The Unending Cycle Of Hipster Fashion

Did you see this chart on Jezebel? I can’t decide if it’s funny or tragic. What do you think?

Notable (and Not So Notable) Quotables

I haven’t had the time to write a proper blog post lately – spending my hours, as I’ve been, wrestling with an unruly Introduction chapter – but I did want to share these two quotes with you. The first, I love. The second, not so much.

The beloved quote comes from Jenna at Jezebel:

I guess I can now exclusively reveal that not only was I not among the bloggers asked to vote on the CFDA Awards, nobody at Jezebel even rated an invitation. But such is the epic struggle for meaning when you write for a little blog with an audience bigger than Vogue‘s.

I absolutely love the sass here. I love that Jezebel’s audience is bigger than Vogue’s (not surprising but still somehow surprising). And I love that Jenna is calling out the fashion stalwarts of the CFDA and of Vogue who didn’t invite anyone from Jezebel because – as I read it – they know Jezebel is a threat to the fashion establishment. And indeed, all smart, analytical, and feisty women are threats to the Establishment . . . and that’s the way we like it.

The other quote comes from Ce Ce Chin of the shoe label 80%20. When asked, “What trends are you ready to see retired?” Chin responds thusly:

I think it’s really chic to have no tattoos.

Chin also links tattoos and piercing to Ed Hardy shirts which only adds to my crankiness about this quote.

I’m not taking this personally. I’m really not. Yes, I have tattoos. Yes, I’ve publicly declared (on our Facebook wall**) my abhorrence for Ed Hardy shirts, hoodies, etc. (as well as Uggs, especially when worn in the summer but really all seasons). What I find irritating about this quote is Chin’s perspective (shared by far too many) that tattoos are a trend. And it is precisely this perspective that leads to the dreaded “trendy tattoo.”

I want to be clear – I don’t care if you have tattoos or not. Get them, don’t get them. Whatever. It’s Chin’s linking tattoos to Ed Hardy and her characterization of them as a trend (like Ed Hardy) that makes me cranky.

** Our Facebook wall is full of side conversations that are both informative and funny. If you haven’t joined our Facebook page, please do – also, we’d like to reach our goal of 1000 “likers”!

Commitments to Collaborations, or The Week That Was Awesome (Thanks to You)

Image by Cristy Road (http://www.croadcore.org/)

In some ways Threadbared often feels more tangible to us than our “real” publications, which tend to involve long stretches of isolation (writing, writing, writing) and prolonged periods of anticipation (waiting, waiting, waiting). So the sorts of collaboration we pursue in this space, and the forms of immediacy it affords us, are part of our efforts to “think otherwise,” as feminist scholars committed to social justice as well as cultural critique.

Nothing we’ve done so far, however, has approached the awesomeness that occurred in the last week. In an incredible chain of collaboration and support, I sent Alana a note asking if she might be interested in expanding upon some of her thoughts on wearable technologies and “cyborg” fashions, mentioned just briefly in a comment she made to the information studies blog Arcades Collaborative; Alana subsequently composed for us a brilliant and nuanced essay prompted by her initial encounter with Jessica Floeh’s designs for a line of insulin pump accessories called Hanky Pancreas; and Jezebel’s Jenna loved this essay, and agreed to syndicate it for a much broader audience than we get here. The Jezebel comments to Alana’s essay and Jessica’s designs are thoughtful, heartfelt, and otherwise truly moving, and well worth reading through. And thanks to the enormously huge platform that is Jezebel, and the crowd-sourcing powers of the internets, Hanky Pancreas is now the most e-mailed post on Coco Perez, and receiving love and much-deserved attention from far-flung quarters.

Today, we feel pretty good about Threadbared, but more importantly, about our commitment to collaboration as both an intellectual and political mode of being in the world. As Alana said in a message to me, “Amazing when words come to matter in these real, clear ways and we get to watch it happen.” So thank you to all our readers and interlocutors — together, we made The Week That Was Awesome.

Orange You A Heel

This is a purely practical post, people. I need recommendations for some kind of glue strong enough for shoes, and especially heels. Above are a pair of vintage ’60s shoes with lucite heels that are in serious danger. I took them to a local shoe repair shop, hoping they had adhesives stronger than what I had at home (both Shoe Goo and Superglue), but the heels fell apart pretty much immediately upon standing. This is why I usually save my boots and shoes in need of care for trips to Oakland, but the pairs are piling up. I have another vintage pair of cut-out leather sandals that are escaping from their soles! Straps on some red silk and wooden wedges have come undone! What now? Do I need to go toward an industrial-strength epoxy? Or is my years-old tube of Shoe Goo simply in need of replacement?

I See Pyramids in Your Eyes

I’m slammed this week, and though I do have some real posts around here somewhere, I’m going with this amazing eBay auction for an original copy (smilingly well aware of all the tensions holding those two terms together) of Madonna’s amazing jacket from 1985′s Desperately Seeking Susan, still her best performance on film to date. Liz from No Good For Me had been shaking her digital fist at the fates that robbed her of the opportunity to purchase this replica –the limited-time offer discovered while “flipping” through back issues of Spin, for just $54.95! — when a reader offered to sell it to her for five million, and then put it on eBay instead.

Tragically, it’s a size L, which is too big for me. But this does make think that perhaps if I want it enough, the Internetz will offer up to me another sartorial miracle. In the meanwhile, those of you who’ve been desperately searching for this jacket, the bidding war is on!

Time Travel Through A Magic Box with the Fake Sartorialist

The Fake Sartorialist put Minh-Ha and I into his Magic Box and voila — we are Fake Sartorialized, complete with a small story about our time-traveling research forays! Minh-Ha of course wrote about the dust-up between the Sartorialist and the Fake Sartorialist some weeks ago (as she brilliantly points out, “the ‘fake’ in the Fake Sartorialist stands for ‘the little guy’ against the cultural and social giants that the Sartorialist aligns himself with and represents. Fakeness sets right and secures the democratic socioeconomic relations the Internet is supposed to foment”). Having enjoyed his work, I jumped at the chance to be rendered otherwise when I noticed that he’s inviting submissions. (You can send a photograph to get transformed too!)

I’m sure Minh-Ha will have smart things to say about the “democraticization of fashion” here (gushing on the phone about the story’s setting –hanging out with Alexander Graham Bell– Minh-Ha says, “It’s great that we’re hanging out with someone who invented a communication technology!”), but I’m still at the “Yippeee!” phase (in real life I would totally wear that outfit, with the brocade and the tweed and the mushroom-turned-inside-out hat all at once).  Thank you, Eduardo!

Dopey Fashion Poses: Lady Gaga Edition

A Jezebel reader, inspired by the “Dopey Fashion Poses” we posted (and then Jezebel reposted), created this Lady Gaga Edition. Thoughts?

Required Reading?

Our foray into the Sassy magazine vault last weekend provoked much Sassy love and memories from our readers, including Jenna at Jezebel. Also, in an uncanny moment of blog kismet, I discovered that Tavi Gevinson was also waxing rhapsodic for Sassy the same day I posted “Dopey Fashion Poses”! (I almost wrote, waxing nostalgic but as Dodai reminds, “Tavi was born in 1997; Sassy ceased publication in 1995.”)

Maybe Tavi saw our post? Or maybe there’s a Sassy force building energy in the universe?  I don’t know. But it got me thinking about the power of really good magazines and how I’ve been missing that for far too long. Last week, I had to discontinue my subscriptions to Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle – because enough’s enough. I’m so tired of flipping through magazines just because they land in my mailbox and tossing them into the recycle bin 30 minutes later. I’m keeping Teen Vogue (for now) and New York magazine (what would I do without the approval matrix?). But I’m in need of new reading materials with a fashion, style, and/or design focus!

The much-hyped Gentlewoman magazine (the sister magazine to Fantastic Man) finally arrived in the U.S. after 6 months of anticipation among bloggers, editors, and other fashion enthusiasts. While I’m still not sure I’d buy it (much less shell out the overseas subscription cost), like so many others, I do want a flick-through.

But what else to read?? What print/online magazines do you love? And why?

By the way, for those still pining over Sassy - I discovered that you can buy Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer’s book, How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, on Amazon for about $3. Also, listen to this NPR interview with Jesella and Meltzer.

Abercrombie & Fitch Blacklisted

As if we needed another reason to boycott Abercrombie & Fitch, Corporate Responsibility Magazine names A&F on its blacklist of “corporate villains.” According to this New York Times article, “To compile both its ‘best’ and its ‘worst’ list, the magazine scored companies from the Russell 1000 index of large-capitalization stocks on 349 data points in categories like financial, governance and human rights.” When Dirk Olin, editor in chief of the magazine, contacted the blacklisted companies for a comment, they declined. No surprise there.

“Dopey Fashion Poses”

We’re not in the habit of posting on the weekends but this seems so perfectly suited for slow lazy Sunday perusing. I don’t doubt that many of you will remember this classic spread from the archives of Sassy magazine, which by the way was the first magazine subscription I was allowed to have.

Here’s Lucky magazine’s current Creative Director Andrea Linett doing “Dopey Fashion Poses.” My favorite, then and now, is “the menstrual cramp” or what I like to call “PMS chic”!