Friday, July 10, 2009

strip for me baby




this is out of order, i know i need to blog about what a HUGE success the pop-up shop party was last night. give me a day or two to decompress and i will blog about that. i'm also now allowed to blog about my exciting fragrance! i'll blog that this weekend as well. you can read the cool article on timeout here.

the nooka message has evolved from an ethos most simply expressed by the not so marketing/sexy attitude of "question everything" and "explore alternative systems" to a more elegantly articulated theme of "universal language". universal language is a key tool for strengthening global culture and insuring greater cooperation for even greater innovations from our society in the future. i truly believe that fashion is as much a universal language as math and music, and in that sense, i like to think of nooka as a futurist brand. it is easy to see these themes in the nooka time pieces which for the most part do not need any written language skills to use and they're designed with a glam future aesthetic, and would be understandable if sent to another planet as a gift. and i am now proud to announce the release of the nooka strip™ [the NS], our very first belt!

belts originated in the bronze age, in leather form, between 3500 & 1200 BC. the bronze age saw the creation of knives, axes, pottery that were more durable than those previously created in the stone age. In these times, interestingly enough, primarily men wore them, and they were used for a decorative purpose. it was considered rare for a female to be seen wearing a belt.

starting in the 1920s, as fashion changed, so did the function of belts. instead of being for show, men needed something to hold up their pants! no longer was it just military men wearing them [suspenders were more commonly used to hold mens pants up before this change in trend] .

Today, there is a variety of belts - police officers use them to hold their equipment, women wear them with a high waisted skirt to provide some oomph, and plumbers...still don't wear them. There are different colors, different sizes, different materials, different types of belt buckles. It has become one of those things that can 'make an outfit'.

but with all the options for belts out there, i still felt something was missing both functionally and in terms of form and color. so i came up with the NS™. the closure is something i developed with my design team to offer easy adjustment throughout the day [i never found the perfect hole in a traditional belt, and it's really socially awkward to readjust a traditional belt in a restaurant!] which is the functional innovation. the innovation in look-and-feel is apparent – you can do the dreaded "matchy-matchy" look with our belts and zubs!

it looks so good you'll have no problem getting people interested in looking at your crotch, and the mechanism is so slick, your pants can come off faster than they went on. this is why i came up with the product name "strip" [strip of material for form as well, so it's really a pure expression of form follows function]. seriously, belts up until now were too concerned with holding your pants up, and a belt equally concerned with getting-off is truly an innovation.

nooka strip available at den, 330 east 11th street until august 16th, DDC lab in NYC [currently west 14th street location] and here. join nooka and love nooka on facebook and nooka on twitter.