Friday, June 15, 2012

About Me




Jen lives in sunny Queensland, Australia. She has a doctorate in history, a love of pop culture and an addiction to pretty shiny things. In 2012 she started designing bags and accessories with her artistic mum Tricia, and found a niche in the market for bags that are fashionable and culturally referential.

Visit her at murdershetote.etsy.com

Monday, June 11, 2012

Keep Calm and Read This Blog


via



You've heard of the Keep Calm phenomenon. I'm not going to pretend that there's a person out there that has managed to miss the youtube documentaries, the news reports, the viral posts and reposts. On the off chance that there is a Chuck Noland amongst you, the short version is this:

In 1939, at the start of  WWII, the British Ministry of Information produced the Keep Calm and Carry On poster to be displayed in the event of invasion. Over 2,500,000 copies were printed, but only a handful were ever distributed, and they were destroyed unused and unneeded at the end of the war.

Fast forward sixty-one years, and one of the few remaining copies was discovered by the owners of a second hand bookshop in Alnwick, Northumberland. From it's rediscovery in 2000, the keep-calm-o-matic has been reproduced millions of times in merchandise, in both faithful and parody form.

Here a few of my favourites:





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Experts will tell you that we find comfort in such an attitude, "unshowily brave and just a little stiff, brewing tea as the bombs fall", and I would agree, but I think there's also an element of modernity in there, celebrating the retro in a technological age that allows the everyman to express their creativity and wit through a universal message.




Since the beginning critics have been predicting its imminent demise (with the confidence that comes from knowing that all fads die out, be they shrug tops or tamagotchi pets):





But the Keep Calm slogan just keeps carrying on.



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