How to turn your face into an "anti-face" — a sight that surveillance technology cannot read as a face.

Don't imagine that sunglasses will work. You need things like dramatically asymmetrical bangs in multiple colors.

I think whatever we do, the robots will learn it and get out in front of us, but you can look quite foolish in your feeble effort to outsmart them. The linked article is more of an art-and-fashion project than a real defense against surveillance. Isn't it funny? Finding surveillance funny is perhaps the closest you can get to a defense.

Enclothed cognition.

A term for "the mental changes that we undergo when we wear certain clothing."

"It’s all about the symbolic meaning that you associate with a particular item of clothing," [Northwestern researcher Hajo] Adam said. And he thinks the study’s results can be applied to many more fields, including activewear and fitness. "I think it would make sense that when you wear athletic clothing, you become more active and more likely to go to the gym and work out."

The linked article is almost entirely about athletic clothing, and there's almost nothing about the researchers' study and the term "enclothed cognition" which amused me enough to start this post. The insight seems so obvious — dressing the part will help you play the part — that it seems funny to have a term for it.

What I think would be fun to talk about is articles of clothing that you have used to alter your perceptions. And have you rejected items of clothing that you thought would skew your perceptions in ways you didn't like? Remember to exclude the idea of how others perceive you and how their response to you will affect you. It's just you. You and that item of clothing. Like this:



ADDED: Here's an Amazon link to a page where you can buy a nice porkpie hat, like the one Walter White uses to achieve enclothed cognition in "Breaking Bad." I searched only for "porkpie hat" and did not mention anything more "Breaking Bad"-related than that, but the Amazon page showed not only other elements for a Walter White costume (jacket, glasses, yellow coveralls) but also packets of blue raspberry rock candy.

"Cartoon characters wear the same clothes every day, because their animators are lazy."

"You are not a cartoon character."

From "6 Telltale Signs It's Time to Upgrade Your Style." [A "sponsored" article at Gawker.]

Does that mean Steve Jobs was lazy and needed to upgrade his style? And as long as we're doing lists, we might as well shift over to "18 Famous People Who Always Dress The Same": Jobs, Zuckerberg, Tom Wolfe, Michael Kors, Larry Page...

These people are so not lazy. They're style icons, projecting power. The same clothes every day projects industriousness, efficiency, and — if you pick the right stuff — style.

Remember the scene in "The Fly" (the one with Jeff Goldblum)? He shows his closet:

 [H]is girlfriend,  Geena Davis, asks him why he never changes his clothes.

“What are you saying?” he replies. “I change my clothes every day.”

“Well, how come then you always wear the same thing?”

Goldblum walks over to his closet, opens it, and shows Davis a long rack of identical suits, ties, white shirts, and black shoes. “See?” he says. “What did I tell you?”

Albert Einstein was even less fashion-conscious and reportedly had only one suit of clothes.  Like the Goldblum character, Einstein felt that having to worry about what to wear distracted him from more important work.

Do you follow this path? If you do — or if you were to do this — what do you wear? Why isn't everyone wearing black knit tops and blue/black jeans (or a black skirt with or without tights)?

"But as I look ahead and think about what may still be relevant in fashion years from now, I think back to eras in style that were defined by freedom."

"I am so happy I was young in the ‘70s and participated in the women’s movement and all it meant. My generation behaved as if it had invented freedom. That was a moment in time, between the discovery of the pill and the arrival of AIDS, when sex was carefree and fun. For design inspiration then, we looked 40 years back, to the 1930s. We loved its furniture and architecture, all minimalist, and the light style of the clothing."

Writes Diane von Furstenberg.

ADDED: Her penultimate paragraph is "Who saw this coming? An icon of the ‘70s: Andy Warhol," which was especially funny to me because as I was reading, I was planning to search for "Diane von Furstenberg" in my copy of "The Andy Warhol Diaries." She's all over the place in there. Sample:

Bianca [Jagger] was there. I thought she’d already left for Paris. She was saying out loud everything I was thinking— what two bitches Diane Von Furstenberg and Sue Mengers were— and she said, “At least Sue can be funny sometimes.” Sue was on her way to Europe to meet her husband, who only lets her see him once every couple of months, I think.

Another one:

And Diane Von Furstenberg was there and she lives in Eleanor Lambert’s building so she invited Bob and me down for dinner and to watch Holocaust. So we went down and Diane’s mother was there, and Marina Cicogna. Diane’s mother had been in Auschwitz, and when the concentration camps came on she was laughing— she said that they made it so much more glamorous than it was when she was there, that all the women had crewcuts and it was a lot more crowded, that where the movie had 20 people there were really 300,000. And it was weird to be seeing this with Marina Cicogna whose family was so involved with Mussolini. Before it was over, Diane was ready to go out, she was calling for a limousine.

And:

There was a mob scene around where Barry Diller and I were sitting because John Travolta sat down two inches away. His eyes are just like— dyed— blue-green. I mean, really deep blue. And he has the most beautiful smile. His teeth must be polished every day. And his skin is beautiful. And he’s so nice. And he says nice things to everyone. And he was talking the most to this girl he thought was with us, but she was a DVF groupie. And Diane is so desperate to be recognized that if one person says, “You’re Diane Von Furstenberg, I love you,” she says, “Come with me,” and she makes them follow her around for the rest of the night so that she can have a following, and then she gives them presents— she carries lipsticks and compacts with her to give out, and she autographs them.

And:

Sondra looked great in this beautiful bright yellow silk dress— the color I used on the Debbie Harry portrait— and it made her look so young, eight years old, and we asked her who made it because it was really pretty and she said, “You’ll fall over if I tell you.” So she told us and Bob and I did fall over— it was a Diane Von Furstenberg. Off the rack for $ 120. It really was pretty.

Also:

Diane Von Furstenberg was having a party for her boyfriend, Alain Elkann, who was married to the Agnelli daughter. He’s French. He’s written four books, and in France if you’re an intellectual, you don’t have to work, they just treat you like this big—“ intellectual.” Like Loulou de la Falaise’s husband who’s supposed to be a novelist but I don’t think he’s ever finished anything. So Diane’s going the Marilyn Monroe route of marrying one person for the name, and now she’s going with this guy who’ll write books about her.

"Rachel Tutera... runs a blog called The Handsome Butch."

"Daniel Friedman... makes custom men’s suits, mostly for corporate clients in his end of Park Slope, Brooklyn."

When she wrote to him last year, seeking a sales job, she had a proposition: Why couldn’t Mr. Friedman, with his expertise in men’s suits, make them for women like her — not women’s suits, but the same gear he was making for guys, with the same masculine profile, but fitted to women’s bodies? It was a question he had never considered.

That's an excerpt from an article in the NYT, and here's the blog, The Handsome Butch, which is very aesthetically pleasing and makes an immediate visual argument that females can look quite naturally attractive in man-tailored clothes.

From the NYT article:

What is the meaning of a man’s suit? Every day men disappear into them, as into uniforms. In wool and creased flannel, the suits tell a story of power and belonging. When Ms. Tutera approached Mr. Friedman, she offered a new twist on that story.

“We started looking at these weddings from Maine, because it had legalized gay marriage,” he said. “And these women who were getting married in these tuxedos looked ridiculous. They looked awful. The suits were giant. And I can only imagine these people going into a Brooks Brothers in Maine and saying, ‘I want a men’s suit that’s going to fit me,’ and I can imagine how uncomfortable it was for both sides.”

Note the statement that "men disappear" into suits, so it's not just those women in tuxedos who look "ridiculous." Everyone looks better in clothes that fit properly. No one...



... almost no one... wants his body lost inside a giant suit. But there is the meaning of "disappear" that means — as the NYT acknowledged — I am powerful and I belong here amongst the powerful. Not all men in a suit "disappear" that way. Some disappear into: I'm forced to wear this thing because of the occasion and I don't really belong here. They're like the lesbian in the wedding tuxedo that bothered Mr. Friedman.

Do your clothes fit? Do you fit your clothes? If not, why not? Is it is the clothes, is it you, or is it what you are doing?

Hipster/homeless ambiguity could be very dangerous.

"Not to offend anyone directly, but this photo could quite possibly be of a homeless man, a street person, or whatever term you wish to use. It could also just as easily be an affluent hipster wearing a highly dysfunctional piece of high-fashion. I think the ambiguity of that is very dangerous."

Comment on a photograph at The Sartorialist.

Follow-on comment: "The ‘danger’ here is somehow thinking that this is in the territory of Zoolander’s “Derelicte” Collection. I don’t know if it’s a ‘trap’ … but when reading some of these comments, I’m thinking Brüno and Zoolander :-)"

"Lululemon founder Chip Wilson’s apology doesn’t pass the drishti test."

Well, there's a headline. That's in the Washington Post. I don't know what a "drishti test" is, but I got a laugh watching the "I’m sad/I’m really sad" apology video. What's he apologizing for? He said —explaining the transparency of some of his company's yoga pants — "Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work," and "It’s about the rubbing through the thighs."

I see the article explains "drishti" — which Wilson "should be aware of." It's "the gaze — outward and inward — that a yogi is supposed to apply to life."

Oh, you don't need any fancy-schmancy mystical stuff to know that if your low-quality-high-price scheme is exposed along with some ladies' asses, you shouldn't point out that the asses are fat. Having goofed that up, how should you keep the cash flowing, now that the ladies you've lured into overpaying know that your sucking up to them was just a sham? I sort of like his "I'm sad/I'm really sad" routine. It's like he's living and being real, right there on camera. Of course, it's bullshit. And is he really sorry? I sort of suspect that he's glad he got the message out that: "some women’s bodies just actually don’t work." Our clothes are not for everyone. Just the special women. The best women. 

It's the snobbery that justifies the price. Are you good enough for Lululemon?

"Reality"?

Upworthy has some interesting pictures from a British department store catalog and the headline is "A Catalog That Believes Reality Can Sell Clothes Better Than Photoshop." But is this "reality" or is just another kind of sensationalism? The first picture makes a nice bigger-is-better argument, but that bigger lady is fabulously large and even she has one leg angled forward and a strategically placed sarong to improve the proportions. And why the amputee models? Because of reality?

Poopy suits.

From the Navy's FAQ about submarines: Question #26 — out of 61 — "What clothes do you wear?"

When in port, crew members wear regular Navy uniforms. At sea, members wear one-piece blue coveralls called "poopy suits." They are very comfortable to wear and reduces the number of clothes the sailor has to bring to sea. Submarine crews usually wear sneakers or other soft bottomed shoes when at sea, as sound quieting and stealth are always foremost in a submariner's mind.

What not to do when telling women what not to do.

A memo to women lawyers is a good negative example:

Last night, we started receiving reports of a memo entitled “Presentation Tips for Women” that was distributed by a member of the Women’s Committee to all women associates across the U.S. offices of Clifford Chance.

I haven't worked in a law firm since the 80s, so you tell me: Why is there a "Women’s Committee" in the first place?

Our tipster was correct in that the vast majority of these words of wisdom aren’t tips for “women,” but rather, tips for “human beings.”

Yeah, but there's a "Women’s Committee." These are women helping women. Either you like that or you don't. Pick one.

We’ve listed some of the most ridiculous “tips for women” here, along with our commentary...

My link goes to an Above the Law post by Staci Zaretsky, which has the text of "the full memo," but I don't see the title "tips for women." Is that the title, or is the "for women" simply a characterization that arises from the fact that there is a "Women’s Committee" and it communicates with the women? In any event, the demeaning that the recipients experienced came, it seems, from the special effort at mentoring the women.

Anyone might benefit from most of these tips, but some address problems only women have, such as whether a little cleavage is ever okay or even good, whether to leave off the high heels if you're not expert at walking in them, and whether you need to make a point of wearing something with lapels if you're going to have a clip-on microphone, and whether you're doing something that might be termed "the urinal position" (which I'm guessing — Google didn't help — is a hands-around-genitals position that men are more likely to realize looks unprofessional).

How would you like to be an older woman at the firm trying to help the younger women present themselves in a way that won't have clients talking behind their back about their uptalking and creaky voice and so forth? It's not easy! We could reverse-engineer that badly received memo to come up with some Tips for Senior Women Advising Junior Women.

1. Don't affect "girltalk." You have power and authority. Acting like you don't fails to create the sense of warmth and intimacy you want and, ironically, sets a bad example of how to sound professional.

2. Make it gender-neutral. Everyone involved already knows you're women mentoring women. Continually pointing it out creates anxiety about whether it really is a special problem to be female.

3. Don't attempt humor, even when — especially when — you're talking about seemingly lightweight things like vocal quirks, hand gestures, hairstyles, and fashion. Even if you were a gifted comic writer — and you're not — it's best to be utterly dull when conveying advice that will be received as personal criticism. Remember the old punchline: That's not funny.

Racial fashion... deaf fashion... blind fashion... deaf music....

As long as I've started on the topic of fashion this morning, here are Tom & Lorenzo on last Thursday's finale on "Project Runway," where [SPOILER ALERT] finally, after 12 seasons, a black person has won. Here's how Tom & Lorenzo dealt with the racial element:

Anyway, major congratulations to Dom, not just for winning, but for being the first black winner in the show’s 12-season history. The reason this is notable is because typically, the fashion world has a distinct problem recognizing black (and especially African-American) designers and styles. We’re gonna leave that there, though. Dom doesn’t deserve to be designated a standard-bearer by us or anyone else. It’s enough for us to note it, but the deeper congratulations are for a job well done....

And — because, I guess "enough" is never enough:

... Dom’s origins and background have an influence on her work, but not in an overt way. She has a fantastic facility with prints and loves to use saturated colors in her designs. Again, not to make her a standard-bearer, but these are elements (along with shiny fabrics, also seen in her collection) that help define African-American fashion. Once again, it’s notable that the judges gave a win not just to a black designer, but a black designer with a distinct, if subtle, African-American sensibility in her work. The world of fashion is primed to wrinkle its nose at shiny, bright fabrics and wild prints, after all.... Dom did it her way and forced the judges to see the value in her work. Can’t argue with that.

There was also a contestant this season who was deaf, and he continually referred to the fact that he was deaf. He chose to be a "standard-bearer," with a mission to teach the world that a deaf person can succeed in fashion. It was an unexamined premise that people had told him he can't, but who were those people? Viewers were rooting for him, not laboring under the notion that deaf people can't do visual design and manual handiwork. It seems to me that a deaf fashion designer almost has an advantage, like a blind musician.

(I say "almost," because I realize that interacting with people, explaining your work and understanding their response, is a big part of it. But I wish his explanation of his work wasn't so much about his being deaf. The winner, Dom, never used race to explain her designs or her character — never, at least, in the edited footage that made it to our TV screen.)

Now, show me a blind fashion designer, and I might get excited about what he'd do. Seriously. He'd have to concentrate on form and texture that could be perceived with the hands and in the mind. He might care about the subtle sounds and smells. I'd like to see that.

As for deaf musicians, you can begin and end the conversation with the name Beethoven, but here's an article about 6 modern-day deaf musicians. Watch Evelyn Glennie:

Wearing evening gowns on the street, in daytime...

... because you have no evening affairs to attend — who does? — and you like the clothes.

A trend, spotted by Bill Cunningham, in Paris. It's not Parisians who are doing it. It's people from China and Russia who are busting loose.

"When I was 19 or 20 I found myself in this position, being pressurised into wearing more and more revealing outfits."

"The lines that I had spun at me again and again - generally by middle-aged men - were: 'You look great, you've got a great body, why not show it off?' Or: 'Don't worry, it will look classy, it will look artistic.' I felt deeply uncomfortable about the whole thing, but I was often reminded by record label executives just whose money was being spent."

Said Charlotte Church.

"Leather jogging pants are a legit fashion thing right now."

"Kanye is talking fashion world which is why it sounds strange to non-fashion people," says a commenter in this Metafilter discussion of the Kanye West/Jimmy Kimmel feud.

The commenter links to: "In Kanye's Defense: 11 Musicians Who Own Leather Jogging Pants: Jimmy Kimmel might not believe that leather jogging pants are a trend, but here are 15 photos of celebs who could vouch for Kanye on that one."

ADDED: "Jogging pants" is a just nicer way to say sweat pants.

And the issue isn't whether you're going to exercise in leather pants, it's whether you want your leather pants tight or loose. Everyone loves tight pants and everyone loves loose pants, but for different reasons. The question is which of your pant-loves are you going to be with today. Is it a loose pants day? If so, with leather jogging pants, you can still say yes to leather.

"We can’t 'Whatevs' hard enough on this one."

"The only thing that merits any kind of response is the question of style. And since she clearly doesn’t have any, there’s literally nothing left to say about it. We reiterate what we said the morning after she destroyed Western Civilization: she just looks stupid.... Nothing says 'I have no persona of my own' than freezing your face into nothing more than a logo for pictures and thinking that it makes you look interesting."

Meanwhile, at the Emmys, keep scrolling here until you get to Raquel Welch. She's 73.

"In the morning I grab the clothes that smell cleanest out of the pile of 'clean' clothes on my floor to wear that day…"

"Would you say this is an acceptable way to approach fashion?"

Question asked in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" of fashion critic Robin Givhan. I consider it a rhetorical question, but she did answer it. No, of course, is the obviously right answer, but it's also obviously wrong, since to answer it is to misinterpret it. And yet, if you submit to "Ask Me Anything," aren't you implicitly offering to answer everything? A clever way out would be to say: I said you can ask me anything, but I don't believe you are asking me anything.

"The rhetorical question is... any question asked for a purpose other than to obtain the information the question asks."

Here's a nonrhetorical question: For what purpose did the above-quoted man ask his question?

"I used to believe that public school open houses required little more than the obligatory clean shirt with buttons and a swipe of lip gloss."

Says Dahlia Lithwick in a piece titled "Parents Left Behind: How public school reforms are turning American parents into dummies."

That made me wonder: Did I miss a memo about buttons?

I get "clean," and obviously one's upper body must be clothed, but is there a thing about buttons? Do buttons mean something?!

I was going to send you to this piece about a fashion designer "pushing" women "into a trap" or "a prehistoric exoskeleton."

It's Robin Givhan expatiating about Thom Browne. She seems to be going overboard.  But then I clicked through to the first picture in the slide show and I'm frozen in horror. Please look at that picture first.

Okay, now, I've settled down, and I think that picture is funny. I'm amused. I can go on with the slideshow. It's quite amazing!

I like this one too. Not as something that could be worn in a real person's life, but as theater. And this.

And — isn't it just perfect? — when the artist emerges, he's a man in shorts!

Back to Givhan. Would you like the job of describing this stuff in a world that has photography? Givhan develops a theme about the literary tradition of portraying women as crazy. It's an old feminist theme. "The Madwoman in the Attic." Were you ever trapped into reading that? Anyway, what does that have to do with Thom Browne?

Browne is not a feminist scholar nor an academic of any sort, but his fashion told a lucid and thoughtful story about constraints, social expectations, and cultural prejudices....

... Browne’s intricate, high-minded gestures served as an invigorating reminder that fashion has the potential to tell stories and raise fundamental questions about how we live our lives. 

After all that, Givhan comes to rest on the same idea anyone flipping through the slide show:

One only wished that Browne had allowed his audience to see more clearly, if only for a moment, something fundamental to a fashion show: What he proposes women wear.

I thought the fashion cognoscenti were aloof from the proletarian question: Who can wear that? When the artist goes this far, it's gauche to ask.

"Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial.'"

Wrote Virginia Woolf — "it is the masculine values that prevail."

An old quote, echoed here by fashion writer Robin Givhan:

I always compare fashion to sports, and when you think about some of the issues that have come up in sports, particularly in baseball, with steroid use and all of that, you wonder, “Why is Congress having hearings and calling Barry Bonds? What does that have to do with anything?” And you realize it’s because we as a culture, or at least some people in our culture, take sports really seriously, and they believe that it represents something about who we are, about our belief in fair play, and they recognize that that has an impact on younger people. I don’t think that fashion will really change until that same sort of recognition happens. 

I agree with the proposition that sports and fashion are exactly equally important and that it's helpful to keep that in mind even as you personally feel more drawn to one than the other. I hate to think that the essence of being taken seriously is that Congress holds hearings, but I don't think Givhan is saying she wants congressional hearings into the problems of the fashion industry. The baseball hearings are evidence that sports are taken seriously, too seriously maybe.

Keep the equation of sports and fashion in mind and use it to test whether we're taking something more seriously or less seriously than we should. This is similar to the way we analyze reactions to Obama by asking what if Bush had done the same thing.

ADDED: Sports are as related to maleness as fashion is related to femaleness, and the 2 things are equally important. You can get by with 0% of your interest in sports as you do your sports/fashion allocation, but you can't get by with 0% of your interest in fashion, since you must wear clothes. Set your percents however you want other than that.

The total amount of time that is your 100% varies from person to person. I'll bet my 100% fashion/sports time is less than yours!

"Optimism: trend alert?"

NY Daily News caption from its Fashion Week coverage under a photograph of a Kate Spade bag that — I am not kidding — looks like this:



That may represent a trend, but it is not optimism. It's painful sarcasm and hopelessness about a lost past that wasn't even any good anyway.

That bag, with the burlap fabric and "homemade" childish embroidery, references the early 1960s. (I remember those idiotically cheerful bags ladies carried on the boardwalk.) Perhaps the Kate Spade operation is alluding to the 50-year retrospective on the ultimate crushing of hope that is descending upon us this fall, the Kennedy assassination.

If you're medicated, you might look at that bag and see optimism. Do you complete the sentence to make lemonade? Those words don't appear on the bag (not on that side anyway). Face it: This burlap monstrosity is intended to make you feel bad. Life sucks. Suck a lemon.