Red Bank lingerie store Sweetest Sin looks to do good
May 23, 2015 by admin
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RED BANK – As a long-standing member of the local business community, Angela Courtney knows the value of working together.
That’s why she and other local business owners collaborate instead of compete.
“We have to work together,” she said.
Courtney owns Sweetest Sin Boutique, 11 White St., in Red Bank, and will have operated her store for six years in October.
She said she’ll send her customers to neighboring businesses, like one of borough’s many dress shops, and those businesses will return the favor, because Sweetest Sin Boutique specializes in one necessity for women: intimate wear.
“We don’t stray from intimates here, this is what we know, this is what we do,” Courtney said. “You are coming here and getting your shapewear, undergarments and your pajamas.”
Born entrepreneur
The entrepreneurial spirit was something she grew up with, Courtney said, as both of her parents immigrated to the United States from Greece and started their own companies.
Her mother owned a Greek fusion restaurant, while her father owned a painting business.
“So I knew I wanted to do something in the (entrepreneurial) field, I just didn’t know what,” Courtney said. “I wasn’t going into the painting business with my dad and I definitely wasn’t doing restaurants. I did enough of that through bartending and waitressing and it wasn’t for me.”
Courtney, who went to school for business and marketing, eventually found her niche.
Intuitive talent
While in college in California, she worked in a boutique that carried ready-to-wear fashion as well as intimates. Her natural talent for fitting women into the perfect bra was something she fell in love with.
“Learning more about the industry as I was getting ready to open the boutique, I knew I just had this passion for it and knowledge and (I) picked up on things,” she said. “Especially the bra fitting because it’s such an intricate part of the industry and not everyone gets it.”
Courtney said that over 85 percent of woman wear the wrong bra for them, a number which is backed up by various different studies, which hovers from 60 to 85 percent of women.
A good fit, she said, depends on more than the number on the tape measurer, but how a woman feels in the bra, and if it’s the right style, fit, and shape for her body.
“It’s not a scientific, mathematical equation,” she said.
Working together
Courtney said she and other Red Bank business owners are constantly involving themselves in group events that benefit different causes, as well as the community as a whole.
Take the “Go Naked and Check Yourself” event, which Sweetest Sin helped to create, and participates in every November.
The event, held at a local venue – previous ones have been held at Teak and the Downtown – raises money for detectable cancers, including breast, testicular and skin cancer.
“Chris (Paseka) and I from Sugar Rush started this event because we are both affected by a lot of people in our lives that have cancer or who are going through their battle now. And we wanted to do something for that,” Courtney said.
During the cocktail party event, business owners and customers get a chance to mingle, while models from Sweetest Sin appear in different lingerie garments throughout the evening.
“Every single business in this town gets involved, it’s awesome,” Courtney said.
The event is always held the Sunday before Thanksgiving, ahead of Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, and as an added bonus brings attention to the businesses that helped raise the money.
“So all of our customers now have all of our friends, local business owners, they have all of their information,” she said. “(They can) go support everyone that just supported us and helped us raise all this money.”
In fact, referring neighboring businesses to her own customers is the right way to do business, Courtney said.
“Everything with a local business owner or small business owner stays with the community,” she said. “We want to keep that, that’s the whole point. I’m not sending someone to the mall …when there are great places right in town.”
Devin Loring; 732-643-4035; dloring@gannettnj.com
SWEETEST SIN BOUTIQUE
Owner: Angela Courtney
Location: 11 White St., Red Bank
Phone: 732-747-3550
Website:www.sweetestsinbras.com
Hours: 12 to 5 p.m. Sundays and Mondays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays
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Fowler’s ‘Making Strange’ exhibit brings together artist’s projects
May 23, 2015 by admin
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Artist Vivan Sundaram meshed together the names Lady Gaga and “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” by Shakira to create the fictional brand name “Gagawaka.”
The Fowler Museum’s “Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem” is a two-part exhibition by Delhi-based contemporary artist Sundaram running from April 19 through Sept. 6. The exhibition, which marks the first time that Sundaram’s “Gagawaka” and “Postmortem” have been presented together in North America, is co-curated by art history associate professor Saloni Mathur as well as professor and chair of the Department of Art History, Miwon Kwon.
“Gagawaka” focuses more on fashion and consists of around 30 sculptural garments made out of recyclables, repurposed materials and medical supplies, Mathur said.
“The second component of the show (‘Postmortem’) is a leaving of the garments behind and a return to focus on the mannequin and the human body,” Mathur said. “‘Postmortem’ consists of sculptural assemblages made of mannequins and anatomical models.”
Mathur said she first saw Sundaram’s “Gagawaka” at an art institution in Delhi, India in 2011, where the project was initially a fashion show involving dancers and models. After presenting the fashion show, Sundaram returned to his studio and created “Postmortem” two years later, she said.
“When I saw that fashion show, I immediately thought that this body of work would make so much sense in Los Angeles because of Hollywood and its fashion and glamour,” Mathur said.
“Gagawaka” consists of commonplace items such as rubber tires, plastic drainpipes and handbags, as well as medical supplies like X-ray film, surgical support bandages and pills. Mathur said the garments made from the medical materials raise questions concerning health and illness.
“What’s striking about those old couture garments is that they’re really funky and fabulous and made up of really wild materials,” Mathur said. “There’s also a whole range of what I would describe as very intimate materials which give some of the garments a kind of erotic charge.”
Some of the garments consisting of these more intimate materials include a men’s suit made of women’s sanitary pads, “Wedding Outfit,” and a women’s piece made entirely out of men’s jockstraps, “J S Lingerie.”
“There’s this kind of reversal of very intimate, gendered materials that are turned into garments of the opposite sex and that’s a complicated theme in the show – the question of sexuality,” Mathur said.
Mathur said “Postmortem” is in dialogue with the fashion aspect of the exhibition, but concentrates more on the human body itself and raises questions about sexuality, illness and death.
“A postmortem is a kind of an autopsy and Sundaram said he wanted ‘Postmortem’ to put the spectacle of fashion to death,” Mathur said. “’Postmortem,’ I would describe as much darker and uses a lot of surrealist and post-surrealist techniques.”
In addition to choosing pieces, Mathur said the two curators were involved in the installation process along with the museum’s staff and Sundaram, who flew in from Delhi for the final week of the exhibition’s installation.
“The key curatorial challenge for us was to think about how to create this dialogue between these two bodies of work within the 5,000 square feet of exhibition space,” Mathur said.
Kwon said that although “Gagawaka” was originally presented in a runway setting, they decided to stick to the Hollywood influence.
“One idea we had at the beginning was to make allusions to the red carpet, like a movie opening,” Kwon said. “That idea converted into the use of the red curtains in the gallery to divide the space up.”
“Making Strange” at the Fowler will mark the first time the show will be exhibited in North America said Fowler Museum curatorial assistant, exhibition tour guide and art history graduate student Tracy Buck.
“(The exhibition) is a really thought-provoking show that you can see a number of times and get a number of different things out of it – there’s a lot of different levels to experience,” Buck said.
Mathur said the ambiguity of “Making Strange” allows it to be read in a multitude of ways. There are hundreds of little messages and a lot of it is very playful, she said.
“It’s about the relationship of human creativity in the form of fashion and clothing with basic elements of humanity,” Mathur said, “which are reducible to our bodies, sexualities, demise and death.”
