The most wonderful interview with Tom Ford appeared on Fresh Air the other day. Ford speaks on how fashion reflects a moment in time:

Fashion is very quick. It’s very disposable. It’s immediately - it tells you exactly where we are in our culture, especially women’s fashion.

If we’re having a glitzy over-the-top moment, fashion is very glitzy and over-the-top, you know, over-the-top. If we’re having a moment where things are, you know, we’re in a recession, fashion becomes quiet.

Gucci in the late nineties

Terri Gross asks:

Of all the things that you’ve designed, do you have any favorites that you really hope will endure because you think they were wonderful?

Ford replies:

I do. I have to say, I think my last few collections for Gucci and for Yves Saint Laurent in 2003-2004, in terms of complexity and construction, were some of the most interesting things I ever designed because I had learned at that point how to make more complex clothes, both cerebrally as well as technically.

And I had worked with a great atelier in Italy for Gucci and in Paris for Saint Laurent. So, I had learned a lot. However, the collections that I feel influenced popular culture the most were early on, in 1995, 1996.

And I think that those were the collections that I’ll be remembered for because at that particular moment in time, fashion was in one place. It was very subdued, very sedated, and in a sense, I brought back sensuality and sexuality to clothes. And the things I did at that time were simpler in construction but maybe more powerful in content.

…the first collection I did that really, you know, brought me a lot of attention and brought Gucci a lot of attention and a lot of business were hiphuggers in velvet, satin shirts, simple coats, but what was new about them at that time was that they were very, very sensual. They were very colorful, as well. There was an enormous amount of color. And they were a throwback to a period in the 1970s when fashion was more touchable.

Benjamin Schupp on Conceptar.org

And then it gets really interesting as Ford contrasts the sensuality of the seventies with the hard edge ‘femme bot’ sexuality of now:

Today, you know, fashion is not - our beauty standard today is harder. It’s beautiful but it’s off-putting. It’s like, don’t touch me, I’m hard.

It’s so interesting how female form, less male form, mirrors where we are culturally, aesthetically, as well as - for example, right now everything is pumped up.

Cars look like someone took an air pump and pumped them up. They look engorged. Lips pumped up, breasts pumped up, everything is pumped up. And it’s also kind of off-putting.

It’s sexual but in such a hard way that it’s, for me, not sexual at all, whereas the 1970s, breasts were smaller. People were not wearing bras. Farrah Fawcett’s sexuality and sensuality was a very touchable sexuality. She was kissable. She was friendly.

And that was what I brought back in the ’90s with some of my early collections for Gucci that we hadn’t seen in a while. And I think that right now we’re in a very hard moment and off-putting. I mean, look at shoes today, women’s shoes. They couldn’t possibly get any higher and meaner and sharper. But then again, you go and watch most films today, they’re violent, and we’re living in a world that is, at the moment, quite hard.

Terri asks him to elaborate on the breasts issue:

I don’t understand all these breasts right now, and they don’t look like breasts. They look like someone’s taken a grapefruit half and inserted it under your skin. I mean it’s - it doesn’t even bear any resemblance to what a natural breast looks like. But we’re starting to think that this is what women should like.

And young girls are looking at these breasts and thinking, oh, I need to go have my breasts done because they’ve lost touch with what a real breast actually looks like. I find it fascinating. I find it disturbing. I mean, you could consider it more fascinating because we’re becoming post-human.

…We are actually - we are. We are actually starting to manipulate our bodies, because we can, into a shape. We are becoming our own art. But what happens for me is that it desexualizes everything. You know, you start to look more and more polished, more and more lacquered and you look like a beautiful car. Does anyone want to sleep with you? Does anyone want to touch you? Does anyone want to kiss you? Maybe not because you’re too scary.

But you’re beautiful, you’re glossy, you’re shiny, but you’re not human. Very interesting. And I say that in a very detached way, I’m not making a judgment about it. I’m just saying it’s fascinating culturally.

When aspirational young women noticeably outnumber boyfriend-worthy men on college campuses apparently “The Rules:Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right ” get tossed out the window. But if its true that men are wired for ‘the chase,’ what do they think of this new wave of female assertiveness in the dating game? From Alex Williams’ The New Math on Campus in the NY Times:

North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.

57-43 isn’t that impossible of a ratio, is it? Keep in mind that these statistics don’t account for who’s hot and who’s not, and how the standards of women and men might differ:

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

And that targeted 10 percent are in the catbird seat:

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.

“I was talking to a friend at a bar, and this girl just came up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and took him out to the dance floor and started grinding,” said Kelly Lynch, a junior at North Carolina, recalling a recent experience.

Students interviewed here said they believed their mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew behavior.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

Fake bisexual competitive show off anyone? That quote makes me recall the much talked about Details magazine article How Internet Porn is Changing Teen Sex and the fact that the counterpart of guys expecting their dates to act like porn stars (I’ll let you read the article for specifics)… are young women who are willing to play along.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

I remember a couple of years ago when Big Love first aired and I became briefly obsessed with Mormons and polygamy I found myself on a pro-polygamy site written by a guy who stated that there are a lot of women out there that would rather share a piece of a good man than have a loser all to themselves. For that lucky top 10 percent of popular, attractive, high status boys in their early twenties that most of the single girls are becoming accustomed to competing for and sharing by necessity, isn’t polyamory an obvious progression? An alpha male with a handful of girls in rotation keeping themselves in the game while shopping for (or amusing themselves with or relying on emotional support from) beta males on the side?

…Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them, Professor Campbell said. In this way, some colleges mirror retirement communities, where women often find that the reward for outliving their husbands is competing with other widows for the attentions of the few surviving bachelors.

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

If ever there were a quintessential example of advertising preying on insecurities of those too young to know better in order to drive consumption of a bunch of junk the entire planet would be better off not having at all, here you have it. From the NY Times Masculinity in a Spray Can:

One bathroom in Stefanie Mullen’s home in a suburb of San Diego is stocked with enough products to line an aisle in a drugstore:

Body wash. Face wash. Exfoliator. Exfoliating wash. Body hydrator. Body spray. Deodorant. Shaving cream. Shampoos and conditioner. Hair gel, of course.

All told, 18 different containers.

They belong to her sons Noah Assaraf, 13, and Keenan Assaraf, 14. They have been dousing themselves for years.

“Every day they walk out the door in a cloud of spray-on macho,” Mrs. Mullen said.

When boys pile into her car, that’s her cue to roll down her window, no matter the weather. “The smell drives me nuts.”

Nooooo! That stuff smells nasty. It does not drive women wild. I’m all about good grooming habits for boys, but soap and deoderant and maybe some zit cream should suffice. Where did these guys collectively come up with the notion that drowing themselves in this eye watering equivalent of glade air freshener is what women want?

“More insecurity equals more product need, equals more opportunity for marketers,” said Kit Yarrow, a professor of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University.

For “Gen Buy,” a new book she co-authored about marketing to tweens and teenagers, Ms. Yarrow held focus groups with boys. “The 10-year-olds are copying the 14-year-olds, trying to be cool,” she said. “Everything is moving down the spectrum. It’s getting younger and more pronounced.”

So boys are turning to hypermasculine guideposts like Instinct from Axe, Swagger by Old Spice and Magnetic Attraction Enhancing Body Wash by Dial with results that are poignant, comic, confused — and stinky.

“It’s not necessarily a hygiene thing,” said Paul Begley, a physical education teacher at Messalonskee Middle School in Oakland, Me. “If they’ve been sweating, they’ll use it as a mask instead of a shower.”

Nooooo!!! Just take a shower, please? But apparently my views aren’t shared by my eigth grade female counterparts:

What further drives the boys’ rush to the products are girls themselves. Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for the market research firm NPD Group, said that in a recent survey, 41 percent of boys ages 8 to 18 said that one of their best friends was a girl.

“They shop with girls, and girls influence them,” Mr. Cohen said, much as the girls in the hit Nickelodeon tween show “iCarly” hold sway over Freddie, their hapless male buddy.

“Boys are paying attention to personal brands more than ever because it’s too easy to be criticized virally by a girl,” said Pat Fiore, a market consultant for body image products in Morristown, N.J. “The peer pressure is starting from the girls, who are discussing how much someone smells or what they look like, and it’s being recorded in real time by e-mail and texting.”

These girls are also becoming sexualized at earlier ages, applying lip gloss and wearing racier clothes. Boys, a bewildered developmental step or three behind, feel additional pressure to catch up.

Ms. Wiseman, who also wrote “Queen Bees & Wannabes,” a nonfiction book about the social pecking order of tween girls, speaks with students around the country. Even in rural North Dakota, she said, 12-year-old boys were highlighting their hair, a focus on appearance that was almost nonexistent five years ago.

“We consistently look at boys in a position of privilege and power,” she said. “But if you ask a 12-year-old boy if they’re in a position of power, they feel out of control of themselves, their bodies.” She added: “I defy anyone to tell me that an eighth-grade girl doesn’t look like she has more power and control than a boy.”

In an interview with Details Magazine, “Markus” explains how women want something different that men do out of a prostitute. Is it that - generally speaking - when women hire a gigolo they want someone to make them feel special and men hire a hooker to freely enjoy doing whatever they want sexually without having to make her feel special in order to make her to agree to said requests? And apparently its a lot harder to fake it:

I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion.

And here’s where it gets really interesting. Whereas the stories of female prostitution are rarely about empowerment and largely about broken, abused women with a lack of other options to earn a living just going deeper down that path, Markus reveals how he sees this calling as a way to give and receive the physical touch and affection he lacked as a kid. Would any but the most naive female prostitute go into it thinking she was going to get the love and affection she never got as a kid? Except in a twisted, unconscious way?

When I was 7, my father and mother applied for a divorce, and I was pretty much left sensory deprived for my whole adolescent and formative years. There was a deficit there—a sensory deficit—where I was left in a shell. There wasn’t anything sexual about it. It was more, like, caresses—maybe a kiss on the cheek or a hug. Psychologists say a child should be hugged at least, you know, two or three times a day for him to be a functional human being. Then, once I reached adulthood, I didn’t have any sexual relationships. So naturally, when someone is in the psychological state that I’m in, I don’t think of it as a disadvantage. I think it’s more of a prerequisite for what I’m fixin’ to do. You’re striving to make up for lost time, basically. You’re trying to remake the things that you were missing out on as a young adult. Psychologically, Freud always said that every man inherently has an innate desire to copulate or have some sort of relation with his mother—regardless of whether he wants to admit it or not. I think this engenders what it means to be a gigolo. A gigolo is looking for a surrogate mother. And basically he’s filling the need for someone, but at the same time, he’s getting the respect and the compassion that he missed from an earlier developmental deficit.

While I really have zero expert knowledge on what goes on with prostitution of either gender, and have heard stories of female prostitutes serving as surrogate girlfriends or lovers, I’ve also heard a lot more stories about men who hire hookers because they can get away with being derogatory and abusive to them and don’t have to treat them with the same respect as most girlfriends would demand. Apparently Markus doesn’t anticipate so much of the ’shut up and do what I say, you loser’ sort of interaction.

In porn, they have to have these degrading acts. I consider myself a classier person than going below myself to do that. This is much different. It’s closer and more personal. Whichever woman may walk through the door, she’s appreciated. A surrogate lover will love that woman for a whole hour, or however much we charge here [$200 for 40 minutes], and she’ll leave feeling much more empowered, and much more confident in herself.

…He must have the heart of a saint, the mind of a philosopher, and the skills of the devil—that’s the second qualification. The third one is I never refer to any woman as a bitch, ho, twat, cunt, or any of those terms. It offends me. Women don’t pay for sex, they pay for experience. And luckily for me, I don’t have that much experience with sex, but I have the mentality and the emotion and gumption to make them feel the way they want to feel.

Hopefully we’ll be able to check in with him once he becomes a seasoned pro and see what his actual experiences are.

Leather for women becomes mainstream everyday wear while young men rebel against their parent’s generation by… wearing a jacket and tie?

http://crossanda.blogspot.com/2008/07/look-of-week.html

Two NY Times articles side by side offer a telling glimpse not only into the generation gap, but into shifting gender roles as well. From David Coleman’s Dressing for Success, Again:

“Today the well-off 55-year-old is likely to be the worst-dressed man in the room, wearing a saggy T-shirt and jeans. The cash-poor 25-year-old is in a natty sport coat and skinny tie bought at Topman for a song. Young men are embracing the “Mad Men” elements of style in a way that the older men never did, still don’t and just won’t. The result is a kind of rift emerging between the generation of men in their 20s and 30s and those in their late 40s and 50s for whom a suit was not merely square but cubed, and caring about how one looked was effeminate….

Between those schlubby baby boomer guys delaying retirement, the fact that Gen Y twentysomethings are the largest demographic group in history and thanks to the successes of feminism young men also have to compete for jobs with their female counterparts in a way their fathers never imagined, the boys motivated to make it in this economic climate have to use every tool they can to distinguish themselves and get ahead.

But what are the girls up to? Ruth la Ferla writes,

Hermes Fall 09 from Style.com

A disdain for such sweetly conventional trappings of sex appeal has trickled down of late from tastemakers like Ms. Watson to scores of followers who are swapping their baby-doll dresses, spindly heels and lace for the flinty attractions of studs and leather, mannish jackets and rock-star jeans. Their embrace of a pointedly aggressive, street-smart style suggests that the more adventurous are rethinking the tenets of female allure.

Hallelujah! I’m having a flashback to my teenage years,

Women now want to project a “more powerful sexuality, not a damsel in distress,” said Sharon Graubard, a senior executive with Stylesight, a trend forecasting firm in New York. The look, streamlined and armored for tough times, reflects a distrust of trends and a skepticism toward traditional gender roles. Most tellingly, perhaps, it also represents a pragmatic response to a hobbled economy.

“So-called luxury — people are tired of it,” said Tatsugo Yoda, the owner of Aloha Rag, a fashionably progressive Honolulu boutique with a New York outpost. “They want more utilitarian pieces — military jackets, track pants and classic white shirts — that they can wear more than twice a year.” The look is assertive, Mr. Yoda said, but recognizable at the same time.

Actually, I’d like pieces that I can wear twice a week, and if my male counterparts can have it, why can’t I? As the propects of a banker boyfriends financing fussy fashion habits grow thin right along with jobs in the fashion industry, it’s not surprising that those still standing carry a survivalist chic aesthetic about them.

These notions of sexual allure can be traced to the utility gear adopted by self-styled survivalists, the funky regalia of old-school rockers, even the lingerie-and-leather of Parisian streetwalkers. More Patti Smith than Fergie, current variations on sultriness are thorny and faintly androgynous. These rebellious, antifashion messages, blunted over decades of exposure, have been picked up, inevitably, by the world of high style.

Today shapeless, and sometimes shredded, T-shirts, combat boots and aviator caps reminiscent of a Mad Max epic, are proliferating on runways, as are leggings, fatigues and bicycle shorts.

Of course, no talk of Mad Max survivalist style would be complete without a nod to Burning Man. But how interesting that while the girls are moving towards the rugged and shredded tough girl look, the boys are getting cleaned and pressed. These two phenomenon side by side also indicate to me another nail in the coffin of a world where modern young women could automatically assume that finding a man as a breadwinner was the rule and not an exception. Given that most of the jobs lost in this recession have been to men and thus women outnumber men in the workplace for the first time in history, young men have another reason to dress for success and it ain’t just in the office. Their dating pool might very well consist of women who are doing better financially than they are, and now it’s role reversal time - they’re the ones playing the looks card.

One thing both genders share is a rejection of disposable fashion. Back to Coleman:

“There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he said. “It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.””

I, as an unapologetic western feminist, have zero religious mandate to cover up, but I think these look pretty cool and I wonder if we might see these catching on with non-muslim girls who just like the aesthetic. Heck, it could be warm in winter….or pair with goggles to keep the sand out at Burning Man!

from Capster.com

Betwa Sharma writes for the Huffington Post, Making the Hijab Work:

Ausma Khan, editor of Muslim Girl, a magazine for Muslim teens in the United States and Canada, says, “In America we’re seeing an evolution where the governing principle of modesty remains the same, but at the same time it is incorporating contemporary styles of dressing.”

…Khan, whose magazine devotes many pages to fashion, notes that this demand is not met by supply. “There is an untapped market for girls who don’t want to look like versions of Britney Spears but at the same time want to dress well,” she says. “The designers have not caught on yet.”

One designer with foresight is Cindy van den Bremen who operates out of the Netherlands. In 2001, she launched a hijab range to match sports needs and solve the problems that bulky hijabs caused Muslim girls in the gym.

After eight years, Capsters have become an international brand selling online and in stores across Europe, Canada, US, Middle East, Indonesia and Malaysia. “To be honest, there have been more requests for wholesale than I could handle,” she says.

As the forest fire rages through retail clearing out the dead wood in the malls, its going to be brands like Capster who innovate to produce a well engineered, appealing product to a gaping niche that will be the new trees rising up from the ashes soaking up the heretofor blocked sunlight. And currency.

Capster for surfing

On a practical level I’ve often wondered about the hijab: perhaps it gets way easier if you wear it all the time, but any time I’ve tried to wear a scarf over my head (costume, warmth, etc) I’ve never been able to keep the darn thing on my head. Which makes me wonder about how being mandated to wear one restricts you in less obvious ways by restricting the activities you can engage in. (This phenomenon is not entirely that different than high heels or tight skirts, no?) So I think it’s a genius adaptation for a girl to be able to approach her parents with a garment they can’t argue with, but that she can still go surfing in.

In my scans of the Fall fashion shows I didn’t see a noticeable trend towards hoods, but they always show up from time to time:

Zero + Maria Cornejo Fall 09, style.com

(more…)

No discussion that intersects fashion and feminism is complete without a debate on high heels - are they a symbol of enslavement or empowerment? Why, in spite of the well documented health problems they cause, do they continue to inspire lust - not to mention reckless spending - by both sexes? Hannah Betts gives a great overview of both sides of the debate, and includes her own perspective suggesting that the whole matter might be more primal than theoretical. From the Guardian UK’s, Are We Just Masochists?

Christian Louboutin's Orlan Ponyskin Sandals, $930 at Net-a-Porter.com

Yet many women - myself included - who consider ourselves vehement, lifelong feminists feel no desire to relinquish our heels. In 1995, when Germaine Greer and Suzanne Moore enjoyed a public spat, Greer poured scorn on Moore’s “fuck-me shoes”. “The thing is,” sniffed a feminist contemporary at the time, “some of us don’t have a problem with fucking.”

And there’s the rub - sex - festering away like the blister it is. When I last experienced heel lust - for a pair of sumptuous 4in Louboutins - my pupils dilated, I had butterflies, and my cheeks turned florid.

…Dr Gad Saad is associate professor of marketing at Concordia University, Canada, and author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption. “High heels may well be the most potent aphrodisiac ever concocted,” he says. “The height sensuously alters the whole anatomy - foot, leg, thigh, hips, pelvis, buttocks, breasts. Men are perfectly frank in admitting that high heels stimulate their sexual appetite, and women, consequently, assign to stilted shoes all the magic of a love potion.

(more…)

Every once in a while a writer comes up with a sartorial description that captures a stereotypical character too perfectly. From An Atheist Goes Undercover to Join the Flock of Mad Pastor John Hagee by Rolling Stone writer Matt Tabbi:

I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

(The above image came from DLTK’s ‘Bible Crafts for Kids’ site and includes a larger downloadable paper template.)

Tabbi is a fantastic storyteller and the whole article is worth a read. It’s a scary behind-the-scenes look at the fundamentalist evangelical scene that so many of us never get near. Be afraid. Be very afraid:

When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers — and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church.

Fashion Indie goes on a rant about the disproportionate number of gay men designing women’s clothes: (Photo credit to Daniele Oberrauch for Style.com)

Not to get all on the side of feminism here, but why is it that so much of what you wear is influenced by a man? Men don’t know jack about woman and gay men are especially tuned out to your needs since nothing about your figure or body satisfies them physically. They’re looking for twigs and berries and all you offer is, well, you know what you have to offer…Why don’t they care?

Cause gays are men. And men are idiots.

Here is the comment I submitted to the above post: Why don’t more people - gay or straight, women or men - design clothes for the ‘real woman’? Because fashion is ASPIRATIONAL. Its about fantasy. Actually, plenty of clothes out there *are* designed for the average woman but they’re not, however, the ones that drive the fantasy hype of the magazines and runways. They’ve tried it - putting normal women in wearable clothes - in the fantasy and guess what? It doesn’t sell. We see that on the streets everywhere and its not what we want to see in our aspirational fantasy.

When most straight men design clothes, their designs look like they’re for strippers. Or video game characters. Gay men seem to be better able to create this abstract ideal of feminine beauty without overtly sexualizing it.

So why do gay men rule the fashion world and not women? Is it the boys club network?

I was reminded of a December 2005 piece by Eric Wilson for the NY Times titled In Fashion, Who Really Gets Ahead? Even though I was of course familiar with the flamboyant gay male fashion designer stereotype, I didn’t realize how disproportionate the numbers were in terms of female aspirants versus male success stories: (more…)

If you’ve picked up a fashion magazine in the past couple of years, you couldn’t avoid the declarations that dresses are a hot item. In Long Live the Dress (For Now) Guy Trebay gives us some insights into the comeback of the dress as a wardrobe staple:

“…a few years ago… as Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, said, “All of a sudden the dress was the ‘it’ item.”

So long out of favor, the dress was discovered by a generation that had never worn one and for which the garment was like some rare and exotic find.

(more…)