I laughed out loud to see a father demonstrating to his teenage daughter, in the most emphatic way, that her choice of clothing left something to be desired. Hysterical! Click the link to watch the video.
https://gab.com/Shazlandia/posts/111439361398804179
Peter
I'm sure most readers are by now aware of the furore surrounding recent Balenciaga ad images, including showing a female child holding a strap attached to a "bondage bear". Note, too, the demonic-looking bear on the sideboard, the chalice-like vessel on the table, the actual bondage-type chains in the shape of jewelry on the black fabric roll, and the images on the wall behind the child. Click the image for a larger view.
Commenters allege that the images amount to an endorsement or promotion of pedophilia. A commenter on Gab has gone so far as to claim that the name Balenciaga is itself of satanist/occult origin.
I'm no Latin scholar, but I wanted to check that: so I looked up "Ba len ci aga" as a Latin phrase on Google Translate. Lo and behold, it does indeed mean "Do what you want"; and yes, that phrase does indeed express Aleister Crowley's teaching, part of his Thelema cult: "An it harm none, do what thou wilt". Satanism was, indeed (and still is) a major element of Thelema.
So . . . is that the true origin of the name "Balenciaga"? I find it a more than curious coincidence, to put it mildly. If so, that's a brand that needs to die out, IMHO. Christian readers, and others opposed to any form of Satanism and/or pedophilia, may wish to bear that in mind when it comes to spending their consumer dollars.
Peter
I did a double-take when I saw this photograph on MeWe of a modern interpretation (complete with stiletto heels) of a pair of sabatons. Click the image for a larger view.
Sabatons were part of military armor for centuries, evolving from the pointed style shown (sometimes called sollerets) to a flatter, blunt-toed style in the sixteenth century. They were de rigeur for knights, and also worn by men-at-arms (usually of the gentlemanly class) who could afford them, or captured them from an enemy. (A good suit of armor would cost many years' wages for a peasant or common soldier, so they had to make do with padded cloth and leather.)
It's amusing to look at those modern works of "fashion" while imagining someone trying to walk in them down an icy, snowy sidewalk. I reckon the slipping and sliding would be epic! However, I tried to imagine what it must have been like to actually fight in them (without the stiletto heels, of course). On horseback they'd be essential to protect the wearer's foot from blows delivered by infantrymen trying to stop him; but if the knight fought on the ground (as was common in, for example, the Wars of the Roses), that same slipperiness would have made them more of a liability than an asset in wet or muddy conditions. How would they - how did they - keep their footing?
I can see them being left off in favor of heavy leather boots for fighting on foot, because for an enemy to bend down to strike at one's feet would leave them very vulnerable to a counter-stroke; but I can also see that other battlefield hazards (e.g. sharp caltrops scattered by an enemy, or spears wielded by footmen) would render boots as dangerous as sabatons for their wearer. Also, what if one had to fight first on horseback (e.g. in a charge), then on foot if one's horse was injured or killed? The sabatons might change from an asset to a liability in a matter of seconds.
I simply don't know. I've read something of the period, but not enough to be able to answer my mental questions. What about you, readers? Has anyone gone into this subject in more detail, to provide us with a better answer? If so, please let us know in Comments. Thanks!
Peter
Full marks for creativity to the artist who designed this brooch. A tip o' the hat to Phlegm Fatale for sending me the link.
It's certainly original. I can think of all sorts of situations where a lady might wish to wear something like that, to display her contempt for proceedings, but in a non-verbal and artistic way. As one commenter said of it, "[I] want it implanted in my forehead".
The Three Percenters logo has long since been branded as "racist" or "extremist", so it's fallen out of favor. Perhaps this might serve as the foundation for a suitable replacement? It could be produced as jewelry, in camo sew-on or velcro patches, etc. It would simply and eloquently express its wearers' opinion of "woke" culture and politics.
Peter
Famously curmudgeonly author, blogger and general old fart (and our good friend) Old NFO is legendary for his salty Navy crustiness. However, I think I've found the way to his heart - and just the thing to fill his Christmas stocking.
Those of you who know and love him, feel free to nominate your favorite among those above in Comments. (I think he might look absolutely fab in the red-and-yellow one on the left, don't you?) I'll see if I can get him to model the majority favorite for Christmas!
Peter
Who decided that these . . . monstrosities . . . belonged on people's feet? As GQ Magazine put it, "These are not shoes—they’re shooze."
They're said to resemble shoes, and even (allegedly) perform some of the same functions, but I can't look at them without shuddering. It's as if your feet picked up a severe case of Yeti athlete's foot, or Bigfoot blobfeet, or Stay-Puft swellsoles, or something!
I can't imagine driving while wearing them. Look at the width of those swollen soles! How would you be able to depress one pedal without pressing the one next to it at the same time?
On the other hand, I daresay the cops will love them. Chasing someone who's wearing shoes so bulky he's bound to trip over them will make their lives much easier! As for following the footprints - perfect fashion for the 'hood, guys. Perfect. Anywhere else . . . not so much.
Peter
I've never been accused of being a fashionista. Casual sweatpants and T-shirts are more in my line. Nevertheless, I can still be appalled by some of the insanity inflicted on the fashion-conscious by modern designers. Here's yet another example of the breed.
FASHION giant Gucci is flogging a £1,700 [about US $2,200] orange check dress with a ribbon on the front for blokes to disrupt the “toxic stereotypes that mold masculine gender identity”.
They reckon it looks great with a pair of ripped jeans, a man bag and a woolly bobble hat.
But it hardly embraces the average male body-size as it only comes in XS and XSS.
There's more at the link.
And they want $2,200 for that??? I wouldn't give them that many cents for it!
On the other hand, I think I might suggest it to Lawdog, as a variation on his usual clothing theme. I'd better be ready to duck, though - he might object . . . vigorously! (Hearing protection might also be advisable.)
After London College of Fashion designer Harikrishnan unveiled his inflatable latex trousers that come in a variety of colours, people couldn’t help but make fun of the high fashion number.
The quirky graduate collection featured billowing latex trousers which are tapered at the ankle.
But folks in their droves took to Twitter to say it looked more like ‘swollen testicles’.
Tough crowd. Clearly the essence of the piece was lost on the audience.
The lacey shorts ... are available in five pastel colors including green, pink, blue, purple and yellow...
Lace shorts first hit the runway at Gucci's Spring/Summer 2016 collection and would appeal to fashion-forward men who are looking to make a statement. The prominence of gender ambiguity in fashion design allows for clothing pieces to be reflective of a generation who wish to challenge traditional notion of masculinity and femininity.
In her lengthy rant, “The Leggings Problem,” White rues the day they “obtruded painfully on my landscape” during a Mass service last fall. She details being overcome with shame over what she viewed as the flaunted female form.
“In front of us was a group of young women, all wearing very snug-fitting leggings and all wearing short-waisted tops,” White whined. “Some of them truly looked as though the leggings had been painted on them … Leggings are so naked, so form fitting, so exposing. Could you think of the mothers of sons the next time you go shopping and consider choosing jeans instead?”
It took less than 24 hours before Irish 4 Reproductive Health, a campus nonprofit group, organized a clap back to the mad mama’s manifesto. The group declared March 26 “Leggings Pride Day,” and encouraged people of all genders to post pics of themselves wearing their skin-tight garments on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
“While well-intentioned, White’s viewpoint perpetuates a narrative central to rape culture in implying that womxn [sic] and girls are responsible for the actions and reactions of others,” organizers posted on Facebook. “She argues that ‘girls’ at Notre Dame ought to change the way they dress to avoid attention from ‘unsavory guys who are looking at [people who wear leggings] creepily’ and in order to protect ‘nice guys who are doing everything to avoid looking’ at people wearing leggings.”
“We wanted … to remind people that leggings are absolutely OK, and you’re allowed to dress your body in whatever way you see fit,” Anne Jarrett, who helped organize the protest, told TODAY Style.
Benjamin Law invented shoddy and mungo, as such, in England in 1813. He was the first to organise, on a larger scale, the activity of taking old clothes and grinding them down into a fibrous state that could be re-spun into yarn. The shoddy industry was centred on the towns of Batley, Morley, Dewsbury and Ossett in West Yorkshire, and concentrated on the recovery of wool from rags. The importance of the industry can be gauged by the fact that even in 1860 the town of Batley was producing over 7,000 tonnes of shoddy. At the time there were 80 firms employing a total of 550 people sorting the rags. These were then sold to shoddy manufacturers of which there were about 130 in the West Riding. Shoddy is inferior to the original wool; "shoddy" has come to mean "of poor quality" in general (not related to clothing), and the original meaning is largely obsolete.
According to various estimates, here's what happens to your clothing giveaways. In most cases, a small amount of the items, the best quality castoffs -- less than 10 percent of donations -- are kept by the charitable institutions and sold in their thrift shops to other Americans looking for a bargain ... The remaining 90 percent or more of what you give away is sold by the charitable institution to textile recycling firms.
. . .
Most of the clothes are recycled into cleaning cloths and other industrial items, for which the recyclers say they make a modest profit.
Twenty-five percent, however, of what the recycling companies purchase from charities is used not as rags, but as a commodity in an international trading economy that many American may not even know about. Brill, from the textile association, picked up the story. "This clothing is processed, sorted and distributed around the world to developing countries," he said.
Take that pair of bluejeans you may have recently donated. Your jeans are stuffed with others into tightly sealed plastic bales weighing about 120 pounds and containing about 100 pairs of jeans.
The bales are loaded into huge containers and sold to international shippers who put them on ships bound for Africa and other developing regions. Again, the price of your old jeans has increased a bit because the shipper had to buy them.
By the time the bale of jeans is unloaded from a container here in Accra, Ghana, it is worth around $144. That's $1.30 per pair of jeans. But when the bale is opened up and the jeans are laid out for sale in the so-called "bend over" markets, customers bend over and select their purchases from the ground for an average price of $6.66 per pair of jeans. That's a 500 percent increase in value just by opening up the bale of clothes.
. . .
There are two ways to look at all this. One view is that ... African textile industries are closing their factories and laying people off because they cannot make clothes as cheaply as those American items found in the bend over markets.
. . .
Neil Kearney, general secretary of the Brussels based International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation says the practice is exploitative, "It is neo colonialism in its purest form. It's exporting poverty to Africa, a continent that is already exceedingly poor."
. . .
The other view is that the donated clothing market is actually the American way, that your old clothing is used at every step to create new wealth and to help people who are less fortunate.
For decades, the donation bin has offered consumers in rich countries a guilt-free way to unload their old clothing. In a virtuous and profitable cycle, a global network of traders would collect these garments, grade them, and transport them around the world to be recycled, worn again, or turned into rags and stuffing.
Now that cycle is breaking down. Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones, and poor countries are turning their backs on the secondhand trade. Without significant changes in the way that clothes are made and marketed, this could add up to an environmental disaster in the making.
. . .
Between 2000 and 2015, global clothing production doubled, while the average number of times that a garment was worn before disposal declined by 36 percent. In China, it declined by 70 percent.
The rise of "fast fashion" is thus creating a bleak scenario: The tide of secondhand clothes keeps growing even as the markets to reuse them are disappearing. From an environmental standpoint, that's a big problem. Already, the textile industry accounts for more greenhouse-gas emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined; as recycling markets break down, its contribution could soar.
. . .
The question is what to do about it. Some brands ... are experimenting with new fibers made from recycled material, which could help. But longer-term, the industry will have to try to refocus consumers on durability and quality -- and charge accordingly. Ways to do this include offering warranties on clothing and making tags that inform consumers of a product's expected lifespan. To satiate the hunger for fast fashion, meanwhile, brands might also explore subscription-based fashion rental businesses -- such as China's YCloset -- or other more sustainable models.
Enter Saint Laurent’s latest must-have accessory — roller skate stilettos.
Yes, you heard us correctly.
Three-inch stiletto heels, with a roller-skate wheel attached to the bottom and a kick-stop brake — because it’s just so easy walking in a normal pair of heels.
Aptly dubbed the Anja 100 Patch Pop Pump Roller, the heels are part of Saint Laurent’s autumn/winter collection and are yours for a mere $2,600.
A new fashion exhibition focusing on conceptual, artistic, and extreme footwear, aims to reevaluate the occult power and mystery of shoes ... these innovative and radical designs aim to defy space, anatomy, and gravity, pivoting around sculptural methods and blending traditional craft and nontraditional materials ... this exhibition creates a meandering journey between the ephemeral and the perennial, the beautiful and the painful, the mythology and reality of some of the most charged and coveted objects in fashion history.
Before the First World War, virtually no woman in the West shaved her legs. And yet by 1964, 98 per cent of them under the age of 44 did so. What happened in between?
Advertising happened, that's what.
Christina Hope researched the evolution for her 1982 paper titled 'Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture'. Through surveying ads in old issues of Harper's Bazaar and McCall's magazines, she could track how women were progressively browbeaten into going hairless via an extreme marketing assault.
At the turn of the century, women – and men, presumably – didn't particularly care about body hair as long sleeves and floor-grazing skirts concealed most of the body.
According to Hope, things began to change in 1915. As sheer sleeves and Greek- and Roman-style dresses came into fashion, ads in Harper's Bazaar started to target underarm hair, informing American womanhood of a problem it had but didn't know existed until now. "The Woman of Fashion Says the underarm must be as smooth as the face," read a typical pitch. "Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair," said another.
Beauty writers jumped onboard, too, ushering in a vogue for body hair removal. Cue, a whole new outlet of female hang-ups for advertisers to exploit!
