Things called curious that are not actually curious.

"... there is curiously no code about how much skin male prom-goers can show."

From the comments: "This article reminded me of this cartoon."

"We want our young ladies to be dressed beautifully; we want them to be dressed with class and dignity."

"But we are going to draw the line relative to attire that would be deemed overexposing oneself," said Freeman Burr, the superintendent of a Connecticut school that managed to get a NYT article written about its prom-dress policy, apparently because some mothers are aggrieved that their daughters' dresses have been nixed.

Students and parents signed permission slips that outlined rules and regulations for the prom. Students say the rules were vague, calling for �appropriate formal dress� and warning that students dressed �inappropriately� would be sent home without a refund.

The article has a picture of a student who was told her backless dress wasn't appropriate (unless she wore it with a camisole). Her mother, Tonny Montalvo, is making an issue out of it: �They say it�s in the student handbook...There�s no specifics anywhere.�

If "appropriate" doesn't cut it, I guess "class" and "dignity" won't help either.

IN THE COMMENTS:  Ignorance is Bliss says:

Would it have been too much trouble to include a picture of the student who was told her backless dress wasn't appropriate while she is actually wearing the dress in question? Maybe so we could see for ourselves if it was appropriate? And would it have been too much trouble to get a copy of the text of the permission slip, and the text of the student handbook?

I know. And the NYT also declines to make the comments function available for this one. This has a real feeling of bias to it � giving ear to these mothers and depriving readers of what we need to judge the facts and a forum to point out these shortcomings.

"You could read Vera Wang's transparent wedding dress � which functions as wearable art much more than sellable merchandise..."

"... as an extreme answer to those often rather cruel tensions: What better way to criticize the constraints of the wedding industrial complex than by creating a dress that is, effectively, invisible?" writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic.

You could also read it, of course, as an overt rejection of the sexual mores at play in the traditional wedding dress. Wedding dresses have always been, on some level, about sex: the white as a sign (and a reassurance) of the bride's virginity; the expanse of fabric as a tacit promise that, while sex will be had, it will be had in the proper way. Women are getting married at older ages than they used to. Which means, among so much else, that they're less inclined to opt for princess-driven designs � and also that they're less inclined to designs that emphasize the virginal. �For my generation," the soon-to-be bride Natasha Da Silva told The New York Times in 2008, "looking like a virgin when you marry is completely unappealing, boring even. Who cares about that part anymore?�

How about creating a wedding that is, effectively, invisible? That's what we did.

"Wow, I hate everything about this."

A much-favorited comment in a Metafilter thread titled "WHAT KIND OF HAT IS IT? I call it a fedora" about a NYT piece called "The Men of Cond� Nast Photographed in Their Natural Habitat."

Strange but true fact: I happened to be wearing a fedora when I ran across that.



Purely for a practical reason, by the way. Stops the light from the window from interfering with my computer-screen vision.

Google does fashion reporting.

The NYT reports:

In its inaugural report, Google distinguishes between �sustained growth� trends, like tulle skirts and jogger pants; flash-in-the-pan obsessions like emoji shirts and kale sweatshirts; and �seasonal growth� trends, or styles that have come back stronger every spring, like white jumpsuits. It makes similar distinctions among sustained declines (peplum dresses), seasonal ones (skinny jeans) and fads that are probably over and done (scarf vests).

Lisa Green, who heads Google�s fashion and luxury team, said the company had begun working with major retailers, including Calvin Klein, to help them incorporate real-time Google search data into fashion planning and forecasting. �Fast fashion� companies, for example, can take a trend identified by Google and run with it, Ms. Green said....

ADDED: It's so funny to think of weird things becoming fashion trends after Google mistakes searching as an indication that people want to wear something when, in fact, they're curious about it for some other reason. I mean, I'm curious about scarf vests now, just because I don't know what they are, so I'd have to look it up. And if Google's presentation causes people to adopt something that wasn't a real fashion trend, then manufacturers will want to figure out strategies to cause certain words to get searched. Or maybe they'll just notice words that are picking up in the world of Google searching and start making whatever it is � tulle skirts or some such thing. (Aren't people Googling "tulle skirts" just because little girls want them? Maybe not.)

"Robin Givhan�s... piece about Lilly Pulitzer was hateful and not worthy of publication."

"Lilly Pulitzer clothing is bright and fun and evokes a carefree attitude, and Givhan took it upon herself to use this as a determining factor as to the socioeconomic background of the wearer."

From a letter to the Washington Post about an opinion piece about why women get so excited about a particular brand of clothing distinguished by bright colors and exuberant patterns like this:



One look at those patterns and you're ready to believe the letter-writer, no? How could a desire to swathe yourself in that mean anything more than lighthearted fun-loving? Givhan instructs:

Lilly Pulitzer is preppy. It is part of a preppy uniform that announces itself from fifty paces. It is not so much a declaration of wealth as it is a perceived statement about class, lineage and attitude. Anyone can work hard and save up enough cash to go out and purchase a Chanel suit or a Gucci handbag. A devoted student of Vogue can cobble together a personal style that speaks to its public identity. But Lilly Pulitzer suggests an advantage of birth. The clothes stir up scrapbook notions of ancient family trees, summer compounds, boarding school uniforms, and large, granite buildings inscribed with some great-great-grandfather�s name. Lilly Pulitzer represents something that money cannot buy.

The clothes are, upon close inspection, not so terribly attractive. Actually, they are rather unattractive. And that is part of their charm. They are not meant to be stylish � that�s so nouveau. The clothes are clubby. Country clubby. One-percent-ish....

Too hateful? How can you look at those patterns and feel hate? I know there's this old tradition of country club people wearing really bright colors and stupid patterns, but what was that ever about? Wasn't it lighthearted fun-loving? Why shouldn't people with less money see the fun too? There's a lot of expensive fashion that is adapted from what younger, poorer people are wearing in the streets. What difference does it make which direction fashion trends move? I think Givhan would answer that I'm asking the wrong question, because this isn't fashion � "Lilly Pulitzer is not fashion. It is clothes." � and non-clubby folks who purport to like these things are delusional. The stuff is ugly and so it must be that they only want to look like the rich.

ADDED: Givhan's argument belongs in the "What's the matter with Kansas?" school of liberal opinion-writing. The common people don't know their own real motives and interests and letting them think and do what they like is a problem.

MORE: I blogged about Lilly Pulitizer once before, at the time of her 2013 obituary, which I presented like this:

Lilly Pulitzer dresses were "really wearable only by the few who were so rich that they could afford to have bad taste."

Says the NYT in the obituary for Lilly Pullitzer, who built a "fashion empire" out of "tropical print shift dresses and lighthearted embrace of jarring color combinations like flamingo pink and apple green." Lilly was born into wealth and married into more wealth. She had 3 children and a nervous breakdown.

�I went crazy. I was a namby-pamby; people always made decisions for me. The doctor said I should find something to do.�

The family estate included citrus groves, so she opened a juice stand with another woman, and juice stains inspired the print dresses....

So the Times obituary declared not only that the clothes were in bad taste, but also that only the rich are allowed to act upon such bad taste. Now, 2 years after Pulitzer's death, Target offered a Lilly Pulitzer line that was cheap, and you can see how dissonant that is with the values of elite commentators like Givhan. It wasn't the price that put these clothes out of the reach of the non-rich. They can make the clothes cheap, but still, you have be rich for these clothes to be wearable.

"I am not a traveler. I hate it.... Also I cannot go on airlines because people stare at me, you have to be touched by people. I hate that...I hate bespoke because I hate to be touched by strangers."

From "A Comprehensive List Of Everything Karl Lagerfeld Hates."

"I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion, but I like to read very abstract constructions of the mind.... I hate rich people when they try to be communists or socialists. I think it�s obscene.... I hate sloppy footwear. What I hate most is flip-flops. I am physically allergic to flip-flops.... And I hate to wear suspenders. I have the feeling I'm wearing a bra...."

To me, the list makes the argument for allowing yourself to use that terrible word "hate." Did your mom teach you not to say "hate"? Do you have friends/relatives in your life who stand ready to meet your deployment of the word with some fussy chiding like "Oh, 'hate' is a very strong word" or "Hate?! Do you really mean hate?"? I hate that.

The perception that "unisex" fashion arrived in the 60s then went away and came back.

Here's "A Brief History of Unisex Fashion" in The Atlantic:

In her new book Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution, the University of Maryland professor Jo Paoletti revisits the unisex trend....

As far as the American fashion industry was concerned, the unisex movement came and largely went in one year: 1968. The trend began on the Paris runways, where designers like Pierre Cardin, Andre Courreges, and Paco Rabanne conjured up an egalitarian �Space Age� of sleek, simple silhouettes, graphic patterns, and new, synthetic fabrics with no historical gender associations....

The unisex movement may have made women�s clothes more masculine, but it never made them unfeminine; furthermore, �attempts to feminize men�s appearance turned out to be particularly short-lived,� Paoletti notes....

Paoletti traces the end of the unisex era to the mid-1970s. In 1974, Diane von Furstenberg introduced her wrap dress, a garment that combined femininity and functionality....

Since the 1990s, however, fashion has been blurring gender lines once again. A recent New York Magazine story traced modern androgyny to grunge: Women donned flannel lumberjack shirts and combat boots while Kurt Cobain posed in ballgowns and housedresses.... Indeed, unisex everything appears to be back with a vengeance....

As fashion, unisex must cycle in and out. Things must look new and then old and, eventually, new again. But not all unisex clothing is part of fashion trending. Once everyone decided we could wear jeans (and other workmanlike trousers) and T-shirts (long and short sleeved), that was always an option, not because of fashion, but for functionality, cheapness, and simplicity. Fashion sometimes taps into this anti-fashion work-and-poverty ethic, so it seems to go in and out, but it's really always been there. It's a separate question whether anyone is specifically attempting to project the message: I am neither male nor female. A subquestion is: Among those who choose to project a neither-male-nor-female message, which ones are expressing his/her true identity and which ones are trying to be cool/cute? Subsubquestion: Which ones even know?

A 10-point list of Easter news.

1. "An Easter Bunny character first hopped up in the 8th century with the English monk Bede's The Reckoning of Time..."

A little girl found a bird that was close to death and prayed to Eostra [the Germanic goddess of spring and fertility] for help. Eostra appeared, crossing a rainbow bridge � the snow melting before her feet. Seeing the bird was badly wounded, she turned it into a hare, and told the little girl that from now on, the hare would come back once a year bearing rainbow colored eggs.

2. In Norway, "Each year, nearly every TV and radio channel produce a crime series for Easter. The milk company prints crime stories on their cartons. In order to cash in on this national pastime, publishers churn out series of books known as 'Easter-Thrillers' or 'P�skekrim.'"

3. The Archbishop of York said: "God is creator of the Cosmos and that includes the Palace of Westminster and the White House. There are followers of Jesus Christ in all the main political parties in the UK. It is not for me to tell their fellow church members how to vote next month, but I will encourage them to use their vote."

4. Police in Tahlequah City, Okahoma nabbed a stuffed rabbit carrying $30,000 of meth: "We�ve intercepted narcotics in the mail before... The Easter Bunny I thought was a strange touch."

5. "When Obama spotted 5-year-old Donovan Frazier distraught after losing his egg roll in 2013, the president gave him a hug and advised him to 'shake it off.'"

6. Pope Francis said: Easter is "so beautiful, and so ugly because of the rain."

He had just celebrated Mass in rain-whipped St. Peter's Square for tens of thousands of people, who huddled under umbrellas or braved the downpour in thin, plastic rain-slickers.

7. In 1926, Time Magazine considered the proposal to fix the date of the moveable feast that is Easter. Was Easter not more about commerce than religion?

People have stepped from decorating their altars to decking their bodies, until the Easter Sunday �parade� of fashionables and fops gets more notice in the lay press than does the sanctity of the holiday. This display of clothes and flowers and jewels and carriages, wily merchandisers have gloated over. None the less they have peered with squinted eye at the fluctuating date of the festival, even as they touted a robe as �hot from N� York, lady,� or �new from Paris, madame.�

8. "Do You Really Need Jesus for Easter?" asks Steve Neumann at The Atheist's Life at The Daily Beast.

[T]here simply is no supernatural realm for a God to occupy. Nature is all there is.

America's native philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson... wrote �Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him.� Achieving that isn�t easy�if those impressions were too feeble 175 years ago, they�re almost undetectable now that we�re surrounded by a shell of concrete and steel, covered by a blanket of wireless radio waves....

�Time and nature yield us many gifts,� continued Emerson, �but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.�

9. David D. Ireland of Christ Church in northern New Jersey indulges in the kind of golf meditation that used to drive me crazy when I went to church in northern New Jersey half a century ago:

Easter is God�s mulligan to humanity. In golf, a mulligan is a stroke that is replayed from the spot of the prior stroke without any penalty. Your error has been forgiven. You may take the shot again. This Easter make a commitment to meet Jesus for the first time � again. Easter reminds you to keep trying to live the God-kind of life.

10. "For Christ�s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again."

"In 1998, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced the idea of 'the extended mind'..."

"... arguing that it makes no sense to define cognition as an activity bounded by the human skull. Humans are masters of mental outsourcing: we archive ideas on paper, we let Google Maps guide us home, and we enlist a spouse to remember where our wallet is," writes Daniel Zalewski in a New Yorker article about an artist, Lonni Sue Johnson, who has suffered from from amnesia ever since, in 2007, viral encephalitis "essentially obliterated her hippocampus."

Her "extended mind" includes: 1. a tote bag full of various notes and maps, and 2. her sister Aline (whose "account of her life [she trusts] as strongly as she used to trust her own memory"). Johnson has a terrible impairment, but reading about her impairments, we see things that are true about ourselves. We may feel that our mind is entirely inside our heads, but the people and things that surround us function enmeshed with our memory. I was especially struck by this paragraph:

Johnson was wearing a magenta turtleneck with black sweatpants and plastic Mardi Gras necklaces. (An amnesiac cannot be trusted with gold.) She had worn the same outfit to the Princeton lab. Some of her favorite clothes are growing threadbare, but it�s difficult to replace them, because she doesn�t accept new clothes as hers.

She doesn�t accept new clothes as hers... We're not that impaired. New things can become ours. But I know the feeling. It's something like what George Carlin was talking about in his delightful monologue "Stuff":



"That's all your house is - a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it." But that's your extended mind, too.

"Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation. You gotta take a smaller version of your house." Well, of course, you're going to need your mind.

"You get over to your friend's house... and he gives you a little place to sleep, a little bed right next to his windowsill or something... You put your stuff up there. You got your Visine, you got your nail clippers, and you put everything up. It takes about an hour and a half, but after a while you finally feel okay, say, 'All right, I got my nail clippers, I must be okay.'"

What things (and people) do you accept as yours? How are they part of what makes feel okay... makes you remember who you are and what you are doing here?

"I have to say that one of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young."

"There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I'd just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? It's repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously. It's like any other sort of revealing clothing, in that the people you'd most like to see them on aren't wearing them. And if they are, it's probably their job to wear them. My fashion advice, particularly to men wearing shorts: Ask yourself, 'Could I make a living modeling these shorts?' If the answer is no, then change your clothes. Put on a pair of pants.... All these clothes that you see people wearing, the yoga clothes�even men wear them!�it's just another way of being in pajamas. You need more natural beauty to get away with things like that. What's so great thing about clothes is that they're artificial�you can lie, you can choose the way you look, which is not true of natural beauty. So if you're naturally beautiful, wear what you want, but that's .01% of people. Most people just aren't good looking enough to wear what they have on. They should change. They should get some slacks and a nice overcoat."

Said Fran Lebowitz, in an Elle interview that's full of readable stuff, like (about Hillary) "I think her lack of style comes naturally. I do, I really do. She has no style, zero. Of course there's millions of women like this, it's just that not everyone's looking at them constantly." And "Well, what if drag queens just really let themselves go, pretending not to try, like most women?" Like most women... including Hillary.

A Drudge screen-grab.

This jumped off the page at me:



Elements that caught my attention: 1. Cropping the photo to give the impression that the big word over Hillary's head is "universe," as if she's running for Mistress of the Universe, 2. The crushing banality of a daughter defending her mother, 3. The atrocious green "housecoat" Hillary has on and its contrast with Chelsea's studiously youthful get-up, 4. Hillary's grandiose hail-to-the-people wave in contrast with Chelsea's little-girl ooh-I-see-somebody-I-know-in-the-crowd wave, 5. The subtle similarities and differences between Chelsea's big toothy grin and Warren Beatty's famous smile, 6. The sense that Warren Beatty stands in for and represents all of the Lotharios of this world, including the (Bill) Clinton fool, 7. I wrote "the (Bill) Clinton fool" because the words, as cropped, behind Chelsea's head are "the Clinton fou," and fou = fool, 8. And now I'm getting into weird flights of possibly over-educated fancy, but the Swedish playright August Strindberg wrote an autobiographical novel in French that was titled "Le Plaidoyer d'un fou," which translates to "The Defense of a Fool." Wikipedia says (somewhat ineptly):

As his stormy marriage to Siri von Essen was coming to an end, August Strindberg feared there was a secret conspiracy between the women of Europe, and they were planning to silence him by conducting a campaign to make people believe he was insane. Strindberg therefore decided to hurridly write a book revealing the truths about the marriage.

Oh, what fun we would have if Bill Clinton came to believe there was a vast female conspiracy that was planning to silence him by convincing us that he's insane and he had to hurriedly write a book to reveal the truths about his marriage.

The blue-and-black dress that looked white and gold...

... worn last night by one of the "American Idol" contestants.