Persiflage

Beauty Strategies, By Laris

If your eyelashes are naturally long and dark, save mascara for the desperate days following sleepless nights.  Then, everyone will be so busy wondering whether you're a hooker that they won't even notice your soulless expression, the proliferation of fine lines, your chalky complexion, or the cavernous dark undereye circles.

Red lipstick helps, too.

It's A Trap, All Right

People!  Why have you been bamboozled by the plastic "Bare Trap" clogs?  These androgynous atrocities remind me of something Devo would wear.  And Devo, in case you were wondering, is not an acceptable style muse.  When it is not Halloween.  Or, I guess, San Francisco.

  Do you think these are quirky and whimsical?  Because, newsflash, they are more like something that dangerous mental patients are forced to wear in the interest of easy identification and limitation of flight risk.  They look like the modernist interpretation of a passionate and tragic love affair between Legos and Swiss cheese.

I would not be at all surprised if the deity of your choice had sent these as a scourge to plague humanity.  Particularly since said deity apparently set the celestial weather dial to "deluge" and borrowed Spinal Tap's amplifier for the thunder peals.  These have to be End of Days commencement exercises, right?

We are all, as global citizens, less stylish for the existence of this shoe.

These Boots Were Made For Walking, and Walking, and Walking

Last weekend, I decided it was time to do a little shoe shopping.  Since I took this job at the bookstore,  my shoe options have been woefully insufficient for my daily wardrobe challenges.  Wearing heels is out of the question, as I'm tripping my way through something in the vicinity of 15,000 steps per day.  Fifteen thousand steps in stiletto heels is roughly equivalent to booking yourself a seat on an SST ride to plantar fasciitis city.  For the most part, I've been wearing sneakers five days a week for the past two months.  Chic, stylish sneakers, to be sure.  But sneakers, nonetheless.  Many of my clothes?  Do not work with sneakers.

I've gotten reasonably skilled at shopping alone.  I'm not quite prepared to say that I don't need an enabler, but in dire situations I'm capable of flying solo.  Whenever my resolve begins to waver, I close my eyes and listen to Emily's voice telling me how the shoes want to come home with me, nay, need to come home with me.  Because it is dark at night in the shoe store, and they are neglected and lonely.  If I listen hard enough, I can sometimes even hear them calling my name and begging me to love them.  This happened twice last weekend, and who am I to deny shoes the warm, nurturing homes they so desperately need?

Never one to let a minor concern such as impecuniosity interfere with sartorial splendor, I bought these Frye boots:

And these Cole Haan flats:

All week long, my mom has been twisting heavily on the faucet of guilt.  Don't I feel remorse for having dropped almost the entirety of a paycheck on footwear?  Don't I think that money could be better spent elsewhere?  Shouldn't I, at the very least, be putting on my new shoes on Sunday morning to come to church with her?  And all week long, I've been blithely immune to her machinations, sublimely clomping (boots) or twirling (flats) my way through my days.  My clothes have been happier, too, as they're now secure in the knowledge that many of them will soon be liberated from their closet prison, now that I have the appropriate comfortable footwear selections to serve as companion pieces.

So: gorgeous shoes, happy feet, happy clothes, happy Laris, and no remorse.  No remorse, that is, until I realized that I do need to pinch the pennies for awhile, and therefore can't afford to squander my spare change on this.  Damn.  Foiled again, by the Venus Flytrap!

Even You're Too Sexy For THAT Shirt

As the esteemed Manolo has requested that his internet friends discuss the fashion "don'ts" that drive them batty, I have chosen today to address an oft-ignored hive of fashion villainy: the sartorial sins of the mens.  For men, the fashion bar is not set terribly high.  If a man manages to leave the house on a semi-regular basis wearing clothing that was (a) manufactured in the current decade for (b) a person more or less within his size range and is (c) not splattered with an array of tidbits from his last six or seven meals, he's considered a reasonably stylin' dude.  In other words, men have the luxury of garnishing high praise for mere competence.  And yet, so many of them fall so short.  Here are some of the male fashion felonies I spot all too frequently, resulting in much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

>> Cheap leather jackets: Are you a dealer in Naugahyde pelts?  No?  Then it is unnecessary to wear the passenger seat of my mother's circa-1985 station wagon on your back.

>> Sagged pants: Every man who sags his pants appears as though he suffers from an incurable medical condition involving an unfortunate partial failure on the part of his pituitary gland, resulting in a state of affairs where his upper body and torso have achieved puberty, while he's left with withered little hairless child legs.

>> Big, doofy white sneakers: Nothing says, "I ride the short bus" quite so eloquently as the sporting of shoes the loss of which the Marshmallow Man has been mourning for these many weeks.  This misstep is particularly egregious when one considers the abundance of stylish alternatives.

>> Brown shoes, black pants: Some of you have degrees.  Several of them.  Advanced ones.  Why is this so confusing for you?

>>High-water pants: A few of you have just recently mastered the aforementioned "socks" concept and want to show the world how well you did.  While we applaud your coordination skills, please limit the demonstration to your home environment.  If you have no plans to embark upon a cheerful wading expedition, dress pants should hang to the top of the heel, while jeans may fall to the heel's bottom.  No exceptions.

>> Enormous shapeless t-shirts: Another roadmap for the perplexed: size labels?  Are placed in garments for a reason.  If you are entirely lacking of social consciousness to the extent that you suffer from genuine confusion regarding the nature of your proportions, feel free to take all four flavors of cotton goodness into the fitting room for a test run.  Professional assistance may also be available; consult your local retailer for details.  It is a researched and proven scientific fact that the donning of an oversized and ill-fitting garment will not cause you to magically gain four inches of height and thirty pounds of solid muscle.  If that doesn't convince you, perhaps this will: a garment pulled over the head, covering the torso, and dangling to the knees is known, my friend, as a "dress."

>> Manpris:  These make unicorns cry. 

Fashion 2006: More UGGliness Ahead?

The inimitable Manolo, he has requested that we, his loyal readers, offer our predictions for the world of fashion in 2006.  Ever vigilant, Persiflage has risen to the challenge::

>>Women will continue to wear Juicy velour sweatpants as daywear.  Nothing in God's great creation is so certain to bestow upon the wearer a more-than-generous VPL (Visible Panty Line, for the uninitiated.)  And sweatpants and thongs are so fundamentally incompatible that they may replace the concept of "oil and water."  Also?  Pantyline or no?  Just.  Plain.  Ugly.

>>Even as the fashion world realizes that it has pushed a cruel joke too far, women will continue to wear jeans with such drastic low rises that their zippers, incapable of actual sliding, are purely decorative.  This look carries the virulent capacity to cause a woman of average stature to bear an uncanny resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy.  Perhaps next year, some enterprising designer will introduce the matching hat.  Women wearing these pants deserve to be poked in their exposed bellies, with no recourse under sexual harassment statutes.

>>Women will continue to wear hideous UGG boots, many in mawkish shades.  Unless your name is Mariah, pink suede is not for you.  If your name is Mariah, you're getting away with this only because we have so many larger issues to address.

>>Women will continue to wear the aforementioned pants tucked in to the aforementioned UGG boots, a trend which is universally unflattering to the extent that it would make Nicole Richie appear a tad hippy.

>>Women will embrace with open arms the newly perpetrated and freakishly bizarre trend of wearing skirts over jeans.  If any human frailties are capable of causing the Earth to break free of its orbit and careen headlong into the sun, this should do it. 

From a purely sociological perspective, I'm interested in tracing this back to its onset.  Is it rooted in simple indecision?  On some morning, somewhere in America (I'm betting on California), did a woman emerge from her shower racked with such inner turmoil regarding whether to don her Citizens or her new Ella Moss skirt that she threw them both on, one after another?  Should we start hosting decisionmaking seminars for young women in Starbucks?  Allowing them to gradually work their way up the menu from tall coffees with room for cream to venti extra-shot soy lattes with a squirt of sugar-free hazelnut flavoring?  Is there a crucial hosiery shortage out there?  Should we recommend government intervention?  Is this a surfeit of modesty somehow traceable to the movement for abstinence-only education?  These questions must be answered!

>>At some point, inevitably, a woman sporting Juicy sweatpants tucked into UGG boots with a skirt on top will cross my path.  I will suffer a moment of sublime cognitive dissonance and drag her outside for summary execution.  Generally, I believe that Violence Is Not the Solution.  But, ladies, if you're going to keep shooting yourselves in the foot, don't blame me if I nudge the process along by shooting you in the head.

Mama Said Knock You Out

Anyone else think the marketing division dropped the ball with these?  Since I'm so generous, I'll rewrite their copy for them:

Exhausted by constant arguments with your honey over where to dine, which movie to rent, and whose football team is indisputably superior?  No more!  Use Rock'em, Sock'em Robots to arbitrate dicey relationship disputes, or just to take out aggression in a way that will never be grounds for a restraining order!  Don't let another evening fizzle because of silly unresolved conflict.   Were you on a break when you slept with that smokin'  personal trainer?  Let the robots decide!  He wants to do <ahem> something you consider unpalatable?  Who wins?  Robots to the rescue!  Remember: you're not wrong 'til your head is gone.

[From TMN]