Gotta love a snow day. Everyone runs home and the city is quiet.

I stumbled across this marvelous video of Peggy Moffitt in action, wearing Rudi Gernreich's amazing creations. Now I desperately want a helmet of dark hair to crown with a hood of peacock feathers. I want to dance like a giraffe in a giraffe print coat too!

For more inspired fashion choices, a friend of mine and her cohorts, were recently profiled in Time Out NY as Disco Shamans. There are some excellent ideas for 99 cent store style, and the awesome Sarah Van Buren makes an appearance as Gernreich-eque sad clown! And on roller skates, no less. Kudos to Sarah!

Penguins eating ice cream. No really, penguins eating ice cream. You will not find this print again anywhere else. Ever. Could there be a more perfect winter novelty print?

Look at their happy little faces as they keep cool in a black and white cityscape here and there relieved by sepia tones, Neo-Classical buildings and faceless pedestrians. They appear to be standing on a subway grate to me (which would probably hurt their little webbed feet) but with my provincial eyes everything looks like New York. Perhaps you see something different? To me they appear to be wandering around the Wall Street area, with the colonnades of the Stock Exchange intruding, and the narrow cobblestone streets closed to automobiles. Only their feet, beaks and ice cream provide the technicolor highlights.

This amazing print is available on sale for a mere $10 from Shotgunvintage, where you can find a number of other fetching things.

Far out, indeed. Prints like these were conjured up by the casual psychedelia of a time when counter culture was transitioning into consumer lifestyle. But I wouldn't say that the designer needed to open the doors of perception to create this print. There is plenty of late 60s to early 70s stuff that mimes or references tripping, but much of it is just that, a reference. I always felt that way about that Monkees' movie, "Head". Jack Nicholson, one of the only credited writers may have been high, but one gets the sense that Bob Rafelson, the director, was not. He was just thinking: what would someone on acid do? But without the bother of the trip. After all, one has production deadlines and someone had to edit the film, and get these ice cream eating penguins printed on polyester.

Though I must say it's been a long time since I've seen "Head". Perhaps a winter psychedelic film festival is in order. Though I cannot interupt the juggernaut that is the Karen Black film festival, currently screening most nights in my apartment. I'm now reading Marianne Faithfull's autobiography and she has a keen eye for the places where counter culture and capitalism cozy up. Her reinvention as the grand dame of rock alone shows her savvy. (I really want to know how one becomes a grand dame of anything. I promise a full report if Ms. Faithfull delivers any trade secrets.)

So, it's your call. What do you think? Penguins on peyote? Or: a bunch of suits sitting around a board room saying: will this rock those hippies?

Happy New Year, goslings, and L'shana tova. Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 5769. I know that a pig dress is entirely inappropriate to present while wishing all of you a happy Rosh Hashanah. But then, that's my style, isn't it?


To be perfectly frank, I've never seen a print anything like this before. A 70's looking couple with a mustached man and woman in a prairie dress holding an umbrella ride an enormous pig in an angry landscape of animalistic plants and polka dot trees. Whoa. This one could cause an acid flashback for sure. I love how the belt on the woman's dress catches the wind. The pig does not look particularly friendly. These pigs are just doing their jobs, as if polka dot pigs had been drafted to serve as shuttle busses. The tulips in the landscape are a nice touch, as are the white outlines of the orange clouds. Or are those marmalade skies?

Its current bid is almost nothing. Maybe your life isn't trippy enough?

I tend to snap up prints I've never seen before. I can't help it. Looking seriously at prints these past few years, I've seen a lot of repeats. Last week for example, I was in line for tickets at the Clown Festival, wearing a jaunty polyester photo print dress with Chinese tapestries and Fu Lions on it, when a woman came up to me and asked to examine my dress. I always oblige in such situations. After all, I have deliberately chosen prints so eye-scaldingly ornate that it takes a good 5 minutes or so just to take it all in. The woman got very excited when she found the Fu Lions. "I just bought my husband a vintage shirt with this same print," she told me. The husband soon arrived to corroborate and we all discussed our love for photo prints, Asian-themed Hawaiiana and the like. And it was a lovely example of loud prints bringing people together.

In the end, even a hand-made vintage dress (this one was laboriously and crookedly handmade) is not entirely the unique snowflake that one imagines. In the past, I have not acted quickly enough on unusual prints only to have them resurface 6 months or a year later. Someone made bolts and bolts of this photo print polyester at one point. It's all out there somewhere.

But I have never seen passenger pigs before. Have you? I feel like this one shall not appear again in my lifetime. Like a century plant in bloom.

I don't know if it is beautiful or not. But if I wore it to a party, I probably wouldn't be able to circulate. I'd sit too long at the hookah table and get lost in the psychedelic goodness of my own skirt.