Mad About The Boy, London
Fashion’s discerning spotlight has most recently landed on men’s fashion and street style, an intoxicating melting pot of looks influenced by music, minimalism and social tribes. In the first of two talks accompanying Fashion Space Gallery’s Mad About The Boy exhibition (W1, to 2 Apr) – which explores the fashion industry’s eternal preoccupation with male youth – east London designer Nasir Mazhar will be in conversation with journalist Charlie Porter (Wed), discussing the future of fashion and notions of masculinity. Continuing with the theme of pervasive youth culture, Mark Leckey and Jason Evans will deconstruct the impact of clubbing and music on male style with the exhibition’s curator Lou Stoppard (Thu). With its ghostly sampling of a recent pre-digital past, Leckey’s 1999 short Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore immerses the viewer in clubbing subcultures, meandering through genres from northern soul to acid house. This idea of youth frozen in time is echoed in Evans’s arresting street shots of dapper young 90s males, which are also showcased in the exhibition.
London College Of Fashion: RHS East Space, W1
LE
An Evening With Joanna Cannon, Salisbury
The summer of 1976 is one of those totemic staging posts of our recent history. The birth of punk, rioting at Notting Hill carnival and a serious drought that seemed somehow to change the character of the nation. This kind of external extremity is a tempting dramatic device; can it run parallel to internal psychological currents? Joanna Cannon’s debut novel The Trouble With Goats And Sheep is set in that pivotal summer and explores the betrayals and tragedies lurking behind the net curtains of British suburbia. It’s also, inevitably, a time capsule evoking a lost era of Babycham and nights spent at the British Legion club. This talk will see the author musing on the themes of her novel and also, presumably, on the rather tangential route she has taken to literary success. Cannon left school at 15 and has experienced half a life of pizza-delivery jobs, bar work and general drift. To what extent has this immersion in life’s less glamorous realms fed into her multifaceted fiction?
Waterstones, Thu
PH
The Russian Economy: Structural Problems And Perspectives On Economic Growth, Edinburgh
Weakened in recent times by falling oil prices and political strife, Russia’s economy shrank by 3.7% last year. Despite continuing recession, the Kremlin has recently returned to a three-year budget rather than the annual monitoring it implemented last year, seemingly signalling increased confidence in the ailing ruble. Alexei Kudrin – a liberal-leaning politician who served as the country’s finance minister between 2000 and 2011 – is a frequent critic of Putin and co’s fiscal policy. As well as voicing his opinions on his former colleagues’ oversights, Kudrin is also the head of an NGO that promotes human rights and civic society and a dean of Saint Petersburg State University. This talk will see him give his views on his nation’s structural issues and economic growth – or lack thereof – going forward.
University Of Edinburgh: Dashkova Centre, Wed
HJD
