Posts Tagged ‘Fashion’

AllSaints

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

I love AllSaints, which reminds me of England, where I long to return. I think I could be an AllSaints girl, stick straight hair falling into my eyes, my long limbs peeking out of well cut stovepipe skinny jeans and a painstakingly distressed leather jacket, looking like a postmodern and just woken up Amelia Earhart, ready to take flight yet once again.



Clothing is a passion, and all saints is often object and fixation point for my prodigious desire, price tag and weakness of the dollar falling away, pleasure for my eye being the only matter worth consideration. When I wear my AllSaints jacket, my mind focuses solely on my silhouette, slim and elegant, ready for the motorcycle or the gastropub, sheathing my curves and enhancing them further. I think less of my problems and more about how fucking good I look, and this gives me great relief. Yes the jacket cost an arm and a leg but my joy is worth that, is it not?



I love the flagship store in my beloved London, just a moment’s walk from my other british landmark, Barbour. The dark interiors are a welcome escape from the surprisingly blazing hot brightness of the Columbia flower market, which rule my sundays in the city. The heavy metal hardware on AllSaints belts and bags are cold to the touch on those sunny mornings, as I hide my coffee from the sales people and feed my soul with all the beauty of London’s east end.



I fell into a month long depression in Scotland, brought on by homesickness and the nonstop alcohol consumption that threatens to consume me whenever I step foot on this island. AllSaints jackets and jeans and boots and sweaters and bags and dresses and belts gave me hope, a serotonin boost that worked better than any sex drive dulling medication. I don’t really go in for ‘retail therapy’. You can’t solve your life problems by shopping – but that be said – oh – AllSaints – j’adore.



They are not the type of company that gifts performers, but i don’t care. I will always pay through the nose for their shit. It makes me feel good, whole, beautiful, sexy, tight, rock and roll – like Chrissy Hynde in her american-in-london black eyeliner best, and this, is priceless.



Ugly Pretty

Friday, April 13th, 2012

Have you ever seen people who go out of their way to wear unflattering things because they are so good looking that they can pull off even the most terrible looks? This is very common amongst dancers. Their lithe bodies can take the most abuse from pleats and plaids. The straightness of their backs makes a fine counterpoint to the messy topknot, hair piled into a ball on the very top of their head like shiva. Shiva is the destroyer and the first thing on his list should be his hairdo, but who am I to argue with the divine? The river ganges is supposed to spout from his hairstyle, so there’s more going on in shiva’s topknot than just a chaotic updo achieved without a mirror during the first five minutes of yoga.



These hipster antihipster fashion forward folk are lucky in thrift stores and diving into a dumpster, and there is delicate art to their look, and most of it has to do with having narrow bones and a strict architecture that can show off a garment plain, without fitting. it just hangs, so that the thing can be seen for what it is, as opposed to having to negotiate the threaded turns and valleys of a shapelier figure. it’s not just about thinness, although this is an aspect to physical confidence which can help pull off a truly disgusting look. There is something of an attention to proportion and balance. ‘Ugly’ is just another form of pretty, and if you can actually master this, then you are a bit of a jedi, who also incidentally wear hideous and blousey and unfortunately belted garments and gross tiny braided tailed mullet hair that makes no sense of the head it is on.



Thick black eyeglass frames are essential, and I love these on everyone, no matter how insulting they are to the face underneath. I couldn’t ever wear these as I have no bridge on my nose. Yep, no bridge, but also no river flowing from my topknotted hair so frankly, I don’t need a bridge, but still, these glasses are a dream that will never come true for me. this is one part of ugly/pretty I really envy. The glasses I have a fetish for, truly.



A very short culotte with a cuff near the knee and big accordion pleats around the thighs and buttocks is another thing I would love to wear, but just cannot. I have only seen one person be able to do this. It’s so awful of a pant that only the most beautiful man I know could make it work for him, and the look is memorable and legendary. It’s a strange kind of shorts/pants hybrid that never got popular after the renaissance, like a poufy princely thing, that you could accessorize with a velvet pillow with a lone glass slipper resting on it, for your continuing search for Cinderella – when you really should be looking for new pants instead.



Shut Up Karl

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

You should hide behind that fan Karl Lagerfeld, shame on you, for calling Adele ‘a little bit fat’. Who are you? What is the point of saying that? What are you trying to prove? Why are you trying to cut a bitch down? Shame shame shame. Don’t read people as that only leads to being read to and you don’t want to hear that story. You have talked about being bullied, and I am sure you were. I see it, as I was bullied too, and I am disappointed in you, for here you have proven yourself to be quite good at it, and you are the very worst kind – a condescending one.



Adele is nothing less than amazing. She is a true, courageous and rare talent and someone who has captured the attention and the admiration of the world in a seriously short time. She is ALSO a great beauty and tremendously meaningful incandescent wonder. She looks so awesome, her loveliness radiates from her strong and fast spinning interior klieg lights and brightens everything to the degree that it makes even dark, overcast me feel luminous and fierce and worthy.  That’s what a light like her does. She lights up our life. She is beaming through the clouds and bringing you the sun. Fuck you if you can’t realize that. Fuck you and your fucking glasses. Take them off for a second and see the goddamn light. Self tanner doesn’t give you no vitamin D. You need sun.



Adele sings and I wish I could sing like that, and I do, in the shower. I wonder if i could look like her. Maybe 20 years ago that could have been me. Maybe I am beautiful after all. Maybe everyone was wrong about me. Maybe I am going to be loved. Maybe I’ll be happy someday. Maybe, yes. Maybe.



It sounds complex because it is terribly complex, but curiously simple and plain. When you see someone you identify with, who has a body that could be your body, and you recognize it on the screen because you remember it from the mirror and you watch them shine and conquer and overcome and overwhelm and startle and take over the world, you think you can do the same. It gives you strength. It’s powerful, indescribably so. A star like her – we haven’t had someone like that for a while. She’s been desperately needed. Where you been all our lives Adele? I am just glad you’re here.



Adele changes the game and all the rules. She makes a generation of women, young and old, want to play. She makes us feel like we could win, we could actually win this time. Finally, we have our eyes on the prize. When she’s on the cover of a magazine, I buy it right then and there. She doesn’t look like the girls who are always on the cover of a magazine. She looks better, and all the more so because she really fucking deserves to be there.



Why are you trying to tarnish that? why are you trying to spit on her success and fame? Its ugly. It’s uncouth and unfair. And I know that you, as you have the kind of face and frame easily run to fat – its familiar as I have the same – I know you’ve struggled. I have felt for you. You know what it feels like to be judged. Why do it? Because you’ve made it to the other side? Is it better there? Aren’t you hungry? I am, just looking at you. I know to be as thin as you are now, you need to control everything that goes into your mouth every second of every minute of every hour of every day. I wish you were as ardent in controlling what came out of it.



I don’t know why we care what you have to say. We don’t have the luxury to starve for fashion. We have to work for a living. We have double shifts. We carry groceries we can barely buy with our meager salaries up many flights of stairs and feed our children and deal with our children being molested and woefully sometimes bury our children and find a way to live through this, being merely children ourselves. We worry through vocal surgery and survive the silence and still go to gigs and keep from getting hit and if we do, successfully cover the bruises with concealer so we can go to school and to the DMV and SXSW and keep our heads up high while being unloved or loved by the wrong ones and hang in the friend zone as we hang our laundry out to dry and run for the bus and fight for the right to marriage while finalizing painful divorces and try amidst all this to keep going and get by.



When you say we are fat, you murder our grace, and we’ve already lost so much to begin with. We’ve already lost everything, except weight. That we gain steadily, along with self hatred, and all you are doing is adding to our burden, pressing down on the scale with the long toe of your fine, elegantly tassled loafer.



We don’t have millions of dollars to perforate our fat with expensive, experimental injections. We don’t have time to be lightheaded and sick with hunger. We can’t afford fasting clinics in the Swiss Alps or a messianic nutritionist or portion controlled meals wrapped up in white linen and enshrouded in Chanel camellias. We have to pay the rent and pay for gas and if eating is some comfort to us in our difficult lives, let it be so. Just let us be. Let us listen to Adele, who is triumphantly one of us and let us enjoy her and feel like her and think we are her for a moment and be safe in her music and in our heads.



To someone like you or me or Adele or anyone really, to be called fat is the gravest insult, and the injury in yours is that you say she has a beautiful face. How many of us have heard the same thing and suffered more for it? Its not a compliment. It’s like saying ‘my, what a fabulous turd.’ Keep your compliments and condescension to yourself. It doesn’t soften what you know in your heart to be a mighty blow.



You consider yourself to be the authority on style, as you are supposedly style personified but what good is style when you have no class? What good is style when you have no humanity? What good is style when you make us want to kill ourselves? We are dying, Karl. Lots of us are already dead.



Don’t bother apologizing, as I am sure your people, your ‘Team Lagerfeld’ is advising you to do. There is no ‘I’ in team, but if there were, there would be a Tim and a Tam and have you had a Tim Tam? You should. They are real good. What you could do instead of offering an empty apology is design for us, all the regular folks in the world, and really go for it. Make clothes that flatter us, make us feel good about ourselves. Make beautiful things that glorify us but won’t bankrupt our bank accounts or our spirit. Do your job, dummy. Be the sartorial equivalent to Adele’s music. I know you have it in you. There is immeasurable genius behind all your idiocy, behind the ridiculous glasses, within the high perimeter of that starched collar.



If you say it isn’t possible, then you are useless. If you say you can’t do it and that it is our own fault that we can’t be thin enough for your vision, then you are a dismal failure, and you’ve always been one and you always will be.



We are sick of only being able to wear your fragrance. It stinks of selfishness and stupidity and lack of effort and frankly, that is beneath you, because honestly, I know you try, just like we try. We are all trying Karl, but I am asking you to try harder. With your prodigious means and power, you could change things for the better, for generations to come. But if you don’t want to now, then you probably won’t ever, which is sad and wasteful of your lavish gifts and a precious opportunity lost. If you want to be that way then flap that fan until you take flight and fill the thin air with your antique birdsong – out of earshot, so we can listen to Adele in peace.





I know he apologized but I still think this is a good piece of writing and truly worth reading. I was a little late responding because I was so angry!! As I wrote, I was crying and clenching and unclenching my jaw and my asshole at the same time. It would have been nice for someone else I guess but unfortunately I was alone. Fashion just hurts my feelings all the time. I love his work, even though it never fits me and I can’t even get my arms in a beautiful white silk sequin pantsuit I have of his I bought on ebay. I keep it and I look at it and I am enraged but I can’t fucking throw it out because it is so nice. I have a bunch of clothes of his like that. It is sick. Ok, I am considering his apology. But he needs to make shit we can actually fucking wear.





There Will Be Bloodstains

Monday, January 30th, 2012

I do love a nice leather jean. It’s not the most practical item to buy, but they are beautiful. I have had a few pairs in my lifetime, and when I find ones I really love, it’s the most exciting thing. I remember all the best ones. My favorite were these weird stiff unlined and low waist ones from Fred Segal that cost a fortune – like $600 or something, which was everything I had at the time, but I didn’t care because they were a strange French peanut color, like that candy that went uneaten at the bottom of your plastic jack-o-lantern on Halloween. I loved the pants so much I wanted to eat them and I can’t find them at all now. Perhaps I did eat them because they were the kind of pants you don’t give away or throw away or lose and yet I search my memory and my closets and drawers and those pants are history, but a figment of my leather pant imagination.



There are white leather pants I wear when I ride motorcycles, 60s style – outrageous – that glow with a toothpaste blue undertone so I can be seen by all on the roads I ramble down. These were specially made for me years ago, and the fly is all snaps and I can undo them with a hard exhale. They have a slight bootcut to accommodate the fearsome Harley Davidson motorcycle boots that are essentially also my brakes, and they are thick enough to protect me from ass gas and grass for now.



I have chaps, which I guess are leather pants too, but they are somehow less complete. Perhaps because they are more like boots with a belt attached. I have to be in the mood for chaps, like a Judas Priest mood – which I am in often (breaking the law breaking the law). I love Rob Halford – what a hot leather daddy! That is who I feel like when I wear chaps! It’s very Folsom St. Fair.



My newest leather pants were the finest ones I had ever seen in my life. The J Brand red lambskin leather skinny jeans were way out of my price range, as they were nearly $900!! This is too much money for any one thing – I mean, it’s fucking pants! But I stalked those pants online, looking at them every day, looking at them on different websites, looking at them in different currencies, wondering what they would be like to have on. I would think about the pants off and on during the day like wondering what they were doing, who was wearing them, who tried them on, who bought them, who didn’t. I was spending too much time thinking about these pants and so I just broke down and bought them.



They came in the mail and I tore the package open with my bare hands making that weird dusty filler that seems like what collects on the lint screen in the dryer explode into the air and fill my lungs. I put them on and they were perfect, just perfect. I loved the feel of the lambskin on my skin and the zippers at the bottom were sleek and kind of punk fading into new wave. I felt like Chrissy Hynde and I felt like Lou Reed and I felt like I had stepped out of CBGBs in the late 70s to smoke a cigarette in the street even though I could smoke inside, I wanted to just be alone, with the pants.



I tried not to wear the pants too much because they were so beautiful I wanted to somehow save up that beauty, not spend it all in one place. They also stretched out a lot in the knee area, so that the hips and butt and ankles would remain tight to my figure, but then these weird bags would appear around my kneecaps, but it didn’t matter because I loved those pants. I folded them as opposed to balling them up like everything else I had. I packed them carefully into my luggage for my big winter trip to New York. I wanted those pants to see the Big Apple. I was taking the pants on vacation.



When I was wearing the pants, feeling on top of the world, in a Barbour jacket and Vanson Skeleton bag, sitting alone in a café in Williamsburg, I looked down between my legs, just to admire the inseam of my beloved J Brand lambskin leather, and I noticed an odd stain. It was like a period stain, but it didn’t make any sense because I had never worn these pants during my lady time. I would never have worn them during my lady time. I was sitting there in the middle of a crowd of bored and hungover looking hipsters with ironic government issue black framed eyeglasses and unflattering/flattering topknot hairdos and pleated skirts and colored tights and expensive but pilled long sweaters and I was staring down at my crotch with my legs spread wide open and I just screamed and everyone looked at me and then everyone looked away very quickly. I actually screamed. I was batting at the stain, trying to see if it was wet or dry, and trying to ascertain whether the stain came from without or within.



I realized I looked crazy, and I left the café and went to the place I was staying and I ran into the door and tore off the beloved pants. The stain was not from the inside. There was nothing inside the pants. If I had shit my pants or gotten my period in my pants or both I would not have been as upset. I own my hole. If something comes out, its on me. But this was different. The stain was from the outside. I must have sat on something – but that didn’t make sense because if I had then the stain would be on the butt area. I must have straddled something – but I really don’t remember doing that, and I think I would remember.



The only answer is that the stain was some kind of a stigmata, a miraculous occurrence on the pants, because they are such nice pants and I love them so much, they must be holy. I thought I could make out the face of Christ in the stain. I don’t know what to do now. I put the pants away and thought about the matter. I guess since it is not an authentic period stain, I can still wear them, but they resemble a period stain so much, that people will just assume that it is a period stain. it’s like a period stain catch-22. There’s also the fact of my age, which should mean automatic immunity to all period stains, but I do look younger than I am, so I guess I am fucked here. I took the pants to my Korean dry cleaner who looked at the pants outside the crotch and said “this blood?” and she looked at the pants inside the crotch and she exclaimed “this not blood!” then she said “$30 – but I don’t know. Maybe.” So now I am just waiting for the pants now to come out of the pants hospital. Oh god. I hope they are ok.






J Brand - L8001 Leather Super Skinny (from www.jbrandjeans.com)

J Brand - L8001 Leather Super Skinny (from www.jbrandjeans.com)







Beauty

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Old dogs listen up! New tricks can be learned! It takes an extra bit of effort, but it’s worth it. I think that beauty is mysterious but fair mistress, and the more you do to keep her, the longer she will stay. There’s a myth that beauty is pain, a harsh dominatrix who desires nothing but your suffering to sate her perverted desires. She wants your blood, your hunger, your money and she gives you back the empty pleasure of your vanity – but I realize that this is not a true being. There is no evil queen, no sleep inducing poison apple, no one is the fairest of all and that’s not the way beauty is. Beauty is more like a friend who has some conditions on the friendship, so not a true real deep friend, more of a shallow one. Like “you give me a ride to the airport, I will pick you up at the airport” kind of buddy. You wash your face at night, I won’t make your face erupt in adult acne in the morning. You use toner on your t-zone, I won’t aggravate your combination skin. You find the right color of lipstick, I will make valet parking attendants bring your car up around first and give it to you for free (of course I insisted on paying – but such is the strength of knowing your own colors).



My mother first informed me of the idea that beauty was pain, as she plucked her own thickly natural eyebrows into the hard, 70s spare lines of the era. “Beauty is pain” she said blankly, as her black eyebrow hairs seemed to turn brown because of the redness of her angry skin underneath her ineffectual Maybelline tweezers. This was a time before Tweezerman and Shu Uemera before we could really pluck those tiny hairs in microscopic earnest. I believed her and ruthlessly tried to avoid beauty for much of my young and then adult life. I am not a masochist. I don’t want pain. And therefore, beauty and I are incompatible. I no longer believe this to be true. To be beautiful is actually to be aware of yourself as art, and to frame your art in a way that is unique to yourself and easy to yourself and fun to yourself.  We are just masterpieces waiting to be framed and mounted and lighted then worshipped. We are worth this, as we are more priceless than anything.



In the last few months I have been practicing this “myself as art” theory, and I have seen a marked improvement in areas that needed a boost, and it hasn’t cost me any more money really. It’s an investment in time, but not a lot, and it’s helped me feel good about myself, which is all we really need on earth, to feel good. To not have dread when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror – which I would do – I would actually feel horror at my own reflection, wishing myself a vampire, wishing myself undead so I would have to endure the image of my ugliness. I don’t feel ugly anymore, and no one has called me that in a very long time (believe me I used to hear it often, maybe more than once a day – seriously!). I am editing my closet and makeup drawers. I am wearing what is attractive on me on my face and body and really only that. Everything I have – its sole purpose is to flatter me, and if it doesn’t, it’s gone. Into a pile that might hopefully flatter someone else, out of my life to welcome another jacket/boot/shirt/scarf/lipstick/eyelash that will realize my beauty further. Make everything work in concert to bring out the beauty in you. Old dogs are the best at learning new tricks because we have been through it all, we know who we are, we know all about it.



Some youtube videos are excellent tutors and teachers. My favorite - Catalina is a genius. She’s Korean and probably could be my daughter. She’s lovely and so smart and also has great tips for skincare. We have similar skin. I have learned a lot from her especially regarding sensitive skin and how to do my eye makeup.



Catalina - Natural Flawless Look

Catalina - Natural Flawless Look

I love these girls – Korean too! park and cube - gorgeous style, photographs – and also Shini is very funny. She’s amazing. She looks like she could be in my family also – there’s a striking familial familiarity. I love her posts.



park & cube

park & cube

This blog – Luxirare -  is also exceptional – in so many ways. I am obsessed with Ji Kim’s design and her cooking and I want everything she posts – either to eat or to wear. I am constantly floored by the creativity of people, and the art which they choose to make from their lives. This blog is really a lesson in how we can live, how we should live – what is possible. We should live every moment like this. I plan to.



LUXIRARE

LUXIRARE







My Jacket

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

We should talk about clothing sometimes. I have beautiful, impeccable, imaginative, innovative and flawless style, no matter how many times I have been featured on worst dressed lists. Every time I get dressed, there is passion and an eye for detail involved. Comfort, class, weather, time of day, time I will be gone from home, texture, hue, appropriate level of dressed up/down, activity, how it looks from every angle while engaging in activity – everything is taken into consideration. There is an art to dressing, and you can feel beautiful and amazing all the time, not just at night, not just on dates, not just for special events, but seriously – every time you wear clothes, every time you put something on, you can be perfect. It’s an opportunity for art.



Every time you put anything on, it is a moment of self expression. Of course there are lazy days, and I have a lot of those, but that doesn’t mean I don’t look good, at least to myself. There are days of wearing the same thing over and over, but if it works, work it. My style obsessions of the moment are high waisted belts, thin hip belts, jeans – but not of the bright crayola variety that are ubiquitous right now – I like a deep black and if it must be a crazy color, I would go with a peacock teal or a lipstick red. If it looks like Chrissy Hynde’s pants, then I want them. I am spending a little more on t-shirts, getting really good kinds that are worn a little, that fit perfectly, that have a softness and sensuality to them, that can be snug enough to wear without a bra (scandalous) and also with a sports bra so they can look good at the gym. I get the ones made to advertise my favorite tattoo studios and artists, as well as books that have gone out of print. T-shirts are important and you don’t need to skimp on them. If you want to skimp, do it with underwear and socks and bras. Normally I just go without that stuff. It’s only about what you can see, in my opinion.



Also, I am going crazy for a tight leather jacket, and you can just have one and wear it every single day all the time and even sleep in it. I have 3 – it’s extravagant I know, but I wear that shit every day. I go back and forth between a thick all saints and a thin all saints, depending on the temperature, and then I have a veda purple/blue suede I got in a sick sale on refinery29. Sick sales are important and you have to take advantage when you can. So that is my leather jacket life.



Alternatively, John Roberts and I got matching Barbour waxed cotton motorcycle jackets that I love so much I had to also get a Barbour bag with dudes wearing the jacket so I could see the jacket when I was wearing it and not looking in the mirror. We wore them together when we were in Glasgow and a hot Glaswegian taxi driver asked us if we were a couple and we in our matching jackets yelled out “NO!” in unison, as if to assume as such was a terrific insult. The jackets are deep black, and John’s is matte and mine is shiny, but they’re both waterproof and warm. The zippers and buttons and snaps and hardware is all gold, and won’t tarnish. It’s soft inside and a little hard outside. If you could have a sexual crush on an item of clothing, it is my Barbour jacket. I keep trying to work the jacket into conversations, as if the jacket applied to the subject. When I talk about my Barbour jacket, my hair stands on end and my face flushes and I start to speak quickly and the words jumble together and I can barely get them out. I love this jacket so much I am actually signing up for motorcycle lessons which everyone in my life opposes, but I don’t care. Anything for my Barbour jacket. Anything.