Black Forest fashion
Oktoberfest may be months away, but thanks to my wardrobe’s recent infusion of Nooworks’ clothing, I’ll be cultivating my beer garden in style all year long. I first fell in love with San Francisco seamstress (and wunderbar Attic bartender) Jennifer D’Angelo’s Black Forest-inspired fashions at the Noise Pop Expo back in March, where I tipsily purchased numerous tees emblazoned with cuckoo clocks and overflowing beer steins (drinking whilst shopping always loosens otherwise-tight purse strings). I also bought the best hoodie ever (and considering how many hoodies I own, that is definitely saying something)—the lovely heart print, patterned after an old guitar strap, rocks. Plus it’s still snuggly soft inside, even after multiple washings, and the cut is completely curve-friendly; not only are D’Angelo’s T-shirts form-fitting, but her hoodies hug like no others.
Last week, while sporting my heart pattern sweatshirt and cuckoo clock tee, I ran into the young designer at the de Young, where her über-cute clothing collection was on display as part of the museum’s Friday Night series. In celebration of the exclusive
North American exhibition of Vivienne Westwood: 36 Years in Fashion, last Friday’s event focused on local fashion designers. Even though she had just flown back from watching her multi-instrumentalist boyfriend play with his band Trans Am at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in the UK, D’Angelo stayed up all night to stitch together a sexy lederhosen-meets-guitar-goddess mini-dress AND build an adorable fairytale forest set replete with pine trees, deer, birdies, squirrels, and red and white-dotted mushroom stools for her pigtailed Bavarian beauties to perch on. Everything looked sehr gut at the showzen.
Along with Noowork’s installation, models in matching platinum curly-cue wigs wiggled in ReadyMade favorite Dema Grim’s latest twisted classics collection. Also adding to the hipster ambience, Birdman Records founder David Katznelson took a spin at the turntables followed by a youthfully raucous set by Lou Lou & the Guitarfish, and mashup artists Adrian & the Mysterious D. Five emerging Bay Area high-end designers put on a runway show at the end, but I was too hungry to look at super-skinny models at that point. So I took off to chow down on a heaping plate of Käsespätzle at Suppenküche. Yum!
