Girls and Fashion

Almost everything I own, clothes-and-shoes-and-etc-wise, is boxed up and in storage in another country. This is because I went full-retard this year and don’t live anywhere, like, indefinitely, because, I don’t know why. Don’t worry about it; basically it means that all my friends are worried about me and feel sorry for me every day, which is better than anything else. So also don’t even worry about how I’ve been wearing the same three identical black t-shirts and a couple boy-button-downs and the same black suede loafers LITERALLY EVERY DAY and/or the same white Converse LITERALLY EVERY DAY. And that I forget what my “style” might be, really, because I haven’t participated in fashion beyond holding a couple of old Chanel accessories and just rubbing them on my cheeks while I chant something about maybe making some decisions again, sometime. Don’t worry about it; I still remember some stuff.

(This is Girl News about fashion; for Boy News: Boys and Fashion, see Wilbert Cooper’s new biweekly dealio Getting Fresh With Wilbert here, OK?)

“FASH”

Ugh, I guess. Wait, no, don’t. NO, DEFINITELY DON’T. “Fash.” You can say that to me if you’re also willing to wear a printed Prada skirt (ugly/best) wrapped up into a diaper and go to breakfast.

FASHION AS TENSION

I like rules and specificity. I like waking up at 6 AM even though I hate it all the way up from the roiling black-lava center of my personhood, because denial and rigidity just feels gooooood to a masochistic power-bottom, and because the more ordered and bounded-up something is, the more opportunity there is within it for blistering chaos and genuine hedonism and the wilder reaches of whatever, say, sex and art and thought. This is a principle that has been lost on the generation that lives inside the internet and just pukes and pukes and pukes on themselves, but all alone and quietly in their room, who know the history of sneakers but don’t know any fuckings of shits about all the possibilities of tension.

(This is why rules-less city kids with liberal parents can’t even conceptualize the real teenage anarchy of isolated rural fields and suburban basements. Maybe Catholic schoolgirls are the city-kid exceptions here, with their anal-only ideas about appropriate sex. You know? Smoking pot with your parents is only a ruse.)

Anywaysenhauer. That’s why I like fashion, because what else is a multibillion-dollar, multinational industry owned by straight men and operated by women and gays, where the actual products are silky, brocade-y loss leaders for underpants and bargain perfume? Tension. Its players are racist homosexuals; 21-year-old corporate-backed entrepreneurs with baby-doll eyes, fun-sized waists and knobbly horse legs; the most truly beautiful girls within it look like how men look when they dress up like women (this is good and fine and hot, I’m just saying); the adeptness at selling sex (see: magazine advertising; the skins and furs of couture; the boom-boom-boom of fashion’s capital cities, Milan and Paris and New York) but retarded at follow-through (see: an intellectual culture created around teenage-daughters-of; the dead eyes; the absence of men who want to fuck you from the front, at least within fashion’s official borders, not including photographers); the most rarefied and privileged humans on the planet look more exactly the same as all of their friends than any sixth graders and are married into specifically financial-advantageous unions. LIKE, OK? I GUESS SO? It makes no and the most sense, altogether, as a pursuit. Plus, everything is pretty.

FASHION GIRLS

A tall-‘n’-ombre-d handful of my girlfriends work in and around fashion and here is a lil’ random sampling from my Gmails yesterday: “Come hang, whoremouth” and “ROLLERCOASTERS INSPIRED BY MOVIES AND NAMED SOMETHING RANDOM TO AVOID COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT” and “Major love. Major lazer.” Like, see how their golden-flossy emailing-me brains are unconsciously just like “How can I make this textual moment juuuuust cuter?”

TOTEBAGS, PT II

I hate bags generally (instead I walk around with armfuls of things, of jangling car keys and rape whistles and Dior powders and too-big Cats 1000 and a mom-wallet) and I especially hate totebags (like a year ago I wrote this: “Want to hear my new expression for that mood where you are sleepy and allergic to fun and not fit for human consumption? ‘Totebag’”). BUT those Céline trapeze totebags? Those Rochas totes? I want to bukkake-splatter their insideswith millions of lipsticks and Kleenex mini-packs and loose painkillers! I want to so bad!!! Oooooh it makes my area hurt.

COLLABORATIONS

Like, I guess. I’m bored of them, they are boring, I am bored of being bored of them but I’m also bored of being miles too poor for this to be an acceptable perspective. This is a nothing thing, I guess. Except, I just want to tell you the best joke I ever made, which was when my friend Max was like “Miu Miu for Ford?“ and I was like “Akris for 7-11” RIGHT? What would that be LIKE! OK I’m no longer bored: new thing is collabos like Akris for 7-11. “Etro for Mr. Lube.”

THE WEIRDNESS

When fashion is filtered through the Teen Choice Awards and your one friend with a stupid and divorced and indulgent mother and Vogue, it’s so distant and also shitty and such an egregious eye-roll. But then it’s also like, you’re reading old copies of The Face or catch a look on the corner with the right architecture of angles and textures and oh right. A few months ago I returned some mail (long story) to Maison Martin Margiela in LA and, not to be fashion-racist (like, I know enough about the Antwerp Six to have marginal opinions and know MM to be just outside of it, but I don’t know know, and am still a gigglepuss about this incident), but this Princess Lea-plus-Bjork-plus-Diana Vreeland person took the mail from me with this sense of ceremony and I was thinking, like, “Do I bow, here?” and, “Can I just sit down on the floor in my army jacket with cut-off sleeves and literalism-oriented Gucci preferences?” and then just scuttled away to my Volkswagen Golf, you know? It was so scary and perfect!

FW2012

BOOOOOOOTS. Like, your old Docs will be far too dainty for the boot action coming up this fall, you guys. Oooooooh I have a shiver moving slow and dull up my spine, like dry fingertips. Have you ever like bought boots—all that pulling, lacing, sweat, the black leather, ponytails bouncing o’er shoulders with the effort—and not lucid-hallucinated that you were in some dreamy softcore?

SENSIBILITY

I feel more normal smiling big and doing huggles on street corners and ruffling up my friends’ hairs like a wiggly pup, but I feel more right silently shifting my hate-gaze just so, especially at, like, someone’s new and shitty girlfriend. The “costuming,” character, persona stuff of fashion is not just for clothes, dig?

WHIT STILLMAN

Even though interviewing Whit Stillman remains such a heartcrushing letdown that I can’t think about it without my head rolling forward and a single marquise-shaped tear cutting to a firm mouth (but only one, so as to remain nu-WASP-appropriate), and even though Damsels in Distresswas exhausting, his fashion sensibility is so choice.

I keep The Last Days of Disco on my laptop at all times as a fashion resource, because if you have a lot going on in the face (like a nose you broke twice in the ocean, mayhaps?) an Oxford and baby-gold bibelots for day and a black sequined dress for night (BLACK SEQUINS PLUS A DUDE’S TRENCH COAT AT 3 AM IS LIKE ALL OF LIFE) is everything you need. (Excellent Stillman quote from when I said I was with VICE: “I used to skateboard, before Harvard.” Hee!)

BOOB

Sideboob—in particular the sideboob demonstrated by white tank tops and sheer black bras, not to get all college-freshman’s-online-dating-profile on you, but the impenetrable Platonic breasticle ideal of the loose white cotton tank top and tight see-through black bra—has been savagely reappropriated by sportswear, a.k.a. the mainstream fashion industry’s less-attractive middle sibling. Now “sideboob” is a thing to say on the Channel Six News, even though that shit is rightfully ours. Fortunately, sideboob has given way to what I’m called the “double-deep V,” or maybe “bottom boob,” which is the thing of moving the area of interest to the top-stomach, with the boobins up and away like soft, round pillars. All of these dresses and shirts don’t so much as “cut” down halfway to the bellybutton (HAAAA is that still a word?) as they are just absent. I like the bottom-boob because you still get to see a kind of cleavage, or at least the shape and curve of inside-boob, rather than top-boob or side-boob, which is nice, but the added frisson of the rarely-acknowledged top-stomach is just very this minute.

Previously – Stuff Girls Like

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