Perhaps more than any other artistic endeavour, rock and roll is about conjuring a sense of communion. About performer and audience affirming their common experience through the creation, transmission, and reception of music. About the catharsis, even love, you feel when another (seemingly telepathically) communicates your own ecstasies and agonies. Where more polite styles are restrained by their own formal limitations, rock and roll shamelessly pursues its democratising ends. Beyond the semantic niceties of lyric or melody, transcending the subtle nuances of rhythm or voice, this music will juxtapose the most extreme sonic opposites to make a point. Rock and roll’s supreme exponents are masters of nuance and noise, of conflict and contradiction. So it is with The Clash and their finest work, London Calling.

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It’s in my hand now. Tight and coiled like a serpent set to strike. Release my grip and forward it bursts in radiant brilliance. I saw the necktie two days ago and thought I’d escaped its silken hold. But I had to give in. Today, I returned to the shop and bought it. Ruby red, knitted, barely 2 inches wide and with the deal-clinching, “Pura Seta, Made in Italy” label stitched into the reverse, this strip of fabric has me hooked. I wrap my fingers around it again, but know I can never contain its allure.

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Yesterday, with my precious $4.99, I defied common sense. Like our sage Simon Morgan, I find that frequenting thrift stores can have a calming effect, a restorative one-heck, in my book, a trip to the Salvation Army is as good as liturgy. Used to be I’d leave the local shop with bags full of fifties frocks and silky camisoles. Over time, though, my intemperance meant I never wore these fine things, and so I turned to the knickknacks, curios, and gadgets. Anyway, it’s in this aisle that the most offbeat regulars linger, and that’s a treat in itself.

On this occasion the gem was a Polaroid Sun 600 LMS, an instant camera several years older than I and purchased for mere dollars. The buy was economical enough, so where was my defiance? This past February, Polaroid announced that, after 60 years on the market, their instant film products would be discontinued. Really, then, I was acquiring a clock along with my camera-time was running out! I take it back. Though sentimentality did figure in here (the chunky Sun 600 had stolen my heart), there was no breach of common sense. My logic: it was not despite the discontinuance of the film that I took my camera home that day, but because of it. If I’d not been pining over Polaroid ever since I heard the news, most likely I’d have reminisced for a moment and then passed the gadget by. Now, instead, I was in a hurry to get my hands on the thing, stock up on film, and revel in depleting it in unison with all other lovers of the stuff.

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Do we really need a new chair? A new lamp? You’d expect a designer to say, “Why, of course! And let me draw you one!” Not so with 5.5 Designers, a collective design group of five graduates from the prestigious Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art in Paris. What’s their answer? “Of course not! Give us what’s broke; we’ll fix it.”

Since 2003, they have been causing a stir in the landscape of consumer products. Vincent Baranger, Jean-Sébastien Blanc, Anthony Lebossé, David Lebreton, and Claire Renard scour our alleys and yard sales in order to return their found objects as unusual diversions from their original use.

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His clothes were elegant and refined. They made the wearer look like royalty. Wearing a Balenciaga gown remains one of the best statements a woman could make without saying a word. The man behind the clothes, Cristobal Balenciaga, was born in Guetaria, Spain in 1885 to a sailor father and a dressmaker mother. He learned early in his life how to make clothes, and at the age of 12, he was apprenticed to a tailor in the city of San Sebastian. During his apprenticeship, Balenciaga met the Marquesa de Casa Torres and was granted permission to make a copy of one of her dresses. At 19, Balenciaga began to work for Calle de Hernani, who made ladies’ gowns.

Balenciaga opened his first salon in 1919 in San Sebastian, quickly followed by two more. He later opened a fourth in Barcelona. While working in San Sebastian, Balenciaga made gowns for several important royal ladies, including the Empress Eugenie and the Queen Mother Maria Cristina. In his salons, he bought and sold French couture from such designers as Chanel and Lanvin. In 1937, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Balenciaga moved to Paris, where he presented his first collection and began to become better known amongst fashionable Parisians. By 1938, Balenciaga was a household name.

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