Best of Lookbook: We Still Love Saggy Clothing, Looking Waifish

This is entitled "coffee & novels" even though I bet he is really drinking a skim soy latte. This guy seems very influenced by the Olsen Twins. I say he can do better! I'm tired of people saying gay gays dress better than straight men. They both dress bad. I guess this guy has some flair, but it's misplaced. A few more examples:

It's like they're in a costume, but they don't know what they are supposed to be. I guess I appreciate the campiness of it, but I think lots of gays seem to dress in parodies in a sort of version of masculinity, hence the the male cast of Jersey Shore in the Village Voice queer issue, illustrating the "guido ideal." But these looks, like all the looks here, are desperately high-fashiony, except I guess the guy in the headband, who looks more Portland 2008. No one seems influenced by anything cool or really belonging to an interesting subculture, just by what is trendy.






This is a big look for girls. It's a kind of swaddled, diapery look. Everyone is into pants with saggy apendages, like dropped crotches and voluminous ankles. More neutral. More 90's. I think maybe the two bottom ones are wearing the same flowy skort? Isn't it weird that not long ago these ladies would be wearing low-rise Sevens and Juicy suits? Like the guy above, they strive for a rumpled "I just threw this flowy skort on," look.




Also hot: tucking something voluminous into a pair of 501 cut-offs and posing with a fashion hunch.



In: long hair for the ladies. But, not curly, wild long fair. That's gross. It's lank and straight, like the pleats in your shorts. And bowler hats and faux vintage sunglasses and skorts or at least a really big shirt with no pants. Standing knock-kneed and unsteadily, as usual.

Who wore the Smiths T-Shirt Better Competition:

That first guy looks your sixth-grade dream date, whereas the second guy is doing the ubiquitous pigeon-toed 90's floral thing. Which goes to show that gay guys dress no better than straight guys, but also that everyone also dresses the same, basically. Also, that everyone is, as usual, harboring the delusion that they alone control how they dress.

Mary's Musings: I Liked It, I Am Sick of Looking at this Bitch, and More!

Issue One: Here is a dress Jezebel hated on as "one of the worst of the year." Whatever! I think this dress is cool. It looks kind of like your everyday cocktail dress crossed with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. It's special and weird!

This, on the other hand, they loooved. It was one of the "best of the year." This is like the kind of dress you might look cool in when you are seventy years old and you're a grand dame type with an elegant and stately style, but if you're 23 or what this Olsen is (God, remember the Olsens??? Everyone was so obsessed with them!) you are just boring and safe as hell. Much like Anne Hathaway in this dress:
What a bunch of boring crap! I'm so sick of rewarding celebrities for wearing a $12,000 gown their stylist picked out for them. Except for the Rhianna dress in there, nothing considered "great" is risky, inventive, unique, or strays from the typical model. I love how celebrities won't even wear necklaces or jewelery half the time because they are so intent on looking classy.


Issue Two:
What the fuck is up with these new cell phone commercials starring an unforgivably bloated Luke Wilson? Who's like, "Well, if fat 'n frumpy Luke Wilson wants me to change my coverage, I will!" I remember when I was a child, and I saw stuff on TV and craved it intensely (once I made my mom buy me this red sugar goo that you were supposed to squeeze onto your oatmeal to make fun shapes- needless to say the goo just kind of smeared and melted everywhere, and I think I learned a valuable lesson.) Anyway, I would love to visit an alternate reality when female stars show up looking fat and disheveled and shilling something on a TV commercials and no one bats an eye.




Issue Three:
Hey, guess what? You suck, Tim Burton. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sucked, Sweeney Todd sucked, Big Fish sucked (I watched this in college with my new-at-the-time roommates and they all cried at the end and I was like "WTF?") , Corpse Bride looked like it sucked, and your new obsession with CGI really sucks, because at least you used to be all about this unique, hand crafted, stylized aesthetic and this preview looks like a video game. Also, much of this aesthetic has become totally cliche- ie, of all the stupid Nightmare Before Christmas plastic crap made for pez Hot Topic teens. Also, Alice is a little girl, not sexy babe with her dress half torn off. I do like Beatlejuice, but that was a long time ago!

Issue Four:
Also, you suck, Michael Jackson. I am so sick of hearing Michael Jackson songs in every place and context. It was bad enough when it was just a hipster party staple, but now you can't escape it anywhere. Of course, there are only like five songs anybody will even play, and no one ever even plays, like, Man in the Mirror. Michael Jackson obviously had a huge cultural impact and is an icon and blah blah blah, but musically those songs aren't anything special. And everyone is so intent on claiming Michael Jackson as their own, like playing Billie Jean at a bar for the five hundredth time is really going to blow everyone away.


Issue Five:
You know what else sucks? "Remixed" old Christmas songs that are like Bing Crosby's voice going "Chestnuts roasting- roasting- roasting- beep bloop boop oonz oonz oonz." It's such a travesty! I hate the modern assumption that no one has enough of an attention span to listen to something slow and complete that doesn't jump or cut into something after five seconds.

Just Say No (To Pants)

The Olsens look like they're dressing up in their mother's clothes, and their mother is a dominatrix from 1996. First, let's start with Mary Kate, my fave Olsen. She is wearing a long, boxy, 1996 blazer. Underneath, something flowy and scarf-like that is dangling out beneath it. En pointe, she has done away with pants, which we all know is chic, chic, chic for the MK set these days.

One trend I really hate is the Lucky Magazine-driven, "If you're wearing something flowy, put something boxy, like a shoulder-padded blazer or leather jacket on top. It'll toughen it up!" You don't need to put something "opposite" in top of something else to make it work! It's called a "mismatch," and it looks dumb. Have the confidence to embrace an entire look.

MK has added a pair of boots that also look kinda '96 to me, what with the square toe, and these boots are scrunching all over her teeny calves. Seriously, if you didn't know who she was, but saw this photo, would you not think she was somebody's kid? Also, are oversized blazers really going to come back because I would have to be held at gunpoint to get into one of those. I will say it right now to both the Olsens: They're no good on short people. Actually, they're no good period, but short people can't even pull it off in a nod to 80's power suit-dressing kind of way (which we all know was really a nod to 1940's Katherine Hepburn power suit dressing.)

And then Ashley, who lately has been going for some kind of severe, minimalist chic thing (whoa, way to button only one button!), and is wearing a corset, leather leggings (godamnit if I see one pair of shiny/metallic/leather/pleather leggings...) and pointy toe shoes. All very vixenish, except she has it all covered up with some large flowy cardigan (speaking of which, if I see one more oversized cardigan...) and, it's just so bland. No one ever wants to have fun with campy seperates! What's the point of dressing like a skank if you can't even enjoy it?

Here they are with models wearing their "fashion line," The Row, which I saw at Barney's this summer. (Though, supposedly, Ashley has asked Mary Kate to leave the company because she doesn't do anying.) Bleh. The models, despite being really tall, look dumpy in these looks too. MK, on the other hand, now looks like a tiny seventy-year old who's had one facelift too many. She's very versatile.

Some assorted looks: A tweed mini and ankle boots with a puff sleeves blouse? Another oversized blazer with skinny black pants? A flowy kimono thing? I prefer the Olsens who wore long capes and lots of bracelets and teetered around on really high platforms and looked crazy. (Check out my Olsens tag for more on that.) There's nothing worth than an attempt at minimal, tasteful chic, especially in an era where you can dress like a total uncreative slob in one neutral, semi-long shirt, put on some high heels, and call it a minimal, tasteful day.

Oversized Flannel + Radiohead= :(

Here's Mary Kate at a Radiohead concert. Ew. Don't you ever feel like you are intimidated by hipsters sometimes because you have this idea that they have really advanced taste in music but then it turns out they just want to listen to whatever was popular when they were 14 because it's retro now? Not that I'm intimidated by Mary Kate. Even I could probably knock her down.

Anyway, what the hell is up with this outfit. This is a large man's shirt with either something very short or nothing underneath, and a peace pin. I don't need to say why this is bad. It's obvious from the way it looks. But I will say that I'm sick of seeing people carry around heavy leather bags with summery outfits. (Not that this outfit is summery, exactly, but I assume if you're pantsless it's probably hot out.) It looks totally inappropriate. Claudia Kishi, who wore many a man's shirt as a dress/tunic, would have at least paired it with a homemade tote bag decorated with single pierced earrings and glitter glue.

PS: On second thought, I can see some tattered strings hanging from her crotch area, indicating she is wearing cutoffs. I should have assumed that's what was underneath, because anytime someone looks like they're wearing a shirt as a dress it turns out there are some crotch-length cut-offs underneath. You know, to keep things classy.

Another Page from the Onesie Files

Oh man, this is one ugly and ill-fitting onesie. Actually, I can't believe this is Mary Kate. The straight beige hair, the black outfit....it just seems so Ashley. I'd expect this of her, but it just seems so depressingly lank for MK. Well, whatever.

The point is, it's really ugly. The top half, with its huge 80's cut and boxy sleeves, make her look like she has a very large and droopy bosom, and the pleated bottoms aren't doing her any favors either. We all know it's hard to make someone of her stature look this large and top heavy, so we know this onesie is doing an impressive job.

I guess she thought that hot pink belt was really going to cinch it altogether, but it just furthers that whole "Florida retiree wears her sassy black silk onesie out on the town" vibe that's going on here.

"Owner of a Lonely Heart" is Stuck in my Head

Why, you ask, am I posting these photos of rags on my blog? Why, they are not rags, but part of the new, minimalist fashion line of the Olsen twins, currently being featured at Barney's, and full of deals and steals like $300 t-shirts and whatnot. This is like how Mandy Moore's fashion line, the annoyingly named Mblem, with the even more annoying description of "vintage contemporary tees" (what the hell is vintage about this? vintage means old, you fools) is supposed to feature that perfect $85 t-shirt you could never find. I don't know what kind of rich people are bemoaning the fact that they can never find a good t-shirt when there is practically no design involved in making them and there are ten million available for $7, but whatever. I guess they are the same sort of people who think American Apparel really makes a well-priced product that just can't be found anywhere else.

Anyway, it's all very fascinating,- I really love that long gray tank dress old MK is showing us in the last picture. It looks very flattering, unique, and well-designed. Apparently "The Row" has sold really well, probably to the same public that buys Britney's perfume and The Jaime collection by Jaime Pressley. I'm really sure that all these "designers" are constantly hard at work on their "designs."

Also, I just spent like twenty minutes trying to find this one photo of Fergie's line for Kipling (remember those hideous nylon bags with the monkey hanging off them that were really expensive and I dreamed of owning in seventh grade?) that I saw in an old People magazine and stared at for like five minutes in order to make a reference to Paris Is Burning in relation to them, but of course I couldn't find the right one, so the pic at the end of this post will have to do, even though it doesn't look nearly as Paris Is Burning as the other one.

But, I admit, I don't really hate the Olsens. I hate aspects of the Olsens, many aspects I guess, but I guess what I appreciate about them (mostly Mary Kate) is that they sometimes look completely psychotic in the name of fashion, and, in their own troll-like way, seem very devoted to it in a way that other self-proclaimed fashion-loving starlets (Lindsay Lohan, for instance) don't. They don't just wear the latest trends their stylist put them in, and sometimes they look crazy, and not just because of their blank and hungry eyes.

As a visual aid, I've added this photo of Mary Kate super Stevie Nicks-ed out at the supermarket, or the one above where she is wearing the fur jacket. She kind of looks like a crazy old lady in these pictures, or a fashionable gremlin. I also really felt jealous of this beautiful vintage lace dress Ashley wore to the premiere of the classic film Troy. I mean, technically I'm against all they stand for, but I'd rather look at photos of the Olsens clothes than of most famous people.

Sienna Miller is a Blight Upon Fashion/ Factory Girl Clearly Sucks

In honor of the release of the certain-to-be-terrible Factory Girl and the recent trendiness of Edie Sedgwick and all things mod and 60's, I made the above collage (please click) of Sienna Miller's terrible costuming in this film.

The real Edie Sedgwick had a streamlined mod style that, despite its extremity, ultimately looked very sleek and pretty sophisticated, but still fun and young. She knew that wearing a pair of huge earrings was awesome as long as the rest of your look was simple, and that she could pull of lots of thick black eyeliner and wearing long t-shirts as dresses. She looked very 60's, but in a unique, New York-y, Factoryish kind of way. Sure, Edie was of dubious talent (though I highly recommend her biography Edie: An American Life) but she had a lot of style.

Sienna Miller, or whoever costumed her, on the other hand, made this Edie's clothes look like one of those "1960's girl" costumes you can get at the Halloween superstore- I'm surprised they didn't include a pair of white platform vinyl go-go boots to go with her million necklaces, huge earrings, floppy hats, copious amounts of eyeliner that she can't pull off, and, yes, open-toe boots. I have to say this picture probably horrified me the most. Who was responsible for placing that horrible hat and cheesy Halloween-ish looking sunglasses on her head? Have they ever looked at a picture of Edie Sedgwick?

In conclusion, there are lots of things terribly wrong with this movie. Weezer plays The Velvet Underground. Hayden Christensen plays Bob Dylan. Jimmy Fallon is in it. I believe Mary-Kate Olson has a cameo- perhaps as a starving monkey, which is the only role I can see her successfully filling. Basically, there's nothing good. On the plus side, it could be really bad in a good/entertaining way. The clothes, however, are just bad in a bad way.