Leandra Medine's Blog, page 738

Why Are We All Dressing Like the Most Pared Down Versions of Ourselves?

This morning, I put on a navy blue poplin turtleneck, a pair of mid-rise, slouchy fit white jeans and a black leather jacket. It took no longer than five minutes to get dressed from the moment of outfit inception to the actual process of leg-in-pant, arm-in-sleeve and so forth. Then, I stood against my shoes, head tilted to shoulder, wondering why I couldn’t just do what I always do: put on my white low top sneakers and get on with my day.

I tried on a pair of beige suede boots. Too western. Another pair in black patent leather. Weird with jeans. Then I put on one egg-shell colored high heeled brogue but stopped myself before applying the second shoe: I don’t feel like wearing heels — why am I putting on heels?

So I settled on a pair of white patent leather Ferragamo Icona slippers. The kind with the two-inch heel that make me feel like my grandmother during her 1967 heyday.

But far more interesting than my decision to wear the ballet flats seems to have been my decision not to wear the white sneakers. They’ve been my go-to shoes — the apple to my eve, the lamb to my tuna fish, the 463,782,472 page views to my BuzzFeed gif list — since the early portion of 2012 so for me to reject them now, to find myself having to think about what will and should happen south of my ankle just seems, I don’t know, unnatural.

The thing is, I think I also know exactly why this is happening — it is normcore’s fault.

Now that fashion has identified a term to describe the cues that initiated members of this large, Philo-obsessed cult with which to some degree we all associate ourselves have been taking, I don’t really want to be part of it. That feeling has only been further propelled by the realization that when I got home from Paris last week, I very atypically found myself less inspired than before I went.

I’ve been covering Paris Fashion Week for five seasons and in those seasons, I have learned that when I come home, I come home incredibly stimulated. The same way you might find yourself feeling ready to write a novel after reading Nora Ephron or Dave Eggers, or ready to run a marathon after a dose of caffeine, I have historically found myself looking into my closet post-Paris, rediscovering garments I’d previously dubbed old or boring or stale as indelibly new. Those jeans, that dress, those jeans to wear under that dress, that skirt — which I can wear over the same dress — and so on.

This piquancy customarily comes from what happens outside the shows. Say what you will about street style peacocks and the craft’s nature as a new-age billboard but watching the way real humans interact with fashion, no matter how unattainable — Valentino gowns and Comme des Garcons denim jackets or Chanel tweed trousers and Anthony Vaccarello leather blouses — will always, to a certain degree, be attainably inspiring.

Far more inspiring, at least, than plebeian sweatpants and sneakers and hoodies or black jeans and navy sweaters and unassuming flat boots. Sure, those items are currently de rigeur but after the novelty wears off — and it wears off quickly — they’re also decidedly boring.

So consider this a plea against the adoptive paladins of normcore. Fashion has always been a vehicle that allowed a benign mode of escapism, a fantastical game of dress up and an outlet that allows a woman’s creativity to flow like a river that is densely populated by freak flags. Why change that?

“It’s Complicated”

Written by Esther Levy-Chehebar

I’d first come to know Aziz Ansari through his ascot popping Parks and Recreation character, Tom Haverford. And for six seasons, I’ve been jovially watching the lovable Haverford roll out his own red carpet and pioneer his own language. Forks, for example, will now forever be “food rakes” to me. Desserts will be “zerts.” And Chicken Parmesan? “Chicky chicky parm parm.”

I love the guy and so when the opportunity to meet him came a-knockin’, I opened that door faster than you can say “fry fry chicky chick.”

(I’m done.)

A friend of mine was selected to participate in a focus group led by Ansari, which would examine the effects that social media snooping has had on relationships. The catch? Attendees were forbidden to bring their partners, thus creating a safe space where one could lament about his or her significant other amid the comfort of strangers. So, I bid my husband of eight months farewell and attended the event with my best friends’ boyfriend.

Ansari began the conversation with a question:

Has anyone here ever seen anything on his or her partner’s social media platforms or e-mail that made you mad? 

The women in the room sprung into action with a “Fuck yeah!” while the men remained decidedly quiet. But the dynamic changed once the lights were turned down. With darkness obscuring our faces, in-depth stories quickly materialized.

One woman, we’ll call her Pinky, told an anecdote about an ex who left his Facebook logged on to her home computer. Equal parts curious and suspicious, Pinky chose to glean his Facebook messages. This was, after all, her home turf, so she wasn’t technically “hacking.” Pinky’s suspicions were met with vulnerability when she found provocative exchanges between the moron who left his Facebook logged on and a mutual girl friend.

Another cyber-spy, a sweet man from Arkansas who I shall call Zorro, said that he and his wife openly use each other’s Facebook accounts. However, it recently came to light that Zorro’s wife had been posting nasty statuses about his mother, using Facebook’s blocking feature to hide them from him.

He was angry to find his wife posting unbecoming comments about his mother on her Facebook page, which I understood, but still it made me wonder if he had a right to be upset.

When this one Israeli solder I met in the throes of an emotionally intense Birthright trip recently messaged me on WhatsApp, I was more inclined to fall into a “flirtatious” exchange but not because I’m emotionally invested — it is simply because the service harbors my otherwise harmless words in a private space that is unaffiliated with my “real life.”

So maybe that’s the thing about social media. These virtual communication platforms encourage a code of privacy that plays by its own sets of rules.

My husband and I share a desktop computer. I know all of his passwords as he does mine, and his e-mail is always open. He doesn’t have Facebook or an Instagram account, and his Twitter account is nearly mum save for the occasional @WhatTheFFacts retweet. (Did you know that “vaginae” is the plural word for vagina?) Still, were he to see the WhatsApp exchange, would he be upset? Or would he respect my privacy and understand that the Internet alters — whether intensifying, mitigating, or even recreating one’s actual personality? And if he could understand that, where do we draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate?

Snooping with probable cause is a complicated matter, but from what I was able to cull through Ansari’s conversation, it seems like the majority of us do it. It just also seems like the question we should be asking isn’t in whether we snoop but rather in how private our virtual lives should be when considering what we share with our partners.

Or, as Tom Haverford would say, “Virty virty life life.”

Visit Esther’s blog, The Philosophy of Windex here and follow her ass on Instagram here.

Spring is Springing

I have known for a long time that my mood depends on the weather. What I have just recently come to know is that this is the case because the weather controls what I will wear.

See, when it rains, I must forgo suede — that and the ceramic promise of decent hair. When it snows, I’m forced to abandon my clothes all together in the name of feeling like a plastic duck, plowing through the depths of chilled, indigenous-to-bathtub waters, wearing not just rubber but rubber that is warm.

And when it’s cold — when it’s cold, who cares what I’m wearing behind my coat? No matter how much I may have liked the cloak when I initially obtained it, the inevitability that it will stay on through the duration of the season starts to sting at month three, leaving me at the intersection of disgusted and in utter hate.

So, that’s that.

When it’s warm, though, when the sun comes out and the ice coffee flows like beer at a frat party or green juice at a Millennial get-together, I’m given the freedom of choice. No longer delimitated by circumstantial climatic woes, I can choose suede or not. Skirt or pants. Long jacket or short jacket or no jacket at all.

In the case of today, the first of its kind since the balmy days of yonder, I chose a long sleeve crop top faced with a terrible case of identity crisis in that it is from Zara but so clearly once was Calvin Klein. The jeans, so high waist the zipper takes a full minute to reach the button closure, are Blk Dnm while the trench coat, lightweight and linen and manipulated heavily by tiers of drawstring is Acne. The boots are Saint Laurent and make me feel vaguely western but only in the same way that bras make me vaguely feminine.

I’m not cold at all and that makes me want to jump, jump, so, I’m going to do that.

Shoesday Special: The Footwear of Fashion Week

For me, the shoes of Fashion Week are always the most important.

They’re a marker, a smoke signal, a metric that may or may not inform the performance of the rest of a collection.

Fine, that last remark errs on the side of dramatic but think about this! When you’re considering how much you like a collection, that reaction will usually either push you to want to understand how much you’re willing to participate in it (and consequently too how defeated you might feel when reality sets in and you realize that an exorbitantly expensive dress care of [insert designer here] is not a feasible experience), or it won’t. If it doesn’t, you can trot off on your merry way, but if it does, what are you left with?

I’ll tell you what you’re left with.

A sliver of hope that comes care of what you see when you look down to forget the dress and welcome the promise of opportunity and simultaneous initiation put forward by the same designer’s footwear. Sometimes I wonder if my relationship with shoes is as passionate as Jared Leto’s relationship with thumb rings because they have historically been my way in. The gateway that allowed me to feel like I was apart of something, maybe a world, that I had otherwise been watching from a sideline with a nickel in my pocket.

Of course that nickel is the other thing because the shoes of fashion week still do not a good deal make but they’re certainly a step closer, literally and figuratively, to the axis of something we’re trying to penetrate.

That and, they make us feel good and offer that sublime sense of escapism, one of the only that come devoid of substance abuse, which, quite frankly, seems like reason enough to catalogue, discuss and celebrate anything. So, let’s play the favorites game, plow through the footwear as documented above and begin charting our autumn footwear strategies.

So many flats! But so many heels. And the boots. Ah, the boots.

Images via Vogue.com, Style.com, Fab Sugar, and Fashionising

Row Your Boat

I never understood why someone would elect to participate in the sport of rowing. It always seemed to me that anyone who knowingly entered an activity that required 4 AM, daily, hour-long “warm up runs” before each actual practice had to be insane.

Then when Armie Hammer rowed as both Winklevoss brothers in The Social Network, I can’t say I “got it” but man, did I respect it. This was a sport for giants; for true athletes; for those less concerned with checking off extracurriculars but rather, making it to the Olympics.

So how did I end up sitting with my ass on a simulated row boat last Tuesday?

Now, a fast pause before all members of their respective crew teams begin throwing oars at me: a rowing machine is very different from sitting in a boat, on a freezing body of water, at 5 in the morning after a million mile run. But for someone who hasn’t been on a true workout schedule since age 21 and compares cycling to ripping hot wax off her soul, this was the closest to crew I’ll ever come save for the Boat House drive-bys on my way into Philly.

I found myself on this recently-hyped breed of torture device by way of a fitness-savvy friend who grew tired of me complaining that I needed to drop a few bagels. She suggested City Row. She has abs. I listened.

So there I was, sitting astride a water-powered floor bike (what the shit do you call this thing?!), trying not to puke as a man in track pants repeated LEGS, CORE, ARMS, REPEAT.

The gist was that we’d row for ten, then get on the floor for ten (more legs, core, arms, repeat), then back on the faux boat and then back on the floor. Legs, core, arms, repeat. Legs, core, arms, this sucks. I survived only by taking numerous breaks and left with my head hung low, defeated.

And yet two days after walking like I’d done accidental splits, the competitive side of me decided to try it again. Either my muscles missed the satisfaction that comes from exhaustion or I am a masochist. So back I went, this time determined to row the shit out of my pseudo ship.

And row I did. Encouraged by the girl in front of me who I was determined to beat (there’s no competition but I could see her stats) and the rhythmic thumps of my instructor’s excellent playlist (Swiss Beatz coupled with old school Missy), I ignored my own complaints and went full Team Winklevii. I was rowing the Henley Royal Regatta. I was angry-Ryan-Gosling in a canoe in The Notebook. I was Kevin Spacey in House of Cards, and if you can supply a female pop culture rowing reference I will update this post faster than you can say coxswain.

Here’s a visual of what I probably looked like:

Now I’m hooked. I still walk like I’ve been involved in a skateboarding/bucking bronco mishap after each class and my arms go all wibbly for at least three days, but it’s the first time in a long time that I feel like I’m working out for fitness, not for weight loss, and that is reason enough to throw my oar up in the air like I just don’t care. Chiefly, you know, because I don’t.

Image via Vogue Germany

Lesson in Layering, Meet Make an Old Dress New Again

I bought this dress from The Outnet over two years ago before a wedding in Mexico. It was the offspring of one of my favorite Stella McCartney shows to date so I was thrilled to have it, which was reflected in the frequency with which I wore it. But as is always the case with peanut butter syndrome, the novelty wore off, the flavor ran bland and it was shelved.

Until, that is, a few weeks ago when Thornton Bregazzi for Preen debuted his F/W 2014 collection in London and there were these skirts — tight until just below the butt and then flowing loosely until mid-shin — that I realized I could totally approximate that look without a) shopping, b) waiting until next fall.

I started with the dress and then layered a tight black mini skirt from All Saints over it, letting the pleats run free like coyotes in the wild. Then I placed a white short sleeve shirt by M. Patmos over the top of the blouse and looked kind of like a disheveled history teacher until I concealed the grubbiness with ye olde (and reliable) black cashmere Uniqlo sweater. I tucked the shirt into the skirt and then performed a half tuck with the sweater.

Next I added strappy sandals — these ones by Stuart Weitzman to give me height and salsa, which was followed by the inclusion of so many accessories, I smelled like the product of a metal factory. The bracelets are Dannijo and the choker is by one Paula Mendoza.

Finally, I cloaked by upper half in a green and white leather knee-length jacket from Club Monaco and a pair of round frames from the Peter Pilotto for Target collab-o-lab.

Then I was ready to run free, so, run free I did.

Why Don’t You: Wear Black Tie to a White Sneaker?

The idea of formal tops never seemed very appealing to me.

With a skirt, or a pair of pants that could moonlight as black tie appropriate, “faking it” with a t-shirt is easy — and adding a denim jacket makes “it” decidedly White Sneaker (the antithesis of Black Tie?) appropriate.

When you want to fake it with a formal top, what happens south of the torso? A skirt? Snooze. Huge pants? Yeah, sure, maybe. But that’s limiting — what about when you’re not formal event bound? Who wants to wear a non-t-shirt anyway? That’s like conceding to going out in going out tops and doing that unironically.

Or is it?

When Vika Gazinskaya first showed her blue chiffon, hand-painted off-the-shoulder blouse for Spring 2010, my whole perception of these alleged going out tops changed. (See also: this). Why wouldn’t I wear one casually? T-shirts are great — but frankly, when they’re paired with jeans, and jeans only, they’re just t-shirts.

When Rosie Assoulin revealed her first collection, my microcosm of a world devoid of raw silk and faille and dupioni silk imploded. I was doing it wrong and the trailblazers of this decidedly unfancy, fancy livelihood were doing it right, so I’m rectifying my wrongs starting right here, on this fine looking Friday afternoon and tampering with one black faille one shoulder blouse which could have debuted at the Oscars last week but instead debuted with $3 jeans, a striped shirt from Zara, and a pair of Saint Laurent sneakers on Bleecker Street yesterday.

To be fair, I did also wear it like this last week in Paris:

Which I feel pretty good about. So, I think that officially makes it your turn to take what’s fancy and supermarket it the shit up like no one, not even Karl Lagerfeld, has ever normcore’d before.

Should we talk about that term or save the conversation on mindless virality and every Gen. Y stereotyped having cometh true for next week?

As of right now, this conversation, in its unpublished state, is actually a monologue so I’ll go ahead and make the executive decision to hold off until Monday and instead suggest that with the help of the neat little tool below, you shop, which, you know, is different from buying, but it’s Friday, so… Treat. Yo. Self.

Rosie Assoulin top, Zara t-shirt, Levi’s jeans, Saint Laurent sneakers, Armani sunglasses

The Funniez of Fashion Week

Fashion Week has wrapped. That’s four cities in four weeks with endless designers to watch. And just when you think you’ve caught up, you’re actually behind, so it’s understandable that amid the plethora of reviews from various outlets, the photos, the Instagrams, the tweets and the style, a few rather large elephants managed to slip between our tiny keyboard cracks.

But now that life has been restored to its natural order, these elephants refuse to remain unnoticed any longer. They demand to be seen, and so, without further ado, we present to you The Funnies (no, not Doug’s family) of New York, London, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks.

…Because just like it says in our Twitter bio, fashion doesn’t have to be serious to be really, really good.

Charlie Brown and Big Bird made runway appearances.

Alexander Wang sent the inversion of Charlie Brown’s trademark bumble bee chevron knit down the runway, worn by a model with similarly sparse brows. Meanwhile, at Marques’ Almeida, Big Bird was hand carried — assumably because his feet were loaned for last season’s shoes at Rochas.

Anna Dello Russo drove a rickshaw around town.

The question’s not so much why as it is…where to?

Stan Smiths went more viral than a baby strapped to a cat.

One was fun, two was a date, three was a trend and by the thousandth human at fashion week to adorn their feet in the tennis whites, the whole thing became funny. Mostly because I just pictured some regular dude working behind the counter at Adidas, trying to figure out where the sudden surge of strangely-but-well-dressed women was coming from. Stan Smith is an unsung lady killer.

There was a sloth at Simone Rocha.

Initially I was more concerned with the swath of gold across the models’ foreheads, afraid that they’d walked face-first into some sort of metallic wall — totally by accident, like I always do with glass sliding doors! However, upon my second go at clicking through Rocha’s delightful show, I noticed that more importantly, a sloth had made it to London.

Shopping carts were everywhere, but Karl made them everything.

Though I will say that it was Leaf Greener who made the most of outfit/cart color-coordination.

Oblina was the must-have accessory.

No longer the Nickelodeon star that she once was, Oblina has rebranded herself as traveling scarf for the most fashionable of necks. She is also a life coach on weekends, or so I heard.

Nipples were out despite legitimate freezing temperatures.

It’s a wonder they didn’t fall right off so props are in order. Ladies, your threshold for the cold is admirable.

MBMJ = A$AP Rocky.

I KNOW. The braids. The neck. The pants. (The unseen shoes!) It’s perfect.

And finally, Dries Van Noten waves like a dad.

I picture him doing this wave as he boards some cruise ship to the Bahamas in his favorite Hawaiian shirt. “Adios kids,” he’ll say, “There’s a jacuzzi with my name on it, and I hear the top deck’s pool has a slide!” Whatever, Dries. You can do no wrong. It’s the perfect sendoff to conclude the end of one long but lovely Fashion Week.

– Charlotte Fassler on that Photoshop kickdrum, images via Vogue.com, The Cut, Style.com, Le 21ème & Fab Sugar.

Overthinking Undersharing

I recently wrote a story for Vanity Fair that questioned the presence of social media at fashion week. Citing Marc Jacobs’ recent show, which displayed a six-aisle runway and only front row seats (and obviously resulted in an avalanche of blurry images shared to Instagram from the manifold but unobstructed vantage points of show-goers), I thought about the widespread access that Mr. Jacobs shrewdly provided.

Content consumers were given the opportunity to sift through thousands of images, which were over shared by the content creators, but was that a good thing?

When I got to Paris two weeks ago, the first show that I attended was Balmain. Seated just across the runway from me, I found the Vogue Paris team situated, cross-legged with not a smartphone in sight. Just one block of bleachers to their left, a front row chock full of celebrities, fashion personalities and Instagram stars flourished, phones ready to capture the articles of clothing that would walk.

When the show started, I oscillated between observing the leopard print pony hair panels on Olivier Rousteing’s A-line mini skirts, the gaze that Emmanuelle Alt emitted, and the fifteen iPhones, propped up like ducks in a row, ready to capture just about anything on bleacher block #2.

It made me realize that I don’t want to be at shows because I have a dense social following. I want to be there because I have an opinion that is worth being fleshed out on the platform that informs my Instagram account. And so I resolved that I would stop taking pictures at shows unless I really believed, like in the case of Christian Dior or Chloé or Saint Laurent, that my purview was one worth sharing.

Most of the images I was posting were coming up cloudy and frankly, there are more portals than there are grains of sand on a beach providing clarion, hi-res images anyway, so why were my amateur shots (the unoriginal ones, at least) worth being shared to begin with?

The problem is, I’m aware of the fact that my phone-taken runway photos aren’t particularly strong. I’ve been aware of that since I first started using Instagram. And while there is certainly value is granting access to he or she who cannot attend a show, recently, I have been wondering (chiefly because I don’t want to share images — or experiences — that anyone else can or will) if my uploading tendencies have been moonlighting as a testament to my a) eliciting second-party FOMO (but why! Why would I want to do such a thing?), b) wanting to prove that I was there, too, or c) giving in to, as Man Repeller contributor Sophie Milrom puts it, Instagram’s popularity contest to prove that “my life is better than yours.”

On the quest to share-cleanse, all three conjectures were boxed together and proven correct with one recurring thought I had every time I sat down at another show: will people know I’m here even though I’m not posting?

But why does that even matter? I’d indubitably review the show shortly thereafter, thus sharing the experience in a decidedly longer form and further detailed recap.

It used to be that fashion shows functioned similarly to the way a book jacket does, providing a summary that would either push you to purchase what lives between the front and back covers or leave it dejected where you found it. But when that book jacket stopped summarizing and instead began laying out all its content for you to digest, sans enticement, in one quick glance, what happened? What were you left with if not mindless, void-filling precision? What are you left with if not mindless, void-filling precision?

Photograph shot by Garance Doré

Three’s a Trend: Patchwork Denim like It’s ’92 Again

I remember very distinctly that my younger brother Henry, when he was six years old, had a pair of mom jeans festooned with embroidered renderings of Taz the Tasmanian Devil, strategically placed across both butt pockets and on the pants’ left knee. I had a similar pair but mine contained images of Tweety Bird, who I kind of hated because the way he inflected pissed me off, so I never wore them.

I remember even more distinctly that in 2005, when I was still in high school and Uggs were more popular than Céline Birkenstocks are now, I went online and ordered iron-on patches from a website that I am pretty sure catered exclusively to Grateful Dead fans of the heavy drug-taking persuasion. I bought some rainbow colored “teddy bears” which I realized even then were emblems of the anterior band but also understood they were, hello!, rainbow teddy bears, dammit. When they arrived, I ironed them onto my Uggs and for about six months, I felt like — nay, was – the coolest girl at school.

Then I forgot about patchwork. Somewhere along the way, I was reminded of Melissa Joan Hart’s alter ego, Clarissa, and it was way too soon to be paying homage to such a recent, catastrophic amulet of the 90s. My parents also asked that I take a drug test given my effusiveness about the teddy bears and that seemed like a crude case of racial profiling as far as I was concerned.

But the September before last, Phillip Lim and Isabel Marant debuted their (decidedly different) versions of patchwork jeans while Junya Watanabe just rolled out his, appearing a season after Dries Van Noten did his version of the embroidery-tango. Additional denim suppliers (see: Mother) have followed suit and save for the oldest homage: manipulated JNCOs, here they are again, between the lines in street style photos from the recently departed (hallelujah!) fashion week season.

Me, personally, I am now contemplating the exact approximation of that first, devoid-of jam-band-paraphernalia slideshow image and I’ve so far come up with the following items:

Are you with me?

Come on, let’s shop. Or, you know, DIY.