Leandra Medine's Blog, page 640

ICYMI: The Week on Fleek

Fridays, man. They just sneak up on you like the sly foxes that they are, carrying promises of better days to come. Perhaps you’ll clean out your closet or finally find a use for that button down you gifted your boyfriend three Christmases ago. You know, the one he’s never worn. Perhaps you have a ball to attend. (If not, we’ve got 12 happening parties and one really sweet Ryan Gosling video to keep you occupied.)

Maybe you have Mother’s Day plans and two empty hands and if that’s the case, shame shame, but allow me to  suggest this really dope choker and some marble jewelry? And ugh, you have three weddings this weekend and nothing to wear! Here are three outfits you won’t retire after the ceremony and one really good guide to dressing for your body. 

But this weekend’s not just about appreciating mothers and the union of two people you may or may not like, it’s about you – our readers, commenters and fellow nudists with a high reverence for Louis Vuitton. We love you guys so much, we handed out awards and wrote a compelling case study on the difference between mom and dad jeans, in the same week. You guys are the avocado to our toast, the men to our menswear and the women we wish to see when we look in the mirror.

Have a good weekend guys. Kick some journalistic ass.

MR Round Table: Fashion Journalism, Then and Now

Leandra Medine: I want to hear a bit about your book before we begin talking about the difference between fashion media and journalism then and now.

Kate Betts, author of My Paris Dream, contributing editor at Time, previous editor at WWD and Vogue: The book tour starts next week. It’s weird to do a book tour for a memoir because it’s a lot of talking about myself, and I’m used to being a journalist and not talking about myself. But I’m excited about it because — and I say this when people ask me why I wrote this book — I wanted to tell the story about my career, but also how my career intersected with a personal passion of mine, which was Paris and France and French culture.

Nowadays, it seems like everyone is on this race to nowhere. People seem to think that there is a clear, direct path from college, and it’s not a clear path. It’s a path paved with disaster and tears and wrong moves, blood and sweat, yet everyone now condenses their stories to these small sound bites. I feel like the more interesting story is the struggle, and I wanted to tell that story. Kids coming out of college are confused and scared and too fearful to take risks and left turns, and you have to do that, otherwise you don’t have any character! You’re just a zombie or a robot, and that’s not good.

LM: I think one of the other problems is probably that the choice has become much more vast. America is marketed as the land of opportunity, right? The fact that you can build a business from your handheld device just adds one more convoluted layer to the equation.

Amelia Diamond:  I wonder if the ability to build a career from your phone is complicating things; if it’s stressing kids out to have so many options — there’s definitely a more entrepreneurial mindset now than there was when I graduated. Or maybe it’s liberating and enlightening.

KB: What’s that famous quote, “Freedom is its own prison?” Yes it is enlightening if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, but not everybody does, and that’s okay. Some people probably feel at some point in their lives that they have to have a path or stepping stone, or as Tom Ford calls it, “a ten year plan.” Some people are that way by nature, but even they need to step out of it at some point in their career in order to discover themselves. My book is very much about that. You have to get lost to find yourself.

I moved to Paris right after I graduated from Princeton and lived there for five years. I worked for Women’s Wear Daily — the book is about those five years and what it took to break into the fashion business. But I didn’t move there thinking I wanted to be in the fashion business, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent for Time magazine. And then I got a job at W because I wanted working papers, and John Fairchild had read a story that I wrote about hunting for wild boar – that’s another story – so I got the job and I ended up in fashion.

It was a very different time then. John Fairchild was a very interesting and powerful figure. It’s strange that he’s gone now. I just went to his memorial service last week. But you know, that was also a time in fashion journalism when the business was not global; every city was sort of its own village of these very closed, hierarchal societies of fashion. It was very much an individual’s business. The designers were individuals, the journalists had individual voices.

LM: I frequently talk about what is happening in Berlin right now, and the creative renaissance that they are undergoing, the way that fashion is evolving there, and its ability to flourish because it has not yet become an establishment — fashion with a capital F.

KB: Right. It’s still gentrifying. It’s still affordable to artists, is what it is. It all comes down to real estate.

LM: I’m sure that as a journalist in France at the end of the 80s, fashion wasn’t really the institution or establishment that it is today.

AD: Well that’s what’s interesting. Kate, you didn’t start as a fashion journalist. Cathy Horyn had the same story.

LM: Robin Givhan has a very interesting point about some of most venerated reporters and journalists in fashion: none of them actually wanted to be in fashion, right? They just had point of views, and liked using fashion as the language to share those points.

KB: Well for many people – more so for women, probably in the 60s or 70s – it was a way to get a job in the newspaper, on the “women’s pages.” That’s how Gloria Emerson, who was a Vietnam reporter and one of my professors at Princeton, started. She started as a fashion reporter at the New York Times and then finally, she was able to break out.

LM: I think Vanessa Friedman started that way at The Financial Times covering style.

AD: That lends itself to being well rounded and having an interesting background and unique references. I’m interested in seeing how that’s changing now with kids graduating with their sole focus as this major fashion-centric background — these kids who grew up educating themselves on Style.com.

KB: My whole point of view with fashion was to put it in a broader cultural context, otherwise you’re just talking about clothes and that’s not that interesting. What’s interesting are the stories the clothes are telling — the people who are wearing them and the lives that they’re living. Fairchild was very much about that; that’s why he started W. It’s not really what the clothes look like, and I think he was one of the first people that got that. If you look at fashion reporters like Bernadine Morris (the New York Times’ fashion reporter until the mid 90s) she would just write about clothes, and people were interested in that, but it didn’t have as much resonance.

I think it was when Amy Spindler went to the Times, fashion started to be viewed through the lens of the music industry and Hollywood. That’s probably when it became a more appealing industry to go into. Kids coming out of school would go, “I can relate to this,” because it’s about music, and that’s a segue into a fashion. Now that it’s such a huge industry, it has come back to what it was: just writing about straight fashion.

What’s interesting about writing online versus print, though, is that it has so much more potential to be seen. It’s much more dimensional than just writing for a magazine. I can’t even imagine not writing for online anymore.

LM: You were at WWD for a while, the new magazine looks wonderful. It must be such an exciting time to be there. I’m curious about how you feel about new media. How do you feel about blogs — a site like Man Repeller, which started as a personal style blog but is now working to build itself as a media company?

KB: A lot of people sit around and go, “It’s so sad that the magazines are dying.” I don’t think it’s sad. I think it’s exciting that new media is giving people jobs and voices and a platform to talk about their point of view.

I do remember a time — probably in 1994 — when people at magazine publishing companies were like, “How can we make this Internet-thing go away?” That’s a direct quote. The new media is scary for a certain generation of people, I guess. I think it’s exciting, and I really respect the fact that in the journalistic sense of things, it’s a personal style blog but you’re still feeding the beast. You’re still getting up every morning and finding the story. That’s journalism. It’s new journalism. You have a curiosity about a certain world and you look at it from a certain lens.

I’ve heard people say, “Ugh, the bloggers.” Disrupting the hierarchy of the front row is scary for some people, but it’s also necessary. Did people get upset and complain when television took over? No, they were excited about it.

LM: I’m sure there were some complaints from radio stars.

AD: Video killed the radio star.

KB: But it didn’t!

LM: And here we are coming right back to it, with a podcast push.

KB: Right. And it’s just another medium or media to telegraph your message.

LM: What we talk about at MR is the need to share that content on the devices that people are taking their brain breaks on. So if they’re not on their desktops and they’re on their phones, then we need to make our content consumable via mobile. It’s as simple as that.

KB: And video becomes more important every day, which is another form of storytelling.

LM: That’s unique to me too though. So many of the incredibly important journalists in fashion don’t have an onscreen presence, or journalists don’t in general. And a lot of them are not very articulate when they’re speaking. Well I guess David Rakoff did – I return to his This American Life special, once every two months, it’s one of my favorite things to listen to. You assigned to him a tremendous piece about couture in the 90s. It was a stunning piece of literature.

KB: Well let’s go back to the beginning here. Good writing is good writing, and that’s what it’s all about. So when you’re a great writer, it doesn’t matter what or who you know, it’s how you tell the story. But you’re right, it’s always interesting to bring people in from the outside world, it’s oxygen because it can get kind of close in the fashion ranks.

But people still want to be told what to do and what to wear, and they still need people with a strong point of view to tell them that. So where do they turn? When I was reporting for the Business of Fashion or even at Vogue, whenever the trend would be “Personal Style!” all the retailers would hate it. Personal style means everything goes, and the consumer doesn’t like that.

LM: But we no longer live in a world of trends. The trend really is personal style. Especially because fashion week seasons are so immediately consumable, and can therefore feel obsolete by the time the clothes hit the sales floors. The 70s have not yet shipped, and I am finished with them! If I see a suede skirt come September…

KB: I feel like the trends are coming from the mass market now.

LM: Right. I wrote a story about this. Could it be possible that a high fashion house is taking cues from Zara and building a collection on that?

AD: Lauren Sherman wrote a great story for WSJ about how men’s fashion week showed a ton of (what are essentially) runway versions of the Patagonia fleece.

KB: Trends have always come from the streets. Designers look at what people are wearing.

LM: It’s just more meditated now. It’s about feeling invisible and living your life, and feeling understood.

AD: My favorite time to think about in fashion – and it would be uncomfortable and suffocating now – but back when trends were dictated by hemlines. They really were — generally — either up or down.

KB: Well they had to be! Because if you had a mini skirt this season, you didn’t need one next season, you needed a long skirt. So fashion had to react against itself.

AD: But now it’s like, “Do I show my legs, or cover them? Because I have both options in front of me AND in the same print.”

KB: Well it is and it isn’t though. There are still trends, and I think it depends on where you are. Maybe there aren’t runway trends anymore. People used to ask me, “Why does every fabric mill suddenly make floral prints one season? And then stripes the next?” But it’s because of the fabric mills. It starts there. They have to sell the fabric, so they’re not selling cobalt blue two seasons in a row. They’re selling marigold one season and then people come back and they say, “No no, now it’s cobalt blue.”

AD: So secretly, at the core of the fashion industry, is someone sitting there–

KB: In a booth.

LM: When you were at either Vogue or WWD, what did the old guard look like?

KB: WWD was its own thing and it wasn’t changing that much. However, it seems so crazy, but at the time, Christian Lacroix was the new guy on the block. Karl (Lagerfeld) was relatively new at Chanel. I remember trying to convince W to do a story about Helmut Lang. He’d only been showing for two seasons in Paris. He lived in Vienna, he didn’t believe in trends, his idol was not Balenciaga, it was Levi Strauss. All he wanted to do was design jeans and t-shirts.

I remember Fairchild looking at me like, What are you talking about? But I thought this guy was really great: “He’s going to be really big!” And they were like, “No Kate. Go back to your desk and quiet down.” So yes, I always felt like I was on the edge somehow, and that was a big transition from that old school couturian Emanuel Ungaro, Karl and St. Laurent, to Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana. They were the kings of Paris. Then this new generation of Helmut Lang was coming up. Miuccia Prada a little bit — she was just starting to show handbags and luggage. And Tom Ford! My god, he was an assistant at Gucci, and nobody cared about him! I remember wanting to do a story on him and being told, “He will always be an assistant.”

LM: When we talk about Alaïa and Montana and the designers who ran Paris back then — that was a very different time to be in fashion. You either were in it, or you weren’t. Who’s running the show in Paris now? Is it Alexander Wang’s Paris? I don’t know, I think it is. I think Paris belongs to the cool kids, the exclusive, you-can’t-sit-with-us Riccardo Tiscis of the world. But it’s also so much easier to access fashion now, because of Instagram.

Suzy Menkes talks about the black crows of fashion, and how in her heyday, it was such a different place. It’s so hard for someone like me to sympathize because this is the fashion that I’m living, but I can understand the nostalgia, I just can’t imagine it.

KB: It was a circus then too. Trust me.

Kate Betts’ new book, My Paris Dream, comes out May 12, 2015. (This Tuesday!) Pre-order your copy here. Follow Kate Betts on Twitter and Instagram, too.

Louis Vuitton’s American Dream

“I’m pleased to welcome you to Palm Springs, a symbol of the American Dream.”

This was written on a greeting card in the hotel’s room for the 500+ guests who, the following day, were to attend Nicolas Ghesquière’s Resort 2016 show for Louis Vuitton. The event would take place at the up-for-sale $25 million Bob Hope estate. The architectural marvel — a recurring theme among Ghesquière’s cabinet of curiosities, looked like a spaceship. Behind the house were blocks made from raw wood, glass, and mirror set up for guests to sit among the runway before a remarkable backdrop: a postcard of awesome mountains casting shadows from the setting sun, which contributed spectacularly to the designer’s obsession with tension.

Here was this man-made house, an architectural marvel artificial in — for better or worse — all of its beauty (with lawns green enough to remind you and make you uncomfortable about the severe drought at hand), situated before (and also possibly subsidizing) nature’s divinity. And I guess that’s the thing about the clothes, too. We saw a 50-look collection made up almost entirely of skirts and dresses that reach the floor — many featuring wrap-around waist belts, all playing with the juxtaposition of soft (silk and chiffon skirts) and hard (elaborate and difficult textural bodices).

The models wore either hiking boots or these strange, space-age flip flops, and while the sun set on an especially spectacular beige leather Victorian-style floor length dress featuring cut-out lattice work, the recurring Ghesquière themes rose: uniform finger rings, cropped cocoon-style jackets, pointed collars and conspicuous zippers. There were also four sets of printed underwear paired with coats, and if it wasn’t the soft skirts that seemed reminiscent of Rodarte, these certainly did.

Ghesquière has a way with his needle and thread. The seasons he was not designing felt like a huge loss at the front of fashion. He’s unafraid to push boundaries, to make statements, to give the world what they have no idea they want — sometimes until years later. His clothes always belong to him, there’s no question about that. But it was fascinating to feel his references further rooted in a small, relatively new house that is so distinctly California. In striking the Rodarte semblance, I noticed several L.A.-based designers in attendance. There was Rosetta Getty, Sophie Buhai and Maryam Malakpour of Newbark. Their presence signified something — maybe a sense of camaraderie and mutual respect, or perhaps something deeper, like a cultural shift pulling from the spotlight of New York’s melting pot to replace it in the cultivation of California’s both cultural (was it not, after all, Hedi Slimane who moved Saint Laurent’s headquarters to Los Angeles) and financial (Silicon Valley’s success trickling into San Francisco’s real estate) renaissance.

That’s the real symbol of this American Dream — right? Its mobile mindset, the ability it maintains to happen anywhere. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is just an idea held by Ghesquière. He knows we’ll catch up eventually. We always do — and this is his postcard to us: “Wish You Were Here.”

Images via Style.com and Getty Images

MR Writers Club Prompt: The Apple and the Tree

I recently listened to an Invisibilia podcast about how we all, on some small level, are much more connected to one another than we realize.

It explored the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which is where “two things that are separated in space can still be the same thing,” according to NPR’s “physics guy” Geoff Brumfiel. So, if there is an atom in California, and it’s entangled with an atom in New York, then theoretically whatever happens to the California atom happens at the exact same moment to the New York atom.

IDK you guys, it’s fucking crazy.

One of the episode’s main subjects was a women who experiences “mirror touch,” a kind of synesthesia where she feels what others feel on a very real, visceral level. She’s entangled with everyone. Somehow. If she watches someone get slapped, she feels the slap. If she watches someone eat, it’s like the food is in her mouth, too. If she watches someone get hugged, she feels the hug.

But we all experience this on some small scale. If a non-annoying couple kisses, we think, “Aw.” If someone does something awkward on American Idol, we feel their embarrassment second-hand and may need to change the channel.

I think that’s why moms seem to know everything. On some freaky universal playing field, at least a few of our atoms are entangled.

Read: we apples are way closer to the tree than we’d like to believe.

All of which is just one big windup for the next writer’s prompt. In honor of Mother’s Day this Sunday, May 10, write about that special connection with your mom. It can be funny or sweet or sad or whatever, because all of our experiences are different. Not all of you have a technical-mom, of course, so write about whomever “that person” is to you: the one who somehow knows you’re lying even though you’re in another country. (HOW? HOW!?)

Send your mom-song in 500 words or less to write@manrepeller.com by Thursday, May 14, 12 PM EST. Yes, the chosen story will run a whole week after Mother’s Day, but so what? It’s about your mom. She’ll love it no matter what.

For past MR Writers Club prompts and entries, click here. But also, did someone say…mom jeans?

How Avocados Became the Oprah of Instagram

Bagels are everything. In their subversive, rebellious way, they are the most “fashion” of all foods. They are Iris Apfel with edible accessories; Rihanna made of carbs.

And yet the avocado — quiet in demeanor, boring in design — surpasses the bagel’s Instagram fame by a whipped dairy landslide.

Leandra posed the question to me just the other day. “How,” she asked, “did the avocado get so famous?”

I see her point and sympathize with her incredulity. The avocado appears to be the most basic of fruit. It’s Lauren Conrad sans the hair — both are lovely, both have mass appeal. It’s Kim Kardashian without the Kanye. (Note that avocados contour naturally: what else do you think is happening when they ripen?)

But where Kim once aimed to break the Internet (which Beyoncé almost successfully broke), avocados sustain the Internet. Avocados are actually Oprah.

The Oprah Effect, as you’ve likely heard, is the documented phenomenon where everything she endorses turns to gold. Oprah’s approval can turn a mom and pop coffee shop into a valiant Starbucks competitor. I once watched a documentary where an artisanal soap company nearly had to shut down because they couldn’t keep up with the post-Oprah demand — then they sucked it up, got a factory, and became billionaires.

But Oprah only has this effect because she equals love. Oprah is a modern day saint with serious business savvy.

Avocados are of a similar force. Add an avocado to a salad and suddenly you’re nourishing your body as opposed to eating grass. Put a bit in your hair and the ends you’ve broken are suddenly repaired. Place an avocado on a slice of toast and you’ve just created art. They ameliorate situations by nature of them being them, but their rise to fame — like Oprah — can be directly attributed to good deeds and hard work.

Asking, “But why Instagram avocados?” is akin to asking, “Why male models?” Because they’re attractive, simple, and regardless of origin they seem like they’re from California. They are the chill that we all wish to be. They are edible therapy and a visual calm. They present wellness and happiness. They tell the world, “I ate an avocado today, so I am doing just fine.” We don’t post photos of avocado toast for popularity or notoriety or fame, really. We Instagram it because we want to be loved. Hugged. Nourished. Sustained.

I mean that, or we’re all total suckers.

You’ve heard of the Avocado Theory, right? If not, click here.

Is Fashion Becoming a Co-Ed Club?

Here is a real question that was asked of my sister and me over a lazy Sunday breakfast at home: “Do you like my skinny jeans?”

Looking up from my bowl of yogurt and basin of coffee and The New York Times, I appraised the supplicant. I did like them, I responded. They were immensely flattering — tapered, nice rise, great wash. They were Goldilocks pants: not too tight. Not too loose. Just right.

“Dad, they look really good.”

My father purchased a pair of pants that he thinks are skinny jeans about a year ago. His art and his children notwithstanding, these are his pride and joy. They are not quite “skinny” jeans, but they have a silhouette that hugs. They are skinnier than the formless denim he once preferred. They are leaner and sleeker than a pair of parachute pants that I have to assume he bought just in order to mortify me. (He succeeded.)

He wanted to know about the jeans because he cares how he looks in them. Like my brother and my friend, Stephen, who has been known to recite an almost poetic defense of loafers, he is not an indifferent consumer. To him and to them, clothes matter.

The New York Times knows it.

Last month, the paper inaugurated a style section just for men. This Friday, it will publish the second edition of the insert, slipping it into every last printed copy of the paper. Assuming its debut effort was any indication, this sophomore issue will feature lithe models, monochromatic advertisements, and authoritative works on how to groom “Like a Man.” I have yet to read it. But I would guess it involves the scent of pine and voluble grunts.

Anyway! Despite what is for SURE a superlative sense of direction, it is no easier for men to navigate the tricky waters of fashion coverage. While it does so much so well, the section could use Google maps. Perhaps it might then avoid the most hazardous potholes: “Tools for the Gentleman Farmer,” “The Dandy Fellows at Fellow Barber,” critical attention to John Mayer — his wrist is a wonderland, apparently.

And yet even the detours and speed bumps are not so dire. The section gets where it is supposed to go, arriving at the conclusion that the male readers of The New York Times are invested in appearances and grace and shoe polish, too.

When the section launched in April, The Atlantic determined that the title indicated “a broader trend” than even the recent revitalization of the monocle. It promised: Fashion is for everyone.

And while complicated and gendered dynamics remain, the fact is that the sartorial universe “is quickly shedding its default femininity.” Even dad-bods wear flannel! Even actual dads wear skinny jeans! This week, my boyfriend really wanted to know the meaning of Crêpe de Chine!

“The Menaissance is upon us,” The Atlantic declares. And I believe it. But I wonder whether the women who love menswear and sneakers and John Mayer can participate in it. Are we supposed to? Would you read a style section oriented toward men? Did you? Did you love it? Did you hate it? Did you buy a dry brush? Do the Y-chromosomes among us need a distinct literature of fashion? Let’s talk about it.

Want more dad jeans? Same. Click here.

The Difference Between Mom Jeans and Dad Jeans

No question in the history of humanhood has plagued us quite so hard as the one posed in this story’s title: what is the difference between mom jeans and dad jeans?

But first, a bit of backstory.

The mom jean rose to fame in the late 80s. Disco was done and with it, the sparkly subculture’s tendency toward unbuttoned shirts and skintight polyester. Trend fatigue had set in: women were tired of the va-va-voom, their gynecologists had run out of Fluconazole, and the major US supplier of denim was dealing with an excess of fabric that had accidentally been bleached.

The result was a semi-stretchy pant that started at the waist for maximum fupa-freedom (detail to note: elastic bands caused ruching the back), then dropped down in a carrot shape on each leg, providing the illusion that one’s derriere began in North Dakota and ended in South.

Moms were thrilled.

Meanwhile, the men saw just how liberated the women not only looked, but felt. Let us not forget that male fashion had been oversexed-‘n-latexed as well.

Men wanted freedom, too — not just for their dignity, but for the sake of humanity’s next generation. Denim producers heard their pleas and created pants that offered enough crotch for one to theoretically sit astride a horse without ripping the inseams while keeping the leg line straight so that men could show off their arch-supports.

Dads rejoiced.

The jeans had a quiet staying power among these young parents who birthed children on the tail-end of ’88. We their offspring, however, were of a new denim era. One that took us from Limited Too patchwork to bootcut to Abercrombie & Expensively Distressed, to tentatively trying skinny jeans to not being able to imagine a wardrobe without them.

Then normcore happened and we turned to the tree from which we apples had fallen: our parents.

This brings us to today and the original question posed. What is the difference between mom jeans and dad jeans other than a deep history of rebellion and anarchy following strife?

Let us refer to the diagram below.

As you can see, the dad jean proposes a waist that hits just below the belly button. The crotch is long, any semblance of an ass is hidden. The pants drop straight then hit below the ankle and the knees bag in such a manner that the leg always appears slightly bowed.

The mom jean, alternatively, sits just high enough to ensure cowboy crotch. The butt becomes a pear; the belly, rotund; and the leg tapers until hitting just above the ankle bone.

Only one question remains, then: which one are you?

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Illustration by Kate Worum

Ten’s a Trend: Marble Madness

Trends are funny in that they seem to stack like building blocks. One informs the next which informs the next and if you follow them closely enough, you can almost always achieve some version of a distinct narrative with a start point, a conflict, a solution and then ultimately, an end.

When the bedazzled bib necklaces of yore became loose fine chains that did not require the kind of upper body strength a breast plate does and could be worn without much thought — forever if you wanted to, the question of what happens to chunky jewelry next was presented. Did the migration from big to small mean that no one wanted to make a statement anymore?

Of course not. This is fashion, people. What are we if not a group of overzealous expressionists fighting to get the last word in? It just meant we were ready for new chunk; for a frontier that mirrored something more pared down or scaled back; the excess-lover’s own version of normcore, if you will.

Enter the marble jewelry movement, which satisfied one’s hankering for a statement piece but did it without calling to mind descriptive words like “bauble.” Early perpetrators of the trend include Chloé, Céline and Roxanne Assoulin for Rosie Assoulin, but as recently as this past season, Stella McCartney and Eddie Borgo have signed on, too. The whole thing feels very Nordic. Like a clean, domestic living space designed in good, sparse taste. Give it a try then play a game of who wore it best, vetting yourself against the nearest kitchen counter top. I am sure you will win.

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Psst. Marble jewelry will look really cool with your summer wedding outfit. 

How to Spot a Feminist

I swear it was an accident. I never meant for it to happen. But I woke up one morning and looked in the mirror, and there she was: A feminist.

When I was younger, I never read Jezebel or investigated sad statistics or told boys who said dumb things to google Gloria Steinem. I never used the F-word. I didn’t think I needed to. I was, like, pretty sure that feminism had happened already — to people like Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag and my mom. I was almost positive it was over.

But then I moved to college. And suddenly, I saw sexism everywhere. I spotted it in the dining hall and in professors who called women I admired “hysterical.” I found it in the Neanderthals who looked girls up and down before inviting them to parties, pawing their waists as soon as they got there. I discovered it in office hours and interviews and libraries and archives — on newspaper pages and in real life. I saw flickers of it in a boy I briefly dated. We did not last long.

Back then, allies were harder to find. Like Doc Thompson, I, too, needed advice on #HowToSpotAFeminist. But I was fortunate. I would discover them in libraries and on dance floors. They would teach me what my mother had tried to. They are my best friends. But Thompson is less eager to be pals. The host of conservative radio talk show The Morning Blaze took to Twitter this week to ask for some advice.

Any tips on #HowToSpotAFeminist??? We’ll discuss tomorrow http://t.co/MlSI2zGap3 #WhatILearnedToday

— Doc Thompson (@DocThompsonShow) May 3, 2015

According to some of those who replied to his tweet, a feminist “support[s] hypocrites just because they are women,” reeks of patchouli, braids her armpit hair, and is “hunched over due to that HUGE chip on her shoulder.” She is “ugly” and “everywhere.” She blends virile men into her açaí bowls each morning, probably.

And she knows how to work Twitter all by herself.

It was not long before real live feminists began to declare themselves, providing some hints to make it easier for bewildered misogynists to find them. A feminist has “the crazy idea that [she] should be paid the same amount of money as a man” and speaks out “against sexist nonsense.” A feminist is “a person who believes in political, economic & social equality of the sexes.” A feminist is “someone [who] noticed that the 19th century ended a while ago.”

They have the crazy idea that they should be paid the same amount of money as a man. #HowToSpotAFeminist #p2 pic.twitter.com/xon1QXetDQ

— Eric Wolfson (@EricWolfson) May 6, 2015

= Dear people using #HowToSpotAFeminist hashtag. = FEMINIST: a person who believes in political, economic & social equality of the sexes.

— kelly oxford (@kellyoxford) May 5, 2015

#HowToSpotAFeminist Someone who’s noticed that the 19th century ended a while ago.

— JRehling (@JRehling) May 5, 2015

#HowToSpotAFeminist – we’re speaking out against sexist nonsense and advocating for the equality of all genders! #BAM

— AmyPoehlerSmartGirls (@smrtgrls) May 6, 2015

A feminist looks a lot like me and probably a bit like you. A feminist looks like a good boyfriend and a great brother and my dad. Since Doc Thompson asked, let’s all tell him #HowToSpotAFeminist. Pretty please?

Repurposing Your Button Down

Amelia once commanded that you never underestimate the power of a button down. She called it one of the most versatile garments a woman could own, honing in precisely on its ability to challenge the constructs of the direction in which you are supposed to button and let it live like a bipartisan, aptly buttoning both up and down. What she failed to mention, though, is that after you’ve accrued a large enough arsenal of the shirt style to veritably identify with the unsung heroes of high fashion: male high school teachers, the question of flexibility is presented.

Here we stand, taking for granted the covered shoulders and forward facing buttons and collars and matching bottoms extolled by our shirts as we wonder whether we’ll ever grow tired of what could become the wardrobe’s equivalent of almond milk. But to ask that question is to disregard entirely the notion that a shirt is not just a shirt. It’s an opportunity. It is an almond and a gallon of water. And vanilla beans. But you know what they say, right? Show don’t tell, so without much more ado, here are three ways to recycle your button down shirts (viva sustainability!).

Exhibit A: The off-the-shoulder technique

This approach was first popularized by Man Repeller favorite Claire Beermann, who recognized the prevalence of off-the-shoulder blouses sprouting like peonies on a Pinterest board and took to her work shirt. I paired mine, by Equipment, with counter-stripe pants and an arm scarf and chain bracelet. I would call it structured pajama dressing if I wasn’t afraid to sound like a human bromide.

Exhibit B: The shirt-as-turtleneck

Bear with me for a second here — I know that it looks exactly as though I’m wearing a button down backwards but that’s also because I am and if it is any consolation or might make you feel more comfortable about turning the mullet on its head, consider that Marni has been selling shirts to look like this for years. Poplin turtlenecks are not uncommon among high fashion designers but they are also not cheap. Why not do your part to save a penny, flip your shirt and then call your back The Great Reveal as though it is a new car?

Exhibit C: The skirt

This shouldn’t look unfamiliar to you as the shirt-skirt is hardly a novel concept, but what you may have been remiss to consider is the notion that you don’t need to buy a shirt-skirt to get the look. You can quite simply re-appropriate the very same blouse and even opt in or out of a slit as high or low as your legs want to shine. I’m wearing a bathing suit with my chef-d’oeuvre plus a jean jacket. Now, who wants to go swimming?

Images by Krista Anna Lewis