January = Fashion In Flux

I'm finding it very odd that, despite January being the moment of highest self-awareness among everyone thinking about new resolutions, new looks, new gym memberships, etc., it is the moment of ZERO fashion excitement. Seriously, though it may be pouring buckets here in L.A., there is a serious drought of fashion fabulosity up in this piece.

Borrrr-ring.

In retail, January is the last month of the fiscal year. Therefore, stores mainly spend it trying their hardest to clear their shelves of stuff and raise their yearly sales numbers as much as possible. This year, retail has taken an especially hard hit, so we're seeing sales of not just 30% or 50%, but 70% off--even at established, always-profitable giants like Banana Republic. (Is anyone else sick to death of their emails? Jesus H, enough already.) They're not going to give us a drop of new merch until February; if we want to spend our Christmas cash, they want us to buy up as many clearance cashmere V-necks as possible.
And in magazines, though this phenomenon is irrelevant, I'm still feeling bored. We already started seeing Spring '08 styles on November and December runways and fashion spreads, so January issues with yet more spring florals are kinda been-there-done-that. Why can't we be supplied with gorgeous, revolutionary fashion inspirations at the same time we're all remaking ourselves (or trying) and looking for new magic in the still-unspoiled first weeks of 2008?
The solution, I think, would be to hold off on the Spring fashion spreads until January. I know the runway shows are earlier, so that kind of spoils things, but I still think that I'd like to save the shoots for later. I adore seeing Vogue's creative, frame-worthy interpretations of the runway looks, and they're really an entirely different animal than Style.com's straight runway slideshows. What if we had a month or two to digest the latest slew of looks (or to ignore them, if you're not among the more fashion-addicted) before seeing the resulting magazine eye candy as a reward for making it through New Year's, and as inspiring fuel for our renewed zeal for personal adornment?
Sure, industry folk don't want to waste time and advertising on spent-out shoppers with no spare change left after the holidays. But shouldn't they realize that the best medicine for those wallet-clutchers is a kick of new goods to convince them to open their purses yet again?
Pipe dreams, I'm sure. Until fashion news gets more captivating, I'll keep busy with those 70% off sales :)

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Oh Dear, Again.

Dear Ladies,

Let Alicia Keys teach us all a valuable lesson:

Never, never, never, never, never wear drapy jersey tucked around your nether regions. It is even worse than what I had thought was the worst offender: satin stretched horizontally across the abdomen.

But mercy me, I was wrong. Thank you, Alicia, for sacrificing all personal dignity to impart such a priceless message. This image, burned forever into our horrified retinas, will not be soon forgotten.

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The Latest on Chanel Tattoo Girl

Remember that girl I have class with who has a Chanel logo tattoo behind her ear, just like in the Chanel glasses ad from spring '07? Right, her. Well, finally the other day I maneuvered my way into finding out her reasoning behind the tattoo. And folks, I was shocked. I'd gone along assuming that my classmate had swiped her tattoo from the pictures in an attempt to join their tribe of converts (chief member: Mischa Barton). But when I oh-so-casually asked, "When did you get your tattoo?", she answered..."ABOUT A YEAR AGO." Whoa. This means that she was getting inked when those ads were just a kernel of an idea in a branding expert's brain over at Lagerfeld Central. Not only that, when I said how it was cool that it was the same as in print (oh, I lie), she didn't know what I was talking about. Nope--this girl, who's decided that Chanel is so "her" that she wears its logo 24/7, apparently doesn't even read the fancy fashion magazines where her fave brand, and its advertisements, are featured.

WEIRD.

Here, for incredulity's sake, is another Chanel-phile with the same idea:

She's a RankMyTattoo.com user named AmandaxChanel, and her caption is: "I got this tattoo because Chanel is what inspired me to be a fashion designer. I know its dumb but its what I am passionate about."

STILL WEIRD.

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When Fashion School & Gossip Girl Collide

How convenient that two main occupations of mine of late—digital sketching and Gossip Girl—would convene in such a, well, material fashion. (Ha! Fashion! I am hilarious.)

Interruption: the most ridiculous Sandals Jamaica ad is on TV right now. Sandals, like Michael Scott on The Office took Jan to. So this ad actually has “Time of My Life” as the background song. Who on EARTH is this targeting? Amazing.

Anyway, first, I’ll explain that a key part of fashion design is digital illustration and graphic design. You may think it’s all Project-Runway-style freakouts (speaking of which, how excited am I that P.R. is finally back? SO VERY.) and madly inspired moments but actually, design now involves a lot of painstaking work in various programs written by Adobe. For my Applied Technology class, I have to draw dresses, shoes, what have you, and then lay out pages with backgrounds and color swatches and titles and stuff…all of which has to correspond with the concept of the design. I like designing everything, but jesus it takes forever. Here’s what a finished page looks like, using a photo inspiration and then adapting it:


Second, I’ve started watching the new show Gossip Girl recently. Along with being the next O.C. (in a good way—oh, the adolescent drama! The love triangles and pentagons! The endless catty comments that we wish we’d thought of in high school!), Gossip Girl also takes The O.C.’s place as fantastic fashion spectacle. There’s Blair, preptastic princess extraordinaire, who manages to pull off headbands and ringlets, and then our heroine, Serena, who’s kind of designer bohemian and has hair that is always unbrushed yet totally perfect somehow. I’m sure her wardrobe is calculated by teams of statisticians to make us fall uncontrollably in girl-love with her, and I can’t deny it’s worked. In fact, I KNOW that the wardrobe is at least as calculated as most…because Gossip Girl, after making you covet every $400 Tory Burch striped sequin shift that Serena wears to an ill-fated party, gives you a hyperlink to its ONLINE STORE. Yep, Gossip Girl has its own boutique with links to all the stuff to let you buy our way to Upper-East-Side soap-opera stardom yourself. You can even "browse by brand, character, episode or product"! And THEN you can link to Victoria's Secret looks "inspired by" the characters.

So while I could rattle on about how interesting it is to see how the entertainment and retail industries are coming together via the all-powerful internet, instead I’ll cut to the coincidence: when I visited the Gossip Girl style file deal online (in the name of research, natch), what did I see but the very purse I’d just finished using for my class! I picked it solely because it was easy to draw, but I guess it must be chic, too. At least according to The CW’s statisticians.

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Sunday Style Roundup

Well, hello there.

Preface: We may have fallen off the old "posting"* boat, but hey, we've been otherwise occupied. Often that means someone is in the loo, but in this case, it means that .:tt:. and >rr< have been occupied with things such as Acquiring New Jobs, being Productive Members of Society (Ending World Hunger, Ending Misuse of Terrycloth Pants, etc.). But we have not forgotten entirely about you, gentle reader (oh, Miss Manners), and to that end I've put together a list of my most favorite fashion & style resources on Ye Olde Internets. Even if you just think of these sites as procrastinatory devices rather than fascinating sociological tracts, hey, at least they're marginally more edifying than Perez. Without further ado:
The Sartorialist - The most gracious documenter of street style, in his words, "started The Sartorialist simply to share photos of people that I saw on the streets of New York that I thought looked great. When I worked in the fashion industry (15 years), I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life." This now translates into a gorgeously simple photo blog updated daily from his travels all over, among circles high and low. He gives us thoroughly chic fashion plates and fantastic old men in hats. [see -------->]
GoFugYourself -This indispensable site is the first thing I read after I stare down my horrifying Gmail inbox. The Fug Girls knock fashion offenders neatly off their pedestals with a hearty dose of hilariousness. They're geniuses. It's addictive. I'm sure you know this already.
The New York Times Fashion & Style section - They're pretty on it in terms of mainstream fashion news, and have intelligent reporting on fashion in the real world. Their photo montages of Manhattan folk are fun too (e.g. people wearing galoshes! Or, yellow dresses! Or, white fur! I feel like New Yorkers are actually way more daring with their everyday ensembles than we Angelenos.). Plus, the Style section has articles on media, pop culture, music, blah blah, which are relatively smart. Plus, their wedding reports are unbeatable! Even my very un-cheesy stepmother reads them religiously. And let's not forget the very pretty seasonal "T" magazine they put out about fashion & style. Good times. (Hah! TIMES! I am a master of puns!)
Deeply Superficial - A graduate student of fashion theory writes this catch-all blog about "fashion theory/fashion history/fashion now." My fave combo! I'm excited to find that you can actually study fashion theory in grad school--a dream of mine--and her posts on fashion theory, recent fashion happenings and phenomena (and sample sales!) are neat.
Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture - I received this heinously expensive Scandinavian journal for a year (thanks, Mom) and now can check the super-academic articles online (or, at least, the free previews of them).
Style.com - Duh, I know. But they have all the runway shows, neat articles spotlighting industry darlings or newcomers, and it's where I can check to see things like, oh, what kind of shirt CAN I wear with my trouser-leg jeans?
Fashion Geek - I guess this is a Citysearch blog (weird), but it's got updates on the U.S. fashion scene, snarky Fashion Week reviews, notices of random fun events and music and stuff too. Whoever writes it is amusing and it does provide a nice jumble of vaguely related posts (Marc Jacobs vs Tom Ford in a "nude-off"! Latest weird trends! Gossip from the reporter! Interviews of people on the street!). Kind of like a Gawker of fashion, I guess.

OK, enough for now. I won't admit to any more of the stuff I read regularly for fear of looking like some geek who reads about the industry all day...um...so, I'm off to brave the outside and find some sushi.
xo,
> r r < *My newest favoritest randomest blog that warms the cockles of my grammar-freak heart: the blog of unnecessary quotation marks!

Branding Herself...Like You'd Brand Yer Cattle

Remember these ads from Chanel's recent Spring/Summer campaign? I remember noting the tattoos, vaguely wondering if they were real, concluding that obviously they weren't, briefly pondering the implications of brand logos being tattooed onto bodies, and soon forgetting the whole subject.

Until, that is, I started my latest term at design school and was seated next to a 20ish girl whose hair was pulled back, revealing an identical "CC" tattoo behind her ear. "Huh," I thought, "Chanel is actually selling those temporary tattoos from the ads! Crazy--I can't believe people would actually buy those. I guess their marketing dept. really does know what it's doing." The next week, the girl still had a tat in the same place. "Wow," I thought, impressed, "Those things really last!" Well, dear reader, of course the next week I realized that Chanel has not made its fake tats available at your local Neiman's; no, no, this dedicated chick actually went further than the Chanel models and got the Chanel logo permanently, indelibly inked on her skin. She's not a tat fiend, either; the CC is the only visible mark on her body, telling the world that the very most important message she has to broadcast about herself via her sizzled skin is...Chanel. I, she is saying, AM CHANEL.

Apart from the obvious falsity of this statement, what puzzles me most is that she's not a particularly Chanel-y dresser. Her clothes come from Forever21 and Abercrombie (and I'm not even sure of that because they're just that unmemorable). The big-ass sunglasses pushing her hair back might be Chanel, but she shows no other sign of Coco & Karl's striking, powerful-woman black-&-white vibe. Perhaps her theory goes that if she's got the tattoo, she doesn't actually need the clothes to transmit the Chanel message, whatever she thinks it is. In other words, perhaps the branding has been so effective that she not only believes in the power of the double C, but believes that everyone else does, too. Heck, she may be right--in which case she's saved herself a heck of a lot of money. I prefer to believe, however, that whatever power Chanel has truly lies in the interesting clothes, which is simply what the logos hope to evoke. I dunno, though--the impact of the Ralph Lauren Polo logo is certainly stronger than the polo shirt alone (strong enough for the guy who got the polo pony tattooed on his chest...*).

*click link for article revealing that brand-branding is an actual phenomenon. Sad, or inevitable?

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The Latest Genius Idea I Didn't Think Of

I know y'all remember the Baby-Sitters Club. I think I read all of them up to about #75; at that point, I grew up a little and Ann M. Martin started to foray into wild new worlds of BSC brand extensions ("Super-Special" double-length books! A mystery spinoff series! The movie! Yes, even graphic novels! When did the woman sleep? I bet she eventually got herself a computer program that just inserted key names, Mad-Libs-style, into prefab plotlines to keep the series going.). But I'd been a big fan. I even took the time to sit down and write Ms. Martin a letter once, pqainstakingly explaining all the inaccuracies in her descriptions of Stacey's diabetes. (I received a simpering form letter in response, covered in BSC stickers and with zero mention of my letter's angry corrections.)

Anyway, my favorite thirteen-year-old bab-sitter (wow, THIRTEEN...I could hardly fathom it) was always Claudia. She was so artsy! So cool! So devil-may-care! She made her own earrings and even decorated her hi-tops with freakin' puffy paint! What a role model. Not that I wasn't creative myself--I always chose my own clothes--but I generally landed more on the fashionably questionable side (picture a little girl in pinafores and hot pink Keds) and only dreamed of being some sort of hyper-cool cross between Claudia and Clarissa [Explains It All].

But I'd forgotton those dark years of my life until I came across this most fabulous of fabulous blogs: What Claudia Wore. Kim of Amherst, MA, whoever you are: I envy you. I envy the genius you obviously possess to have come up with the idea, and I envy the power you have over legions of twentysomething female readers to conjure up memories of our reverence for Claudia's ensembles, alongside burning, burning shame at realizing how utterly horrifying said ensembles were. Thank god most of us weren't as crafty as ole Claud, or else the 80s might have been just that much worse.

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Does This Make Computer Games Cool, or Fashion Dorky??

Remember when I wrote about LC's virtual clothing line for the Virtual Hills game? Apparently, she's not the only one with that idea....


Ever in search of the newest ways to promote their wares, labels such as Stella McCartney, Lacoste, and, more recently, H&M, are venturing out of real-world practices and reaching out to what may become greener marketing pastures — the digital lifestyle simulators of Second Life and The Sims.

Steve Lubomski, H&M's US advertising director who spearheaded the fashion retailer's collaboration with The Sims this summer, proclaims that "The virtual world is definitely the new marketing frontier."

A solution for those computer nerds who may not be so nerdy? I still find the whole Second Life phenomenon quite creepy, but obviously those designers have gotten over the heebie-jeebies and hopped on the money train. Apparently there's even a designer or three who makes her LIVING designing virtual gear. I'm just imagining trying to explain this to my 93-year-old grandmother, who used to work at a clothing manufacturer in Manhattan, which was about as far from "virtual" as you could get. I don't think she'd even believe me.

Salmon and Celebrities

All right, so, yesterday Jenni and I had a date to make a delicious dinner. It was going to be a leisurely process--cosy little grocery shopping trip, a few glasses of wine, perhaps some romantic music to cook by--but my school day ended up three hours longer than it was supposed to have been, so we had to expedite the process. It's a long story, so I'll just skip to the food.

HA HA HA HA. Yeah right--it's not that long a story, and it's by FAR the most blog-worthy topic (sorry, Jenni). So recipes, just shut up and wait your freakin' turn--I have CELEB GUSHING to do here.
Okay, so remember Nick from last season's Project Runway? The super nice sweet one who never said anything (terribly) bitchy except sometimes in the solo confessional-style parts? With the snappy wardrobe and little faux-hawk? The one who teaches at my school? Oh right, that one. Whether you remember him or not--though you SHOULD, since anyone worth anything should have been watching P.R. and commiting every detail to memory since Episode One--the point is that as I was sitting in Mrs. Something-or-other's Fundamentals of Sketching class yesterday afternoon, I realized that if I did a little scheduling magic, I COULD BE IN NICK'S CLASS INSTEAD. And that, kids, is what I did. So three short hours later I found myself making big eyes at Nick himself, asking for permission to join his roster (success!), and listening to him call everyone "honey" in the most flamboyant possible way (it seems that, since P.R., he's turned up the volume on the flamitude.). He also managed to name-drop more substances that he'd like to ingest in the name of relaxation (Xanax, Jager--since when is that relaxing?--, margaritas, and at least a few others) than I'd have imagined possible in one three-hour class. Anyway, despite all the show, he looks to be a really effective teacher. He guided us through making our own croquis (sketching model) and assigned an armload of homework (never mind the armload of actual materials for the class...I'll definitely be in serious need of a chiropractor soon).

And for the other celeb, or something: I was so absorbed in Nick and his spiel that I didn't even notice that the (in)famous Lauren from "The Hills"was sitting in the seat across from mine, overly tan, tapping away at her sidekick. Woo. We all had to sign release forms saying that we don't mind if MTV uses our images, words, "and any lyrics we may sing on tape" for their own skeezy purposes. I can't decide whether having a chance appearance on "The Hills" will be funny or just bad. Oh, as for LC--hard to tell What She's Really Like. The only glimmer I saw was when, standing in line, another girl introduced herself to me and LC as Valentine. LC's reaction: "That's a neat name." Silence. Ooookay.

ANYWAY! On to the food! After class, I jumped on the bus, picked up salmon and spinach at Trader Joe's, and then got Jenni (with neato oyster mushrooms and Japanese eggplants in hand). We made a delish vegetable sautee:
-ginger, onions & garlic sauteed in oil
-oyster mushrooms & normal mushrooms added
-soy sauce and fresh spinach added & cooked just until spinach wilted.
All of the above served over sauteed eggplant rounds, next to:
-salmon fillets, sauteed in sesame oil with a black pepper & sesame-seed crust. SO YUM.

Speaking of salmon, I just read a neat tip in Russ Parsons's book: to cook salmon so that the skin is crispy and good instead of slimy, "use the back of a knife to 'squeegee' the skin of the salmon until you see moisture come out and collect on the knife. Wipe the knife and the salmon dry with paper towels. Repeat until moisture no longer appears. Cook skin side down, and flip over only at end." Huh. Neat.

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