There are designer labels and then there are designer label digs. The concept of merging an iconic fashion house name with a liveable space is not new.

In the past few years though there’s been an influx of fashion designers staking their reputed names alongside ultra luxurious hotels that will make any Wolfpack blush.

Think names like Karl Lagerfeld, Bvlgari and Missoni all broadening their reach via a different industry and you’re well on the path to living like a style icon – minus the tens of millions of dollars and global recognition.

If your pursuit of once-in-a-lifetime experiences has lead you to dodgy motel rooms with questionable stains then it’s time to step up your game.

Witness the extravagance and indulgence of designer-inspired furniture, theme execution and room aesthetics at your next memorable stay.

These are the world’s best fashion designer hotels.

The post Inside The World’s Most Luxurious Fashion Designer Hotels appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

For a while now we’ve been bringing avid style hunters their weekly dose of wardrobe inspiration from some of the world’s most fashionably recognised faces.

Suffice to say it’s been a challenge to consistently weed out the pretenders from the trendsetters, but nonetheless a very rewarding experience.

What we stumbled across is proof that men are now beginning to pay more attention to how they are presented through the suits they wear, the colours they opt for and even the type of hairstyle that complements their unique sense of style.

In 2016, that journey could not have been possible without some of the best heavy hitters in the game providing men with all the inspiration and swipe-able ideas they could ever need.

These are the best dressed men of the year that was.

The post These Are The Best Dressed Men Of 2016 appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

2016 was a big year for drones. Pilots raced them in Dubai. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to use them to provide internet access to the world. Dutch police trained eagles to snatch them out of the sky. Artists also jumped on the drone bandwagon, using the tech to provide a unique perspective on our planet.Dronestagram, a popular photo sharing social network dedicated to drone photographs, is bringing 2016 to a close with 20 of the most stunning images produced by its community this year. Their selection highlights the beauty of aerial photography across a range of areas: agriculture, sports, adventure, wildlife, landscapes, cultural heritage, romantic moments…The pictures span the globe, from the rushing waters of Niagara Falls in North America, to a bird attack in French Polynesia, to a chile farm in India, to the beaches of Australia and Brazil.Some sights, like a lavender field in France or Italy’s Cinque Terre, are well-worn subjects for photographers, but they feel fresh when seen from a sky-high vantage point. Others, like the formation of a ski race in Russia or an erupting volcano on Reunion Island, can only be fully appreciated with an aerial view.If the holiday season has brought the gift of a new drone into your life, these breathtaking images are setting the bar very high for your Instagram in 2017.

The post Dronestagram Reveals The Most Mind-Blowing Drone Photographs Of 2016 appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

This story was originally published on GizmodoRanking movies or TV shows is easy compared to more traditional art. There are a finite amount of sci-fi TV shows and movies you can watch, but pop culture art is damn near infinite. Every sliver of the internet is chock-full of it, not to mention the professional galleries, poster companies, on and on.With the caveat that we surely missed a ton of great stuff, here are just a few pieces of the undeniably coolest pop culture art released in 2016, in no particular order.Gizmodo explores the smart design, breakthrough science and awe-inspiring tech shaping your future.Follow Gizmodo on Facebook and Twitter.By Germain Lussier – Gizmodo

The post A Closer Look At The Coolest Pop Culture Art Of 2016 appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

Look The Part

You’ve heard to “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” If you’re hoping to score a sneaky room upgrade, apply the same strategy to hotel check-in. Spiff up and look worthy of the Presidential Suite. No one’s upgrading the guy who looks like he’s just coming off a 3-week bender.

Talk The Talk

Appearance is only part of the equation. Pay attention to non-verbal communication – your posture and poise – and always, always treat the staff well. Be polite and personable. Hours of dealing with idiots will make your graciousness even more gladly received. A little goodwill can go a surprisingly long way.

Offer A Review

Slip an inquiry about the hotel’s online presence into the conversation at the front desk (“Are you on Yelp or TripAdvisor? I’d love to write a review…”). It may be just enough subtle pressure to secure a better room or a smaller enhancement, like free breakfast or late check-out.

Coordinate Your Comings And Goings

Request an early check-in or a late check-out. It’s a simple way to extend your time spent lounging in the lap of hotel luxury, and front desks are often happy to oblige. The odds of a “yes” go up if you have loyalty with a hotel group.An alternative option is to check in late intentionally. The later the hour, the fewer last-minute guests will arrive, and the more the front desk knows about the day’s cancellations and no-shows. You have a stronger shot at being bumped to a better room when the hotel knows it won’t get filled that night.

Understand Occupancy

Travelling during a hotel’s period of lower occupancy – the shoulder season or off-peak days – increases your chances of having a cushy stay. A better staff-to-guest ratio means more attentive service. Fewer fellow lodgers also means no one to fight for prime poolside real estate, and of course, a larger number of open rooms available if you’re hoping to switch.If your hotel is primarily a business destination, it will likely be busier during the week and quieter on weekends. If it’s in a popular tourist destination, its occupancy will be down in the off-season.

Don’t Book On Discount Sites

Booking at a deeply discounted rate on a site like Expedia may save you money up front, but you’re bound to get stashed in one of the hotel’s more dismal rooms (and don’t even think about asking for an upgrade). Hotels know that bargain shoppers are unlikely to return unless they get a similar deal, and they aren’t interested in doling out perks to people with no potential to be repeat customers. Book directly via a hotel’s website if you want the red carpet treatment.

Be A Regular

While discount customers get discount experiences, regular guests get pampered. Join the hotel or hotel group’s loyalty programme to receive vouchers, upgrades, special amenities, and other perks for your bookings. The promise of future business is a powerful motivator for a hotel to treat you like the A-lister you are in your own mind.

Try Travel Hacking

Travel hacking isn’t just for flights. Investing in the right credit card can earn you substantial sign-up bonuses as well as ongoing rewards that can be applied to hotel stays. Some cards grant the holder elite status instantly.

Advise Staff Of Special Occasions

Mention any special occasions – a birthday, a honeymoon, an anniversary, etc – at the front desk when you check in. Better yet, let the property know in advance when you make your booking. Many hotels will gift you something to help you celebrate, whether it’s a day pass for the spa, a bottle of bubbly, or the coveted upgrade to a king-sized bed.

Broaden Your Definition Of “Upgrade”

‘Better’ doesn’t just mean ‘bigger’. When more square footage isn’t an option, seek enhancements of other kinds – a corner room, a bath with two sinks, a nicer view, free movies, included breakfast, a spa pass, or a free minibar can all make a stay more special. Just don’t go overboard with your asks.

Stay Somewhere New

It may sound counterintuitive to book at a new hotel if you’re gunning for an upgrade – that’s when everyone is dying to stay, isn’t it? -– but hotels are rarely operating at full capacity during this time. They’re trying to train staff and work out the kinks, and some parts of the property may still be under construction. Being a willing guinea pig could get you treated to extra perks, especially because they want you to spread the word to family, friends, and social media followers.

Tip Generously

More common sense than a hack, every gentleman knows that money talks. Slipping a bill to the front desk staff (plus valets, bellhops, housekeeping, food and beverage staff, and the concierge) is an easy way to ensure you’re well taken care of. They’re almost always authorised to upgrade for special circumstances, and your hard-earned in their hands is most definitely a special circumstance.

The post Expert Tips To Get The Most Out Of Your Next Hotel Stay appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

After a roller coaster of a year, many are looking forward to giving 2016 a swift kick in the seat and starting over. It seemed like life threw an unprecedented number of twists and turns and corkscrews at us over the last 12 months, while humanity bravely grinned (and bitched on Twitter) and bared it.In the face of so much uncertainty, we sought solace in art – in the movies, books, music, podcasts, and other creative endeavours that brought much-needed wisdom, wit, insight, and entertainment to the year.Amongst 2016’s most interesting creations were its art installations. Some of these large-scale works were poignant, thought-provoking, and challenging. Others were fun and irreverent – reminders that play matters even (and especially) in a world that sometimes seems impossibly bleak.Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains graced the parched Nevada desert with colourful, gravity-defying stone totems. Jason deCaires Taylor submerged Europe’s first underwater sculpture museum off Spain. Christo’s The Floating Pier invited visitors to literally walk on water in Italy.For the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, the IOC invited an artist to give his interpretation of the Games, both as a sporting occasion and as a source of inspiration. JR transformed Rio de Janeiro with Inside Out, a global participatory art project whose objective is to “change the world”. The artist unveiled multiple larger-than-life athletes that interacted with the city’s landscape.Many of 2016’s best art installations made a statement. Pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi performed a song atop a floating platform in the Arctic Ocean for Greenpeace. Ai Weiwei wrapped Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 14,000 refugee life jackets. Philippe Echaroux drew attention to the destruction of the Amazon with The Blood Forest, a striking series that projected portraits of indigenous tribe members onto trees.Other installations were an escape. The incredible artworks of Burning Man 2016 invited attendees to engage – to touch, to climb, to spin, to ride, to interact like children exploring a playground. New Yorkers were transported to another world by Pipilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest. Across the country, Angelenos explored the musical rainstorms of Yuval Sharon’s Nimbus. And across the world, Bruce Munro’s Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku turned the red heart of Australia into a fantastical field of light.These pieces, and others, made the art-loving world go round in 2016. Check out some of the year’s best installations above, and click the links to learn more.

The post Culture Shock: The Coolest Art Installations Of 2016 appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

This story was originally published on GizmodoLife is weird. Between the mysteries that baffle scientists, strange disappearances and even stranger reappearances, there are some things that we just can’t explain. It turns out a lot of those things happened in 2016, and no, we’re not talking about Trump being elected president.

Creepy Clowns On The Rise

With everything else that’s been happening this year, it’s easy to forget that in 2016 we were invaded by creepy, vaguely threatening clowns. In case you missed that: oh god why are the clowns here, what do they want, why won’t it stop staring?The whole clown thing started back in August, when multiple reports of creepy clowns trying to lure children into the woods at night emerged out of Greensboro, North Carolina. While even one is fairly alarming, this was a case of three sightings happening within two days. People, understandably, began to get a little creeped out.Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there.Later that month, South Carolina was targeted too (in a city called Greenville, oddly enough) with residents of a gated community warned about lurking clowns, and security being tightened around the area.The reports only escalated through September and October, leading up to Halloween of course.They made their way over to Australia, where Perth and Victoria appeared to become hotbeds of clown activity. A clown was arrested in Western Australia after chasing a group of teenage girls down a Perth street.The clowns started getting organised, rallying under ‘clown purge’ groups on Facebook. And then Halloween came and, perhaps predictably, they all just disappeared. Thank god. Was it just a case of people jumping on a convenient way to terrorise other people, or was there some more sinister clown plot going down? Hopefully, we’ll never really know.

The Tromps

No, not the Trumps. You may have followed the tumultuous story of the Tromp family as it happened, but if this is the first thing you’re hearing about it, you’re in for a wild ride.One day in August, the Tromp family of five — husband and wife Mark and Jacoba and their three adult children, Riana, Mitchell and Ella — got into their car and drove away from their home in Melbourne with little warning, heading north.Passports, credit cards and mobile phones had all been left behind at their house, aside from the phone belonging to Mitchell. He brought it along, but barely 30km into their drive was pressured to throw it out the car window as they went. The family was apparently paranoid — worried that the phone was being used to track them, that someone was after them or wanted to kill them.They drove 800km away to the town of Bathurst in NSW, driving for an entire day and night. It was in Bathurst that Mitchell left the rest of his family, parting ways at 7am the next morning. The other four continued on the the Jenolan Caves. Here, the two sisters, Riana and Ella, stole a car and parted ways with their parents, driving south to Goulburn.It was there that the two sisters made a report that their parents were missing, before the two of them split again. Ella left to go home, arriving back at their farm on Tuesday night — and finding police there, investigating. She was the first Tromp to be successfully located, followed by Mitchell, who caught a series of trains to arrive home on the Wednesday morning. The other three were still missing.A Goulburn man driving to Canberra on the Tuesday made a strange discovery when he felt something kicking the back of his seat. When he stopped to look, he found Riana Tromp curled up in his ute in a ‘catatonic’ state. She apparently had no idea either where or who she was, let alone how she got there. He delivered her back to Goulburn police, who delivered her into psychiatric care at Goulburn hospital. Her sister Ella, meanwhile, was charged with the theft of the car they took from Jenolan to Goulburn.The two parents were still missing, however, and an interstate search kicked off for Mark and Jacoba Tromp. They had been driving back towards Melbourne, but became separated in the town of Warangaratta. Jacoba, somehow managed to get herself to the town of Yass where she was found the next day, 350km away. She too was taken for psychiatric care, and eventually moved to be with her daughter at Goulburn.But there was still one Tromp left to be found: Mark, the father, who had been spotted a few times behaving erratically. First, he had dangerously tailgated another car in Wangaratta, before being seen fleeing from the silver Peugeot the family had taken on the trip, leaving the keys in the ignition. The search ramped up after a night of heavy rain in the area, with rivers becoming swollen and searchers becoming worried about Mark’s wellbeing.He was eventually found on the Saturday, almost a week after the whole ordeal began. He was located by a road, near the Wangaratta airport.So why did they do it? Investigators believe that the family were never in any danger from an outside party, and they weren’t found to be under the influence of drugs, nor did any of them have any previously diagnosed mental health problems.The most likely fact would be that it was some kind of shared delusion, though even the family didn’t really know exactly what had happened. As Ella said when she and her brother faced the press outside their family farm: “There’s no one reason for it. It’s bizarre.”

Disappearing Shipwrecks

How do three 74-year-old shipwrecks just up and disappear from the ocean floor? That’s exactly what happened in Indonesia this year, when the wrecks of three Dutch warships sunk in World War II were found to be missing from their previously known locations.The wrecks — of the HNLMS De Ruyter, HNLMS Java and HNLMS Kortenaer — were first found in 2002 by amateur divers, with all sites being declared war graves. The ships collectively had taken down 915 Dutch and 259 Indonesian soldiers when they fell victim to the Japanese fleet.In November this year, the Dutch government confirmed that all three had simply disappeared from the seabed. Ship salvage experts weighed in on the mystery, saying that any attempt to move entire warships that had been sunk for three quarters of a century would be a massive operation — not one easily hidden from the authorities.Even theories that the ships had been torn apart and stripped for salvage didn’t quite — excuse the pun — hold water, and a number of other possible fates for the shipwrecks were suggested. Storms, swell, tsunamis or even a shift in tectonic plates could have been to blame — though a shipwreck of this sort would have been incredibly difficult to budge by most means. So, in absence of any other explanation – aliens?

Contagious Hallucinations

It seems to have been a year for strange, shared psychosis, with another example cropping up at an Oregon hospital in October.A woman was taken to said hospital after police were called to her house — she claimed she had seen strangers on the roof of her car. After two callouts, the police realised that she was suffering from hallucinations, and took her to the hospital.She was soon after discharged and left to go about her business, cleared of any illness or substance use. That’s where it starts to get weird.The two police officers who had picked her up to take her to the hospital also began suffering from hallucinations, closely followed by similar symptoms appearing in the woman for whom the original patient was a caretaker.After the older woman was hospitalised, one of the nurses attending to her was also struck by mysterious hallucinations.Was this a case of directly contagious hallucination?Whatever it was, the hospital was placed under quarantine, and HAZMAT was called. Standard procedures applied – everything was sterilised, washed and examined in an effort to identify the cause, but nothing could be found.There was no drug or even anything strange found in blood samples. No contaminants were found before the quarantine was eventually lifted with no real answers.I think what we’ve really discovered in 2016 is that the human brain is weirder and more terrifying than anything the natural (or supernatural) world can throw at us.

The post Four Of The Creepiest Unexplained Events Of 2016 appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

Colours fall in and out of fashion, but black remains a stylish staple. We like it from head to toe, on our wrists, on our cars, on our superyachts, on our leather, and even, when we’re feeling particularly bold, on our walls.With the recent trendiness of the Scandinavian aesthetic, we’ve been seeing a lot of light and airy spaces. White is an it-colour in interior design, and social media feeds have been flooded with polished, practically incandescent, rooms as a result. We’re avowed fans of the minimalist look, but we also like to shake things up.You’ve also been warned that inky shades will shrink a room, making your space seem unbearably small and claustrophobic. We wouldn’t recommend giving the dark treatment to a room that already feels cramped, but if the size of your turf is not an issue, don’t consider it a hard and fast rule. We’re no strangers to breaking rules when the result is chic.Black walls aren’t just for the Batcave anymore. Daring designers are embracing the shade in a surprising range of spaces, whether they boast the classic charm of intricate moldings or a more pared-down, contemporary style. The rooms above prove black walls (and other details) belong anywhere you want them, provided you’ve got the attitude to match.

The post Dramatic Homes That Prove Black Walls Belong In Any Room appeared first on DMARGE Australia.

Forget about being bright and festive this season. TAG Heuer are joining the dark side with a gorgeous new version of their Carrera Heuer-01.

The popular model was first introduced early last year and has today been reimagined as TAG Heuer’s Carrera Heuer-01 Full Black Matte Ceramic which features the unmistakable feel of ceramic construction paired with titanium carbide accents.

The 45mm case holds TAG’s in-house Caliber 01 movement which affords a 50-hour power reserve. On the dial is are three small seconds sub-dials which complement the skeletonised mechanics within – also in black, of course.

The watch is water resistant up to 100 metres and comes with a matching ceramic bracelet and rubber strap.

The watch is now available at a very affordable price point of US$6,300. Head over to TAG Heuer to find out more.

The post TAG Heuer Joins The Dark Side For The Latest Carrera Heuer-01 appeared first on DMARGE Australia.