The Red Sweater(s)

It was a big-news week. So many huge, important stories tweeted out as must-reads, which I would notice here and there in between teaching, and which I am catching up on, one by one.

I do not have the bandwidth, though, for follow-through on any of the stories of the moment. What I will tell you about instead is sweater-shopping.

It all started - as these things not infrequently do - with a photo of Emily Weiss. More specifically: of the Into The Gloss / Glossier founder in a red sweater that was just so great. Céline, evidently, and discounted to a price at the high end of what I'd consider plausible for a sweater to cost full-price, and at any rate, that was over a year ago, so for this whole host of reasons, that specific sweater wasn't going to happen. But something like it, why not? I loved the idea of a bright red sweater - an everyday item not in a fade-into-the-background navy, gray, or black, like my other sweaters. A pop of confident, grown-woman color.

If I speak of a quest, it sounds as if I was devoting every moment from whenever I saw that photo until the moment of locating a sweater along those lines in an attempt at finding one. That would not be an accurate way of describing the last year or so, to put it mildly. But it would be fair to say The Sweater was always on some level in the back of my mind. It inspired the purchase of a rayon, long-sleeve, bright-red shirt from Uniqlo in New York. But upon return to Toronto, the moment had come. I was going to find this sweater.

Uniqlo did not come through in that regard. It had numerous variations, each not quite right: v-neck rather than crewneck, short-sleeve rather than long, dark crimson rather than the perfect bright red. They clearly have the right fabric, but use it only for this one $150 turtleneck dress, which is definitely not the thing I was looking for.

I don't know what came over me, as this is not my normal way of shopping, but I decided to look on eBay. Sure enough, there it was. The great advantage to being ancient is that I can tell, from a photo, if something is likely to fit me, and indeed, this did. Even with all manner of I-live-in-Canada fees, it was something like $80 (CAD) - not cheap but not outrageous. I was thrilled.

I became a notch less thrilled about it when the Everlane pop-up appeared in Nordstrom, and... there it was. The Sweater. In the right color, at least. Too expensive ($140ish), but still. I had to know. Did The Sweater exist, even if I wasn't about to buy it? The eBay one is a true, bright red, but more like cherry-red, a bit darker than the neon, almost orange red (think Nars Heat Wave) I had been imagining. (On Pinterest they look identical, which tells you something about the level of color difference we're talking about here.) Had I foolishly bought a sweater online, in some confusing and effectively non-returnable way, only to see The Sweater in person?

Was it foolish, though, given that I would not spend that much on a sweater, even if it were The Sweater?

I am pleased to report that the sweater I already bought is the superior entity, at least for my subjective purposes. The Everlane one fit me all wrong (too long and generally odd-fitting), and the material was flimsier. As for the color itself, while it's for sure the color of The Sweater, I can now see that the shade is - like all permutations of orange - not great with my coloring, whereas the slightly darker red seems to work.

If there's a moral to this story, it could well be that it's sometimes worth it to look for clothing in places other than Dundas and Yonge, with all due respect to that most relied-upon of intersections.

In all seriousness

I don't believe I'd ever seen a dig at a specific publication in a different publication's submission guidelines page before, but hey, what do you know? The New Rambler Review does look interesting, though, and smart people I know and don't know are involved, so I won't hold this against them. (Their statement about not paying contributors, that I might, but maybe it's an academic publication? Kind of?)

From that same submissions pages, I learned the following: "The New Rambler Review publishes reviews of serious books about ideas, including literary fiction." This means that they probably wouldn't be interested in my (Miss Self-Important-inspired) review of British crime shows available for Netflix streaming. Well, not so much a review as a downward spiral:

-"Last Tango in Halifax." Excellent highbrow (who am I kidding) soap opera, with a crime backstory, but mainly a lot of technically legal bad behavior. Two easy-on-the-eyes actors. A fantasy world depicted, in which middle-aged women have their pick of good-looking, often-younger men and women. A show I was genuinely sad to have reached the end of.

-"Happy Valley." More from the excellent Sally Wainwright and Sarah Lancashire. So much heroin in picturesque England, who knew? People in England, probably. There was recently a news story in Princeton about someone ODing on a bench in town, so it really does seem to be everywhere. Apart from that, the thing to know about it (or not, if this ruins it) is that it's basically "Fargo."

-"Broadchurch." Weird twist of an ending I hadn't seen coming, but otherwise not memorable. I must have enjoyed watching it enough to finish it, though.

-"The Fall." Starring the woman from "X-Files" (which I don't think I've ever seen) and the male model from "Fifty Shades of Grey" (which I also haven't seen). There are think-pieces about whether or not it's feminist - does the often gratuitous centrality of Mr. Abs's torso cancel out the serial-killer-of-professional-women plot? Discuss, or just watch the abs, and listen to the cool Irish accents. I like how they say the word "why"?

-"Hinterland." Accents posed a challenge. Star was too brooding. But having recently read some (literary) fiction set in Wales, and having once reviewed a book for a Wales-based journal (which I think involved sending a copyright form to Wales?), and having once learned how to order coffee in Welsh from an office-mate, I enjoyed the virtual trip to that part of the world.

-"Midsomer Murders." Evidently big in (early-2000s) Belgium. Not particularly striving for realism. (Candlesticks as murder weapons!) Was going to praise it for progressive-for-its-time gender politics, but it's actually not an old show. But whatever it is, I'm enjoying it.

Extraordinary descriptions of ordinary occurrences

-Yesterday I - I! - drove to Los Angeles and, crucially, back from Los Angeles as well. Around it, too, even, a little bit. My husband (and former driving instructor) was with me, which was particularly helpful when I was driving on whichever part of the freeway has like 20 different lanes on either side of you. Given the driving involved, L.A. itself was a bit of a blur. We had some (all excellent) ice cream at Carmela, coffee at Dinosaur, Thai food at Wat Dong Moon Lek,  Korean BBQ at Eight. I think I ate (and spent) enough for this entire month in California in one day.

There was also a halfhearted attempt at clothes-shopping. Which is to say, I tried to go where the five minutes of where-do-my-favorite-bloggers-most-of-whom-seem-to-live-in-L.A.-now-that-I-think-of-it shop? research directed me (this trip was, as you might gather, spontaneous), but this one boutique that sounded very promising turned out to be... exactly how I now see the Yelp reviewers found it, which is to say, ridiculously expensive and hipster-parody-ish.

-After reading so much about it (the "cool girl" speech especially), I decided the time had come to read Gone Girl. It was a complete page-turner, as in, it was difficult to put it down as I was reading it. It had a lot that held my attention apart from, you know, the suspense. Specifically the parental-overshare angle. The book does suggest that writing fiction about your kid can be as damaging as non-fiction, at least if it's more fictionalization than fiction-fiction. Much of the story ends up hinging on this. Well, that and the "cool girl" thing - Amy Elliott is so chill that she cheerily moves from New York to rural Missouri, where she can't find work, so that she can care for the aging parents of her cheating husband. (There may be thoughts on the intersection of "cool girl" and "monogamish" forthcoming.)

The only thing that bothered me was that Amy makes no sense as coming from New York. She's from a demographic of native New Yorkers that exists in entertainment - I'm thinking especially of "Gossip Girl" - in which Manhattan-ness means being the too-cool-for-school popular girl from an all-American high school. I couldn't figure out where she fit into any actual part of the New York population of the years when she's supposed to have grown up. She's this posh woman with family money, but the money was made from bestselling children's books. Yet that somehow lands Amy into something like a WASP upper-crust ice-queen status, and not, like, Zabars-and-Fairway country.

OK, and one other thing... I wouldn't say bothered me, exactly, but it's something I wondered about. I kind of get why literary fiction is so often about writers. I wish it weren't, but it sort of is what it is. But a mainstream suspense-type novel, does that also have to be about Brooklyn writers' parties, even if it quickly moves elsewhere? 

And now for something completely unserious

As surprised as I am to say this, a couple years after mostly losing interest in the genre, I have a new favorite personal-style blogger. Madeleine Alizadeh lives in Vienna and (thus) writes in German, but that's neither here nor there. What's exciting for me is that she's the first such blogger I've found who has my build as well as my coloring. She has far better taste than I do, however. Better, but similar, and making her blog the perfect resource for coming up with ways to style what I already own. And that's really what you want in a personal-style blogger - someone who has (give or take) your wardrobe, looks (give or take) like you, but knows how to put outfits together.

So! Outfits I plan to shamelessly copy using clothes I've already got on hand include pairing a button-down shirt with a motorcycle jacket; a loose gray t-shirt with a black pencil skirt; a tough-shade-to-wear blue sweater with black jeans and a navy jacket; camel with navy (yes! it always looks odd, on me at least, with just black); and camel with camel. Oh, and pairing everything with black sunglasses, although I feel this is only a borderline already-own, since I just bought these and have yet to wear them. All of these combinations may sound obvious, but somehow, on a day-to-day basis, they're not.

Affirmative consent, sitcom edition

The Mindy Project season premiere may well be the first time female heterosexuality was depicted on television. Wait, what could I possibly mean? Aren't virtually all the women on TV straight? Perhaps so, but they're basically always objects of male sexuality, in one way or another. Even Sex And The City - there, there was so much focus on looking perfect (despite the tremendous tragedy of crossing the threshold of 35) so as to get a high-status mate. Mr. Big... I mean, separate from my subjective indifference to Chris Noth, there's the fact that Carrie was always interested in being rescued by a car-and-driver, and a Big without those trappings clearly wouldn't have been of interest. There wasn't a whole lot of... female gaze, I suppose, with the exception of Samantha, who was always sort of a hollering-at-Chippendales joke of a character. And her lust had to be presented as mutually exclusive with any interest in a relationship - something never expected of men.

But TV changed when Mindy, at the end of the episode, put on her nerdy-but-not-hipster glasses to get a better look. A look at what, well, go check out Hulu, or, if you don't care about context, click here. But the gaze is definitively in the female-looking-at-male direction. Female vanity in no way enters into the scene. There's no desire-to-be-thought-beautiful. That's not the fantasy. This has been the case for a while on The Mindy Project - thus the way that every episode finds an excuse to have two hot guys in a "fight" of some kind. But that's a bit too subtle - it's possible for male viewers to take that in as slapstick, without catching on to the fact that it's the same, for the equivalent audience, as if two hot women were in an equivalent tumble. This was... quite a bit more straightforward.

French and Anglophilia

As all of us with too much TV under our belts know, every show is an older show. Ron Swanson is Lou Grant, etc. So, another for the books: "The Mindy Project" is "The Vicar of Dibley." (Like, to the extent that much of what's been called revolutionary about "The Mindy Project" - much of what I've called groundbreaking about the show - doesn't count as such, if British shows count.) Which probably explains why, despite in principle supporting Geraldine's quest for a pretty-boy, I kind of rooted for her to fall in love with David, who's the show's Danny.

In further Anglophilia, I was recently informed (well, reminded) of the existence of lemon and sugar as a topping for crepes, on Pancake Day. Most excellent.

Ellen Page (still) won't date you

Brain is mush from the inevitable cold-weather-doesn't-cause-colds-or-does-it cold, so I will leave you with a post I'd thought up back when my brain was somewhat less mushy, but have written in the full-on-mush state:

It's often said that gay actors and actresses can't come out because of the legions of mostly-hetero crush-bearing fans. And whenever this comes up, I wonder the same thing: why? Do fans imagine they actually have a chance with celebrities? If Harry Styles turns out to be gay (and I have no opinion on the matter), does that make him significantly less available to the girls and women 12-42 with crushes on him? Does the fact that Ellen Page is an out lesbian mean that you, shlub, no longer stand a chance with her, considering that the presumed-straight-until-stated-otherwise Page also wouldn't have given you a second look?

I understand there's a parallel phenomenon of every good-looking male actor being told to come out already by a portion of his gay male fan base, when this, too, may be wishful thinking... or maybe he's been spotted at whichever clubs and this is known in some circles, circles that don't include my bit of suburban Central NJ. Perhaps this isn't such a thing with good-looking actresses (or does one now say female actors?), what with the female-sexuality-is-fluid presumption. There's always the chance that men would be titillated by an actress coming out; when actors do, their screaming female fans, what, go into mourning?

I suppose what makes me wonder why this is a thing is that my own preferred male celebrities tend to be multilevel unattainable - like, gay or dead, gay and dead, or probably alive and probably straight but not what they were in 1980 or whatever, or Keanu Reeves, or possibly attainable but I've seen them walking around Park Slope and when not onscreen, they're nothing special. (Not naming names, but this could probably be inferred.) Part of this is that I'm married and thus not looking to date anybody, famous or otherwise, but even when single, the list would have been more or less the same. I didn't and don't stand a chance with celebrities, and that's just fine. (Exception: the 1990s B-list sitcom actor, now dating a famous model, who shot me an admiring glance once in Los Angeles. But he was never one of my favorites. This is merely an exception-that-proves-the-rule humblebrag.)

Never-gonna-happen is part of the fun of the celebrity crush, and basically defines it. The leap necessary to imagine that Mila Kunis would drop Ashton for you is so huge that it can't possibly matter what Kunis's sexual orientation is. Once you're using your imagination, you can imagine whatever you please. As long as you're leaving the people in question alone, you can imagine them at whichever age, with whichever taste, that you like.

The snake-oil paradox

I keep hearing that shampoo creates the need to shampoo, moisturizer the need to moisturize, and now, chapstick the need to use chapstick. What does it all mean?

As appealing as it is, from a Cheapness-Studies perspective, to believe this, or in more Gwyneth-compatible terms, as intriguing as it is from a toxin-avoiding standpoint, I do wonder. It makes sense that companies would want to get you hooked on something, to create a need for a something useless. See also: skim milk makes you fat! (Meanwhile, anything but skim tastes disgusting on cereal.) See also, also: hair-ironing. Gives you shiny hair, but also split ends, such that if you then don't flat-iron, you get more frizz than you would otherwise.

I tend to think there's enough truth to this that unless you can locate an actual, identifiable problem, you shouldn't introduce a product. Meaning, if your face isn't giving you any specific concern (other than not looking 16 anymore, yet producing the occasional zit just to spite you), you don't need to 'take care of your skin,' apart from, I don't know, soap and, if relevant, sunscreen. You don't need to apply random creams in the hope of it looking in some unclassifiable way better (i.e. younger), and indeed, doing so has an excellent chance of making it look worse (i.e. the possibilities are endless).

But, like, chapped lips! Which some of us may have had until splurging on that French beeswax product in the little tub! Which may return, in this weather, if we stop using this product! Such a chicken-and-egg problem, this. Sometimes there will be an identifiable problem that predates the snake-oil purchase, so it's not entirely in our head. For those without the funds or leisure time to spend half the week at the dermatologist (and do they even address frizz?), some medically-questionable products seem more or less inevitable.

An open letter to the gnome in the computer selecting my ads

Dearest Gnome,

You have correctly figured out that I'm in the market for some brown leather hiking boots with red laces. Alpine or traditional hiking boots, they're called. What you may not know is that these are to replace a pair I got at 14, and that I'd worn out by maybe 17. I've been looking since then, on and off, and yes, I tried the place where the initial ones came from. (Roots, the Canadian store.) I've found almost the right ones in a variety of places, allowing for the likely necessity of buying the red laces separately. (I'll confess to being swayed, though, by photos of the right boots with the laces already included.)

I have talked about this quest at dinner parties. (I'm sure that if you're reading this and had been thinking of inviting me to one of your gnome dinner parties, you're now second-guessing that.) I have looked for the boots online, obviously, which is how you, Gnome, learned about this. I really, really want these boots, but they're never quite right. Or they're close enough, but far too expensive. Or they're perfect, but only in men's sizes. Or they're on eBay for a reasonable price, but non-returnable. $100 for boots that fit is acceptable. But what are the chances they would, really? And these $50 pairs from the 1970s on Etsy - are any shoes that durable, to make it from someone's "Bob Newhart Show"-era closet to the 2014 woods? I want fashion and function. I want the theoretical option of hiking, or at least comfortably walking on trails.

So you see, Gnome, that while your ads may inspire me to return to the various pages - Sierra this, Amazon that - with the most promise, I've spent approximately half my life trying to track down the Platonic ideal of these boots, and so far, no luck.

Do the rich not sweat?

I get that Maggie Lange's "In Defense of Disgusting Gym Clothes" is meant to be contrarian. But is it, really? Isn't the idea that if you're truly hardcore, you skip the 'performance' fabrics in favor of comfortable old clothes, pretty standard? While yes, people do dress up for the gym (or so I've heard - I'm usually the only person in the one I go to, and use the disintegrating regular-shirt approach), who's announcing that they do so, loud and proud? At best, you might get a defensive answer, about how whichever pants were on sale, or, conversely, that spending $90 on leggings guilts you into going to the gym. And sure, there's some shaming of those who work out without the proper sports bra or sneakers, because they are, according to onlookers, injuring themselves. But no one wants to announce that they put on ass-lifting pants so people will check them out. OK, not no one, but few, few. (And even that woman says she doesn't want attention!)

Lange does make a good point, though, about sweat and more accumulating on workout clothes in a way it doesn't on regular ones. It's not so much that sweat would ruin these clothes, though, as Lange suggests (shirts, maybe, but black leggings?), and more that they'd render them unwearable until the next laundry cycle. Which is something I'd long wondered about 'investing' in clothes for the gym. If you've spent $90 on your leggings, do you wear them more than once before washing them? (I may be finicky about this sort of thing, but unless it's really cold at the gym, I'd advise against.) Or is this part of the status-symbol aspect of these clothes? As in, not only do you put a lot of $$$ towards your workout-wear, but you have enough $90 leggings to make it through a laundry cycle.

Maturity

-More Bloggingheads! This time I had the pleasure of chatting with Autumn Whitefield-Madrano about beauty. I compare hemming and hawing over Lululemon at 29 or 30 with doing the same over Adidas Sambas at 9 or 10.

-My current gym-and-laundry-folding accompaniment is "What Not To Wear," although even by my admittedly low standards for this sort of thing, it might be too formulaic. A woman dresses too sloppy/"slutty" (this isn't the Jezebellian, anti-slut-shaming universe, but the tell-it-like-it-is genre of reality TV), and her nearest and dearest summon Stacy and Clinton. She announces that she likes how she dresses, then is somehow magically convinced that her self-presentation indicates low self-esteem and a tendency always to put others first. She has her hair dyed some new color, not always more flattering but better for the dramatic effect, and emerges in an outfit that looks like it's from Ann Taylor even if it's not.

Apart from being repetitive, it's... kind of cringe-inducing, from the initial "ambush" on. There are only the slightest nods to personal taste, and (from the admittedly limited sample I've seen) no acknowledgements of variations in gender self-presentation. (Why can't the more masculine-self-presenting women get spiffied-up in more menswear-inspired clothes? Do they really need lip gloss?)

And I get why they have to do this, given how insulting the premise is ('surprise, everyone in your life hates how you dress, and your hair and makeup aren't so hot either!'), but they go a bit overkill on the body-flattery. They keep announcing that women have an hourglass shape and tiny waist, even when these things are so plainly not the case. I'd have thought most grown women would have long since come to terms with whichever ways we don't resemble swimsuit models, and that being told we have traits we don't would come across as patronizing or just silly. Couldn't they go with a generic and, because it's subjective, not-untrue 'beautiful'?

I was curious to see how others had overanalyzed the show - whether their overanalysis matches up with mine - and, kind of yes and kind of no. In an interesting piece, Greta Minsky argues that the show "co-opts feminist rhetoric to promote an anti-feminist agenda" - pretending to be about empowering women, while instead shaming their style as too lower-class or insufficiently corporate-America. On the one hand, yes, the show does exactly that. On the other, though, it's all very pragmatic. The advice is, people will judge you by how you look, and you want to be conscious in the choices you're making. If you want to project corporate, neither the sweatsuit nor the ill-fitting-lingerie-as-daywear will get that across.

In a way, then, it gets back at the "Frances Ha" maturity question: A part of growing up means getting past the idea that being true to yourself in self-defeating ways is some kind of sacred authenticity. Getting what you want out of life might involve a bit of superficial selling out, and that's not the end of the world. Not all quirkiness is self-defeating, so maturity also means figuring out which to hang onto. But there's a way that resistance to superficial conformity can be a crutch. Deciding that your fundamental being is expressed only by wearing outrageous clothes is a way to avoid facing the difficult challenges that going for whichever professional or personal goals might bring. The conceit of the show may be cruel, but its central message isn't entirely unreasonable.

-Random thoughts from the last Savage Lovecast:

1) I hadn't been following Santa-race-gate, because it seemed, as Savage says, remarkably idiotic. Racist in a way that doesn't even need to be spelled out. To the point where, what more could I add? But then Savage himself goes on this well-meaning tirade about it, the crux of which is, Santa might have been white because St. Nicholas was from Turkey, whereas Jesus couldn't have been, because he was Jewish and from the Middle East. Huh? An interesting view into Savage's own, somewhat unique ideas about how America defines whiteness, but the proper response was what he implicitly began with - that it's a bunch of racist nonsense worth noting only to raise awareness that racism in this country isn't over.

2) The call from the 21-year-old debating whether to enter a threesome with a couple she'd met online (what college these days has come to!) was indeed amusing for the no-longer-21 set. The dilemma was, would she possibly be attracted to them, given that they're... drumroll please... in their 30s? The oldest person this woman had ever been attracted to was, she emphasized, 26. Savage clearly found this hilarious, and went on about how "decrepit" these people must be.

Alas, it's a useful if bleak reality check for the ancient among us. Is 30 (-something) young? It's not as if the 30-plus can correct the under-25s who see 30 as old. It's subjective. And while it's certainly possible this 21-year-old has a warped idea of what 30-something looks like, it could also be that she has a very accurate idea, which is that these are likely people who look between 9 and 19 years older than she does, and that while this isn't a problem for many 21-year-olds, it would be for her. It's not necessarily that she imagines 35-year-olds look 85.

On wanting an "I finished The Magic Mountain" bumper sticker

Finished The Magic Mountain. Highly recommended, but yes, a medal would be appreciated - if you get one for 26.2 miles, one would seem appropriate in this context as well.

-If you live in a remote, snowy wilderness resort-that-isn't, set apart from the world geographically and in other respects (but reachable by train, with a village not too far), with gourmet meals and rigidly assigned tables, and an international community with lots of Russians and Germans, you're bound to find certain aspects of the book... relatable. Of course, where I live, rather than this being tuberculosis sufferers and their guests, it's people who are unusually good at math and their families. And the visits are for more predetermined amounts of time. So it's not actually the same thing at all.

-Oh, to have been bourgeois back in the day, when that meant living off investments and swaddling yourself with blankets.

-Who doesn't picture Clavdia Chauchat as Natalia Vodianova? Herr Settembrini: Adrien Brody? That's all I've got for the moment. Despite snippets of physical description, I never did picture Hans Castorp, which is maybe the point.

-From the department of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, yes, hilarious, the pseudoscience behind a rest cure at a sanatorium. But! All this quackery in the name of ridding the not necessarily ill of "toxins" sounds not unlike today's juice cleanses. The invention of antibiotics didn't change as much as one might think.

-From the department of you never really finish your dissertation, Thomas Mann had a Jewish wife, whose own sanatorium stint inspired this novel. And the novel has Jewish angles like whoa, which I had to try not to write term papers about in my mind while reading. Obviously Naphta was Jewish - no big reveal there. And then there's Frau Levi with the "ivory complexion" and I believe further discussion of Jews' pallor. That Hans Castorp is - in his ineffectual way - an anti-anti-Semite is kind of surprising. And then, on a more abstract level, there's the conflation of cosmopolitanism with illness, which is and isn't about Jews. (See also: Paul Bourget's Cosmopolis.)

-My pea-brain couldn't make sense of certain philosophical aspects of the novel, as well as certain references I'd no doubt have nodded along to knowingly if I'd paid more attention in Mr. Gern's English class.

Weekend glamour

-Experimenting with heels. (What Would Emily Weiss Do?) Tame ones by regular heel-wearers' standards. Wearing them to a party in someone's home, and half hoping that this is a home where one is expected to take off one's shoes upon entry. More than half. Wearing them while sitting on the couch at the moment, and even that's a challenge.

-Philadelphia has Shake Shack (not "Shake"!). And so the great where-to-eat-lunch-near-Rittenhouse-Square dilemma is solved. That plus Elixr for coffee make mall-Philadelphia quite pleasant. Today we discovered a different side-street area with an independent bookstore (which we went to) and glam-looking shoe store (which will one day be my reward for driving to Philadelphia alone). Depending your goals for the day, sometimes the tolls to NY are worth it, sometimes not so much.

-I'm like 20 pages away from the end of The Magic Mountain. Expect thoughts on that later on, but in the mean time, re:commenter Petey's suggestion of an intertitle-silent adaptation, vs. mine (a Magic Mountain sitcom), these two are not mutually exclusive because... Frasier!

Frump is relative

Having subliminally picked up on the idea that the non-platform stiletto is back (Blahniks rather than Louboutins, in haute terms) I ordered some shoes online last week. (I'm delayed-reaction suggestible. The "classic" black pump seems to have returned in 2011. No! 2010.) They arrived yesterday (free shipping winning out over instant gratification, and what's a week if one is three years past so-very-now), and are spectacular, if on impractical side. They scream Kate Moss. Or: random woman in Milan photographed by the Sartorialist.

This was not, however, the impression of Nordstrom shoe-reviewer "coatgirl," aged 40-44 of Los Angeles: "I was looking for a decent black patent pump but this was just meh. The point just wasn't pointy enough so they look frumpy."

I mean, maybe? (Is this look frumpy?) We learn from this, if nothing else, that coatgirl's other shoes aren't sneakers, ballet flats, and motorcycle boots. I hadn't thought of my usuals as all that frumpy until I put these on the shoe rack next to the rest. And, it's jarring. Of course, whether I actually wear the new pair remains to be seen.

But yes, in all shameful honesty, I see what coatgirl means. A really sharply-pointed toe is different from an almond-toe, and these fall somewhere between the two. I can see it, like, aesthetically, even if there's not a chance I'd be able to hobble around in whatever she'd deem sufficiently lacking in frump. 

Incidental rhinoplasty

Lisa Kudrow* just gave an interview that's received a lot of press, essentially because in it, she admits to being glad that, at 16, she got a nose job. The Daily Mail helpfully intervened to provide the requisite before and after photos. Because let's get real - a nose job story needs pictures. In the same interview, by coincidence, Kudrow also discusses her Jewish background, including the Holocaust and her personal experiences with anti-Semitism.

Neither Kudrow nor her interviewer draws any connection between these two items. It's as if, by total coincidence, she had a deschnozzification, and is Jewish. Is this like interviewing a black woman about skin-bleaching, or an East Asian woman about eyelid surgery, and doing so in a way that suggests ethnicity didn't have anything to do with this? And I say "women" because, as they say, intersectionality. Sure, men do such things too, but there's the extra pressure on women to be beautiful, on top of whichever pressure's on everyone to look less ethnic.

I suppose we might look at it as progress. Look, an article going out of its way not to imply that Jews have big noses! Any actress might have had a nose job! How about Rachel from "Friends" - despite what the name might have had you believe, the actress who played her, at least, isn't Jewish.

Still, to admit that there's a tremendous Jewish angle here isn't to agree to the 'fact' that Jews have big noses, which, I wouldn't bet on it, nor am I offering my own as an example for Exhibit A for 'see, Jews can have button noses.' It's not so much that Jews have prominent noses (and it sure isn't that non-Jews don't!) as that when a Jew has a big nose, this is a feature associated with Jewishness, and thus more likely to be agonized over and, if funds are sufficient, trimmed. No, Jews aren't alone in that regard, and may no longer be the group most self-conscious about that trait. But certainly back in the day, when Kudrow underwent schnozz-reduction surgery, those were still the days of this procedure having a specific association with Jews.

*I have a complicated relationship with this actress, or more accurately, with the character she played on TV. Early in the days of self-Googling, I found a white-supremacist website where I was under attack for being Jewish. Or my name was, but they were, it was clear, discussing Phoebe from "Friends," and had somehow gotten the last names mixed up, and were under the impression that my name was that of the actress who plays Phoebe on that show. Cue requisite 'racists are idiots' remark.

That, and for as long as that show's been in syndication, I've had to field questions about whether I was named after Phoebe from "Friends." Which makes no sense - I was not plausibly born in or after 1994 - but once a sitcom reaches a certain age, it's just old, and short of being in black and white, when exactly it comes from is a blur. It might have been from the 1980s, but even if it had been, a part of me is like, you think my parents named me after something to do with "Friends"? Yes, there's a television connection to how I came to have this name, but not friggin' "Friends." It's just such a terrible show, and I say this as someone who really likes some sitcoms and readily tolerates even the mediocre ones. I can't put my finger on what about the show was so off-putting - I think it was mostly just the aesthetic, something between the set design and the hairstyles. Or that people were always conflating that with "Seinfeld."

Natalia Vodianova looks tired

Embrace your flaws! Anyone familiar with fashion writing will know this is code for, time to use a model who's airbrushed-flawless but for a delightful gap between the two front teeth. Meant to indicate, I suppose, that the girl/woman in question is effortlessly beautiful. After all, how hard would it have been to fix that flaw? If she's left that alone, presumably no artifice whatsoever has entered into the rest of what we see before us. And it's reached the point of cliché: new models now regularly have that gap, because it's the perfect flaw-that-isn't. It's the kind of thing that, on an ordinary-looking person, might be thought to detract from an appearance. Or it must be: I had such a gap as a kid, and my family paid good money - and I underwent good tooth-agony - for this to be closed up. (This was allegedly for legitimate dental reasons, something about what would happen to my teeth as I got older if this wasn't fixed. Maybe?)

See also: the gigantic-eyebrow craze. Traits that add a certain off-beat edge to conventional beauty will, if adopted by the merely tweezer-lazy, lead to the not-charming version of effortless, a kind of sad return to those elementary-school pictures, before you learned that eyebrows even could be shaped. By all means resist the tweezer as a way of standing up against beauty norms (and fine, don't overdo it if you do tweeze). But if you're doing so in order to look more beautiful, and you're not a certain British model-socialite with the world's most energetic PR team...

The flaw of the moment is under-eye circles. As someone blessed with this trait - since childhood, and yes, even if I get plenty of sleep, probably related to being this pale - I ought to be thrilled. Huzzah, I can toss my concealer! (Better yet: I can hold off buying the Nars "creamy" one I keep going back and forth on - it seems so great, but for $28? Fourtinefork, oh commenter, oh official WWPD makeup advisor, thoughts?) And yes, there's the secondary problem of this particular slideshow - of course if you have mere under-eye shadows i.e. nothing to conceal, you'll only make matters worse by painting over your under-eye area with a shade that inevitably won't be a perfect match for your skin tone. But it's entirely conceivable to me that a Natalia Vodianova who did in fact have splotchy, purple half-moons under her eyes would be that much more intriguing. Which in no way liberates me from the beige-goop hold.

Into The What?

When guilty pleasures collide. Emily Schuman (of "Cupcakes and Cashmere" fame) has come across better than possibly anyone else profiled on "Into The Gloss." Which is to say, there isn't the requisite posturing about being so very low-maintenance... followed by a list of dozens of serums and moisturizers used daily. It also isn't a great big list of Estee Lauder, her sponsor... unless all the brands she mentioned are owned by one conglomerate. (Where's my corporate sponsor? Ideally this would be Uniqlo, but I'd settle for Nars. Or Zabar's, Murray's Cheese, Strand...) She just frankly discusses what it is she has to work with ("a pretty athletic build"; "I lack any real facial definition"; "mousy-brown" hair that she bleaches), and the end result is relatable rather than self-deprecating. Relatable not because these happen to be my own personal concerns (which I have, fear not, just not those), but because the whole thing reads more as 'within-normal-limits woman making the best of what she's got' than the trials and travails of being naturally stunning in a world with too many parabens and not enough pulverized kale.

***

Unrelated question relating to a different post on the same site: What does the following mean? "Last year, a friend gifted me with [fancy soap]." Why not the far more direct "a friend gave me"? While I know that "gift" can now be used as a verb (and that some contingent cringes every time it is), I'd thought it was more in the context of, say, a fashion blogger is comped whichever handbag from a designer, and then it can be that Coach or whatever "gifted" the bag. But do friends now "gift"? Is this used to indicate that something was given as a gift, as versus I don't even know, handed to someone? Like where "give" is just a synonym for "hand," like hand/give it to me? Or does it just add an air of luxe to whatever's being discussed? So your friend might gift you luxury soaps, but give you an extra roll of toilet paper.

***

Unrelated comment relating to yet a third. The so-very-now look for men's hair is apparently the one that's been so-very-now since forever among male physicists. (For obvious reasons.)

Adulthood Studies: how do you buy pants?

I've decided I don't have a problem with leggings, or even leggings-as-pants (despite having once received 15 minutes of fame for complaining about the style). No, my problem is with the legging-ification of all women's pants, and British readers, I mean "pants" in the American sense. They are now all stretch pants. Jeans, yes, but other styles as well. I checked, and my corduroys are stretch. They are not legging-ish at all, and yet, 2% stretch. Because these corduroys are on the ancient side (but not that ancient - they're from the post-spandex era), the spandex bit has ceased to function, making them baggy in precisely the most unflattering way possible.

I understand why this is meant to be a good thing - women's clothes are expected to fit just so, yet human beings' weight/shape tends to fluctuate. And the stretch-jeans will, at least when new, fit perfectly. But... I don't want to wear leggings all the time. Or if I'm going to do that, I might as well throw in the proverbial towel and get a really nice pair at the Lululemon in town, and wear those to all occasions, formal and informal. Leggings that aren't pretending to be regular pants, these I respect. But I want some regular pants that wouldn't inspire theoretical Daily Mail reporters to write that I'm flaunting my curves. I don't want to hide my form, I just want normal pants, like men get to wear, and like women got to wear until polyester-and-spandex had to be woven into absolutely everything. And this did once exist! I can't find a full-length image, but the ones Teri Hatcher wears on "Seinfeld" - very flattering, not "mom jeans," but definitively pre-jeggings. (Wears? Wore. I might be stuck in what was apparently 1993. 20 years ago. Yikes.)

And yes, I've tried the men's department. Despite being short, there are lots of men's jeans in my size - something to do with women having longer legs, and perhaps with waist sizes for men being less vanity-based than for women (and also: the lack of stretch). And... actual men's jeans are not like "boyfriend" jeans for women, but designed to flaunt - or at least comfortably contain - that which cisgender women haven't got. If you are such a woman and you've had luck with men's jeans, more power to you (and do tell me where), but the one's I've run across might ostensibly fit, but I wouldn't want to leave the house like that.

This quest, this eternal quest, has led to some possibilities. A.P.C. proved useless, but whatever these are, I tried them on in a store in Philadelphia, and the very moment I cease to be horrified by $112 jeans with $9.50 shipping, maybe? (Must I, god forbid, drive to Philadelphia? On the highway? And parallel park when I get there? Avoiding this is worth $9.50, right?) These (via) sure look spectacular, but are they, and if so, at $225, would I even want to know? For the most part, though, the search leads either to mom-jeans (which I did order last year, and which are now a perfectly adequate pair of cutoffs) - and these days even those mostly seem to have stretch - or to some kind of patriotic cult of denim. These jeans will not only be Made in the U.S.A. (and all-cotton jeans seem to be, as a rule) but compatible with "concealed carry," which, no thanks.

Insufficiently-critical shopper

Oh happy day, Princeton now has an Urban Outfitters.

A sentence like this needs context: until the arrival of said Outfitters, if you wanted low-end, there was, what, J. Crew? Which, especially these days... kind of mid-to-high-end. New additions in town include a deck-shoe store and a Brooks Brothers, but there's also Ralph Lauren, J. McLaughlin, Kate Spade, I think a Lilly Pulitzer. Oh, and the Princeton-sweatpants store. What am I forgetting? The lacrosse shop. In other words, although I'm not averse to clothes-shopping, I had managed to live here, what, a year and a half, most of it time without many trips into the city or a car, without buying any clothing whatsoever in town.*

Say what you will about Urban Outfitters - that it's vintage-knock-off, poor-quality, overpriced junk aimed at those too square for real vintage-shopping; that it's mall-clothing for 12-year-olds; that it's a subliminal plot to turn young people into Republicans; or that it's generally obnoxious. Say it - you're not telling me anything I don't know. But when it comes to town, I'm not what would be called a "critical shopper." There is now a store I could walk (OK, bike) to that sells normal clothing. $40 jeans. $15 (U.S. union-made, apparently) hats. Actually, really gorgeous $15 hats (we will look past the fact that a similar hat is cheaper in Japan, even though I think they're made in Pennsylvania or possibly even New Jersey - Princeton is Princeton, and if a hamburger's $14...). I broke my no-garments-purchased-in-town policy to buy the absolute perfect gray hat, one I can't find a photo of online, but that's basically the acrylic version of this. It's just so cool, so Acne, so A.P.C., so Gwyneth-on-a-good-day, this thing that I bought in Princeton.

*While I've come to accept online shopping as a fact-of-living-in-the-woods, online clothes-shopping, not so much. Meanwhile, to give town its due, there is also a consignment store where the less-exciting Talbots goes to be subtly reduced, as well as an out-of-the-way, barely-counts-as-in-town, has-some-potential thrift shop where they make you check your bag, which, if you want this to be a dissertation-break, means you end up holding your computer as you browse, which is not necessarily worth it.

Luminosity

It's possible (definite) that my parents sometimes read my blog, and one piece of evidence is that I got a Sephora gift card for Chanukah. And promptly spent it on pale-person under-eye "corrector" (chosen at the advice of Fourtinefork and a Sephora employee) and pale-person luminizer. Jews' fried-potato Christmas happens to fall at that point in the semester, when stamina is maybe not what it once was. Also: winter is bleak, thus the need for these holidays, for sparkle. Artificial illumination of all kinds - coffee on the inside, shininess on the outside - is essential.

As the various reviews of this Lorac product say, the pump gives you so, so much of the stuff each time, which you maybe don't want. And I can see that this is a product you need to apply carefully, or dare I say learn how to apply. For example, after Googling this, I put some on my nose. It turns out that's a really bad idea. Noses are shiny enough to begin with - this is probably a contouring trick intended to give those with a wide and/or snub nose a Roman/aquiline/classical-looking one, which, much like hair extensions, I'll file under last-thing-in-the-world-for-me-to-sign-up-for. If light wants to reflect off my nose less than it currently does, that's fine by me.

But I can see how luminizer has the potential to work miracles, and by 'work miracles' I mean change one's appearance in a way that's entirely imperceptible to others but feels tremendous to one's self. The best way to describe it would be that if you put some on as you would blush, it makes you look like you're in an air-brushed, vaguely space-age magazine spread. It's not, in other words, a natural look, but it's a cool kind of artifice. It's not painting yourself orange, for example.  Nor is it blush, which is also kind of great but the line between 'healthy' and 'clown' is a tough call, and what works in certain light won't in other. Not sure what the "pearl" color would do for someone not 'sure you're OK?' pale, but works for me.