch Blank.  If you watched the closing credits for Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, you might have chuckled at his credit: “Hypnotist Collector”, a reference to lyrics in “She Belongs to Me”.  The credit is appropriate because Blank is afterall, “THE world’s premier Dylan archivist”.  Mitch Blank was instrumental in selecting the songs that appeared on the (three) discs that comprise Tell Tale Signs and he is mentioned in the liner notes (pg.s 4-5).

Getty Images is the proud distributor of Bob Dylan imagery spanning the musician’s career from the late 1950’s to the present.  You may notice some material in the lightbox is from “Blank Archives”.  That’s Mitch too!

Blank also consulted on the recently published, A Freewheelin’ Time, written by Dylan’s one time girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.  You know her as the gal walking down Jones Street in the West Village under Dylan’s Arm on the Cover of 1963’s Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.  What better time than now to take these two works in tandem?

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Today, actress Anna Karina attended a Master Class during the 13th Pusan International Film Festival at Grand Hotel in Busan, South Korea. The biggest film festival in Asia showcases 315 films from 60 countries.

Then, in 1969, Karina was on set shooting Justine, directed by George Cukor and Joseph Strick and she had been divorced from director Jean-Luc Godard for two years.  This seven year romance was accompanied by her participation in at least six of his films, including Une femme est une femme and Pierrot le fou.   Karina had a unenviable childhood, traded by grandparents, foster parents and her mother.  She started her career as an actress and singer in her native Denmark, later moving to Paris at 17 where she befriended Coco Chanel and Pierre Cardin and began modeling.  Karina has always had a bewitching presence on screen and anyone who relishes the modish styles of the mid to late 1960’s will appreciate the bohemian tinged glamour Karina embraces.  Let her filmography guide your vintage inspiration this weekend.  Let her photos take you back now.

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Here, accessories are the great equalizer, it seems. They can almost transform Katie Holmes on the street in New York this weekend into Jackie Kennedy-Onassis when over-sized sunglasses are paired with a headscarf. Zoe Kravitz at the Chanel show in Paris last week echoes Bianca Jagger with the help of a beret and shades. Recipe to convert Jane Doe into “suspected starlet”?  Combining the ultimate trio of sunglasses, headscarf and trench coat.  What is your accessory secret weapon?

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Your stovepipe jeans feel a little tight don’t they?  I know mine do and it’s not because I’ve had too many cookies from the “snack table”.  I’ve been looking at pages of high-waisted, loose as a goose, slouchy trousers from Fashion Weeks in New York, London and Milan and anything tight looks passe to my eyes.

For most women, the thought of flowy pants conjures the image a middle-aged healer from Sedona.   My mom called an extreme variety of the loose, dropped crotch pants people wore in the late 80’s: sh_t bag pants.  I’m not sure anyone would endorse MC hammer drop-crotch balloon pants now, but the nuanced “new loose” looks modern, comfortable and even cool.  Designers such as Moschino Cheap & Chic, Jaeger, Blumarine, Paul Smith and Sportmax have banished our perception of breezy silk trousers as matronly.  Will you be opting for more flow this season?  See these breezy pants in action in the spring/summer 2009 collections here.

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Another cool styling execution swept runways at Japan’s fashion week for Spring/Summer 2009 collections. Everlasting Sprout, a line designed by Keiichi Muramatsu and Noriko Seki, showed silhouettes reminiscent of ballerinas, but in hooped crochet, over flimsy slips. Wabi-sabi was at play here: relaxed, over sized separates with baggy pockets in a bleached out palette had a resort meets hippie-mom quality.  white-grey wigs cloned the models and gave the collection a courtly look.  Earlier in the week, Mikio Sakabe’s collection used blond mop top wigs to unite models into an army of uniformity.  Have a look at the wigged out runway.

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I know, I know… Woody Allen is hardly a fashion icon but he does have his own sense of style, a very particular and stubborn one, that has carried him through the early 60’s and into the millennium. Corduroys, bucket hats, blazers, button down shirts, plaids and of course, those glasses are as much a part of Woody Allen as anything. (Below, left) we can see him dressed almost exactly the same way he was in 1981 (below right).  See Woody as fashion plate through the years here.

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Rodney Bingenheimer aka Mayor Of The Sunset Strip has kept the same basic aesthetic for over 40 years, pairing jackets with slim pants and never without a shaggy fringe. Those who carry a subcultural torch are usually the ones who invent and then adhere to a specific unique look. Bingenheimer has maintained a tweaked British Mod look from his days running English Disco until today. His adhesion to a strict style code tends to make him somewhat ageless. Do you think there should be a point at which subcultural dressing is no longer appropriate?  See Rodney shift his looks here.

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Fittingly, fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has maintained a strong expression of style through his life in the spotlight. The main elements to Lagerfeld’s look are comprised of a ponytail, shades, a jacket, trousers, pointed shoes, some form of tie and a decorative pin (though he has gone without one). He wears almost exclusively black and white, though he wore a silver jacket at the Met’s Costume Institute Gala. Lately he has been wearing gloves, either open fingered or closed. He is pictured here on the left in 2008 and on the right in 1984.

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Trends are overrated. Those who find a “look” and stick to it are few and far between. One who has picked an aesthetic as bold and uncompromising as 1960s model, Peggy Moffitt, for example, is most likely self-assured and committed. Self-imposed limitations on wardrobe or hairstyle can be liberating. It frees us up for other trains of thought. The style-stickers do run the risk becoming cartoons of themselves. Over the next few posts we will be focusing on people who have maintained a strong, unwavering sense of style throughout their life in the public eye.

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As summer comes to a close, we prematurely mourn the loss of white jeans. The wearing of whites has traditionally marked summer, sandwiched in America between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Regions blessed by temperate weather such as the west and deep south tend to eschew the tradition of shelving white shoes and pants after September 1st, but in general we are moving away from such rigid etiquette.

Some claim that bright whites after Labor Day is a maverick, fashion forward move and others have sworn off white jeans for life. You’ve seen them everywhere lately thanks to the 80’s revival. Liz Hurley has been wearing them non-ironically a since the 1990’s. David Hemmings caused a stir when his character wore white jeans with a black belt in 1966’s Blowup, launching a mini white denim trend. Let’s not forget Mick Jagger, who rocked them in The Rolling Stones’ 1981 music video for “Waiting On A Friend”. Enjoy the video as you check out white jeans then and now. Do you dare wear white jeans and will you venture out in them after September 1st?