Subversion, liberation or sinking into a mass of black and grey. Kiss The FROG and the Eight Limbs of Yoga, a Manifest of sorts
We always make a statement when we dress, consciously or or not. Do we want to show ourselves, state what tribe we belong to, dressed for success or not to wanting to be seen, sinking into a mass of I don’t have time, money or I don’t care at all. As the inside so the outside, everything is an expression of our relationship to ourselves just as much as our relationship to everyone else. As long as one woman is not treated equally, can’t get an education or is sexually harassed or mutilated, WE ARE FEMINISTS.
It takes courage to be just a bit stylish or to fully state: look at me, here I am, I am taking care about what I express. How you dress can be a great conversation starter, it can indeed attract people to you. Here I am, I am irresistibly charming. You can express your individuality or you can show that you are part of a tribe.
No matter what, there are fewer and fewer places where we can run around freely in the buff, so most of the time we have to throw on something or we can dress with consciousness going for high vibes. All new things come from the street up, from the fashion underground, which we are. We like to express the JOY in our lives, and to create more joy.
” Counter-cultural fashion has been marked by its ability to uncover taboo practices and mess with normative gender or class coding, in a sense bringing taboo practices like sad-masochism and explicit nudity, or the infusion of working class designs, to the surface of clothing.” Gil Allison, ‘Deconstruction Fashion: the making of unfinished, decomposing and re-assembled clothes’, Fashion Theory (March 1998) vol.1,p.33.
And yes, we love to dance and take it with the writer and anarchist Emma Goodman, if the revolution doesn’t make me dance, I want no part of it:
Painting on leather is quite exciting. Painting on black is backward of sorts. You want to keep the original black of the jacket, and you are painting on skin, although dead.
My background as a punk and rock’n roll musician, manager of the legendary rock’n roll clothing store Trash & Vaudeville, combined with a masters in fine arts, a strong printmaking practice and living in Hawaii, allows me to pull from all these different fields and be a driver of the ever changing fashion underground.
Influenced by punk, rock’n roll, yoga, meditation, living in Hawaii, these irreverent and experimental pieces of wearable art will sure catch your eyes and those of many.
Kiss The Frog is a special feature of our current collection, that demonstrates how we transform traditional thinking and connect to our collective psyche through the study of mythology, meditation, art and music. The frog, the princess, or the prince and the frog, there are many different versions around, it doesn’t matter. What it stands for from our point of view, is that we are all on a quest for true love, or unconditional love, the state of the cosmos and who we truly are, when we are connected. Yet, we all have a dark side. In many versions of the tale the princess or the frog have done something or are doing something bad and are looking for redemption.
The fairy tale makes us believe that we are dealing with different persons, that one liberates the other. That is not the full truth. We are all one and the same and only through facing our demons, when we Kiss The Frog, can we be free. That is the true meaning and it is the intend of this art/fashionunderground, complete internal freedom and nothing less.
The Kiss The Frog block is printed upside down inside one of the legs of every one of our denim jeans that we are working on. If you wear the pants and feel like pulling up a leg, Kiss The Frog is visible for all to see right side up. It is a secret code, a commitment that we are in acceptance of our dark sides, that we shine a light on it, that we are indeed facing our demons.
Some art prints can be turned into t-shirts. Here is an example. The original photo for the pair of “Celebrating Olena” W & K, was taken at exactly the spot where the photo of the t-shirt took place. As with every piece we produced so far this is one of a kind, but we consider a run, for which we need investors. This truly is the fashion underground. For more on the original print.
A billion $ industry, there is still lots of confusion about Yoga. The West has come to associate asanas, the exercise part of yoga for yoga itself. It is just one of 8 legs of classical yoga as set forth in Patanjali’s philosophy of yoga. They are:
- yama, our attitudes towards our environment.
- niyama, our attitudes toward ourselves.
- asana, the practice of body exercises
- pranayama, the practice of breathing exercises.
- pratyahara, the restraint of our senses.
- dharana, the ability to direct our minds.
- dhyana, the ability to develop interactions with what we seek to understand.
- samadhi, complete integration with the object to be understood.
The 8 limbs move from the external to more and more refined states of introspection. There is no prescribed sequence, no set rules for practice, yet it is clear that yoga is more interested in our ability to turn inward, which is achieved through a practice of meditation towards which basically legs 4-8 point. But everybody has to find their own path. To clarify, we took a pair of Levi’s 501s, with button fly to show you the 8 limbs of yoga on denim. And just in case you like to learn more, here is my article: Pranayama is the Bomb.
When we create we are connected, we experience joy, there is no hierarchy. We are feminists and we encourage equality of all genders, fluid, we are inspired by the so called mentally afflicted, by their unique insights that inspires us to learn from them. We believe that a society that that doesn’t care of their weak, has much to improve. Yes, we believe in art, music and dance, and justice for all.
……. and laughter from the depth of our soul that make our bellies shake, rattle and roll.
Ok, so what do we want from you? Collaborators, interns, models, apprentices, advice, investors, artists, social media experts, computer – web skills, photographers and friends of course.