Ever So Scrumptious

Returning to the Elements of Style series…clothes and assembling outfits. Usually, when someone feels they’re behind on the dark art of dressing in the 21st century, it’s not that they don’t have the style nous to pull it off, once they put a bit of thought and cash into it. Often, they have just been BUSY. Buying a house, raising small children, getting a Ph.D. Also, the young often look delicious in whatever ludicrous garments they’re wearing. So, we often don’t get around to thinking about style and clothes much until our thirties or forties. And then, with the plethora of advice available nowadays, where to begin? As a geek, I find it useful to see my outfits as a project of some kind, where I have to get multiple components to work together, like a piece of music, or a software program.

A good starting point is to define how you see yourself and how you want clothes to work for you: whether you want to be stylish or fashionable. My stylish friends know what they love and stick with it. Tribal, rave-flavored, vintage, steampunky, preppy. Often they make their own clothes.  If they look out of date for a season, they don’t care – fashion comes around to match them soon enough. The fashionable are more mutable, with a strong sense of the look of the moment.

With the cost of clothes here, the fashionable NZ women I know don’t have huge wardrobes: three or four well-selected outfits serve them for a season. The stylish ones have more clothes on tap, wardrobe libraries they pick and choose from.

It is OK to:

• Take a morning and go through every darn thing in your wardrobe. Get rid of things that don’t fit or will never get worn, rediscover old favorites.
• Take time to set up a couple of outfits in a row for the week, for a busy weekend, or for a trip. Try them on, move around in them, then put them to one side, ready to go.
• Wear a uniform (such as trousers/jeans and a knit top) or two or three “looks”, and alternate the pieces.
• Decide that you like to dress simply.

As you sort things out and make changes, your friends never mind being asked for advice. When you go through your closet; contemplate changes online; or ask them to be a consultant on a real-time shopping trip. Children are also excellent advice givers. Are you afraid that a child will dress you in leopard-print Wellies and feather boas? Maybe that’s a good look for you!

If you don’t know where to start with wardrobe updates, or only have a limited amount of money, go for good underwear. My budget is limited at the moment due to paying for a house repair, and my spring wardrobe update has been two pairs of shoes, an “event” dress, and some important new bras.

As delightful as an LED-illuminated hypno-bra is, it is not a wardrobe staple. Available from Enlightened Designs, click to view more.

Good underwear is project management for your body – everything comes together more easily with it in place. Good underwear is bras that fit, and panties or pants that aren’t too tight. Alas, there is is often a difference between underwear that looks good under clothes (smooth, often microfiber/no-show construction, slightly padded bras) and underwear that looks good without clothes (lacy, detailed, very sheer or very ornamented, includes built-in electronics). Also, there’s a whole post waiting on the linguistics of panties versus pants.

The Internet is a sea of style advice today, and not all of it is useful. Style media rewards those who go extreme or are conventionally attractive. Witness this blogger’s experience in being styled as “street style bait” – she couldn’t walk by the end of the day and didn’t own most of her designer garments/bling.

Here are my favorite, most practical sources of hardcore advice online – coding and QA for your outfits.

• Work wear: Corporette. (Lots of good advice about professionalism/work politics, too.)
• How to make clothes and trends work: Already Pretty. Also does an inexpensive self-guided makeover via a PDF and consultation session.
• Understanding body shapes and wearing color: Inside Out Style.
• Forums to ask questions and post pictures: Inside Out Style again and You Look Fabulous.
• A good place for a bra fitting in the Wellington area: Au Fait Lingerie in Petone. I know we all love to head up to the Bendon outlet in Otaki, especially during $20 sale season. Au Fait has sales too, and the ladies who run the place are superb.

For inspiration it is useful to hunt around for a style blogger you like and identify with. Myself, I enjoy Wardrobe Oxygen – she’s about my height, about my shape, and she had a tree fall through her closet during Hurricane Irene a month ago and just kept on going.

What Do You Want To Look Like deals with a desire I see a lot: “You want to dress like a rock star, a pin-up girl, a circus performer, a mermaid. You want to do your hair big and wear monstrous combat boots and pile on bangles from wrist to elbow. Your parents or teachers or boss or officemates or friends or lover will be scared/disappointed/angry if you do….”

The next post in this series will be about  how to channel both this desire and some style changes.

I went to a quasi-burlesque event last night that included, unexpectedly, a genuinely disturbing piece. In the middle of a fairly erotic show, a dance piece with abuse overtones jolted me off the smooth rails of enjoyment. It was awful, but it was also several women’s studies papers’ worth of thought. And it had me remembering women’s 1990s performance art.

Just as with the burlesque scene now,  you had international stars and local luminaries. Well known performers at the time included Lydia Lunch, Linda Montsano, Karen Finley, bell hooks and Sapphire, Laurie Anderson and Annie Sprinkle. I’m going to count Tribe 8, too. You learned about them from your friends, and going to their gigs was a huge deal. I remember going to a Diamanda Galas performance where she mourned for her dead brother with her voice, and I came down with an earache for the next three days, from the pain channeled by the sound.

Trying to track down some video of that time, it’s all incredibly raw and jagged and angry. Video was crude and expensive compared to today – besides, you were supposed to be there. In retrospect, some of it was sheer pretension. Some of it was channeling the anger linked to punk and the awkward second stage of feminism. Some of it, the part I saw with local performance artists, was women looking to be heard and have meaning in their lives. If you want to learn more about the voices of that time, I recommend the book Angry Women.

One of the more enduring and widely relevant artists at that time, brought to my attention by someone who is still a dear friend of mine today (hi Rachel!) is Laurie Anderson. Her ’80s songs and spoken word pieces about America gain more eerie resonance as time goes on, and she can be both sexy and incisive about gender. Here she is, performing “Smoke Rings” – a piece about gender and desire, Frank Sinatra and a place where “all the girls in this town were named…BETTY”.

Plenty of people want to write about burlesque, but performers’ stories are thin on the ground. Burlesque performers are either absent or goddess-like advice-givers – describing their own ups, downs, setbacks, and tricks is at odds with the brief enchantment of presenting a burlesque persona on stage. I’ve read Immodesty Blaize’s novel Tease, which was an acceptable British-style bonkbuster lashed with luxury brands. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have, after reading Collette first.

The recent Dr. Sketchy Wellington, with its corseted models and tumbling curls,  reminded several of us of Colette, and we swapped our favorite Colette titles as we drew. A fine overview of Collette at Apartment Therapy, of all places – whatever Colette wrote about, from goofy bulldogs to tatty bohemian apartments, became infused with glamour. And a side-splitting synopsis of one of her first novels, Claudine in Paris, is here: “Still your beating hearts, mes petites schoolgirl fantasists!” It was after she wrote the Claudine books that she left her husband and, as part of making a living, took to the music-hall stage. Some of the wicked highlights of Collette’s burlesque acts – performed with her butch lesbian lover – are here at History is Made at Night. But she kept her eyes open between acts, and her music-hall burlesque tales are the result.  Colette’s books are worth reading for the potential burlesque names alone. Fanchette, Fosette, Manette, Lola, Kiki-the-Demure – and that’s just the pets!

Anyhow, I promised you burlesque stories. Mitsou, or Music-Hall Sidelights is a collection of short pieces Colette wrote on life in the music hall before and during World War I. The brunette starlet Mitsou has her own novella in the collection, but the shorter following pieces profile the vague blonde chorus girl, the starving male backup, the life of touring vaudeville acts, even the piano accompanist. Collette doesn’t miss a loose spangle or a tubercular cough from her colleagues on the boards. Mitsou was turned into a forgettable movie in 1956 – Colette’s novella Gigi would become a less mangled, more famous movie in 1959.

Lots of today’s burlesque generation will identify more with the wry dancer Renee in Colette’s novella The Vagabond, published serially in 1910. Renee, formerly the complaisant wife of a bohemian philanderer, put her foot down and left, and now makes most of her living on the music-hall stage. Intelligent, world-weary, aware that her beauty is starting to fade, Renee loves dancing but is ambivalent about her current milieu, regarding her compeers with an eye as sardonic as it is affectionate. Surely, when a rich admirer turns out to have a heart as well, she is ready to be swept away from that milieu…or is she? One final dancing tour through the French provinces, and she will decide.

Last, and unmissable, is The Pure and The Impure. Colette profiles the most striking of the erotic adventurers she has known, with tenderness and depth; a heartless womanizer, a dignified butch aristocrat, a bisexual courtesan now turning over dirty tarot cards, the ladies of Llangollen, the lovely and mad poet Renee Vivien. You may ask what this enigmatic queer classic has to do with burlesque. Its milieu of smoky cafes, opium dens, and aristocratic parlors was the demi-monde background to the caf-conc’ dancers in The Vagabond; they were all equally disreputable. And what erotic performer would not benefit from this piercing view into seduction and the human heart?