All Clogged Up

These are from Chanel but there are several other sources for the spring trend of clogs.

This photo essay from UK Telegraph has some lovely examples.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/fashionpicturegalleries/7480769/Alexa-Chung-is-Queen-of-the-Cloggies.html

The McQueen is Dead

Alexander McQueen will be missed.

Adored because he kept borrowing from the fetish market. No more wild, over the top shoes on the catwalk from him.

Pix-napped from here.

Here's a link to a pictorial history of his fashions: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/fashionpicturegalleries/7214180/A-history-of-catwalk-collections-by-designer-Alexander-McQueen.html

Good points...

...but they can obviously be fixed with plastic surgery.


Women's right to choose was not meant to be about Botox

Libby Brooks, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 January 2010 19.00 GMT

The era of perfectability has seen feminist calls for autonomy distorted into a row about rights to self-mutilate the body

This lady has a tattoo on her right buttock. That lady's breasts are slightly lopsided. The woman to the left has an ample tummy that jiggles when she bounces. As a quotidian consumer of contemporary culture, I consider myself inured to nudity. But, on a chilly evening earlier this week, before a stage full of naked, whooping strangers, I realised that I don't know women's bodies at all.

Nic Green's Trilogy is an exuberantly choreographed and unashamedly political piece of theatre that examines the arc of the women's movement from the passionate debates of the early 70s to the neutered discourse of big jugs and work/life juggling today. Now playing in London for the month, Trilogy was the talk of the steamie at the Edinburgh festival last summer for reasons that were easily apparent the other night: for much of it the actors are nude, there is a set piece naked dance performed by non-professional volunteers, and a finale that invites female audience members to strip on spec and join the cast in a singsong.

There's something at once endearingly old-fashioned and perfectly modern about deploying the elemental shock tactic of nudity in the service of women's empowerment. Germaine Greer famously posed naked for the 60s underground publication Oz. Only last week, the actress and fashion designer Sadie Frost, guest-editing the rather more sedate Grazia magazine, included nude and un-airbrushed shots of herself in order to make the "big point", she said, that women should be proud of who they are. Certainly, there is little more visible than bared flesh. But there is also little more dishonest.

What is striking about Trilogy, alongside ordinary women's delight in striping off, is how unfamiliar we have become with the familiar sight of the female form. From the cult of the Virgin Mary in late-middle ages European art to the surgically sculpted cover girls of today, the perfected female nude has been rendered the idealised aesthetic and unequivocal, aspirational norm. We live in an era of perfectability, where cosmetic procedures are marketed according to how effectively they may be executed in a lunch hour, and almost half of secondary-school girls would consider some form of surgical intervention to change the way they look.

Quite apart from the unknowable physical and mental health consequences of performing invasive and unnecessary operations on younger and younger people, the terrifying normalisation of cosmetic surgery, in tandem with the epic prevalence of digitally altered images, distorts not only our notion of what is beautiful, but our sense of what is natural. It is ironic that the more shapes and sizes that become technically attainable, the narrower our template of what is attractive becomes. Instead, what have been vastly expanded are the aspects of appearance we pathologise.

This is really nothing more than the logical extension of the way that late capitalism co-opted the language of empowerment to sell women shampoo and mascara "because we're worth it". A woman's right to choose, once the foundation of feminist discourse about abortion, contraception and the like, has mutated into a woman's right to inject her crow's-feet with botulism, or indulge in potentially life-threatening mutilations. Physical flaws, no matter how minor, and the consequences of ageing, no matter how inevitable, are re–conceived as a challenge. Since bodies can be so easily improved upon, is it not, in fact, one's ultimate responsibility to do so?

In her 1990 classic The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf predicted the inevitable outcome of what she called the Surgical Age: "Women in our 'raw' or 'natural' state will continue to be shifted from category 'woman' to category 'ugly', and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory, until no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face." It's not so far from the more recently imagined dystopia proffered by ­Jeanette Winterson in her novel The Stone Gods, in which scientific advances allow women to fix their physical appearance at their preferred moment of youthfulness.

The era of perfectability is far from singular in its focus on women's bodies. Men are similarly maligned, and ­encouraged to entertain their moral responsibility to achieve perfect pectorals or phalloplasty. Indeed, the winnowing factor is no longer gender, nor class, but cash. But still, it does retain a specific message for women: that, after longer than a century of political ­movements fighting for the right to visibility in public life, the locus of ­participation has shifted to the private preoccupation with individual ­presentation. Perhaps you can't change the world, but you can – and indeed it is beholden upon you – to change yourself.

I choose not to get fixed.

WTF???

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/fashionnews/6334941/Barbie-doll-Christian-Louboutin-to-redesign-fat-legs.html

From the article:


Barbie doll: Christian Louboutin to redesign 'fat legs'

Three new Barbie dolls being designed by French shoe designer Christian Louboutin to celebrate the doll's 50th anniversary will have slimmer legs and ankles after he decided they were "too fat".

By Nick Collins
Published: 11:54AM BST 15 Oct 2009

Barbie is no stranger to controversy, having been attacked in the past for being too thin and sending out the wrong message to young girls about living healthily.

But fashion designer Mr Louboutin, whose luxury shoes retail for up to £1,500, thinks the model has 'cankles', or fat ankles, and is planning to make his three new dolls even slimmer.

A Louboutin spokeswoman told Metro: "They're completely wild and even come with mini Louboutin boxes for the shoes." But, she added: "He found her ankles were too fat."

Barbie manufacturer Mattel has previously been attacked for making her too top-heavy, while studies have revealed she also has too little body fat.

In 1965, Slumber Party Barbie came with a book entitled How To Lose Weight, which advised children: "Don't eat".

Mattel was also criticised in 1980 for releasing a black Barbie which lacked African facial features, and simply looked like a white Barbie painted black.

I am so impressed with Louboutin. NO ONE, ever, looks like a Barbie doll without extensive cosmetic surgery, body modifications, and intensive dieting. Yes, this is just what we need, another designer telling us what is wrong with being normal by telling us that the idolized Barbie is "FAT".

Thanks dude, I'm looking forward to the next generation of anorexic girls trying to fit into mommy's Louboutin's.

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Mixed Bag

Coffee as art. Being very fond of our java in its many forms, this caught my attention, because it is coffee that appeals to the visual sense as well as taste and smell.


I do enjoy 'art' that does have sensation for more than one sense, visual that is tactile, taste and smell, sound and vision, for example. Perhaps that's why 'scratch & sniff' advertising became so popular.

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Now this just confuses. Let's try to follow it: Design house Ralph Lauren hires a model, uses her as a face of Lauren for some time as she has appeared in many Lauren shoots over the years. Recently a photoshopped ad disaster was shown with this particular model appearing unbelievably thin, so much so, that one would believe the only thing going for her is a fat head. Lauren came under attack for the ad. It started to receive web attention, going viral, and they issued cease & desist orders to ISPs hosting webs that spread the image under what would appear to be fair copyright use of the image. Lauren had to back off their cease & desist tactics and actually admitted to being involved with the ad image being manipulated to a point of obvious unreality. The real topper for this is that they fired the model in the picture.

The reason: They fired me because they said I was overweight and I couldn't fit in their clothes anymore," she said. (Fillipa) Hamilton, a 5'10'' model, reportedly weighs only 120 pounds.

So let me get this straight. Ralph Lauren fired the model because they had to photoshop the ad image of her to the point where she looked totally emaciated because they only want people with anorexia to buy their line and since Fillipa Hamilton is only genetically blessed with a thin body, she doesn't qualify to work with them anymore because she doesn't fit the ideal Lauren image.

Other links on this, all of which contain images of the ad:
http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/08/searching-for-the-sk.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/fashion/2009/10/14/2009-10-14_model_fired_for_being_too_fat.html#ixzz0TueSS2PX
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/14/filippa-hamilton-ralph-la_n_320396.html

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Yes, I really needed to read that modern mankind does not measure up to it Neanderthal predecessors. Thank you for the head shot.

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Mixed Bag

An answer to one question that we've all had lately:

Nobel jury speaks out in defence of Obama prize, calls critics patronizing
October 14, 2009 - 5:42
Ian Macdougall,Karl Ritter, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

"To those who say a Nobel is too much too soon in Obama's young presidency, "We simply disagree ... He got the prize for what he has done," committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland told The Associated Press by telephone from Strasbourg, France, where he was attending meetings of the Council of Europe.

Jagland singled out Obama's efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe.

"All these things have contributed to - I wouldn't say a safer world - but a world with less tension," he said.

In summation, I still think Obama got the award because he's not George Dubya, and the rest of the world likes that very much.

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This is still happening, and it always saddens that we can't live and love as we choose, safely:

Surveillance video captures brutal beating of gay man, Jack Price, in Queens; Both suspects arrested
BY Rocco Parascandola
DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU CHIEF

Updated Wednesday, October 14th 2009, 1:22 AM

A shocking video shows a gay man trying in vain to fend off two thugs who repeatedly punch and stomp him on a deserted Queens street.

Jack Price, 49, tries again and again to get to his feet and escape, only to have the cowards knock him back down in their brutal onslaught, the footage shows.

Two men have been arrested in the beatdown.

Daniel Aleman, 26, was nabbed Sunday night, and Daniel Rodriguez, 21, was captured Tuesday night in Norfolk, Va., police said.

The attackers walk away from Price at one point, only to return. One of them slugs Price one last time in the face before they leave for good, the video shows.

Late Tuesday, however, he remained in critical condition at New York Hospital Queens, hooked up to a respirator. His lungs are collapsed and his jaw and ribs are broken.

"It's a despicable crime," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said of the assault in College Point, where the victim and his alleged attackers all live.

"The individual was attacked simply for his orientation, and we're just not going to tolerate it in this city."

It shouldn't be tolerated in any city in any country that considers itself to be free, democratic, tolerant, for equality, first world, need I go on?

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This kind of medical work makes me wonder what kind of physical mutants humanity will have become in 25 or 50 years.

Genetic manipulation shows promise in preventing heart failure from aging:

In a paper published in the journal Circulation, Tetsuo Shioi, lead researcher and assistant professor of medicine at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine in Kyoto, and his team described how they managed to suppress a variety of the P13K gene in a group of elderly mice.

Compared with another group of mice in which the gene was left intact, mice with the suppressed gene had improved cardiac function, less fibrosis (which makes the heart inflexible) and fewer biological markers of ageing.

I think this is promising research for people that have a heart... now if someone could just figure out how to give Canada's political elite a heart to start with...

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Perhaps this speaks to Obama's popularity in France. It also makes one ask, just what the hell were they thinking, were they thinking?

French Vogue, the fashion magazine, has prompted outrage by featuring pictures of a Dutch model with her pale skin painted a dark colour.

Published: 8:00AM BST 14 Oct 2009

The photo shoot, which was styled by the magazine's long-time editor, Carine Roitfeld, presents pictures of model Lara Stone "blacked up" alongside normal photographs of the model.

The magazine is no stranger to controversy and has run images of supposedly pregnant models puffing cigarettes in the past.

Yep, I remember that controversy too, we covered hearts in the last article, maybe we need research on how to give fashion editors a brain?
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On the bright side, Punk seems to making a strong revival in mainstream fashion. Studs and leather and goth look have been seen on a number of runways for the past year, but it has just been noted that the UK Telegraph is writing on "how to" get the look punk with make-up. Like anyone who saw it the first time around is going to forget the black eyeliner with the fuchsia and turquoise eye shadows with the glittery black nail polish and deep red lips on deathly pallid skin.

They also just covered studs. Those shiny, pointy, square, round, grommetted, metallic things for shoes, boots, jeans, coats, gloves, hats, or anywhere that they can be fastened without necessarily having them adhered to flesh. Now that's a look I can do.

...and to wrap it all up in a warm blanket, we can rely on the Canadian twins of Dsquared2 to promote the rugged Canadian look in men's fashions during their Milan Spring/Summer 2010 show. At least men aren't going to have to work too hard to be fashionable men. A beer, boxers, and a blanket in the woods should do the trick.

Pix-napped from here.

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