"Capes that flowed into skirts, coats on top of denim jackets and socks worn over tights.... layers were bright sweaters or cozy scarves... many people were covered up [or] wearing shorts, high-slit skirts or other layers...."

In case you want to feel as though it will be perfectly fashionable to throw on as many oversized comfortable layers of whatever you happen to find in your closet, look at the photographs at "Layers Upon Layers of Lively Fall Fashion/Capes that flowed into skirts, coats on top of denim jackets, socks over tights — and don’t forget scarves and sweaters" (NYT)(free-access link).

The article is by Simbarashe Cha, who works in the tradition of the much-missed Bill Cunningham. Scanning the photographs, I get the feeling he was working on sets that didn't pan out. One unrealized set is "twins" (2 individuals out and about while dressed somewhat like each other). Another is the double breasted jacket. Those pictures are tucked into fashion's biggest catch-all: layers.

I was reminded of the famous advice attributed to Coco Chanel: 

"Whether playing a streetwalker or a terrorist, Ms. Karina managed to look flirtatious, with her dark hair, wispy bangs, heavy eyeliner..."

"... and chic wardrobe of sailor-uniform tops, knee socks, lots of plaid and perky headwear, from berets to boaters.... At 14, she dropped out of school, sang in cabarets and worked as a television model. At 17, she ran away from home — hitchhiking to Paris — and was discovered by the casting director of an advertising agency while sitting at Les Deux Magots, the fashionable Left Bank cafe. During a photo shoot for Elle magazine, she met the fashion designer Coco Chanel, who advised her to change her name. Godard, a film critic at the time, saw her in a movie theater ad for a Palmolive bath product. When he subsequently offered her a small part in his first full-length film... she objected to doing a nude scene. Godard said he didn’t understand — after all, he had just seen her onscreen in a bathtub, looking very comfortable and showing plenty of skin. 'I wasn’t nude,' she told him... 'That was your imagination.' She had been wearing a swimsuit in the tub, she said, and “the soapsuds were up to my neck.'... After her divorce from Godard ('He would say he was going out for cigarettes and come back three weeks later,' she told The Guardian), she married several other times... Ms. Karina was happy to acknowledge Godard as a Pygmalion figure, but also pointed out her own contributions... 'I gave him self-confidence.'"

From the NYT obituary for Anna Karina, whose  name, prior to that encounter with Coco Chanel, was Hanne Karin Bayer.

70 years ago today, Christian Dior unveiled what was called "The New Look."

Wikipedia:

[T]he new collection went down in fashion history as the "New Look" after the editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar Carmel Snow exclaimed, "It's such a new look!... It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian!"... The silhouette was characterised by a small, nipped-in waist and a full skirt falling below mid-calf length, which emphasised the bust and hips... The collection overall showcased more stereotypically feminine designs in contrast to the popular fashions of wartime...



The New Look was welcomed in western Europe as a refreshing antidote to the austerity of wartime and de-feminizing uniforms....

Not everyone was pleased with the New Look, however. Some considered the amount of material to be wasteful, especially after years of cloth rationing. Feminists in particular were outraged, feeling that these corseted designs were restrictive and regressive, and that they took away a woman's independence.

Fellow designer Coco Chanel remarked, "Only a man who never was intimate with a woman could design something that uncomfortable."

It's just by chance that Coco Chanel came up a second time in my blogging this morning. The first appearance is here, as I discuss Trump's remarks about how phony he'd look with a dog. There was an old Chanel quote that sprang to mind. This Chanel quote exemplifies the homophobia that used to be aimed at fashion designers. So often, when I was growing up in the 1960s, I heard the older generation opine that the reason this or that new fashion looked horrible was because fashion designers, being gay, hated women.

The Chanel quote isn't so much about hate as ignorance, as if having sex with a woman — presumably a naked woman — would educate a man about what she'd find comfortable as she does the things she does with clothes on. Or maybe not. I can see how to get Chanel off the hook. Maybe she meant that a man who spends time living with a flesh-and-blood woman would think about her various real-life activities, and a man who dealt only with fashion models has a more static or theatrical vision.

"You do love your dogs, don't you? I wouldn't mind having one honestly, but I don't have time. How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?"

Trump, in El Paso, last night.

"Would that be [makes a face] — right? — sort of not — right? I don't feel good. Feels a little phony — phony to me. People say, Oh, you should get a dog. Why? It's good politically. I said, That's not the relationship I have with my people."

Trump muses about having a dog at the White House, but concludes "it feels a little phony to me."

"That's not the relationship I have with my people... Obama had a dog." pic.twitter.com/xZTuMozOYk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2019

Someone in the crowd calls out "Obama!" Trump points at him, laughs, and says, "Yeah, Obama had a dog, you're right."

Perhaps the man in the crowd wanted Trump to riff on Obama's childhood acceptance of eating dog meat in Indonesia, but Trump only spoke of the dog Obama acquired as he entered the White House. Obama's dog acquisition really did seem to be a political move, and Trump could have gone on about the phoniness of Obama's dog specifically, but he moved on to another subject. He'd already made his point that White House dogs seem phony and acknowledged — I'm reading his face-making — that in his case walking around with a dog would look especially phony.

When I was listening to the speech last night, when Trump said "That's not the relationship I have with my...," I thought he was going to talk about relationships with pets and say something about not getting a pet that you are not committed to spending time with and treating as a fellow sentient creature. That's one reason not to get a pet.

But he said "That's not the relationship I have with my people." For a second, I thought he was calling dogs "people," then I realized he was going to a completely different place. He wasn't talking about what dogs deserve. He was criticizing the politicians who get dogs to influence how human beings think about them. It's phony. It's manipulation. And Trump doesn't do that.

We could talk about what Trump does do and whether any of it is phony, but, whatever, he doesn't do it with dogs. And maybe he only refrains from using a dog as a political prop because it just wouldn't work for him. It would just look wrong for him to walk around with a dog. That seems to be what he's thinking about as he makes those faces and gestures. GWB and Obama looked pretty sweet walking with their dogs. Trump is a showman, but that means he knows what shows to put on. And maybe he is just being himself, doing what comes from his true core, whatever that is. It's hard to think of his self-presentation as natural and purely self-expressive, but maybe in some weird way, it is.

This discussion makes me think of the old Coco Chanel aphorism: "Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve."

Nature didn't make his hair go like that or turn his skin orange. There's some unnatural stuff going on, but — at least theoretically — those things express the man. And that is what Chanel meant, that what you look like when you are old is what came from the inside.

"She is standing slightly behind him, considerably more sombre. In buttoned-up black, her long, dark locks tumbling in abundant waves, she is Botticelli’s Venus as channelled by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark..."

"... an icon of the Calabasas Renaissance. Her pose is stiff, her jacket sleeves pushed up in a gesture of can-do, eighties-style power-dressing."

A description of Kim Kardashian, in "Kim Kardashian Meeting Donald Trump in the Oval Office Is a Nightmare We Can’t Wake Up From" by Naomi Fry in The New Yorker.

I blogged that because when I read it I got a twinge of envy from the realization that if I'd wanted to write a description, I wouldn't have come up with those details.

Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing. pic.twitter.com/uOy4UJ41JF

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018

I mean, there's the photo. We can all see it, but can we string together words like that? And yet, what is it about those 2 sentences that makes me think other people are the writers — the writer writers?

1. "buttoned-up... tumbling... channelled... pushed up" — we're entertained with swirling action, even though it's a static, formal, boring posed photograph. How did Fry see all that stuff? How did she arrange it so it's up, down, around, and back up again.

2. We've got cultural references: Botticelli’s Venus (I know what that is) somehow merged with ("channelled by") Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (which I would have thought I knew who she was but the reference to the Calabasas Renaissance is telling me I am an idiot to think that).

3. Those sleeves! So much happening there: "her jacket sleeves pushed up in a gesture of can-do, eighties-style power-dressing." I would have thought the can-do gesture was rolling up your sleeves, and that bunchy push-up look was something casual that people did in the 80s because of Don Johnson on "Miami Vice" and that the power dressing of the 80s was something else, something more northeastern and businesslike, not a Floridian police-work fantasy.

4. Those "long, dark locks tumbling in abundant waves." I would not have dared to use all those words. Like Coco Chanel with her "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off," I'd have looked at that sentence and felt obliged to strike one word out. One or three or four. And I couldn't bring myself to call hair "locks." Especially near "waves." I'd get influenced by the wateriness of "waves" and think of the locks in canals.

5. Why are we talking like this about a woman? She's a real human being. Is it okay to make her into some sort of clusterfuck of female iconography? I'd get stalled in some vague ethical cogitation and not save my time for putting out crafting that kind of prose.

"She just looks so fake now, the white wigs, the excessive makeup, I can’t picture her getting dirty or riding ATVs"/"I'd watch an episode of that reality show."

Comments on a Tom & Lorenzo blog post about the Marie Claire cover story on Gwen Stefani, which says:

On life with Blake Shelton – recently named People’s Sexiest Man Alive – and how they spend their time on Shelton’s ranch in Oklahoma: “It’s very tribal. Blake has a sister, she comes with her kids. We cook and get muddy and dirty. There are ATV’s. Being a mother of three boys, it’s kind of the perfect place. Everything is real now, whereas before, things didn’t seem so real.”

So the subject is: What is reality and can you picture it? It's possible that her claim of getting to what is real is a con. But certainly all that wiggery and makeup is a con, except that it's real in the context of the cover of a fashion magazine. It's frankly fake.* It's the cover of a magazine, exactly what it is, and not some pretense of the "natural look" (achieved with subtle makeup and hair styled into "windblown" strands or faux "bedhead").

Stefani invites you to picture her getting dirty riding ATVs on a ranch in Oklahoma, but she doesn't give you pictures of that. The pictures would necessarily be posed. You have to use your imagination, and you will be very much grounded in the reality that what you are seeing is your mental picture.



____________________

* "Coco Chanel is credited for having coined the phrase 'frankly fake' and igniting a craze for high wattage, oversized baubles set with obviously faux pearls and gems...."