I Can’t Believe I’m About To Say This…

but Michelle Malkin had a point in the entire Rachael Ray business. Sure, on the specific points, she was horrifically wrong. Ray isn’t wearing a keffiyeh, keffiyeh’s aren’t necessarily “hate couture” and enforcing this type of conservative political correctness is just stupid. But she still had a point about the proliferation of the keffiyeh as a hipster accessory. Although in the Middle East, the keffiyeh is hardly terrorist wear - in Jordan its red and white, in the Gulf it’s just white and Palestinians of all stripes sport the black and white one - but it’s only popular in the West because of its terrorist chic. Just like Che shirts, or more accurately, the spate of khaki and leather military-esque jackets that proliferated in the 60s and 70s, they are only cool because of the inherent association with revolt and violence. Now, I don’t particularly mind people wearing keffiyeh’s, they are remarkably useful and look really cool, but the argument that they’re totally innocuous and have no association with violence, nationalism or revolt just ain’t true.

Full disclosure. I own a keffiyeh. I bought it when I was ten in Palestinian East Jerusalem. It’s really cool.

UPDATE: If you dare look below, I’ve uploaded some really crappy pictures of me sporting my authentic Palestinian keffiyeh in both relatively traditional and hipster fashion. View at your own risk

How Ballet Flats Saved Humanity, Or At Least Its Better Half

I’m absolutely positive that someone, probably a woman, has said this before, but the popular adoption of the ballet flat is on par with basic hygiene as far as massively beneficial popular norms go. It solves the problem of trying to look a bit more dressy than flip flops or sneakers without resorting to foot-destroying heels. And they just look cool.  But because of their obvious awesomeness, as Phoebe Maltz has noticed, they’re everywhere: especially in the black patent leather variety. As to whether this is a “a citywide if not worldwide trend” that Maltz has started, I can confidently report that in the affluent, relatively stylish oasis that is the Head-Royce School, ballet flats, and specifically black leather ones, are absolutely endemic. As to whether this can be attributed to  Maltz-fashion-butterfly-effect, I can not say.

No Justice. No Peace. No Rami.

We have two designers. One is a flamboyant, overbearing, egoistic clown who has designs that only look good on models and solely display his own out-sized sense of his brilliance, as opposed to an actual sense of style.  Oh yeah, and all the pieces look the same.  The other is also slightly full of himself, but backs it up by being able to design a variety of stuff, and make clothes with understated craftsmanship and skill that his competitor probably couldn’t even understand or envision.

And yet, flashinesss won over nuance, ego over real skill, and Christian over Rami.  Now, this was the first and last episode of Project Runway I watched this season, but it was still abundantly clear, even from the judges deliberation, that Rami was the best.  THe only problem they could vocalize was that he wasn’t great with colors. Christian’s final collection, however, was about 70% black and 100% ridiculously over-the-top.  In the words of Tim Gunn, it was “not-so-wearable art.”  Did I also mention how swarmy and annoying Christian is?  All and all, an abominable decision.

Is it bad that this made me feel crappier than the Ohio and Texas results?

Concerning Flip Flops in Winter

Jill at Feministe excerpts a conversation she had with a fellow student, concering the strange phenomena of preppy, white, college students in cold places (Middlebury, Vermont…Hamilton, New York…Hanover, New Hampshire) wearing flips flops in the dead of winter.  As the Head-Royce Class of 2007’s offical “most likely to wear flip flops in winter” and someone, who, if it all turns out well, will be going to college in a cold, Northeastern place, I’ll give my own take on this strange sartorial choice.

The way I see it, there are two types of people who wear flip flops more than, say, 300 days a year, or at least wear them in cold weather.   The first type is the stoner/hippie/surfer who simply doesn’t care about  fashion or clothing norms, and really wears flip flops all the time because they’re so comfortable.  The second type, of which I’m much more familliar, is someone who also wears flip flops because they’re comfortable, but does so while still being a conscientious, more-fashionable-than-not dresser.  This would be someone who wears Rainbows, nice jeans, a Lacoste polo and a sweater vest (not that I’ve ever sported that look…).  To them, and I really should say us, wearing Rainbows with the normal preppy garb says two things: I’m a well dressed guy, but I’m also more chill than my friend in the LL Bean duck-hunting boots or that jackass in the scarf and the boat shoes.

But why white people?  If by “white,” you mean upper middle class types who dress well and go to schools in the Northeast, the above dynamics apply, but if you want to probe deeper, there’s another, more general motive at play.  If you’re at Dartmouth and intend to become a consultant/investment banker/corporate lawyer, you know that your days wearing flips-flops — in any season — are certainly numbered.  The appropriate dress for The Green isn’t exactly what you wear at McKinsey or Watchell.  And while it would be untenable to totally abandon the dress of your classmates and social class, wearing flip flops in winter can be seen as a silent rebellion against the expectations set out for ambitious, upper-middle class youth.  And they’re so comfortable.

Luxury Goods

Dana Thomas’ op-ed lamenting that many luxury goods aren’t actually made by Italian or French craftsmen, but instead on assembly lines in China, is pretty weak stuff. Her basic argument is that before luxury good companies consolidated into behemoths like LVMH of the Prada Group, they indeed made superior products. Now that they make everything in China, we’re lead to believe that luxury goods companies are hawking exploitative crap. What she misses, among other other things, is that the design process for luxury goods is still done by those European craftsmen she so admires. It’s just that the goods — like nearly every other bit of clothing in the world — are made in lower cost countries. She never really proves that those products are actually lower quality, but apparently we’re just supposed to believe that it is impossible for the Chinese to produce a good piece of clothing from a superior design.

She then sums up her argument with another round of unwarranted assertions:

Luxury brand executives who declare that their items can be made only in Western Europe because Western European artisans are the only people who know what true luxury is are being not only hypocritical but also xenophobic. They are not selling “dreams,” as they like to suggest; they are hawking low-cost, high-profit items wrapped in logos. Consumers should keep in mind that luxury brands are capable of producing real quality at a reasonable price. They know better, and so should we.

There’s so many things wrong with this one paragraph. The first is that the reason luxury goods companies jump through hoops to say “Made in Italy( or France)” is because consumers are the xenophobic ones who will, especially when encouraged by the snobbish likes of Dana Thomas, take it as a given that “China” and “luxury good” can’t go together. The second is her silly discussion of “dreams.” Luxury goods’ “dreams” effect has little to do with any external measurement of quality, it’s all a perception and marketing issue. A LV bag can be a “dream” no matter where it’s made. What matters is that for whatever reason, people see Louis Vuitton as aspirational for reasons that have little to do with “quality.” But then Thomas comes around and says that luxury companies are ripping us off, by refusing to produce “real quality at a reasonable price.”

What she’s asking is that luxury companies drastically reduce their margins, which seems like a bad deal, because if LV drops the price of their bags, they aren’t luxury products anymore and thus will have to compete on metrics like price and real quality with other more reasonably priced bags. In so much as one wants a “reasonable price” for luxury goods, producing as many of them in China would be the most basic first step.

The oddest thing about any discussion of luxury goods is how the revenue streams of the companies vary so widely from the public perception of them. For example, in 2002, “Prada relied on apparel for only one-third of revenue, and got 55 percent from accessories, leather goods and items like sunglasses.” The dirty secret of the luxury goods and high-fashion industry is that all the things we see - the fashion shows and the glossy ads - are just a way to get middle aged women to buy perfumes and sunglasses.

Hope For the Future

Despite our disagreements about the relative triviality of sports and shoes, Phoebe Maltz makes a very important and hopeful prediction:

That said–and this is the real point of this post–if “hipster” is being used in “Newsweek,” maybe the phenomenon is finally over and the women of New York will at last trade the leggings in for the long-abandoned pants.

Maltz couldn’t be more right. When will women learn that leggings don’t count as pants, and if one is wearing them exclusively on her lower body, she isn’t “dressed.” It was bad enough that I only had to be exposed to this cultural travesty when I visited my brother in the East Village, but now when teens in the East Bay think that leggings constitute clothing, it’s become intolerable. End of civilization, I tell ya.

Shoes and Sports

Phoebe Maltz laments the alleged triviality of shoe blogging:

The above mention of girl-blogging brings up the altogether pressing issue of why men can blog about sports (which are boring) and still be taken seriously, while one mention of shoes (which are fascinating to no end) defines a woman as silly.

While it’s certainly true that men can tend to get away with blogging about “trivial” matters with their reputation intact more so than women, I don’t think sports blogging are the best analogy for shoes.  To put it simply, do people forge long lasting, emotional relationships with a shoe brand?  I’m sure some do, but do tens of thousands of people from all races and social classes show up for the release of a new line of Jimmy Choos?

Of course, the distinctions between shoes and sports don’t really matter, what matters is how various blogging of issues totally unrelated to (usually) politics is perceived in the blogosphere.  But because sports demand so much national attention, shoes hardly seem to be the best comparison.  A better one would tech blogging. How are men who write about how awesome their google maps enabled iPhone perceived?  The answer is probably the same, women who talk about shoes are silly, while men who talk about tech are just a little quirky, but still totally serious.

They say they love my ass in Seven Jeans, True Religion / I say no, but they keep givin’

The NYtimes details the work of a knock off fashion designer, Seema Anand, who literally takes pictures of items on runways and then has sowers in India make the clothes, getting them on the racks before the high end products hit their boutiques and high end clothing stores. Many of the designs are strikingly similiar, one might call them copies. But since only distinctive patterns (like Burberry’s) and logos are copyrighted - cuts, colors and designs are all fair game. The designers want to intervene and copyright their designs to fight the knocks offs. I’m unsympathetic — the purpose of copyright is to serve the public good, not the good of designers who want to sell dresses for 800 dollars. Are fewer high end clothes being made, are designs less adventurous and original? Also, how do you copyright a cut or design? What if a fashion innovation, like boot cut jeans, was copyrighted? Would the public be well served by one company making boot cut jeans for 100 years? One part of the article, however, illuminates the frustration for the high end designers and the opportunities for Anand:

“Some people don’t want to spend $300 on a pair of jeans just because of the name,” said Siovhan McGearey, 16, from London. “They may look nice, but why pay $300 when you can go down the street to Forever 21 and get jeans that are $30 that look exactly the same?”

In the case of jeans, I have to wonder, who’s getting screwed? Some jeans are largely popular because of logo they throw on the ass — Seven is the canonical example (Citizens works as an example too). These logos are already copyrighted, what makes these jeans “better” can’t be copied (stitching, fabrics etc). Even if the logo is stirkingly similar, the women wearing the real Citizens or Sevens will know exactly who’s trying to fool them. What about True Religions? Sure, they have the logo, but what makes them distinctive is the seam. They start like a normal seam, on the out side of the leg, and wind their way to the front. Should True Religion be able to copyright the direction of their seam, the red stitching they use in the seam? Should a judge have to decide whether Forever 21’s seams are too similar?

What it all comes down to is this - “They want to look fabulous,” she said. “It’s their right to look fabulous.”

Fashion designers, are you going to deny the right of young women everywhere to look fabulous?

Last White Jeans Post, I Promise

Well, I can’t promise anything, but I sure hope that discussion about such a generally abominable item of clothing doesn’t come up again in this part of the blogosphere (I’d rather not turn into a young male version of Robin Givhan).  For those who don’t believe me that white jeans are for most people - excluding runway models, coke addicted musicians and Megan McArdle -  a bad idea, I wonder if they’ll think that after seeing this picture:

’nuff said.

I Made Fun Of Megan McArdle’s Looks Before It Was Cool

If you’re coming here from bloggingheads tv, I need to clear a few things up. 1) Unlike most of left blogistan, I like Megan McArdle, I read her blog regularly and all my blogospheric interactions with her have been nothing but pleasant. 2) I have never seen McA below the neck (I’ve only seen the blogging head), so my comments on the infamous white jeans were purely speculative. More importantly, the post wasn’t specific, I never said “Gosh, that retarded ivy league ditz, how dare she wear white jeans when they probably look awful, I hate her” (which is basically the level of much of left blogistan’s McA commentary) 3) What I said about white jeans was not a malicious personal attack intended to degrade her, unlike what some other people have said. Basically, I’m not a hater.

What I said about the inadvisability of wearing white jeans was reflecting the aggregate experience of those people that have worn white jeans who aren’t runway models or coke addicted rock stars. Though there may be outliers, like Megan, for statistically meaningfully purposes no one looks good in white jeans. Just because Shane McConkey can ski off 1000 ft vert cliffs, do two back flips and not die doesn’t mean you, or any meaningful other number of people, can as well.

Japanese Tourists Explained

Whenever I see large groups of Japanese tourists - in Hawaii, San Francisco Airport, Squaw Valley - they’re always universally decked out in branded luxury goods - Louis Vuitton Bags, Burberry shirts, scarves, pants, sunglasses with Nova Check everywhere. The kids, the parents, everyone. While an obvious explanation would be that those Japanese taking group tours to tropical islands and ski resorts are clearly the upper crust of Japanese society and thus would obviously be more likely to wear expensive clothing, comparably wealthy Americans very rarely so conspicuously adorn themselves in designer schwag. Were my continual observations of traveling, wealthy Japanese then just confirmation bias, prejudices, or stereotypes? No! According to Tyler Cowen, Japanese buy one half of the world’s luxury goods.

Analysts estimate that 20 percent of all luxury goods are sold in Japan and another 30 percent to Japanese traveling abroad — meaning Japanese buy half of all luxury goods. Today, approximately 40 percent of all Japanese own a Vuitton product

White Jeans and the Rest of Us

Megan McArdle asks just why would people design clothes - like white jeans - that only look good on a very narrow range of body types, the tall and the thin:

there was a longish discussion of my white jeans, and whether white jeans only look good on tall, skinny people. This segued into a conversation about why designers only design clothes that look good on tall, skinny people.

A few thoughts.  White jeans, in particular, look bad on everyone except actual runway models and gaunt, emaciated, coke addicted male musicians.  Unless you fit one of those two categories - don’t wear white jeans.  On the more general subject, tall and thin people look better in everything.  There aren’t any bulges to cover up and limbs and torso’s to elongate with gimmicks like vertical stripes or black. Tall and thin are the Platonic ideal to design around, everyone else is somehow defective from the perspective of the designer.  So, if you’re a designer who’s looking to make something adventurous or especially creative, you’d design for the tall and thin, so you can maximize the originality or artistry of the clothes without having to worry about covering up or visually altering the person wearing them.

More Knock Offs

One thing that’s odd about this entire deal is that the knock offs the fashion industry are complaining about are mostly made by legitimate clothing companies - Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, Zara - not sold by Senegalese hawkers on Canal Street. While those knock offs should be considered piracy - they actually steal the brands, which are copyrighted - the Zara/Forever 21 is just heavily borrowing the designs, which can hardly be distinguished as original in the same way a brand or logo can. Is a judge really going to have to decide that a 65 dollar dress from Zara is too similar to a runway Marc Jacobs Dior dress that one could buy for 4500 dollars.

More importantly, the market for these dresses are totally non intersecting. If you’re going to drop 4500 on a dress, you’re not going to suddenly discovery frugality when you accidentally walk into Zara. The entire point of designer clothing is the snob appeal (for the most part) and so buying knock offs would defeat the entire purpose. In fact, there’s a decent case to be made that these knock offs are probable beneficial for clothing designers. Young people can get interested in well designed/fashionable clothes and get plugged into the entire designer world when they only have enough money for Zara and Forever 21, and when they do get enough money to buy the real thing, they’re much, much more likely to.

Pink Triangle On Her Sleeve…

Via Matt Yglesias, by way of Ann Friedman ( blog attribution is so much fun) Barbara Ellen slams the marketing of “for women” pink products as infantilizes women. Not being a woman, I can’t really say much of substance about the entire issue.

I can, however, admit that I’m a total sucker for pink things - well, mostly shirts. I love, love, love pink shirts (don’t worry, pictures are forthcoming). At last count, I think I have five, more than any other color besides white. I like to think it compliments my olive skin tone, at least that’s what people tell me. I usually get nothing but compliments when I’m sporting some pink apparel.  I also have a pink polka dot breast cancer awareness ribbon pinned to my backpack (which is mostly baby blue, because I just love ‘masculine’ colors).  I’ve even had fleeting thoughts of wanting the infamous pink RAZR, but the iron curtain of social expectations and norms crushed that desire.

I wouldn’t be the first guy to have a hankering for pink - it just looks really good. I don’t know the social or cultural significance of my like of a traditionally “female” color, but it’s worth pointing out that pink doesn’t always equal feminine - the Sex Pistols used a lot of pink and influenced it’s dual-sex use in punk fashion.

So yeah, if anyone wants to buy me a birthday (Feb 24) or Hanukkah present - a pink t-shirt, polo, or button down would be much appreciated (smallest adult size possible, except American Apparel… regular small is fine).