Brooch Bouquets

Three posts in one day. I know! But...am rewarding myself for writing all these horribly hard-to-write motivational emails to people I might fire soon. Brutal.

Anyhow whilst preparing my blogroll (honestly, is that the right word? I don't even know but I don't care cause it's fun to type and say silently to myself.) I visited finestationery's blog, which I visit often to keep on top of trends, how the other half lives, and colour palette ideas for work.

I've talked a bit on here about what I do but currently I have one full time gig, and two side businesses. One is a marketing and design consulting business that I've mentioned, but I also have another business that I only advertise word of mouth- I'm a floral designer. I specialize in custom weddings. I prefer really unusal things but I'll do red roses too. It's not something I advertise, but I can tell you since I would assume many of ya don't know me. On that topic, should I add an email address to my blog? I see others have one. Do you get messages?

Sorry,  I digress. To be a floral designer and make any money, you gotta do weddings. Doing a wedding takes up a whole weekend. Usually a summer weekend. Since I'm at that age where a lot of people are getting married, I get a lot of referals, and generally, since I'm...what some people have kindly referred to as motivated, I can't say no to a gig. So I don't advertise. An ideal summer has 2, maybe three weddings booked. Maybe 4. Depends on the size of the wedding. Upcoming I am booked one weekend in July and one in Sept. I think that's enough for this year, since the Sept one is shaping up to be a doozie.

ANYHOW, (rambles on) I came upon these awesome bouquets upcycled from antique brooches. Aren't they awesome? I love them.

Even more amazing is how much I can love these, and real flowers, and looking at what people in the biz call 'wedding porn', and have amazing, unique ideas for brides, and yet still not ever want to have my own wedding. Never have either, not even as a child or a preteen. My sister always tried to convince me otherwise. She thinks I'm just in denial. A 30 year denial, it seems.

The thing is, the very idea of them upsets me. I don't want some god or the government in my relationship any more than they thrust themselves upon it already. Also I don't like the concept of not being able to leave a relationship at any time. Some say not being married means you are choosing to be together, not out of obligation, but out of love. That's way mushier than I would go, but I get the sentiment. Another take would be that I'm commitment phobic. Maybe that's true too. All I know is, a wedding seems like a bad idea to me. But, that's just me. Besides, I like other people's weddings, so I'm no party pooper. I even cry sometimes, if the vows are sincere enough. Open bar weddings are especially fantastic. It's just the idea of having my own makes me ill. Really the only good part to having your own wedding in my estimation is the party and the honeymoon. I figure, if I ever do feel the need to have some sort of shin-dig featuring my awesome lovelife, that it'll be a party and a vacation and that's it. I might have the very first wedding-less wedding ever.

Dancing Shoes are for Dancing

I've got them on:



But they do not look like any of these. Cage heels are my drool worthy "want" for the summer, but I might pass on them in favour of other needless fashion purchases, such as hot pants and plaid things. What I am wearing are these lovelies:



however, in the red variation, which is much more sexy-siren than hippie-dippie.

And this lovely picture is the inspiration for my outfit tonight:



That amazing shot is from my favourite style blog The Sartorialist , really the reason for this whole post.

Really, Vogue? Really? What a Joke!

Here is the new cover of Vogue magazine:



At first glance, you think that it's refreshing to see a curvy woman on the cover, right? Even Beyonce's tag line, "Real Women Have Curves," jumps out at you.

But look closer. Here are the other headlines:
"Nip/Tuck: Designing a Perfect Body"
"Shape Issue: Fashion for Every Figure -From size 0 to size 20"
"Work It! - Longer Legs, Leaner Lines, Sexier Silhouette + The right swimsuit for your body type"
and last but not least,
"Weight Obsession: One woman conquers her diet demons"

This can't be real. It is fake, right? How can they promote having curves, dressing to look thinner, plastic surgury AND beating the weight obsession in the same issue? They can't. What they are promoting is the very weight obsession they are writing about. It's all kinds of fucked up.

Most. Useless. Invention. EVER.

The Bra Dryer is a "Patent Pending device used for drying bras", and will help "save your bras from damage in conventional dryers". Well, first of all, since you aren't supposed to put bras in the dryer, there's one big flaw with the concept. Also, it's something a woman doesn't actually need, which makes it genuinely flawed as a mass manufacture appliance, and since bra manufacturers don't actually recommend using heat of any kind to dry a bra, the concept is really a dud.

I suspect that the need for this has come out of women who insist on wearing moulded cup bras:



These presumably take longer to dry than the average lace bra, which take only 4-6 hours. Presuming this is the type of bra which as inspired the device, there is one other problem.

Behold the dryer:



It's just one size. And one shape. As women who wear molded bras know, they come in different shapes from different brands. The website claims it can be adjusted to suit many sizes, back sizes, cup sizes, etc, but this is a 'custom' part of the object. The website also claims it is the future of "luxury house appliances".

I wonder how much a custom bra dryer would cost. If it was fully customizable and utilized infrared technology, as it advertises, would it not be expensive? I'm sure it would be, if it is being called a "luxury" home appliance. This means the target market for such an item is the upscale luxury market. A market that currently purchases their bras at La Perla, for example.

In this case, their customer would certainly have more than one bra to choose from in their wardrobe, would they not? Why the rush to dry one in particular?

I am desperately hoping this is an ill-conceived student digital rendering project, but part of me says it is not, mostly because they are advertising for investors, and have a pretty slick website.

Anyhow, I'm chalking it up as the most hilariously useless invention ever. Can anyone top this? I think not.

Fuck You Men's Style

Women as garbage? Thats a tad much.

RIP Bettie Page 1923-2008

Here are some links to excellent articles on Bettie, her life, her legacy. I won't try and re-write them or whittle them down. Instead, just my favourite quotes from each article.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/goodbye_bettie_page/
"She’s not playing stupid in these pictures, and it’s genuinely hot. She’s naughty without seeming to have an ounce of guilt to her. They cater to the fantasies of men who want something more interesting than cheesecake. But it was women (well, women like me and a lot of women I know) who put her popularity over the top. I suspect a lot of women see her picture for the first time and think, shit, I can actually be sexy without getting breast implants, dyeing my hair blond, and adopting a cloying posture. For real."

http://dodsonandross.com/blogs/carlin-ross/2008/12/bettie-page-died-today
"I remember finding one of my grandfather's Playboy magazines and finding the image of Bettie wearing nothing but a santa hat pinning an ornament on a xmas tree. I sat there for hours looking at her. It was her joy and sexual confidence. She looked so different than the other women in the magazine. She was happy. She was sexually expressive. And she was powerful. "

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/12/12/bettie_page/index.html
"In light of her status as a darling of third-wave feminists -- between the sexual liberation and the cute bangs, what's not to love? -- it's worth remembering that her fame came, at least in part, from a lack of options. Page had already tried and rejected being a teacher, a secretary and a housewife when she got into modeling -- there weren't too many more careers available to women of her generation."

Do High Heels = Empowerment?

I read this article by Germaine Greer today. In it she is suggesting that high heels don't empower us, and the addiction to them is all "our" (read: women's) fault. Yes, it's all our fault! We prevent our own empowerment. With our love of shoes.

Now, it's worth a read, and I do suggest you pop over there and have your thoughts provoked. But it's something about the following paragraph that really puzzles me:

"Ever since the courtesans of Ancient Greece signalled their presence by the clacking of their shoes, high heels have been sexy. The margins of my surviving schoolbooks are filled with drawings of f***-me shoes. As an eight-year-old whiling away the long hours of watching over my baby sister I would prop my feet on dominoes set on their ends, and twirl my newly leggy self in front of my mother’s full-length mirror, yearning for proper high heels. Sadly, long before I was old enough to wear them, I had grown too tall. Like Jackie Kennedy, Princess Di and now Carla Bruni, I found myself restricted to kitten heels or downright flats. "

When I read this, I think....um, you aren't allowed to wear high heels because you are tall? How exactly is specifically choosing NOT to wear heels, because of your height, empowering yourself? Wouldn't it be quite the opposite?

Now I know some very tall women who don't like to wear heels. They don't like to tower over men, or their friends. It makes them feel less feminine, I suppose. As a person who is, by conventional standards, tall at 5'8", this has never been a question for me. I always wanted to be taller. So I will wear 4" or higher heels without a second thought. In fact, there's nothing I love more than the feeling of being taller than a man, or looking eye to eye with a man over 6' tall. I find it empowering, and it makes me feel sexy. Which is also empowered, in my books. But that's another blog entry, I suppose. And so it's hard for me to relate to the feeling of being "restricted to kitten heels," because I've never felt restricted.

Isn't this the ultimate in empowerment? Freedom? Never feeling restricted? That it is your choice to do and say and wear whatever you please?

The love that women have for shoes runs much deeper than the height of the heel. Single women are a new purchasing segment of the luxury market - and yes, we are sold to in a sexist, sometimes offensive manner. But we have spending power like we've never had before, because we are more liberated than we've ever been before. The correlation between Sex and the City and shoes isn't just that Carrie Bradshaw preferred shopping to sex, as Greer suggests. It is simply a new model of woman. Carrie Bradshaw, however unrealisitically, was an independant woman. She had her own apartment, worked full time, dated, had friends, and bought herself things with the money she earned. I don't want to equate empowerment with the ability to buy things. However, one way of looking at it is that Carrie wished to demonstrate her wealth - her self-made wealth - with her shoes. This is her choice, and I'm not sure that I can buy that this action constrained her in any way.

To me the modern idea of feminism and empowerment is centered on the right to choose. One must be aware of the fetishistic association with heels, and the physical discomfort. They can think of the weakness that heels ensure - for example the inability to run away from an attacker. If a woman is aware of all of these things, yet chooses to wear the shoes anyhow - for her own reasons - is this right to choose not empowered? I feel that it is. I feel empowered in the right environment in high heels. Because I dress for how it makes me feel, not for how I think it makes others feel. I think most women do.

What are your thoughts on this?

Photo Friday!

Italian Vogue recently asked photographer Steven Meisel (popularily known as the guy who photographed Madonna for her book Sex) to "do something crazy," and this is what he came up with. My word, they are stunning photographs, with an absolute overload of pattern and colour and shape to dazzle the eye.

Check out more of them here.










Oh, and in case you were wondering, patterned fabrics and fashions are "in".

Girl Power!

In the late 90's, I'm not sure any members of the general public really gave the message "Girl Power!" any weight. It seemed a little silly at the time to link Girl Power with pop music. It was a marketing scheme, really. It seemed fluffy and light compared to real feminism. It didn't seem authentic - how can you sing about girl power in hotpants?

It was stolen from the Riot Grrls , a punk feminist movement, and changed to the more reader/children friendly "Girl Power" when the Spice Girls popularized the saying. Some would say it was linked to "third wave" feminism, insofar that some writers like to link things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Spice Girls to feminism.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Girl Power as:
"Power exercised by girls; spec. a self-reliant attitude among girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness, and individualism."

I've been thinking a lot lately about this term and thinking perhaps it is time it made a comeback.

Yesterday I read (online) an interview with Miley Cyrus, who is extremely popular with the tween set. Sure, she sings songs that proclaim she "stutters when you ask [her] what [she's] thinking 'bout," but I won't get all over her for saying she's shy. That's pretty normal for 15 year olds, right? In the interview, which originally appeared in a Teen magazine, Miley talks about her two year long relationship with a Jonas Brother. She says they got together on the first day they met and were inseperable for 2 years. She says she 'changed for him' and 'gave her hair highlights' because he wanted her to. Wow, heavy for 13, right? After I read this I thought there was going to be a follow up along the lines of "But I learned you should never change who you are for a guy,"...but there just wasn't. There was nothing positive for girls to take out of the story. In fact, she goes on to say that they fought all the time, and that maybe someday she'll marry him.

Hmm. Not very self-reliant.

When I look to the Hills, which to be honest, I don't watch, but have seen a couple of times, I don't see much evidence of Girl Power. The girls on the show seem so wrapped up in the drama that is supposedly their lives, that they turn on eachother at every opportunity. They do not support eachother, and don't seem to really have long lasting valuable female relationships. While they are certainly ambitious and assertive, there is a serious lack of individualism going on. That added to the new way to get famous (aka show us your tits) and we have a sad example of what being a young, single female is really all about.

I'm disturbed by the dating shows - the Bachelor, Rock Of Love, Tila...they are all the same. They are filled with the message that dating the right person can make you "whole" and its all about the "connection" you feel with someone. Women fighting over one man, throwing themselves at him. They feature emotionally void relationships that are based largely on looks and the willingness to have sex. Ok, Ok, True - this is what a lot of relationships are based on, but not mature, lasting relationships. And while I don't want to underestimate youth - I'm sure many if not most of the young girls watching know that this is not reality, it really leaves me wondering what alternative influences they have? What is the alternative? Surely, they know this is not real - but what is real then? What role models do they have?

What do we have now in pop music, or pop culture that could compare to the Spice Girls, or to the Riot Grrls for that matter? What female group is allowed to exist in popular culture that spreads a message of female empowerment? What message is there in media for young girls to tell them to be assertive, self-reliant, ambitious and individualistic?

Last night I was thinking about this because I saw this ad in a WalMart flyer for tshirts. I felt like it was a glimmer of hope. The tshirts I've seen recently at WalMart usually say things like "Princess!" or "Whatever!" or "Don't say Diva Like its a bad thing!" or something equally annoying.

These however have more interesting messages:


"I wear the brain in the relationship"
and
"Girls should be two things: Classy and Fabulous"

Now, nevermind who would actually wear these tshirts, these messages are certainly an improvement on recent vapid messages I've seen floating around.

"I wear the brain" supports the trend of girls acheiving more in school of late. Girls go to university more often, get better marks. We still aren't paid evenly at the end of it all, but it's a start. Girls seem to be enjoying this time in history, I know I did. It was satisfying to beat a guy at something - because the popular assumption is 'boys are better', no matter what the task is. So beating them - doing well (and not just 'for a girl') is incredibly satisfying.

"Classy and Fabulous" is interesting too; while wearing this tshirt that is decidedly unclassy, and I'm not sure that young girls really know what Classy is, I do hope that they know what Classy is not. "Not classy" would be: being a bleach blonde on a dating show fighting over Bret, changing your hair colour for your boyfriend and then talking about it in a magazine, dropping your close girlfriend because you don't like her boyfriend, for a few examples.

I do hope that somehow WalMart has spotted a trend - a natural pendulum swing away from the diva-tramp-paris-hilton era, back to the Girl Power era. The Girl Power of the Riot Grrls or Spice Girls championed friendships, loyalty, individualism, creative and self expression. If the message was said in hotpants or army shorts, the message was clear: we're not dumb broads.

In retrospect, that message looks better and better all the time.

Fashionably Unfashionable

Hipsters. Club kids. Club hipster kids….I’m not quite sure what the variety of hipster to which I refer is called. Do they call themselves something? Perhaps they are so individualistic, they don’t have a collective name. It’s a shame really. Clearly I’m not a part of it, or I would know.

Here is what I do know, about this new genre of trendy character.

1. They seem to like American Apparel . A lot.
2. They like to ironically (I think) recycle fashion from the late 80s and early 90s
3. The worse it flatters your figure, the better.
4. If at the time it went out of fashion there was a collective sigh of “never again!” they will recycle it and wear it.
5. It must be terribly contrived and show the amount of effort involved.

Below are some examples of the exact variety of hipster to which I refer. If this is not good enough, I suggest going to Circa Nightclub in Toronto for one night, you'll have all the reference you need.


















My question is, and perhaps this is a dumb question that in turn shows my age; what exact point does this fashion style have? I guess that leads to the greater question: Does fashion have to have a point? Perhaps this genre’s style is that it has no point. How very dada. I mean, if that is the point, that there is no point, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. Is this what the youth of today have achieved? A collective distaste for genre to the point that genre bending is the new genre?

We all know fashion movements are touted by the youth as a way to express their individuality. Of course anyone over the age of 25 has realized that dressing the same way as a bunch of other people expressing their individuality really doesn’t result in you looking very individual at all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, I mean, maybe you just want to fit in somewhere different than you normally do. Like Goths, or Punks. Sure, they look different than the mainstream, but they are also carefully placed within a counter culture slot that is definable.

What I am getting at is that for some reason this particular brand of individualism seems rather contrived to me. Each outfit I see on Facehunter (a style bible to this set) seems anything but effortless. Isn’t looking cool all about looking like you didn’t try? Maybe I missed a memo sent out in 2005 that said looking cool is all about trying hard these days. Maybe this is all about expressing outwardly how geeky you are inside. Maybe geeky is the new cool. I don't know. But it doesn't seem effortless.

Besides paying attention to youth trends for work, I am also paying attention because sometimes you’ll see someone walking down the street, dressed in a way that sure seems like they are one of these hipsters. Then they turn to face you, and it’s actually a crackhead who is just still dressed this way, having not bought new clothes since 1991.

I don’t know about the kids, but I generally try and avoid dressing in anything that might get me mistaken for a 42 year old crackhead.

Some Trends are Dumb

Today I was online and discovered that you can purchase vintage geek-chic eyeglasses from American Apparel. While I find this interesting, I have to laugh to myself. I mean, I've been wearing nerdy glasses since grade one. I am so fashion forward. It’s hard being me.

I know, I know, nerdy glasses are a trend, they were very important on the runway and whathaveyou. Big frames are back. I get it! But, does this mean that in a few months, wearing black framed glasses will be viewed as passé? Trends are moving rapidly these days.

That doesn't seem very fair to those of us who have no choice.