Fashion in Action!

The Cheek Of It!

Fashion in Action!, War on Terror, Women
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A revolution without dancing or pretty underwear is a revolution not worth having, if you ask me; especially when said nice pants cock a snook at the same time. Via Andy Worthington:

…With exquisite timing, lingerie darlings Agent Provocateur unveil their latest product, a pair of Guantánamo orange knickers emblazoned with the message “Fair Trial My Arse.”

Conceived after consultation with Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, the project arose after the farcical Case of the Contraband Underpants last August, when Clive Stafford Smith and Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve were accused of smuggling underwear into Guantánamo for two of their clients, Mohammed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident and Chadian national, who was just 15 years old when he was picked up in a random raid on a mosque in Pakistan, and British resident Shaker Aamer, a long-term hunger striker, who has been held in solitary confinement at Guantánamo for two and a half years.

More…

I can’t believe I didn’t notice those knickers (though maybe knickers is slightly too robust a word for something quite so diaphanous) back in February; my antenna for political luxury lingerie is usually quite acute.

That said, I doubt anyone who buys them will wear them; the associations aren’t exactly erotic. Not unless your name’s Mosley.

Oh Deer, Oh Deer, Oh Deer

Culture, Fashion in Action!, Merkins..., Sexuality, Women
Published on 2 Comments on Oh Deer, Oh Deer, Oh Deer

This has to be parody, because surely nobody can be so up themselves and live.

From the Albany Times Union arts pages:

Accidental human
C. Ryder Cooley pushes notions of life through music, art, trapeze acts

By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer

I should’ve stopped when I saw the word trapeze, but no i had to go and read the whole thing. Bigger fool me.

There’s plenty of people who take themselves and their silly artistic affectations seriously, but not many do so as assiduously as does wannabe multimedia artist C. Ryder Cooley. And when a wannabe multimedia artist meets a journalist willing to take them at their own self-inflated valuation, well then there’s disaster in the making.

Multimedia artist C. Ryder Cooley thinks she has had better incarnations. But she’s trying to make the best of this one.

“I started working with animal themes probably before I was born,” said Cooley. “I think I just was an animal. Somehow I accidentally turned into a human, and I’m trying to get back to my animal.”

[…]

For the past few months, she’s been working on her thesis performance, titled “Animalia: Stories of Collapse, Calamity and Departure,” which will include elements of video projection, aerial performance and the accordian.

Call it an interspecies fairy tale.

Call it what you like, but how’s it going to play in Peoria?

“I like looking at animals for evidence of different structures of living,” said Cooley.

Don’t we all? Personally, I’d love to be a squid, but I can’t see me making a living decking myself in bits of rubber hose and a bodystocking and flying through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring notsosyoung blogger on the flying trapeze, just to make the point that water’s wet and squid live in it and humans don’t.

With her earth-toned clothing, childlike voice and haunted eyes, Cooley looks more like someone out of a storybook than someone likely to be standing right in front of you. She looks out of place in the 21st century. Or maybe it’s that she looks out of place as a homo sapien.

Or maybe she looks like someone you’d take a running punch at… but no, that would be animal cruelty.

Interspecies deer

Most people who have seen Cooley perform locally associate her with a deer, as she is often seen wearing antlers or a cut deer head strapped to her back.

The deer, she says, is her “East Coast animal,” a creature she began feeling an affinity for shortly after she moved from San Francisco to the Capital Region.

I wonder what her West Coast animal is..?

“The deer heads I have are trophies that were killed by hunters. By putting them on my body, I can bring them back to life and be their body for them,” she said. “And there’s a certain perceived gender to wearing antlers. I become a cross-gender, interspecies deer.”

No, sweetie, you become an overeducated, underdisciplined, spoiled western madam with a stinking deer carcase on her back and outstanding gender issues.

It’s that reinterpretation of the gendering of animals that appeals to Cooley.

“How people deal with gender in animals is even more intense than how they deal with it in humans,” she said. “It’s hard to find research of animals that isn’t based on hetero-normative mating behavior.” In other words, even nonhuman animals are not as set into their gender roles as humans want to make them out to be.

Oh, Cooley, Cooley, Cooley. It’s not illegal to have a fetish you know. What should be illegal is you boring others silly dressing it up a fetish as art and worse still, using an accordion and a trapeze to do it.

Just go buy a Furry deer outfit and get yourself to a Con. Free your antlers, and your ass will follow.

Then go back to campus, get your faunsuit on and have sex with your roommate. You know that’s what you really want.

Much more about Cooley’s deer carcase/accordion/trapeze masterwork here, if you can stand it.

Better be a whiter shade of pale

Fashion in Action!, Life under Capitalism
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Aja Mangum is a beauty editor for New York Magazine and she has a problem. Because she’s a Black woman of a particular skin tone, the range of make up products for her is limited. So what should be an enjoyable outing for a woman interested in beauty products and fashion inevitably becomes frustrating. She describes those
experiences in an article for New York Magazine and the nub of the problem lies in the following two paragraphs:

I’m also, obviously, a beauty editor, and the lack of cosmetics—particularly the basics, like foundation and concealer—for my skin tone has always bothered me. When I ask companies about extending their lines for women of color, I’m usually told some version of “we’re working on it,” or shown one or two dark shades. Counterside makeovers can be humiliating; I end up in whiteface or am told point-blank they don’t have my color. And it’s great that former supermodel Iman has developed a makeup line for women of color, but I want variety.

[…]

“You can cover, say, 80 percent of light skin tones with six shades of foundation,” says Sarah Robbins, Bobbi Brown’s global vice-president of product development and marketing, as she explains the complexities of light, medium, and deep coverage to me. “As skin tones get deeper, they get much more complex in tonality, so six shades don’t cover that complexity in depth. It takes longer to get it right.” She’s clearly empathetic, but there’s also business to consider. “What’s difficult is to rationalize making SKUs [stock-keeping units] when you don’t know how many women you’re going to be able to service. We want to service everyone, but the reality is that it’s very difficult to do.”

This problem may seem minor at first, but it is the sort of everyday humiliation a lot of people face because they don’t fit the fashion and beauty industry’s standards. Not just if your skin colour is outside the acceptable range, but if you’re too fat, thin, short or tall, you will often have trouble finding good clothes. From a business point of view, this makes good sense for the reasons given in the second paragaph: there may be a lot of potential non-standard customers, but they’re all non-standard in different ways.

But there’s also a lot of (unconscious) racism and bigotry at work here, as has been noticed here before. A cosmetics house like L’oreal creating makeup lines for Black women? That would lower their image! The supposedly universal image of beauty is still white and blonde and anything that differs from it runs the risk of becoming a brand for Black, or Asian or fat people rather than something with universal appeal.

Hey! Trutex! Leave Them Kids Alone

Civil liberties, Fashion in Action!, Life under Capitalism, Parenting, Policing, Poverty, War on Terror
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Via Archrights: first it was the co-option of teachers into fingerprinting every British child, whether they or their parents agreed or not.

Now even the school uniform suppliers are to be drafted into the suburban stasi:.

The chip connects with teachers’ computers to show a photograph of the pupil, data about academic performance and whether he or she is in the correct classroom. It can also restrict access to areas of the school. The radio frequency identification system is being tested at Hungerhill School in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Ten pupils began wearing a chip sewn into their uniforms eight months ago.

The scheme has drawn criticism from human rights campaigners. “Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early,” said David Cleater, from Leave Them Kids Alone, which campaigns against the finger-printing of pupils. “It is appalling.”

It is, but that’s just a science experiment, Chipped uniforms are on the horizon though and a line of chipped uniform items is apparently going into production, made by Trutex. (Anyone British who has children or who has been a child knows Trutex. They’re one of the biggest suppliers of school uniforms and clothing in the country.)

A school uniform maker said yesterday it was “seriously considering” adding tracking devices to its clothes after a survey found many parents would be interested in knowing where their offspring were.
Trutex would not say whether it was studying a spy in the waistband or a bug in the blazer but admitted teenagers were less keen than younger children on the “big brother” idea.

What, you mean they get a choice?

Nope, didn’t think so.

Even leaving aside privacy concerns this will no doubt add to the cost. It cost over 600 pounds to kit my younger son out when he went to senior school, (and that as ten years ago) because you have to buy specific items in specific colours and patterns by specific manufacturers in specific shops: but if he’d turned up at school in the wrong thing, he’d’ve been a laughing stock, as my sister and I were when we had the wrong brand and colour of games skirts. Thirty years and it still rankles.

That kind of snobbery and financial bullying can drive some children, and some parents, to despair and self-harm. That’s bad enough. How much more is obliging parents and children to pay to be spied on going to cost?