"'Some people take ‘no’ personally'"

I don't get the Vows. The NYT wedding announcements, yes. You're photogenic and successful, so is your spouse, so are your families (well, they don't need to be photogenic), and if you're lucky, David Brooks will use you to demonstrate a cultural shift. That much I can wrap my head around. I didn't apply for it when I got married, and thus don't resent my non-presence in it. It's good, clean, barely-awake-on-a-Sunday-morning fun - progressive, even, now that same-sex couples are included.

But the Vows - the part where there's a whole column devoted to the love story itself - I can't imagine signing up for. For there to be a story, there needs to have been an obstacle. And that obstacle is very often one-sided or mutual indifference. Sometimes he sees her, finds her beautiful, and needs to spend ages convincing her to go for a shlub like him. Other times there's an on-again, off-again trajectory so much heavier on the 'off' that the reader is left less than confident about the marriage to come. Past a certain obstacle threshold - again, when the obstacles aren't external (war, natural disaster, etc.), but are about how the two people feel about each other - readers are going to be wondering how long that marriage will last. That, or we end up hearing far too much about the convenient bystanders to the relationship - jilted exes (including ex-spouses who are the parents of their kids), and in one notorious case, a child killed in a hit-and-run by the bride.

But mostly it's the scenarios where an extended lack of interest, especially on the part of the bride, and this is meant to represent romance. "'Some people take ‘no’ personally,' [this week's groom] said. 'I don’t.'" Luckily it seems like in this case, "no" meant 'not yet,' but it would be better, as a rule, to assume "no" means 'not interested, leave me alone.'

Try this: Reverse the roles. Imagine a man and woman dated in college, broke up after college, and then she spent years pursuing him, and getting rejected. Is that romantic? No - he's not into her anymore, and each passing year isn't going to render her more interesting to a man not interested in her in the first place. Even though the truly scary exes are almost certainly more often men, the persistent female ex is readily labeled nuts, delusional, etc. Which is true, but why doesn't it apply to men and women alike? A woman who won't leave a man alone is involved in a quest everyone recognizes as futile. A man who won't leave a woman alone, well, either the cops need to be summoned (and any college women reading this, be sure to call the actual cops, not the campus police), or it's love.

So where does this come from? Romantic comedies, which tell us that a woman's repulsion and a man's persistence are the formula for happily ever after? Or is it the default belief that all women over 25 are desperate to marry any man they'd be willing to call a boyfriend, so a refreshing romantic story has to involve a twist where it's the man who's ready to settle down, whereas the woman is (the inevitable phrasing, if sometimes unstated) a free spirit?

But to return to the matter at hand, I don't get why anyone would want to be in the Vows. Anyone who understands it - or who was featured and enjoyed that! - comment away.

Lifestyle roundup

-One of the strangest things about the post-Facebook age, I find, is the way that what was loser-marking behavior in the earliest days of social media (posting photos you've taken of yourself, or being obviously online on a Saturday night or, say, New Years) has switched over into being... cool. I think?Young/cool people, am I missing something? My impression of today's fashion is, if you haven't documented a party, ideally by photographing yourself at it, and posted it instantly, chatting on- and offline simultaneously, you're out of the loop. If you actively choose not to document-and-post your own social life, this is no longer because what's going on is too scandalous or fabulous, or you're too busy having a good time to photograph it, but rather evidence that you haven't been outside past 8pm since 1994. In any case, as with all fashions, this appears to be cyclical.

-Does it tarnish high fashion when models bare all in Playboy? Hadley Freeman thinks so:

It is well past time to call bullshit on this alliance between fashion and Playboy. If women want to make their careers out of glamour modelling, good luck to them, but to suggest that Playboy itself is somehow chic, that to ally oneself with that dud Viagra pill of a magazine is excitingly racy and that women who have achieved enormous success and fame in their fields are proving their self-worth and sexiness by posing for it is just demented.

The eternal dilemma. Which beauty ideal is more democratic or feminist or what have you: the regime of "chic," which is sometimes welcoming of eccentrics, but not of the usual variants of the female form; or the regime of male-gaze, which tends to lean more conventional and not particularly empowering, but which also tends to include virtually all women, what with male tastes (if not the tastes celebrated in mainstream male-oriented mags) being far more subjective than runway-casting requirements?

I'm a huge Freeman fan, and used to be Team Fashion on this one, but the more I think about it, the more I end up, if one must choose, on Team Male Gaze, with the obvious caveat that we'll need to include the lust of women-liking women while excluding that of non-women-liking men. If fashion really were about self-expression, it would be about self-expression for all women, or many women, or, at least, not just a handful of the thinnest and youngest, on whom anything looks Fashion, because that's how fashion's been defined. The typical woman is sexy to some people, and chic to none.

-Mark Bittman suggests, as a resolution, "Cook big batches of grains and beans." I remain unconvinced.

Revival of the fittest

What's hip these days? Sure, I alternate between Target sweatpants and J.Crew outlet-store shorts, but I keep up. I do. I don't know why I do, but there it is.

The current look, it seems, is 1990s revival. But that's not specific enough. It's early Elaine Benes crossed with the kids from "Kids"/the boys from my Hebrew school and, later, high school who used to drink 40s and smoke pot on stoops on the Upper West Side. Why has it come to this? It just has. That's what now looks current.

Exhibit A: Emily Weiss. The dress, the shoes. This Frenchwoman, because if a Frenchwoman in 2013 dresses like a 15-year-old Jewish skater kid circa 1995, we must take note. Also: whatever this was about.

Exhibit B: Garance Doré, who basically tells us: this is what's in fashion.

Exhibit C: the persistence of Chloe Sevigny as a style icon.

We could probably blame Isabel Marant as well - in the public eye what with a (forthcoming? so-last-season?) xH&M collection. But all I know about Marant is that a) some 90-euro but otherwise ordinary white t-shirt a friend and I had fun mocking in Paris was a Marant, and b) she's responsible for the resurgence of the wedge sneaker. I imagine Isabel Marant involves some kind of nouveaux JNCOs, but could be way off.

What this does mean, though, is, florals and Converse. No more premium denim, as that wasn't invented until circa 2003. Adidas Sambas, apparently, as someone fashiony I follow on Pinterest has declared. It's not preppy, but it's not really subcultural, either. It's the Gap from before the chain tried to offer more than basics. It's borrowed-from-the-boys, but not menswear-chic. To keep from veering over into cross-dressing - which is nice and all, but not generally Fashion, which merely plays at bending rules - this can be feminized either with a long floral Elaine dress or, more troublingly, with a crop-top. These are back, it seems.

The convenient thing about this trend for me is that I'm not sure I ever did get past 1998-ish in my own style. It's not that I haven't shopped since then, but what I'm drawn to in stores probably is typically that which I'd have been drawn to at whichever formative age. So maybe it's just that the tastemakers are give or take my age, and these outfits say 'the cool kids three grades ahead of me' to them as well.