Harper's Bazaar did that round-up in 2014, and Diana Vreeland worked there from 1936 until 1962 and then at Vogue from 1962 to 1971. I got sidetracked into the topic of Diana Vreeland after blogging about the Vogue editorship passing from Anna Wintour to Chloe Malle. As I noted in the comments section to that earlier post, I had a job in the early 1970s that required me to read Vogue (among many other magazines) ever month. I was intensely aware that there had been an earlier era that was so much wilder and crazier.
But the pink bulletin board with thumbtacks seems within anyone's reach. I assume "pin with colored thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms" means use colored thumb-tacks to pin up slips of paper upon which you've written words representing whatever you're currently feeling enthusiastic about.
"Instead, the title is 'head of editorial content, US'.... Over three decades, Wintour has transformed fashion from a mainly trade-facing industry to a billion-dollar celebrity and pop culture vehicle.She has turned Vogue from a monthly print magazine into an omnichannel digital brand.... 'Anna is basically the CEO of fashion and this new job isn’t that,' says a fashion veteran who did not want to be named. 'As we’ve seen at the other editions, these heads of content aren’t mini editors-in-chief — they’re quite muted figures. This person might be seen as ‘the new Anna’ from the outside, but Anna is still very much in control.'...There are those who say that, rather than marking a new era, this job indicates the end of one. As one industry stalwart puts it: 'This is very much an assistant position. Vogue dies with Anna.'"
"Minimalism and quiet luxury were in vogue. But in the wake of President Trump’s second election, it’s the luxe life at full volume. He gilded the White House, turning it into a rococo Liberace lair. Swaggy and braggy have replaced stealth wealth. Flaunting it is in. For women, that means sequins, diamonds, tight silhouettes and big hair.... And now there are the Bezos-Sánchez nuptials.... Ms. Sánchez brings to mind another unlikely Vogue subject: Ivana Trump. Ms. Wintour gave her a cover in 1990, shortly before her divorce from Mr. Trump, after worrying, as I reported in a biography of Ms. Wintour, that she was 'too tacky.'... As much as those with more understated taste might turn up their noses at the crassness of the Bezos-Sánchez wedding’s display, tacky is very clearly carrying the day. Maybe hating on tacky oligarchs is itself just elitist...."
"Just like the met gala is a ridiculous, outdated event that does no good except for advancing privilege. I hope we begin to understand how many generous, kind people there are in the world and that those are the individuals we should be celebrating."
The first-highest-rated comment: "It's kind of rich when a newspaper that oozes white privilege and credential worship, prints endless real-estate stories about zillion-dolllar properties, and covers celebrities endlessly in its style magazine and arts pages goes after Anna Wintour."
The NYT is going after Anna Wintour — not because she said anything arguably racist or got caught in blackface or anything like that, but simply because she is powerful and imperious and because, apparently, Vogue is a fashion magazine.
They also have this quote from André Leon Talley, "a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue": "I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame. I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege."
A colonial broad, whatever "colonial" is supposed to mean. As for "broad"... it's a blatantly sexist word, but sexism was last year's concern. This year it's race, and for some perverted reason, we can't concern ourselves with both at the same time.
She is literally a "Dame" — I'm reading that at Wikipedia, where I also learn that she lives in Greenwich Village, rises before 6 a.m., "rarely stays at parties for more than 20 minutes at a time and goes to bed by 10:15 every night." For lunch she eats "a steak (or bunless hamburger)" but years ago it was "smoked salmon and scrambled eggs every single day." She wears sunglasses all the time because they are "actually corrective lenses" but also (as one acquaintance says) "you know, really, armour."
Politically, she's a big supporter of Democrats. They say if Hillary Clinton had won, Anna Wintour would have become the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. And now, look what she gets. The NYT coming after her for nothing. You can't devote your life to fashion for the sake of fashion in the Social Justice Regime.
Wintour has built her entire career on the foundation of fetishizing white-woman meanness... Wintour’s persona isn’t just of a boss that’s tough to please, but of a woman boss who’s just as awful as a man could be. It’s an earlier, less PR-optimized incarnation of the Nasty Woman/Girl Boss modus operandi: the idea that being authoritarian or contemptuous at work is feminist, because if men get to do it, why can’t women?
Wintour embraces a version of femininity that says you have to be skinny, white, elegant, aloof, and rich..... Wintour found power in being icy, while third-wave “feminist” bosses learned to hide their harshness behind public displays of feminist solidarity....
Feminism is so last year. This year is all about race. Wintour is white, so she's out.
"... (sizeism, ageism — and, above all, racism, a recurring and painful through-line) to his own failed lap band surgery and inability to have a romantic relationship (he was abused as a child by a neighbor), it’s as if simply acknowledging the existence of these facts — the way they marred the otherwise gorgeous vistas of the industry as it unfurled in his mind — is enough. He never really looks at whether the rewards were worth the price exacted.... He was the diva he wanted to be... complete with his own often demanding behavior, and the diva his boss [Anna Wintour] needed, shaped by the divas of yore (Diana Vreeland, Andy Warhol). But today fashion has no more room or patience for such divas — not in magazines or modeling or designer ateliers — and Mr. Talley has grandiosed himself out of a job.... It’s the tension between fantasy (or the world as you would like it to look) and reality, that is the essence of fashion. But perhaps the attempt to have one without the other is what it took to be him: a pioneer; the most famous black man in the glossy world — often the only black person in the room...."
"... Anna Wintour has sculpted her hair into a bishop’s hat with mousse, a cape made of Martin Luther’s skin, Benedict is here in a modest swimsuit. I want Miley to stick out her tongue and there’s a wafer on it. I want the Royal Baby to roll down the red carpet completely soaked with holy water. But so far it’s just like a rose, some lace, I’m carrying a book!... Jared Leto has dressed as Jesus. We hate him for doing it, but we would also hate him if he hadn’t! Imagine how gross it would feel to be healed by Jared Leto/Walk on the water and let it bathe you Jared Leto/Ya got holes in your feet because you were walking around barefoot in a parking lot Jared Leto... Bella Hadid looks like she’s going up to heaven to whip God’s horse...."
Everyone was all Hosanna-Heysanna over this look on social media last night, lauding Gucci Jesus for really sticking with the theme of the night. That’s great and all, but he pretty much dresses like this all the time, so it came off slightly less impressive to us.
Lots of pictures of Leto. And comments. E.g., "Isn't that the blouse that Jane Fonda wore in 9 to 5?"
Mr. Picardi grew up in North Andover, Mass. His father, a devout Catholic, owned a technology company. His mother was a homemaker and an executive assistant.... It made for a sometimes challenging environment for the young Mr. Picardi. “I was gay,” he said. “G.A.Y., with an exclamation mark and a little asterisk.”
He came out to his parents in the summer before ninth grade. It was 2 in the morning, and Mr. Picardi, who had just finished watching “Queer as Folk,” burst into their bedroom and said: “Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you.” His mother sobbed as he said everything he had to say. Ten minutes later, his father rolled over and asked what was going on. He had slept through it.
His parents sent him to a Catholic therapist and instructed him not to tell his neighbors, his friends or his younger brother. Before coming out, he had wanted to be a lawyer. Now, he decided, he should work in fashion.
“I watched ‘Will & Grace,’ and that’s what it felt like they were doing, more or less,” he said.
TV is influential!
You know, I find "Philip" such a hard name to spell. It it one L or two? It's hard to see, because the lower-case i also looks like an L. Picardi is a 2-L Phillip. He even spells "Phill" with 2 Ls, which seems excessive, but it was "Will & Grace," not "Wil & Grace."
Philip means fond of horses. "Phil" is love, of course, as in "philanthropy," and "ip" is the same as "hippos," which means horse. (A hippopotamus is a horse of the patomos (the river).)
Anyway, did you as a child get any ideas about how to live and be your true self by looking at some TV-show character? Here's a list of the top-rated TV shows when I was in 9th grade. Who would I have looked at and thought, well, that's where I'm going? I see 3 housewives and a "jeannie." The jeannie and one of the housewives had superpowers, and the other 2 were Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) and Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor). I can see why I was so deeply affected when the hippies suddenly appeared on TV...
ADDED: I found that 1969 Gomer clip because I was looking for things with "Goldie" (that is, Leigh French), and I did not recognize — until EDH asked about it — that the other hippie there is Rob Reiner. And here's Reiner as Mitch the hippie in a scene in a 1969 episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies":
WWD retreats into quoting Anna Wintour (who is not only the editor of Vogue editor but also the artistic Director of Condé Nast of which Vanity Fair is a part). Wintour only made a gentle gibe, "I’m not sure if I should include a new pair of tights in her welcome basket."
I'm more interested in interpreting the metaphors. What can you say about a navy blue dress strewn with zippers? It says women have the power now. The zipper's strongest association is with the fly on a man's pants. We might say a man with uncontrolled sexual compulsions has a "zipper problem," as in "Jackie Collins Knew Bill Clinton Had A ‘Zipper Problem’" (HuffPo, 2011)("I remember, before Clinton was president, I was sitting at a dinner in Beverly Hills and one of his aides was there and told me that he was definitely going to be president, except for one problem: the zipper problem.... They knew way before he was elected!").
And then a navy blue dress... I think of Monica Lewinsky.
Therefore I interpret Radhika Jones's dress as wry political commentary: the end of the political subjugation of women, the end of silencing — zip your lip, not mine — and a new era of female domination.
Now, let's consider the item of clothing that was even more attention-getting and metaphor-pushing than a blue dress strewn with zippers: tights covered in foxes.
So there were many zippers on the dress and many foxes on the tights, which is a message of multiplicity already. But each of the many foxes is also a symbol of knowing many things.
There is, of course, the idea of women as "foxes," which was already laughably sexist when Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin played Festrunk Brothers in 1978 (and Garrett Morris had to explain that you can't talk about American women like that):
I'd say the foxes on Radhika Jones's tights represent a reclaiming of an old diminishment, amplified and multiplied, and complicated by zippers. Foxes run around, finding out about everything, uncovering what is hidden, and zippers enclose while suggesting a sudden, perhaps shocking disclosure. That's all very apt as a message about journalism, and it's an exciting way to say that a woman is now in charge.
And I created a "zippers" tag and went back and applied it to old posts. I was amused by how many times over the years I've talked about the Brian Regan comedy bit about Zipper, the bad dolphin (in contrast to Flipper) — "Zipper's surly. He is uncaring."
Meade, reading this post, said his first association with zipper was the "zipless fuck" (in Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"). I had to do some additional retroactive tagging, because I'd only searched for "zipper." Searching for "zipless," I found places where I'd talked about Erica Jong's idea, including one in the context Trump's "Access Hollywood" remarks, from October 8, 2016 (the day after the sudden, shocking disclosure of the tape):
[I]f you watch the whole video, you see him winning with another woman, Arianne Zucker, the one who, in Trump's words, is "hot as shit, in the purple." Zucker is the one who inspired him to say "I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
And in fact, you see the female version of that power trip: The woman plays on the man's sexual interest. Grab them by the crotch. Zucker looks entirely pleased with herself, demands to walk in the center and grabs the arms of both men. If that is what is expected and that is the norm in your workplace, how can you be the cold one who keeps her sexuality to herself?
I invite you to contemplate why this got me thinking about Erica Jong's concept of the "zipless fuck":
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
Ms. Gingrich was appearing at her confirmation hearing — she's nominated for ambassador to the Vatican — and her hair was "a perfectly styled chin-length bob with a side swoosh... controlled and proper and smooth."
Yes, but what is "mythic Washington" that has anything to do with Callista's surrealistic hair?
[H]er hair is being discussed because it manages to be both utterly unique and a marker of the kind of place that Washington... once believed itself to be but certainly is no longer.... a mythic Washington: a place of order and comportment, stuffy but reliable, self-conscious, mannered, impervious. And most of all, studiously dignified.
Is it so stuffy and sober? It's got that insouciant, elongated, extra curve...
Who has done that before while saying take me seriously? If Callista Gingrich were a liberal, wouldn't Robin Givhan be enthusing about how modern and impudently playful it was?
Oh, but it's hard, it "does not move or swing a la Anna Wintour’s timeless golden bob."
It's a stiff hard prong, like a horn, for the lady who's going to represent us in the Vatican. If you wanted to say it poked at convention in a delightful new way, you could.
That side swoosh made me think of all the talk of the significance of upward curves in Seurat paintings like "Le Cirque" and "Le Chahut":
What does it mean, the upward curve? I remember reading (long ago) that Seurat thought it meant happiness and joy, but I can't confirm that. Rereading this post, I'm tempted — by the horned devil? — to make the Freudian leap and say it signifies the erect penis. And that's not inconsistent with happiness and joy. And perhaps that's why it's disconcerting — to Givhan and others — that it's so stiff and hard.
"In the movie, we see what happens when Gwyneth Paltrow's character comes home early from work one day to find her boyfriend cheating on her. We also see the alternative, where she is delayed on her way home and doesn't catch him. The most exciting part of the movie? In the timeline where she catches her cheating boyfriend, she ends up with the world's most awesome haircut...."
1. You remember Wintour, the Vogue editor who did a glamorous party for Obama where it wasn't just fashion insiders, who get what she's supposed to be, and there was that video, turning the do into a competition where one common person would be permitted to mix with the Wintour-getting folk, and she was all "It'll be a fahntahzztic evahnahng, ahnnd you cahhhnn join us."
2. Why haven't we seen Wintour at the Democratic Convention? They've been parading one woman after another across their stage. Obviously, though she's about keeping up with fashion trends, she's thoroughly out of touch with the American political style — they way you have to talk to the people. But the Obama campaign is trying to pick the right people for their message, and they learned their lesson after they wheeled out Wintour last spring and let her unleash her mannerisms and affectations for the camera. (It's the other party that's supposed to be the rich, so you sure don't want someone who talks and tics like a stereotype of a rich dame.)
3. But Robin Givhan, the Daily Beast fashion-and-politics writer, is pumping the rumor that Wintour is after an ambassadorship. Robin Givhan, who's never hidden her fond love for the Obamas. (Just a couple days ago, she celebrated Michelle's perfect-for-politics fashion.) Why, then, would Givhan spread the rumour about Wintour? That doesn't help Obama. We should not be looking at that right now!
4. My guess is: Givhan is toning it down, and Wintour has the ambassadorship in the bag. The terribly expensive bag.
This is completely mundane to me. Of course, a house that a real family lives in is different from the norm for a glamorous lunch party. Whether Anna Wintour or some less divine stylist is doing the redoing, it must be redone.
Have you ever heard of the term "shabby chic"? That is how the New York Post describes Sarah Jessica Parker's house. The decor is shabby chic. I've never heard it, either. I don't know what it is. But they had... It's in the Post. Apparently, people were over there Windexing doorknobs. This place is made out to be an absolute pigsty that Anna Wintour had to go into and clean. No, I'm telling you that's how it's written. There are people cleaning the doorknobs, washing the windows, taking a piano upstairs, moving furniture out, moving furniture in.
Etc. etc. After the break, he's got a definition of the term — it's from Wikipedia, though he doesn't say so — and he's quoting and riffing:
"Shabby chic is a form of interior design where furniture and furnishings are either chosen" because they look old and worn out, with "signs of wear and tear." Or if they're new items, they're made to look that way. Flaking paint, dents, little chunks taken out of the wood table in the kitchen. I have pictures of some of this stuff. It looks like you'd run into it in one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins. At least to me. "At the same time, a soft, opulent, yet cottage-style decor, often with a feminine feel is emphasized to differentiate it from genuine period decor."
Anyway, Anna Wintour didn't like it. She got it out of there. It's not even her house. It's Sarah Jessica Parker's place. Anna Wintour shows up, and she probably said, "I'm not going in there. I am not setting foot in this place! I'm not having my picture taken in a place like this." So the story goes on. She moved the piano upstairs. They were spray painting stuff, washing doorknobs inside and out. They're making the place sound like a pigsty.
Limbaugh obviously wants it to be that Parker is a big old slob, but "shabby chic" is a decorating term that has nothing to do with things being filthy or even messy. And "one of Hatfield or McCoy's cabins"... that's a way to say "hillbillies" without saying "hillbillies." Limbaugh wants to say: this is the case of the biggest fashionista in the room calling another fashionista a hillbilly. The material is not there, because "shabby chic" is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.) But Limbaugh nevertheless follows his original impulse, that Wintour and her people insulted Parker by calling her home "shabby."
IN THE COMMENTS: I say: "Note to commenters: References to Parker's resemblance to a horse have been done, done, and overdone. Come up with something new." And Crack Emcee says: "Glad to oblige," and — quoting me "The material is not there, because 'shabby chic' is a technical decorating term. (My Google image search tells me it's very heavy on the color white.)" — says "Oh, that shit is HEAVY alright." Indeed!
ADDED: An antidote to the heavy at Crack's link. By the way, we're repainting our house, and we're repainting black and white. What we need to survive... together alive...
I know this is a few days old, but I've been laughing at it for a few days, and I'm convinced now that it is ageless, so embed I must:
I could swear that at 0:22, she says "We're saving the 2 best teats in the house for you," but Meade won't agree.
I'm just trying to imagine the life a person would have to live to develop these mannerisms and affectations. Perhaps Anna Wintour came upon this personal style through hard work and wonderful creativity, but it's just so freaky! Why did the Obama campaign folk imagine this wasn't horribly, embarrassingly out of touch with Americans? That's the question.
By the way, is Wintour American? Because if she is, what the hell is that accent? Some kind of Jackie-Kennedy-gone-mad inflection? Okay, she was born in England. So I can't fathom depth of the phoniness. It's a mystery. And I think she is an American citizen now, so it's not that ridiculous for the campaign to want to use her as a lure for donors. But... someone in that campaign should have realized how mockable this would be and said no.
Here's a feminist clue from me to Media Matters: If you think it's "sexist" to make fun of how a particular woman looks and talks, but you don't have an equivalent principle with respect to making fun of how a particular man looks and talks, then you are being sexist. No special protection for the ladies — especially when they step into the political arena.
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