How wonderful!
I heard about this a while back and only decided to check it out recently. The Uniform Project is a wonderful exercise in sustainable fashion and also helps a great cause. In short, Sheena Matheiken wears the same dress every day (well, 7 identical uniforms, one for every day of the week) and reworks it everyday.
Check it out at theuniformproject.com
and here’s a little clip below:
It began on October 13, 2009.
Over a month and 4 days later, just as I was beginning to think that I could avoid retail shopping forever… I had my first case of the withdrawals.
It was my first day back at work in a long time and the atmosphere of Christmas got to me. Luckily I took a breath and thought about what else I could do with the money and tried to rationalize as deeply as I could as to why I wanted the items passing through my hands.
For one, the atmosphere was conducive to purchasing. Everything was a theme aimed at my acquiring new items. The scene had changed since I began this little mission and I was feeling left behind. I felt compelled to move forward with the aesthetic of present time. This Christmas is about deep colours, blacks, velvet, satin, sequins. I was not in theme! Interestingly enough it was not about standing out but about standing out in the wrong way, looking out of touch. For a brief moment, I put aside my critical thinking hat and my train of thought went something like: “this is cute! I would look good in this! (Picture inner model) How much is this? I can afford this… wait. When would I wear this? (Picture christmas party) Could I wear this all winter? (Picture going to school) No.” Immediately my fizzy excitement fizzled out. I don’t care for this, the love is gone. All this in the span of 1 minute give or take. But had I not intercepted or recognized the mini-rush of adrenaline I may have failed and this blog would have been shut down for shame.
The interesting part for me was that I didn’t want to stand out. Usually when clothes are advertised, they are advertised with the sense that a particular ensemble will highlight you out of a crowd with a message that goes something like express your individuality! Your style, your look! Yet as I observe people shopping for Christmas Party wear, they recognize that some dresses are ‘over the top’, ‘too tight’, ‘too bright’, etc. They want to look attractive but not draw too much attention so its a negotiation between attracting some positive attention and blending with the crowd… but I see no primary focus on individuality in these negotiations. How many times do we get invited to events and wonder, is it formal, casual, what’s the theme for this year’s senior prom? The downtown streets can seem like a microcosm of a themed event where its about office wear in the day, and oversized tops, leggings and boots in the evening. So… is it helpful for me to keep referring back to my sense of individuality when my shopping urges never stemmed from individuality in the first place?
This commercial has been on for a while now and I can’t help but cringe every time.
Anyone can see that there is an obvious comparison between the glass of beer and the woman. The girl then disappears and the slogan reads: “She is a thing of beauty”. Thing, she is a thing. Great.
I know that the feminist standards of beer commercials are not the highest, they’re abysmally low but I’m over it. I used to find Stella Artois commercials refreshingly different but now this whole 60s themed female getting dolled up just to be ‘consumed’ makes me wanna puke.
Of course the lyrics add to the puke-fest: “il sait que c’est plus fort que toi, et comme il te veut un jour il t’aura” BAARF!
He knows its stronger than you and because he wants you he will have you.
It’s always fascinating to go back to the 50s and 60s and look at how awfully sexist the advertisements were but we can’t take comfort and think that we’ve come a long way because in the world of advertising, we really haven’t. Women are objects, we’re never active agents unless we’re disciplining ourselves in some way – always aware of how we present ourselves and garnish our package. I want to see us as active agents, participating in the world not just posing alongside the active agents holding the glass of beer, listening to what he’s saying, laughing as if he were soooo funny.
Screw this. If you’re trying to sell me something by selling me a feeling or an idea, sell me the feeling that I’m better than a pretty thing, sell me the idea that I can accomplish things in the world besides obsessing over my appearance all to just stand there next to the guy with all the dialogue. If Stella Artois can make me buy their product, they can also make me think more of my gender while doing it, il n’y a pas d’excuses.
Holy Manatee!
Got news about what to expect for the November 14th Jimmy Choo launch at H&M and it sounds like the rules of a UFC cage match.
Ding Ding Ding, here are the rules if you choose to play:
The first 160 people in line will be given colour coded bracelets.
Each Bracelet represents a 10 minute time slot.
At the time corresponding to your colour, you will be let into the barricade housing the collection and you will be timed via stopwatch. The barricade will be surrounded by 10 guards.
After 10 minutes, you will be forced out of the barricade and you will only be allowed to purchase 1 item per model but you are allowed to have the same model in different colours.
After the first 161 people go through the collection the remnants will be open to the rest of the public and just a note, employees will be handing out 20% off coupons for another item in the store asides from the designer collection – adding to the anticipated madness.
How afraid are the employees? Take a look at what happened at Cavalli’s collaboration launch below:
Nothing to rant about today, just a few updates:
I may be getting a new job, details are still unclear so I have decided to share horrendous and hilarious stories about my experiences working in a retail clothing store to give an idea of 1 of the places where my no-shopping experiment is coming from.
Also, because of my potential leave, I am now more tempted than ever to stock up on my employee discount and leave with a bang. Leaving with a bang also means enacting a ‘last-day-of-work’ fantasy. Some fantasies include:
-dancing around the store like a musical number complete with sliding down the banister on the end high note.
-hiding in the clothes and grabbing people or whispering either threats or socially conscious messages to them (“pssst: I’m non-recyclable”).
-telling the absolute truth of what I’m really thinking to all the customers.
-Breaking every company rule: (wearing a mini-skirt with a nike sweatshirt and flip flops while standing on the last step of a ladder and shouting in English: it’s my laaaast daaaaay!…while chewing gum.)
Story time: this isn’t so much a story as it is an account of what happens in the changing rooms. One woman came in holding her little boy’s hand asking for a bathroom, we don’t have any for customers. So she looks like she’s shopping around then goes into the changing rooms. Eventually we find out that she told her son to just pee in the changing room and was asked to pay for the cleaning bill. One colleague has found a dirty diaper and I myself have personally found a used sanitary napkin with a tip: 75 cents in change neatly stacked next to it. Even though we don’t allow 2 in a cabin there are couples who try and we can hear every gross compliment and flirtation that they share (I just threw up in my mouth) and there are the people who insist on being buck naked in there and come out to ask for something and let it all hang out.
Haven’t bought a thing yet. Not even tempted to.
It began October 13, 2009. 25 days and counting.
I’ve noticed that there aren’t as many makeover segments as there were just a few years ago on TV.
It used to be all the rage and they all had more or less the same narrative:
Fashion experts find a selfless woman who doesn’t have time to take care of herself and looks awful, (fill in awful with old, unkept, unfashionable, etc.) run her through a car-wash of experts and moments later she is revealed to her family and friends as the ‘new and improved’ version of herself. Next comes her testimony of how wonderful she feels “I feel like a new person!” gleeful and flaunting her new self with agreeing audience members.
This whole before and after comparison of 1 person is really strange. Its obvious that before is bad and after is good but somehow its alright to do it to one person but you can’t put 2 pictures of 2 different people side by side and caption as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ because that’s just mean and yet the makeover recipients always talk about how they’re ‘a new person’. What does that say about people who resemble the before picture? Are they not good enough? Are they ‘lazy’ or do they suffer from low self-esteem because they didn’t ‘take care of themselves’ enough to look like whatever Stacy London wants you to look like?
It just seems like these shows are rewarding kind people with warm hearts by objectifying them and then acting like they’re doing them a favor by making them physically more acceptable. (Now you’re beautiful on the inside AND on the outside… oh, and you’re welcome).
The criticism before the makeover is unbearable and heart-breaking to me. What Not To Wear in particular laughs at people’s clothing choices but keeps trying to push how beautiful they are so that the criticism’s seem to come from a caring place. “These make you look short, fat, ugly, etc. when you’re really more beautiful underneath and you probably feel short, fat, ugly because of your clothes”.
It would be interesting to have a show where instead of a makeover, people learn to love themselves and others and stop criticizing appearances. Besides, I think clothing as a form of self-expression is more inspirational than clothing as a tool for conformism.
This episode of What Not to Wear is particularly… problematic.
Jennifer is super talented but we need to see ‘the human being’ under there (how does wearing big clothes not make you a human being?). 5, 000$ spent on clothing (in this economy ha!). Her style and her talent don’t match – I didn’t know talent had a look. In fact, Juilliard didn’t need to see her Banana Republic receipts before admitting her. Be beautiful and people will pay attention to you – now we get to it. It’s more about making other people comfortable. It’s like the hosts of this show are saying, I can’t see how a woman who dresses any way she wants can be so talented so instead of questioning the standards of beauty to fill in someone’s persona, let’s just give her a makeover. They have a limited view of what a woman is and can be. If Stacy and Clinton can’t get past the army gear then that’s their loss.
A lot of people will have you believe that shopping is somewhat of a democratic process – well, not entirely. You definitely have a choice, but it isn’t to buy or not to buy it’s more like buy this or buy that. So the democratic process is supposed to happen when you go for the blue or red item and making that decision all by yourself is democracy in action.
Most companies have a manifesto: a slogan to operate by like ‘where fashion meets quality at affordable prices’. Seems harmless enough but if you work in retail, you know that it’s not that clean cut and simple.
Oftentimes, retailers will subject their employees to learning and memorizing the makings of the ultimate shopper. When I used to work for a Danish clothing company they had a book with a section on the most desired shopper and they got pretty specific: a European woman from 25 to 40, well-educated, upper class, career oriented, etc. and next to the description was a full page photo of a blond wavy-haired model coming out of a car with a three-piece suit. That same picture as well as other advertisements in and around the store featured the same model but I don’t think consumers realize that she was what they were looking for in a customer. Had they known, maybe things would be different now.
Of course some stores go even further. They will completely invent a human being like an avatar on second life. They’ll give her a name like Alexa and bring her to life: Alexa is a 15 year old who plays soccer on weekends and loves animals. Her dream is to become a singer and she hangs out with her friends at the mall. Picture of Alexa includes young and sexy wavy-haired blond frolicking in the leaves for the fall campaign. She is not only their target consumer, as I look through their store-front window she is also the face of their ad campaign.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that when a line of clothing is produced, it’s not exactly the magic of sketches from a designer come to life. It’s a business and it is very much calculated. When a line of clothing is produced, it’s produced with someone in mind and oftentimes, that person is rich, young and White.
Ok, that’s over-generalizing (is it?) but if a specific character is not made up, there will be images for the visual merchandisers to inspire their mannequins and the overall look of the store and the models in those images are very much what you would expect from a model: skinny, full of attitude, White, look comfortably well-off.
I have yet to see a character make-up with someone who looks like anyone I would like to spend time with that states: Rhonda is a hard-working 32 year old single mom who likes horror movies. She has 2 children who are in grade 1 and 3 and she cuts the crust of her sandwiches. She joined the gym but stopped going and plans to take up yoga instead. Insert picture of Rhonda running from the camera at a birthday party.
I see that if something is unattainable it creates a need. Why would we buy things if we thought we were fine just the way we were and didn’t need them? I guess what I’m asking for is a stretch of the imagination and little more variety. The glossed up, photoshopped, affluent, effortless, skin and bones is getting old for me. Give me Rhonda!
Speaking of race and target consumers, here’s a clip from ABC’s Would You Rather:
You never know how wrapped up you are in something until you take a step back to look at it from a different point of view.
Since my conscious efforts to stop shopping I’ve been spending time away from shopping districts, magazines, online shopping sites, etc. It gave me a whole new outlook on my work environment when I went back last Thursday. All I kept thinking was: “look at all this stuff!”. Sweaters, jeans, tank tops, t-shirts, cardigans, dresses, accessories piled on top of one another, the racks overflowing and overstuffed with pieces everywhere. I felt like Newman on Seinfeld talking about the mail… it just keeps coming and coming and it never stops!
The people keep coming and coming and they buy and buy some more, put things on hold, try 2, 3 credit cards, call their banks, ask their friends for money and I’m behind the cash register screaming on the inside: “walk away!~~~ let it go~~~! It’s not worth it!~~~” but I suppose the imagery that I just conjured up is the vision of a stimulating economy and not necessarily a democratic one where there’s an equal amount of exposure to options of buying and not buying practices.
Our lives literally depend on stuff. It’s pretty bleak when I put it that way but I see first hand how true it can be. There’s so much more effort and exposure dedicated to buying: the sales, the discounts, the bargain-hunting, the deals, the new, the latest, the stylish, the sexy, the cute, the hip, the must-haves, (must-haves is my favorite buzz term because its so urgent but has no consequence: must have it or else what?). But nothing about the thoughtful, the considered, the pondered, the socially-politically-economically conscious, and as for sales – what better way to save than to stop spending?
It just seems so obvious and yet when I bring this up, I mostly get 1 of 2 responses either, they’re aware of this grim expectation that people will buy anything if it gets enough positive exposure but what can we do about it? Or who are you to tell me what I can and cannot buy? As in the right and freedom of purchase whatever, however. I didn’t realize not-buying something became so politically charged and somewhat “radical” for our times. How has shopping become such a huge part of who we are? Why is this becoming a sensitive topic?
I thought about the first question and tried to remember how it became such a huge part of myself. I can’t recall any space where I was free to hang out safely with my friends than when I was at the mall. How sad, my pre-teen years and sense of freedom from supervision are primarily linked to shopping and hanging out at the mall.
In order for this experiment to last I’m going to have to reconstruct my ideas of leisure time living in a downtown city and shopping is not an option.
It began Tuesday October 13, 12 days and counting.
November 20, 2009
The Kids Are Alright
“Oh won’t somebody please think of the children?”
There’s something about kids and animals that pull on our heartstrings. I myself have witnessed some sad events but I’ve never lost complete control of myself the way I did during Marley and Me. Perhaps its their presumed innocence, perhaps we’re just projecting onto them. Either way, kids are presented as our not-yet-corrupt, innocent, weakest and most in need of love and protection. Sometimes asking what something will do to the average adult is not enough to convey consequences, sometimes people feel the need to ask ‘what will this do to our children?’ to give things more seriousness.
When I watch the evening news I often hear of unspeakable horror passed on as natural occurrence… until children are involved. They’re a special human category. Yet at the same time, in everyday life they’re not taken seriously. They’re ‘just’ a bunch of kids who don’t know any better. Kids are innocent yes, but they’re also impressionable, weak and vulnerable. Things that are permitted to adults are denied to children because its presumed that they just don’t get the world they live in and we somehow know better. It is my personal opinion that kids are twice injured in the way we often speak about them. They’re meek but also foolish, they are victims twice over.
I think that we should give kids more credit. I’m sure we all remember pretending not to know about ‘bad’ things in front of adults or the pain of not being taken seriously and especially the irritation of being talked down to or laughed about cause we’re silly kids with crazy ideas. It’s a matter of respect. Kids, like everyone else deserve at least that much. So let’s not assume that we know better.
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Tags: 50 cent, children, kids, pledge of allegiance, pruane2forever, will phillips