No femininity for you!

Beyoncé has a song out right now called "If I Were a Boy." The first line is:

"If I were a boy even just for a day
I'd roll out of bed in the morning
And throw on what I wanted and go."

Menowz? If you're a girl you can't roll out of bed and throw on whatever you want? I guess I have to give back my Femininity credentials.

(Click here for a rock-pop version.)

The strange bedfellowness of politics and fashion

A friend sent me a link to a New York Times tidbit -- about a makeup artist using this image from Afghan's 80s war as her inspiration for a fall runway show.
"“The skin was bronzed to appear tan, but a bit dusty,” said the makeup artist Ayako, who wanted a gypsy effect to go with clothes that will cost more than the annual budget of Kandahar."

According to this video the photo was given to her by the designer. Ayako describes her look as trying to achieve a "very gypsy girl, very National Geographic feeling."

Someone told me once that fashion trends follow politics. I guess this designer (Miguel Adrover) was a straight A student in fashion school. The designer even looks like a guy I went to poli sci with.


Randomly googling this Adrover fellow, I have mixed feelings about him. On one hand, he's consciously integrating politics with fashion, which might be a good thing...

Among the criticisms leveled at Mr. Adrover by his detractors is that his work was too political, his politics too naïve or else just postures, his agenda too provocative to make commercial sense.

"Fashion lives in a bubble," an unrepentant Mr. Adrover said. "We're not going to show pink flower dresses on the catwalk if people are in the world throwing bombs." This was a reference, perhaps, to a show in Paris last October at which the designers Viktor & Rolf presented models wearing ribboned pink dresses and gave each audience member a gift of their first fragrance, which comes in a bottle shaped like a grenade and is called Flowerbomb.

And I do like this coat:
On the other hand... one can see where the Politically Naïve accusations come from. (For the record, the designer is from Spain.)

Another one for the boys

We complain all the time that women are infantilized in the media, fashion etc., but what's the whole deal with hairless men?

Click here to see Braun's new body shaver.

This isn't even a trend, I think it's here to stay--body hair had its last big party in the 70s, and was gone by the time of this ad (a fave of my friends' and I in high school).



And fashionable male friend and I were discussing this the other day--the rising expectations of male grooming. And I'd have to agree with my dad, that this is the next frontier in the beauty industry, in terms of making more money. In Business Land, if you're not moving forward, creating new needs, creating new consumers, then you is dead.

Maybe it's reassuring that soon men will have as many body issues as women. Equality now!

One Girl Revolution

Some songs aren't musically genius, but they get the message across anyway. That's how I'd classify Saving Jane's "One Girl Revolution"--a song that would have had a better chance if picked up by someone like P!nk. It's a nice antidote to the Pussycat Dolls and their brand of female-chauvinist-piggism (as evidenced by the final line in the song: "No thanks, I can loosen up my own buttons.")

Some of the lines are mediocre, but the middle part is solid. (Desperately not wanting to be a "carbon-copy-wannabe-like-everybody" was the Essence de Moi in high school.)



*

Raise your hand if you're not another carbon copy
Wanna be like everybody else
Raise up your hand if you've got something more to say

I'm here to start a one girl revolution
I'm not a perfect ten, paper thin, Hollywood illusion
I thought I told ya I'm a soldier
[is she referencing Yoda??]
And I ain't leaving till the party's over
One girl revolution

What are we selling, our brains or our belly buttons
What are you buying, don't you know that they're lying
What are you crying about, don't just sit there
And wait while they're selling us out