"The singer... swapp[ed] her trademark sweats for a style more domme than deb: pink Gucci corset and skirt over Agent Provocateur skivvies, accessorized with latex gloves and leggings. The choice was her own, Edward Enninful, the magazine’s editor in chief, wrote in the June issue. 'What if, she wondered, she wanted to show more of her body for the first time in a fashion story?' Mr. Enninful recalled. 'What if she wanted to play with corsetry and revel in the aesthetic of the mid-20th century pin-ups she’s always loved? It was time, she said, for something new.' To that end Ms. Eilish embraced the shopworn trimmings of female allure, offering the camera, without apparent irony, a nod to the sirens of golden age Hollywood and some of more recent vintage: Taylor Swift, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion among them."
First, "garner" — she garners her fans. Doesn't just get them and doesn't quite win them. She garners them, so picture her storing them in silos, like grain.
If you've already garnered a "world of fans," what do you do next? Maybe offload some of them. Offend. Disappoint. She was the girl who covered up her body with big, heavy tracksuits — which she said she wore so people wouldn't focus on her body — so the opportunity was there, inside the suit, to put the body on show.
Enninful's quote challenges our credulity. It was all her idea. And it was "play"! Oh, was it? The NYT critic, La Perla, says she went for "the shopworn trimmings of female allure... without apparent irony." If it was play, why does it look so unplayful? Maybe the photographer's attempts to make it seem playful looked staged and creepy, and the glum face — hostage face — seemed at least arguably sophisticated.
Let's break the Enninful quote in half. The second half is believable:
"... @wantshowasyoung. The pair pose in compelling outfits styled from clothes their laundromat customers have left behind. The account is now up to over 654,000 followers and the pair was recently named the ambassadors for Taipei Fashion Week."
I'm amused by the way the WSJ tried so hard to get the double letters in "millennial" right and came up with "milllenials."
Anyway... @wantshowasyoung isn't about youngish people dressing like really old people. It's old people wanting to "show as young" — look young. I'm blogging this little side issue, because I like the Instagram account. Such a perfect idea. Example:
As for millennials and Gen Zers dressing like "grandfathers," my favorite example of this is the YouTube icon Review Brah, who explains here — in his mesmerizing style — why he dresses like that:
And the comments to the article (by Amy Sohn) are full of expressions of thanks. The top-rated comment:
Thank you, Amy Sohn for this article. Thank you. And thank you for naming the work of 4thwavenow. The health impacts of experimental transgender medicine on children and teens very much needs to be brought to the public's attention.
From the doctor [quoted in the article]: “It’s strange to me that someone would think of a binder as being a form of self-harm when there are so many other garments used by gender-typical people to change their appearance that are also extremely uncomfortable (hello high heels …).”"
Everyone should be concerned about this blase attitude from clinicians with regards to potential harm being done to otherwise healthy bodies. And the bodies of children at that. High heels are not benign. High heels hurt women's feet, backs, knees, and can permanently change your physical structure. Binders should be seen as yet another way of "fixing" the female body, when there is nothing wrong in the first place.
Again, thank you.
Another comment:
Thank you for this article , it’s the first time I’ve seen the Times recognize (if ever so slightly) the epidemic of teenage girls suddenly identifying as trans. Breast binding, cross sex hormones, double mastectomies (what you call “top surgeries”) and phalloplasties are dangerous, invasive interventions with lifelong consequences. None of these coping strategies for bodily distress are healthy or sustainable. There is little proof that they are even effective at relieving dysphoria / dysmorphia. Teen girls that are in distress about their bodies need loving and intense therapeutic support. If they aren’t heterosexual and/or feminine, they need and deserve full family acceptance of this. Parents should never enable or validate self harm or self hatred. These kids deserve better care that teaches them to love and accept their bodies and themselves. If they decide to medically transition as adults, in full understanding of the risks and benefits , that’s their choice. But kids should not be pushed onto this beltway.
"You can get it on without even lacing or unlacing. By the end I was just snapping it on, snapping it off. It was like second nature. Keira Knightley, who I think has been in more corsets than any other human, told me that there was a whole thing with eating. That you have to time your meals, because otherwise it starts to come up. Definitely. For better or for worse, the corsets kind of put you into the character because it does literally affect everything that you do: Breathing, walking, running, sitting, standing, and definitely eating. Yeah, you do kinda have to time it out because it can not feel so good after lunch."
"In 1967 Harold Baldwin published there an article, 'Building better blivets,' in which he described the rules for the construction of drawings based on the impossible fork. In December 1968 American optical designer and artist Roger Hayward wrote a humorous submission 'Blivets: Research and Development' for The Worm Runner's Digest in which he presented various drawings based on the blivet. He 'explained' the term as follows: 'The blivet was first discovered in 1892 in Pfulingen, Germany, by a cross-eyed dwarf named Erasmus Wolfgang Blivet.'..."
I was trying to remember how I'd heard that word defined, and I don't think it's what Bad L was thinking of (which comes up in the Urban Dictionary definition: "Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag").
And I'm sure it wasn't The Impossible Trident, which is this familiar thing that exists only in drawings:
So what was my old, forgotten understanding of "blivet"? Hey! It's in the Oxford English Dictionary:
U.S. slang. (chiefly joc.).
A pseudo-term for something useless, unnecessary, annoying, etc.; hence, = thingamajig n.
The oldest published use is in a slang dictionary in 1967, looking back to WWII:
1967 H. Wentworth & S. B. Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang Suppl. 673/2 Blivit, n., anything unnecessary, confused, or annoying. Lit. defined as ‘10 pounds of shit in a 5-pound bag’. Orig. W.W. II Army use. The word is seldom heard except when the speaker uses it in order to define it; hence the word is actually a joke.
So Urban Dictionary is more right than Wikipedia, but Wikipedia seems to know it's getting it wrong, since it also has an article for "Worm Runner's Digest," which is identified as (partly) satire:
The W.R.D. published both satirical articles, such as "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown", and scientific papers, the most famous of which, "Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria", was a result of McConnell's RNA memory transfer experiments with planarian worms and was later published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry.
Consider now an elemental strip of cloth isolated as a free body in the area of plane B of figure 1. The two tangible forces F1 and F2 are equal and opposite as before, but the force W(weight of dress) is not balanced by an upward force V because there is no cloth above plane B to supply this force. Thus, the algebraic summation of horizontal forces is zero, but the sum of the vertical forces is not zero. Therefore, this elemental strip is not in equilibrium; but it is imperative, for social reason, that this elemental strip be in equilibrium.....
"Here’s an experiment to try. Find the square footage of your home and calculate how big it is in units of you. I am 5-foot-4, and my current apartment is 320 square feet. Therefore, my current apartment is 3 x 3.75 Mollys. I wonder if there is a golden ratio at work here — a crude logic behind our spatial preferences. As a compact and rectangular human, I gravitate toward compact and rectangular shelters. Ranch houses make me feel diluted. When I walk into a spindly Victorian, I feel as though someone is tightening my corset. My first thought upon entering any dwelling more than 6,000 square feet is 'Nobody will hear my screams.'"
"From the far-away sphere of the Unknown we are immediately borne, by this film, to a land of enchantment," [The Green Room theatrical magazine said]. "Something of the wonder of the Arabian Nights, of the glory of the East, of our own war, of fairyland, of womanly power and eternal beauty, is manifested to us by this masterpiece of cinematography."...
"She represented the fit, active and spectacular female body, and urged other women to throw away their corsets and become fit and healthy," says Angela Woollacott, professor of history at Australian National University. "She saw herself as something of a guru for women's fitness, but others also saw her as an icon of feminine modernity," she adds.
I'd never noticed this historical fact before. I learned it from a NYT crossword from 2012 that came up in my crossword app last night. Paine wasn't much of a corsetmaker though:
Young Tom's formal schooling ended at twelve, when his father took him on as an apprentice to learn the family trade. Yet an uncertain economy made for a bad climate for a new tradesman, and Paine's efforts as a staymaker (and in several other subsequent careers) failed. After he sailed for America in 1774, he never practiced the staymaking trade again....
"The fun of it is, all the condemnation comes from those who don't wear stays, either from men or from women with hobbies and without waists. All who have tried tight-lacing speak approvingly of it. I would not give up my well-made, tight fitting stays for anything. The sensation of being laced in tight is an enjoyable one that only those who have experienced it can understand. I have been in corsets ever since I was eight years of age, and I am now past my teens, and though I am five feet four inches tall and broad in the shoulders, I only measure nineteen inches, and I am in capital health."
That's a letter published by The Toronto Daily Mail on May 5, 1883, quoted in the long Wikipedia article titled "Corset controversy," where I ended up following my idiosyncratic train of thought after reading the Instapundit-linked NYT article "Can Compression Clothing Enhance Your Workout?" ("The clothes also are thought to refine proprioception, which is someone’s sense of how the body is positioned in space [and are] also... believed to reduce fatigue and soreness after exercise by literally squeezing the muscles with a kind of no-hands massage and, by increasing blood flow to muscles, help to flush out unwanted exercise-related biochemicals.")
The reason I was moved to blog this — other than my delight at the sheer length of the "Corset controversy" article — was that phrase "women with hobbies and without waists."
2. If the goods were, in fact, knockoffs, it wasn't "$1 million worth of accessories and jewelry," was it?
3. A burglar, it seems, has contacted his victim to extort money from her lest he expose her as a phony, flaunting expensive-looking goods that aren't what they appear to be, and he thinks his silence might be worth $500,000 to her? If she had that kind of money to throw around, why was she buying fakes? I guess the answer to that last question could be: Her game is quantity, not quality. Why else would you have a 3-story closet and do what was needed to make the closet famous? If you had genuinely expensive things, you probably wouldn't call attention to where you were storing them.
4. The top comment at the link is: "Sounds like an insurance scam heading south."
5. Newspapers seem to have settled on the term "she-cave," but I'm also seeing "female man-cave." Why not the parallelism of "woman cave." Looking back at material that predates the Roemer incident, I'm seeing a lot of repetitions of a joke in the form of asking: If men have something called a "man cave," what is the female equivalent? Answer: The rest of the house.
6. As I was typing in my search "what's the female equivalent of...," Google tried to help with the following suggestions: cockblock, a bromance, a neckbeard, and phallic.
7. Among the alternative terms for female man-cave: Ma'am Cave, Estrogen Den, A Room of One’s Own, and Ovarium. That's from a blog post that takes the idea of a special women's room seriously. That is, it's not just a big closet, a very nice bathroom, or the old "rest of the house" joke. But what is in that room? It seems to be either a room with feminine colors and furniture, set up for conversation or reading, or a space for doing Martha Stewart-type crafts. Not that some men don't love that sort of thing. Here's David Rakoff in "Martha, My Dear":
I have a cupboard in my living room, a freestanding armoire that holds, among a ton of other stuff, the following supplies. Six stamp pads, rubber linoleum printing blocks, seven boxes of Chinese flash cards, bindery fabric sample books from the garbage of the carpet and tile store on 20th, acrylic paints-- approximately 40 tubes-- rhinestones, pearl buttons, architectural balsa wood, pipe cleaners, and a tin cracker box of golf tees. Quantity, approximately 1,000 assorted colors.
I make stuff. Boxes, lamps, mirrors, small folding screens, painted jackets for kids, that kind of thing. It's what I do in my spare time. Some people need to exercise every day, my salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive.
8. The female equivalent of cockblock is "clam jam." The female equivalent of bromance is "womance." The female equivalent of phallic is "Perhaps women are not so neatly summed up." And the female equivalent of neckbeard is:
If the neckbeard uniform is a fedora, a stanky Slayer tee, and cargo pants, I'd say the female equivalent is webbed fingerless gloves, an ill-fitting corset worn over a stained t-shirt, and anime pins on her backpack/cargo messenger bag. I think we've all went to school with this girl before.
2. I've read about a murder that happened long ago in which a woman was stabbed in the heart with a long pin, and because she neither felt it — perhaps because of a tight corset — or saw the blood — which oozed slowly into her dark-colored dress — she went about her activities for many hours before succumbing.
"Why should they be forbidden to bake ginger-bread just because Joseph thought it bad for the stomach? Why the Imperial edict demanding the breast-feeding of infants? Why the banning of corsets? From these and a thousand other petty regulations, enforced by a secret police, it looked to the Austrians as though Joseph were trying to reform their characters as well as their institutions. Only a few weeks before Joseph's death, the director of the Imperial Police reported to him: 'All classes, and even those who have the greatest respect for the sovereign, are discontented and indignant.'"
Austria is our "History of" country today, as we proceed through the 206 countries of the world using the Wikipedia summaries. So much has happened in Austria over the ages. The "History of" project cannot begin to summarize the summary. I merely offer up a snippet, one thing that struck me as something that might have particular resonance. But it is only one of many things. For example, from 25,000 BC:
Her rant includes many of the hackneyed phrases we're accustomed to seeing in anti-Court writing:
It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes.
How do hacks writing NYT columns dress up?
All the fancy diplomas... cannot disguise the fact that its reasoning on the most important decisions affecting Americans seems shaped more by a political handbook than a legal brief.
I elided "of the conservative majority" to highlight how political liberals bitching about conservative judges talk just like political conservatives bitching about liberal judges... and all their fancy diplomas cannot disguise it!
But I'm interested in the phrase that sounded new "cosseted behind white marble pillars." Can one be cosseted by pillars? What exactly is cosseting anyway? Did you picture something like this?
No. That's a corset. Do you let similar words affect your understanding of a word? (I once lost a spelling bee because I allowed the word "ostrich" to intrude upon my understanding of "ostracize.")
But cosset... it's something soft, not pillarlike, is it not?
cosset
1650s, "to fondle, caress, indulge," from a noun (1570s) meaning "lamb brought up as a pet" (applied to persons from 1590s), perhaps from O.E. cot-sæta "one who dwells in a cot."
When it comes to the Constitution and the Affordable Care Act, one must wonder who is the little lamb brought up as a pet.
Apparently, it was much harder to get the lady's clothes off than the average fiction-writer would have you believe. But, generally, in fantasies, clothes come off — even fall off! — much more easily than in real life.
The Chief Justice spoke of Lincoln's "Christ-like character," but the President said Lincoln was a "natural human being with the frailties mixed with the virtues of humanity" — as the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated today.
"Every man turned into a devil. We ran fighting and clawing and scratching and swearing for the ladder leading up to the deck. We found the hatches battened down. Great God, how the men did curse!" A terrible ship fire.
The NYT tries to explain the physics of "Young Professor Heisenberg," and Lady Grace Drummond-Hay talks to General Hermann Wilhelm Goering.
Tom Wolfe "suggested that intellectuals are attracted to socialism because it seems in 'good taste"" and it has the '''secret promise' ... that intellectuals will wind up with power."
The NYT wonders why it is that the 12 greatest women alive in the United States today are all childless.
So if I have nothing to say then I wasted 148 minutes. To try to salvage my lost time, I'll go with a numbered list:
1. Why is a comedy 148 minutes long? Especially a comedy based on a half-hour sitcom. It was like 5 TV episodes stuck together. Except 5 TV episodes would have been more fun because there would have been a lot more random, go-nowhere plots and not a true-romance story arc for each of 4 characters. They'd have thrown in some extra bad boyfriends. Instead, each aging diva has the love of her life to come to terms with.
2. Hollywood is back to casting black women in the role of the maid: Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar, then plays the "personal assistant" to Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City." My heart is too full to tell you how just how I feel:
3. Why did Carrie Bradshaw even need a personal assistant? She's been using that damned Apple laptop for over a decade. Doesn't she know how to click the "junk" icon in Mail? Also, if she's such a big Apple user, why did she shun the iPhone? Well, the answer is, of course, these were all plot devices. How can you generate enough miscommunication to make a modern love story when everyone has instant communication? You have to have kids hiding cell phones, cell phones thrown into the ocean in anger, unusual cell phones that a person who isn't supposed to be an idiot can't operate, and personal assistants to set up password-protected email boxes.
It’s easy to bash the show’s over-the-top materialism, but “Sex and the City” has never bothered to rationalize it, no matter how absurd or overpriced an item may be. (Nor has the show explained how a freelance writer could afford all those clothes.) It simply accepts that fashion is good and assumes the audience, just like Carrie, so badly wants to be a part of Vogue.
It's a little game we play. Does it hurt anyone? We all like a walk-in closet, so why not show us the ultimate dream closet... and show our Carrie having glorious make-up sex in it?
6. I say "our Carrie," because it seems we're supposed to identify with her, but why on earth do we? Is she our fantasy? We might like to maintain our skinniness as we age, but we don't visualize it turning out that stringy. How many tendons are there in the human body anyway? I tried counting that one time when we got a horrific closeup of the axilla:
7. Meanwhile, Samantha is supposed to get shockingly fat (from living in Los Angeles and having to consume food instead of the usual smorgasbord of men that she got in New York). But the actress, Kim Cattrall, declined to put this kind of dedication into acting:
8. But credit where credit is due: Cattrall puts in the effort where the result is to make her look pretty. I'm thinking about that sushi scene. (Which was another place where they figured out how to make the telephone unanswerable.) And let's be fair. Cattrall has a beautiful body at age 51, and stretching it out at this point could be catastrophic. Couldn't they have made some sort of fat prosthesis to make the fat scenes big and believable? What percent of the women in the theater were slimmer than the supposedly fat Samantha?
9. And if Carrie is so horrified by fat, why is she so hung up on Mr. Big, who is fat? Hey, I'm just seeing that Chris Noth (who plays Big) was born in Madison, Wisconsin. That's nice! But still, the man is substantially overweight, and in profile, at least once, it was very obvious that he was wearing a powerful girdle.
10. Noth had to act like a pussy about going to his giant wedding, and it was completely unbelievable. I can't believe the whole audience didn't audibly scoff.
11. Because the audience was breathing and sighing along with ever emotional moment in that damned movie. Dog? Awwww. Baby? Oooohhh. Women go to that movie to have their emotions played. Suspend your critical mind and flow with it. If you don't want to do that... really, you shouldn't go. (It's like pornography.)
12. The most pornographic part of it all is the fashion and the interior decoration. You'll never be bored if you can pay attention to the details of costume and set decoration.
13. For me, the most astounding thing in the movie was the chest of drawers in the Vogue office. I have this old chest of drawers — my parents bought it in the 1960s — that earlier in the day I decided I had to get rid of. I was thinking about rearranging the furniture in my living room and I realized that the awful thing had to go. It's black with three wavy gold squares on each drawer and a big gold door-knocker pulls. Then — unbelievable! — there's that very chest in the Vogue office. Weird!
ADDED: Sean says:
My parents had that exact same chest (at least as described: I didn't see the movie). It's by Dorothy Draper. You can google her. My sister saw one in the window of an antiques store in Greenwich so it's worth something, although she didn't stop to check the price.
It's Susan Hallowell, the director of the Transportation Security Administration's security laboratory, as X-rayed by the "backscatter" machine. She's willing to appear in this form, so why not you? What's worse, that or a pat-down search? Take your pick.
This reminds me of the discussion of X-Ray glasses in Bill Bryson's new memoir of his boyhood. Wouldn't people look creepy, seen naked under their clothes? They wouldn't look like a naked person, because the clothes would be smooshing various parts of their body in strange ways. (And speaking of creepy: "Do I Creep You Out?" (via Drawn!).)
Then there's this book, "Seeing Through Clothes," that contends that paintings of nudes tend to do just that, depict the bodies pushed into a form that could only be achieved with a corset or some such device.
Nude people. You don't really want to see them. Believe me.
On an early morning in March 2004 some 85 adults gathered at a restaurant in Manhattan's meatpacking district, removed their clothes and posed for Mr. Tunick's camera. Arlene Donnelly Nelson and David Nelson's moving 38-minute documentary, to be shown tonight on Cinemax to commemorate World AIDS Day, captures the moment gracefully.
Like a lot of their fellow human beings, some of these men and women are a little apprehensive about revealing their naked bodies to total strangers, not to mention the world. One man says he is much more nervous about showing his distended abdomen (a side effect of medical treatment) than his penis. Many seem nervous at first but soon relax into the equality that nakedness creates. Not surprisingly, one man reports "a sense of camaraderie" in the experience.
At first the sight of scores of naked adults milling about and looking confused about what is expected of them bears an unsettling resemblance to a scene from a Holocaust film. But as the photo session proceeds, an energizing dignity takes hold. Neither the documentary nor the magazine cover photograph focuses on genitalia. The scene really does convey, as publicity materials suggest, the spirit within the flesh.
We'll see if it's quite as spiritual as all that. I tend to doubt it. I hate the idea that it's supposed to be profound because we're told it's about AIDS, as was done so often years ago.
ADDED: "The equality that nakedness creates"??
UPDATE: I've now watched the documentary "Positively Naked," and, despite all the talk about an art "installation," it was very much a documentary about people living with HIV/AIDS. An art-focused documentary would have been entirely different. I'm not knocking it for using AIDS to add weight to art, because it wasn't enough about art. It was about AIDs, and the feelings of the people who got naked and photographed were the subject of the documentary. Yes, photography on this level is art, but there was no pomposity about this art, and Tunick was an appealing and reasonably modest character. He wasn't at all like the stereotypical "installation" artist. As far as the nudity, it was really the standard nudist material. Getting nude in a group has some meaning. It's not art. It's a psychological phenomenon that isn't edgy or new in any way. So basically, this was a conventional documentary about struggling individuals. They also got nude and posed for a big photograph. But there was no pretension about the quality of the photography as art. The emphasis was entirely on the camaraderie. Nice. I wouldn't have watched it if I'd known what this was going to be, but it's perfectly fine for what it set out to do. Really, I would have preferred a full-of-himself artist revealing a lack of sensitivity toward the subject, but that's speaking only of the documentary I'd like to watch. Tunick seems like a decent guy, and that's a good enough thing in itself.
Last year 2,361 Americans had buttock augmentation surgery, almost four times as many as in 2002, the first year that the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery kept statistics on the procedure. The operation typically costs about $20,000....
Some women over 50 get the surgery to bulk up deflating derrières, while younger patients say they want larger buttocks to complement prominent busts. "I always got compliments for my front but never for my back," said Natalie Del Rio, 18, a high school student in Miami who had the procedure last month with Dr. Mendieta. "Now my mom says I look like a Coca-Cola bottle."
Presumably, the mother put up the money for all of this. What kind of a culture does this girl live in that she fretted that no one was talking about her ass?
Go to the link to read about the elaborate procedure that involves relocating two pounds of your own fat and that requires you to wear a "surgical girdle" and to avoid sitting down for weeks. All of this is supposed to make you more sexually attractive, but you have to be extremely pleasure-denying to go through with it. Well, what's the point of sex without irony?
And then there's the whole question of what the ideal ass is:
Two Mexican plastic surgeons, Dr. Ramón Cuenca-Guerra and Dr. Jorge Quezada, examined 132 patients and more than 1,000 photos and concluded that a beautiful bottom has four features: slight hollows on each side, a curved fold where the buttocks meet the thighs, a V-shape crease that looks like cleavage at the top and two dimples in the lower back. Dr. [Constantino] Mendieta also examined hundreds of photos but came to a different conclusion: that the overall shape of the buttocks is most important. He proposed that female buttocks come in four basic configurations: square, round, V-shape and A-shape.
Yes, it sounds ridiculous, the doctor who collects $20,000 for injecting a small bucket of fat into your ass had damned well better have done a lot of hard thinking about what shape he's after. And you'd better think it through carefully before going through the ordeal.
The article about the man and his minivan, discussed in the previous post, was buried in the back pages of the sports section of the Sunday NYT. Now, here's an article about a woman and her minivan, and it's buried in the back pages on the Sunday "Styles" section. (I remember when newspapers used to have a section that was just forthrightly called the "Women's" section, or, more amusingly, the "Society" pages.)
So what's the angle for dealing with the big minivan issue vis a vis women? Oh, how about feminism and fashion:
WOMAN, in case you had not heard, is not a vessel.
But Woman has been poured, packed and trussed into some mighty constraining containers over the years, from the figure-flattening boned bodices of Elizabethan England to the figure-flattering Wonderbras and stilettos of the 1990's. And when it comes to helming vessels, Woman has often found herself skipper of that slow boat to suburbia: the S.S. Station Wagon, a weighty skow practically synonymous with women's lack of lib.
Or should I say: feminism and fashion and alliteration?
And while we're being literary, let's toss in another element that, Oprah knows, appeals to the ladies: literature:
Jennifer Weiner feels liberated behind the wheel of her empowering minivan.
Kate Klein, the heroine of the new chick-lit best seller, "Goodnight Nobody" (Atria), and the possessor of today's answer to the station wagon, can relate. "She hates her minivan," Jennifer Weiner, the novel's author, said of her protagonist. "To her it's a symbol of suburban enslavement, everything she's given up - going from having a MetroCard and all the freedom it represented to a life of encumberment."
Before you go thinking of the writer as an ardent yet trenchant cross between Gustave Flaubert and Erma Bombeck, take note: For Ms. Weiner, the sound of freedom is the robotic rumble of the side doors of her Honda Odyssey sliding open at the remote click of her key ring. She doesn't just like her minivan. She loves it.
You will love your minivan.
So from "the figure-flattening boned bodices of Elizabethan England to the figure-flattering Wonderbras and stilettos of the 1990's" to what? Speaking of literature, I note that the imagery fell short. What is the fashion step of the '00s that corresponds to the minivan? It's all about room, room, room, so .... well, we hate to say it.... caftan?
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
પોસ્ટ્સ
