Two Pants Rants

One: Why did my little Bear - age 9 and smarter than both his parents put together - think it was a good idea to put sticky tack in his pants pockets??!! And how do I get it out? This stuff is like chewing gum!

Then again, I guess it could be worse ...

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Two: Yesterday, with my two kids in school and me on break, I seized the chance to shopping for pants. It was an unmitigated disaster. For one thing, my town's solitary "mall" is actually a ghost mall. Only about every fifth store is occupied; the rest are empty, apparently because the mall's owners have overpriced the rents.

In our one lonely remaining department store I tried on about 30 pairs of pants. Not one fit me. I tried jeans, dress pants, cords - oh, I would've tried clown pants if they'd had any! I even ventured into the junior department with its distressed and ripped denims. Nada. Zip.

It comes down to this: For over a decade now, these $%*&@ low-rise pants have crowded nearly everything else out of the market. Even my slenderest students - the ones I suspect wear a size zero or less - often have a muffin top in these styles. As for me, they consistently gape in the back and even the "moderately" low-rise ones still stop miles below my belly-button.

Hey, I've done market research on this and the results are indisputable: There's not an overwhelming public demand to see me wearing a girly version of the plumber look.

I realize some women seem to fit just fine into "modern" pants (which frankly aren't all that new anymore). My sister is one of them. But are the rest of us all just a bunch of freaks? I have a waistline. I'm the same weight and height that I was 30 years ago in junior high. I'm not boasting; I was a few pounds heavier but lost them in last spring's minor medical tribulations when I was reduced to eating plain yogurt for a few weeks; and now my existing pants are all too large, and I can't find new ones. I honestly don't think I'm such an oddity. Yet it's been years since I could find pants that really fit me.

Men don't quite have this problem, do they? (Well, okay, there's the variety of older gent who wears his pants over his belly and under his armpits. I think that's a personal style choice, though.)

Anyone up for a revolt against the fashion industry's rigidity? If not, I guess I'm stuck waiting for spring - and better weather for skirts. And if anyone has a line on clown pants, do let me know.

Fur the Sake of Fashion

Via Benny Bleiman of Zooillogix at Science Blogs comes a real dog of a fashion news item:

A totally normal British couple has made headlines by wearing sweaters, knitted out of the hair of their deceased pet dogs. Beth and Brian Willis have made two sweaters, one out of Kara, a Samoyed, and the other from Penny, a Swedish Lapphund.

Hmm, totally normal? Well, I guess I'm always saying that normalcy - like gender and race and a whole bunch of other goodies - is a social construct. Some constructs have a useful and benign function, though, and "thou shalt not wear the fur of your deceased pets" seems like as a good a taboo as any.

Here are the originals:


And here's the fashion statement/canine tribute:


I actually knew a couple who did something similar. I hadn't thought of them in years until this news item popped up. They were my landlords in Palo Alto the summer after I graduated from college in 1986, a young couple in the thirties with no kids and, from what I gathered, some fertility issues. They kept a couple of long-hard dogs (the breed is lost to history) who seemed to function as an ersatz. I was occupying my then-boyfriend's rented room for the summer while he was in Germany. They were very kind when Grey Kitty broke her jaw, driving us to the emergency vet at 10 p.m., well past their usual bedtime. I imagine Kitty saw this as minor compensation for all the times those critters put the fear of Dog into her.

They also evicted my boyfriend a few weeks into the fall - after he'd already lived there a year - when they figured out that he and I had been coupling in said rented room. Why it took them so long, I don't know. They were extremely Christian, so that may explain both their naiveté and their swift, draconian reaction. (And yes, I'm pretty sure the sex was worth it.)

Anyway, a couple of years later they moved out, and somehow I heard through the grapevine that they'd been collecting dog hair in order to knit with it. I couldn't picture it. Now I can - a bit too clearly.

Both photos from the Daily Mail (UK), which was Benny's source, too.

The Skinny on Male Fashion

Remember how Madrid's Fashion Week banned emaciated models from the runway in fall of 2006? Madrid's action didn't change the bony face of fashion, but it did shine a spotlight on how female models are starving themselves.

Well, being cavernously thin has now become an equal-opportunity deformity.

The New York Times just ran a story in its Style section (not in Health, where it rightly belongs!) on the evolving standard for underfed male models. Or maybe this is devolution rather than evolution. Aptly titled "The Vanishing Point," the Times story persuades as much with images as with arguments. Pictures like this one tell the whole tale:


It's refreshing that men no longer need to look like they eat 'roids for breakfast. If these skinny dudes represented just one possible image, I'd say fine. Lots of very young men are naturally built like this, and why shouldn't they see guys who look like them?

But of course, in a high-fashion world that loves conformity even more than novelty, the new look is rapidly becoming the new dogma. The Times reports:

George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”

If your 6'1", you'd better weight 155? So we're now ditching the bulky muscles but paring the men down to bare bones, all while maintaining the bizarre fiction of the hairless man.

To me, the most disturbing aspect of the trend is captured by a fashion expert, Kelly Cutrone, who told the Times:

"People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult.”

It's not that this look is downright pedophilic, exactly, although it does lean in that direction. And it's not terribly hard to find examples of ads that do go for the little boy image, such as this ad for American Apparel found by copyranter. (It'd be one thing if this were an ad for boys' clothing, but it's not.)

Here's a revolutionary idea: How about male models who look like men? What if they actually had a normal amount of body hair? What if they looked more handsome than average, but otherwise rather ordinary? Now that would be sexy.

Easy Targets

I'm going for minimalist commentary here, because I'm going to make my poor students check out these images and I don't want to pre-empt even the most obvious observations. Don't expect any analysis from me - just snark, ingeniously disguised as questions, which are as subtle as the images themselves.

So, is this ad sexist? Or just, y'know, kinda free-spirited and irreverent?


Does your answer change if you know the ad is actually a 20' x 20' billboard in Times Square?

What if you consider the original use of targets (and please don't think too hard about the arrows, it gets painful really fast)?

Can you imagine a male model in this ad?

If it's not sexist, then we shouldn't be upset if little girls want to be playful and clever in the same way. This shirt is being marketed to toddlers:


But the sexualization of little girls is old hat, as this ad from 1976 shows:


So maybe we shouldn't get too heated up about that, either. Besides, sexualization is now the hottest theme in the presidential campaign. Just take a look at the emblem of a newly formed non-partisan anti-Hillary Clinton group, whose sole purpose is apparently to sell this classy logo on T-shirts:


It turns out there are oh-so-many ways to creatively use the c-word in politics. Here's one for the music fans:

So, as you can see, if these images are just silly, or tacky, or maybe a teensy bit sexist after all, it doesn't matter anyway. Because we all know that women's issues are all about identity politics, or special interests. They surely don't have much to do with real politics.

Images:
Target ad via Shakesville
Hooter's toddler tee via Feministe
Love's Babysoft ad via copyranter
Anti-Clinton logo via Salon's Broadsheet
Anti-Clinton T-shirt also via Broadsheet