The yoga-pants crowd is apparently huffing and puffing (mindfully, I imagine) over the "Who Is John Galt?" shopping bags being handed out at Lululemon. (There's a good photo, with both sides of the bag, at the bottom of this blog post.)
“Galt would not likely have proclaimed, as Lululemon’s bags once did, that 'what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves,'” notes the NYT's Ian Austen--a deadpan understatement that demonstrates just how often (the right kind of) politics goes unnoted on shopping bags.
But, he reports, the company's website relates Ayn Rand's celebration of excellence to the company's philosophy: “Our bags are visual reminders for ourselves to live a life we love and conquer the epidemic of mediocrity. We all have a John Galt inside of us, cheering us on. How are we going to live lives we love?”
Or, as Molly Worthen writes on Slate, “Yoga and Rand have both spawned subcultures of devotees not because Americans are either pantheistic mystics or objectivists but because they are individualists who belong to the church of self-improvement.”
Worthen's observation is borne out by another Rand sighting, this one in Bloomingdale's (click photo for larger view), where a Rand quote appears alongside similarly inspirational lines from Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Diana Vreeland, Betty Friedan, and Raquel Welch: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark....The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” Oprah couldn't have said it better.
[Photo by Virginia Postrel. You are free to use it with a link back to this post.]
To celebrate Black Friday, our friends at Electra Lang, interviewed in the post below, are offering DG readers a chance to win one of their modern classics: the Darcy shirt, with its flattering Edwardian collar and adjustable length.
Don't worry, you don't have to show up at 6 a.m. and fight the madding crowds. To enter, just leave a comment below before midnight Pacific Time on Friday, December 9.
The winner will be picked using Random.org. Contest open to U.S. residents only. Pattern and color of shirt will depend on availability. DG reserves the right to delete comments deemed to be commercial spam.
Most women of a certain age, especially those who've had a few kids, face a fashion dilemma: how to look chic and stylish without veering either into youthful indiscretion (Forever 21 doesn't mean you really are) or what the founders of the Electra Lang clothing line call the "Bea Arthur" or "Stevie Nicks" pitfalls. The Los Angeles-based company arose from experience, after Laura Collins (above, middle) discovered that the only way to find clothes that fit and flattered was to design them herself. She teamed up with Electra Lang and Kristi Buckley to turn that inspiration into a line of dresses and tunics with a casual yet polished vibe. Selling primarily online, the first Electra Lang collection launched in May 2011, with an expanded line planned for Spring/Summer 2012, beginning in February. The partners talked with DG about designing clothes "with an actual human body in mind."
Come back on Black Friday for a special giveaway contest from Electra Lang.
DG: Who's your customer?
EL: Our customer wants clothing that she doesn’t need to think about—she can be comfortable and look stylish, but not be a slave to fashion. We thought a lot about what works for most people’s bodies and we came up with Electra Lang’s Manifesto: “The Proper Principles of a Perfect Piece”
Chic Simple to wear Versatile Enough coverage Comfortable Lined Reasonably priced Easy to buy Voila…. Electra Lang Clothing was born.
DG: You talk about "dressing with style but with some propriety too." What do you mean?
Too often, we find tops that aren’t long enough, hemlines too short on dresses, lack of much-wanted sleeves, transparent fabrics with no lining, and jersey that clings too much. We designed our clothing to be fun and beautiful, but still cover all the right not-so-beautiful spots.
DG: You use a lot of interesting print fabrics. What do you look for in selecting prints?
One of our favorite parts of the design process is choosing our fabrics. We work with designers who create some of the freshest, most beautiful prints: they need to be sophisticated, yet playful prints. Sometimes a garment is more about distraction and camouflage, and certain prints can provide that, but for us to use them, they have to be glamorous as well.
DG: What's the problem with relying on a body form, or fit mannequin, to develop new designs?
One of the first things we did as designers was to get rid of the mannequin and fit everything on a real human body! Mannequins, unlike humans, look amazing in everything! That’s how we solved the mystery of why so many garments in the marketplace don’t fit well, or seem ill-conceived (a bunch of men in a back room dressing up a giant doll). Our designs are created with an actual human body in mind!
DG: Aside from buying clothes from Electra Lang, how would you advise women to avoid the "Stevie Nicks" and "Bea Arthur" looks?
As women get older, the balance between femininity, fashion, and fit becomes rather tricky. Too many wispy, lacy ruffles become rather theatrical and circuslike—in a bad way. On the other hand, manly pantsuits with long vests or wraps definitely set off the Bea Arthur alarm. Feeling comfortable in your own skin and clothes is what makes you attractive and sexy. If you look good without trying too hard, that says volumes about your style. Electra Lang balances great fashion with comfortable designs.
DG: How do you make your garments adjustable?
We are always working to improve the fit of our pieces. In every piece, whether there is an “adjustable” element or not, we make sure that it has flexibility. Our new silk jersey dress has stretch, but is carefully designed not to cling where it shouldn’t and to flow where it should. Our tunics are designed to camouflage a belly, but are adjustable in the back to create a flattering silhouette.
DG: What have you learned about the garment business in L.A.?
We decided from the beginning to do all of our production here in Los Angeles. This allowed us to control and monitor every aspect of the production, so that our designs were as close to our specs as possible. We also, want to be able to respond quickly to the market and we can’t do that with the long lead times required when manufacturing abroad. Plus, we love our city and want to do our part in keeping jobs here in Los Angeles.
1) How do you define glamour? Glamour is confidence, a personal style that looks put together and shows some thought behind it.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon? Katherine Hepburn—she had a signature style that was sometimes adventurous, but she always embodied ease and confidence.
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity? For a woman, glamour is a necessity, it is part and parcel of being a woman. It’s not just about fashion, it’s how you present yourself, how you entertain, how you care for others and, ultimately, reflects how you feel. Even if you weren’t born with it, it is something that you can cultivate.
In an article for History Today, Carol Dyhouse, the author of Glamour: Women, History, Feminism, chronicles the rise and fall of different sorts of fur as the symbols of feminine luxury, particularly in Britain. Particularly interesting is the way mink suddenly replaced fox after World War II:
Instead mink became the fur most coveted by women. J.G. Links, son of the furrier Calman Links, mused on the fickleness of fashion in this respect. Gone were the days ‘when a hundred thousand silver foxes alone would be offered for sale and eagerly competed for in one London auction alone’, he wrote. Red fox was now deemed just about unsaleable and he found it incredible ‘that a Kamchatka red fox, with its deep golden-red colouring like a Turner sunset, and its caressing, sensuous fur, should today find no buyers at fewer shillings than I used to pay pounds for it’. By the 1950s Links estimated that sales of mink were worth three to four times as much in money terms as all other furs put together. Some six million mink were being ‘produced’ annually by this time.
Now, of course, the market for mink has all but collapsed. When my mother-in-law asked about possibly selling her own mother's mink stole on eBay a few years ago, I had to break the news that it was worth less than $200 (probably considerably less, judging from current listings). People often assume that has something to do with the animal rights movement, but Dyhouse suggests the shift is less about ideology and more about pure fashion.
Fur was falling from favour well before the activism of the 1980s. In the late 1950s the price of mink fell dramatically. The cost of manufacturing a mink coat now exceeded that of the raw materials and there were many in the trade who felt that the luxury status of fur was becoming a thing of the past. Demand began to fall. The widespread adoption of central heating no doubt played some part: in bitter cold, nothing keeps you warm like natural fur. But the truth was that the fur coat, once the epitome of glamour and luxury, acquired unfashionable connotations from the 1960s. It signified an older, less trendy and more dependent kind of femininity. The urbane and discreet Links had insisted that most furs were bought by husbands for their wives and not for their mistresses. But in the popular mind the fur coat had come to signify hussies on the make or the kept woman.
This had little appeal for the young woman of the 1960s. When she rose to television fame as a popular singer in the 1950s, Alma Cogan had celebrated by buying two silver blue mink coats, one for herself and the other for her mother. She had offered to buy one for her younger sister, Sandra, too, but Sandra had demurred. She wanted to be seen as a serious actress ‘and a sort of beatnik’, she recorded, and she insisted on a duffel coat instead. Fur was a dying trend. Fur coats, once lovingly consigned to ‘cold storage’ facilities in department stores in summer, went to the back of the wardrobe instead. Many found their way to flea-markets or car-boot sales in the new millennium.
In the U.S. at least, I don't think furs signified hussies or kept women, but they definitely signified a doting man, rather than means of your own. Mad Men played with this in Don Draper's early ad, starring Betty, with its caption, "Why Wait for a Man to Buy You a Fur Coat?"
While dining last night at the Bluehour (shown to the left), one of the most fashionable contemporary restaurants in Portland’s Pearl District, my wife Carol commented that part of the expense of dining there was paying to have beautiful servers. Once she mentioned this, I realized that the serving staff was indeed remarkably attractive.
The stylish young hostess who seated us had long, curly blonde hair and wore a little red dress that, while undeniably sexy, was too fashionable to look cheap. The host (floor manager?) was young, tall, handsome, and wore a beautifully tailored black suit.
The other servers were all dressed in white. Carol thought that the young woman who filled our water glasses was more beautiful than Alicja Bachleda, the striking actress in Ondine, a film we had recently seen. This young woman had the tall, thin figure of a runway model, and, like runway models, she and the tall, handsome male servers maintained neutral expressions as they fulfilled their duties.
Their task, I realized, was not to engage with us. Instead, their role was to slip in like attractive, lithe-limbed apparitions and magically do whatever was needed to maintain the glamour of our dining experience. As when, for example, the knife I had used to spread butter was, at the proper moment, whisked away with effortless grace and replaced with a new one.
Our waiter was also dressed in white, and was tall, trim, older, and slightly balding. He seemed to love his work. He had a highly engaging smile, and a manner so relaxed that you immediately felt at ease. This made it easy to ask questions about the more exotic ingredients in various entrées.
The food was remarkably good and inventive, but the impression that I was most left with was now effortless the whole remarkable dining experience had been made to seem. Castiglione’s term sprezzatura came to mind because the staff appeared to handle everything with effortless grace, thus concealing the training and experience that had made this possible.
That maintaining this sense of effortlessness is difficult was made apparent the following evening. While dining in another fine restaurant the floor manager called attention to herself by wearing an ill-fitting suit made out of cheap material. A small mistake compared to the great food, but it led us to wonder if there would be other small mistakes. And once we had switched to that frame of mind, naturally enough, we did notice a few other flaws.
I've been enjoying Christian Esquevin's Silver Screen Modiste blog, which he started in December 2010, for the past six months or so and, thanks to a Google search, knew that he lives in Southern California (he's director of library services for the city of Coranado). So when I went to the Debbie Reynolds auction, I made a point of looking for him in line. Sure enough, Christian arrived not long after I did. In our conversation there and in his subsequent blogposts on the auction, he provided valuable insight for my Bloomberg View column. I also learned that he has a large collection of costume design sketches, which are a beautiful art in themselves. Christian kindly agreed to share a few sketches (don't even think of reusing them without permission), as well as some thoughts on the art and history of movie costumes.
DG: How did you get interested in Hollywood costumes?
Christian Esquevin: My interest came relatively late. My great-aunt had been the head cutter-fitter at the RKO studio during the 1930s. Although I had heard some of her stories growing up, it was not until she bequeathed me many of her photos and costume sketches that I became interested. This interest grew into a passion as I researched many of the unknowns about these beautiful items.
DG: You've written a book about Adrian, who with Edith Head is probably the most famous Hollywood costume designer. What makes his work particularly significant?
CE: There were, and are still, many great costume designers for films. Adrian, I believe, was a genius. He combined his artistic and fashion abilities with the needs of the movie character and the actor playing the part to make indelible images. I truly believe that along with costume designer Travis Banton he created the modern look of glamour.
You can actually look at a photo of some of their creations and say that there was no precedent for such a look – that’s where modern glamour started. Take any of several photos of Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, or Carole Lombard for example. The look of knock-your-eyes-out glamour is there, and it’s still the look today. And with Adrian, you can look at fashion at the time (late 1920s and 1930s) and draw the connection between his costume designs for the stars on film and what women wanted to wear around the world. His looks have been knocked-off for so long that people nowadays can no longer make that connection. Yves St. Laurent was heavily influenced by Adrian in the 1960s, but it’s YSL that gets the mentions.
Los Angeles is always being compared unfavorably with other cities in fashion creation and influence. But in the 1930s and early 1940s, Los Angeles and Hollywood were where fashion trends were started, and that was due to the influence of costume designers like Adrian.
DG: You're now writing a book on Irene, Walter Plunkett, and Helen Rose. What should people know about them?
CE: These three costume and fashion designers were as influential and accomplished in their day as Dior or Schiaparelli. They all led fascinating creative lives designing the looks of movie-star icons, yet who hears of them today?
If your resume stated that you created the costume designs for Gone with the Wind, Singing in the Rain, and King Kong among many others, as it would for Walter Plunkett, people would be impressed. Or that you designed Grace Kelly’s wedding gown, much of Elizabeth Taylor’s early wardrobe, and for such stars as Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Cyd Charisse, Doris Day, Esther Williams, Debbie Reynolds, and many others, people would take notice.
As for Irene Lentz Gibbons, known simply as Irene, it was said at the time that she dressed everyone in Hollywood. [The sketch to the left is one of Irene's designs for Easter Parade.--vp] Since she worked both as a costume designer and a fashion designer with her own boutique and then her own fashion business, she really did work with many leading ladies. Her customers and stars included Marlene Dietrich, Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Dolores Del Rio, Ava Gardner, Greta Garbo, and many others. When you look at her gowns and suits you’ll quickly see why she was so admired. They are impeccable and drop-dead gorgeous. While each of these designers is fascinating in their own right, they all worked at MGM at the same time for a period. What a combination – a unique time and place in history that will never be repeated. I just couldn’t leave that story alone.
DG: You collect costume design sketches. How do the clothes change from sketch to actual garment to what we see on film? What's the difference from medium to medium?
CE: I’ll talk about the process during the classic, “studio system,” which is what I’m most familiar with. At that time the studios employed virtually all the talent they needed on a long-term basis. In the wardrobe department this was a vertical integration, so that a designer had one or more “cutter-fitters” they worked with, and seamstresses working under them. These skilled cutter-fitters made muslin patterns based on the costume sketch a designer created. And consider that the costumes fabricated could be Elizabethan, classic Roman, or satin glamour gowns.
The costume sketch itself could be rendered by a sketch artist that had the artistic ability to paint figures and costumes. In these cases the sketch artist had to develop a close working relationship with the designer. Some designers wanted to do the sketch themselves. Adrian, for example, did not want anyone else “interpreting” his designs.
After the cutter-fitter used the sketch to devise patterns, the seamstresses would sew the final fabric based on the individual pattern pieces and then sew them for the fitting. Beaders and embroiderers would also base their work on the sketch.
Still, changes came about in the movie-making process. So some costumes were later modified from the original sketch for the movie. Edith Head liked to change her costume designs as she went along. Adrian wanted his costumes to look just like his sketch.
What is particularly fascinating about having an original production-made costume sketch is that this is an artifact that was handled by the stars, the director, often the producer, and the artisans that made the costume itself, as well as the designer. These pieces often have approval initials from these individuals, as well as budget information on the back. They are unique pieces of Hollywood film history.
DG: Can you share a few of your favorite sketches with our readers and tell us a bit about them?
CE: I have many sketches, and each is special in its own way. Although they have traditionally been called “costume sketches,” they are really water-color paintings, with more attention taken than would a pencil sketch. They were nonetheless working tools, and equally important, they represented the costume designer’s original design. I emphasize this because there are also pieces floating around that were often done many years after a film had been made. These were often done by the designers themselves as commemorative illustrations, or because they did not possess the original sketches, and were made for some of their fashion shows. Since these were done as show pieces, they are typically exact reproductions of how the costume looked on film. But even as working tools, the sketches are usually beautiful – they had to “sell” the director and star on that look.
I have picked a few that I like and I think will be of interest to the viewers, or that illustrate a point I want to make about costume designing and sketches. One of the icons of the movies is Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson. The costumes were designed by Edith Head. This is the costume sketch for Gloria Swanson’s opening scene in the film. It’s interesting because it’s not a regular dress but rather what was then called a hostess gown or hostess dress which was worn over pants. You only notice that when she descends the stairs in the movie. As with many of Edith’s designs, the final costume was changed in that the interior lining was no longer a plaid but rather a leopard print.
Here is another Edith Head costume sketch, done for Betty Hutton in Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek in 1942 (left). Edith Head sketches are pretty rare from the early 40s. Over her long career her sketches look quite different. That’s because she used different sketch artists over time and each had their own artistic style. Also, many costume sketches are never signed. When it was a real production sketch, everyone knew who the designer was, so it was not necessary to sign the piece. Sometimes that makes identifying a particular sketch difficult. The next sketch is also by Edith Head from this period, but there is nothing to identify who it was for or for what film.
The next two are costume sketches designed by and rendered by Oscar winning costume designer Mary Wills. The first was done for Joan Collins in The Virgin Queen in 1955. Joan played Beth Throgmorton in the film. A fabric swatch is attached. This costume was one sold at the Debbie Reynolds auction. The next one was also from Mary Wills and was done for “extras” in the outdoor market scene in Hans Christian Andersen starring Danny Kaye. This is one of many sketches Mary Wills did for a variety of outdoor vendors that made the scene really come to life. The sketch looks more like it was painted on an easel at the actual Copenhagen market than a costume sketch in a studio.
This sketch by Donfeld (Don Feld) was done for Angelica Huston in Prizzi’s Honor. Donfeld’s sketching style was very distinctive, with exaggerated long limbs. This sketch was probably done later than the actual film production sketch.
Here is a costume sketch designed by Helen Rose for Edie Adams in Made in Paris in 1966. The sketch was actually rendered by Donna Peterson, Rose’s long-time sketch artist. Some sketches actually showed two views of the costume, or with and without a jacket or coat.
This sketch was done by William (Billy) Travilla for Sharon Tate in Valley of the Dolls in 1967. Travilla is famous for his costume designs for Marilyn Monroe, a couple of which sold for several millions at the Debbie auction.
DG: Are there any contemporary films whose costumes you particularly admire?
I really liked the costumes designed by Coleen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland last year. This was a challenge because of the fantastical nature of the story and the well established look of most of the characters, but she did a great job. Another “fantasy” type movie was The Tempest, with costumes designed by Sandy Powell for Helen Mirren, Felicity Jones, and the other cast members. Powell really created the fantastical look of these characters based on the Shakespeare play.
For more contemporary costume I liked A Single Man, with costumes by Arianne Phillips and directed by Tom Ford. You’d expect the best costumes to come with a Tom Ford movie, and these did not disappoint both for the men’s and women’s wardrobe. And for those period costumes that are close to the “Mad Men” rage, there’s Revolutionary Road, designed by veteran costume designer Albert Wolsky for Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. The one dress that has made the biggest splash over the last several years is Keira Knightly’s green satin, backless gown from Atonement, designed by Jacqueline Durran. The movie was set in the 30s and 1940s, and this gown is really right out of the classic movies of that era.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour?
The original meaning of glamour was “to enchant” and that’s what it’s still all about. The person or the dress of glamour is one that captures attention and holds it in a mesmerizing and basically pleasurable way. It is strictly visual, so you know it when you see it without being able to describe it. That’s one reason why new looks in fashion or glamour occur.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon?
There are several, including classic icons such as Jean Harlow, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, and Catherine Deneuve, and more contemporary ones like Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, and Marion Cotillard.
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity?
It is a luxury, but also a necessity in that it’s a human need that many people pursue.
4) Favorite glamorous movie?
There are many, but I’ll mention Dinner at Eight, The Women, Shanghai Express, To Catch a Thief, and The Thomas Crowne Affair (with McQueen & Dunaway).
[Questions 5, 6, and 7 omitted.]
8) Most glamorous job?
I think that even creating art, music, beauty, or fashion involves toil. Creating glamour is work, and displaying glamour oneself becomes a role. The most fun is being the person watching glamour.
9) Something or someone that other people find glamorous and you don't
Parties. I would make an exception for the “masked ball” parties that were held in France by such bon-vivants as Carlos de Beistegui during the first half of the last century, for which I was regrettably not around.
10) Something or someone that you find glamorous whose glamour is unrecognized
Formal dining outdoors for lunch.
11) Can glamour survive?
It will, but it’s always in short supply.
12) Is glamour something you're born with?
No. But It helps if you’re born in the right milieu. Mostly you acquire glamour through cultivation. Some people acquire it through the expertise of others. Garbo was glamorous on the screen, but it was Adrian that created that glamour for her.
[Sketches are owned by Christian Esquevin and used with permission. Do not even think of republishing them without permission. Tumblr counts as publishing.]
“He who seeks beauty shall find it” is the personal motto of 82-year old fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. He’s been riding around on his bicycle, photographing fashion on the streets of New York City for roughly half a century. And although his name and reputation are well established in the fashion world, his personal “fashion philosophy” is by no means conventional.
In the movie Bill Cunningham New York, Bill comes off as a mysteriously simple character, a happy man who loves what he does and does what he loves. But there’s more; in fact, there are many complex and profound ideas wrapped up in the way Bill views fashion and culture, all of which inform the pictures he takes.
When photographing runway shows in Paris, he says, “If it isn’t something a woman could wear, I’m not interested.” His down-to-earth, fun-loving attitude makes fashion approachable to all. He praises daring and originality in clothing choices above all. He’s not afraid to call an outfit boring, no matter who’s wearing it. He may ignore a celebrity on the street wearing a multi-thousand dollar gown in favor of a bag-lady digging in the garbage, whose overlapping patterned shawls and head-scarves he thinks are “marvelous.”
Bill Cunningham’s straightforwardness stems from his ethical commitment to honesty and to celebrating individual creativity. He takes a firm stance against fashion magazines’ “In & Out” lists for attempting to dictate from the top-down what’s “in fashion” and what isn’t. Part of his opposition is moral and the other part is practical. He understands that no matter what magazines and designers decree, real fashion—what is actually “in”—can only be determined from the bottom up, by what everyday people actually wear.
To me, it seems that Cunningham’s incredible ability to capture weekly street-style trends is made possible by his understanding of how culture works. Bill’s photographs show us that in the city, fashion is a silent dialogue between people on the streets. Some respond to the latest designs from Paris; others adopt and revise the looks of those around them, incorporating good ideas from anywhere they can be found. People’s clothing choices are also often responding to the conditions of the local climate and Bill traces these complex and spontaneous orders with skill and grace (see “Boiling Point,” documenting the woven, eyelet fabrics of the hot New York week of August 14, 2009).
In de-emphasizing the role of “top-down” dictates from the fashion elite, Bill Cunningham helps us see how we, as everyday people, have the opportunity to participate in the fashion world. “I’m not interested in celebrities with their free dresses,” he says, “I’m interested in clothes!” He calls our attention to the role each of us has as a potential contributor to the silent dialogue of fashion with the choices we make in front of our mirrors each morning.
Click here for a list of when and where the film is showing.
Over at Silver Screen Modiste, Christian Esquevin has a second excellent post on the Debbie Reynolds costume auction, which includes a sad note on why the collection was so heavy on period costumes. Debbie Reynolds bought the foundations of her collection as when MGM had the mother of all garage sales in 1970, dumping its inventories of props, costumes, photographs--anything that could be sold for quick cash. (Twentieth Century Fox did the same a year later.) Christian writes:
Most of the studio's wardrobe at that time consisted of period costumes, which is by and large reflected in the strength of Debbie's collection. That MGM had many years earlier dumped many costumes in its wardrobe collection is little known. Due to the small value that was ascribed to contemporary fashion, and the lack of its re-usability in later films, many crown jewels of costume were destroyed. By the time of the 1970 MGM auction, many of those late 1920s and 1930s costumes were already gone. These had been the costumes that created the very image of glamorous Hollywood movie-stars, and that started fashion trends around the world. The Adrian-designed gowns worn by Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford that defined the look of glamour were mostly discarded. It is informative to consider the sale of Debbie's collection as reflecting the earlier MGM auction and the even earlier destruction of those movie costumes.
Yet even as scholars and fans mourn the collection’s breakup, dreaming of the museum that might have been, they admit the importance of private collectors. These enthusiasts may not all preserve artifacts in museum-quality condition, keeping costumes unaltered and mostly in the dark. But without the sometimes-eccentric people who buy at auctions out of their own passion to own a piece of movie history, no one would have saved these objects in the first place.
“Thank God for them,” says Deborah Landis. “Thank God for Debbie. We would have nothing. It would have been rags. That was the old way. We used everything until it fell off the hanger. That was the tradition in Hollywood.”
In my Bloomberg View column on the Debbie Reynolds collection auction, I cite some of the waist measurements Lisa Urban took from the costumes. But column prose didn't allow for the full inventory, which should be kept for historical interest. Here, in alphabetical order with links to the photos (much better than my snapshots) and auction results for each costume, is the full list. The numbers are the auction lot numbers. In a decision I now regret, I did not request a measurement of Audrey Hepburn's My Fair Lady Ascot dress, because everyone knows she was thin, the same reason I didn't ask Lisa to take any Katharine Hepburn measurements.
The biggest surprise to me was that Deborah Kerr's waist was as large as 24 inches. Her costumes, particularly the black gown from An Affair to Remember, are strikingly svelte and, like Marilyn's white dress, couldn't be fully fastened in the back, as you can see by my photo of her Catherine Parr gown. I was also surprised that the Ginger Rogers dress had a 24-inch waist. It looks even smaller in person.
As I was headed to a going-out-of-business sale at the Border’s Bookstore in Santa Fe, I saw something that probably happens millions of times a day around the world. An older sibling was trying hard not to appear connected to a younger. In the photo shown at left, two sisters are distancing themselves from their parents and younger brother behind them. And, sadly, at some point in her teen years, the older sister will protest if told she needs to let her sister tag along.
In Santa Fe I saw a nattily dressed boy of about seventeen purposely walking very fast, forcing his younger sister to periodically have to run or skip to catch up. He was trim, attractive, and had impeccably styled hair. He was wearing a nice sport coat with a well-matched shirt and tie, nice trousers, and well-polished dress shoes. He perhaps looked a bit preppy for the bookstore, but there was no question he looked confident and sharp.
His younger sister was about thirteen or fourteen, and I could see why he was trying to ditch her. She was pudgy, her hair was a mess, and her unattractive pink dress fit horribly. She had put on a long-sleeved t-shirt under the dress for warmth, and this make her outfit look even worse.
While he looked sophisticated, she looked clueless. Once in the bookstore, they separated, and I never saw him go anywhere near her the whole time I was there.
I told this story at a dinner gathering the other night, and many people starting talking about their relationships with their siblings. One woman’s younger brother (by two years) used to like to hang out with her girl friends when they came over, and she was not happy that her friends found him so funny that they liked having him around. Although she had a good relationship with him, she reached her limit when he tried to join them at their lunch table at high school. After all, she laughingly recalled , “I was a senior!”
No matter how close we might usually be to our siblings, there are times when they can interfere with the image we are trying to project, especially in the strange peer-pressure world of junior high and high school.
[Photo "Hey, Alice, I've been thinking: we're old enough to go out on our own now, without Mom and Dad and our younger brother tagging along and slowing us down" by Ed Yourdon. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
As a word glamour is tricky to define. Whether any of us experience something as being glamorous depends on our individual responses. I find Charlize Theron’s hair and makeup wonderfully glamorous in the photo at left, while others may not. I feel certain that the intent was to create a glamorous photograph, but intending something to be perceived as glamorous does not insure we will all respond to it in that way.
In dressing for the Oscars, Theron has made some choices that bombed with most fashion critics. Most people felt that the Christian Dior dress that she wore to the 2010 Oscars looked regrettable on her, and it made many worst-dress lists. The Christian Dior dress (shown at right) that she wore to the 2005 Oscars was panned by some as suitable for a high-school prom, but most loved it, and it has appeared on several lists as one the best Oscar dresses of the decade. When you see a large photograph of her making her entrance onstage in this dress, you can almost imagine that it was chosen knowing what the stage colors and design were going to be. The effect of the dress in relationship to that stage design is stunning.
In a situation when something strikes us as stunningly glamorous, the archaic meaning of glamour as magic or enchantment still seems relevant. What we experience seems to cast a spell on us, and what we perceive seems like an enchantment. Even while under the spell, we may sense that what we are experiencing is in part a transient, artful conjuration, and that everything possible has been done to try to make us feel we are experiencing glamour at its epitome, fully incarnated.
Small wonder this is so difficult to pull off—the slightest incongruity can break the spell of glamour. Oh, but what a delightful experience to have when the enchantment works as planned.
Sunday night's emerald gowns offered a vivid, tasteful contrast to the usual red carpet wardrobe of what the LAT's Vincent Boucher calls the "boring tone of 'blushnudeplatinumivory.'"
This Kelly bag in Hermès orange is for sale at Decades Inc., the high-end vintage boutique beloved of Hollywood stars and the stylists who dress them. According to the Decades blog, this particular model retails for $9,000 but is available for an undisclosed "below retail" sum. (If you have to ask, you can't afford it.)
The bag got its name when Life ran a photo of Princess Grace, then pregnant with her daughter Caroline, using it to disguise her pregnancy from paparazzi. With its dated combination of large size and short straps, the bag is a holdover from the days of perfectly polished ladies in white gloves who'd never think of flaunting their “bumps.” Yet it’s still considered a timeless classic. Why?
The Kelly bag reminds me of Lisa Fremont, Grace Kelly’s character in Rear Window. It’s rare and expensive. It flaunts its owner’s wealth in a subtle and unapologetic way. But it’s also tough and more adaptable than it initially appears. If Lisa does wind up tramping through the jungle with her true love, the Kelly bag is the sort of purse she might take with her.
The practical effect of this combination of rarity, expense, and toughness is that people can justify spending outrageous amounts on a purse, knowing that it will last indefinitely. It won’t go out of style, because it wasn’t really in style to begin with, and Hermès will refurbish it on request. The per-use cost thus drops substantially, plus there’s a secondary market in case you need the cash.
Note that it’s called the Kelly bag, even though Grace was married when the name was coined. It’s not associated with royalty but with Kelly’s on-screen persona.
Last week Southern California teens with chronic kidney disease had a chance to experience one of the joys of prom season: picking out the perfect dress.
In preparation for next Sunday's Renal Teen Prom (see earlier post here), volunteers from the Renal Support Network fanned out around Southern California, bringing donated prom dresses to hospitals and dialysis centers. They set up makeshift dresing rooms in any available space, from exam rooms to restrooms to janitor's closets, allowing delighted girls to browse and try on dresses (with advice and assistance from assorted moms).
This year's prom dress selection was better than ever, thanks to donations from DG friends at TJX (TJ Maxx/Marshall's) and Out of the Closet. TJX rushed their dresses overnight so they could arrive in time to become the caravan's most popular items when it hit Millers Children's Hospital in Long Beach, where RSN volunteer Robert Ziegler took these photos.
RSN accepts dress donations year-round. You can send them directly to 1311 N. Maryland Avenue, Glendale, CA 91207 or, if you prefer, drop them off with DG friend Marina, owner of the fantastic First Class Tailors in Brentwood. You can also make a financial contribution via PayPal--$50 sends one teen to the prom.
The prom could still use a volunteer videographer who can work next Sunday evening, January 16, at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks. For more information, please contact RSN directly or leave a comment below.
Someday someone may see a picture of you and likely smile or laugh when they realize that you were wearing your hair in the fashion of the age, most likely inspired by your favorite actor or singer. I offer as evidence this picture of my maternal great-grandfather and great-grandmother and their children. All of the women are wearing the 1920s-fashionable Marcel wave. With the string of pearls all of them probably felt as up-to-date as film star Mary Pickford, shown below with the same look (except that Mary smiles and dares to bare her shoulders). My grandfather, the only male offspring, has his hair slicked back in the fashion of Rudolph Valentino.
Looking at high-school and college yearbooks from a few decades gives us the perspective to see just how conformist we sometimes can be. My wife laughs when she sees that most of her friends were wearing the same hair style that she was. Many of the boys in my high school wore some version of Elvis Presley’s or James Dean’s hair, hoping somehow that their charisma would magically transfer to us.
Tina Fey has admitted having a girl crush on Dorothy Hamill (shown here receiving an Olympic skating medal). Fey got a Hamill-style haircut, plus wore a big Dorothy Hamill button. Hamill’s wedge cut flowed so beautifully when she skated that some commentators have lamented the lack of something similar at the last Winter Olympics.
How about DG readers? What actor, singer, or athlete had the glamorous hair that you and many classmates aspired to? For inspiration, here’s a site showing many 20th-century hairstyles, and another showing 10 of the most popular hairstyles.
A rite of passage in many ways, all of the rituals and excitement surrounding the prom give most kids their first brush with adult glamour. Reared on princess mythology, girls finally get to don their own ball gowns and be perceived not just as little girls, but as something close to grown women.
For kids with chronic kidney disease, who typically spend four hours a day, three days a week hooked up to a dialysis machine, that rite of passage is often just a dream. That was the case for Lori Hartwell, who was only two years old when her kidneys failed and later missed her own high-school prom because she was on dialysis. As an adult, Hartwell founded the Renal Support Network to help give people with kidney failure “health, happiness, and hope” while coping with their disease. (If all goes well, Lori is due for her fourth transplant early next year, with a kidney donated by her step-sister.)
One of the networks's most inspiring—and certainly most glamorous—programs is its annual Renal Teen Prom, which each January gives “kidney teens” a special night “to have what no young person should miss...the chance to enjoy being young!” As Linda Oakford, RSN's patient coordinator explains,
The best part about the Renal Teen Prom is that they get to share a wonderful evening with others who are experiencing the same issues that they are and that they are not the only one dealing with [chronic kidney disease]. They don't have to explain their scars or other obvious medical problems. The girls will wear strapless dresses not worrying about covering catheters or scars. As you know teenage years are difficult enough without medical issues, many of these teens feel like outsiders. Life-long friendships have been made at the Renal Teen Prom.
Thanks to financial and in-kind donations, and a lot of volunteer labor, the prom is free, including dinner, transportation, gowns for the girls and ties for the guys. The prom is held the Sunday before the Martin Luther King holiday, because dialysis is rarely scheduled on Sundays and the following day is a holiday.
The photos above were taken at last January's prom by DG friend and kidney mom Karol Franks, whom you may remember from her great candid photos at our hat party. She told us about the prom when she was looking for a last-minute replacement photographer. They're covered for photography this year, but DG readers can still help make these special prom dreams come true.
Your $50 contribution can send a teen to the prom. Or you can help with in-kind contributions. In particular, the RSN needs donations of large and extra-large dresses that look appropriate for teenage girls. During the first two weeks in January, volunteers will visit hospitals and dialysis centers around Southern California, bringing dresses for girls to try on and select from. They already have plenty of small and medium dresses, but larger sizes are in short supply. They can also use accessories like jewelry and evening bags. Dresses do not have to be new, but they should be cleaned before donating.
Financial and in-kind contributions are tax-deductible. Businesses that support the prom will receive credit in the printed program.
To donate dresses or accessories, you can contact me at virginia-at-deepglamour.net or leave a comment below. I will either arrange pickup or a convenient dropoff. If your business would like to support the prom or RSN's work in general, please contact Linda Oakford at Linda-at-rsnhope.org or 818-543-0896 x106.
And if you're a celebrity, or know one who'd be willing to spend an evening in Sherman Oaks, they'd love to hear from you. Jack Black was a big hit last year.
Perusing Etsy's vintage shops, I came upon this interesting juxtaposition. The tight-waisted, full-skirted '50s vintage dress is just as "alternative" as the model's tattoos, and the tattoos are as overtly feminine as the dress. The contemporary counterpart of the woman who first wore the dress is probably wearing jeggings and several carefully layered knit tops. For more photos (or to buy the dress), click here.
Editor's note: I'm often asked if Michelle Obama is glamorous. My usual reply is that she is stylish but that her appeal, like Sarah Palin's, is based on being an extraordinary version of an ordinary person and she (unlike her husband) thus lacks the mystery and distance for glamour. In this guest post Sarah Sá Couto, who blogs at First Order Goods, offers a different answer. What do you think? --VP
Michelle Obama is said to be you know who with a law degree, someone for whom fashion is second to social purpose, yet whose sartorial choices move markets. There is a general sense that she has brought glamour back to the White House, something that is greeted with wild applause and mild outrage. While we might appreciate her wardrobe in abstract, let it not be confused with glamour.
Virginia put it best when she called glamour a process of “idealization, glorification and dramatization” to achieve a particular purpose. In any given context, the first lady’s words, gestures and, yes, clothes project a vision that is larger than herself and loaded with meaning.
Michelle Obama was at her most glamorous during the presidential campaign. The purpose was simple and her proposition alluring: she, a striking woman and gifted speaker, high-powered executive and nurturing mother, exemplified how you can rise above your circumstances to fabulous heights. This idea was reflected in her dress code of smart, bold and feminine outfits. Young fashion designers gave her a modern air, while a touch of high-street made the dream seem accessible. The personal nature of her story and the confidence, even enjoyment, with which it was presented, made it look easy.
As first lady she continues to pose as an example of what is possible, but now pride has given place to conceit. In line with her husband’s message of openness, Mrs. Obama has welcomed thousands of people to the White House, to give them confidence to rise, as she says, from “mediocrity to fabulousness.” Her first major initiative ‘Let’s Move!’ serves to lecture kids and parents alike on the inadequacy of their way of life. All is delivered in great style, which at this point gives her an air of arrogance. Back on the campaign trail for the mid-term elections, she consolidated her fashion credentials, by wearing the latest trends from the hottest designers. The style was often relaxed and even flirty, in sharp contrast with the mood of the disenchanted electorate. As has often been said about her husband, she appeared out of touch.
On the international stage, Michelle Obama may have won on the fashion stakes, but surely the point was to inspire trust and good will. An electric blue gown, combined with rhinestones, sapphires, glittery makeup, and elaborate hair was always going to stand out, if not outshine everyone in the picture. That was her solution to improve understanding with Mexico. In the first state dinner, meant to honor India, the first lady’s approach was to display her athletic figure in a strapless golden number, even though it was obvious that her guests would don saris and turbans. She looked dazzling, but did she inspire?
Another poignant moment was when the Obamas were received by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip for tea. Her outfit wasn’t particularly daring, but a voluminous black skirt, worn with high heels and high hair made her host, a formidable woman, appear frail by comparison. The Queen was actually compelled to remark on their height difference. If her purpose was to out-Queen the Queen, she succeeded.
Decorum is not always the solution. The first lady can be young and beautiful and dress to impress when the occasion is right. She can even redefine the rules, but always with purpose in mind. In fashion matters, Mrs. Obama has repeatedly said that it is more comfortable for her to be “Michelle than it is to be first lady”. The result is very stylish and often dazzling, but her self-centered approach fails to inspire at home or abroad. Glamour involves something other than dressing up, it’s about dressing for.
[Photo from White House Flickr stream. Unlike every other blog, we don't steal copyrighted photos, much as we're tempted.]
Chances are the moment you saw this photograph you instantly had an opinion about it: whether you felt the model was beautiful, whether her red lipstick looked stunning or overdone. Studies have shown we form initial impressions surprisingly quickly. At Northwestern University researchers found that when they tested listeners by letting them hear tiny samples of music, the listeners were able to classify different styles of music based on samples lasting only 250 milliseconds. A half-second sample added only a little more accuracy, and with a sound sample lasting a second most listeners could classify every style of music they were familiar with. This is an astonishing finding, because it suggests that we use timbre, the character of the sound, to quickly do most of the work when we are identifying musical styles.
This ability to form quick impressions is an extension of our survival skills, stemming from the need to assess sights and sounds that might indicate the presence of danger, or a friend, or an enemy. These quick impressions can of course be mistaken, but without the ability to form quick impressions our ancestors could not have survived.
Those of you who have watched Project Runway or The Fashion Show know that you decide almost as soon as the model walks onto the runway whether you think her outfit is attractive. Later, you sometimes think the judges are crazy to like an outfit that you immediately found unattractive. If we watch an awards show in which music, film, and TV stars are trying to look glamorous, we take one look and quickly decide if we think they have succeeded or failed.
The model in the photograph above is Emily DiDonato, a relatively new model who has been featured in several recent Maybelline ads. The photo at right shows her with little or no makeup. For a chance to form other quick impressions, look at DiDonato made up in strikingly different ways here, here, and here. If we were to imagine each image as our first impression of her, then our initial reaction to her might be quite different.
Understanding this allows us to see why some religions have been suspicious of makeup for centuries. When we see an image of Emily’s face, within milliseconds we have evaluated her appearance and formed an initial impression about her as a person. When her makeup changes she instantly appears to be different—perhaps even a different kind of person. This is horrifying if you believe that people should present only one face to the world. But, if you believe that we play different roles in life, and that we should have the option of presenting ourselves differently, then the ability to dramatically change our appearance in various ways seems liberating and fun.
A couple of weeks ago, I published a WSJ column citing research showing that while bicycle-helmet laws do save lives they also significantly discourage kids (especially teenagers) from riding bikes in the first place. The comments were lively and interesting—as I note in the article, this is a topic that excites all-or-nothing passions—with some people adamantly arguing that appearance is, or ought to be, completely irrelevant: "Riding a bike is not a fashion statement," declared one.
Wearing Yakkay helmets
Except, of course, that for many people it is. As both the WSJ and NYT have reported, bikes are gaining popularity among fashionable urban women. “The idea now is to look like a pedestrian on wheels,” a bike retailer told the NYT's Ruth La Ferla. Preferably one liked to be featured on The Sartorialist. The "lovely bicycle" is in, and it doesn't go with the typical bike helmet.
Fortunately, in bike-loving Scandinavia enthusiasts for both bicycles and head-protection have turned not to laws but to design. In my article, I briefly mention Yakkay, a Danish startup that offers stylish helmets with changeable covers. "If you make a stylish bicycle helmet you don’t need legislation," says CEO Michael Eide, "and in YAKKAY we wanted to make a helmet people actually want to wear." Now sold in Europe and Canada, Yakkay helmets will be available in the U.S. beginning next spring.
The Hövding: Protection without hat hair (click photo for larger image)
Taking a more radical approach is the Hövding (Chieftain), developed by Swedish designers Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin. An airbag disguised as a collar, it is, as Ariel Schwartz reports on Fast Company.com, "the complete antithesis of the hard-shelled helmets that cyclists have become used to." Six years in development, it will be available next year. Here's a video of how it works:
Unlike dresses or skirts or blouses, shoes hold their shape even when no one is wearing them, and therefore evoke a sense of promise. When you see a pair of stilettos on display in a department store or featured in a fashion magazine, you can imagine yourself wearing them and becoming the kind of person who lives a magical life, gliding around gracefully with no need for sensible, lace-up shoes. The fantasy just might become realizable by stepping into the shoes and inhabiting them.
Very often, what women “love” about shoes is this frisson of potentiality, of expectancy. When considering a beautiful or unusual pair of shoes, whether high heeled or not, they think: This is what I could be. If I wear these shoes I will become a new me—a better me—a me whom others will recognize as fearless and exciting. No longer will I be a woman who plods and clunks along. In these shoes I can be fun, edgy, sexy, unpredictable. Anything is possible.
Alas, as we know, the fantasy is never truly attainable. Gorgeous shoes do not lead to a carefree life, or even to the appearance of one.
During recent trips to Santa Fe and Boulder I picked up some fun clothing items, including the 191 Unlimited shirt shown on the model at left. I had some interesting conversations with saleswomen, and more than one of them bemoaned her husband’s lack of interest in ever wearing stylish clothing. Their husbands always wore work clothes or very casual comfort clothes. One saleswoman and I agreed that some men and women seem uninterested in fashion, while others play it safe by wearing what most people around them are wearing. We both felt that developing a personal fashion sense is a slow, incremental process that involves some trial and error.
Any person hates to look foolish, but Carol Dweck’s mindset research at Stanford has shown that people who believe that abilities such as intelligence, musical talent, and athletic skills are unchangeable are the people who are most likely to avoid trying to master areas of endeavor that prove difficult for them. She has shown that children who have been praised because learning some subjects or skills seemed easy for them (“you’re so smart, gifted, or talented”) often absorb a darker side of that message which implies that if you have to work hard to master a particular subject or skill, it means that you have a permanent lack of aptitude in that area. So when some area proves difficult for these fixed mindset students to master quickly, they may feel that having to work hard at it makes them look inept, and they may then choose to avoid that subject as much as possible. In her research Dweck found, for example, that pre-med students with this fixed-ability mindset often changed majors when they encountered the first math or biology course that they had to work hard to pass.
On the other hand, children who have been praised for their hard work in learning various subjects and skills tend to believe that abilities can be developed incrementally, and they are usually far more willing to work hard to try to master subjects and skills that challenge them. They view making mistakes and learning from them as integral parts of the long-term process of growth. Dweck’s controlled studies have repeatedly shown that this incremental-growth mindset is far more likely to give students the grit needed to work hard and make it past various obstacles they encounter as they pursue their interests and goals.
I can understand that some people may have little interest in fashion, and others may not wish to differ in appearance from their peers. But I suspect that for some people, professing a lack of interest in fashion may be a way to avoid giving others any opportunity to judge them as trying and failing to be fashionable. One or two such failures may have already convinced them that they have little aptitude for fashion, and they assume that this will always be the case. And after dressing for years in an inconspicuous, blend-in way, trying something different might make the wearer too self-conscious to appear confident and comfortable.
For those whose mindset assumes that developing an ability is an incremental process, taking a fashion risk becomes a single step toward incrementally developing a personal fashion image. If some people suggest that your efforts on a particular occasion are partially flawed, you can deal with that. You realize that taking risks can lead to imperfect results, and if you decide that this effort didn’t work out as successfully as you had hoped, you assume that this one effort implies little or nothing about your long-term ability to develop an interesting personal sense of fashion. You move forward and try new possibilities.
For the first few years of elementary school one of my granddaughters, who loves animals, wore a tail to school and preferred mismatched socks. I thought this was fun, and I was proud that my daughter, a visual artist, was comfortable letting her daughter go to school dressed in an eccentric way. A gallery owner friend let her daughter choose to head off to the first day of kindergarten in full-length gloves. I don’t know what the fashion sense of either of these young girls will be as adults, but hopefully it will retain some measure of their childhood audacity.
Editor's note: Ever since the launch of DG my friend David Bernstein (a Bay Area engineer, not the Volokh Conspiracy blogger) has been passing on interesting glamour-related links and observations. I've finally persuaded him to join us with the occasional post. Here's his debut. For more on this topic, check out this 1974 New York magazine article by Anne Hollander (and for a really creepy experience, keep scrolling to the one after it). [VP]
A couple of Sundays ago the other half was watching Little Women from 1949 on TV while I walked through the living room. Now, I'm an engineer, so fashion generally slides right past me, but the clothes of all the girls (little women?) activated the pattern recognition part of my brain. It seemed that they were all wearing dresses with inverted triangles over the upper torso. They struck me as looking more like photos I've seen of women from the post-World War II era rather than around the Civil War. It got me to thinking about how art that depicts history is affected by the time of the art itself, as opposed to that of the depicted history. It can be difficult to remove the current-colored lenses that we all peer through.
To illustrate the point, here is a montage of scenes from three different versions of Little Women.
One of the most successful companies producing Merino wool clothing is Icebreaker, a New Zealand company. Icebreaker is known for using evocative images in their advertising, and their Summer 2010 ads are no exception. In one a fair-skinned, wide-eyed naked woman rides a dark-skinned, naked Merino-ram-headed man who is at least three times her size. The ram-man is leading a column of Merino sheep numbering in the thousands. (The image shown is a crop taken from the central quarter of the full image.)
One of the themes of Icebreaker’s advertising is symbiosis, with human forms covered in soft, warm, odor-absorbing Merino wool clothing. However, the use of naked human bodies in snowy mountains seems completely beside that point. I have always found their ads fun, but some people who live and work near the Icebreaker store in Portland have found huge window displays such as this image offensive. A salesperson in the store told me that this image has been the most controversial yet.
Some people object to the petite fair woman being carried off by the huge, dark-skinned beast, which they feel has both racist and sexist overtones. But, as seen here, in one of their earlier ads an even fairer and frailer woman clearly has the advantage over a darker-skinned beast-man more her size. And it is a longstanding cliché of Romance novels that the fair heroine falls for a tall, dark, handsome, somewhat unruly man whom only she can manage to tame.
Icebreaker does not shy away from the cross-species “monster” implications of their images. Early ads showed a white-haired woman with sheep ears. But beast-humans have a long mythological history—witness creatures like satyrs, centaurs, and the Minotaur. According to Greek legend the Minotaur, born with the head of a bull and the body of a man, was the offspring of a mating between the wife of Minos, ruler of Crete, and the Cretan Bull. I suspect that Icebreaker is merely pushing the notion of symbiosis into mythological imagery.
I suspect few men can see an image of a woman preparing to shear a beast-man’s groin without feeling a twinge of terror, but ultimately I see these images as more fun and tongue-in-cheek than genuinely disturbing. On the other hand, I also think that there is no question that they were intended to be provocative, and in that sense, they have been successful. Apparently too much so for some people’s comfort.
Addendum, August 30, 2010: A few days after writing this post, I remembered that in his delightful book The Happiness Hypothesis
Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of a rider on an elephant to represent the scale of our newer language-oriented, reasoning part of the brain in relationship to the faster, automatic processes in various older and incredibly powerful parts of the brain. Our ability to accomplish things depends in part on creating a good working relationship between the rider and the elephant.
The day that the post went up, my wife Carol and I did a lovely, but tiring 5.5 mile hike in the Columbia Gorge. That afternoon we spent some time driving around Oregon with Carol giving me directions from the map. At some point, as the afternoon wore on, I began to feel like the car and I were a beast, and that Carol was a rider directing us. I expressed that thought, and Carol said if the beast was tired it was all right if we went back.
Now when I look at the image of the woman riding the beast-man I consider the possibility that she may be doing her best to control the direction of the herd by using her hands to steer the ram-man's head where she wants to go.
Capes are officially one of this fall's big fashion trends. "Practicality (they're easy, cosy and comfy) meets theatricality (see Givenchy's sexy caped crusaders) in this season's favourite cover-up," declares British Vogue in a cape-filled slideshow.
Concealing the body and arms in a dramatic sweep of fabric, capes are among the most glamorous of garments. Yet they haven't been popular for quite some time. As Fashionising notes in another guide to this season's cape craze, "Since the humble poncho had its hippie revival, the cape in its more sophisticated forms has seen nothing of a major comeback on the streets--that is, until now."
Perhaps that's because the cape's mystery and drama come at the price of practicality. Even most superheroes have abandoned them. "Capes have been an object of scorn among discerning superheroes at least since 1974," writes Michael Chabon, "when Captain America, having abandoned his old career in protest over Watergate, briefly took on the nom de guerre Nomad, dressed himself in a piratical ensemble of midnight blue and gold, and brought his first exploit as a stateless hero to an inglorious end by tripping over his own flowing cloak."
For mere mortals, I know from experience that there's good reason to leave capes for evening wear. It's hard to carry things when your arms are shrouded in fabric.
When I was just out of college and living in Philadelphia, my grandmother gave me a beige wool cape she'd bought for herself but found too heavy for Georgia. I thought it quite glamorous and happily substituted it for my rather boring winter coat.
There was just one problem. You can't carry a purse on the shoulder of a cape. It slides off. In fact, with your arms covered by the fabric and small slits for your hands, you can't carry much of anything at all, especially when commuting by bus. My solution was to put my purse, and anything else I needed to carry, under the cape, against my body. That worked, and it had an unexpected benefit.
For some reason, whenever I was standing up on the bus, people offered me a seat. It took three or four such incidents before I figured out that I looked pregnant.
Fashion stylist Angie at the excellent YouLookFab.com blog recently challenged readers to tell her how much they'd have to be paid to wear this outfit in normal, everyday life. Among the first 70 replies prices ranged from $100 to a cure for cancer ("no amount of money would be enough"). Amazingly, a real online retailer charges £135 for the hot mess.
The outfit is hideous and inappropriate to pretty much every context. It also sends a strange signal about the wearer's identity (Hooker working Comic-Con? Unfortunately paired Project Runway model?).
But what about outfits that aren't downright ugly, just unconventional or signals of the wrong identity? How sensitive are you to social expectations? To making sure your wardrobe matches your self-image? How do you balance those two factors when identity and taste clash with convention? When I interviewed cosplayers at Anime Expo, several told me they wished they wear Edwardian-inspired fantasy outfits every day. On a more mundane note, I myself spend most days in jeans and T-shirts even though in theory I'd rather wear suits or dresses. It just seems strange to dress up to work at home.
So, to add to Angie's question, here are some less outre outfits to consider.
These pink and orange Lily Pulitzer silk pants sell for $98. I'm sure they have many fans, but they're definitely for people with very specific tastes. And they say the wearer is either a super-preppy or a wannabe. Along similar lines, consider madras pants, available for both men and women.
What would someone have to pay you to wear them to work? Or would you happily pay for the privilege yourself?
Moving on to a different taste subculture, how about this Renaissance Faire-influenced upcycled T-shirt dress? I love the color palette, and the "medieval style liripipe hood" and giant bell sleeves have a certain romance. But for everyday office wear? How much?
Finally, no such discussion would be complete without the classic Juicy Couture velour tracksuit, complete with rhinestone-encrusted crown. Everyday glamour? Or the wrong sort of signal? What's your price?
Got an outrageous outfit to share? Please add your own challenges, with links, in the comments below. We'll award a DeepGlamour goody bag to the one we like the best.
In the introduction to her essay collection, A Dedicated Follower of Fashion, fashion critic Holly Brubach makes a case for the cultural significance of fashion. It is, she suggests, “architecture’s feminine counterpart....Buildings and clothes are the primary components of our everyday landscape, and they embody the ideas and the attitudes of the time in which we live.”
While I agree with her about fashion’s significance, I’m not convinced that buildings are clothing’s masculine counterpart. They are too static, too permanent, and too communal. Architecture operates differently on the imagination. It tends to be more evocative in photographs than in person, while clothes are just the opposite.
Fashion’s real masculine counterpart is personal transportation, which since the early 20th century means cars. (It once meant coaches, as time spent with Madame Bovary or Sherlock Holmes will quickly demonstrate.) Like an outfit, an automobile wraps its owner in a new outer shell, both protective and decorative. Even the most ordinary car, like even the most ordinary clothes, thus holds some prospect of transformation while extraordinary cars, like extraordinary clothes, conjure up whole new lives. The glamour of both comes from the promise of escape and transformation.
Both cars and clothes also express, as Brubach said of architecture, the ideas and attitudes of their time. Yet, outside of the movies, they are only rarely deliberately paired to call attention to these correspondences. People who think seriously about cars usually know little about fashion, and vice versa.
The photos here represent an exception: an exhibit, titled Automotivated: Streamlined Fashion and Automobiles, on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles through January 23. A collaboration between the Petersen and my friend Dennita Sewell, the uber-talented fashion curator at the Phoenix Museum of Art, the show pairs such examples of 1930s styling as (top) the 1934 LaSalle Model 350 Convertible Coupe with a 1939 Hattie Carnegie dress whose pattern echoes the car's portholes and streamlining. (Dennita mounted a similar exhibit in Phoenix in 2007, complementing this extraordinary car exhibit.)
As the exhibit’s copy notes, in the streamline era the echoes were sometimes deliberate:
Wealthy connoisseurs would collaborate with French couturiers, automakers, and coachbuilders to create perfectly matching ensembles. Even Chanel met with exclusive coachbuilders like Joseph Figoni to formulate matching automobile and fashion ensembles for a select few clients. Well heeled patrons often had long lunches in exclusive hotel restaurants with their coachbuilders and couturiers to order coordinating fashion and automobile ensembles to be debuted at prestigious parties or high profile events such as a concours d’elegance.
There might have been other, less official wardrobe coordination. The second car pictured is a 1937 Delage D8-120. Louis Delage, the car company’s founder, contrasted his products with the competition. “Gentlemen drive Alfas, and you’re driven in a Rolls,” he said. “But a Delage is something to give one’s mistress,” perhaps along with a similarly streamlined bias-cut dress.
[Car photos courtesy of the Petersen Automotive Museum. Fashion from Phoenix Art Museum Collection, photos by Ken Howie. Bottom exhibit photo by Virginia Postrel.]
In the 1980 comic movie CaddyshackRodney Dangerfield’s character played a loud-mouthed, nouveau-riche real-estate tycoon who disrupts the decorum of a country-club golf course. Great touches in Dangerfield’s portrayal were brightly colored clothes and flashy cars.
Now life is imitating art as American golfer John Daly has become a representative of Loudmouth clothes. Virtually all of Loudmouth’s pants have a clown-like character which makes Dangerfield’s movie outfits look almost restrained. The psychedelic pants shown in the photo are so garish that most men would be embarrassed to wear them as pajamas.
Golf has long been a relatively moneyed sport, and if you watch a telecast of a major golf tournament the main sponsors will inevitably be investment firms, luxury cars, expensive watches, and golf equipment. Since much golf is played at country clubs, proper dress is usually tasteful, occasionally even a bit dapper. Here is British player Sir Nick Faldo looking as glamorous as his title suggests he might (he was knighted for his services to golf).
Although some brightly colored golf clothes in solid colors are seen on tournament broadcasts, Daly’s outfits make him look as if he has wandered in from some other cultural universe. One of Daly’s nicknames has been ‘wild thing,’ and it is a tribute to some quirk of his personality that he can manage to play great golf while wearing clothes that make him look like a caricature of bad taste.
[The photo of John Daly is by Flickr user Keith Allison and is used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]
When I first saw this painting a few years ago at SMU's Meadows Museum, I thought it was some kind of spoof. Surely the sunglasses were an anachronism in a Baroque painting.
But, no, Jusepe de Ribera's Portrait of a Knight of Santiago is a legitimate 17th-century work. The Meadows website explains that the "large ebony spectacles are of a fashionable type sometimes worn by upper class Spaniards. Besides adding concentration to the sitter’s already imposing gaze, the spectacles offered Ribera an opportunity to capture the subtle interplay of shadow and reflection in the lenses as well as a glimpse into the sitter’s personality."
The history of sunglasses seems under-researched. This dubiously sourced article seems to be the Ur-text of most online histories, but even this seemingly more reliable one suggests that tinted lenses date only to 1752, a history contradicted by de Ribera's painting from more than a century before. But there seems to be a consensus that they only caught on in the early 20th century.
Why did it take so long? Were there manufacturing and cost barriers? Or did hats and veils provide the physical and psychological protection that now come from shades? If you know more, or can point me toward good sources, please leave a comment or send an email to vpostrel-at-deepglamour.net.
Writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, William Loeffler proclaims the end of the Metrosexual:
The man's man is back. And he's had enough of unisex salons, simpering emo music and the emasculating kryptonite of the Oprahsphere.
Or so say a spate of ads, books and websites that hail the emergence of the retrosexual, whose attitude and style hearken back to the strong, silent type of the '50s and early '60s.
The retrosexual keeps things simple. He does not own more hair and skin care products than his wife or girlfriend. He does not "accessorize."
Think Don Draper, the dapper, jut-jawed executive played by Jon Hamm in the AMC series "Mad Men." He may be a philanderer, but you won't find a pink shirt in his wardrobe. Like the dark hero characters of ex-spy Michael Westen in "Burn Notice" and U.S. Marshal Raylon Givens in "Justified," "Mad Men" presents alpha males who live unapologetically by their own code.
Loeffler's is the latest in a string of articles on the so-called Menaissance (see for instance this 2006 Boston Globe piece). What struck me, however, was the juxtaposition of Don Draper and Michael Westen (I've never seen Justified)--both exceedingly stylish figures. They may not own a lot of grooming products, but they do accessorize. Westen's sunglasses are, in fact, one of the show's signature props and have sparked much online discussion from viewers who want their own versions. (That'll be $400.)
The real contrast isn't between these guys and overgroomed Metrosexuals but between both groups, with their grown-up polish, and the beer-bellied American male in comfy shorts and untucked oversized shirt. On my recent trip to research glamour in Shanghai (more on that later), I talked with author and marketing consultant Paul French who, among many other interesting things, commented on why, with a few exceptions, American apparel lines haven't been terribly successful in Shanghai. U.S. companies are too attuned to the sloppy casualness of the American market, and Shanghainese like to look sharp. They want Banana Republic, he said, not The Gap--something that apparently escapes the parent company of both. (Instead of BR, there's a local knockoff called Urban Renewal.)
By way of illustration, French recounted what observed when two jet-lagged Americans came into the McDonald's where he and his 10-year-old son were having breakfast:
I noticed the Chinese were giggling at them. And then I looked at them. These guys were about my age. They’re in their 40s, right? And they had T-shirts, baseball caps, shorts, and then sort of sports shoes that looked like they had some tractor tires on the bottom of them. And I looked at them and then I looked my 10 year old who was not quite as casual as them.....If you put them on a bus and drove them around town, people would think they were retarded and going to the special place that they’re looked after for the day. I mean just isn’t it a shame? They never grew up mentality but they did physically.
No one would say that about either Michael Westen or Brad Pitt. What makes Retrosexuals seem manlier than Metrosexuals is their sprezzatura. They hide the artifice it takes to achieve their look. But the popularity of both models suggests that at least some American men want to escape the pressure to be sloppy.
In a minor victory for age-inappropriate hipsters everywhere, Seth Aaron Henderson took the title of reigning champion of Project Runway last night in a collection inspired by "1940s Russian-German military style." (Oh what I would have paid to see the look on Michael Kors' mother's face for that gem! You know he took hell for that one at seder in the Hamptons.) This year's finale theme was "trends that everyone else discovered a few years ago." Patent leather? Gasp! Mustard yellow and bright blue? Don't tell Mr. Jacobs. He'll never think of it.
Ah, to return to those halcyon days when Wendy Pepper was sending gowns down the runway to the dramatic strains of "A L'Infini," or to have but one glimpse of another ombre feathered creation by Christian Siriano. Drama! Music! Sizzle! At certain fabulous workplaces, fashionistas would scramble to the water cooler the morning after a Runway finale to dissect every last button on the final collections and defend their designers to the death. But Season 7 not only failed to inspire, but it may have achieved the unthinkable: to de-glam the notion of showing at Fashion Week. This season's collections were, to quote one of Padma Lakshmi's best lines of all time from reality television, "pedestrian at best." This is saying a lot after Season 6, where the unlikeable Irina Shabayeva proved that one really can escape the doldrums of bad taste with a rescue ladder made of pleather and fur, and Season 5, where the milk-toasty Leanne Marshall designed a collection so forgettable that I had to Bing it to remember the signature piece.
So how did Project Runway jump the sharkskin pump and lose its glamour? DG offers 3 reasons:
1. The move to Lifetime. Notwithstanding the great strides that "Television for Women (and Gay Men)" has made over the past few years, this used to be the network that considered re-runs of Supermarket Sweep and The Golden Girls to be its anchor programing. Watching Runway in high definition on Bravo gave the show an air of cool, current relevance, but Runway on Lifetime feels like wearing a Dior gown for a coffee date at Wal-Mart. I can't see a commercial break for Drop Dead Diva and then return to a program purporting to show me haute couture.
2. The heavy hand of the marketing department. Frankly, the Bluefly.com accessories wall, even when used thoughftfully under the watchful eye of Uncle Tim, is an eyesore. (Remember when Kara Saun got into a throw-down with the producers in Season 1 over those fantastic shoes that may have put her over-budget? Can you imagine telling Kara, "but look at those lovely metallic flats on the Bluefly.com accessories wall!") Models on the Runway was another misstep. Does Lifetime not watch the CW? An ANTM rip-off may have been timely a few years ago, but not when Tyra's girls are now just as likely to end up in (or under) the Rock of Love tourbus with Bret Michaels. But perhaps the lowest point of Season 7 was watching Vivienne Tam hawk an HP TouchSmart PC in somewhat broken English as part of the "fashion meets technology" challenge. Even the designers were visibly unethusiastic about such gross product placement.
3. Judging fatigue. Could Nina Garcia possibly be any more bored with the show? We used to live for Nina's caustic critique, but after career demotion and new motherhood, Nina seems to lack the energy to muster much more than a raised eyebrow for an unfinished hem. Inspired by Michael Kors, I live for an opportunity to describe an outfit as looking "like a dinner napkin just crumpled up" or "a paper brioche." Where were the zingers for this season that brought bitchy fun to the last 10 minutes of the show?
What could bring back the glamour to Season 8? Give us your thoughts in the comments.
Needing a new pair of glasses, I drove an hour to visit an eye wear store in Denver. I was told they had 4,000 “products” to choose from, with designs from all over the world. To help me narrow down the possibilities, I was meeting with Paige, the salesperson who had helped me choose my last pair of glasses. While working in a local shop, Paige had put me in a pair of glasses I would never have tried without her help. I knew she had done well because many people, including strangers, had subsequently commented on how much they liked my glasses.
I called a few hours early to let her know I was coming, and when I arrived she said she had been thinking about what eye wear she would like me to try ever since I had called. I sat in a chair while she walked around the store putting glasses on a tray, and she came back with about ten pairs to try. As soon as I tried some she would say “no,” and before long we were down to two choices that she felt looked great. Finding it hard to choose, we called another salesperson over, and that woman voted for the pair that she felt had more “edge.” So the choice became the Danish-designed Orgreen pair shown in the photograph.
I’ve described this satisfying shopping experience to illustrate why we go back repeatedly to work with good salespeople. Sadly, finding a salesperson with a good eye whose opinion you trust can be difficult. So when you locate such a salesperson, they become a valuable asset. In this case, when Paige changed where she worked, I followed her to her new location. Paige has helped several people I know choose their eye wear. Some friends told my wife and me about her, and I send people to her whenever they comment on my glasses or my wife’s.
All too often you find yourself dealing with salespeople who don’t seem to hear what you’re telling them—they seem to ignore or not understand what you’ve said about the look you are hoping to find, the situation you need it for it, and so on. Sometimes they don’t even know the store’s merchandise well enough to help you narrow down your choices, whereas a good salesperson whose opinion you trust can save you a lot of time, and save you grief in other ways.
Last fall my wife was headed to an event in London. After she had the rest of her outfit picked out, she went to a shoe store that had a bewildering array of choices. She knew the look she wanted, so she picked out seven pairs of shoes to try on. With both arms full of samples, she showed a young salesperson her choices. My wife explained that the event would be in a huge exhibition center, and that she might be walking and standing for most of a day. To my wife’s surprise the young woman started taking shoes away from her, explaining that she was taking away any shoes that she felt would be uncomfortable after a few hours. My wife was left with only two choices, one of which was the pair of Dansko Sally suede clogs pictured at right.
Though my wife loved them, she doubted they would remain comfortable for a full day. The salesperson assured her they would, and thankfully it turned out she was right.
A friend of ours was going to the same event and purchased a pair of shoes without asking about comfort. He decided to test his purchase by spending an hour on his feet in them, after which he pronounced them “posing” shoes, not “wearing” shoes. He had to go shopping again to buy shoes he could wear all day.
Finding a salesperson who will tell you when something you are trying on doesn’t work well on you is a good start. Finding one who tells you that something “looks great on you” when it fits terribly is a signal to shop elsewhere. We once had artist residencies at Montalvo in California, with second-story rooms. The villa grounds were often used for elaborate weddings. I got to know the wedding planner, and looking down on one of those wedding ceremonies I commented to her that the strangely layered dress that the mother-of-the-bride was wearing looked as if her slip were showing. The wedding planner’s comment was, “Someone lied to her.”
My wife and I moved from the Phoenix area to Fort Collins, Colorado about four years ago. A recent Gallup Poll study reported that Fort Collins and the neighboring city of Loveland have the lowest level of obesity in the country (16%). Boulder, Colorado was number two at 16.6%. The study reported that most people in these cities practiced good health habits.
Any American city of 100,000 or more will have some people who are obese and some who are underweight. But I find living in a city where obesity is relatively uncommon to be quite a different experience. During a recent trip to Phoenix and Tucson, I saw more obese people in four days than I would likely see
in six months in Fort Collins. (And Arizona cities are not among the most obese.) In a large book store in Tucson, almost
half the employees struck me as obese or nearly so. In contrast, I couldn’t ever remember seeing obese employees in retail stores in Fort
Collins. At a restaurant in Tucson I was stunned by the obesity of the patrons at one table. Compared to what I have become used to seeing, some of them seemed
grotesque. Yet there were diners at other tables who were just as
obese. I have never seen a similar situation in a Fort Collins
restaurant.
A recent study found that high school girls judge
their weight relative to their peer group, and I think adults do the same. We assume that the people around us provide a more realistic perspective on normal weight than do tall, thin models in magazines. So if you are overweight and hang out with other overweight people, you may feel that your weight is reasonably normal. But in a city where most people are relatively fit, this feeling is hard to sustain. If you are seriously overweight and shop in downtown Fort Collins or Boulder, you will look fat compared to most people around you.
This creates pressure to stay fit. Among our close friends, everyone does something to exercise, as well as putting some some effort into maintaining a healthy diet. Several of our friends work with personal trainers or take classes in Yoga, Pilates, or Tai Chi. All of them engage in some outdoor activities, from gardening and walking to running, bicycling, and cross-country skiing.
Does everyone in these cities work hard at fitness? Of course not. But a high percentage of them do regularly engage in physical activity. Knowing this makes it harder to make excuses for not exercising, especially when some your neighbors are amazingly fit. In my case a woman two houses down has climbed all 54 of Colorado's 14,000+ mountains. And a woman in her late sixties at the end of the block still runs marathons at 5000' elevations.
[Photo of two women on a Sunday ride in Boulder County by Let Ideas Compete. The photo of the group backpacking the Estes Park back country west of Loveland is by akeg. Both photos used under the Flickr Creative Common's license.]
Virginia’s recent post contrasting the differences between “cute” and “glamorous” made several interesting comparisons. Her distinction between “innocent, ingenue” and “worldly, sophisticated” reminded me of a lyrical poem by Richard Wilbur
in which an experience of innocent beauty created an ecstatic moment for him. His poem, Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning, begins:
I can't forget
How she stood at the top of that long marble stair
Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette
Went dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;
Nothing upon her face
But some impersonal loneliness,—not then a girl
But as it were a reverie of the place,
A called-for falling glide and whirl;
The poet witnesses a girl who, amazed by the Spanish steps in Rome, comes gliding and whirling down them, seemingly innocently unaware that she somehow completes the image of the place for the poet. Wilbur continues:
As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip
Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a moment above it,
Rides on over the lip—
Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.
To create the lovely photograph shown at the beginning of this post, the photographer Matilde dressed herself in the kind of fairy skirt that so many young girls have played in, and she danced in her bare feet. The photograph has a wonderful feeling of innocence, but it is a portrayal of innocence created by a grown woman.
If we imagine a glamorous Italian woman descending those same stairs wearing a high-fashion gown such as the one shown here by Valentino, we assume that while she was descending she would remain perfectly aware that she was presenting herself as a beautiful, sophisticated woman.
And her awareness of her image, and the value that she knows that Western culture places on such fashionable glamour, is part of what makes her appear “dangerous,” to use Virginia’s term. She seems fully aware of the worth of her beauty and perfectly willing to use the status offered by her appearance and wealth to her full advantage.
The photograph of this gown (found on a Chinese economic site) is an illusion in that it was taken during a runway show, and the model may be wearing a gown that she herself could not afford to own. So this photograph is a portrayal of glamour designed to convince women who can afford Valentino’s
gowns to purchase them. Nonetheless, I imagine this model feels glamorous while wearing this gown and walking the runway.
To see this model wear this gown and descend the Spanish steps would provide an impression as unforgettable as a girl innocently dancing down them. But where the girl presented an image of innocence, the model would present an image of glamorous worldliness.
[The photograph “As A Fairy” is copyrighted by Flickr user ♥ { ๓คtเl๔є, and is used by permission.]
There's a new Barbie on the scene, and the rest of the dolls on the shelf aren't quite sure what to make of her. She's got long blond hair and bright blue eyes, just as she always has, and a smooth, tanned, curvaceous body. And just like most Barbies you've known over the years, she loves any color as long as it's pink. But there's something different about this new doll. When you meet her, you might notice there's a special little necklace hanging just over her sternum, or as she turns to leave, that there's a flat panel screen between her scapulae. Meet Video Girl Barbie, presented to the world this week at the International Toy Fair, a kind of Flip camera with a face that Mattel promises will let you look into the world of Barbie.
There's something interesting about this notion of looking into Barbie, or looking through her. Barbie has always been a lens into a different world for girls, a glamorous teenaged or adult world full of fashion, parties, careers, and dream houses. This was, after all, the intention behind the doll as it was invented by Ruth Handler — to give girls a way to act out their fantasies and fears through imaginative play. This premise of projection was also the reason for the most controversial feature of Barbie's physicality — her breasts — because Handler felt a mature physique was essential to allowing girls to envision their future selves. The Barbie business model, with its endless parade of kits containing outfits and accessories, serves as stimulus for these projective fantasies, providing ample conduits to aspirational worlds.
It seems to me that girls have never had trouble looking into Barbie's world. Because the nature of Barbie is such that at any point in time, Barbie's world is at least partially (often mostly) in a girl's head, that world is personal and accessible. Barbie is a sketch, just defined enough to inspire a story. She's an outline to be inhabited, a room to decorate with your own desires. The doll and her things provide the form and the context; you provide motivation and narrative. Talking to friends who played with Barbies as children, the imagined scenes vary wildly, even with the same props. Some girls staged fashion shows in the Dream House while others were hosting dinner parties. Some were getting dolled up for the prom while others were making out with Ken behind the bleachers. Barbie's stories are as varied as our own because her stories are our stories. Maybe not the ones we lived, but the slightly more glamorous or dangerous ones we once wished to live. Girls see through Barbie into these fantasy worlds, and they do it effortlessly.
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To think that such a view could enhance the fantasy of Barbie is to assume that Barbie's world is the molded plastic one Mattel produces in its factories, and not the ethereal one in the female consciousness. The most interesting things a girl sees in Barbie are not things she sees with her eyes, but with her mind.
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Making the leap to Video Girl Barbie, a doll you look through, seems logical but oddly literal, an Amelia Bedelia kind of goof. What can you see in looking through Barbie like a periscope that you can't see with your own eyes? To think that such a view could enhance the fantasy of Barbie is to assume that Barbie's world is the molded plastic one Mattel produces in its factories, and not the ethereal one in the female consciousness. The most interesting things a girl sees in Barbie are not things she sees with her eyes, but with her mind.
Given that, this seems less a doll than a tech toy, and I imagine it will have big appeal to girls on this level. A video camera is a video camera, and it's fun regardless of the housing, though girls today are probably savvy enough that they don't need technology to be softened up with fashion in a bionic Barbie.
But the bionic nature of this doll — a strange mashup of hard tech and feminine physicality — does raise a different set of interesting questions. As we move closer to an era of post-human body modification, what kinds of new body types will emerge as aspirational? If in the past five decades Barbie has represented a standard of beauty that can be blamed with a rise in body modifications ranging from breast implants to blond highlights to anorexia to tanning, how will she evolve as a standard in a world where the available modifications are increasingly technological? Will Barbie offer a new viewpoint on the form and function of the female body as the lines between man and machine are increasingly blurred?
If these sound like imaginary inquiries better left to the world of futuristic sci-fi films, think again. Already, the field of wearable technologies is electrifying fashion, exploring ways our clothes can behave or react like smarter, more beautiful skins. Designer Hussein Chalayan is known for his avant garde work with wearables, exploring how robotic elements can create extraordinary displays of movement and light. Joanna Berzowska of XS Labs is another designer working in this space, fusing fiber and wire to create striking interactive garment-sculptures. Often these designs suggest new functions our bodies might take on in the future, like increased sensory capabilities or protective response mechanisms. The subtle displays of Ying Gao's Walking City dresses, for example, function like hypersensitive second skins, unfurling and rustling in reaction to the proximity of others. Powering many of these innovative designs is the LilyPad Arduino, a washable microcontroller that can be fully integrated into clothing, developed by Leah Buechley at MIT's Media Lab.
These are technologies worn on the body, without requiring any intrusion or permanent modification. But those innovations are coming too. Discussions of augmented-reality contact lenses are in the offing, and just this week, the New York Times reported on the development of piezoelectric body implants that would allow us to convert our bodily movements into energy that can be used to power our electronics. Already we see people who seem chained to their iPods or mobile devices — imagine if one day we actually plugged them into our skin to recharge them. Or stopped by the Apple Genius Bar for a surgical battery change?
If these potential innovations sound eerie, think about how breast implants sounded the first time you heard of them. Body modification is always unsettling, sometimes even long after it has become widespread. But all of these designs, whether worn on the body or inserted within it, are pioneering new possibilities in the shape and performance of the human physique. As we gain more power to control how our bodies look and what they do, which of these designed bodies will move towards the mainstream? Which will become new aspirational models? Will techno-bodies ever be sexy?
I don't propose that Video Girl Barbie is in any way an attempt on the part of Mattel to forge a new post-human female ideal. (The violence of the mashup — Barbie's viscera removed and replaced with a TV — would make that a vision more appropriate for R-rated horror films than Toys 'R Us.) But the juxtaposition has made me wonder what the Barbie of 2029 looks like. Will Barbie at 70 be a stunning cyborg? If we saw her today, would we think she's beautiful? Or, in an ironic twist, will Barbie's plastic figure seem nostalgically natural in comparison with our own bodies of the future?
This full page image appears next to an ad for Louis Vuitton shoes which is titled, “The Craftsman with his Brush.” A better title might be, “A model in a photographer’s studio pretends to be a craftsman with his brush.”
Part of the ad text reads, “But other qualities remain unseen: the craftsman’s skill and the simple elegance of his gestures, repeated so often and precisely. Not forgetting the final touch: a coat of dark paint to protect the sole and enhance the beauty of every step.”
If we take this photo at face value, it’s a difficult job to get. You have to be stunningly handsome, have great hair, and never ever get the dark paint on your hands. The job is made harder by the lighting conditions, a single light source (reflected in the glass jars) that makes you look artistic and soulful, but makes seeing what you are doing difficult. Apparently you’re only allowed to wear dark clothes, to go with the black walls. At least they’ve given you a nicely stained work table, though you’re never allowed to get paint on that either.
In some senses this glamorous image is harmless, as long as we recognize that it is an fabricated illusion designed to make us feel beautiful with every step, provided we wear Louis Vuitton shoes. But as Elizabeth Wilson pointed out in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, the fashion industry has a long history of exploiting workers, and an image such as this does not convince me that applying paint to the soles of shoes has now become a glamorous job. I appreciate craftsmanship, but the craftsmanship displayed here is a photographer’s, not a shoemaker’s.
The untimely death of British fashion design Alexander McQueen has been covered in a number of articles already (the best is the Telegraph obituary). Most describe him as an enfant terrible and as the "bad boy of British fashion," focusing on the goth edge for which he was famous.
Those that take a closer look at McQueen's life and career portray him as something rare - a creative visionary who also possessed superb technical skills. He will be remembered as a risk-taking designer with a penchant for skulls, but also as a technically excellent tailor. Despite his talent for couture, McQueen's take on fashion lacked any snobbery (his McQ collection sold at Target in he spring of 2009) and he considered individualized style more important than brand.
McQueen's startling creativity is on full display in this brief clip from his Fall 2006 show at Paris Fashion Week, in which a hologram of Kate Moss floats above his runway:
Alexander McQueen's edgy aesthetic, technical brilliance, and dramatic vision will certainly be missed.
In 2008 Giorgio Armani sponsored the Met’s annual Costume Institute gala and the related exhibit, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.” It was an odd pairing. At the press preview, Mr. Armani, who built his career on understated elegance, marveled at the over-the-top concoctions of designers like Thierry Mugler, Gareth Pugh, and Alexander McQueen and acknowledged the irony of his own role. “The curators must have worked very hard to find something in my past that belongs in this exhibit,” he said. It was clear, however, that for all his dedication to “a fashion that is worn,” he was enjoying the exuberant creativity behind all those impractically superheroic clothes.
And now we have Lady Gaga wearing Armani haute couture to the Grammys. Strange, but perhaps not as strange as it immediately appears. Aside from recycledpressreleases, there hasn’t been much commentary on how music’s most flamboyant performer teamed up with a designer known for his restraint. But I can’t help thinking that Armani wanted his own superhero moment.
Left: Gareth Pugh, spring/summer 2007 Photograph courtesy of firstVIEW. Right: Alexander McQueen, fall/winter 2007-2008 Photograph courtesy of Chris Moore. Both courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute. Lady Gaga photo from Giorgio Armani press materials.
For the best look at Lady Gaga’s Grammy costumes, check out this New York magazine slideshow.
See a slideshow of Armani Privé's Spring 2010 collection, inspired by the moon, here.
The awards season provides various fashion spectacles, and the Grammys are usually the most outrageously flamboyant. This is especially true now that music videos and elaborately costumed stage acts have become part of the popular music business. Artists coming to the Grammys have to choose who to come as—their onstage persona, or a person glamorously dressed to attend a fancy awards ceremony.
Lady Gaga has become so known for outrageous costumes that she would risk disappointing her fans by attending in more traditional attire. Her costumes are so singularly outré that it would difficult for others to wear similar clothes without seeming to imitate her. Her Grammy costumes were on most of the worst-dressed lists that I saw on the internet, but viewing her outfits as clothing rather than as costumes misses the point. She costumes herself onstage and offstage as “Lady Gaga.” Her costumes remind me of the commedia dell’arte tradition, in which characters like Columbina wear masks and heavy makeup, as seen in the carnival photos at left and below. Like Gaga, the Columbina figure was typically portrayed as bold, experienced, and frankly erotic.
Country-western women, on the other hand, are free to dress like glamorous movie stars. Their performance costumes range from jeans to beautiful evening gowns, and in their videos they are much less prone to place themselves in surreal environments calling for surreal costumes. Taylor Swift attended in a lovely gown that would have been appropriate for the Oscar red carpet.
Rock and rap stars have an interesting problem. With some notable exceptions, their performance costumes tend to emphasize anything but fashionable haute couture clothing. They usually perform in some variation of urban street clothing, sometimes made over into something flashy for the stage. So for them to “dress-up” in a way that suggests a Vogue or GQ sense of style might seem to distance them from their fan base.
Some performers solve this problem by not trying to “dress-up” at all. Others manage to put together outfits that retain a sense of “street,” but still look stylish. Unfortunately, in other cases their efforts to “dress-up” end up making them look like night clubbers, pimps, hookers, drug dealers, or people on their way to a prom in a horrible dress or tux. Others, such as Rihanna, have a personal interest in high fashion, and use awards ceremonies as a reason to wear their finest. All of the women mentioned can be seen in the following video:
[Photo of the bird couple by Nahlinse. Photo of the masked woman by Alaskan Dude. Both used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]
Shown at the Paris Fashion week last Thursday, the Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2010 Menswear Collection immediately caught my eye. Not because I am particularly fond of Vuitton (like too many other fashion houses, it has fallen prey to the Plague of Excessive Logos), but rather because of the references to Vienna.
Dominated by narrow-waisted suits, crisp riding boots and structured bags, the collection is described as having been inspired by Vienna's Age of Splendor, and by the Vienna of today. As Vienna has been my home on and off for the past several years, I could not help but ruminate on my own impressions of the city's style, and on the implications of its new status as Fashion Muse.
Over the course of my life in Vienna, I have continuously struggled with how I relate to it. On some level, it has become deeply familiar and even quite mundane, while on another level it has remained a romantic hallucination. In many ways, Vienna is a continental European city like many others – rich in heritage but dynamic in contemporary culture. The streets are full of young trendy people, the museums offer impressive lineups of cutting-edge international artists, the UN Headquarters looms large, and no matter where you are, you can be certain that a Starbucks or an H&M is not terribly far off. And yet, Vienna is not quite of this time. The spirit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire remains present, its rigid, explosive splendor running through the city like a rogue undercurrent.
Experiencing Vienna in this manner is like having persistent double vision, or perhaps even triple vision – whereby reality, history and historical fiction co-exist and struggle for domination over the cultural landscape.
When I ask myself why this is so, one obvious thing that comes to mind is the architecture. Unlike that of other German-speaking cities, Vienna's architecture has largely remained intact after the Second World War. Enormous neoclassical structures erected for the sole purpose of glorifying the Empire continue to surround the city center along the Ringstraße. The towering white marble, the black wrought iron, the vast stretches of cobblestone, and the tall chestnut trees, create a backdrop that insists upon itself and undermines the passage of time. In a sense, it is a romantic backdrop. But the brand of romance is the kind that makes one feel overpowered and somewhat uneasy. The architecture - both in its grandiosity and in the sheer fact of its continuity - sets a mood over the central district that even an army of neon Starbucks and H&M signs cannot overpower.
Granted, architecture can be seen as a passive influence. But there are other areas where Vienna's anachronistic atmosphere is maintained by choice. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of the Viennese Cafe. One can walk into any number of Viennese cafes that look as if they have remained basically unchanged since the 1920s: gilded interiors, plush red upholstery, starched white tablecloths, waiters in tuxedos, sugar cubes in tiny silver bowls, newspapers attached to wooden holders... the head spins from the elegance, and extravagance of it. And the elaborate coffee nomenclature puts other countries' terminologies to shame. (When in doubt, just order a Melange - and stay away from what the Viennese call a Cappuccino unless you want your coffee made with pure cream instead of frothed milk.)
It is not just the look of such a cafe that functions like a time machine, but the atmosphere as well. In a Viennese cafe, you will be called by your title. You will not encounter crammed floor space, even if it means that the cafe is serving only a quarter of the patrons that it could be serving. And you will never be rushed to free up your table, even if you have been nursing the same cup of coffee for hours while a crowd of hopefuls queues outside. And no, such places are not gimmicky tourist traps; they are perfectly normal cafes where the Viennese themselves go to relax.
And then of course, there are the head-turning persons you see in Vienna, the likes of whom I have not encountered elsewhere: from the ladies in floor-length fur coats and sculptural hats who look as if they've walked out of a silent film, to the serious men with heavy, intense gazes and thick streaks of gray in their hair regardless of their age, to the people wearing traditional national costumes as formalwear on a night out. True, the “retro” look has been internationally popular for over a decade, but I feel that in Vienna the look isn't “retro” at all, as it is done entirely without irony. The mixing of the old with the new simply reflects the city's nonlinear sense of time and its playful attitude towards contemporary realities.
An interesting trend I have noted, is how many fashion ateliers in Vienna are simultaneously involved in costume design for the theater. Of all the arts, theater probably occupies the most important position in Vienna, and has enormous cultural influence. Perhaps this explains why even the most contemporary boutiques seem to be at least partly inspired by dramatic turn of the 20th Century style: the designers who make the clothes for the streets are the same ones who create the costumes for the local stage. It would also explain why the past that mingles with Vienna's present seems to be not so much a historically accurate past, as a fantastical one: a romantic notion that the city embraces and projects back onto itself.
Getting back to the Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2010 Menswear Collection, I think that in large part it succeeds in portraying all of these things. The clothing is architectural, theatrical, and communicative, and there is a conceptual depth to it that exceeds what I have come to expect from Vuitton. The garments are rigidly tailored while suggesting fluidity, tightly closed while expressing a potential for openness. They evoke Sigmund Freud's writings on hysteria, Egon Schiele's images of tortured lanky youths, Gustaf Klimt's gilded motifs, and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis while mixing traditional and contemporary materials and employing deconstructive techniques.
The LV collection is rather impressive really. But... Well, quite frankly, it brings to mind what has been available in Vienna for as long as I have lived there. If you want Viennese splendor that embodies all the anachronistic complexity the city has to offer, visit Vienna itself and walk through some of the neighborhoods that are lined with independent boutiques carrying Austrian designers, including the areas around Neubaugasse and Kettenbrückengasse. Viennese style is at its best in its natural habitat.
[LV runway images via Louis Vuitton/ Antoine de Parceval; all other images belong to the author]
I drove a friend to a podiatrist appointment, and one of the magazines in the waiting room was this December 2006 issue of Traveler. I was struck by the strange photograph on the cover. Though it is daylight, the model is wearing a brightly colored evening gown, and is posing on the steps of the grounds of this estate in bare feet.
Though an image showing a bare foot seemed fitting for the office of a foot doctor, I felt that there must be a more romantic advertising purpose involved.
The cover mentions fairy-tale Europe, so perhaps the image is supposed to make the viewer think of Cinderella. If so, the story has been distorted because the model’s foot looks fairly large. Feeling that the model’s proportions seemed slightly odd, I cut the page apart to see if the image had been split apart just slightly to make more room for the banner. To my eye, the lines of the skirt and her bodily proportions looked more natural when I moved the bottom portion up about the height of a step, so I suspect the cover image was manipulated a little in Photoshop. (Check out Lady Gaga’s shoulder on this cover photo to see an obvious and bizarre Photoshop manipulation.)
Whether the image was manipulated or not, I don’t get it. If women find this image appealing, I can’t quite understand why. As a man I can’t image going around in a tuxedo in bare feet, not even as a fantasy. Ladies, is there something about this image that appeals to some deep inner sense of princess? I’m both baffled and curious.
In trying to achieving an elegant effect suitable to a situation, there are many ways to go wrong. At one end there are possibilities that suggest we made insufficient effort. These can range from a sense that we made no effort (wearing rumpled “around the house” clothes) to being underdressed or out-of-style relative to the occasion and everyone else.
There are also many ways to “try too hard” or show questionable taste: ranging from overdone glitz to being decades out of style. Ever since Liberace took glitz over the top in Las Vegas, some entertainers have confused glitz with glamour. This photo of Elvis Presley in his gold lamé tux exemplifies how show-biz costumes can become outrageously glitzy. Such costumes inevitably crossover into kitsch when wore offstage (whatever you think of them onstage).
One of the widely acknowledged exemplars of elegance was the appropriately named Grace Kelly, show in the above photograph at left. You can find several articles on the web discussing how to look or dress like her, and the emphasis is often on a certain simplicity in clothing design, jewelry, color choices, and use of makeup.
On the other hand, “elegance” implies more than mere simplicity. Dictionary definitions of “elegance” often include the word “pleasingly.” For example: “pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner,” or, relative to solving a problem, “pleasingly ingenious and simple.” As Albert Einstein said about science, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
This is one of the great quandaries of style in many fields, including fashion, art, and writing. If you want your work to be elegant, you have to do enough to create a pleasing effect; otherwise you will have failed to achieve your aim. In fashion, true elegance can be stunning in effect. Thus effects that are dowdy, shoddy, or just plain dull fail to qualify.
On the other hand, once you have done enough to achieve an elegant effect, adding elements that seem extraneous can weaken the sense of artful simplicity.
Jessica Biel, a beautiful woman, wore the Prada dress shown at left to the 2009 Oscars. The bow on the front was widely criticized as looking sloppy and extraneous, and some critics were surprised that the normally elegant Prada seemed to have miscalculated in this instance. Yet the outfit cannot be faulted as glitzy became the color scheme and jewelry are so classic and restrained.
For those of us who feel the bow looks “added on,” rather than ingeniously integrated, it is a single design flaw, but nonetheless regrettable in that we feel that we might have admired the dress without the bow. In contrast the addition of rhinestones to Elvis’s gold lamé tuxedo is of little consequence. The gold lamé has already pushed the concept of a formal tux so far into glitz-ville that some extra sparkle just turns it into extreme kitsch—gold lamé made superbly lame.
[Editor’s Note: With this post, DG intern Crystal Hubbard, an aspiring television writer and organizer of the L.A. chapter of Liberty on the Rocks, joins our writing crew.]
“A
woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by
her own image…” wrote art critic
John Berger in his text on visual culture, Ways of Seeing. Berger’s
perception hinges on the word “must,” implying that there is something
inescapable about the female vigilance to appearance; something within her psyche
that compels a woman to preen and then guard the finished product.
But
it is one thing for a woman to watch herself at trivial and mundane events
(though she will) and a completely different matter when she has committed herself to
public service. Suddenly, a decision to wear (or not wear) X-item becomes a
clue as to how she will vote, how she will govern, how she will wield power.
When Senator Blanche
Lincoln (D-Ark.) announced she would support the Senate’s motion to keep health
care reform legislation alive, her historic decision—Lincoln’s was the last,
and necessary, vote to further debate—was marked not with an accompanying
dossier of accomplishments, but by what she was wearing. A relative
unknown, Licoln chose to make her biggest senatorial moment into something almost not worth mentioning. “Her
attire was school-principal prim—blue suit with knee-length skirt,
orange silk scarf tied tightly at the neck,” wrote the WaPo's Dana Millbank. A meekly feminine showing, at best.
One has to
wonder why she chose something so uninspired. A more memorable ensemble would
have communicated that Lincoln realized she had climbed to the pinnacle of
power, and had seized the national spotlight with an outfit worthy of the
moment.
"My
decision to vote on the motion to proceed is not my last, nor only, chance to
have an impact on health-care reform," Lincoln said, having outlasted all the other pork-barrel beggars, and as Millbank
noted, “She took a
streetcar named Opportunism, transferred to one called Wavering and made off
with concessions…”
If there is
further motive—Lincoln is sure to remind her party, in the coming weeks of
debate and deal making, of her solidifying vote—her propriety now becomes
suspect. Following Berger’s observation to its logical conclusion, this may
turn out to be only a penultimate moment for the senator from Arkansas, who gave
a major piece of legislation a much-needed second wind, and may show up in
something significantly more eye-catching the next time Harry Reid is found
holding his breath.
In his same
essay, Berger also said, “men act, and women appear.” Which helps
explain why fashion plays a less important role in the career of a male
politico. Men are physically imposing without having to adorn themselves, and
powerful just by being. If a man fails
in the fashion—or
appearance—department, we do not automatically question his judgment or
ability to govern. We merely chastise him for not being mindful of the moment.
During a 2005 visit to Auschwitz to commemorate the liberation of Jewish
prisoners, then-Vice President Dick Cheney sported an ill-advised parka, that,
as Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan wrote, made him look “like an awkward
child amid the well-dressed adults.” Former interim
UN Ambassador John Bolton also
received the Givhan treatment during his hastily made-up appearance before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the days leading up to his failed
(permanent) appointment as Ambassador.
…when he settled in before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee this week to answer questions about his record, his
philosophy and his intentions at the U.N., he looked as though he did not even
have enough respect for the proceedings to bother combing his hair -- or, for
that matter, straightening his tie, or wearing a shirt that did not put his
neck in a chokehold. Bolton was one wrinkled suit away from being an insolent
mess.
For men, we playfully mock and move on;
for women, we analyze and critique ad nauseum. It’s one thing for Dick Cheney to look as though he
should be clearing the driveway at Number One Observatory Circle; it’s another
to say that since a woman looks like she could be the offspring of Tammy Faye Bakker we
should question her political acumen. When the contentious results of the 2000 presidential election put Katherine Harris in charge, fair or not, the nation took one collective look and said, “Uh oh.”
We react this way because we count
on women to “continually watch” themselves. And if our elected women aren't watching, if they too are schlepping around their closets like the worst of the boys, then they are—whether they know it or not—signaling that they are an aberration, out of touch with what it means to be a woman, and negligent of one of their most sacred weapons: themselves.
While shopping in Santa Fe, my wife and I discovered a new line of activewear, nau (based in Portland, Oregon), that has made chic urban design one of their main concerns. Their “Urbane Jacket” for women is shown at left. The luxurious-feeling fabric is waterproof/windproof/breathable recycled polyester. The fabrics in every garment that I examined were remarkable, and the construction of the garments was meticulous. High-tech materials and careful construction can make activewear expensive. Patagonia, for example, is known for styling, quality, and being costly (some of our friends call it “Patagucci”).
Nau emphasizes creating garments that will look fashionable in a sophisticated urban market, and still function superbly as activewear. This concern has been important in some urban European markets where many commuters bicycle, and under “who inspires us” nau lists Copenhagen Cycle Chic (as well as Dior, YSL, Balenciaga, Gerhard Richter, and numerous other designers). The company’s web statements list Patagonia and Prada as the kind of company they compete with, and nau’s design sense moves activewear toward a forward sense of fashion that we are more used to seeing from Italian and Japanese designers.
The “Riding Jacket” shown at right is described as “a contemporary update to the traditional blazer.” The 100% recycled polyester fabric is 4-way stretch. Their designs tend to be
cut for fit, slender bodies (such as bicyclists often
have), and many feature sleeves that are slightly long to help cover
wrists during activities such as bicycling.
One of the design principles of the company seems to be to avoid the visible display of their company name on their garments. We have come to expect “look-at-what-brand-I’m-wearing” logos on activewear and ready-to-wear clothing. Yet it is obviously difficult for tags and logos to serve a valid design purpose, and they are seldom found on couture garments. Nau not only avoids frou-frou fabric ornamentation, but also avoids labels of any kind on the outside of their garments—doing so would compromise their minimalist aesthetic. Some other high-end outerwear companies also seem to be moving in a less flashy direction, as concern grows for creating fashionable products suitable for urban wear.
Yesterday I saw a middle-aged man riding an old bicycle along the edge of a snow-plowed road. The sun was setting, and the temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit. He was riding into the wind, so the windchill was subzero. He was dressed warmly in inexpensive clothing, and was likely riding a bicycle out of necessity. He was on a bus route, but perhaps he couldn’t afford a bus ticket.
I suspect that he represented the ultimate in low-impact commuting, given that his bicycle and clothing were all old and well-used, and perhaps even purchased second-hand. Seeing him reminded me that high-end outerwear is a luxury that most people cannot afford. A single jacket from a top manufacturer could easily cost more than his bicycle, plus everything that he was wearing.
If we can afford them, the high-tech materials in the latest activewear can allow us to be relatively comfortable in extreme conditions of cold, heat, moisture, and wind with less weight and more freedom of movement than was possible with some older materials. On the other hand, for urban wear it is still possible to stay luxuriously warm with fur coats made from the hides and pelts of buffalo, coyotes, beavers, foxes, rabbits, minks, and other animals. The fur option reminds us that there is an environmental cost to the creation of any kind of clothing. Wool can be removed without sacrificing the animal, but raising sheep has an environmental impact, as does raising cotton or manufacturing synthetic fibers.
I visited the websites of a several high-end outerwear companies (companies whose products I wear). As I expected, most of them had pages devoted to topics such as eco-consciousness, social responsibility, sustainability, recycling, and ethics. Such awareness is laudable, and perhaps necessary in an industry in which many of the customers are environmentally concerned. And it is no easy task to convince us that wearing a waterproof, breathable membrane like expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (Gore-tex) is ecologically sound. This web page at Gore-tex uses of a series of images that imply that Gore-tex gives us some of the protective qualities of animal fur without needing to sacrifice the animals.
Thinking about nau’s use of recycled materials, it is a sign of our times that many consumers consider a garment of recycled plastic to be more chic than a fur coat. Yet given that some animals like rabbits, cattle, and bison are being raised for pelts, hides, and meat, I’m not qualified to say whether one of my leather jackets or one of my synthetic-fiber jackets has had a higher environmental cost (setting aside the contentious issue of killing animals). It is difficult to even imagine all the steps involved in creating such jackets (whether starting from raising animals or pumping oil), and finally shipping them to a retail store.
Being eco-conscious leads to complex questions without easy answers. Hopefully caring is at least better than not caring, and awareness allows us to at least question whether the companies we do business with seem to care about such things as sustainability. Of course, in our current cultural climate, companies are likely to say that they do, whether it’s true or not.
I found myself agreeing completely with the first sentence of Kit Pollard’s Thanksgiving post: “One of the peculiar side effects of blogging is looking for your blogging subject in absolutely everything around you.” In addition to that feeling, as a result of reading DeepGlamour I have found myself interested in learning more about certain subjects, one of which has been the history of fashion.
The dress shown in the illustration was advertised in a Parisian paper in 1906. As Barbara Tuchman vividly describes in The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
, the Belle Époque, the era just before World War I, was a period of extravagant luxury for European upper classes. So much so that wealthy, aristocratic women spent much of their day changing from one fashionable outfit to another.
When Étienne Balsan invited a young Coco Chanel to come to Royallieu, the chateau where he bred horses, she agreed and became his second mistress. She was ill-suited to the lifestyle of a kept woman, so she spent most of her days at the stables and became known for her ability to work with difficult horses. She amused Balsan and his pals because she was young, and could jump astride the back of a two-year-old stallion and gallop off.
Given this athleticism, you can imagine Chanel was dissatisfied with much of what women were expected to wear. Having been abandoned by her father as a child and raised in an orphanage, Chanel was fiercely determined to eventually be financially independent. Since she had been making her own clothes since she was a teenager, fashion seemed a possible avenue (despite the fact that the field was then dominated by men). Though she thought some women looked fine in Belle Époque fashions, she didn’t feel they suited her personally. Seeing that some men’s fashions offered more freedom of movement, some of her most successful designs were reinterpretations of male clothing, made convenient and stylish for women to wear. As Karbo relates, Chanel legend has it that she borrowed a pullover from her next lover, Boy Capel, while walking at the beach. Finding it inconvenient to put on, she took out a pair of scissors and cut the pullover up the front. And thus the basic concept of the cardigan was born.
Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in Business and in Life
is the self-descriptive title of a best-selling book by Leo Babauta. It is one of a growing number of books which offer advice for coping with the seemingly unending information, tasks, and choices offered by modern society. Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
deals with the paralyzing effect that having too many consumer choices can have. For example, now that Apple’s App Store has more than 100,000 apps, there are increasing numbers of blogs devoted to how to possibly choose among them, as well as asking questions like how many apps do you actually need or use?
In this light I found it interesting that some current guidebooks on style in fashion emphasize the importance of periodically paring down your closet. In her The Little Black Book of Style
Nina Garcia writes, “Be an editor. Your closet should only contain amazing pieces—it is much easier to be inspired when you see five remarkable pieces then when you see twenty-five pieces and twenty of them are unremarkable. Pick out those key pieces and get rid of the rest.”
She advises being “ruthless when you edit,” and to keep only items that look good on you now, and make you feel good about yourself. She advises not to hang on to any item because of sentimental reasons, initial cost, or the hope that someday it will fit again. Esquire’s Handbook of Style offers similar advice for men about paring down their closet to items that look good on them now.
Both of these guidebooks also advise shopping for items that emphasize quality fabrics, careful construction, and timeless style over trendiness and bargain prices. And because they believe that good fit is crucial to appearance, they also recommend finding and using a good tailor.
On the fashion-design reality show Project Runway, the models always come in to be fitted, and this is a crucial part of the process. During the judging the way that the garment fits the model is a key factor. With the great variety of sizes available in stores, there is a good chance that you can find items that fit reasonably well, but a good tailor might make them fit exceptionally well.
Which brings us back to purchasing items that use quality fabrics and good construction. The tailor that I now use told me that people sometimes come to her with an item they have picked up as a bargain, and hope that she can tailor it to fit so that it looks great on them. They are surprised when in some cases she has to explain that there is a limit to what she can do if the material is of poor quality or the garment was poorly constructed.
After encountering so much advice on paring down, I decided to go through my closet, and I tossed out clothes that were worn out, no longer fit, were out of style, or that I hadn’t worn in years. Now I am surprised how much more inspiring it is to look through a selection of shirts when I like them all than it was when my closet contained lots of shirts that I was never going to wear again. The same with shoes, pants, jeans, and so on. I also noticed that many of the shirts that I threw out were ones I had purchased on sale and then had worn only a few times. Ouch. They weren’t such bargains after all.
In the November 2009 issue of Harper's Bazaar, Tina Fey trades in Liz Lemon's schlumpy cardigans for several seriously gorgeous designer cocktail dresses. They say that the clothes make the man, but in this case, I wonder.
On the subscriber cover (at left), in white Yves Saint Laurent, Fey looks pretty. But she also looks awkward, like a jockish girl all dressed up for a high school dance. Like she can't wait for the shoot to end so she can wash her face and get back into her baggy jeans. It just doesn't feel like Tina Fey. But it's a fashion magazine, so she's in a dress.
Inside, Fey admits that she's not really much for dressing up and that Liz Lemon, the character she based on her early years as a writer in NYC, "has little to no style." She also admits that Lemon's character could use a little more confidence.
This Bazaar cover just looks all wrong to me. But what I wonder is this: who's responsible for that? Should Bazaar have dialed down the glam factor, dressing Fey in something more comfortable and familiar? Or is Fey selling herself short by not totally owning that dress?
[Harper's Bazaar cover image by Alexi Lubomirski.]
The striking garment shown at left was created by deconstructing a rain mackintosh, recutting the material, and then recombining the resulting pieces with extraordinary imagination. It is typical of the work produced by a London-based company called Junky Styling. The company’s name is an ironic reference to their use of second-hand clothing as their raw material. The transformed final garments are stylish, well-constructed, and finished in great detail. Vogue called their clothing “high fashion street couture.”
As teenagers Annika Sanders and Kerry Seager began taking men’s suits (bought from second hand shops) and turning them
into experimental garments to wear to clubs. “We began because we wanted to dress differently. Initially, it was all
about unique design, and we were able to achieve this through cutting
up clothes that were second hand.” While traveling they noticed that textile recycling was already happening in cities like San Francisco and Tokyo, and their own designs drew lots of compliments. Their London friends began to commission outfits, and this led to a market stall in Kensington Market. In 1997 they launched Junky Styling, and their clothing is now stocked in shops in cities like London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
I learned of their work through the new book Junky Styling: Wardrobe Surgery. The ethos of their company is “timeless, deconstructed, re-cut, and completely transformed clothing,” and they are so committed to recycling textiles that their book contains a how-to section with basic instructions for some of their most popular designs. Intrigued, I asked them a couple of questions.
Deep Glamour: Your use of men's suits and shirts as primary sources for material is interesting. Did you do this because of the quality and quantity of the material in these items, or is there a certain provocativeness in reworking these normally staid items? Perhaps both?
Kerry Seager: Yes both! The combination of using such fine, quintessentially British fabrics that have truly stood the test of time and then transforming them into very apparent recycled styles really works for us. 'City' items that evoke a certain thought process in people tend to work really well when redesigned as there is that instant familiarity, that then provokes the next question as "Is that..." or "How did..." which is why our customers are addicted not only to the recycling aspect of our label, but the conversations they have with strangers when wearing Junky.
(The crossover top shown at right was one of their first designs, and perfectly illustrates both the sense of familiarity with the suit elements and the surprise at what was done with them.)
DG: You mention that it might have been helpful to have had more tailoring experience in starting your business. Do you think that not having conventional training in tailoring might have left you more open to thinking about design in unconventional ways?
KS: Certainly our lack of training enabled us to produce the freestyle designs that we do, as there is no doubt of the freedom that a sewing machine and cloth (with no constraints) can provide you with! I think though that training is an integral part of progression, as the skills enable you to realize your vision quicker — vision of course can't be taught, but French seams can.
Over the years the Junky crew has grown larger. The zipper elements
in the dress at right were created by Eric Holah. Their website lists
some locations where you might see some of their work.
As the images in their book and on their website
illustrate, garments based on the same design can look remarkably
different when produced from different second-hand material. These are
definitely one-of-a-kind garments, and many are made to fit for
individual clients. (The process is outlined here.)
Junky Styling designs garments for both men and women. In addition to shots of models wearing their clothes, their book contains photos of some of their customers wearing their favorite items. Wearing such garments draws attention. Chris Richmond, a video director and film maker wrote, “I’m not a show-off (I’m actually quite shy), but I enjoy the comments that I get when I am wearing Junky clothing.” Kurt Williams, an actor and jewelry designer, said he wears his favorite jacket when “I’m feeling a bit resigned or subdued so people can focus more on the jacket and less on me.”
In the book’s foreword fashion writer and broadcaster Caryn Franklin describes checking out Junky Styling by having them make her something, and she writes that the garment that they created out of an old Paul Smith suit jacket “frankly looks better on me than it ever did on the hanger gathering dust in my husband’s side of the wardrobe.” I cringed when she mentioned that he had “unknowingly donated” the jacket. Though it made a good story, I suspect most women would find secretly commandeering some of your husband’s upscale clothing a risky way to recycle.
[All photos used by permission. The rain mac photo is by Ness Sherry. The crossover top and zipper creations photos are by Luz Martin.]
Ralph Lauren, who turned 70 last week, is the most successful purveyor of glamour since the golden age of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Like studio-era movies, Lauren sells dreams of transformation and escape—all those green lawns and polo fields, safari tents and Rocky Mountain ranches. His designs transport the audience out of everyday experience and make the ideal life seem palpable.
Critics may mock him as a faux WASP parvenu and dismiss his customers as “yuppie arrivistes” (as a New York Timesletter writer put it in 1992), but Lauren’s work has authentic emotional power. It expresses his own “yearning for something beautiful and timeless that conjures up a world and takes you there.” His genius as a designer and businessman was to find a huge audience that shared his yearnings.
If fashion is of the moment, Lauren is an anti-fashion designer. “I’ve never designed for obsolescence,” he wrote. “I’ve designed for longevity.” Flip through the massive volume
of photographs and reflections he published two years ago to mark 40 years of designing and you see what he means. Only the most subtle differences in silhouette distinguish today’s clothes from those of decades past.
A brand built on timeless glamour faces special challenges. Glamour is eternal, but its embodiment changes with the audience. Aspirations and tastes formed in one era may not suit the next. Lauren writes that the songs of Frank Sinatra “have no time.” A child of the ’60s—or the ’90s—would disagree.
And glamour is a delicate illusion. Anything discordant can break the spell. Lately, Ralph Lauren the brand seems determined to puncture its audience’s reverie.
In honor of glamorous Frenchwoman Catherine Deneuve’s 66th birthday (which is today), I have a question: What is it about French women that is just so glamorous? And how can I get some of it?
I ask myself that question more frequently than I should probably admit – every time I painstakingly wrap a scarf around my neck or throw on a striped, boatneck shirt in an effort to grab a little of the nonchalant chic that French women seem to be born with.
I’m hardly the first frustrated American woman to ask that question. Last January in the New York Post, writer Maureen Callahan posed the question, albeit in a snarkier tone, in her article, “French Women Can Suck It.” In an effort to uncover the roots of the myth that “French women are better than we are,” Callahan interviewed a couple of legitimately glamorous French women, both of whom hedged a little when asked about French glamour.
Mireille Giuliano, author of the French Women Don't Get Fat
books and president and CEO of Veuve Cliquot, Inc., says that it’s not really all French women who appear so glamorous, it’s just the Parisians. And they’ve got American counterparts in New York. (Full FTC-approved disclosure: I once received a signed copy of one of the French Women books, along with a very nice handwritten note from Ms. Giuliano, thanking me for something complimentary I’d written about the books. Glamour or no, I was charmed.)
Callahan also spoke with Garance Dore, a Paris-based street style photographer-blogger (and girlfriend to Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman). Dore said, “For me, the French woman is a nice and beautiful myth.”
Both Giuliano and Dore seemed eager to assure their American fans that the “French” thing can be overcome. That there’s no glamour gene that exists only in French DNA. The thing is, while both praise the confidence, style, and attitude of American women (especially New Yorkers), I’m pretty sure they both believe that French women have something special in the glamour department.
At the beginning of her second book, French Women for All Seasons, Giuliano writes about the reaction the first book generated among her French female friends. In short, they were outraged. She quotes one, who said, “How dare you give away OUR secrets to the world?” This was specifically said with respect to “not getting fat,” but the books are really about the way of life that keeps French women famously trim – and glamorous. Somebody in Giuliano’s circle, at least, believes that French women have a corner on the fabulous market.
Garance Dore’s story is similarly murky. Just a few weeks before the NY Post article ran, Dore was interviewed by New York-based writerJoanna Goddard. The subject? How Goddard could stick to her New Year’s resolution to “dress like a French woman.” Dore gave a real, and thorough, answer, involving stripes, scarves, “unconcious layering,” an aversion to color, laziness, and an appreciation for the “sexy detail” (though it seems to me that “sexy detail” is pretty vague…and probably where a lot of American women get caught up). Gore also shared this:
The French woman doesn’t take any resolutions. The French woman is. The present is her sole religion. In fact, the mystery behind the French woman is that she has confidence in herself, despite all the nonsense she says. There’s the secret to her indestructible Frenchitude.
So there it is. French women – from Deneuve to Dore – do share a secret. And, unfortunately for us Yanks, even when it’s spelled out, it’s vague. Guess it’s back to scarf-tying class for me.
[Photo of the Eiffel Tower at dusk, the ultimate glamorous building, by Flickr user stevenvanwel. Used under the Creative Commons license.]
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, chronicles the rise and fall of different sorts of fur as the symbols of feminine luxury, particularly in Britain. Particularly interesting is the way mink suddenly replaced fox after World War II:
, who with Edith Head is probably the most famous Hollywood costume designer. What makes his work particularly significant?
. It’s rare and expensive. It flaunts its owner’s wealth in a subtle and unapologetic way. But it’s also tough and more adaptable than it initially appears. If Lisa does wind up tramping through the jungle with her true love, the Kelly bag is the sort of purse she might take with her.
from 1949 on TV while I walked through the living room. Now, I'm an engineer, so fashion generally slides right past me, but the clothes of all the girls (little women?) activated the pattern recognition part of my brain. It seemed that they were all wearing dresses with inverted triangles over the upper torso. They struck me as looking more like photos I've seen of women from the post-World War II era rather than around the Civil War. It got me to thinking about how art that depicts history is affected by the time of the art itself, as opposed to that of the depicted history. It can be difficult to remove the current-colored lenses that we all peer through.
Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of a rider on an elephant to represent the scale of our newer language-oriented, reasoning part of the brain in relationship to the faster, automatic processes in various older and incredibly powerful parts of the brain. Our ability to accomplish things depends in part on creating a good working relationship between the rider and the elephant.
, fashion critic Holly Brubach makes a case for the cultural significance of fashion. It is, she suggests, “architecture’s feminine counterpart....Buildings and clothes are the primary components of our everyday landscape, and they embody the ideas and the attitudes of the time in which we live.”
in which an experience of innocent beauty created an ecstatic moment for him. His poem, Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning, begins:
, the fashion industry has a long history of exploiting workers, and an image such as this does not convince me that applying paint to the soles of shoes has now become a glamorous job. I appreciate craftsmanship, but the craftsmanship displayed here is a photographer’s, not a shoemaker’s.
. Berger’s
perception hinges on the word “must,” implying that there is something
inescapable about the female vigilance to appearance; something within her psyche
that compels a woman to preen and then guard the finished product.
(DG interview 
, the 
is the self-descriptive title of a best-selling book by Leo Babauta. It is one of a growing number of books which offer advice for coping with the seemingly unending information, tasks, and choices offered by modern society. Barry Schwartz's 
deals with the paralyzing effect that having too many consumer choices can have. For example, now that Apple’s App Store has more than 100,000 apps, there are increasing numbers of blogs devoted to how to possibly choose among them, as well as asking questions like how many apps do you actually need or use? 
Nina Garcia writes, “Be an editor. Your closet should only contain amazing pieces—it is much easier to be inspired when you see five remarkable pieces then when you see twenty-five pieces and twenty of them are unremarkable. Pick out those key pieces and get rid of the rest.”
offers similar advice for men about paring down their closet to items that look good on them now.
. The ethos of their company is “timeless, deconstructed, re-cut, and completely transformed clothing,” and they are so committed to recycling textiles that their book contains a how-to section with basic instructions for some of their most popular designs. Intrigued, I asked them a couple of questions.
of photographs and reflections he published two years ago to mark 40 years of designing and you see what he means. Only the most subtle differences in silhouette distinguish today’s clothes from those of decades past.
books and president and CEO of 
, Giuliano writes about the reaction the first book generated among her French female friends. In short, they were outraged. She quotes one, who said, “How dare you give away OUR secrets to the world?” This was specifically said with respect to “not getting fat,” but the books are really about the way of life that keeps French women famously trim – and glamorous. Somebody in Giuliano’s circle, at least, believes that French women have a corner on the fabulous market.
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