Can you please turn that up?I'm trying to think!

Okay, it's officially Spring. I know this, because I have bid goodbye to hose. But what am I doing? Well, between filling Spring orders, I'm designing fall 2008. It started a while ago, when I felt a little tingling inside that sent a Mad Max meets Elizabeth the Golden Age vibe through me. But not the trussed up Elizabeth- the scene where she's firing up her troops on the battle field, and her hair's down, and she's in armor. Except I'm thinking her armor may have some vinyl involved in my book. And I have my mental soundtrack on continuous play-it's the new Gutter Twins. Then my friend Douglas said he had a fog machine, if I should ever need one, for a show. Uh oh-I see trouble ahead. But I just went to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with a friend at her insistence, and as much as it's an arresting, amazingly life affirming movie(about death, of course, because that's when we need it the most, eh?)it was the use of Tom Waits' song "All the World is Green" that sent me reeling. Back in 1987, I heard his Swordfish Trombones for the first time, from a very unlikely source- a shop neighbor next door to mine in New Haven, and it changed my life. Until then, I had been remaking the past, and not thinking ahead. Because didn't thinking ahead mean spacesuits, pseudo mod get-ups, which I'd already redone again and again, and silly things, not real clothes? No, it meant going somewhere dark, and coming out with the bright light of something new, with an edge, but still completely wearable. Perhaps these are dark times, and I think what I do needs to wow you. I hope come Fall 2008 I've come up with "The Juice"(needs to be said with thick Aussie accent for impact)and you'll all be riding down the Post Road on your way to the shop in your crazy Road Warrior vehicles with heady anticipation. Just watch out for that kid with the boomerang.