Perfect Vision | Four Female Thought Leaders

“We Come From A Coat”

CEO Angela Ahrendts of Burberry hit the nail on the head with Art of the Trench, a socially networked site with user submitted street photos of the classic trench in action along with snaps from Sartorialist photographer Scott Schuman (for now, other collaborators to follow).  What this shows is that Burberry knows their roots and understands how to tap into their consumer’s best instincts as well as finding a natural link to social media’s major players.  Nothing is forced here – which is always the problem when brands jump on board the bandwagon to wince-worthy effect. The added bonus: a direct incentive to buy yourself a new trench knowing that if you’re out there wearing one, you might end up on www.artofthetrench.com. Keeps us wearing our trenches into late fall’s chilly rain. Genius.

-C Zalkin

Nobel Prize for Literature goes to German writer, Herta Mueller

“Herta Mueller, a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority who was persecuted for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse.

Mueller, born in Romania’s Transylvania Banat region, was honored for work that ‘with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,’ the Swedish Academy said.”  -NPR

Kazuyo Sejima to be next director of Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition

“The president of the Venice Biennale, Paola Barrata, announced this morning that the director of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition will be Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA Architects.  Last week, we reported rumors that the next director was going to be a woman—a first for this most important of international contemporary architecture expositions. The names most frequently bandied about for this major job were Sejima and Liz Diller…In picking Sejima, the Biennale has chosen a practicing architect for the first time since Massimiliano Fuksas in 2000.” -blog.archpaper.com

Sejima is quoted as saying: “It might be argued that contemporary architecture is a rethinking and perhaps softening (borders between)…inside and outside, individual and public, form and function, physical and virtual, contemporary and classical, past and future, harmony and discord, structure partition, art and architecture, nature and man”

The “Woman Among Warlords” Comes to the U.S. to ask us to leave Afghanistan

“Malalai Joya, called the ‘bravest woman in Afghanistan,’ is finishing up a U.S. tour where she has pressed the Obama administration to pull the military out of her country. She says nothing could be worse for women than what she sees as the current civil war.

Joya gained international recognition in 2003 when she spoke out against warlords and drug traffickers at the Afghan constitutional assembly. Addressing the “felons” who controlled the country, she called them anti-woman, demanded they be put on trial in international court and declared that history would never forgive them. She was then pushed out of the assembly room in a sea of both threats and applause.

After speaking at Brown, Joya met with Women’s eNews and recounted with a smile another speech in which she compared members of parliament to animals, attacking their integrity and usefulness. That got her banned from parliament and stripped of her formal political role, but she has not stopped speaking.

Joya has little security at her speaking events, even though, as she told Women’s eNews, she faces threats from allies of Afghan warlords in this country.

Sometimes she is unable to sleep at night after she has seen pictures of the horrors, she said. It is loyalty to ‘my people’ that has brought her to the United States, where she has spoken to packed auditoriums and sold copies of her 2009 book, A Woman Among Warlords.

..Although government officials have demanded Joya’s apology for insulting them, she does not believe she is the one who should be sorry.

‘Someone had to do that and I did it . . . and I don’t regret it,’ she said.

Instead, she addresses President Obama:

‘Apologize to my people and end this.’”

-excerpts taken from article by Amy Littlefield for Woman’s ENews

Buy her book on Amazon.

Thursday • November 12, 2009 • by Chauncey Zalkin

Category: Angela Ahrendts, Blog, Herta Mueller, Kazuyo Sejima, Malalai Joya, Paola Barrata, Topical Thursday