The Lacie Golden Disk external hard drive, designed by Ora-Ïto, is tempting me, even though I know fully well that I can get double the capacity for another $50. Realistically, though, it will be many years before I max out half a terabyte, and I can't resist that surface value—some might call it "shiny"—especially when it comes in a shape that casually resembles Gió Pomodoro's classy abstract bronze pieces.
Maybe you like one of Lacie's other designs better?
Gió Pomodoro, Forma distesa, 1963–4.
I hadn't realized that the new Camel cigarettes design that you see around is meant to be a permanent change. I suppose in 10 years they'll change it back and we'll all marvel. Here's hoping that Brand New is around to record the shift. Perhaps more addictive than smoking, the Brand New blog records changes in corporate logo design—and observes rightly that "Besides fragrances and perfumes, one of the few categories that has amazingly maintained a level of graphic sophistication and restraint is cigarette packaging. From the underrated simplicity of Marlboro, to the indefatigable Lucky Strike, to the sophisticated Gauloises, cigarette packs are remarkably simple."
Richly deserving of the many nods they received last year, Helen Yentus's designs for the new Camus edition are fine.
An brief profile on Yentus by the art director of Print. Yentus's designs for Camus are cousin to the 2006 Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett boxed set, designed by Laura Lindgren; I'd call both successes. What fun exercises.
Washington Post Style fashion critic Robin Givhan can't help but beat on Hillary Clinton. Not because she's poorly dressed, but because she's a woman, and women's clothing dominates the fashion world. I like that Givhan's column exists, but if she's going to divide her attention between the male and female candidates in a way that reflects the proportionate interests of the industry, she's going to be writing about Clinton often. Recognizing also that this is the first time the United States has seen such a high-profile woman candidate, and she could be writing about Clinton twice weekly. And that's all fine—no amount of hand wringing will change the fact that Clinton's fashion sense is newsworthy.
But how newsworthy? A-section newsworthy? Feminist-commentary newsworthy? Steve Benen says no, and I agree. The problem with Givhan is that she can't decide whether she wants to lead or follow the conversation. "Voters are being asked to envision something this country has never had," writes Givhan, "a female commander in chief." That is one take that voters are being asked to swallow—namely by Clinton's critics, or at least, with a mind to the language put forth by the right.
"Voters are being asked to envision something this country has never had: a female leader." Put another way, Givhan's question doesn't sound so ominous, and the pressing connection to the pant suit falls away, too. Close reading of clothing is not necessarily a bad thing but at the end of the day there were probably more newsworthy items to run in the front of one of the nation's largest newspapers that day.
(Courtesy of Tyler Green)
Have a copy of the Sunday Styles handy? Flip to page 11. Look at the Banana Republic ad. Focus on the man's suit jacket. See the felt design, whatisthat, mistletoe?, where a pocket square ought to be? [Found the ad online. —ed.] What do you call this thing?
May I suggest "abomination"? Gentlemen, we are not adopting pocket accents. The pocket square, on the other hand, has a rich history that we should not be quick to abandon. What kind of story would it be if Iago were to wave a felt twig at Othello as evidence of Desdemona's cuckolding ways? Recall Emilia's lines about Desdemona's intimate connection to Othello's handkerchief:
I am glad I have found this napkin;The handkerchief's literary applications extend beyond the romantic, of course. In fact, the handkerchief dreams, too. James Fenimore Cooper writes about the dignity of the wild flax seeds that were called to service as a pocket square in The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief. It's not that a felt twig doesn't have a story to tell: shorn by a shepherd, pressed and dyed by a manufacturer, shaped and sewed by a craftster—I'm sure it's gripping. But it isn't a story featuring names like the Astaire, the Cagney, the Cooper, the Reverse Puff, and other ultra-masculine terms for carefully, artfully folded silk squares.
This was her first remembrance from the Moor.
My wayward husband hath a hundred times,
Woo'd me to steal it; but she so loves the token
(For he conjur'd her she should ever keep it)
That she reserves it evermore about her
To kiss and talk to. (3.3.290–296)
Carrying a pocket square is a polite thing to do: When someone sneezes and you're wearing a handkerchief, you hand it over. On the other hand, carrying a pocket twig is a selfish thing to do: When someone sneezes and you're wearing a pocket twig, you're probably making him sick.
Does Target count as a "fast-fashion" outlet? In a class with H&M? Target produces designer lines often enough, but do they count as a sort of rapid-turnover indicator of trends and seasons? On that note, courtesy Svetlana, the Erin Featherston stuff is dull—and notwithstanding this and this and maaaybe this, the clothes make the models look frumpy.
In a piece arguing the case against IP protection in fashion, Julian Sanchez identifies "masstige" lines as one reason that designers are casting a warier eye on downmarket copying. So the idea is that lines like Featherston's makes some market actor more anxious. But who? Is the idea that Featherston herself is competing in a market tier against fast-fashion knockoffs, so she's the one who feels more protective? Or is the notion that any designers whose work Featherston "references" will be crankier about potential design similarities given her enlarged platform through Target?
Culture Warrior reads the NYT T Mag piece on the District and asks, "[W]hat the fuck are they talking about?" My response falls along the same lines. And wtf with that Legally Blonde Real Doll they use for the slideshow!
Three names you don't see in association every day: Annie Leibovitz, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Louis Vuitton. The photograph is nothing controversial: just reliably bland Leibovitz. But Gorbachev—he makes a lot more money on the lecture circuit that he can off a photo spread, doesn't he? And Vuitton? The endorsement of Gorby's mighty, tattooed dome means what, exactly, to the LV brand?
The New York Times calls them "trapeze dresses" and says that they're designed to show off a woman's clavicles, of all things. But come on. A lot of these potato-sack dresses don't reveal the collarbone. In fact, the best of them don't and aren't even designed with that in mind. Sure, there are counterexamples—hot!—but these dresses, as a family, don't highlight the neck any more than others.
Also, it's not as if the women modeling these dresses got skinnier for this season. Rail thin may be in, but then rail thin always has been, right? so you can't draw decent conclusions about what women are doing with their bodies from the runways. Highlighting the clavicle, I dunno. But in any case, it's gratifying to know that the fashionista at the Times agrees with me, contra my commenters.
Erik Wemple writes about a WaPo style convention I like to call the Rule of Appositives. I use a lot of nesting in my own writing—I have to, since I'm writing about a topic for people who aren't necessarily familiar with that topic, one that has a very particular argot. So bracketed explanations don't bother me: they're efficient. But at the newspaper, the Rule is, where there's a way for an appositive, there's a will for an appositive. Wemple find two examples of things that the WaPo explains that it probably doesn't need to explain—the iPod ("an expensive music-playing device that has become a pop-culture icon") and blogs ("an online update with much of the same news but viewable by anyone with a Web connection"). You gotta assume that some portion of the newspaper's readership overlaps with the percent of the population who made the iPod popular and use the Internet.
These potato-sack dresses that people are wearing: thumbs up. These look good. Some of them are kitschy and vintage, and we all agree that those are wrong. But even the future-bebop stuff is better than the dread bohemian clothing and, god, above all, those horrible, blocky, wooden beads. Correct me if I'm wrong, but any woman can wear these potato sacks, right? They obscure the figure, so there's no issue there, leaving only concerns about color and design and style.
Now, back to playing tackle football using broken glass for cleats.
Five'd get you ten that the Washington Post's Robin Givhan would knock this Nancy Pelosi story out of the park. People like to complain about her (Givhan, that is—though Pelosi has her fair share of maligners) and about fashion criticism generally, but Givhan's found an exceptional niche. She's just about the only writer who reports on the intersection of fashion and politics, which might seem like an obvious, even mandatory, beat for a writer in the capital; she manages it, though, without writing again and again that the District is or ain't the fashion pit you'd believe it to be. When a fashion crisis becomes an honest-to-goodness political flap—who's wearing Ahmadinejad this season? Nancy Pelosi, feminist Democrat or fawning Dhimmicrat?—she's the go-to critic.
(Too bad she's already written her Obama and Pelosi features. Maybe if Givhan were a better blogger, we'd have her updated insights.)
Advice: I don't know how other writers wrestled with the many-tentacled beast that is Miami Art Basel, but here's my approach, for what it's worth: I carried around a digital point-and-click and dictaphone. (My pass permitted me to take photos. But it seemed that plenty of people were snapping away, so it must not have been all that difficult to sneak a camera through the doors.) Today I'm faced with the irritating prospect of reconciling images with memos, but that's a hell of a lot easier than taking and transcribing notes and then hunting down images by professional photogs. And we're getting closer to the tricorder everyday.
Ice: A friend of a friend gave me passes to an exclusive gala held by Maxim. The lad magazine—not exactly name number one in cultural commentary, right? We skipped it in favor of a ludicrous Vanity Fair bash (at which, I swear to/at god, I paid $30 for two drinks). Much to K.'s chagrin, we learned too late that Maxim was hosting a Balenciaga runway retrospective. These $100K leggings might be the only accoutrement in Miami priced to compete with (complement?) the art. Unrelated: More robot dresses, please (fastforward to 4:23).
Vice: It turns out, I'm a celebrity pessimist—I need concrete proof before I'll buy that someone loping around is in fact Someone—so I missed out on my chance to (speak to? take pictures with? bask in the glow of? cut?) Chuck Close, Leonard Nimoy, and Kanye West. And the Sartorialist, whom I mistook for Matthew Barney, then Lance Armstrong, and finally just some guy.
When your angle, your take, your thing is killing your ex-wife and her boyfriend, you need to constantly remind the public about your double-murdering tendencies, lest it be that you did the deed in vain. But you can't just kill a new ex-wife and boyfriend—either getting away with murder is more often beginner's luck than practiced talent; or it's too much bother to search out that special person who will later seem a lot less special and, ultimately, deserving of a ghastly death; or you're afraid you can't carry it off with the same pluck now that you're older. Yet the problem remains: How to cement your legacy? You—because you know that society reviles a biscuit conditional as totally as it does the evidence of its own failures—you give them both. I think it's safe to say that the people will never mistake your talent.
Full disclosure: I know only as much about fashion as people tell me. I only know who Karen Walker is because Valerie linked to her collection. Still, as the man once said, though I can't say what fashion is, I know it when I see it.
This and especially this, I think are really fantastic. And before you complain to me that no one can actually wear parachute nylon without looking as if gym just let out, let me point you to this get-up as an example of eminently wearable fashion.
The only other nugget of advice I have to offer is one my friend R. and I agreed on a while back: High-top kicks are sweet, yo. Pick up some Air Force Ones for fall.
If you were going to make me wear one of those conservative shirts that are always advertised on blogs—and hey, about that, what's going on? what did I ever do to you?—I guess I'd pick this one. I have a kind-of similar shirt with Putin's mug done a la Warhol that garners me daggers from anyone who knows that Putin is a baby stomach–kissing despot. (Oh! And I have another shirt acquired abroad, one that entirely unironically says "Istanbul" across the chest, that earned me some nasty looks from a trio of teenaged Armenian protesters. Later that day I was planning to go into Wrapworks to buy a delicious smoothie, when I spotted them again and had to flee. Sans smoothie. The price of genocide.) This terrible "world tour" shirt forgets all the military's engagements between 1945 and 1991, a black-out that would make Keith Richards blush. But that one, I think, is one that liberals could co-opt, what with its 2003 listing of Iraq as "FREE." This one makes the American bald eagle shed a single tear, but this shirt—oh, it's so good—this shirt trades on pan-African identity to promote handgun ownership. Subtext that crisp doesn't wrinkle.
Bayes is all wrong about Robin Givhan's column on Abramoff's gangsta style. I really like the archetype of a self-serious beat writer who can't help but transform the news through her individual lens. Also, Abramoff did show up to trial in a floor-length trench coat and coal-black fedora. The fashion analysis makes clear that Abramoff is simply dressing true to form.
What's the current over/under on congressmen implicated in the scandal, 20? Republicans 18, Democrats 2 sound like the right spread?
Should anyone ever again come by this blog by way of the question, "what+kind+of+grammar+is+ouch," let it be known that "ouch" is an interjection. Strictly speaking, an interjection is a word that not grammatically moored to the rest of the sentence, so I suppose the answer here is "no kind of grammar." But interjection, nevertheless.
From a compatriot in the battle against bad usage comes a link to Ban Comic Sans. Too long have readers suffered at the hands of mothers, HR supervisors, and the authors of yardsale and lost kitten flyers everywhere, all of whom are intent on propagating Microsoft's great crime against typography. The site even offers dozens of comicky fonts for those who need a graduated phase-out program to beat a Comic Sans addition.
If you know someone who abuses Comic Sans, tell them there is a place where he can get help.
Since everybody's talking about them, let's all take the lead from Sasha Frere-Jones and correctly refer to "mashups" as such. You don't want to be embarrassed in a few months that you used to hyphenate "mash-up" as if it were "down-load" or "on-line"—and you don't have to be.
And as far as I'm concerned, Freelance Hellraiser's "A Stroke of Genius" squeezes the Gospel truth out of Xtina and The Strokes.
UPDATE: My roommate was just noting that though the New Yorker adheres to Fowler's antihyphen instruction better than any out there, they like to throw the odd German diacritical at household words like "cooperative." True. They also refer to the MoMA as "The Modern." So let me be clear that I'm with S F/J on mashups, but not all the kinky stuff the New Yorker favors.
Red states and blue state got you all worked up over partisan geography? Maybe proper style can be the first step toward healing the political divide. I think I've seen most often the locution "red-state/blue-state" used as a modifer (first to describe "divide" before it was "meme," but that's another post). I maintain that there's a better (and correct) way to write the compound adjective: with the en dash (–).
CMS (14th ed.), 5.117:
The en dash is also used in place of a hyphen in a compound adjective when one of the elements of the adjective is an open compound (such as New York) or when two of the elements are hyphenated compounds:APA (p. 291) adds a nonpartisan connotation to the en dash solution:
[. . .]
quasi-public–quasi-judicial body
En dash: Type as an en dash or single hyphen with no space before or after. En dashes are used between words of equal weight in a compound adjective (e.g., Chicago–London flight).I think you can make a strong case that "red state" and "blue state" are both sufficiently well understood (ubiquitous, even) to qualify as open compound modifiers, so hyphens shouldn't apply. The preferred style, then, is:
red state–blue state divideAlong with the Microsoft Word method APA describes, en dashes can be created with HTML by typing [ampersand]ndash; or with ASCII by typing ALT+0150 or on a Mac by typing OPTION+hyphen.
Why not just use the solidus ("red state/blue state")? The APA and MLA agree that the slash has only a few applications in formal prose. It's overused as a crutch, often when more precise punctuation is available. (MLA (2.2.10) maintains that "the slash has a place mainly between two terms paired as opposites or alternatives and used together as a noun." Sounds right to me; good/evil is an example.)
It's a more complicated rule, but the en dash is also used to connect inclusive dates, time, and reference numbers. Give the en dash a try:
