What the young, hip political woman is wearing

Halle by Kate Spade

[T]he Kate Spade wedge heels are not just one candidate’s shoes. They seem to be the shoes of a circle of younger women aspiring to power or already in it, women directly and indirectly passing on to one another ways of navigating the particular challenges of being a woman in the public eye. A woman must look put-together, but not as if she is a slave to fashion; she must look groomed, but never be spotted grooming.

Not for nothing, but if the NYT is gonna devote an article to a shoe would it kill them to show a picture of said shoe? A better picture than this, that is.

Did Rachel Cover This Site Already?

The Sartorialist.

What the well-dress Obama supporter could be wearing

Unfortunately, the $10 Barack and Michelle Obama hairclips are sold out.

But fashion-conscious Obama supporters can always opt for the Obama cheerleading outfit shown by Parisian designer Sonia Rykiel or a neon bright dress by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

ADDED: Where Sarah Palin got her her Hockey Mom hair.

Via NY Mag.

Breasts are out

The fashion world has never had much use for them. Luckily, they're not completely obsolete. In addition to their traditional function, you can also use them to make soap.

Fashion tribes

Everyone looks like everyone else.

Dutch photographer Ari Versluis ... has spent the last 14 years documenting the disconnection between our human desire to feel unique while also belonging to a greater whole. Since 1994, he and his stylist, Ellie Uyttenbroek, have travelled the world seeking to document the dress codes of different social and cultural groups. What they discovered was a series of modern fashion tribes - people who dress the same, often without even realising it.

In Beijing, they found students wearing brightly coloured tracksuits and double-strapped rucksacks. In Bordeaux, they photographed a series of housewives in the same subconscious uniform of dreary beige dresses carrying capacious handbags. In Rotterdam, it was young men in graphic-print hooded tops, each one posing with the same slouched shoulders and sulky stares. In Praia, Cape Verde, they sought out the elderly men with flat caps and high-waisted trousers who looked like extras from Buena Vista Social Club

So true: 'Men are not mugs'

Linda Grant:

Here is a picture from the Prada menswear show AW8. If you were to take a shirt and slit it down the back and then gird it with some horizontal braces and put it on Agyness Deane, I can guarantee that two things would happen: a) Victoria Beckham would be wearing the self-same shirt the following week b) a month later I would be standing on the tube looking at hordes of teenage girls shivering with cold backs.

And yet I can also guarantee that you are not going to see this shirt on anyone. You will, in fact, never see it again. Why? Because men are not mugs. They don't wear stuff like this, they get women to wear stuff like this.

And yet, I don't agree with this assertion:

The extraordinary conservatism of men and their clothing is a twentieth century phenomenon. For a thousand years men dressed as peacocks. Now they don't. They dress for function. With some colour sense. Personally I find it quite boring, but perhaps it says something about a crisis of masculinity as a response to feminism - butch it out.

If men stopped dressing like peacocks it's not a response to feminism, but rather because men's clothing reached its apotheosis with the suit.

Cary Grant was the perfect man in the perfect suit.



But Fred Astaire, a man conspicuously without Grant's obvious physical perfection, knew how to wear a suit.



Brit Hume isn't the world's most handsome man, but he always looks well turned out, thanks to his suits.



The Duke of Windsor was, basically, nothing but a suit. Or rather, many suits. And a knot.



There is nothing more perfect than a man in a suit. Any man. You can take the most loathsome specimen off the street,



Pop him in a suit and all of a sudden he looks decent, even desirable.

I win! I win!

For building the best outfit in the Manolo's Build the Outfit #8. Here's the winning entry:

For the Manolo it was the very colorful short dress that made this outfit. Tall, dark, and handsome boots like these require a the short dress, so that the tiniest bit of thigh might be shown. The splash of color here enlivens the boots and makes what could be somber, more festive.

The honor would have been enough, but the $100 gift certificate at heels.com makes this victory even sweeter. Mommy really does need a new pair of shoes.

Just the thing to wear to today's peace talks

A £3,000 keffiyeh. Although, to be honest, I'm not sure what makes this a keffiyeh as opposed to a square scarf folded and tied like a bib. It doesn't come in the Yasser Arafat table-cloth print, after all.

What the well-dressed woman was wearing

Circa 1939. From The Women, which is a B&W movie, except for this part, when it turns to glorious technicolor. It's like when Dorothy enters Oz, only with models instead of munchkins. I wish this included the fashion show's introduction by Madame XXX, who explains that she's the ladies' "cicerone to fashionland." She then goes on to announce the revolutionary nature of this show in which models imitate the "rhythmic movement of everyday life" so one can "study the flow of the new line as it responds to the everchanging flow of the female form divine."

Grace Kelly's clothes

Princess Grace's clothes to be sold at auction.

The New York exhibition will feature, among other items, the dress that Grace wore when she first met Prince Rainier, as well as never-before-seen photographs and films of Princess Grace with her children, His Serene Highness Prince Albert II; Caroline, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Hanover; and Her Serene Highness Princess Stéphanie.

Grace's wholesome yet sophisticated look — neat twinsets, full skirts, and pearls — was perfect for the 1950s. It even caught the eye of fashion designer Oleg Cassini, to whom she was unofficially engaged before she met Prince Rainier. In films such as Rear Window, in which she played a fashion insider with close ties to Bazaar, Grace cemented her place in history as a style icon. "I believe that her style was very inspiring during her movie-star period," Valentino tells Bazaar.

Not really handbags

Ankle purses from Chanel. Because it's so convenient to keep your cash by your foot.

Those jeans aren't sagging

When you pull your jeans below your buttocks and belt them there, that's not sagging.



I actually hadn't seen this particular style in a couple of years. Then, a couple weeks ago, I saw a grown man (he must have been at least 35) sporting this look. It's one thing for a 15-year-old to adopt this look, but grown men are supposed to know better. And this guy wasn't merely displaying his backside: His trousers were pulled down in the front, too. Perhaps he has bladder trouble and needs to have split-second access to his member?

Following a pattern of past fashion bans, the sagging prohibitions are seen by some as racially motivated because the wearers are young, predominantly African-American men.

Yet, this legislation has been proposed largely by African-American officials. It may speak to a generation gap. Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University and the author of “Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip Hop,” said, “They’ve bought the myth that sagging pants represents an offensive lifestyle which leads to destructive behavior.”

I, for one, don't care about anyone's lifestyle. I just don't want to see his underwear.

Stop them before they strike again

The makers of Crocs plan to unveil a clothing line made with the same material as their gruesome plastic shoes.

At a fashion show in Las Vegas this week, Crocs will unveil a range of T-shirts, mens' work shirts and children's shorts, trousers and skirts. The clothes will go on sale in America in October and they will reach British shops next year. Womenswear will follow in 2008 - the spokeswoman said: "Men's and children's clothes are a bit less complicated. Waiting until 2008 allows us to take time over our women's fashion range."

No good can come of this.

Adventures in pandering

Senate ponders bill to give fashion designers copyright protection, led by chief Senate panderer, Chuck Schumer.

“Designers spend countless hours doing and redoing, testing, creating, thinking, and then some counterfeiter comes along and just takes it away,” said Mr. Schumer. “It’s stealing, plain and simple.”

People give her shawls

Joyce Carol Oates:

“I guess I must look like someone who needs a shawl,” she said in the deadpan in which all her jokes are delivered, and which has led the less observant to think her humorless. She is grateful for the shawls, if slightly puzzled by the regularity with which they appear.

But then she is both puzzled by and grateful for many gifts, not being one to splurge.

She'd be much better off with a good bra. Seriously, there's no reason for anyone to go around looking like that.

I just don't get it

First of all: I don't understand why British makeover experts Trinny and Susannah staged a "sex-change" operation on the Long Man of Wilmington. What was the larger point of this exercise? Sure it brought publicity to their TV show, but they could have done that by trying to set the world record for goldfish swallowing. Or kidnapping a fashion transgressor, stripping her naked and putting a video up on YouTube.

Second: Am I to take seriously the concerns of "a Druid battle chieftain" named Arthur Pendragon? What battles, I wonder, has the nomadic Pendragon fought and against whom?

Third: Judging by this picture, Trinny and Susannah (that's Trinny on the left) are one-trick ponies--or in the pay of the leggings industry.

Celebrating Dior

60 years of Dior.

Design Museum: Dior.

The evolution of the shirtwaist.

Dior show at Versailles.

In praise of hats

Photograph: Timothy Ockenden/PA


I get nostalgic for the days when women wore hats as a matter of course, even though I never lived in that era.

But my nostalgia is fed by watching old movies. In Mrs. Miniver, Greer Garson's final indulgence before the war was a silly hat that she had been pining for for weeks. And in The Bishop's Wife, Loretta Young desperately wants a certain hat for Christmas.



Rosalind Russell was a great one for hats. I'd say Roz's hats were an externsion of her character as the gossipy socialite Sylvia in The Women.



And as the flamboyant Auntie Mame.




Hats added drama to everyday clothes. They offered a way for a woman to get noticed without flashing her boobs or showing her butt crack. Nowadays the only women who wear hats regularly are the Queen of England and black ladies who go to church.

More pictures of ladies in hats at Royal Ascot.

When a g-string covers too much

You need the c-string.

C-String has a flexible internal frame that hugs and holds it to the body both securely and comfortably. Your modesty [emphasis mine] remains safely covered at all times.

Via bglam.

That's some monstrous bag

I can think of better ways to spend $3,500, and if this quote is even remotely applicable I question what that bag says about her private parts.