B EAST Magazine website

BEast Magazine, Eastern Europe’s edgy fashion/lifestyle glossy, is organising two one-week travel/fashion photography workshops on Ukraine’s Crimean Coast in the summer of 2009. The workshops will be led by the photographers that have given the magazine its distinctive look and provocative feel over the years. Unlike some photography workshops, which place too much emphasis on the technical aspects of photograhy, BEast Magazine’s workshops will be more about recreating the creative insanity of a magazine photoshoot. There will also be an option of landscape and travel photography for those interested in capturing the harsh beauty of the rocky Crimean coasts and its mix of influences, ranging from Turkish, Mongol & Czarist to the Soviet era.

For more information, click here BEast Photo Workshops

BEast, B.East, Be East seems to be in the air these days. Our guess is that it’s the financial meltdown that has given the East an added impetus. With the West tethering on the abyss, those on the decks of its Titanic are battering down the hatches, while on the lookout for a lifeboat from the recession. The savvy ones are looking East through their portholes, to Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Dubai and elsewhere, whose economies are still relatively unscathed compared to the USA & the UK.

Well, for those stuck in Manhattan over the holidays, and pining for the East, there’s always the BEast lounge, with its tomato martinis with curried green-tomato garnish to chase away the blues.

Bread&Butter, Barcelona’s tradeshow for selected brands, was steaming this year, not just because it attracted most of the koolest brands in Europe, and beyond. It was also just hot and humid in southern Spain, the sort of weather that drives most Indians or Texans to the comfort of their airconditioned offices and living rooms. Europeans like the heat though—which is still a relative novelty in these global warming times—and, so while some premises were airconditioned, especially those in the swankier Urban Superior and Denim Base areas, many had to deal with the heat. Especially those stuck in the concrete sweatbox of the gargantuan Sport & Street area. Our sympathies went out to Reebok, which had one of the coolest stands at the fair, but was stuck in Barcelona’s version of Dante’s Inferno—down, down in the basement.

The heat, though, meant that fans (the objects, not the star-fuckers*) were in high demand, and those brands savvy enough to hand out their own punkahs certainly got more bang for their buck than biz-as-usual stickers and fliers. We went around photographing fashionistas fanning themselves, and here you go.

And, finally, one of our favorite brand managers, Stephan Ploch from Reebok, Germany