The Digital Ramble | Le Smoking

(Peter Stackpole/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

The Digital Ramble explores aesthetic topics through materials found online.

LIFE magazine made millions of photos available this week — most never before published — through Google image search, and I got digging. Cigarettes turn up everywhere: with Sophia Loren between takes, with Eisenhower after a parade. But it’s tough to enjoy that world-war-era cool when there’s this two-year-old smoking in your face. “Le smoking,” as a phrase, has a bit more of the glamour and sex I sought, even if it only means “tuxedo.”

For the Moment | Kim Jones and Co.

Kim Jones

This week’s guest blogger is Kim Jones, the British men’s wear designer who was recently hired as creative director of the British men’s luxury brand Dunhill. Jones started out designing under his own name in 2003 at London fashion week, made his Paris debut in 2004 and was named men’s wear designer of the year by the British Fashion Council in 2006. He also collaborated on a book with the American art photographer Luke Smalley, and has designed for companies including Uniqlo, Topman, Umbro, Mulberry, Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss and Iceberg. (Read Kim Jones’s previous posts.)

The greatest influence on my life is my family, and when I say my family I also mean the friends closest to me, as I think of them as family too. My father’s side of the family is English and my mother’s Danish. My parents met in the Canary Islands and were married shortly after, then came my lovely sister Nadia and then, five years later, me. They separated when I was five and living in Botswana and from then on I’ve had numerous step parents and step brothers and sisters. I am still in touch with most of them, but it’s my real family — including my mother who sadly died when I was 17, so I am not going to talk about her here — that have been the major inspiration for me in what I do today. They are an interesting bunch and have made me ‘me’ and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else either!

Childhood passport photos of Kim Jones, left, and sister Nadia.