Fast fashion: enjoy it while it lasts

A favorite blogger of mine, pattern-making guru Kathleen Fasanella, notes an interesting trend: the price of womens' clothes have been declining since the 1970s. Mens clothes, on the other hand, are holding steady. Why would this be?

Her explanation is that womens fashion is driven by trends, while mens clothing is the same year after year. I'm not sure that explains much, but you can't argue with the statement that clothes today are cheaper than ever.

D'apres moi, this has less to do with trends than macroeconomics. In the last third of the 20th century the world entered a new phase unlike anything that had come before: a state of inequality between industrialized nations and their former colonies, combined with faster-than-ever communications. Telephones, cheap air travel, fax and the internet made neighbors of us all, making it possible to manufacture cheap goods with short shelf lives in poor countries, and then ship them around the world to the customer.

In other words, fast fashion - that ever-changing form of consumerist entertainment - is a consequence of global inequality and the information age. But you already knew that.

What few people want to discuss is that given the rapid game of catch-up countries such as China are playing with the developed world, factories are forever being moved to a further shore in search of cheaper wages. Someday, there may not be a cheaper shore - and then the cost of goods will start to rise.

There's nothing wrong with this system. Lovers of humanity condemn sweatshops, but who doesn't like a bargain? And what's wrong with creating in jobs in impoverished, benighted corners of the world like Haiti? It's worth keeping in mind, though, that your supply of cheap junk may not last forever. Enjoy it while you can.

Tavi: the joke's on you

As much as anyone, I've been perplexed and a little repulsed by the overnight rise of 13-year-old blogging sensation Tavi Gevinson. Where did she come from? What's so great about her? Someone, somewhere, seems to have decreed her to be In, though no one seems to understand why.

I should start by admitting - as you might suspect - that, yes, I'm a little jealous. Everyone dreams about recognition coming so easily. Jealousy, however, is not interesting; what is interesting is the way her abrupt rise illustrates the curious, sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the fashion publicity machine.

Certain things become cool overnight, almost without explanation. This is evidence of a pack mentality: fashion people tend to move as a group, especially in how they think. Oftentimes, they have trouble adapting to new things, but if one of the true avant gardists - Katie Grand or Rei Kawakubo, for instance - should take a shine to something, there is no question that everyone else will follow.

Fashion people aren't very independent-minded; mostly, they're afraid to be left behind. What they may not realize, in this case, is that foisting a 13 year-old blogger on the fashion world is Rei Kawakubo's idea of a joke.

This is a joke that Tavi may be in on - if you'd like confirmation, just look at this picture of her at the Dior couture show in Paris. With her grey hair and ridiculous hat, she's sending up the grand-dame editors of the 1950s and 60s. If you ask me, it's quite droll.

The Return of Josephus Thimister: 1917, Come Again?

It looks as though haute couture fashion week will be with us for at least another season - unfortunately so, because haute couture is about as irrelevant as it gets. You might as well be going to a Renaissance Fair. There was one show I was looking forward to, however: that of Josephus Thimister, the Belgian designer lost in obscurity since as long as I can remember.

Thimister's main claim to fame, if it can be called that, is that he designed for Balenciaga before Nicolas Ghesquière took over. The reasons for his firing are unclear - I've heard the music was too loud at one of his shows, or that he rather unwisely took Fascism as a source of inspiration. Ticklish, even today. In fact, for all the fuss I'm making over him I've only ever seen one photograph of his work.

It was in a volume on Belgian designers in a library in Paris: a black gown with a high neck, long-sleeved, utterly beautiful. I'm not sure what made it so lovely, some secret of construction and draping around the hips. It was one of those gowns which could have transformed a plain-looking woman into a hybrid of Cate Blanchett and Susan Sontag.

Well, he's back, or would like to be. I looked at a few pictures on Diane Pernet's blog and was rather sad to see him engaging in costume drama, just like everyone else at couture week. It's the Russian Revolution, or the First World War, or Bolshevism. And at Dior it's the New Look and the 19th century and the 18th century. It's not even faintly glamorous, just dated. Who cares?

Politics: Ew

I wish I wasn't in the habit of reading the Times and the Daily Beast; right now, I'd like nothing better than to forget that government exists.

I won't say anything about the special election in Massachusetts except that, as everyone has noted, Martha Coakley was a terrible candidate - I've heard her described as 'nanny state and police state', a disgusting combination - and a product of the womens' lobby's belief that electing female politicians is a worthy goal in and of itself. She deserved to lose, the question is why was she running in the first place?

Some blame for the national mood must fall on the President. He has allowed the debate over healthcare reform to drag on since last summer. That's eight months! In a system built on two-year electoral cycles, that's way too long to spend on one bill. No wonder voters are sick of it, as the economy continues to stagnate.

If I could give the President and Congressional leadership advice, I'd say this: pass the bill you have (the Senate version) and move on to something else. You've wasted too much time.

And then there's the news of the Supreme Court's decision on campaign finance. In short, the Supreme Court overturned a century of precedent and corporations can now buy whichever politicians they like. Judicial activism, much?

Politics can be unbearably frustrating.

Cathy Horyn vs Her Readers

A little scuffle broke out yesterday at fashion critic Cathy Horyn's blog, On the Runway. Writing about the Golden Globes, Horyn quoted an anonymous stylist calling actress Christina Hendricks a "big girl." A photograph published alongside had obviously been stretched, making Hendricks seem wider. Several commenters made a fuss, and Gothamist even wrote a post about it, pompously stating that they had 'contacted Horyn for comment.'

I doubt anyone at the Times distorted the image on purpose; it was most likely a mistake made in a few seconds, made even more likely if, as I suspect, Horyn uploads most of the pictures herself. She's a busy woman. In the end, Horyn simply replaced the stretched photo with an unstretched version and that, one hopes, will be the end of it. What's important, though, is that this shows that an influential newspaper critic can be held instantly accountable by her readers.

Cathy Horyn started blogging several years ago, but she still seems to think of her blog as a one-way street, or at best as a question-and-answer session with She Who Knows Best. She takes an interest in what some of her commenters have to say, but rarely, if ever, does she admit to having made a bad call.

Compare to another blogger, the Atlantic contributor Andrew Sullivan, who regularly posts emails from readers disagreeing with him. Though they write about completely different things - Sullivan sticks to politics - it's an interesting contrast that the fashion critic would seem to be more rigidly entrenched in her authority.

In an area so subjective as fashion, it can be hard to tell the difference between a valid difference of opinion and simple ignorance. It will be interesting to see how Horyn continues to balance her authority as critic with her readers' responses.

One for Almodovar

Pedro Almodovar remains one of my favorite directors years after he made Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother. His reputation with me was cemented by Bad Education, a story of abuse and deception in a Catholic boys' school. His new film, Broken Embraces, strikes a balance between the screaming camp of Women on the Verge and the quieter Volver.

Any film made in the 1980s - when Women on the Verge was made - is bound to be somewhat campy. The Spanish love of eye-searing color seems to have reached a high point during that decade. Farce and caricature is part of what makes Almodovar himself.

Broken Embraces takes a deeper interest in its characters' emotional lives and moves at a slower pace; compared to the films with which Almodovar made his reputation, there is a shocking lack of transvestitism and perversion.

I won't describe the plot except to say it unfolds slowly and convincingly; some things are given a little too much time, others not quite enough, but in the end it balances out and you leave feeling that the characters were believable and sympathetic.

The cast - the ubiquitous but still lovely Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar (who one remembers as Sr. Berenguer in Bad Educaton), Blanca Portillo and José Luis Goméz - perform beautifully, and though one hopes Almodovar could get back to his farcical, campy ways, this was a good film for him to make.

Winners and losers

When it comes to fashion, the small collections shown between the big ones, Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer, are a more accurate window as to what's really going on inside the designers' businesses; it's less of a circus, and the clothes have a longer window to sell. Unlike the extravagant nonsense that assaults the senses during Fashion Week (no matter which one), these clothes are meant to be worn. For me, that means they're better.

Everyone seems to show midseason collections in New York, though for all I know the same collections are shown in Paris and Shanghai. One of the best, I thought, was from Céline, which last year hired Phoebe Philo out of retirement. I'm too young to remember her glory days at Chloé but it doesn't matter. The clothes are polished and sporty, not weighed down by their luxuriousness, yet unapologetically posh. They seem simple and modern, the perfect thing for wealthy women today.



I was also struck by Givenchy's collection. The designer, Riccardo Tisci, is unpredictable and sometimes a mess; his work smacks of immaturity, as if a thousand hasty ideas had bubbled to the surface without reflection. I get the feeling that he isn't very good at self-criticism and needs someone to tell him no. But this time, he came out on an even keel with a sharp, elegant collection. It's nothing groundbreaking, but when it's done this well there's nothing wrong with a little recycling.


Strangely enough, Tisci switched places with another rather famous designer, Nicolas Ghesquière of Balenciaga, who fell flat on his face (usually it's the other way around). I always suspected there was some kind of dark secret at the bottom of Balenciaga's success, and this collection might be a clue. In addition to being a staple among thin, robot-like professionals, Balenciaga may be the label of choice for those who wish to swaddle their figures under grotesquely shaped coats and garishly printed trousers.

So as not to scar your eyes too much, I've chosen a picture of one of the more manageable looks - I can certainly imagine this ensemble, very Balenciaga in its proportions, clanking down the halls of power.


(All photographs from Style.com)

Wit and elegance

That was my reaction clicking through Lanvin's pre-fall collection on Style.com; the designer, Alber Elbaz, marks everything he does with warmth and beauty, but with humor as well. I can't get enough, and I'm just looking at little pictures on my screen.

If I were a woman, this is how I'd want to be. I'll leave you with two examples; the first is zany and, I suspect, a fabulous little joke (I hate leopard print! Except when it comes from this guy) and the other is just a really pretty dress, with cute earmuffs.




(Both images courtesy Lanvin via Style.com)

Terrorism - are we overreacting?

I am sick to death of the hysterics in this country every time someone comes close to blowing up an airplane. Yes, security mistakes were made, but mistakes are inevitable and no security system is without flaws.

Americans should make an attempt at stoicism and accept the likelihood that in the next few years there will be more terrorist attacks, some of which will succeed. It's a probability we all have to live with.

Thousands of people die every year in driving accidents or because of gun violence; the chances terrorism will kill you are negligible. Everyone - in particular, the media - needs to calm down and grow up.

The circus of the poor

There's something terribly sad about fame, sacrificing a person to create a persona. In the age of celebrity, the celebrities themselves are the victims in our modern version of human sacrifice, their lives eaten up by tabloids and gossip websites as an offering to the masses. Arrests and accidents, public feuds, stints in rehab and divorces, with luck the star's eventual death - all a cathartic spectacle for public consumption.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of celebrities: those born rich, and those born poor. The rich ones are as a rule not very smart, illiterate and with no idea what to do with themselves; trying to become famous is a natural outlet for their ennui, the adoration of their fans compensation for what were probably loveless childhoods. They can be found mostly in reality TV.

The most famous musicians tend to be from the other end of the spectrum. As examples, I'd cite Kesha (I refuse to allow her that idiotic $), who was raised by a single mother who got by on foodstamps, or Lady Gaga who grew up in Yonkers. She had the advantage of a good Catholic girls' school education, yet her family could not have been better off than the middle of the middle class.

Despite what Americans like to think about their country, making money is very hard for all but the children of the bourgeois. Conventional wisdom holds that a good university education is the key; whether that holds true today or not (something yours truly will shortly find out), the fact remains that for the children of the lower middle and working classes the best they can hope for is to do about as well as their parents did. For many of them, getting into a good college and becoming a doctor or lawyer is simply unrealistic. It should be no surprise, then, that just as Edith Piaf narrowly avoided a career as a prostitute to become a singer, young women today with bleak economic prospects see the pursuit of celebrity as an escape from whatever other kind of work they could get.

This goes a long way to explaining the crass tone of popular culture, a circus of rather hopeless people whose only way to the top is public self-destruction. It also explains their endless penchant for referencing money in their stage names.

Tom Ford Fail

When a friend tells you to see a certain movie in order to better understand him, what can you do but get yourself to the theater? In the case of Tom Ford's 'A Single Man', I'm not sure any psychological similarity between oneself and the film's characters should be advertised; at best, it seems melodramatic, at worst more than a little self-aggrandizing.

This film was supposed to be the start of the former Gucci designer's grand new life as a man of the cinema. F. Scott Fitzgerald's rueful observation comes to mind ("There are no second acts in American lives") which, though mostly untrue, for Mr Ford might deservedly turn out to be the case.

James, or Colin Firth in the title role, is a depressive but rather stylish professor of English at a little college in Los Angeles, back when Southern California was livable. In the course of a day, he thinks sadly of his partner of sixteen years, who recently died in an accident; goes to school, where a young man with a face like a porcelain doll makes eyes at him in class; comes home, thinks about blowing his brains out but decides against; instead has dinner and drinks, but mostly drinks, with his best friend, Charlie (Julianne Moore), who tries to seduce him; then heads out to a bar, where he picks up said porcelain-faced boy before dying of a heart attack, putting to rest any danger of what would have been a supremely uncomfortable love scene. It's an abrupt ending which left me wishing that, had he been a little more decisive with the pistol, he would have saved Charlie the bother of trying to sleep with him.

In fact, the entire film is constructed around the apparently unbearable sex appeal of middle-aged men in natty suits. In the course of the movie, poor James must fend off not only of Charlie, who one might have counted on to understand that after sixteen years her friend's pederasty was not a passing phase, and the doll-boy, tirelessly enthused for his professor, but a very angular, rather handsome Spanish prostitute who makes a pass at him in the parking lot. "Aren't we going somewhere?" he asks James. "No," James says. There's something off-putting about the stream of younger men flinging themselves at him mere hours before he bites the dust, as if even in the last hours of life there's nothing better to do than think about sex.

More broadly, the film is infused with a sensibility which is emphatically that of a fashion designer, not a director. I don't mean the costumes; they're nice, but nothing you couldn't find in Brooks Brothers. Instead, the film is animated with the melodramatic aesthetic of a fashion show: a woman smiles, and her lips turn brilliant red. A handsome young man enters the room and the screen brightens as if a floodlight had been switched on. Out of the blue, the quality of the image turns grainy and switches to slow-motion; abrupt shifts such as these might not look out of place in an advertisement, but in a movie they seem amateurish. It's as if Ford is trying to bring the senseless, got-your-attention spontaneity of fashion to film but it ends by feeling like a film-school experiment.

I shouldn't pretend the movie's terrible, but neither is it all that. In ten years, it will be looked back on as an oddity - "Remember that time Tom Ford made a movie?" - watched by those curious about its director's career in fashion - if in ten years anyone remembers Tom Ford at all.

Fashion, exhausted

Though I like getting dressed, I don't like to shop; unfortunately, in order to continue with the former I must go shopping from time to time. To that end, between Christmas and New Years I set out for the high street. I didn't buy anything, but I came to realization that, if shared by others, will be bad for designers and retailers: I don't want anything new.

The bottom line is, nothing I found made my heart race. At TopMan I found some nice shoes, which I thought about buying until I realized I only liked them because they look like a pair I already have; at Barney's, I found an intriguing cardigan from Nice Collective which, likewise, I left behind because I already have a cardigan I like (at a quarter of the price and, to my eye, of superior quality).

One of the few items I would have considered was a white formal shirt with a ruffled bib (it sounds infantalizing, but it wasn't). At $600, it was a bit steep; unfortunately, I have a pretty realistic idea of what it costs to manufacture clothing and when it comes to designer duds, it doesn't seem worth the price. The only way a shirt in white cotton - even a nice-looking one - should cost that amount is if it were hand-stitched by expatriate Russian princesses, which this certainly was not.

So I have shopper's malaise; who cares? If it were the case only for me, it wouldn't matter, but judging from recent economic indicators it's a feeling shared by a lot of people. New things just don't seem very exciting. We're happy with what we have. Unfortunately, this could be a serious problem for everyone who makes his living selling or manufacturing clothes.

Fashion has been on an exhausting merry-go-round since the 1990s, when new ideas essentially stopped appearing. The way people dressed changed a lot during the last century: Poiret did away with the corset, Chanel formalized the vocabulary of modern womens' clothing, Balenciaga obsessed over the set of his sleeves and most every other original thought belonged to Yves Saint Laurent. Yet for all the upheaval of the decades that separate us from those designers, many of their designs continue to be relevant - with a modern touch.

The shirt I described above was from a Belgian company called Martin Margiela, which made its reputation copying and deconstructing old clothes from years gone by; this shirt in particular was copied from one made in London in 1945. London after World War II might seem terribly distant, but, strangely enough, the menswear still looks dapper. For all the tumult and change of the 20th century, sometimes we prefer stasis - but where does that leave creativity?