W&LT (Wild & Lethal Trash) - 'Killer / Astral / Travel' Spring/Summer 1996

After seeing WhosListening's '9 Albums' post on Who'Studios, which of course included MF DOOM's Madvillainy, I knew I had to throw a villain-related question in today's issue.

Daniel Dumile, the London-born, Long Island-raised rapper and producer, came back to music in the late 1990s as MF DOOM, a supervillain persona named after Marvel's Doctor Doom. After Gladiator came out in 2000, replica gladiator masks went on sale as collectibles, and a friend told DOOM one would be perfect for the character. The one they bought was based on the helmet Russell Crowe's Maximus wears in the Colosseum, and it came mounted on a wooden display stand. The friend removed the stand and the top piece, and fitted the faceplate with the inner band of a construction hard hat so it could be worn. DOOM later had it chrome-plated and added a ruby. It looked enough like Doctor Doom's mask to fit the persona, and different enough to stay out of Marvel's way. For DOOM, the mask was about character, not hiding: "It's really just another character," he said. "The DOOM thing is to be able to come at things with a different point of view."

His undisputed hip-hop classic, Madvillainy, made with producer Madlib as the duo Madvillain and released on Stones Throw in 2004, features DOOM in the iconic mask on th cover. The cover was shot by photographer Eric Coleman, and the album's art direction and cover layout, including the famous small orange square in the corner, were designed by Stones Throw art director Jeff Jank. Jank said he added the orange "partly because it needed something distinctive, and partly to match the color with Madonna," a nod to the visual parallel he saw with Madonna's self-titled debut album cover.

The mask kept the focus on DOOM's music instead of his face, so much so that impostors nicknamed "Doombots" sometimes performed in his place. "The character himself, DOOM, will always have the mask," he said. Dumile died on October 31, 2020, at age 49. RIP to one of my favorite rappers ever.

In December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Balenciaga skipped the runway and released its Fall 2021 collection as a free browser video game, Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow. Set in a fictional city in 2031, the game has players pick a character and move through five levels, starting in a labyrinthine Balenciaga store where avatars model the clothes. The world begins in decay and gradually returns to "a healthier balance of nature and industry." Creative director Demna described the clothes as "modern-day armor": oversized high-visibility jackets, statement parkas and medieval-looking armor boots, plus T-shirts with ironic PlayStation 5 logos and NASA patches. Streamline Media Group developed the game in Unreal Engine with a team of specialist studios. Dimension Studios captured 50 digital models using volumetric video, one of the largest volumetric video projects ever attempted at the time. Balenciaga's video game launch helped kick off fashion's wider move into gaming in the years that followed. I wonder what the parrying mechanics were like. And would God Mode allow you to spawn clothes for free?

Paul Poiret was born in Paris in 1879 and learned couture from the inside, first under Jacques Doucet and then at the House of Worth, where his designs were considered too daring for the clientele. In 1903 he opened his own house and began defining a new silhouette for the female body, one "in motion and without restraint," freeing women from corsets with high-waisted, fluid shapes. In 1908 he published Les Robes de Paul Poiret, an album of his designs illustrated by Paul Iribe. Its bold color and artistic compositions changed how fashion was shown on paper and influenced fashion magazines that followed. Poiret saw fashion as a whole way of living, and in 1911 he expanded into two new ventures at once: Les Parfums de Rosine, one of the first perfume lines launched by a couturier, and Atelier Martine, named after his daughter. Atelier Martine was a school and design studio where untrained working-class girls designed textiles, wallpapers, rugs and furnishings for complete Poiret interiors. His lifestyle vision also included lavish parties that doubled as publicity. But taste was changing, and his spending outpaced his business. He sold his couture house in late 1924, and for the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts he chartered three barges on the Seine at his own expense, a move the Musée des Arts Décoratifs calls "a financial disaster." He left his house for good in 1929, published his memoir Dressing the Age in 1930, and died in 1944.