Writes Amanda Mull in "It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Everyone Started Dressing Like Kramer/It’s the summer of Kramercore" (The Atlantic).
"Years of stretch fabrics that really needed the stretch have given way to breezy textiles and retro short-sleeved knits with a natural slouch, idiosyncratic prints, a lot more color, and maybe a little bit of embroidery. There are fewer sneakers and more loafers. And then there are all those camp collars.... Tired of the sameness and omnipresence of new clothes and nostalgic for a past that many of them don’t remember, young people have plunged themselves into thrifting and vintage resale, hunting for weird or interesting things from the ’90s and early 2000s."
Sounds like a repeat of the hippie movement.
Anyway, I like that word "louche." It's from French, where it means squinting. Squinting! How did a word that meant squinting travel into English and end up meaning whatever it is "louche" is supposed to mean? Well, according to the OED, in English it means "Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable." The oldest appearance in English is from 1819:
1819 Lady Morgan in Passages from Autobiogr. (1859) 318 There is some~thing louche about him, which does not accord with the abandon of careless, intimate intercourse.
Lady Morgan was probably just using French. Thackeray used the same "something louche about him" format in 1850:
Some 20th century uses by very classy writers:
A quick cold clasp now and then in some louche hovel.... um, yes... but what will you wear? Kramercore?1905 G. B. Shaw Lett. to Granville Barker (1956) 53 You could play Snobby. I want a slim, louche, servant-girl-bigamist, half-handsome sort of rascal.1921 A. Huxley Crome Yellow xvii. 182 There had seemed to be something a little louche in the way she had suddenly found herself alone with Ivor.
२९ टिप्पण्या:
"This summer, the stylish young men I’ve seen around New York..."
They'll do anything they can to avoid calling them gay.
Although I understood the gist of louche, I couldn't have given a detailed definition. Now it will forever be defined for me as Kramercore, which is descriptively perfect.
Hipster doofus, an apt description of Cosmo Kramer coined by a character within the show. One surmises Amanda Mull knows many hipster doofi, herself among them, but hardly everyone or even a substantial fraction of everyone, just of a thankfully scare genus of thoughtless conformists sardines packed in a small can, what John Podhertz has called the bizarrely naive quality of hermetic liberal provincialism.
Summer of Newman
I liked the term "inescapable skinny pants." It made me think of Houdini.
Should've gone back another decade or so. Men's clothes in the mid-to-late '80s reached the apex of tastefulness over fad. Unlike '80s hair.
Althouse writes, "Anyway, I like that word 'louche.'"
As an occasional enjoyer of absinthe, I'm familiar with louche as a verb, the action of water on the liquor that makes the clear greenish liquid transform into lovely, swirling opalescent clouds. And I've read the word as an adjective in literature, but my peek into the etymology doesn't quite jibe with squinting.
First off, Google Translate equates the French louche with English suspicious making the modern French usage a dead-ringer cognate with our usage. However, the word itself traces to Latin lusca, the feminine of luscus, meaning one-eyed. So how does that relate to its French descendant? A classics scholar could be consulted, but I'll venture a wild guestimate. Who might be one-eyed in the Roman world? Anyone, really, but an inordinate percentage of ruffians and hooligans could be expected to have an odd number of eyes among them, and there's the infamous Cyclops of the Odyssey -- pirates and monsters, they're all sort of louche, aren't they?
Anything is better than a skinny royal blue suit with pants to the ankles and orange shoes.
I'm jumping ahead and ordering an urban sumbrero
The ultimate Krameria:
https://youtu.be/yRIVzA27lA0
Did anyone know what a "camp collar" (shirt) was without looking it up?
I just discovered that I've been wearing them all my life!
I thought Kramer (or the actor who portrayed him) was not to mentioned anymore, that he was persona non grata, cancelled, finis, sent to the gulag.
When was he rehabilitated?
It made me think of Houdini.
All sorts of lore swirl around the figure of Harry Houdini, and many people even today repeat that lore as established facts 98 years after his passing. Inescapable. Nothing is what it seems when it comes to magic. Besides being the paradigm of theatrical illusionists, Erich Weisz was perhaps the last example of an American literary phenomenon, a living person presented as a fictional character.
The Wild West of the post-Civil War era spawned a market for penny-dreadful tracts and novelettes featuring real people such as James Butler Hickok and William Frederick Cody engaged in absurd, violent, and usually made-up heroics against road agents, redskins, and oily card sharps, with the typical rescue of the comely rancher's daughter as a finale. Cody happily endorsed the manure written about him because it made him a fortune as Buffalo Bill. However, "Wild Bill" was murdered by an idiot who was strongly influenced by such scribblings. The last of that disreputable form was perhaps the adventures of Harry Houdini, leader of the Pinkerton bunko squad dedicated to the exposure and prosecution of spiritualists, seers, and necromancers, evil fraudsters all on the hunt for the wealthy and gullible widows seeking solace as chronicled in the crusading Police Gazette. Of course, those articles were wholly fictional and very lucrative compared to the actual investment of Houidini's time, more or less none. In fact, Houdini did crusade against spiritualists and mediums but mostly in the press and by demonstrating their methods of trickery and illusion to panels of scientists and law enforcement officials, much as the late Jame Randi has done.
My oldest daughter bagged up so many clothes and brought them up for me &her 2sisters to try and then get rid of. She’s got great taste- &can afford the good things.
I picked out a few dress blouses and some pants. I tell you- wearing those beautiful blouses feels like skinny dipping!! Weightless. Like liquid.
I never could decide on anything-
don’t get me started on my damned hair :0/
Kramer's stuff is good on TV.
But not on me.
Well, that's one thing (of many) about New York, just because one is fashionable doesn't mean one is gay.
"Watch another TV sitcom." - borrowed and adapted from critics of people who use Harry Potter references incessantly and seemingly exclusively.
"I liked the term "inescapable skinny pants." It made me think of Houdini."
Skinny jeans were created as a way to further emasculate men.
Urkel did it first.
"Style is forever, fashion is apple sauce." Mortimer Levitt, The Custom Look
Ice Nine said...
Did anyone know what a "camp collar" (shirt) was without looking it up?
No.
Now I feel like I should switch to wearing those instead of t-shirts here in AZ and fancy myself all Hemmingway-esque. Younger Hemmingway. Not the really fat bearded one.
I didn't know 'camp-collar' either, and also thought that all mention of Kramer/Richards in the MSM was streng verboten. Surely there was some ritual distancing in the piece?
I did know 'louche,' and have used it here, but I'm not an Atlantic scribbler . . .
"Well, that's one thing (of many) about New York, just because one is fashionable doesn't mean one is gay."
"It doesn't help."
-George
Humperdink said...
"Urkel did it first."
Beaver and his brother Wally did it first.
Next thing you're going to tell me is that puffy pirate shirts will finally be the fashion.
Gay is just a detail, Robert Cook. Fashionable means one has far more money than brains or character.
"Fashionable means one has far more money than brains or character."
Sometimes not even money. Believe it or not, in 17th and 18th century Europe some men frequently went into great debt so they look as homosexual as possible.
The first time I saw the word “louche,” was to describe Bill Clinton. His picture should be next to the word in the dictionary.
Esquire covered this trend five years ago so my conclusion there is that The Atlantic is not really a fashion mag.
Anyway, apparently the Prada spring line in 2018 was a direct rip off of Kramer. Photos don't lie!
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