Fashion Inanities

Oh I need a break from public policy postings and debate. I don’t always talk politics. Another love is fashion. Hell, I even talk politics and fashion, but this one is all about the fashion. I indulged myself with the latest fashion mags (hey, trying to be a lady o’leisure here sometimes) which I usually reserve for cross-country flights.

I’ve never looked to fashion magazines to determine what I will or won’t wear. I usually get inspiration for what my particular fashion style will be any given season by what’s available that will fit me, and what I see in the streets and on particularly fashionable friends and what I’ve determined as my own style. But it is fun, after that, to look at the fashion magazines and see how close or far off I am from the “trend setters.” For the record, I’m usually not very close. I don’t always have a choice.

I have a figure that only comes into fashion every 5-6 years. In those times, I snatch up pretty much everything I can lay my hands on to save for those rainy stylish seasons that insist women don’t have hips or tits. During those hipless/titless style periods, there are usually one or two nods to the “curvy” figure and I snatch those up as well. And by the way, this is no matter what size I am. In my adult life I’ve ran the gauntlet between sizes 4- 10 and even at my skinniest, low slung pants or skinny jeans do not fit and never will and I cannot wear a bubble skirt. Ever.

Anyway, for the past six years I’ve been accumulating what I feel is a fairly spectacular wardrobe for someone my age and income (meaning, I’m not stinking rich so I don’t have that kind of wardrobe but I haven’t had to bargain shop either). But all in all, it’s pretty substantial in shoes, clothes, and jewelry and is pretty heavy on the quality side of the scale as well. I adore shopping. I adore accessorizing. I adore putting new looks together. I’m no style icon, I don’t pretend to be. But I like putting my look together for any given event or occasion.

So I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to maintain that on a sabbatical as I can’t justify my regular shoe habit or my disregard for price tags when I don’t have new income coming in every two weeks. But I was pleasantly surprised when I was leafing through several fall fashion previews that I’m almost entirely covered and wouldn’t need to add much if anything to adapt my look to whatever’s going on this year. A few areas where my closet is lacking are things I wouldn’t wear anyway (or at least only rarely) and the others can be made up with cheaper accessories or vintage shopping.

• Artist prints and flowing tops: Check
• Shoes in crocodile, alligator, snakeskin: Check (Croc and snakeskin Manolo’s; python Jimmy Choo’s—even if I can’t walk ten feet in them)
• Capes are back which gives license to my ponchos. I love my ponchos and wear them whether they are in style or not, but at least I have to defend them less when they’re in style.
• Hardware-studded shoes: Covered (thank you fiancé for picking out those Manolo’s in Vegas! I love you!)
• Autumn colours actually found in nature: Double, triple, quintuple check. Those are my perfect colors.
• Jeans and trousers I’m completely good with.
• When it comes to dressing up, I have every look I’d ever wear covered, and still a few I wouldn’t wear. I have frilly feminine, austere feminine, Victorian, Goth, romantic, structured, hippy, avant-garde, Asian-style, you name it. A year ago I swore I wouldn’t buy a new dress until I’d worn everyone in my closet. I only broke that vow for the ‘50s style taffeta shirtwaist dress in blurred leopard print. That pretty much completed the collection for now. And I’m not bored with a single one of the dresses in my closet.

A few things that are missing:

• A big slouchy off-the-shoulder or boat neck sweater: I remember I had the absolute perfect one several years ago. For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened to it and can’t imagine I got rid of it. I must have been high. But I don’t get high. Weird. Anyway, have been looking for a replacement for that for years.
• Ankle boots: Particularly drooling over the ones in Manolo Blahnik’s fall collection. If you haven’t picked up on it by now, I’m a HUGE Manolo Blahnik fan. And while yes, my knowledge of this designer started with Sex and the City, it’s because of the fit and style that I remain an adherent. There are a lot of designers that I love the look of, but whose fit and heel placement don’t work with my feet (Christian Louboutin, sadly) or whose shoes have toe cleavage, which I hate. Still, my Alexander McQueen’s are my favourite shoes in my collection. But McQueen just doesn’t have a big shoe line. Anyway, I’ll probably have to bypass the ankle boots this year unless I can find acceptable knock-offs. I can live without since I have enough regular boots and I’m not a big fan of the ankle boot with skirt or cropped pants. On me anyway. For women with fabulous legs, it works. I have good legs. Not fabulous legs.
• Metallics: I’ll mostly cover this base with accessories. Too much metallic starts looking too ‘80s.
• Jewelry: There are probably a few new pieces I’ll pick up throughout the season. Most will be cheap/vintage, but I might have to make a visit to my jewelry designer friend for something special.

What I’ll pass on:

• Jewel tones: Not the best look for me. I have one or two dressy pieces that work, but for everyday, it tends to make me look a bit clownish. Earth tones are much more my color.
• Plaids: They keep trying, it keeps failing. Plaid outside of Scotland or the SCA needs to just stay away.
• Pencil skirts and really skinny pants: They just don’t fit and never will. I’m zen about that now.

I’ve also got it on my To Do list in the next two weeks to go through what I have and get with my fabulous seamstress sorceress to update anything severely in the need for it. I also have extra of a fabulous fabric (red-orange silk taffeta that will make my curtains) to turn into something as well. In fact, I’m going to do a lot more fabric/pattern hunting than actual shopping for new pieces. It will be cheaper and I will be 100% sure of the quality for the value.

Think Before You Speak

GRRR! ARRRGGH!

I just watched Chris Matthews tear apart a radio talk show host for not knowing what he was talking about. Not an hour later I’m in a debate with someone on an entirely different subject who was taking an issue where he didn’t even know the definition of it.

Nothing drives me crazier than people who do that! C’mon folks, say you don’t know something and after you do a little research (like Wikipedia or Google) you’ll come back with your opinion.

This—in my opinion—is the single biggest cause of the piss-poor state of public discourse in this country. This need we all have, for some weird reason, to have a position on something whether we know what we’re talking about or not. This compulsion we seem to have that we can know a little and say a lot. Just watch The Daily Show asking small-town people about small-town values. These people have no idea what they’re talking about. But they’re voting based on what they’re saying. That’s terrifying.

Another example, from earlier this morning (yeah, three instances in one day!), was a coffee shop conversation I had with a woman about Ayn Rand. I overheard her criticizing her writing but what she really hated about Rand was her philosophy. So debate me her philosophy (which we did) but what’s that got to do with her writing style? Even when this woman would attempt to make a criticism about the actual writing style, she couldn’t get half a sentence through without resorting to what Rand was saying rather than how she said it.

Then it was patently obvious that she’d only read an article about Ayn Rand, not any of her books, since she didn’t know who Gayle Wynand was. I don't care if you don't know who Gayle Wynand is. I care only if you want to engage in a debate about Ayn Rand with me. 'Cause believe me, I know who he is.

My point being, ask questions and think before you speak. If it’s an obvious question (like how many senate seats each state has*) I will make fun of you. But I will still give you an answer. Or just wait until you get the answer before committing an opinion. There is nothing wrong, nothing embarrassing, nothing demeaning about saying “You know, I don’t know enough about that. Let me look it up and I’ll get back to you.” Or, “You know, can you tell me more about that? ‘Cause I don’t know enough to have an opinion.” Or even, “You know, I don’t know anything about it and I don’t care. Here’s another topic of conversation.” Or if you make a mistake (as I do, as does everyone), simply say something like, “Really? I thought I knew more about that. Thanks for the new information.”

I don’t remember what the particular subject was, but it was when I was in junior high and I pretended to know something about some band or book or topic or whatever and was found out in about two sentences flat. I don’t think I was ever more embarrassed. I don’t think I ever pretended to know about something I didn’t know anything about again.

*Yes Anonymous, that one’s a zing at you ;-)

Fashion Politics

All the broo-haha over the “value” of Cindy McCain’s convention outfit (estimated at $313,000) is rubbish. Now I love Vanity Fair, but they know better than anyone about the difference between estimating what something is currently worth vs. not only what it actually cost but also what the wealthy actually have to pay for these items. First off, other than the watch and the de la Renta dress (which Vanity Fair absolutely would have known a solid estimate of the price of), there is no factual numbers associated with any of the items. The 3-carat diamond earrings are estimated to cost—right now—approximately $280K, but there’s no information about the designer, the distributor, or how she obtained them. She could have gotten them at an auction (oh, even a charity auction). Same with the pearls. Take those two off the table, and the outfit’s value is dramatically reduced to $8,100. While they were able to identify Laura Bush’s as Stuart Weitzman’s, Cindy McCain’s are unidentified and estimated to be $600. Which is a good estimate for average designer shoes. My guess is that, given she’s wearing de la Renta, she probably has some high end shoe tastes. But all in all, neither she nor Laura Bush probably paid retail prices for the dresses as designers do like having high profile people strut their clothes across national television.

I don’t like the McCains anymore than VF does, but can we leave fashion out of our politics? It’s really unfair given that Michelle Obama isn’t getting the same critique. Quick searches shows her preferred designer (and the one who did her convention speech dress) is Maria Pinto who retails at Saks and Barney’s (quick search didn’t produce a price for a Maria Pinto dress, but a simple wool top is $95) as well as accessorizes with Alaia. Now I can’t price out all her accessories, but I do know Alaia shoes usually retail for at least $1,000. So let’s stop blowing Cindy McCain out of proportion for earrings that we can’t even confirm cost that much or are even real (the disclaimer in the VF piece says “All prices except Laura’s shoes and Cindy’s watch are estimates, and the jewelry prices are based on the assumption that the pieces are real.”)

I’m just happy, since I have to look at them for the next two months, that they’re all at least fashionable. Laura’s bored me to tears for 8 years and Condi stopped wearing the cool boots.

Speaking of cool shoes, Manolo Blahniks fall collection has me drooling. Almost--just almost--makes me want to start job hunting.

Television Inanities

EDIT/UPDATE: Completely forgot to add Dexter to the list of must-watch shows. Apparently Season 3 starts in September.

I’m being extremely lazy this Sunday morning. Slept ‘til 9 (which is very late for me) and spending my morning computer time deciding what I’m going to watch this TV season. What can be lazier than figuring out your schedule for laziness?

I’ve already set my TIVO for True Blood and Fringe, but I suspect I’ll be cancelling that after a couple of episodes. I have a strange compulsion to try any vampire-related show, and keep watching it well after it’s worthwhile. But none of them ever match up to BtVS and Angel, so I’m always disappointed. I just wish Joss would come out with something, anything, new! Same with Aaron Sorkin. Fringe got good reviews as the next X-Files, so I’ll give it a shot. I’ve avoided most of the X-Files-like shows since it went off the air (and avoided the latest movie, too), but it may have been long enough to come up with a decent new show in that genre. And oh my, they’re doing a new Knight Rider. Must check it out. At worst you’ll get the cheesy factor. At best, cheesy factor.

Returning shows will be Smallville, Heroes (best show ever after BSG), Battlestar Galactica (whenever it gets around to scheduling the final episodes), Law & Order, SVU (new episodes only; when you find yourself sucked into a L&W marathon, you know you’re in the bad place), Bones (and catch up on previous seasons, in order, via Netflix), Lost, Desperate Housewives, and Dexter. I don’t know when/if the BBC America’s Robin Hood is coming back. The last episode of the second season fell off my recorded shows on my TIVO while I was traveling. I can probably Netflix the first season and that episode as well.

At some point I’ll Netflix Weeds, as I was too late to the game on that show. Plus I have borrowed The Wire, as it is highly recommended.

Obviously with it being an election year and with a lot more free time on my hands, I’ll be watching The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and Bill Maher more regularly. Bill Maher I already watch regularly, as its weekly. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don’t get watched every single time.

That’s about 11 hours of scheduled TV time per week not counting Robot Chicken which we have a tendency to save up and watch in one big batch.

I’m not one of those people that have a guilt thing about whatever amount of television I watch. TIVO changed my world, actually letting me watch less/better TV than random channel surfing. Though random channel surfing has its place. The fiancé and I did that last night. Got sucked into two episodes of Project Runway (god I HATE reality show formats, even when the topic is good—like fashion—the format is unbearable) and Pink Floyd’s The Wall and subsequent documentary. I’d never seen The Wall, so that was a good outcome of channel surfing. And now I know—despite all recommendations—that I will not end up watching Project Runway. I may get addicted to their website as the outfits they come up with can be truly amazing. But I don’t have to endure the god-awful reality show format/fake dramatis that goes along with it. I’m still resentful over the one season of The Apprentice I had to watch because I used to know one of the contestants.

By all means, if I'm missing out on the next fabulous show, do let me know. I have a tendency to miss great ones (like the aforementioned Weeds and like when I didn't catch on to The West Wing until four seasons into it).

From the How-Did-I-Have-the-Time Files

I just finished a very simple task that took four hours.

A few years ago I went on the hunt for my perfect duvet cover. Long story short, couldn’t find it even when I made price no option. It simply didn’t exist. So I went fabric hunting, found precisely what I wanted, and had my seamstress sorceress whip it up. It was fabulous in almost every detail. Only thing wrong was that the comforter still poked out of the bottom. Easy fix, just needed Velcro strips to seal it down. So easy I wasn’t even going to bother the seamstress sorceress. Even I could handle a simple task like that.

The only problem was time. When I was working, I had a few hours in the evening (you see, I insist on actually making dinners, not take out) and the weekends to cram in all household tasks/projects, time with the fiancé, socializing with friends, TV/movies, reading, and relaxing. When you figure I worked usually minimum 10 hour days and I’m one of those people that need 7-8 hours of sleep a night, that literally left ~40 hours a week to cram in all non-work things. Oh, and those 50 hour weeks were slow weeks. So I would have paid to have it done thereby keeping up the cycle of working to pay for the things I don’t have time to do and with little to no time left over to utilize the rest of the salary. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’ll end up going back to that cycle in some aspect. I’m just hoping I won’t let it get so bad again.

So I finally tackle the minor but long task today. Four hours to glue and iron on 10 strips of Velcro to a duvet cover. It’s perfect, went exactly as expected. Just takes that long to measure the strips, position them, carefully iron each side, and check and double check your work so it doesn’t fall apart. At least it’s something that can be done in front of the television, but only watching something you either don’t care about or have seen at least once so your attention can be diverted.

I seriously don’t know how people do it. Am I just a perfectionist? Or are all working people’s lives messes in some aspect? Maybe that’s what I’ll figure out during my sabbatical. Which part of my life I’m willing to have consistently fall apart.

Random Inanities

For some reason, coffee is not kicking in like normal this morning.

I just cleared my Inbox of 50 Facebook e-mails. That site is a black hole of time suck. I love it.

Keeping up at Electoral-Vote.com, it looks like McCain lost ground after the convention. I thought conventions were supposed to boost a candidate, not drag him down further. ;-).

Reading: Finished Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (recommend it), picking back up on Stephen Clarke’s Merde series (hilarious, but you have to know enough about the English and the French to really get the humour). After that I’ll try a Neil Gaiman (Good Omens) where he partnered with Terry Pratchett. I simply adore Neil Gaiman, but am a bit skeptical about Terry Pratchett. If it sucks, I can start watching the BBC series of Neverwhere to get a Gaiman fix. I love discovering an author that’s been around for a while because there’s a backlog of books to get through. But then typically, that author has decided to take a long sabbatical just when I start jonesing for his/her next book. Or they start partnering with other authors and those rarely work out well. I’ve gotten good recommendations for the Gaiman/Pratchett partnership.

My cats love that I don’t go to work anymore. Or rather, they think my new job is to let them in and out of the house all day long. When good people die, they come back as one of my (or my sisters’) cats.

I think Middle America, except for Chicago, should have their statehoods revoked and turned back into territories. Territories can’t vote, right? But we still get to tax them, take their goods, and benefit from their labor. Just deprive them of their votes and all would be right in this country, right? Or is that left? It’s really just the uber-religiosity that gets to me. I can actually get behind some—even most—of the fiscal aspects of conservatism (particularly those that understand that environmentalism should be at the core of conservative ideology), but those religious wack-jobs just gall me no end.

Redoing the home equity loan. Have to dig up all kinds of verification documents regarding the fiancé’s employment, income, etc. Which is fine, just annoying when you aren’t falsifying your loan application like the sub-prime fools did. It was a bit weird to have to classify myself as a homemaker on the application. I’ve been a corporate whore for so long it just seems weird to suddenly be a homemaker, officially. I laugh with former coworkers about being a housewife for six months, but to have it on an official application is a bit jarring. I could tell that the lady on the phone thought I was pregnant.

Consumerism, a world of diminishing returns ...

Currently reading Billy Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Typically humourous and engaging Bryson, it however tells a real story about life in the 50’s and covers the blandification of the US at the end of the decade with the rise of chains and malls and the deaths of downtowns. That’s a subject I am extremely attracted to. It was during my move from Florida to Seattle that it struck me so hard that I could drive from one corner of this country to the other and eat at the same restaurants, sleep in the same hotels, pump at the same gas stations no matter where I was. It was hugely depressing. I don’t know how it is in the middle of the country or in smaller towns (in the US, we stick to the corners, the urban centers, or the wilderness), but at least in my corner of the universe, that trend was halted and is being significantly rolled back. My neighborhood has only one fast food chain restaurant (currently a KFC, soon to be replaced by a Jack in the Box) that isn’t Dick’s. And Dick’s doesn’t count since it’s a fabulous greasy fast food restaurant that is locally owned and entirely contained within Seattle. But anyway …

One line in the book jumped out at me: “… joyous consumerism is a world of diminishing returns.” When you decide to give up income (regardless of how much you saved up to spend in the duration), you automatically start assessing the cost and need of the materialistic attitude. When I turned 30 my income started escalating and my debt disappeared. Everything was disposable income. After 8 years of scraping by and accumulating monumental debt, it was all changed. I didn’t have to shop at Marshalls anymore, I only had to avoid the haute couture section of Nordstrom’s (and sometimes I didn’t avoid even that section). The media system that had seemed so perfectly adequate for so long now was completely unacceptable for our newfound tastes (I admit, that was primarily the fiancé—I just went along with it except for the insistence on the flat panel television; I simply despise the amount of room the old televisions took up).

It was orgiastic in nature, and it was wonderful. See a pair of Alexander McQueen shoes that tickle my fancy? Owned. See a dress that will likely never be on the market again. Owned. Skis, snowboards, bikes, hiking boots and gear. Everything to make our leisure time fashionable, fun, and top of the line.

But at some point we stopped having the leisure time to enjoy the equipment or wear the fancy shoes. And that’s where the diminishing returns came in. If all you’re working for is to buy the stuff that you’ll never use, then there’s no point. So, I stopped working, realized I pretty much had everything we wanted, stopped buying, and started enjoying. I’ve actually worn my fabulous shoes more since I quit than I did in the six months preceding it. I just make up reasons to dress up.

I’m not against consumerism or buying outrageous things. I’m only against it when you never get to use it. And we’re pretty set on what we got. Except of course the fiancé now wants a fancy new camera. Hey, he’s the one working, he can afford it. Of course, this new lifestyle could crumble to bits depending on Manolo Blahnik's fall collection.

BTW, back to Bill Bryson, I highly recommend reading his Shakespeare. Especially if you had to study him ad nausea like I did in high school and college (curse of being an English major). What you’ll learn from Bryson is simple: No matter how much we study Shakespeare, we know next to nothing about the man. Everything you think you know (beyond the born in Stratford Upon Avon), is probably made up. We know he lived, he wrote plays, he died. It’s a pretty short book.