(Roughly) Daily

Emily Roose, a graphic designer at Boston’s Museum of Science, has gone public with her Masters thesis, posting it on her nifty blog, The Sketchy Pixel.

She explains…

For my Masters in Graphic Design thesis project at New England School of Art and Design, I designed and stitched breaking news stories into cross stitch samplers. I juxtaposed content that is extremely fast and ephemeral (breaking news stories) with a very slow and archival medium (cross stitch). I wanted to see how this transference of medium affects the message of these stories and highlights the absurdity of the way stories are reported in the media and the way we consume them…

More handsewn headlines (each of which took about 25 hours to complete) and more on the project itself at “Slow Breaking News.”

[TotH to GMSV]

As we reach for our etui, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that the “tuxedo” made it’s debut, at a formal ball at the then-new Tuxedo Park Club, just outside of New York City.

Earlier that year, Tuxedo Park resident James Brown Potter and his wife were vacationing in England, where they were invited to dinner by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII).  Unprepared to dress for such an occasion, Potter asked the Prince for advice, and was sent to the the Prince’s tailor, Henry Poole & Co., where he was fitted with a short black jacket and black tie– not the then-standard white tie and tails.

Potter brought the ensemble back to Tuxedo Park, where he showed it to Pierre Lorillard IV, the scion of a wealthy tobacco family, who had just opened the Tuxedo Park Club– and whose passion was designing clothes.  Lorillard revised the design to include the crepe lapels, covered buttons, and other now-standard details, and unveiled his creation at the Autumn Ball.

The prospect of liberation from tails proved irresistible– and the “tuxedo” steadily replaced traditional “evening wear” as the American formal standard.  (Edward continued to wear “black tie,” so the fashion caught on in England too– as the “dinner jacket”– but remained a less formal option…)

Lorillard (in his jacket, but with a white tie) source