June 10, 2013
I really like my hands—hence all the rings, and the occasional accent-painted nail. People ask me what I do to keep them baby-soft and photo-ready, and the truth is that they are just naturally this way. But beauty is fleeting and so I’ve devised a weekly habit to nourish and cleanse two of my most important appendages. It is my take on the classic salt and oil hand scrub, enriched with all my favorite flavors and substances, and this is how to make it.
Hand scrub with extra virgin olive oil, Himalayan black sea salt, green tea, tobacco, and sandalwood extract
Sprinkle about a third of an inch of a cigarette into the olive oil. Tobacco, as an herb, and not smoked, has a surprisingly wide range of health benefits. In Ayurvedic medicine, it is regarded to have anti-inflammatory properties, and is used to treat colds and even rattlesnake and insect bites.
Add the same amount of green tea and let it steep for about 20 minutes. The caffeine in the green tea stimulates the skin, and the antioxidants in it are just plain good for you. This one is blended with some peppermint, which feels zesty on the hands.
Crush the herbs with a spoon to release the oils and let everything amalgamate. Add the black salt after mixing so as not to pulverize the grain. This Himalayan salt is black because of natural charcoal, which has purifying qualities.
Add the sandalwood extract last. Two drops will do; it is precious and highly potent. The scent of sandalwood, by way of Le Labo Santal 33, has been one that people associate with me. I thought it would be apt to mirror that note on my hands.
Spoon the mixture on to your hands, rubbing thoroughly. I try to get the salt grains in and around my cuticle, for a haphazardly painless version of a manicure. Rinse with water, and pat off the excess oil. I’d rather not wash my hands at this point, but rather, let the oil absorb into the skin.
Enjoy your dandy handys. Vintage rose ring with ruby drop, skull band by The Great Frog NYC
March 19, 2013
Sometimes, great DIY projects don’t involve the lifting of a finger, or well, maybe just that. I designed an iPhone case and an iPad sleeve with the wonderful folks at Caseable and was very pleased with how beautiful and fully-functional they turned out. See, much as it would be fun to construct an iPad sleeve out of macaroni and jump rings, or vajazzle my iPhone with real Herkimer diamonds, frills might have to take a back seat to streamlined design when we’re talking about the gadgets with which I run my life.
marble and me: trompe l’oeil marble iPhone case and an iPad sleeve imprinted with a photo of my headless torso, designed with Caseable
Designing these tech cases was an easy process of uploading photos, centering them, picking out trim, adding text, and clicking to check out. I also like that they’re hand-made out of recycled or sustainable materials. Caseable products are made in Brooklyn, and the company also has offices in Berlin—two of my favorite cities in the world, one where I’m always at, and one where I’ve yet to go.
The marble print, a nod to old Raf Simons and the new Wanglenciaga, is a photo I found off Google Image Search, tweaked with Photoshop.
minutely inscribed with my Internet initials
a bomber and bling on the other side
special thanks to Chris of Caseable
February 26, 2013
I am so pleased to announce the winners who will participate in Do It Ourselves, the collaborative DIY menswear project I started with Andrew and Giuliano. It was hard to choose just one, so we picked Pete Skibinski of SKIBINSKY and Daniel of WeHaveNoStyle to join our circle. Thank you so much to everyone who send in their entries; we were overwhelmed with the creativity and enthusiasm that was tweeted and Instagrammed to us. Stay tuned, and hopefully, we create something inspiring.
the final lineup for Do It Ourselves: Izzy of The Dandy Project, Giuliano of HHHoly, Andrew of Pull Teeth, Pete of SKIBINSKY, and Daniel of WeHaveNoStyle
January 16, 2013
I’ve pooled together two of my favorite men’s fashion bloggers for a collaborative project aimed at shining light on new, creative talent in the menswear blogosphere. It’s a little DIY orgy, if you may: one blogger creates a DIY piece for another, and receives a piece from another blogger in the circle to wear and style. We’re calling on you baby bloggers, and veterans in the game, anyone with an online presence and hands that create beautiful things, tweet or Instagram us (@thedandyproject, @HOLY_SPICE, @pullteeth) a DIY project that best describes your style and the reason why you should be part of this collaboration. Mechanics are listed below.
DO IT OURSELVES: The Holy Teeth Project
1. Contestants may apply by tweeting and/or Instagramming to all three of us (@thedandyproject, @HOLY_SPICE, @pullteeth) a link to or a picture of a DIY project that best describes their style and skills AND one reason why they should be part of this collaboration. All contestants must have an existing blog online. Submission period is January 16th-29th, 2013.
2. The three judges deliberate and decide which blogger(s) get to be part of the collaboration, and who they DIY for/who DIY’s their piece.
3. Each winning contestant shall create a DIY men’s fashion item according to the brief, and ship it to the blogger he is assigned to.
4. Each winning contestant will receive a DIY men’s fashion item from a blogger assigned to him, and shall photograph himself in an outfit post featuring the DIY piece he received. Dialogue and collaboration between creator and recipient is highly encouraged!
5. When all the pieces have been created and photographed, the three judges will set a time when all posts will be synchronized to go live. Each winning contestant’s post must feature: (1) the DIY process of the item he created (2) a photograph of the item styled on the blogger who received the item he created (3) a graphic featuring all DIYed outfits of all bloggers involved (4) links to all blogs involved.
6. This is a non-compensated, not-for-profit project. Creative collaboration is encouraged, and the discovery and support of new talent is the goal.
Looking forward to seeing your entries! Feel free to e-mail info (at) thedandyproject (dot) com for any questions.
January 7, 2013
I wear lip tint. When done subtly, it’s a great way of looking more healthy and vital, as if I work out regularly and eat right all the time. It does wonders at balancing out colors in an outfit: I like having my lips look ever so slightly more vivid as a pop of color in an all-black look, or to avoid looking washed out in the rare occasion I wear color. Our resident moustachioed model, menswear designer Mike Shaeffer, returns for another series of my DIY men’s beauty tutorials.
Bare, unconditioned lips can tend to look dead, especially when wind-burned in the winter.
I like to use Benefit’s Benetint for color, and Kiehl’s lip balm #1 for conditioning. Fun fact: Benetint was created for an exotic dancer in the 70′s, allegedly, to make her nipples look rosier. A subtly tinted lip balm could work just as well. Screw the rules of matching warm skin tones with cool colors, and vice-versa. Try on what you see, and if it feels good, then wear it.
I layer the lip tint several times in the inner portion of the lower lip, then I dab it on the inner portion of the upper lip. The idea is to look like you’ve been sucking on a berry, and not like a boy who’d become great at evenly applying his mother’s lipstick all over his lips.
Apply a light amount of clear lip balm all over, to condition, and always blot on a tissue.
Lips, alive and tinted.
Would you rock tinted lips?
October 18, 2012
I am on sabbatical in Manila, for a few weeks, and in addition to my domesticated activities of practicing yoga and baking my famous cookies while I’m home, I’m bringing back an old cottage-industry skill of mine: beadwork. You may recall the nuts-and-coins collar I did on a white shirt a while ago, it was partially inspired by a jet black beaded collar shirt which was part of Amber Siegel’s (of Baartmans and Siegel) graduate collection. I’ve always had that shirt in my virtual to-DIY list, and now that I found the perfect too-plain shirt to encrust with gems, I decided to get on with the bedazzling.
an old basic black button-down by Cheap Monday
It’s as if it was begging me to bedazzle it.
I took black plastic sew-on gems in different shapes and sizes. I decided to go tone-on-tone on this one in an effort to display some sort of restraint on a fully bejeweled collar.
I started to sew them on, starting on the edges, creating a border around the entire collar. I would lock the stitching after every three gems or so to ensure that the entire collar doesn’t completely unravel if one stone comes out.
I made sure the beading was dense as possible, using the smaller stones to fill in the gaps.
beaded black
DIY beaded black collar shirt, Comme des Garcons Black drop-crotch trousers, Guidi shoes
DIY jet-black beaded collar shirt
last two photographs by Michelle Ordoveza
September 5, 2012
The beauty of creative pants is not lost on me: statement trousers bring a sense of tailoring wonder to warmer-weather outfits necessarily comprised of just a top and bottom, and provide an interesting base above which jacket upon sweater upon shirt are piled on in cooler weather. In search of a new pair, I turned to old Comme des Garcons for inspiration.
DIY white denim and black corduroy double-hem pants
double-hem pants in various color combinations on the Comme des Garcons Fall/Winter 1998 runway (photos via firstVIEW)
This was a simple way of salvaging two pairs of pants that were already in the “garage sale” bin, and if perchance you held on to the hems of pants you cut into shorts for the summer, this may be the perfect opportunity to repurpose those. This also seemed to be a great way of bringing my typically pre-labor day white jeans (not that the rules matter to me) into the Fall. I can imagine this working just as well with hems in plaid flannel, tweed, or even leather. Here’s how I made them:
I used: two pairs of H&M pants in a similar size and cut (white denim jeans and black corduroys), iron-on fabric adhesive (feel free to sew if that comes easy to you), scissors, and an iron.
I folded the white jeans to my desired length in front of a mirror, and marked them with pins.
I cut the jeans straight three folds down from my mark and ironed the folds over with fabric sizing to ensure that they stay.
I laid the black corduroys over the cut white jeans and, using the crotch as reference, transposed the black cords down by the width of one hem fold.
I then cut the black corduroys along the folded hem of the white jeans.
I turned both the jeans and the corduroy hem extensions inside out and I affixed a strip of fabric adhesive about the width of a hem fold on to the insides of the white pants.
I peeled the paper off the adhesive strip, and ironed on heavily over the two fabrics to be fused. I found that using steam helps bind the fabrics together better even if the package advertises that a steam iron is not needed to activate the adhesive. I turned the pants back right-side out, and excitedly wore them out.
DIY Comme des Garcons double-hem pants, vintage cherry red Made in England Dr. Martens oxfords
Comme des Garcons trench coat, oversize silk shirt of my own design, DIY double-hem pants, Dr. Martens shoes
I thought I'd temper my con-Comme with a piece of the real thing: this Comme des Garcons Homme Plus trench features most of the classic trench coat's functional features: the collar, pockets, and vent, all stitched shut. Worn with a vintage flower stick pin.
I found myself initially uneasy about the coat's stiched-shut parts, but I've grown to appreciate how cleanly they make the jacket hang, particularly on this high stitched vent.
double hems
outfit photographs by Sean Santiago
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