An Illustrated Fashion Blog by Angie Réhe

Among the many pleasant things to do on a cold rainy Sunday night, you would have to count sitting in plush surrounds with a glass of red while drawing a semi-naked sexy man wearing fetish boots and hair underpants.  It’s my idea of a hole-in-one, and exactly what I did last Sunday night.

Dr Sketchy’s is where my favourite worlds meet; art and fetish – what more could you want?   Except for that.  Started in New York by Molly Crabapple, Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School expanded to Melbourne 3 years ago, and what the hell took me so long to find it??

The models can be burlesque dancers, circus freaks, et al, and on Sunday night at Madame Brussels we were graced with the foxy vixen Marawa Ibrahim, and the bad & beautiful Anthony.  Ooh, Anthony… There is something disturbingly disturbing about being so attracted to someone clearly belonging to the other team.  What is it about those feline men??  And why are they peppered amongst my ex-boyfriends for that matter?  And why did each one of them have a penchant for wearing skirts?  Wait – does the fact that I like a man in make-up and a skirt make me theoretically gay? –  I think it brings out the masculinity! Argh, I need a panadol…

In any case, Anthony looks like a cross between Russel Brand and my friend Craig (please don’t be disturbed by that attracted comment buddy), and cemented my fan status when he chose my drawing as his favourite for the night, winning me a copy of Titzen Blitzen, a cool new book about the local burlesque scene.  Mwah Anthony!

The deal clincher:

And the prize…

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I don’t change hairdressers all that often, largely due to my dread of the post-dumping pass-by, and subsequent avoidance tactics such as crossing the road, taking alternative routes, etc etc.  At this point in my life however, my ex-hairdresser list is not unlike my ex-boyfriend list, and they are forming a web that threatens to drive me out of the inner north of Melbourne, and I like it here.

So what could tempt me to ditch-the-bitch-and-make-the-switch again?  Sure the arse-kissing, ah, I mean air-kissing was getting tedious at my ex’s, but it was more a result of my extreme openness to influence.  Funnily enough, today someone asked me if I was easily influenced.  “No!”  I scoffed, before realising that a seed planted in my brain germinates in under 90 seconds, causing me to take immediate action on said new idea.  This has the potential to make me both fun at parties, and a danger to myself.  But that’s another story.

So the influence: I was once told that I look like Julia Zemiro from Rockwiz, a bizarre observation that when challenged came down to “personality characteristics” – ie. we are both smart arses and have a penchant for stripes and red lipstick.  More recently I was reading the Melbourne magazine and came a across a snippet of “Julia’s Melbourne tips”, which included her hairdresser, and went something like “I go to the best hairdresser in the world – Mariam at Biba in Fitzroy.”  End of story, that’s all it took.  If it’s good enough for her it’s good enough for me, and I am now a devotee.  Mariam isn’t afraid of a dead blunt fringe, and god bless her, she can cut it straight, which is more than I can say for my mother throughout my entire childhood the night before the school photos.

Meet Mariam…

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Let’s face it – It’s Friday night, and I’m here in my studio studiously analyzing trends for Winter 2010 (which sounds, and is, a lot like reading magazines and surfing the net), about to drag my dull arse into bed so I can get up early enough to worship at the temple of Joel (my yoga teacher and centre of all things lustful – what else would get me out of bed on a Saturday morning?)  But that’s a whole other story.

But in another, more social chapter of my life, I would be just a few hours short of striking a pose as girl below.  Except instead of slumping delicately onto the corner of my bed, I would be passed out, pre-central heating, in front of my fan heater – just for a touch of danger.  And there would be every chance it was one of the nights when I couldn’t wrench my boots off my post-dancing swollen feet, so would sleep in them.  Ah, the single girl’s lament…Why does this, and jammed zips, only seem to happen in-between boyfriends??

It’s taken me quite some time (read: my entire life) to find a sport I can not just tolerate but consider buying the t-shirt and fridge magnet of.  Enter The Roller Derby.  What more could you want from a sport than quiffs in the crowd, leopard-skin anything, and a licensed tuck shop?  Nothing.  Thanks Ms Oparski for leading me into the far northern Melbourne woods on a Saturday night to my new favourite thing.

But these girls are freaking insane.  Anyone who answers an ad that reads – “If you are prepared to get bruised, body slammed, skate fast, dress up in costumes, get sweaty, practice 3 times a week and are over 18 then we want to hear from you.” – needs to learn to crochet. Costumes? tick.  Bruised? Slammed? Sweaty? No stinking way.  Insane.

Which explains why crazies such as the completely mad and scary Kittie von Krusher are to be found flying around the rink.  If that WMD-on-wheels was heading in my direction I would grow wings and fly the hell out of there.  She even bumps her own team out of the way, with a crazy look in her eye like, ah, well, something in need of a valium.  Put it this way; if James Bond had a roller derby scene, she’d be the baddie in it.

Unlike 9 Lives Isis, who is both the cuteness and the hotness, and man can she jam and block.  And no, she’s not a rep for VB, I just stalked her at the bar where she was kindly fetching drinks for friends.

To the guy with the quiff who passed me on high street a while back: Who are you sweet cheeks??

I was making my way from the chemist to the car with a pocketful of amoxicillin, and this guy says as he approaches me from behind “Did you hear what that guy yelled out?  He yelled out ‘Nice Arse!’ – How rude!”  (Note to the universe – I never find this comment rude.)….It was pretty much at that moment I knew I actually did have a flicker of will to live through whatever WMD I’d picked up from the infectious diseases bin I pretty much humped for 8 hours the night a third of my family was ripped from this world.

Anyway, mystery man, not illness that felt like the other side beckoning, nor the look of abject horror on your face as you strutted up beside me and saw my deathbed complexion (responding with a look approximating the expression on Luke Skywalker’s face when Darth Vader takes his helmet off and says I’m Daddy), could prevent me noticing that you were a hunk-o-burnin’ love, and what I really wanted to yell out as you disappeared into the distance?  “Nice arse!”

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Forgive me blog-god, I have not posted for a week.

But you see I’ve been burning the candle at 3 ends.  Interviewing fabulously interesting people like Preston Zly (look out for up-coming interview on this blog) for my monthly newsletter for WGSN (time sheet: 5pm-9pm shift); Pitching for 2 very cool design gigs out of Sydney (time sheet: 9pm-2.30am shift), and teaching the secrets of fashion drawing at the Whitehouse Institute by day.  Phew, that explains the bags.

Which brings me to my most annoying discovery of the week.  Leafing through class notes past and present I came across scraps of paper with my rough-as-guts, fast-as-lightning, unfinished, experimental demonstration drawings, done with a bunch of students standing around me watching while I draw and wax lyrical about faces/feet/paint/the importance of the plumb-line/why it never works to draw teeth in the mouth/etc etc.

What’s annoying is that I liked some of these crappy sketches on scraps of paper more than I like the ones on beautiful 250gsm hot-pressed illustration board (and thanks Eckersleys for introducing me to the perfect paper which you no longer stock), which I labour over for considerable time.

My point being – time, fancy materials, and giving a damn really don’t maketh the Art.  See for yourself.

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Ok so this morning is significant for 3 reasons:

1) It is the morning after my birthday.

2) It is exactly 364 days until my next birthday (I consider this a good thing – and yes I know; “it’s a privilege, bla bla bla”, but I don’t have to love every privilege.)

3) This is my first hangover post crash, and my, don’t you just forget how completely undelightful a hangover is?  The thirst, the overheating, the sleeplessness that even my best tricks (earplugs/eye patch/sleeping on my face) couldn’t fix…So as I emerged reluctantly from the bedroom into my hall of mirrors and saw in my reflection what appeared to be a 3D map of the Pyrenees, the words of the walking quote book Karl Lagerfeld came to mind: “This face – it is not possible”.  Except in his case he was referring to a photographer with BO, who he had removed from the room with “This smell – it is not possible.”  I love him.

…So sitting here at my computer I’m staring at the wall and have noticed a drawing I did for a friend’s recent birthday card, and well, it feels like I am looking in a mirror, except one that turns you from craggy to glamorous.  Sort of similar except just replace her frock with my jammies, insert road map on her face, and replace sexy eye mask with my British Airways eye mask. Done.  So I’m stealing it, because the coffee & ibuprophen  have just not kicked in yet, and it is there…

My love for RRR radio will take me a lot of places, but it may not have taken me all the way across town to the Elsternwick oval on a cold winter solstice, had it not been for my sly plan of stalking Fee B-Squared to draw her for this blog.  You may remember my spectacularly successful stalking of The Sartorialist, and this may be gloating, but the term shooting fish in a barrel comes to mind?  So with my constant-companion-SLR-camera (officially almost equal in value and weight to my car) in tow, I made the trek.

Alas, despite my vigilant crowd-scanning and thoughtfully-located hanging, there was no FB2 for me.  Quelle horreur that this trek be for nothing, I turned my attention instead to the Rock/Radio crowd, but again disappointment at the lack of pencil-worthy subjects.  Sure, the fact that I was juggling an almost-cooked sausage and a UDL in one hand (2 things strictly reserved for festival-type situations when lack of choice causes me to leave my standards at the gate) didn’t help, but come on – Yawn.  

Which brings me to my find of the day; 3 stylin’ chicks with cheekbones that make it hard to like them.

Meet the cheeky, vivacious, and never superficial, Kelly, Ann, and Lesa…

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Don’t you love it when the laydees get the memo?

Benefit Sunday: Dress in red.  Accessorize in red.  Lipstick: RED. 

– Check, check, and check.

Be sure to always have a champagne in your hand.

– Well duh.

A day that rocked in many ways, a gazillion thanks to all who came and/or were involved.  How about the love!  How about the music!

P.S. Who is that gorgeous Texan, darn come here to steal our men’s hearts??