It’s a while since we’ve done an “In the Closet with…” feature but I can’t think of a better way to re-introduce than with a Stateside Bitchy friend Selah Says. I first encountered Say in her former life as Melly Shabazz, one half of a duo called the Agyators. The Agyators was probably the first actually the first blog I followed too and it sparked my interest in writing and photography, something that has continued to grow since.

Say represents positivity strength and inspiration for us – we love to follow strong girls everywhere, fearless in speaking their mind, feisty and creative in multiple-disciplines.

Apart from everything else this girls never got a less than KILLER do appealing to our deepest levels of hair shizofrenia.

I’ve been meaning to blog her for what seems like an eternity(I’m a bad blogger, I never promised I’d be good at this) and I think now is the most appropriate time – she’s one of the finalists short-listed to become a Levi’s girl. Please show your support too and vote for her – we re-work Vintage Levis in our Remade collection so would be lovely to see one a friend of BITCHY represent a brand that we work with daily. (We’ve just been commissioned to do a really exciting project for Urban Outfitters UK with vintage Levis but more about that later)

Above are her images and below, her words and her video – nothing is impossible(my favorite three words, she proves them)…..

Just Say Say!

Hey world this is Selah Says (pronounced say!)

Up until this monumental point in history, most people have known me by my other alias Melly Shabazz (Google me), when I ran about NYC photographing parties and reeking all types of creative madness under the brand The Agytators (which is now defunct). But honey I had to turn Melly Shabazz into a glass figurine, and put her ass in the back of my great aunt’s menagerie to bite dust—it’s all about Selah Says now!

As Selah Says, I’m continuing the multi-disciplinary artist agenda I began with Melly Shabazz; but now instead of purely focusing on the visual arts (photo, video, self-portraits), I’m branching off into music. I sing and I rap. I know, I know—everybody and their momma sings, raps, and has a demo CD, but 99.9% of them suck monkey balls, and their CDs should be used as coasters at a dive bar. I have the liberty to say such things because I am currently standing behind a 7ft, 340 lbs security guard, come and get me suckas…LMAO!

As for my personal style….I’m the lovechild of Grace Jones, Prince, Joe Strummer, and the monster underneath my bed.

In regards to my musical style…I am Chaka Khan, Lauryn Hill, George Clinton + P Funk and 2pac singing on a Southern Baptist Church Choir on Acid.

I haven’t officially released any of my music. However, you can find videos of me doing my music thing on my Youtube channel. I also have a Facebook page where I share my thoughts. Come visit me at my humble abodes.

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/selahsays

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/selahsays

I bid you all peace and loads of fun.

And by the way, here’s my latest SONG + VIDEO that I made. On this video entitled “CONCRETE JUNGLE,” I got my PRINCE on. I wrote the SONG and RAP, PHARRELL made the Beat, I sang all the vocals, I recorded and mixed my own vocals, I shot the video, and I edited the video all whilst getting my MC on with the Vocals + Rhyming. I hope you ENJOY!

Sincerely,

Selah Says aka say!

]]> http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/2010/07/vote-selah-says/feed/ 0 http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/2010/06/the-curious-confectioner-cake-innovator/ http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/2010/06/the-curious-confectioner-cake-innovator/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:46:29 +0000 M http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/?p=3673 Let them eat burgers and chips

A few weeks ago a friend introduced me to a man with a twiddly moustache and a not so twiddly cake habit. I have a really bad cake habit – if I lived in France i would most likely be morbidly obese – so this was sheer delight. The Curious Confectioner creates edible art cakes(and trust me they are) from all manner of unusual ingredients including popping candy, edible glitter, edible flowers and weird berries which he fed us the last time he visited our studio(I can’t remember what they were called but they had a great name that sounded slightly rude which obviously we love).

The Burgers and Chips cakes above – BURGERS AND CHIPS CAKES!!! – were created for the Hackney Wicked arts festival. The only thing better than burgers and chips is burgers and chips cakes don’t you think?

Way too Pink” popping candy biscuit Unicorn Cake – Of course!

I’ve been trying to persuade him to make cake tits for a while now, I’m not quite sure why . There’s something terribly cliche about cupcakes with cherries on top so maybe it’s more of a challenge. I believe the cake tits have been made and I shall be seeing them on Friday. Ha ha I’ve just had a text from him saying he needs to figure out how to transport his jelly. I leave the Destiny’s child cliche’s alone.

ZUUL. Human Hair Neckpiece – TWO WEEKS by bitchingandjunkfood.com

Today sees the lauch of Vicestyle.com VICE’s online fashion site aimed at the next generation of youth culture. For me VICE has always managed to tap into the “it’s wrong but it’s kinda right….am I weird” element of my brain so I was interested to see how they applied the same aesthetic to fashion.

MOUNTAIN TRIBE. This is just beautiful and reminds me of Ireland.

If you’re gonna be trussin up your toes we suggest getting laid back everywhere else…..just like Kath in her French Workwear pants, more of this look also coming soon.

Property Of… Open Toed Biker Boot £55 coming soon to bitchingandjunkfood.com

T-Shirt by One-Teaspoon £65 bitchingandjunkfood.com(available next week)

Vintage Lace Vest £25 from bitchingandjunkfood.com

Vintage French Workwear pants £40 from bitchingandjunkfood.com(more of this on the way)

Property Of boots…£55 bitchingandjunkfood.com(available next week)

Kath yours for a tenner.

Don’t know how this escaped our attention – totally forgot about this shoot, filmed the end of last Summer but this(Hackney Wick) is where BITCHY began last year in a big dusty old warehouse. Pre Olympic development Armageddon, it was the place for any kind of shoot and Adidas’ above was no exception.

To be totally honest having Beckham round looking for tea and jaffa cakes every five minutes got a bit head wreckin – he’s not a great conversationalist and doesn’t know a thing about post-modernism. Snoop n his bitches were a bit distracting, all that batty – Noel can’t really sing but he was a good laugh. Goes without saying that everyone in Hackney Wick is that good looking and despite what you may have heard about squat parties, they actually all look this glamorous.

Thankfully Adidas left all the props on the streets for the local art scavengers – that’s our mate Jarris on the skateboard, he also helped us put up all the shelves in our studio.

Me n Suzaaaay who I accidentally called Croydon the other day. For real.

Installation by Adelita

Inside of tree-house/shop/watering hole installation

Greg selling Mojitos and Moscow Mules

Kath n Suzaaaay drikin em - check out the boots, online soon, collaboration with Underground!

A smokin customer buying one of our hats and waistcoat

More of these feathered waistcoats on the way

Me and lil bitch Pepper

Kath takes on a shoplifter.

....and loses

Charlie Baker n his missus. Loving his double glasses action.

We’ll be doing this market every Saturday from now on so if there’s something you fancy from the website or just wanna come down, meet us and hang out in the sunshine, drop by say hi. If nothing else do it for the Mojitos, the treehouse and the East LDN eye candy.

Map below…

View London in a larger map

MAX VOLUME PLEASE…

Two Weeks label came about this AW10 in order to represent both our design aesthetics, my background in jewellery/accessories and Kath’s in clothing design. We’re loving menswear just as much as womens and both our own styles are kind of sporty(occasionally slutty but our remade label serves that purpose well) so we decided to do a Unisex collection – we also just wanted a pair of tracksuit bottoms we could throw on and still look cool(guess it’s a bit lifestyle).

I met Gabriel Gettman several months ago and we had a brief chat about fashion and film. I’d brushed shoulders with him a few times since and hadn’t really followed it up until we decided to shoot a film with 2 days to pull it all together. I don’t really see our film as a lookbook and I don’t think a film can replace a lookbook as it serves a different purpose. We wanted to cross-over art and fashion, to create something dynamic, slightly sinister, a mood, a texture as a backdrop to our collection. I approached Gabriel to make our film with ideas on opposites black/white, male/female, light/dark and I knew there was going to be paint bubble or splatter involved – I just didn’t realised quite how much(80 litres in total).

We love a good challenge and work best under a stupid deadline – it’s just not exciting unless someone’s rolling their eyes and exhaling heavily(but smiling a little bit too)!

We managed to pull together a whole cast of  models, hair and make-up, cameraman, studio manager, art director in two days and shot a film that we’ve watched time and time again.

Big thanks to everyone involved and especially to our models Miguel Dare and Jade Mc Sorely(who you might recognise from Britain’s Next Top Model) for letting us cover them in paint in a freezing cold studio on Valentine’s Day. Super big thanks to Gabriel who realised our vision to perfection.

We’ve already got SS11 ideas and we’re stepping it up again – possibly not with a 2 day lead – how about Two Weeks?

]]> http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/2010/05/two-weeks-our-new-uni-sex-label-and-film/feed/ 3 http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/2010/05/our-first-front-cover-on-ellie-and-marina/ http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/2010/05/our-first-front-cover-on-ellie-and-marina/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 10:54:09 +0000 M http://blog.bitchingandjunkfood.com/?p=3441

Company Cover June 2010

Bitchingandjunkfood.com for Urban Outfitters

Marina wears THE feather head-dress.

Metal Rimmed Visor

Our sunnies are flying out at the moment and the festivals haven’t even started. We’ve totally sold out on our GAGA sunnies but fear not we’ve a re-order hitting in a couple of weeks so watch this space. We got a new delivery today of lots of new styles and were TOO excited, we’ll be uploading next week, here’s some of our favorites.

Chunky Wayfarer in Red

Chunky Wayfarer

Invisible Sunnies - screwed if you lose 'em.

All of it....

We’ve been invited back to do an AW collection for Urban Outfitters and our meeting is today. I was just going through my inspiration pictures and found this one. According to BITCHY Kath, it’s “everything in my mind”.  Human Hair, studs, sunglasses, black – what exactly this says about my mind I’m not sure but I love this picture. I don’t think our next range for Urban will be as dark at this but some inspiration might make its way into BITCHY.

M.I.A billbored

Right, been a while since we’ve been blogging – something to do with our involvement in last night’s installation in Future Gallery for the launch of LIVE magazine, our Urban Outfitters collaboration delivering this week, our Mates Rates shopping evening and our prep for the Clothes Show Live. Not much going on then. We thought this was pretty blog-worthy though and if we weren’t furiously sewing we’d be making our own banners to project.

Billbored, collaboratively produced by NIki Best, Debra Bourne and Josef Valentino offers everyone in the UK the opportunity to design and submit their own ‘Billbored’ showing their personal vision for change, in response to the UK General Elections. With the support of Red Bull, submissions will be broadcast throughout Election Week onto the front of key London Landmarks and made available afterwards via Social Networking Sites such as Facebook and Twitter to galvanise support and encourage online interactivity.

Josef Valentino Billbored

Cassette Playa

We cannot express how much we love KTZ – a label that’s just fun. We still love to play dress-up, we never grew out of it and I guess it’s that part of our personalities that the team have touched with us. 

Kokon To Zai Harem Pants

A favorite with club kids world over, this season sees the label take inspiration from sportswear and I love how the prints reference a certain deceased 90’s designer. I wore the leg braces to fashion week in Feb and actually felt like a celebrity – I know this was nothing to do with me and everything to do with the shoes. This is definately an ‘elevate you from the masses’ label – isn’t that what we all crave in some way or another. Yes, now go shop.

KTZ dress with peaked shoulderpads

And we ALSO got the visors as seen on GAGA created by Linda Farrow for KTZ.

Image borrowed from the lovely GAGA daily

…and here’s the BITCHY GIRLS Kath and Marion – I’m rockin the leg braces, they made me walk better…we’er both wearing Two Weeks, our new label, film and lookbook to follow.

images courtesy of weknowwhatyoudidlastnight.com – thankyou Chrisopher for your lovely photography skills.

Feather Headdress by Bitching for Urban OUtfitters

Vintage Crystal Flapper Necklace by Bitchy for Urban

Main Page

Oh shit I think I've hurt myself

This is an on-going debate between everyone we work and collaborate with. My feet were firmly rooted in column No whereas others sat gladly in column Yes. However I stepped across a few months ago. 

I don’t really know how this happened as I’m opinionated(occasionally dogmatic) and stand my ground pretty well on most topics. Well I guess it’s time to disclose some secrets.

I’m a bit of a word Nazi, a grammatical control freak. Despite the fact that I like techno and dubstep I’m noise sensitive and certain things just don’t sound quite right(like crunching cornflakes) – in fact certain sequences of words make me wince. So when I started this blog I banned lots of words, some I just didn’t like the sound of, others just made me cringe.

Banned words and sentences as follows: Gaga, Lady Gaga, East London, Shoreditch, Fashionista(we haaaaaate this word, all of us, what does it actually mean any more?), commerical, sexy, glamazon, shoes, i love shoes, I’m obsessed with shoes, I’ve so many shoes(same sequence again replaced with handbags), the girls, night out with the girls, trendsters, scenesters, trend setters – hipsters is allowed though. Oh yeah and we live and work in East so it’s hard not to mention it. We never say Shoreditch though.

So how did Gaga manage to creep back in “oh la ra ra ra ra” style. Let’s get one thing straight here. The music doesn’t sound sweet in my noise sensitive ears – something vaguely reminiscent about working in nightclubs in Rimini as a student clad in hotpants. Gaga as an entire creative team is doing something very very clever to mainstream fashion and pop. If Gaga was producing some experimental avant garde music it would probably never make it further than some obscure back-alley club in Berlin. By brain-washing the masses with lighthearted disco-pop it means that fashion and performance-wise House of Gaga can push boundaries and still be fully accepted in a commerical market(shit just said commercial, what’s happening!! next I’ll be calling myself a Fashionista, please shoot me if that happens). Whilst celebs like Kelly Osborne are crumbling under the twinkle toothed, blonde bimboed stateside pressure others such as Gaga are making it acceptable to be bonkers and I think that’s just brilliant even if I don’t like the disco-pop. Who else could get away with bleeding to death on stage at the MTV awards.

In the inimitable words of Dizzie:” some people think I’m bonkers but I just think I’m free, man I’m just livin my life there’s nothin crazy bout me”. Well said Diz, well said.

Human Hair Zip Necklace by bitchingandjunkfood.com

I’m a sucker for ripping out pages, printing things off, sticking them in folders and forgetting about them but I know they’re going to be useful someday and if I chuck them then I know that within a week I’ll need them.

ILIL Guerilla found its way into one of these folders about 2 years ago – it was a WGSN report about a pop-up store they’d done at WUT Berlin in Tokyo – it went into the “dream stockists” list for when I had my own label – which we do now, it took a while, but the print-out was patient! I just liked the concept and thought it was cool and we just wanted to be there. It wasn’t about money. Some places you just want to be. And now we are.

Human Hair Zip Necklace by bitchingandjunkfood.com

I recently pulled the folder out to reference a window installation from WUT and showed it to BITCHY Kath then moved same to pile on desk where it sat for several more weeks until I received a mail from the lovely Rachel at – guess where – ILIL Guerilla. They just launched their first permanent store and are stocking our human hair zip necklaces modelled by lovely Leo above. BITCHY girls happy. The human hair range has been met with horror and ecstasy(people literally swooned they were so overcome with excitement, really they did, they did.) They’ve actually been one of our best selling ranges so hurray for the adventurous, who needs diamante studs anyway? You can buy them from our online store here.

Pictures courtesy of dropsnap.com – a Tokyo blog we love. We also love Tokyo. Who doesn’t.

H.O.T oh yeah and the shades are pretty cool too

These are just cool. Shop them now in bitchingandjunkfood.com. 

In case you hadn't seen, if you haven't then you probably shouldn't be shopping here, you won't like it.

We stumbled upon designer Sarah Claire and her lovely collection of mesh leggings “Dainty Things”.  What a great way to wear leggings in the summer, with built in air-conditioning!!  Wonderful.  This small capsule collection ticks all the boxes for us:- cycle shorts – check, mesh – check, nude colour palette – check,  knee pads – check!   Now check it out in the store.