Batfort

Style reveals substance

Category: Style (page 1 of 5)

Melania Style, Revisited

It’s been a while since we checked in on Melania’s style. The fashion media refuses to cover her, so somebody’s gotta do it. Enter yours truly, an amateur style blogger.

I like style. I’m not always the best practitioner of it (I loves me some sweats), but I’m more stylish than the average cubicle-dweller. I’m interested in how style sends a rhetorical message, and how outward style reflects inward personality.

Anyway. Melania. Style. Specifically, coats.

Melania usually deploys a good coat.

This coat, however? I’m not so sure. The shape is okay, and the fur detail at the cuffs is FAMAZING, The bright pink is not her best color, and the nude pumps seem like an afterthought—like she didn’t know what other shoes to wear.

That said, her look is 10x more cohesive than the First Lady of Columbia’s, which is all over the place with blocky shapes that fight for visual attention.

Every time I see Melania in a traditionally “feminine” color like pink or light blue, I’m not convinced she’s presenting her best self.

Bold, on the other hand, is something she does well.

I love this outfit on her. Clean lines, very little texture, and bold accessories. Of course, the drama of the lighting in this pic helps to frame the effect.

Moving on, we have my favorite version of Melania: Military-inspired Melania.

Here, on board the USS George H.W. Bush, Melania pulls out the utilitarian accessories and aviator sunglasses. Leather gloves add a nice jolt of texture to this look without going tweedy like the pink coat above.

She looks, well, fierce. And not a bit out of place onboard.

I’m not convinced that the asymmetrical buttons on that coat are doing her any favors, but this is not the worst thing I’ve seen her wear. And the coat echoes traditional Navy uniforms, so it’s understandable.

As much as I love the idea of her wearing a beanie, this one is a little severe.

Christmas decorations and feminism

The jackals of social media have descended on Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations.

AIDE: There’s this perception you don’t care about children, so we need to—

MELANIA: Get me the blood-red nightmare Christmas trees with NO ORNAMENTS OR PRESENTS

These trees remind me of the Handmaid’s Tale protestors. Perhaps these decorations are more tongue-in-cheek than you think.

Yet when Michelle Obama rolled out a similar treatment, she got a feature in Vogue.

Glowing lava trees

At this point, the double-standard isn’t shocking anymore. Frankly, it’s expected, boring, tiresome. No matter what Melania does, a large subset of the population will criticize her for it regardless of what (or if) they liked the aesthetic last week.

If Melania wore the Gucci clown look (which she never would, but let’s pretend for a moment), it would finally die.

Perhaps the “Cold Melania Doesn’t Care” criticism is real, but ~showing compassion~ wouldn’t turn things around for her. It would just make her weak, and they would swarm. Even divorcing her husband and denouncing everything he stands for wouldn’t do it.

Feminists, which most fashion people tend to be, absolutely hate it when other women go off the reservation. The hate is so strong that it permeates everything—the free-thinking woman can no longer do anything right.

Even Christmas decorations.

I appreciate that Melania does her own thing, with style and grace. She’s certainly not going to get any support from the Style Establishment.

Here are more pics of her Christmas White House.

Plenty of warmth and elegance to go around.

Image of the Week: Memes become dreams

(or is that nightmares?)

Pewdiepie’s dreams came true. Someone wore the Montcler x Pierpaolo Piccoli collection in the wild.

Embed from Getty Images

Because no event calls for a nun-Darth-Vader-puffer-jacket-Christmas-angel look like a Harry Potter movie premier. Looks like Ezra Whatshisface is determined to ascend to the next level of fame, yeah?

Dressing this way certainly gets you buzz. But it also makes you the weird goth kid who is super-pissed that he has to take family photos with the rest of the normals.

Priorities, I guess.

Appreciation post: Vox Day’s Winestream

What is this??

 

A classic thumbnail?

Real music?

Impeccable lighting?

A well-framed shot?

Just the tiniest tease of Spacebunny in the intro?

GOOD AUDIO??

The Dark Lord is upping his game, and got himself a YouTube lackey.

I gotta be honest here, this is about the last thing I would have expected from Vox Day. The details are refined. It’s clear that he took time to set up and film it. Everything about it is finished—except I wish that he would have turned the wine label toward the camera at the end so we could have seen it.

There are so many questions in my head right now, but I’ll just say thing: I’m glad to see attention going to refinement and style. A deliberately presented appearance goes a long way toward saying “I’m serious about what I do,” which obviously Vox is.

I’m curious as to how much Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich have influenced Vox as of late, and how much the timing of this has to do with the release of Hoaxed later this week.

Winestream Vox is great. Can’t wait for more, even though I don’t even drink wine.

This is everyone’s reminder that Karl Lagerfeld is a complete troll

Fashion people have no sense of humor.

I think that this is related to “women aren’t funny” but also to the fact that fashion is likely full of personalities kindred to Registered Dietitians or Nurses. They know what is approved right now and that definitely isn’t it.

Humor is never “approved” and so fashionistas will never recognize it.

This reminder is brought to us once again by the humorless fashion writers of whatever British newspaper this screenshot is from. I can never tell apart The Guardian or The Times or whatever. (I did my research. It’s The Guardian.)

 

As far as I can tell, Karl Lagerfeld is still in charge of the design direction at Fendi (which is focused on fur, something that Karl has never compromised). And from the looks of it, Uncle Karl is still up to his old tricks.

I can never decide if I like Karl. He’s somewhere in between “Elitist Fashion Prick” and “Greatest Troll of Our Time.” Sometimes he comes across as so stuck up—but maybe that’s the fairytale that fashion journalists want to weave about him—and yet he can get Fashion People to wear the stupidest stuff.

And some of that stupid stuff is really, really beautiful.

It’s like he’s turned trolling into an art.

Why stop at pink pussyhats and vulgar homemade costumes when you could go luxe, with fox fur and silk? With the further indignity of having paid that much money for it!

Who’s more at fault—the fashion designer who put something together knowing exactly what it looks like, or the fashion girl who buys it anyway?

I would love to get Karl Lagerfeld and Banksy in a room together, honestly. I think they’d have a lot of interesting things to say about art and commerce, and playing to the crowd.

Tonight I didn’t give myself a lot of time to write this post (hello, 10pm bedtime) but I’ll put it on my to-do list to write up a listicle or something of Uncle Karl’s Greatest Hits.

I seem to remember what’s essentially a Wookie suit from sometime circa 2008.

Indie Fashion Magazines

For a long time now, I’ve considered starting an indie fashion magazine. This is because the fashion magazine I want to read doesn’t actually exist.

And really, it would be more than a fashion magazine. It would be a style magazine.

I don’t want to read propaganda. I don’t want to read something that will tell me what to wear or think or watch or read or buy. I want a magazine that will get me to think, that will offer depth, the “why” of things.

At first, I thought this magazine could be a stripped-down, low-fi affair. No stylists, no photoshop, just real women. Darling magazine is already doing that.

Yet while I’m 100% happy that Darling is doing their thing, it’s not the magazine that I crave. It’s polished and clean, and based out of LA. I’m looking for something darker, willing to dig for things, more like a carpet of leaves on a forest floor.

No to succulents, yes to ferns and mushrooms.

Back then, even when I imagined this magazine, I couldn’t conceptualize how one would go about running or financing such an endeavor. Now that I’ve been sniffing around the indie publishing scene for a while, I have a better idea of how that would work.

And of course, the timing of this blog post is brought to you by synchronicity in the simulation: a random retweet of a 2015 article on indie fashion magazines on Business of Fashion.

Many indies still rely on traditional advertising, which is a good reminder that often fashion people just want things to look prettier—not be all that different.

The most obvious revenue stream available to titles is the cover price of the magazine. “It has been my number one rule here that we never ever sold a magazine at a loss,” said Masoud Golsorkhi, founder and editor-in-chief of Tank magazine, an innovatively-designed, ideas-focused, independent fashion title. “If we couldn’t rely on copy revenue, I would just close shop immediately,” he continued.

This model could be facilitated for niche publications by crowdsourcing websites like Kickstarter and Indie-go-go. It’s working for sci-fi journals—why couldn’t it work for another genre?

 

Other magazines capitalize on the publisher-as-retailer format (the exact opposite of content marketing, I suppose):

A number of independent publications, including Inventory and Kinfolk, a quarterly magazine based in Portland that celebrates the ‘slow lifestyle’ and features contemporary illustrations, charming photography and intimate interviews with creatives, have also been able to leverage their brand and point of view as curators of products, tapping transactional revenue by setting up online and brick and mortar stores.

Really it’s the same endgame as content marketing, just starting from a different side. A really high-end merch store. The more I think about it, the more that the publisher-retailer dualism seems to be the most viable way to sustain an operation online. Advertisers are fickle, platforms like YouTube are fickle, and right now even payment providers are fickle (see also: PayPal deplatforming InfoWars), but an group of people who support your cause—those people can’t be bought.

Other funding models seem to follow standard ways to make money online: advertising, consultancies, sponsorships, etc.

Finally, an observation on the increasing rarity of printed magazines:

“Paper is a luxury material and I think that consuming our magazine is a luxurious experience. It is very different from the way that you engage with online content,” said Martin, who said that working in print builds a different, more desirable relationship with readers than online. “It extends to things like the quality of the photography and the production and the way it is graphically designed — it’s a very time-consuming operation, which extends to the way we want to engage with our readers.”

There is something to be said for this—the luxuriousness—but also the exclusivity. It’s how Ben Settle runs his copywriting empire. The best stuff is in the hard-copy-only format.

I have too many ideas for projects at all times, but this one makes me hmmmmmmmm a little bit hmm-er.

Style reveals substance

I may have finally refined my mental concept of what I want this blog to be, enough to the point where I can start to hone in on an idea without cutting off the option to explore new things.

That is a ridiculous sentence.

Let me explain.

I’ve always loved the structure of communication–speeches, the written word, how well-designed typography conveys a word and meaning in a way that is visually pleasing. In grad school, I tried to organize my studies around this idea. That did not always work, especially when I got distracted by things like the lack of scholarship around Queen Victoria. I was equally hamstrung by my inability to articulate what was interesting to me in this area.

“Rhetoric,” broadly, fits the definition somewhat. “Visual rhetoric” might be a better descriptor, but it’s a very stilted, academic term. And the idea of rhetoric also misses the aim of truth.

My vague idea when I started this blog was trying to determine if the Truth has certain aesthetic qualities. (Talk about stilted and esoteric!) The problem is, I also don’t want this blog to be a dry academic ~tome. I want it to be fun, and useful, and insightful.

So a ponderous quest for Truth was out. Besides, that was too much pressure.

I’m still interested in things like fashion, and k-pop, and the many ways that people can lie in photographs.

Finally, today, I had mulled over enough horrible taglines for the blog that I finally found one worth refining further: “Style reflects structure.”

It’s a good start.

The best visual design is design that most accurately and efficiently conveys the message of the text to the reader. This is both in emotional content (font shapes and evocations) but also in cognitive and vision science–what tends to hook a reader and help him retain information. There’s an interplay between the purpose of the document, and its physical manifestation.

The style is born of the mission. It does not necessarily drive the mission, but it is integral to the communication of that mission.

Not everybody things in structures, so I changed that to “substance,” which I think works fine. Style is not substance. Anyone who thinks they can have substance without style is kidding themselves. (Even the default is a style, and tells you something about the person who uses it.)

And then I changed “reflects” to “reveals,” because I feel like it works better. Like a woman reveals the character of a man, style reveals the character of an argument. Maybe it’s cohesive, maybe it’s utilitarian, maybe it’s the default option, but the style can tell raise many questions.

Now, there are a lot of considerations. What if it’s a book designed by the design pros in a publishing house? Well, that tells us a lot about the book publishing process, doesn’t it. Once a book makes it out of the editing and publishing process, it’s no longer a single idea. It’s an idea that’s been edited (hopefully by someone who cares about preserving the source material but who knows), that’s been reinterpreted by a designer and a merchandiser and a marketing blur writer and an executive or two.

Anyway, I’ll keep posting about a lot of random stuff here, but I plan on making this blog a little more cohesive. I’d like to explore more historical styles and take a look at what people are doing now.

NCT Dream’s Formal Sweatsuits

It’s been a while since NCT’s stylists made me go “…wut.”

I miss those days.

NCT’s signature WTF-meets-urban styling made a comeback with NCT Dream’s recent performance of “We Go Up” on KBS Music Bank.

It’s the kind of styling that’d delightfully weird and off-kilter: just deliberate enough that you know it was on purpose–but very rough around the edges.

(Kind of like the choreography for “We Go Up.”)

All the members wore some sort of sweat suit or loungewear, topped with a black blazer and a ID badge lanyard. It all seems mismatched, like something you or I would wear on our day off when we’re doing laundry, until you realize that each member has a color scheme. The continuity of the color gives a certain level of formality to the sub-casual sweatsuit style.

It’s almost like a mismatch of genres. The decor motifs of the sweats and tops are mismatched (casual), but the color scheme is monochromatic (formal). The blazers are rendered in black (formal) but cut in a loose style (casual). ID Badge lanyards scream both work (formal) and conventions/fun (casual). They also flop around a lot and make it impossible for an outfit to look completely pulled together.

Chenle wore an all-white outfit with a contrasting jacket in the “Go” video, and it looked out of place because the level of formality was higher than the rest of the styling for that video. Here, though, it works (thought it’s Renjun who’s wearing the all-white outfit) because of the contrast principle.

I love it when “official” things also have a sense of humor. Little details like this are why we all love NCT Dream a little bit more than all the other NCT units.

Update:

We got a live one. Matching white pants and jacket with a different colorful rugby shirt for each member. Similar concept as the sweatsuit/formal jacket combo, but a different execution.

 

I like

…how Kanye makes just as much of a splash IRL as he does on twitter. Man knows how to make an entrance.

Anyway, I don’t have any other new photos saved on my computer, so you’re getting this one this week. I think Kanye is up to the same things this week, only with bigger slides.

The styling on this is fascinating to me. My brain doesn’t want to consider them a matched set. Kim is bright and futuristic, while Kanye is dull and self-consciously minimalistic. Kim is the sexy sports car we know and love reconfigured for the future, while Kanye reminds us that he does all this despite or because of his bipolar disorder.

Both convey a sense of success and forward-thinking.

They don’t match, but they go.

Melania doesn’t care, do u?

I’m coming to love Melania more and more.

She obviously doesn’t care for the spotlight as much as Trump does (#introvert), but when she’s in it, she kills it. Especially on the style front.

There hasn’t been this much controversy about what Melania wore since the media was obsessed with the fact that she wore stilettos (which she always wears) on a flight to Houston.

(That was only last August, in case you lost track. The Houston floods seem like a few years ago, at least.)

Most of the time she lets the clothes do the talking on their own, but this is not the first time she’s used words on clothes to explicitly state her message. In Houston, she wore a FLOTUS cap. I guess sometimes you really just need to let the message hit home.

I wonder who her stylist is, and how much fun they have planning these outfits.

The people we usually talk about online who use clothes to tell a story are actors and actresses, out to promote their latest movie. Stylish people of all walks of life also imbue some of that storytelling into what they wear.

I certainly do, in my own outfits, but it’s a language that only people who know me well would understand.

Melania has figured out how to go from the personal, internal narrative of style (“this dress makes me feel confident so I’ll wear to make a presentation at work”) to an social, external narrative of style (“this jacket tells the media to f##k off, so I’ll wear it while boarding the plane so they’ll be forced to stare at it”).

Of course, the media then tries their best to make it about the children at the boarder and not themselves, but deflection and obfuscation is what the media does best these days.

Conservatives are so often concerned with doing things right that they don’t realize that there are effective ways to be wrong. Same goes with clothing. They’re more concerned with looking “well-dressed” than with stating an effective message with style.

Roger Stone doesn’t fall into that trap. Neither do Trump or Melania or Milo. Peter Duke understands it.

Part of this is because conservatives aren’t as into the dress-up-and-take-pictures scene. But I think part of it is also because conservatives think that aesthetics don’t matter. Only principles.

This is simply not true. Aesthetics–edifice, artifice, surface–are the way in which we encounter the world every single day. We tell our kids stories about the wolf in sheep’s clothing, so that they can be aware of the fact that appearances don’t always match motives.

And yet, Trump can’t be president because he doesn’t look presidential.

 


This is a topic I’d like to explore more. I’d love to know what you think–what would you want to read about?

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