Shoes #2
I have been fighting my shopping restraints left (foot) and right. Bought a pair of shorts (egads!) and flats for the summer. But I'm finished now, and back to my sartorial strictures. Hey, it's a recession, should be easy enough. Having almost weakened and bought a pair of completely indulgent Terra Plana ecofriendly heels on sale at a favourite local boutique, I decided to get the momentary shoe obsession out of my system by painting some glam heels instead. Which I'll soon be posting on my new ETSY shop.
Bandeau Solution
Dear dELiA*s,*
Thank you for sending me an ugly, heart print, ill-fitting halter tank suit, instead of the suit top I ordered. Thanks for being so charmingly unhelpful on the phone, after taking two weeks to ship the item in the first place. Thanks for refusing me the honour of speaking to your supervisor after I politely inquired as to whether or not there was a higher authority on-site who had a brain. I know you generally sell your clothes to suburban preteens who won't quibble with your incompetent practices, and perhaps I should blame myself for tangling with you in the first place, dELiA, but your business is all wet. And summer's half over.
* I should have known the whole thing was ill-fated from the two cute by half way you write you your name, though you admirably restrained from dotting your eye with a heart.
Good Sport
It was only after seeing The Dress' dad's coordinated, wick-away workout wear that The Dress began to comprehend the tattiness of her own jogging togs. She'd never coveted Lululemonleggings or jewel-encrusted sports bras, but seeing the orange burst of sporty freshness (pre-workout, anyway) of Dress Pere's exercise attire, the dowdy frock herself was consumed with her first truly consumerist desire in quite some time. She wanted a sport suit and she wanted one pronto. Instead, she allowed herself the indulgence of a new swimsuit, her pool attire having revealed itself to be embarrassingly transparent upon close inspection.
Frown Upon Crown
Can a grown woman really get away with a tiara? A great friend and mentor proffered this exquisite vintage tiara, but I'm just not sure I can pull it off without feeling like Tinkerbell.
On Groupthink
The Dress' mother thinks that giving people tote bags full of snacks and treats when they arrive at their hotel room to attend a wedding is a nice thing. The Dress isn't sure it's necessary. But Mother Frock found a supplier of ecobags in Deerfield Beach, and the deal was done. Now The Dress and The Suit have the fun and trying task of coming up with a design that will look good on a swatch of bag that folds itself in half. Something palindromic? Something bilingual? Something glib and insouciant but not so much so that The Suit's Nan wouldn't feel comfortable stepping out to a bridge game with said bag on her arm?
Eschewing official crowdsourcing, we engaged in a little bar-sourcing last night, wherein all parties sketched their best ideas on soggy cocktail napkins. Things sound better when you're soused, as the morning revealed, but parties Dress and Suit feel confident that something clever will manifest itself. That said, we welcome your suggestions.
Vintage Bride
This blog began with a crude dream of a goal - to not buy any new clothes until The Dress and Suit's wedding, at which time a wedding gown would be fair game. Well, the day's almost here, and though The Dress and a gaggle of friendly frocks had a Saturday full of appointments at various meringue shops, the 'special' dress was purchased at stop #1, a basement vintage shop in Mirvish Village. The gown dates back to 1930 and hails from Troy, New York. And it's the prettiest. What's more, the 'get of jail card' that was to be the end of the self-imposed no-shopping stricture was all but torn up. The Dress no longer wants new dresses, though she did flirt with the idea of getting a dress made by a lovely local designer.
Of course, there may be a time and place for new things here and there, but for now The Dress will keep heading towards tomorrow in yesterday's duds.
Hat Shtick
It goes thus:
• I buy a hat.
• It sits in my closet for a few weeks while I build up the fortitude to don it.
• I put it on.
• I leave the house.
(ten minutes elapse)
• I feel like Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake and an atonal American Idol contender all smushed into one trying too hard to be stylishly askew fedora.
• I de-hat.
- but look how nicely this woman pulls it off?
Off the Cuff!
The Dress had to go to coldest Winnipeg. While there, she wanted to pick up something for The Suit. Nothing superfluous, more a little prairie product that The Suit could put to daily use. She saw some lovely typewriter cuff links but thought the price tag of $95 seemed a bit steep. A cursory scan of the old internets revealed the availability of said links (get it? a link to a link!) for much, much less. What's an appropriate markup, The Dress wondered? Surely not 300%. Our anthropomorphosized frock told herself not to get keyed up, but to instead be glad that she'd backspaced out of purchasing such an inflated gift.
Stopping Shopping
Some Friday links:
• The Dress talks sartorial abstinence.
• Do's and Don'ts televised. Know what's great about Sarah Silverman? She's not afraid of her fuzz. If the Dress could take back those grade school years of attempting to clamp down on her temple fuzzies with an industrial size can of Aquanet, she would, in a frizzy heartbeat.
Knot Appropriate
Why would Goody adopt the tagline 'So Fresh' for their brushes and bobby pins? Fresh is toner, Fresh is mouthwash, Fresh is a man on the street who calls you baby when you are, in fact, a grown woman. But Fresh is not a hairbrush, pulling stray strands from your head before bed. Nor is it a bobby pin, gently supporting a weighty pony tail.
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Percentages of the Truth
On a scale of one to 100, how much truth do we expect from our public figures? In confessing his affair with Rielle Hunter, John Edwards said "being 99% honest is no longer enough." That one per cent falsehood contained "the misconduct" that "took place for a short period in 2006", but is that it? If you were to tabulate all of the former candidate's speeches, articles, blog posts, podcasts, talking points, debate transcripts and off-camera banter, how many more serious errors in judgment could be crammed into that bottom percentile? Maybe his father was only a millworker 99% of the year; he could have been running the place for the other 3.65 days. Perhaps there are only 1.98 Americas, but he rounded up for the sake of a stirring stump speech. Maybe Four Trials, the book that vaunted him into the Senate, falls 0.04 of a trial short of its title.
Even if those biographical details fall short of perfection, John Edwards is still an honest man, give or take a point. Sure, he's less pure than Ivory Soap, but only by 44/100ths of a percent. Would that fraction really make you think twice in the drugstore and/or polling booth? When painted into a factual corner,who among us hasn't told 0.56% of a lie?
And though politicians aren't often trusted with the truth, compare Edwards's revelation with that of David Sedaris. The essayist was taken to task for calling his humorous remembrances of the past non-fiction, and he was unapologetic. As he told Time magazine, "when I write something, I put it on a scale. And if it's 97% true, I think that's true enough. I'm not going to call it fiction because 3% of it isn't true." To extrapolate, that means you're three times more likely to find a falsehood in Barrel Fever than in Edwards's January concession speech in New Orleans.
Of course, this is all relative. Any teacher will tell you that either 97% or 99% is a high A, and together with solid extracurriculars and a slightly padded resume, that should get you into the college of your choice. George W. Bush famously sailed through Yale with a gentleman's C, which these days means a GPA of 2.00 on a scale of 4. When you're sitting at 50%, the high nineties look pretty close to perfection.
The reason Edwards calculated his honesty in percentage form in the first place was likely because of his occupation: Modern politicians are famously poll driven, and margins of error on most polls run close to three percent. While he's admitted the affair was a mistake, by those standards his lie was well within the acceptable wiggle room. Well outside the margins, however, is Howard Wolfson's claim that Hillary Clinton, his candidate, would have been the Democratic presidential nominee had Edwards been 100% truthful from the beginning. As Jon Cohen writes on the Washington Post's website, 43% of Edwards supporters in Iowa said Barack Obama was their second choice, while only 23% chose Clinton. Once you're talking numbers like that, you can be 99% sure that one percentage point wouldn't have made a difference.
And then there's the biologist's perspective. In 2005, a sequencing of the chimpanzee genome found it to be 96% identical to the human DNA sequence. This did not result in a reissue of Jonathan Marks' 2002 book What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes, so apparently the 2% margin of error is forgivable. That lets Edwards off the hook, and Sedaris comes pretty close. Think of it this way: The author is nearer to the complete truth than homo sapiens are to their closest cousins in the animal kingdom. That 4% genetic difference means that, like the rest of of us, he's only human.
The Second Mr. Ciccone?
Is Madonna about to dump the overrated Mr. Ritchie (surely the Catholic Church can annul, especially if Vatican cinemas screened Swept Away)? Perhaps not, but she was looking pretty chummy with Eugene Hutz, lead singer of Gogol Bordello, a premium dancer, the only redeeming feature of Everything is Illuminated and the star of her new film Filth and Wisdom. Hutz plays a cross-dressing philosopher-dominatrix (dominator?) in the London-set film, which failed to wow the Berlin filmfest. This couldn't possibly be Eugene's fault, as he has a terrific moustache, deft comic timing and, in the above photo, is wearing a slingshot around his neck.
Snooze You Can Use
In this new feature, respected sleep psychologist Theodore Splutz, a
visiting professor at the University of Northern Ontario, will use
both neo-Jungian research and a mother's intuition to explain what
common dreams mean. Is it true that there's nothing more boring than
listening to another person's dreams? Read on to find out!
The dream I'm back in school, and it's the end of the term. It turns
out that I forgot to drop that Introduction to Conversational Finnish
class, and now I have to take the final exam, which consists of both a
written test and a vat of pickled herring. I am extremely nervous and
wake up in a cold sweat.
What does it mean? The exam dream is quite common, and recent research
suggests it means your eavestroughs need cleaning.The herring
angle is of particular interest and may represent a breakthrough in
your unconscious life. My guess is the free-floating anxiety you have
over alarmist reports about mercury levels in seafood has found its
home here.
The dream I am falling through the air, but wake up just before I hit
the ground. Also, I am strapped to Jack Nicholson.
What does it mean? Your hatred of dirigibles has somehow grafted
itself to a coming attraction for The Bucket List.
The dream All my teeth fall out, and for some reason I take them to
the bank to cash them in. I am told they are on par with the U.S.
dollar but not quite as valuable as the Euro and advised to keep
flossing.
What does it mean?
You fear being dinged by astronomical ATM fees, and
this fear is legitimate. Call your financial institution today and
demand their best rate. This is not always advertised!
The dream I am able to fly, but am chased around the sky by irate
Canada geese. When I wake up in the dream, the geese are at the foot
of my bed, but now they are quite jovial. When I wake up in real life,
I find I have overslept.
What does it mean? The geese motif is surprising, so I took the
opportunity to show it to some bright lights in the biology
department. They informed me that these majestic creatures can be
quite ornery if you invade their personal space. I would leave them
alone in the future.
The dream I am riding a high-speed train in a foreign country when I
realize I have forgotten my clothes.
What does it mean? You despise your current wardrobe. Go buy new
clothes, preferably using a train to get to the store. Avoid synthetic
fibers and anything with extraneous buttons.
Divided By A Common Language
What do you suppose British PM Gordon Brown and David Beckham discussed in their hour-long meeting today? A number of subjects, among them:
• How much of a tie pattern is too much?
• Plans to relaunch the Spice Girls as New Spice, while quietly abandoning the group's long devotion to common ownership of the means of production.
• Reiterating their commitment to a two-state solution for Guy Ritchie's career.
• Can we just call it soccer? It would be so much easier for Brooklyn and Romeo that way.
DigiAbs
Who needs sit ups when your midriff can be firmed up in post-production? Ray Winstone, a terrific British thespian who let it all hang out in Sexy Beast, is in fine form as Beowulf thanks to the boys down in the lab. Given last week's news in praise of spare tires, this may be the wave of the future. Too bad it didn't come soon enough for Ms. Spears and her analog, spray-on abs.
How Can I Compete?
Everything was going fine on this half of the site until we discovered Jason Ashley Wright, fashion blogger over at the Tulsa World. Seeing his work made us realize how Caroline Miller must have felt when Adam Moss took over New York magazine and made it interesting. How do you drag yourself out of bed each morning when you know you're up against such profundities as this?
I typically dread Tuesday mornings.
For starters, I’m not an a.m. individual, unless you’re talking 1 a.m. or so. From there, it’s the fear of checking my voice mail on Tuesdays after a column runs in the paper. I could’ve written something innocuous – that tends to be an adequate adjective, actually, if you’ll pardon the assonance. Still, someone will call to complain about a “the” being out of place (although I love me some English critics, especially teachers).
Today’s wrist slap came from someone who chastised me for using the C word. In case I offend someone on here, it’s a four-letter noun that rhymes with “trap.” Got me? Anyway, I apologize if others were offended.
Seriously, though: Can you imagine being the fashion reporter for the Tulsa World? Here's to you, Jason Ashley! And for you, I will soldier onward!
Germans Say The Nicest Things
We always liked former German chancellor Gerard Schröder. For starters, the German press calls him "Audi Man" because he's been married four times (Get it? Oh, Teutonic humour!)
And then there's his temper, which was on full display when he went to court over a press report that he dyes his hair. For the record: ""Whoever suggests I'm coloring my hair is suggesting that I am an established liar."
And now there are the salacious bits from a new book by Alistair Campbell, former right-hand man to Tony Blair. He quotes the former British PM as saying, after a meeting with Schröder, that "It's not much fun having your balls squeezed by a German who's being wound up by a Frenchman."
Who can disagree with that?
Colour Coordinated
Whenever we see carefully stage-managed events like today's transfer of power in the U.K., we wonder about the clothing negotiations. If both Tony and Gordie wore red ties, the headlines would read "Same old, same old." And yet red is Labour's colour, so who gets to wear it? We're reminded of the U.S. Presidential debate back in 2000 when Gore and Bush both showed up in the classic blue suit/ white shirt/ red tie combo, a faux pas that likely threw a few hundred votes to Nader, a true sartorial alternative. In the end, letting Brown wear light blue works well as a sop to Tory-leaning voters. Genius!
Worldwide Pants
It's not often that shoddy drycleaning service makes the news. We have (had) a nice shirt that our drycleaner butchered with a huge, Frankenstein-like stitch over a minor tear. Boo. Still, a multimillion dollar lawsuit seems like an overreaction.
Schlub Chic
Karl Lagerfeld debuted his new collection during Chanel's 2007/8 Autumn-Winter Pret-a-Porter show in Tokyo this week, and among the pieces was this excellent penguin sweater. Now, where have we seen this before? Ah yes, on one of the fat ladies who works on the second floor of our suburban office park. If memory serves, she was waiting in line for the Festive Lunch at the bafeteria. Fashion!
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