The year was 1986, the Oscars were coming up, and Cher had been snubbed for her role in the movie “Mask.”
She had not received the nomination for Best Actress, despite critical acclaim around her performance. Instead, she had been asked to present the award for Best Supporting Actor.... Mackie, in a 2008 interview... recalled telling Cher: “You can’t wear this to the Academy Awards. You’re giving an award — you’re going to upstage whoever you give it to.’”
But Cher, he said, insisted: “She said, “Oh, they won’t mind, it’ll be OK.’”
Here she is, in what was experienced as extremely outré at the time, giving the Oscar to Don Ameche, who performed his acceptance in a traditional and highly dignified style that the actorly audience ate up:
Cher went on to win the Best Actress Oscar in 1988, and here's how she looked, once again dressed by Bob Mackie (whom you see on screen right after Paul Newman announces Cher as the winner):
"... performers like Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Bernadette Peters, Bette Midler, Mitzi Gaynor, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, RuPaul and, most memorably and enduringly, Cher — as well as an 11½-inch model named Barbie — died on Monday in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 87."
In 1971, the TV producers didn't know what to do with Sonny and Cher "but Mr. Mackie did. (He noted that she was built just like Ms. Burnett, a perfect size 6 with no cleavage: a human clothes hanger.) Their collaboration, first on 'The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour,' which ran from 1971 to 1974, delighted television audiences and confounded the network’s censors, as Mr. Mackie bared more and more of Cher’s extraordinary physique in ever more outlandish getups."
She'd had more than $200,000 in student loans, but qualified for loan forgiveness, so "One thing I did is I gifted myself an extra loan payment for whatever my heart desired."
She is New York City Council member Tiffany Cabán, who "spends much of her day thinking about how to address New York City’s affordability crisis," and rents a two-and-a-half-bedroom place in Astoria, "where she lives with her rescue dog Ducky."
It is a nice jacket for a City Council member, and it's nice that she has season tickets to the game ($5,000), and that her salary is going up from $148,500 to $175,500, after she and other council members voted them a raise. Well earned, no? You wouldn't want to try to live in NYC for only $148,500.
The jacket's slogan is "It will Always be New York or Nowhere." You know that wonderful New York feeling: every place else is nowhere. It reminds me of my old saying: Better than nothing is a high standard. But acquiring nothing leaves you intact as a living human being, and you save whatever money you'd have spent on that item that's not better than nothing. But with "New York or Nowhere," it seems you cease to exist if you can't swing life in New York. Life without being in New York is not better than nothing. It's nowhere.
"You might not like the way he looks. You might not love his look.... But he was the best Attorney General in the country, perhaps... and that speaks a lot louder than the suit he’s wearing that doesn’t look so great. Or anything frankly."
More Kelce fashion-talk: "I kind of take bits and pieces from everybody and everything that I see, and just kind of change things around depending on which situation I’m in and what event I’m going to.”
Why do I find this so funny? "Dog Dad"... the posing... posing as nonchalant.
In February 2011, a drunk Galliano was caught on video at La Perle bar in Paris saying to a Jewish couple, “I love Hitler” and “People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f***ing gassed.”
"No, this isn’t some elaborate rookie hazing prank... it’s the result of Friday’s theme night at High-A Wisconsin, one in which the team normally known as the Timber Rattlers becomes the Brats as part of Bratoberfest, a play on Germany’s iconic Oktoberfest, while also paying homage to the state that’s home to one of the highest concentrations of residents with German ancestry. It just so happened that Abner Uribe, the Brewers’ flame-throwing reliever who is working his way back from a flexor strain, was in town on his rehab assignment...."
Humiliating? Or is it wonderful... bratoberfestive!
I could watch the Green Bay Packers exhibition game, women’s college volleyball, the team with the best record in baseball the Milwaukee Brewers, the Winn-Dixie 250, high school football, WWE SmackDown, or…Abner Uribe in lederhosen. You tell me… pic.twitter.com/lZWfgdxMLi
ADDED: I have a bit of a tags quandary for this post. I don't like tag proliferation, but this isn't the first appearance of lederhosen on this blog. It's the fourth. See them all here. But all the other times, I was able to use my well-loved tag "men in shorts." But this baseball take on lederhosen avoids the baseball travesty of shorts — White Sox, 1976 — and sticks with traditional knickers. As I've said before, I like the knickers and wish all the players would wear them and not those pajama-looking long pants, but I'm still not making a tag for knickers. But if I did, I'd have 12 "knickers" posts now.
Let me highlight the best of those old "knickers" posts. I remembered that the Young Rascals wore knickers. I found this 1926 song with the lyric: "Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide/Nobody knows who's walking inside!" I said that David Brooks: "expatiated about the good old days when men like George Washington displayed their thighs in tight silk knickers."
And, in 2008, before I got together with Meade and started watching baseball again, there were TVs outside State Street Brats just as The Backstreet Boys were singing the national anthem to open the World Series. I blogged: "The players look like hell! When did they stop wearing stockings and knickers? Those long pants look like pajamas."
And there was Meade, the first commenter: "I must be smoking too much blog. I hallucinated." Because the video looked like this:
Key word linking the end of this post to the beginning: brats.
It's on the old "men in shorts" topic. Something about women being able to wear "sundresses" to work. I think the term "sundresses" is being used to mean sleeveless dresses. An actual sundress wouldn't look any more professional than a man in shorts, but sleeveless dresses exist and might look okay in the office. But isn't the office air conditioned? I think women are more likely to put on a sweater than to want their bare arms exposed.
Anyway, my classic men-in-shorts topic was about men looking like children. It all started back in 2006. It all started with something Tom Wolfe wrote in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" [commission earned]. "I was amused," I blogged, "to run across this description of a man wearing shorts":
All that elegance was what made the personage of Dr. Lewin seem so curious. Last week, when the class first met, he had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of his gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead -- unaccountably addressing thirty college students, at Dupont, no less.
That's my motivation. Trying to encourage you to eschew the look of an ossified 7-year-old.
Earlier this year, Esquire described the trend as the loafer’s “big generational shift,” describing how younger consumers “were bypassing sneakers in growing numbers.” And in January, The Times UK deemed 2026 “the year of the loafer.”...
The surging interest in formal footwear fashions has simultaneously been a boon for both high-end luxury retailers and heritage brands with classic shoe offerings, like Allen Edmonds, the Wisconsin-based retailer. Nick Wooster, the brand’s consulting creative director, said that they have “absolutely” seen a recent increase in interest in their handmade leather loafers and derbies among younger customers.
"There is no one effortless way to look as a congresswoman, no uniform of business suit and tie that allows her to blend in. Most female politicians handle this by approximating male attire with some tweaks. Usually that involves a blazer, pearls, and very discreet hair and makeup — ideally, none of which gets talked about. But there is power in rejecting this model. Power in embracing the variety of embellishments available to women — earrings, lipstick, dresses, different hair styles. And an extension of this power can be a woman experimenting with baring her belly, along with her reproductive journey. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is consciously working to fuse her body and mind on the public stage, to show us what real, human, embodied and, yes, female power can look like. She will not be a mere 'thing in a suit,' as she said."
It's an old idea — that feminine beauty is powerful and that power-seeking women can implement beauty to rise in the political world. Cleopatra, etc. But Garelick adds the notion that a woman baring her belly to the public and making a show out of shifting her fertility into the realm of science and technology will augment the power achieved through beauty and fashion. The old idea is a cliché. It works as far as it works. The new idea is barely coherent.
"... they want us in milk maid dresses, heavy hideous makeup, plastic surgery and naked. And it's actually worse when I think about their plans for society as a whole with illiteracy, poisoned food, toxic 'health' care, etc. Separation of religion and state must happen to even attempt a free society. This is why this concept exists."
"... by the sartorial flotsam that comes packing itself in. The other night a guy came in with a shoulder-length butt cut and his T-shirt tucked into his jeans. 'Now there’s a dork,' I thought. I could’ve clocked him from down the block. But no. An hour later I went outside, and he was making out in the alley with a six-foot freaking supermodel — and she was goth. Or at least she was dressed like what I consider to be a goth; nowadays I don’t even know..... Why is everybody under the age of 30 these days dressed like an actual lunatic?... The subcultures of my youth were a sort of surrogate extended family. In a society jettisoning the type of organizations and communities that stitched it together over the 20th century, finding someone or a group of someones who were the same thing as you served as a bulwark against the fracturing sense of atomization. Making up a subculture every couple of months basically does the opposite, keeping you permanently aloof from the kids around you. I mean, half these things barely sound like groups of anything. What the hell is a performative matcha boy — some guy who drinks a thing? How’s that going to be your tribe?"
That's image that sprang to mind for me as we were discussing this blue jumpsuit worn by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong at the Madison protest yesterday.
If you don't know who that is in the photo above, it's Jack Lalanne. Why did I know his jumpsuit was blue? I only ever watched him on black and white TV. His daytime show began in 1951 (the year I was born).
"In 2000, John Galliano showed his infamous 'homeless chic' couture collection. Alexander McQueen’s 'Highland Rape' show of torn dresses shocked the industry in 1995. Rei Kawakubo’s spring 1997 line, known as 'lumps and bumps,' remains one of the most significant collections of the century because it rejected traditional sex appeal, distorting and reimagining a woman’s form. It would be impossible to defend 'homeless chic' or 'Highland Rape.' Or Mr. Lagerfeld's disdain for fat bodies, a part of his personal brand, or Mr. Galliano’s antisemitic tirades.... But as fashion becomes more consolidated and homogenized... it hasn’t seemed to figure out how to provoke and shake up aesthetics and culture, creating crazes that people open their wallets to be part of...."
Sterile wealth, romanticized poverty, and mindlessness about sleevelessness.
1. The family of 5: "'Money right now, there’s not enough. Literalmente,' said Ms. Torres, speaking Spanglish. 'Sometimes I feel bad, like I can’t do enough for my kids.'"
2. The Biebers: "The 2,792-square-foot apartment has two kitchens — an open-plan kitchen for entertaining, with marble counters and Scandinavian larch wood cabinetry, and a secondary chef’s kitchen with stainless steel and matte aluminum cabinetry. The primary suite looks out to the Hudson River..." The living room, I see, looks out onto a big TV screen and turns its back on the uninspiring skyline of New Jersey.
3. The presumed dearth of sleeves: "In all of the discussions about body positivity and loving the different parts of you, including the parts of you that decades of social conditioning have deemed potentially problematic, arms, especially the upper arms, are often overlooked...." The letter writer is urged to "rethink the issue" and "learn to love your arms."
Barack Obama "is really messed up. I'm giving him some time because this beautiful skirt that my stylist Meredith Koop picked out that is my favorite portrait of my mom. He didn't know it existed until just a few minutes ago. I've had a few weeks to settle down" - Michelle Obama pic.twitter.com/YbjPXRy0OS
ADDED: I've seen faces on shirts but I can't remember ever seeing a face on clothing below the waist. I went looking and found this from Jean Paul Gaultier in the 1990s. I think it works because the faces are small and numerous, making it not that different from, say, a floral print.
One giant face, larger than the face of the wearer, feels quite obtrusive. But it's long been accepted above the waist. How long have those things been around? I remember the Che Guevara shirts, circa 1970, but what was the original T-shirt with a big face? My quick research says it was probably the Thomas E. Dewey 1948 U.S. presidential campaign T-shirt — Dewey's face and the slogan "Dew-it with Dewey."
"... either AI/algorithmically generated content that deploys recognisable taste markers — a brand mood board featuring a designer suitcase, a skinny-neck kettle, a Dieter Rams book — or tasteful things deployed in service of slop, like a curated influencer dinner for a tech company. The key is that the visible signs of taste have been extracted from their original social context and redeployed generically."
After Segal coined the term it went viral.... [S]he pinpointed a dinner party at a New York restaurant considered to be classy and slender-spouted kettles as slop, and explained why Jennifer Lawrence’s style is too (“she looks more like a shopper/demographic and less like an individual figure”, Segal wrote). Once you see it …
Dieter Rams? Here's Dieter Rams pointing at things he doesn't like:
Mx. Gonia... said the company was trying to take away their name permanently and “erase an activist”.... Mx. Gonia said the timing of Patagonia’s lawsuit, “at the height of anti-LGBTQ politics and attacks,” was purposeful. “They looked at this political moment and thought they could pull this off without a pushback,” she said.
By the way, I think the NYT is getting the pronoun wrong when it writes "She's ready to go to court." I'm seeing this in Outside: "My name is Wyn Wiley, but you might know me as Pattie Gonia, Patricia Gonia, if ya nasty. I’m a drag queen, I’m an environmentalist, and I’m a professional gay person. As Wyn my pronouns are he/they and in drag, my pronouns as Pattie are she/they."
You might think the easiest solution is to use "they," but in that headline, "They're ready to go to court" would be read as referring to Patagonia. Patagonia has already filed suit. The caption on the court papers, I believe, is Patagonia, Inc. v. Entrepreneur Enterprises, Inc. (doing business as Pattie Gonia Productions) and Wyn Wiley (individually, as the owner/founder). I think the person "ready to go to court" is Wiley, so it should say "He's ready to go to court."
"And so it did, with multiple brands, including Fendi, Miu Miu and Dior Men all showing sandals and socks on recent runways.... That this has happened at the same time that Gen Z has become increasingly vocal about its general discomfort with visible toes — the subject of multiple 'who let the dogs out' memes and Reddit threads — is probably not a coincidence. (Gen Z, after all, is the consumer group most brands are most eager to attract.) Whether that reaction is due, as some have posited, to a fear of fetishization — there are accounts on OnlyFans devoted solely to feet — or some other generational quirk, it’s a real thing."
Complicated! I'd like to say wear socks and sandals in whatever combination expresses the youness of you, but as between the people who have publicly overembraced a supposed rule against socks with sandals and the people who are squicked out by the sight of toes, I'd like to skew toward the toe-haters. But make a good sock choice. Wear socks that say: I know what I'm doing.
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That's image that sprang to mind for me as we were discussing 
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