Roll out the red carpet and get your glam on… Art Deco Chic is coming to the MOV (March 8 through September 23).    

Art Deco Chic:  Extravagant Glamour Between the Wars features more than 60 women’s garments from the 1920s and 30s. Handpicked for their decadent beauty and exquisite craftsmanship, many of these garments boast couture labels like Chanel, Vionnet, Patou and Schiaparelli. 

Notable Vancouver treasures include this black gown (right), worn to the opening of the Commodore ‘Cabaret’ in 1929.  Handbags, hats, shoes, jewelry and dresses (like this golden sunburst flapper shift (below) illustrate the distinctive, sleek geometry of the Art Deco period. 

If you just can’t wait to see what else we have in store, you can immerse yourself on a glittering night on the town here at the MOV for the Art Deco Chic Opening Night  on Wednesday, March 7. [Note: The opening night is primarily for Members and VIPs, so a limited number of tickets are available for purchase, and must be bought online beforehand!].

Dress Code?  Vintage glam of course! We’ll all be reveling in the sassy spirit of these roaring ‘boom and bust’ eras so this is your big chance to float into the room like a tall glass of champagne!

Hot vintage styling tips to get you ‘the deco look’

Attitudes & Inspirations…Think of rebellious young flappers…The exuberant movement of Josephine Baker…Sweet cinema darlings like Mary Pickford or Clara Bow  (the original ‘it girl’)…The confident modernism of the Empire State Building…The bright lights of Broadway…The streamlined  elegance of  Coco Chanel  and vintage Vogue couture …Mae West in all of her cheeky swagger…Jean Harlow dripping in long, cream satin and bombshell shine…Marlene Dietrich smoking in a tailored tux…Smoldering Greta Garbo or those famous Betty Davis eyes. 

For a little extra inspiration, you can also check out these videos on 1930s hair and makeup.

• 1930s Hairstyles (Vintage Clip)
• 1930s Make Up & Skincare Guide (I do this every morning…Don’t you?)

And if you’re now day dreaming about the perfect outfit, you could always take a trip out on the town and do a little vintage shopping at some of these great local stores:

• Deluxe Junk:  Vancouver Vintage since 1973. (Pictured right, the lovely Rod from Deluxe Junk digging through the storage room and showing off some 1930s casual frocks)  
• Woo Vintage
• Burcus Angels
• John Fluevog: Scan these originals for vintage inspired looks like the Bellevue Etta Place, Pearl Heart, Operetta Brightman, Gertrude.

If you read this after the event has already happened, we hope you’ll join us for some upcoming events that celebrate this Art Deco Era!

Sunny days have struck the city, slowly filling up parks and bike routes as we seek out that elusive vitamin D. Different story for Europe, however. Record-breaking temperature lows are sweeping westward and causing much grief for the continent.

The good weather might even have you brainstorming fun summer building projects, in which case you might be interested in applying for a VIVA Vancouver public space invigoration grant. Ever been to the “Parallel Park” bench on Main and E.14^th? Your proposal could easily be the next best sidewalk extension project. Applications due Feb 14!

In harmony, Douglas Coupland is urging us to break free from our conservative cloaks:

“My own theory about Vancouver is that we’re all at our best when we’re experimenting with new ideas, and we’re at our worst when we ape the conventions of other places.” He said at the Cities Summit last week.

The Vancouver Design Nerds are listening, and they want you to help them transform Vancouver’s public spaces this Thursday evening at City Studio. And you really should – if only to partake in a “Nerd Jam”. Our MOV Youth Council had the chance to hang out with the Design Nerds last spring and ended up yarnbombing the crab outside the MOV!

Still not convinced that there are people trying to create opportunities for creativity? Last on our list this week, DOXA International Film Festival has just released their call for young women to participate in the Youth Connexions Forum, which offers two weeks of intensive film workshops in the beginning of May. At the MOV, we can’t stress enough the importance of being able to tell a good story, and certainly encourage you to apply. Here is one of our fave short doxa flicks: Love Life

Many would say that Nature had it right, and that she’d be much better off environmentally speaking, without human interference. However, since we’ve now burned through the industrial revolution and now find ourselves struggling for solutions to house a human population boasting 7-10 billion by 2050, architects, and scientists alike are asking, “Should design imitate nature?”

For the third and final installation of the MOV’s BuiltCity talks (with Architecture Canada), “Nature, Urban Space, & Biomimicry” Thomas Knittel of HOK and Dr. Faisal Moola, Director of Science at the David Suzuki Foundation responded with a resounding “Yes!”

With close to 80% of Canadians living in cities, and largest population booms expected right here in Vancouver (and Montreal/Toronto), it’s clear that our developmental policy needs change. As Faisal emphasized in his talk, “with scarce resources and little guidance, municipal governments are charged with developing and enforcing many of the policies and programs necessary to ensure that urban development doesn’t consume what’s left of the natural world closest to home.”

For Thomas, this means moving away from a model of simply reducing harmful developmental practices, towards a model of positive impact. At HOK, they’re focusing on a few key principles, based on examples from the natural world. Take, for example, the delicate bones of a vulture's wing, which can be mimicked in the structural design of a building’s framework to concentrate material where it is needed most, and reduce waste elsewhere.

As exemplified by this orphanage built in Haiti, whose design mimics the function of a forest canopy, HOK calls this process a Fully Integrated System (FIT).

The evening’s lecture was a unique contrast in perspective, pairing Knittel’s practical experience, with Moola’s policy/natural capital point of view. 

Pointing to another HOK project in Lavasa, India, Thomas spoke to how, recognizing the ecological performance standards of a region are key to the FIT model of development, which aim to create the best social, economic, and environmental capacity of design. For example, if a desert plant grows in a way which provides a degree of self-shading, water storage, and a balance between overheating and sun collection for transpiration during cool nights, why wouldn’t a building in the desert follow similar principles?

Following the presentations from Knittel and Moola, there was an interactive discussion, moderated by Ray Cole. Questions were raised about the ability to distinguish between simply a ‘beautification’ vs. ‘biodiversity’-enhancing project; audience members wondered what the most important area of policy change to push forward to encourage the practice of biomimicry; and some technical discussion emerged around the limits to a biomimicry-styled design process? Is it simply the next trend? Overall, it was agreed that we cannot place the same design demands on all buildings. Warehouses, schools, factories and houses have different requirements and restraints, exactly the same way ecological life has more and less generous players. A sustainable future must recognize that complexity.

Ray Cole, professor at the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and co-founder of the Green Building Challenge, summed up the evening stating that we as humans have been more demanding than nature itself, and that the positive messaging of biomimicry and ideas of nature for enhancing life is the type of powerful point that will sow seeds for the fundamental will to change.

UP NEXT: While the BuiltCity lecture series has wrapped up for now, the MOV has a stellar lineup of architectural and planning-based dialogue planned with the upcoming SALA Speaks series taking place every Sunday in March at the Museum of Vancouver.  

[Photos by Hanna Cho and Gala Milne // Images courtesy Thomas Knittel and Faisal Moola]

Originally slated to close on October 23, 2011, the coming close of Bhangra.me on January 1, 2012, is bittersweet.  As one of the longest running exhibitions at the MOV, we'll be sad to see this beautiful and rich feature, disassembled.

Launched on May 5, 2011, Bhangra.me: Vancouver’s Bhangra Story was the culmination of over two years of collaborative research, a mini exhibit (April 2010), two community consultations, and hundreds of hours of primary research.  Bhangra.me was a collaboration with the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration, and was co-curated by community researcher Naveen Girn and MOV's Curator of Contemporary Issues Viviane Gosselin

Beginning with an unforgettable opening party on May 4, 2011 where over 500 people joined special guest performers - including Mayor Gregor - in a vibrant celebration of this groundbreaking exhibition.

The research and collecting phase helped generate the first historical interpretation of Bhangra’s significance in Vancouver, and demonstrated its role as a cultural tool for inter-cultural bridging during labour disputes, challenging gender roles and re-imagining the definition of Canadian identity.

What the research, design, and curatorial team hoped to accomplish, was not just mount a beautiful exhibition displaying artefacts, but to use the exhibit itself, and related programming in order to catalyze new understandings about intercultural relations, hybrid identities, and strengthen community ties with(in) the South Asian community in Vancouver.

We're honoured to have worked with such amazing people, met so many great Bhangra fans, and we look forward to continuing to see, hear, and share Vancouver's bhangra stories on the Bhangra.me Storymap!

For those of you who haven't seen the beautiful touchscreens inside the exhibition, this is one piece of the exhibit, that will live on, indefinitely.  We invite you to add your story to the map, by uploading a photo, anecdote, to what we hope will become the next natural gathering place for Bhangra fans around the world!

Representing another first for the Museum of Vancouver, this hybrid Drupal/Silverlight powered storymap was a collaboration made possible by a community sponsorship from Microsoft Canada, in particular the Open Platforms crew, lead by Nik Garkusha.  A neat mobile version of the storymap was developed for W7 Phones by Redbit.

In all, with just a week left in what has been a truly remarkable journey, we hope you'll come check it out here at MOV, listen and dance, tell us what you think, and continue the conversation online.

Balle balle!