Fashion and Style

Fashion Friday: "The soaring heights and the greedy, murderous depths": ceepolk

Greta Christina5 Comments

I’m taking a semi-break from blogging this week: mostly doing reprints, event announcements, cat pictures, street art pictures, reposting interesting comments, and so on.

So for this week’s Fashion Friday, I’m re-posting this comment that ceepolk made on last week’s Fashion Friday piece on fashion and money. It was an exceptionally insightful, extraordinarily beautiful piece of writing, and I thought it deserved more attention, so I’m pulling it out in this post.

I get you about fashion. I love it. I’ve always loved it. for as long as I can remember I have engaged with clothing – as a child I would look at coffee table books of fashion, the history of fashion, and current magazines. I wanted to be a fashion designer when i grew up. And I was poor. Well, I still am.

i get you about how fashion is art and art costs money. I have tried to explain to people that the extensive wardrobes they worry about maintaining and changing every season taints their perception of what clothing is worth and why I always, always refuse to make anyone a single piece of apparel, period, because fashion is a complex skill and skills cost money. I’m happy they love the whateveritis that I’m wearing that they think is beautiful, and that some of them are gobsmacked when they discover that I made it, but they ruin the conversation quickly by expecting me to use hard won years of skill and practice to make them something and they offer to pay for the cost of materials (and often estimate a price that isn’t even half that.)

I’m happy to see a post on the deeply complex implications of fashion. I have never found a clear answer that ties up all of the influences, intersections, and interstices in grosgrain ribbon in the colour of your choice (mine shall always and forever be imperial purple no matter what Pantone declares is in this season.) Fashion, more than any other art, has taught me how to enjoy something that is inherently and permanently problematic. And the best I can do is this –

Alexander McQueen was an artist. He combined the beautiful and the political in ways that make my heart pound and my skin shiver. I can say the same thing about a lot of artists. I never stop being aware that fashion is and has always been steeped in classism and sexism and racism, that fashion has unbelievable influence on our individual self-image and regularly shapes the image of human beauty.

A color wheel and a sartorial task that requires it is is better than most drugs as far as i’m concerned. The woman who made my panties is exploited and at risk of violence and rape that she has to endure just to keep that job, and she has that job because white western capitalists have dismantled every worker protection fought and won here. I move through cosmetic, fabric and yarn stores in a meditation that I think a lot of artists can understand. I engage with it and everything starts to flow in a series of beautiful moments, because i love these things. Millions of people over centuries have suffered and died because a certain cloth, a certain shade of a certain hue, a certain shell or stone or animal bone was the object of desire. I love the finished work of fashion, and I love making clothing, I love being able to look at a finished garment and *see* the structure and components that make it.

Fashion is as true an expression of humanity as any art could be, because it expresses the soaring heights and the greedy, murderous depths in every thread, no matter what you wear or how it came to exist.

Fashion Friday: "The soaring heights and the greedy, murderous depths": ceepolk
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Runway Recap: On Giving Up

Greta Christina10 Comments

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers about last Thursday’s episode of Project Runway: Season 10, Episode 4, “Women on the Go.” If you’re a fan of the show and you haven’t seen it yet — you stand warned.

So if you were on Project Runway, and you realized you were in over your head and couldn’t cope with the pressure… what do you think you’d do?

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this week’s winners and losers. Yes to Sonjia winning. Yes to Buffi going home. Yes to Fabio: at first I was puzzled about why this was on the bottom and not Melissa’s “friar of the Jawa monastery” look, but the judges made a good point that, at this level of the competition, you should be doing more than making a decent dress in a pretty print. And no, I don’t care how well-made it was: Christopher’s thing with the weird dangly asymmetrical handkerchief hem did not look like a “woman on the go.” It looked like Stevie Nicks dressed as a Goth pirate. Gunnar’s brown dress with the petals was way better, I thought: elegant but also sporty, and somehow magically both structured and soft. I’d wear it in a second. Continue reading “Runway Recap: On Giving Up” →

Runway Recap: On Giving Up

Fashion Friday: Money

Greta Christina33 Comments

Marion-Cotillard-in-the-August-2012-Issue-of-Vogue-US-Alexander-McQueen-ankle-cuff-stilettos
I was flipping through the new issue of Vogue the other day. (Yes, I read Vogue. In fact, I subscribe to Vogue.) I saw a pair of shoes that made me stop dead in my tracks, a pair of shoes that made my heart hurt and my clit throb: a pair of tall black stiletto pumps, with ankle straps that looked like bondage cuffs. Teetering on that knife’s edge between fashion and fetish. Exactly where I like my shoes.

I flipped to the “where to buy this stuff” index in the back, to see if there was even a remote chance that I could dream of affording them. (Now and then, something does pop up in Vogue that I can afford.)

Alexander McQueen. $885.

It’s not like I was surprised. I’ve seen shoes before in Vogue costing that much, and indeed much more. But it started me on a train of thought I’ve been riding for some time now, a tricky and delicate and complicated train of thought that I’m extremely unresolved about. I started thinking, not for the first time, about fashion and money.

On the one hand: To quote Lindy West in her review of “Sex and the City 2,” “SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human — working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it’s my job — and bludgeons it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car.” * There is something repugnant in the fact that the kind of shoes Carrie Bradshaw wears in SATC, the kind of shoes I was eyeing in Vogue, cost as much as some people spend on their car, or a month’s rent, or a semester’s tuition for their kid.

On the other hand: If you look at fashion as an art form — which I do — then complaining about how expensive the high-end stuff is starts to be a little silly. No, I can’t afford Balenciaga or Alexander McQueen. I can’t afford a Kandinsky, either. And while I care intensely about social justice and economic inequality, my pinko conscience doesn’t keep me awake nights raging about the fact that the common worker can’t afford a Kandinsky.

Gauliter hooded cape
At the Gaultier exhibit we went to a few weeks ago, some of the gowns had placards in front of them, saying how many hours of work had gone into each one. Each one took over a hundred hours. Some took over three hundred hours. At an extremely conservative labor rate of $15 an hour, not even counting materials or overhead or years of training, that labor just by itself makes the dresses worth four figures. Again, you can argue whether it’s worth putting that much labor into a dress… but when I look at dresses like Gaultier’s, to me the answer seems obvious. Gaultier’s work is art. If you value art, and the time and effort that art takes, then it makes no sense to value that time and effort in paintings and sculpture, while reflexively despising it in dresses and shoes.

But on the first hand again: Continue reading “Fashion Friday: Money” →

Fashion Friday: Money

Runway Recap: Shades of Mediocrity

Greta Christina13 Comments

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers about last Thursday’s episode of Project Runway: Season 10, Episode 3, “Welcome Back (or not) to the Runway.” If you’re a fan of the show and you haven’t seen it yet — you stand warned.

In these Runway Recaps, I’m trying to focus on the designs and not the drama. But it’s going to be tricky this week. Having spent last week gushing over the shiny happy candy challenge and what an exciting batch of designers we had this season and how much I was looking forward to the rest of the competition, I now haz a giant sad. The designs this week were so vague, my eyes were having trouble focusing on them. The good designs were boring. The bad designs were boring. Only one of the middling designs wasn’t boring — and it was badly made enough to not really be worth commenting on. (Although, of course, I’m going to anyway.) This week’s designs were almost universally executed in shades of mediocrity. Like emptiness in disharmony.

Yes, I know: team challenges are tough, and it’s hard to get that blazingly unique vision thing when you’re forced to collaborate with someone who was randomly picked for you out of a hat. But then I think about Chris and Christian in Season 4, and that giddy, exuberant, magnificently artful, “made of silky sunset clouds and the essence of pure joy” piece they teamed up on, which years later people are still talking about. And I think about Jillian and Victorya, also in Season 4, and that lavish, bad-ass, magnificently elegant, “soldier in the army of awesome and every coat I’ve ever bought since has been an echo of it in my mind” coat they teamed up on, which would have won that challenge by a mile in any other season and only lost by the bad (and yet freakishly awesome) luck of being on the BEST SEASON EVAR.

Sigh. Sorry. Nostalgia for Season 4 over (for the moment, anyway). I think I’ve made my point… which is that “Team challenges are hard!” is a pathetically weak excuse. ([cough] Elena! [cough]) So let’s get back to the pathetic weakness. Continue reading “Runway Recap: Shades of Mediocrity” →

Runway Recap: Shades of Mediocrity

Runway Recap: Did The Wrong Awesome Designers Make the Top Three?

Greta Christina10 Comments

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers about last Thursday’s episode of Project Runway: Season 10, Episode 2, “Candy Couture.” If you’re a fan of the show and you haven’t seen it yet — you stand warned.

So did the wrong awesome designers in the “make clothing out of candy” challenge make the top three this week?

In last week’s Project Runway recap, I was definitely on the snarky and bitchy side. For which I won’t apologize: being bitchy and snarky about laughably bad designs is part of the fun of being a Project Runway fan, and in any case, bitchy snark is my birthright as a queer American. I could easily go there again this week: wondering rhetorically if anyone in the known universe had even a microsecond of doubt about who was going home this week, or declaiming with horror and dismay about why Andrea’s shapeless paper smock thing irrelevantly slapped over the nightmare bustle didn’t catapult her to the bottom three.

But I don’t want to go there this week. Like Mr. Darcy, this week my mind was more agreeably engaged. I’ve been meditating on the very great pleasure which an unconventional materials challenge in a group of talented designers can bestow. The guessing game this week wasn’t, “Given what should be the easiest challenge of the whole damn season — make any design you want, inspired by a piece you made at home on which you had no time or money constraints — which crappy designer is going home?” The guessing game this week was, “Given what is typically one of the more difficult challenges of the season — make an outfit out of unconventional materials, in this case candy — which delightful, imaginative, surprising, freakishly beautiful design is going into the top three?” Continue reading “Runway Recap: Did The Wrong Awesome Designers Make the Top Three?” →

Runway Recap: Did The Wrong Awesome Designers Make the Top Three?

Fashion Friday: Gaultier, and the Blend of Discipline and Frivolity

Greta Christina15 Comments

Gaultier striped hooded cape
Ingrid and I were at the Gaultier exhibit at the de Young a couple of weeks ago — many pics at the end of the piece — and I’ve been wanting to write about it ever since. The exhibit had my brain spinning with dozens of ideas: about the intersection of fashion and fine art, about the influence of street and fetish wear on high fashion, about the complex and screwed-up relationship between fashion and money. But the idea that’s really stuck with me from the show has to do with the blend of discipline and frivolity. Continue reading “Fashion Friday: Gaultier, and the Blend of Discipline and Frivolity” →

Fashion Friday: Gaultier, and the Blend of Discipline and Frivolity

Runway Recap: Did The Wrong Crappy Designer Go Home?

Greta Christina17 Comments

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers about last Thursday’s episode of Project Runway: Season 10, Episode 1, “A Times Square Anniversary Party.” If you’re a fan of the show and you haven’t seen it yet — you stand warned.

So did the wrong crappy designer go home this week?

Ingrid and I have been debating this question at some length. We don’t have any doubt that both Beatrice and Lantie should have been the bottom two designers. (I disagree about the third slot: I actually had a certain amount of respect for Kooan’s original look, especially for its roots in Japanese “fruits” street fashion, and thought Buffi should have been in the bottom. Ingrid disagrees: she has a soft spot for Buffi’s shiny, candy-colored ’80s style.)

But the big question is: Of the two truly appalling sets of work, did the wrong crappy designer go home? Continue reading “Runway Recap: Did The Wrong Crappy Designer Go Home?” →

Runway Recap: Did The Wrong Crappy Designer Go Home?

Fashion Friday: Menswear, and Some Thoughts About Gender Roles

Greta Christina167 Comments

So what about teh menz?

I’ve been asked a few times now, by a few different readers, to write about menswear. I wish I had more to say about it: it’s certainly an interesting and fertile topic. But I don’t have a lot of personal experience with this. I’m a woman; my partner of many years is a woman; we both tend to dress on the more feminine side (although I do venture into butch and genderfuck on occasion). Menswear really isn’t in my wheelhouse.

But I do have some general observations on the topic. And the main one is this:

Menswear sucks.

With some exceptions, menswear is so soporifically boring, you shouldn’t wear it while operating heavy machinery. Continue reading “Fashion Friday: Menswear, and Some Thoughts About Gender Roles” →

Fashion Friday: Menswear, and Some Thoughts About Gender Roles

Fashion Friday: Trying Things On

Greta Christina25 Comments

When you’re shopping for clothes… where do you start?

As regular readers of Fashion Friday know, I’m a fan of the fashion makeover show, “What Not to Wear.” I have some issues with it, but on the whole, I find it entertaining, informative, often oddly touching, and loaded with both specific tips and broad philosophical insights about fashion and style. (Not to mention insights into human psychology.)

It’s fascinating to watch the mental processes and emotional rollercoasters the show’s participants go through when their entire wardrobe is decimated, and they have to start from scratch. And one of the most common reactions the participants have to shopping for a new wardrobe is paralysis. They walk into a clothing store in New York with $5,000 of someone else’s money… and they have no idea where to start. They try on a couple of things that don’t look right… and they get frustrated, or they feel like failures, or in some cases they have a complete emotional meltdown.

I actually understand this, and have sympathy with it. I’ve only been seriously into fashion and style for a relatively short time, and when I was beginning to explore this hobby in a more conscious and thoughtful way, I often felt overwhelmed by all the options, and had no concept of what to even try on.

So I developed three rules for myself for trying things on — actually, they’re more guidelines than rules — and I thought other people might find them useful. Or at least entertaining.

Rule #1: If it catches my eye, I have to try it on. Continue reading “Fashion Friday: Trying Things On” →

Fashion Friday: Trying Things On

Fashion Friday: Being Appropriately Inappropriate

Greta Christina20 Comments

When I was writing my piece last week on fashion and age and sex, and on trying to use fashion and style to express my sexuality in a way that’s age-appropriate, there’s an important idea that I left out.

It’s the idea of appropriateness vacations. Events where “inappropriate” is exactly what’s appropriate.

When I get dressed in the morning (or the afternoon — hey, I work at home now, I typically don’t get dressed until the afternoon), I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to dress in a way that’s appropriate, both for how I feel and what I’m going to be doing. Is this blouse dressy enough for the restaurant we’re going to? Does this jacket strike the right balance between “authoritative” and “accessible” for the talk I’m giving? I want to look both formal and festive for this holiday party — is this dress right for that? I don’t resent it: I enjoy doing it, it’s my primary hobby, and I get a kick out of it.

But a few times a year, I find events where I feel entirely comfortable wearing whatever the fuck I feel like. I find events where, fashion-wise, all bets are off. I find events where “inappropriate” is not only appropriate, but welcomed and indeed encouraged.

Ingrid and Greta at Dyke March 2011
The Dyke March. My friend Jezebel’s Solstice parties. The Perverts Put Out! reading series. A party I threw last year, where I encouraged guests to wear whatever they had in their closet that they loved and looked awesome in, but that was a little too much: too formal, too trashy, too garish, too costumey, too slutty, too ridiculous, too severe, too over-the-top, too something. (A party at which I dearly wish I had taken photos, because my friends came through with flying colors.)

And this keeps my everyday consideration of “what’s appropriate” from feeling constrictive. It keeps me from having a sad about how, now that I’m fifty, I will never ever ever again wear miniskirts and fishnet thigh-highs and combat boots. Or whatever.

Let’s say I’m shopping for clothes, and I find something that is way too short or low-cut or flashy, but that looks TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME on me. Let’s say I’m thinking, “Damn, I love this, want want want want want — but where on Earth would I ever wear it?” I have my answer. “I can wear this to Jezebel’s party. I can wear this to the Dyke March. I can wear this to Perverts Put Out.”

Greta in damask stockings and steampunk jacket
I might not buy it. I might decide, “I already have enough wild slutty things to wear to Jezebel’s party and Perverts Put Out.” The same way I might decide, “I already have enough suit-like things to wear to conferences,” or, “I already have enough little sleeveless dresses.” But knowing that I have options for being my slutty, over-the-top, “I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of me” self, options where I can do that and not feel ridiculous or desperate or out-of-place… that keeps me from feeling sad about the fact that, most of the time in my everyday life, I’ve decided not to go there.

It’s a little like weight management. A big part of my weight management plan is that, one day a month, I eat whatever the fuck I want, and don’t count calories. If I didn’t do that, I’d get obsessive and deprived and sad about all the things I want to eat and can’t. The difference between thinking, “I will never again in my life have a day when I don’t count calories” and, “I’m counting calories all this week but am totally blowing it off for Kanani’s birthday dinner at Nopa”… that’s a big part of what makes counting calories every day seem do-able. (I realize this doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for me.) And while I enjoy my over-the-top food indulgences, they also remind me that I don’t, in fact, want to eat like that all the time, or even most of the time.

Greta in red corset and bowler hat
Appropriateness vacations with fashion are like that. They keep me from getting obsessive and deprived and sad about all the things I want to wear and can’t. And they remind me that I don’t, in fact, want to dress like that all the time, or even most of the time.

Just sometimes.

Fashion Friday: Being Appropriately Inappropriate