Plus-Sized Model Calls BS On American Apparel: Creates Portfolio To Mock Them
Photo courtesy of American Apparel
It’s taken over twenty years, but American Apparel has finally finally begun offering clothes in size XL. Up until just recently, anything over a “Large” was just plain “not our demographic,” according to American Apparel reps. It may seem strange that the popular clothing outlet has never provided anything over a size 11, but who here is truly surprised to hear that Don “I’m A Sleazeball And I’m Okay With That” Charney’s company caters exclusively to slender women?
New sizes apparently mean new models to display them, so American Apparel has started a plus-sized model search/contest looking for “booty-ful” women to fill out the new XLs. Women submit photos to American Apparel’s website, where they are then numerically ranked by readers based on their perceived attractiveness.
Anyone who has ever been to a model search can tell you that, despite the abundance of beautiful people, it’s a horribly…
Poses: Juxtaposing Fashion With Reality
The Spanish artist Yolanda Dominguez brings the visual language of fashion into the realm of the real world, with brilliant results:
“Poses” is a direct criticism of the absurd and artificial world of glamour and of fashion that magazines present. Specifically, the highly-distorted image of women…these images are virtually the only feminine reference in the mass media.
Using these impossible stances of the fashion publishing houses as a symbol of how grotesque and unreal this industry is, a group of real women transfer these poses to daily scenes: the queue of a museum, the supermarket or the bus stop.
In Defense of the Hipster
PART ONE: WHAT IS A HIPSTER, AND WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE THEM? or: YOU’RE SO FAKE (AND SO AM I)
My name is Tuna Ghost and I have a confession: I’m a hipster.
One may think this is a self-defeating statement, like “this sentence is false” or “all Cretans are liars, says so-and-so of Crete”, as one of the commonly accepted hallmarks of a hipster is that he or she will vehemently deny that they are a hipster. This bit of conventional wisdom is easily verified, all one has to do is ask the hipsters around one if they self-identify as a “hipster”. Personally, I have to look no further than my own friends to see evidence of it. By the traditional definition of “hipster” they are obviously hipsters, but thus far I am the only one who will gladly self-identify as such. One may wonder why anyone in their right mind…
‘Air-Conditioned’ Clothes Keep Japan Cool
With temperatures rising the last thing you’d want to do is put on a jacket, but Japan’s ‘air-conditioned’ coats have built-in fans to keep you cool. Via France24:
As jackets go it looks far from fashionable, but its Japanese maker cannot meet sky-rocketing demand for “air conditioned” coats with built-in fans.
Kuchofuku Co. Ltd — whose name literally means “air-conditioned clothing” — has seen orders soar amid power shortages in Japan after the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
As parts of the nation sweat out an uncomfortable summer shackled by restrictions on electricity use, demand has grown for goods that provide guilt-free respite from the unrelenting summer heat.
Two electric fans in the jacket can be controlled to draw air in at different speeds, giving the garment a puffed-up look. But this has not deterred those happy to be cool rather than “hot” when it comes to fashion.
A Year’s Worth Of Makeup At Once
With the aim of highlighting the “cosmetic overkill” prevalent in modern life, directors Lernert & Sander applied the quantity of makeup typically worn over the course of a year, 365 layers, onto a model in a single day.
(Surely she will be 365 times as beautiful?) The results of the experiment are fairly unsettling.
Joint Stockings Are Eerie
As androids/dolls/CG figures become more lifelike, flesh-and-blood humans may desire to head in the other direction. Girls (and boys) can now pick up chic joint stockings to give themselves the look of a robot/figurine attempting to mimic a human being. Asiajin provides some explanation and unsettling photos:
Kyutai Kansetsu Sutokkingu (Spherical Joint Stocking) is a coterie stocking sold at Bungaku Furima (literature flea-market), a dojinshi sale dedicated for literature-related things only, by circle Ojosama Gakkou Shojo Bu (preppie school girls section). The stocking has globe joint painted on knees, to make your leg like real figure.
The stockings, 2,000 yen(US$25) seems sold out on their online shop, currently on order.
But why? I guess some people might love figures too much so that now they want to become like that. It is interesting because those joints originally showed their incompleteness of mimicking human beings.
So Exactly How Can You Dress to Fly on US Airways?
Saggy pants are a no-no. Rocky Picture Horror Show, clear to go. Not sure what the deal is here. Reports the AP via Yahoo News:
SAN FRANCISCO — Days before a college football player was arrested on a US Airways flight at San Francisco airport following a dispute over his saggy pants, the airline allowed another man wearing skimpy women’s panties and mid-thigh stockings to fly, according to a passenger and airline spokeswoman.
Jill Tarlow, a passenger on a June 9 flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Phoenix, took a photo of the scantily clad man, which she provided to the San Francisco Chronicle. The newspaper published the photo in its Wednesday edition.
The man flew six days before University of New Mexico football player DeShon Marman was arrested on a US Airways flight at San Francisco airport following allegations he refused to pull up his pants.
Tarlow told the Chronicle she and other passengers complained before boarding the plane, but US Airways employees did not prevent the unidentified man from flying.
The Age Of Perpetual Self-Branding
Facebook wants to be the place where you feel most yourself, with the most control over how you are regarded. It inextricably intertwines marketing with selfhood, so that having a self becomes an inherently commercial operation.
Writing for n+1, Rob Horning concocts a frightening, fantastic, and thought-provoking essay on how we live today, connecting the reign of “fast fashion” companies such as Forever 21, social media such as Facebook, and 21st century capitalism’s demand that workers market and reinvent themselves endlessly:
I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals.
Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager…
The NYC Fancy Rat Convention
June is a special time of year in New York, when the sun warms the city, and the rats come out of hiding and get whisked off to fashion shows in the finest of attire at the Fancy Rat Convention.
Steampunk Cell Phones
Trying to cultivate a traveler-from-another-era aesthetic but concerned that the look is ruined every time you pull out your Blackberry? Designer Ivan Mavrovic has a line of frightening steampunk cellphones to help stay in character. Now you’ll never have to pull out a bland businessman’s phone again.
See the rest via How To Be A Retronaut.
Augment Your Body With Brainwave-Controlled Cat Ears
Completely real and available for purchase now from Japanese startup outfit Neurowear. Being a bionic cyber-feline has never looked cuter. Via Wired UK:
The ears twitch through a range of different positions, which correspond to different brain activity. So when you concentrate, the ears point upwards and when you relax the ears flop down and forwards. Mind control isn’t new, but lately advances have been made to make mass market control devices at affordable prices.
The Power Of Clothing Labels To Shape Your Life
In another experiment, volunteers watched one of two videos of the same man being interviewed for a job. In one, his shirt had a logo; in the other, it did not. The logo led observers to rate the man as more suitable for the job, and even earned him a 9% higher salary recommendation.
In a society in which the populace is now referred to as “consumers” rather than “citizens”, we all know the power of branding. The Economist reports on a study showing just how far this effect goes — the cooperation, respect, and money which others will give you varies widely based on the logo that appears on your shirt:
Rob Nelissen and Marijn Meijers of Tilburg University in the Netherlands examined people’s reactions to [actors] who were wearing clothes made by Lacoste and Tommy Hilfiger, two well-known brands that sell what they are pleased to refer to as designer clothing.…
Mask For Full-Head Pixelation In Public Places
If you long for privacy in a world of near-constant surveillance, take note. Finally there is an analog device for pixelating one’s face while walking the streets. Wearing this will definitely liven up your day. Via Co.Design (thanks to John K. Smith for the tip):
Martin Backes has designed some conceptual fashion headwear to assuage your paranoia. “Pixelhead” is a full-coverage mask decorated in pixelated colors, so that if you do get caught by Google Street View’s cameras, your privacy is assured.
Clearly, Mr. Backes has his tongue at least partly in-cheek with his design: as he explains on his site, that pixelated pattern is actually a “fashionable” de-rezzed image of German Secretary of the Interior Thomas de Maizière. Pixelhead is no tossed-off piece of conceptual art — created with advisement from fashion designer Liza Sander, this “media camouflage” is made from the finest stretch satin.
If you feel like your commitment to upholding…
Why Do Girls Wear Pink?
No, it’s not an immutable law of nature. In the 1920s, retailers began encouraging pink (a strong color) for boys and blue (a dainty one) for girls, before the trend reversed after World War II. For centuries prior, both boys and girls wore white dresses.
In light of hysteria over a photograph in J. Crew’s new catalog depicting a mother painting her son’s toenails pink, Smithsonian Magazine explores how we got to this point:
For centuries, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.
The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the…
Clothing In The Year 2000
A video in which fashion designers circa the 1930s were asked to design clothing as they predicted it would look in the year 2000. More fun than accurate (”transparent nets to catch males”, “an electric belt will adapt the belt to climatic changes”, “a dress of aluminum”), although their vision of the tie-less, goateed 21st century male — with his portable phone/radio and pockets for “keys, coins, and candy for cuties” — is fairly prescient.
‘Concrete’ Dress Helps Purify The Air
Looking for that perfect dress that will turn heads? Well, this one is made with pollutant-absorbing concrete, so you can clean the air too! Discovery News reports:
A collaboration between London College of Fashion, University of Sheffield, and the University of Ulster, “Herself” is a prototypical dress sprayed with a concrete mixture that purportedly absorbs pollutants in nearby air. The details of the process remain a little hazy, although pollutant-absorbing concrete does actually exist — in fact the same Italian company that made this “transparent” cement (as some readers pointed out, this should have been concrete, which is actually the mixture of cement plus gravel and sand) has already built some air-friendly structures in Europe with it. Using sunlight as a catalyst, titanium dioxide on the surface of the material reacts with pollutants in the air, reportedly decreasing nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide in the surrounding area by up to 65 percent. I suspect…
Blue Jean Missing Link Discovered!
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.
This just in…
So it seems that it sometimes takes a number of arty types to explain something as fundamentally proletariat as humble, timeless blue jeans.
I’d love to go off on this subject, but I couldn’t do a better job than The Vancouver Sun:
Workaday staple and fashion favourite, blue jeans have conquered the planet. But were they born in the textile mills of New Hampshire, on France’s southern coast or the looms of north Italy?
Art historians believe they have found a piece of the centuries-old puzzle in the work of a newly discovered 17th-century north Italian artist, dubbed the “Master of the Blue Jeans”, whose paintings went on show in Paris this week.
Nothing comes between me and my…oh well…you know…
Running through his works like a leitmotif is an indigo blue fabric threaded with white, with rips revealing its structure, in the…
Grab A Can Of Spray-On Clothing
Don’t have time to deal with negotiating tricky sleeves? Just pick up a Fabrican aerosol and spray a t-shirt onto your torso. In all seriousness, the spray-able fabric has all sorts of applications (spray-on bandages, for instance), but I like the idea that in the future, this is how we will get dressed.
Even Your Pants Are Lying To You?
I don’t believe Disinformation’s first book, the Russ Kick anthology You Are Being Lied To, (now updated as You Are STILL Being Lied To), covered fashion, but this story made me think of it. Wow, as Americans, it seems that we don’t want to accept even the truth about ourselves right beneath our noses. Abram Sauer writes on Esquire:
I’ve never been slim — I played offensive line in high school — but I’m no cow either. (I’m happily a “Russell Crowe” body type.) So I immediately went across the street, bought a tailor’s measuring tape, and trudged from shop to shop, trying on various brands’ casual dress pants. It took just two hours to tear my self-esteem to smithereens and raise some serious questions about what I later learned is called “vanity sizing.”
Your pants have been deceiving you for years. And the lies are compounding:
Read More on Esquire
