Category: Fashion

Wide Brimmed Hats

July 18, 2025 By arne hendriks Off

Before Edward Bernays taught people to consume things we don’t need, fashion and it’s ideologies of constant change and replacement already inspired artistic response. La Moda Vuole L’ala Larga (Wide Brimmed Hats are Fashionable, 1912) starring Ernesto Vaser, is an early cinematic and funny critique…

French Door Fridge

October 10, 2023 By arne hendriks Off

Plus-sized fridges in American kitchens have long been regarded as a domesticated expression of the banal idea that bigger is better. And the rest of the world caught up. Today everybody seems to want a big fridge. Many a kitchen is dwarfed by its size.…

Abundance Fantasies: The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat

November 20, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

Perhaps no Hollywood movie director and choreographer personifies the desire for abundance better than Busby Berkeley. His choreographies were wildly extravagant, the geometric patterns hallucinatory, and the props and costumes beyond anything seen before. His work oozes a profound and limitless desire for excess. And…

Tall Tales: The Well-Heeled Wobble

November 16, 2013 By arne hendriks Off

Tall Tales investigate signs, stories and tropes on how our obsession with tallness became so culturally embedded that we experience it as natural, normal and inevitable. One of the most accepted and visible products of our desire to be taller are high heels. Throughout history men,…

Toad Leather

December 5, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we decide to shrink to 50 cm, cane toad leather could replace the less flexible, thicker leathers we use now. It is both beautiful and very soft, perfect for Shrinking Man’s shoes, bags or any other leather products. Other suitable leathers are snake-, eel-,…

Mainstream Microphilia (Lady Gaga)

September 25, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

In our investigation for the popular display and culture of shrink desire, Lady Gaga stands out as the first openly microphilic celebrity. In a marketing campaign for a new perfume we see Gaga in what she calls her ‘Gulliver’s pose‘ while tiny men dressed in…

Overcoming the Height Gap

September 13, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

There’s a 40% difference in height between the shortest 5 percentile and the tallest 5 percentile of the adult human population. That puts humans amongst the Earth’s most hypervariable species. Shrinking the body will create an even greater height gap, Younger generations will be shorter…

Relic Paulina

September 8, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

The Dutch are among the tallest people in the world yet the smallest girl that ever lived was from the Netherlands. Johanna Paulina Musters’ extremely small stature, she was only 61 centimeters, her talent for acrobatics, singing and dancing, and the ability to speak several…

Plus Size Camouflage

March 30, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

One of the more complicated issues in shrinking the human species is how to deal with generational size differences. New generations will be smaller than older generations. Dutch designer Heleen Klopper speculates on a future fashion and make-up of camouflaging the large as well as…