Rebecca Traister has a cute article up about how magazines that peddle the high life are having to readjust their editorial so as to reflect the fact that their readership is so worried about money and/or broke that they can’t even fantasize about $500 pairs of shoes without getting a pit in their stomachs. Articles about shopping in your closet, making the most of your dollar, reinventing your wardrobe with clothes you already have—-everything but the time-honored strategy of buying secondhand. (Please do not peddle this, fashion magazines. Pickings are already slim for us long-standing resale shoppers.) I disagree with Rebecca’s assessment of the situation:
This is very practical advice. It is very sturdy. It is very sage. It is very depressing. As someone who kind of loathes shopping, I nonetheless am horrified by the idea. No one should shop in their own closet unless they are rich and their closet is huge, in which case, they can probably still afford to shop outside their closet anyway. For the rest of us, this is just a fancy way of saying, “Wear the same clothes you’ve been wearing for the past 10 years.” I admire the sentiment, but it’s precisely this kind of workmanlike thrift that could suck all the joy out of magazine reading.
In all honesty, these articles have made me want to buy these magazines. I’d rather learn how to do more with the clothes I already have, due to the fact that buying them means I already like them. Instead, I just went with a book on how to do vintage with some pizazz, something I had down in the past, but have lost a little of the touch for, and could use some pushing. People complain about resale prices, but they’re still half of what you’d pay for new stuff, except maybe at Cream Vintage, and it’s often much more unique an item. And there’s always thrift stores and garage sales.
But what’s really depressing is that even as the rest of the fashion industry is taking a huge hit, Ugg boots are still selling like hotcakes. Feministe and Jezebel are reporting on this disturbing problem. It appears that many women, given the choice between decent clothes that flatter and perhaps will last you awhile and a pair of shitty boots that flatter no one and are beginning to be the official uniform of the desperate and insecure, will pick the latter every time. According to Jezebel, the Ugg situation has reached emergency levels.
Vanessa has an interesting post up about the politics of “mantyhose”, which are pantyhose, but repackaged for men for no purpose other than to convince male consumers that they won’t grow a vagina just because they’re wearing a type of clothing that’s practically designed to suffocate vaginas and make bacterial infections grow unimpeded. (I suspect this spoils the great reveal of my opinion of pantyhose later in the piece.) It’s actually kind of sad how bent out of shape some men get when they find themselves in a situation where wearing stockings makes sense. Because nothing is worse than being a woman, and therefore something coded as feminine creates this deep horror.
For more than a decade, Mack wore women’s pantyhose under his clothes to keep him warm while he worked as a landscaper. But four years ago, Mack, 35, discovered “mantyhose” —pantyhose for men.
“It’s nice because they are specifically made for men, so I felt less weird about it,” said Mack, who declined to give his last name (because his wife does still feel weird about it).....
“Men were being told by their doctors that they needed compression legwear for knee problems,” Katz said. “So they were sent to buy women’s hosiery, and that was embarrassing for them.”
Taking off a post at Shakesville. I’ve got a lot of things I’m a fashion nazi about, though a couple have been moved off my “do not” list in recent years because the Gap and other companies have figured out how to do it right (such as having a fitted band at the bottom of the sweater—-turns out if it’s not tight enough to puff out the sweater and is generally unobtrusive, it’s not too bad). These include
*Tapered ankles in jeans. Skinny jeans look good on no one.
*Anything that obscures the waistline, which flatters neither thin nor fat people. In the former, it obscures the waistline, and in the latter it makes them look like apples on sticks instead of like normal human beings, as they do in more flattering clothes.
*Stone washing.
*Pointy-toed shoes.
*High rise jeans. I’m probably an outlier on this, but I love low rise jeans and if they go out of style so you can’t buy any more, I will scream and cry and never wash the ones I have, hoping they’ll last until they come back in fashion. I don’t care if they show off your butt crack. Don’t sit down, then. They look good on everyone. If you’re skinny, they look awesome. If you’re curvy, they make you look dangerously sexy. If you’re fat, they give your stomach some room to breathe without fucking up your shirt line. They rock.
*Push-up bras, which were invented by Satan, the bad one. I’m not anti-support. But playing like you’ve got something you don’t qualifies as an EPIC FAIL. Women with no tits, stand up and be proud! There is no reason to skulk. We are sexy without tits. I love being titless. I wear bras that do minimum work so the whole world can see that I’m titless and DEAL WITH IT. If we don’t stand up for ourselves, who will? I had a push-up bra in college. I wore it once under a bodysuit to a bar and my phony boobies caught some eyes and I felt like a pretender. Then and there I vowed to avoid padding. Now I know every guy who eyeballs me would have the same opinion if I were naked and it feels good.
A couple of items, one a little silly and one totally not. First of all, the not-silly item: Single-minded, obsessive anti-choice nuts are trying to leverage our economic hard times in order to—-what else?—-force more women to give birth against their will. Because what this country needs when feeding and housing people is getting iffy is more people to house and feed. Groups are trying to pressure states into cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood, citing economic woes as a reason. Partially, this is because anti-choicers believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that they’re performing abortions on every single woman who walks out the door. Really, even if you slip in and out in under 5 minutes to give them a couple of bucks for a bag of condoms, the stress of the occasion probably forced one of your eggs to give up hope. Or something like that. They’re a bit fuzzy on biology in any sense.
If I were to propose that the best thing to cut to save state money is a program that improves worker productivity, and saves us money by preventing STDs, unwanted pregnancy, cancer, and by catching cancers while they’re still small and much more manageable, then you’d laugh in my face. “You’re right! Let’s cut programs that get $5 return on every dollar we spend. And then let’s take the money we would have spent on Planned Parenthood, wipe our asses with it, and set it on fire!” Brilliant. But of course, the anti-choice nuts are so singularly obsessed with punishing people, especially women, for fucking, that they never stop to realize that every person “punished” in this way adds to a social problem that costs us all. Because you know who else pays when someone is afflicted with an unplanned pregnancy or an STD that they have to deal with? At bare minimum, their bosses and other co-workers who have to cover for them when they miss work. And, of course, if their problems start to get really expensive (like HIV), then the costs that get spread around get astronomical. The fuckers aren’t the only ones punished for fucking. We all are. Of course, most of us are fuckers, so I suppose it’s a full circle. But even crazy anti-choice nuts practicing non-consensual abstinence have to pay.
The argument is that Planned Parenthood has too much money to spend saving the rest of us even more money.
Some fluffy Friday night Obamamania. I’m with the women at Broadsheet; I have mixed feelings about the focus on Michelle Obama as a style icon. On one hand, the whole thing smacks of the same old sexism that reduces women—-even brilliant, ambitious, multi-faceted women like Michelle Obama—-to decorative objects. But on the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fashion per se, and Obama is a lovely dresser. (Though the victory dress didn’t really work as well as most of her clothes.) More importantly, I think her beauty and stylishness will be a bulwark against the inevitable right wing smear campaign that will try to paint her as a scary ballbuster, as they did to Hillary Clinton, except for Michelle Obama it will be worse because the right wing smears will (as they have already) incorporated racist ideas about the Angry Black Woman. The Jackie Kennedy vibe will do a lot to alleviate that, and all the tensions it will bring. And frankly, as a political geek myself, I appreciate the Obamas for showing the world that political geeks are not all shabbily dressed, weirdly undersexed goobers. It’s a sign of the times that nerds don’t feel so much anymore that they have to be shabby or badly pulled together to be taken as intellectual.
I’m a little hostile to the automatic dismissal that fashion gets as shamefully lightweight, because it seems to me that it’s more demonizing of the feminine. No one is wondering if it sends the wrong message to be interested in a male politician’s interest in sports. We’re not worried that seeming too masculine will make politicians seem like lightweights, even though it totally did in Bush’s case, because it was so obviously a series of costumes for him. We mourn that women feel they have to dress up all the time, and it’s true that it’s a giant bummer for women who are disinterested in that. But I also feel bad for those who would like to experiment with fashion, roll themselves out as sharply dressed, but can’t because it seems unserious or emasculated. As I’ve said before, I think that the more feminism penetrates the public consciousness, we’re going to see women give up a lot of habits that are just time-consuming and/or uncomfortable, but we’ll see men pick up more.
In fact, you can already see changes. Women wear less make-up than they did when I was younger, and painting your nails is increasingly being seen as an affectation for the few, instead of standard for the many. And wearing underwear that doubles as scaffolding is out of style. Honestly, Michelle Obama’s style reflects certain changes—-as good as she looks, she also dresses very simply. At the same time, I’m seeing that men are more interested in being well-shaven and wearing nicer clothes. Maybe in my lifetime we’ll actually see the standards for the sexes meet somewhere in the middle, with a lot more flexibility for personal preference.
Why does American Apparel have to fuck up everything good with a thick coat of demoralizing sleaze? Even setting aside the complexity of their labor issues (they say they pay fair wages, their employees say they’ve been union-busted), there’s a lot that you would initially like about the company. I like cotton. I like bright colors. I like silly ad campaigns. I really like that nice, thin cotton that’s flattering while still being, you know, cotton. I don’t like leggings, but that’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things that AA sells. But everything is coated in this sexist sleaze that dares you to complain about it, lest you get accused of being anti-sex.
And now they’ve gone and fucked up Dr. Bronner’s. I’m taking this personally—-Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap is a summer tradition of mine, because it feels really cool and clean when outside feels hot and heavy. I’m not oblivious to some of the double entendres that can be spun out from feeling tingly all over or anything, but that’s the sort of thing that can be sexual without demeaning women. It’s certainly not in the four toxic categories of demoralizing ways to look at female sexuality that not only turn off your thinking individuals, but are repulsive.
Blogging while I got the time in these hectic Netroots Nation days. The good news: We have internet at the new place and a shocking number of Very Famous Bloggers are posting using my wifi. Which is very exciting, like having rock stars fuck on your couch.
I want to apologize up front for the weird editorials that emerge from student newspapers in Texas. (Via.) I can’t help but think that the reason for publishing this article was charity casework aimed at the writer, but of course right wing writers don’t deserve your charity, because they’re often able to ride the wingnut welfare train regurgitating the same 5 opinions about how everyone that’s not a straight white guy sucks.
Rebecca Traister has a cute article up about how magazines that peddle the high life are having to readjust their editorial so as to reflect the fact that their readership is so worried about money and/or broke that they can’t even fantasize about $500 pairs of shoes without getting a pit in their stomachs. Articles about shopping in your closet, making the most of your dollar, reinventing your wardrobe with clothes you already have—-everything but the time-honored strategy of buying secondhand. (Please do not peddle this, fashion magazines. Pickings are already slim for us long-standing resale shoppers.) I disagree with Rebecca’s assessment of the situation:
A couple of items, one a little silly and one totally not. First of all, the not-silly item: Single-minded, obsessive anti-choice nuts are trying to leverage our economic hard times in order to—-what else?—-force more women to give birth against their will. Because what this country needs when feeding and housing people is getting iffy is more people to house and feed. 
Some fluffy Friday night Obamamania. 
Why does American Apparel have to fuck up everything good with a thick coat of demoralizing sleaze? Even setting aside the complexity of their labor issues (they say they pay fair wages, their employees say they’ve been union-busted), there’s a lot that you would initially like about the company. I like cotton. I like bright colors. I like silly ad campaigns. I really like that nice, thin cotton that’s flattering while still being, you know, cotton. I don’t like leggings, but that’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things that AA sells. But everything is coated in this sexist sleaze that dares you to complain about it, lest you get accused of being anti-sex. 
Blogging while I got the time in these hectic Netroots Nation days. The good news: We have internet at the new place and a shocking number of Very Famous Bloggers are posting using my wifi. Which is very exciting, like having rock stars fuck on your couch.