A Healthy Glow
Perhaps it’s a backlash against menacing glycolic-acid peels and tough drugs like Accutane that has pushed the founders of Fresh – the cosmetic company that bottled chocolate milk for the bath – to launch a new line of soy-based skin moisturizers and soap ($12-$34). Once the diet staple for the tempeh-eating set, protein-rich soy is the latest antidote against aging and damaged skin. Makeup guru Kevyn Aucoin is so sold on soy that he’s made presents of the product line to friends like Alanis Morissette, Sandra Bernhard, and Tori Amos. If this catches on, will we see botox injections replaced by old-fashioned cucumber presses?
ANNA RACHMANSKY
Touch of Evil
Stylish shoppers at Kirna Zabête are bypassing the racks of forward-looking Belgian designs and colorful beaded purses to grab handfuls of e.vil T-shirts ($50). The cotton baseball jerseys and tees emblazoned with slogans like little miss tramp and little miss drama or simply the ominous e.vil allow mild-mannered uptown girls to wear a bit of ‘tude on their sleeves. Aimee Soleimanzadeh, the designer and self-proclaimed “Queen of Evil” who spends her workdays as an art director for Spike Lee’s advertising firm, Spike/ DDB, explains that “evil means good – like baaad.” The fashion flock can’t get enough of the nasty tees – for themselves or their precious Jack Russells, which can march along the sidewalks in their own little miss bitch T-shirts ($35). But is that good or bad?
MAURA EGAN
T&A for T.A.’s
One doesn’t automatically associate Victoria’s Secret with Victorian lit. But a new downtown company, Passion Bait, is giving its own lingerie a surprisingly literary spin: Its catalogue is a knowing knockoff of the paperbacks produced by the Olympia Press, the most notorious publisher in Paris from the twenties into the seventies. Olympia’s slim volumes housed all sorts of outlaw literature, from frank little porn tales to the first printings of Ulysses and Naked Lunch. Passion Bait’s booklet (available by mail; call 212-460-9854), while perhaps a little less high-minded, mimics the Olympia look almost exactly, with the famous green cover, crude mimeographish typography, stark but racy photos (of models in Passion Bait’s designs, of course, most of which are hip-hugging Lycra numbers with minimalist details), and a running story line about a late-night encounter … in a library. Just the thing to get you through that next all-nighter.
CHRISTOPHER BONANOS