the alex party
i've often considered myself a class alien when it all boils down to it: i walk about -- and i know this -- unlike so many others in my station in life with the type of high head and high aspiration that so many in my same circumstance do not gather: i've often tried to pinpoint exactly where this unusual sense of do-your-own-thing-ed-ness comes from but i've never really found a genesis: however, over the past couple of weeks, i've certainly found its sustenance. for all of the credit i give my friends, they have begun to operate in just the way i've seen my parents' adult friends treat them: equal portions of love, respect, and keeping-up-with-the-joneses-ness: it's a dose of something that could get misinterpreted as unhealthy, but i take as one of the most healthy influences in my life: it's not jealousy, fully, and it's not envy because there's no malice, it's just a tacit setting of expectactions, a rat race of sorts, a crazy type of "keeping up appearances" that we all play out on each other that actually makes better and refines us in a way that simple instruction or individual ambition may not: and one might say, in the end, it came down to the jonathan adler pottery. long ago, on an episode of the sopranos, carmela soprano boasted about her lladro statuettes and her community involvement for the benefit of her son's girlfriend who lived in house populated with rodins and picassos. it struck me as a funny irony that this woman who wanted to put on all the pretensions of the upper classes found herself relegated back to her actual station in the presence of actual wealth. and while i'd never entertain the notion of being even above the poverty line since the layoff last year, ever since my promotion at work and the first paycheck thereof, i've found myself returned to a place i haven't enjoyed since before i worked at pier one. my only warning signal this time guards against the complacency i felt then and losing sight of constantly moving onward and upward wherever that might lead. but right before i de-camped for chicago, i experienced this forgotten feeling. the feeling of paying my bills. the feeling of fulfilling my impulses. the feeling of going out when i want. the feeling of going to the store on whim. the feeling of seeing an ad and purchasing it. in season. without hesitation. the feeling of going out for after-five drinks with my friend the p.r. girl. at the new bella brava no less. the feeling of involving myself in the community by going to the opening of the fall season of the florida orchestra. the impromptu purchase of a bottle of wine to enjoy on the new balcony of the new apartment of the p.r. girl. and doing it all before a trip and still having money. that's the feeling. it's not absolute comfort. i mean, i'm not going out to dinner every night like i once did and i'm not going out to lunch every day like i once did. i'm not ordering breakfast deliveries. i'm not dry cleaning everything on habit. i don't have laundry service pick up my dirty clothes. i haven't started going out two, three times a week again. and for the time being, i'm shopping sales racks and not having things put on a rack by a nordstrom personal shopper, but i've gotten back some sense of control and some sense of happiness again. i find myself welling up with happiness even as i sit in my little showroom studio, sipping on a glass of wine, languishing in the absolute beauty of large scale canvases and gorgeous lamps and proper furnishings. and then i go to chicago.
and just like carmela soprano, i found myself so thoroughly put back in my place that i couldn't help but smirk. i brought six hundred dollars for a fairly short weekend in a relatively inexpensive city. by the time i touched down in chicago, this had already dwindled to five hundred (airport parking, checked bag fee, gas to run to the airport, last minute dry cleaning, etc). one hundred fifty set aside for alex and i had three fifty which officially stands as not enough to do much in a city like chicago. but before i get to the economic realities, i have to get to the things that surprised-and-delight. first, the train ride into chicago remains the stuff of legend. riding into the great downtown of that city filled me with the thrills i once felt as a child riding the trolley in tomorrowland. skyscrapers of all sorts intertwining around each other like some old redwood forest. and a compendium of people of all classes and all races and cultures crowding together on the train with lives and priorities and idiosyncrasies of their own. a near-goth african american nerd next to a clearly monied bottle blond with a nose piercing next to a handsome athlete in the chicago uniform of aviators, too-tailored jeans, v-neck t-shirt, non-descript loafers, and the mid-west form of i-know-i'm-hot swagger. i boarded the train in a after five outfit of polo button down shirt, rich and skinny dark jeans, brouges and a burberry trench, and some tourists actually asked me for directions setting me in the perfect mood. when i got off the train, i found myself wonderfully pleased that i recognized the neighborhood. the "el" stop sat right across the street from the bar, berlin, where alex had taken us a couple of years ago. on the streets, i found myself again pleased by the potpurri of the the young chicago crop and those who pushed around strollers, and when i got to alex's street, i got even more bowled over by the crazily cute and architecturally distinct buildings that lined both sides of the street. an old midwestern town house here, a starkly modern building of full floor apartments, a single family home fit for a king. when i got to alex's doorstep, reagan, their gorgeous black dog came running down the stairs, and i got welcomed by the open arms of both alex and rob. soon, i met alex's partner, mike, who effused all of those elements of masculinity that one might so soon forget should one get very immersed in our world. because of the time change, we all found ourselves catching up at an unusually early hour with little to do, so alex and i went shopping after i had set down my things and i loved the neat shopping that surrounded him. a army/navy store stood up the street with the patina of a raw trend store. think the d & g boutique at the forum shops in ceasar's palace in las vegas. seriously. while my eyes immediately got drawn to the german militaria, i found myself most besotted with the navy air force and army jackets. we also stopped in american apparel and a poster shop (how these places afford storefronts continues to boggle the mind) and then headed back so we could go to dinner. we went to the neighborhood haunt, ukai, and had great sushi and byob wine, then we went back home to get ready, which became an ordeal in and of itself as my linea pelle cross-studded belt had trouble fitting in the belt loops of my ysl jeans -- and headed downtown for alex's surprise birthday location. we pulled up to the wit hotel downtown and while i felt almost fabulous in my ysl skinny jeans, my ysl loafers, and my vintage ysl camel blazer, and we walked to the front of the line getting ushered inside with whispers into walkie-talkies tracking our every movement. "the alex party is in the lobby." "the alex party has entered the elevator." "the alex party has arrived." and though we played musical tables at first, needless to say, rob and i found ourselves woefully overwhelmed with the orgasmic view of the skyline of chicago. nested in a huddle of city lights, the bottles arrived to the table and as we guzzled down the vueve clicquot, alex gave us these lapel pins of the numeral five. quite chanel if you ask me. after we swallowed the bottle of champagne, we embarked on the mission to attack the bottle of grey goose. rob did not feel well and though the music rocked me to my core, i think there came a point where we had all had our fill because we had to invite another of our ohio state friends -- who never showed up -- and while i remember dancing and remember having fun and remember drinking, i have absolutely no idea when what where or why we left or what i did because my next memory is waking up on the air mattress in my undies with the beginnings of a chicago hangover. they told me that after my memory stopped apparently, i proceeded to give back what little sushi and the grand lot of vodka that i consumed all over the fantastic boite. yeah, the friday night city crowd of chicago what with their pretty young things and the young upwardly mobiles and every other stereotype of big city living and i vomited all over them. thank GOD i don't live there.
the next day, i tried with all my might to get up and go shopping in lincoln park, but three hours of sleep over forty eight hours plus a hangover i only know with the boys kept me asleep until the late afternoon. that evening, we went to another neighborhood haunt, mathilda, and i ran to belmont army and navy to get the air force jacket to don over my reiss double polo shirt and rock and republic skinny jeans and ferragamo suede trainers. mathilda is exactly the type of place i wanted to go when in chicago. it had a patio and funky decor and chocolate martinis that set me right into a good orbit. we caught a cab to the gold coast to the penthouse apartment of one of our old ohio state friends and while i found myself wrapped up in this nostalgia and intrigued by the art collection, the party found itself mostly a bust what with restrictions on red wine and the heat blowing through the vents -- despite the high eighty degree temperature outside -- and besides one gregarious broad and a couple of decidedly chicago looking people, no one all that interesting besides us old ohio state folk who mostly holed up in the bedroom re-living old times. after alex's mike left for another party and the gregarious broad left, we decided to off-ramp as well and went to the new york times' recommended mainstay big chicks which i had been to some years prior and after a lifechanging cab ride -- think ninety miles per hour, fully amped house music, lake shore drive situaation -- we tried to have a good time at big chicks despite our mutual cokehead ohio state friend putting our friend alex in an even worse state of being and pushing rob and i to the margins of the evening: in that moment, alex decided he needed to go home. well. we didn't really know how to react since we had just now gotten into the drink -- yeah, though slowly, i had managed to get up to number six at this point and rob had broken his pledge against ketel one on the rocks -- and we rode with him all the way home. and rob tried his best to comfort him, in the patent-pending robert crouch way, while i buzzed about the apartment not conceding the moment. and when alex threw the keys on the table and said "go out!" -- my drunkenness comingled with salesman-ness said "let's go, rob!" and though he tried to resist it, we went out and we painted the town RED. we started with roscoe's and (i think) that's where we started the night's joke that we were touring husband factories for rob and while he didn't buy in immediately, by the time we got to sidetraxx (i think), and three rounds further in, he was on board with the metaphor and my maniacal -- think will and grace's karen walker with a cocktail and a notary public stamp -- motioning like i was approving compliance documents. by the time we got to hydrate, the night was on full blast. my jacket caused a stir as we walked down the street. some black girl snapping at her friend, "no, i LIKE it," even as her respective gayboyfriend said, "i don't know." and we snaked through the hydrate (i know) just like it was 2001, well, maybe, 2003, and besides all of the anthems we heard that night -- "only girl" to "million dollar bill" -- we eventually lost steam and decided to head back with a very emotional -- "on a very special episode of" -- confessional session at subway -- where they didn't have mayonnaise (i don't know why i remember such things) -- where i confided in rob that i slept with someone he dated once upon a time that shared a building with me. at the time they dated. yeah, damned alcohol. then we went back to the apartment.
the next day, we did brunch at ann sathers where i literally exploded twice after eating so much food i died. the cinnamon rolls remain legend. after brunch, we headed downtown for a bit of shopping. we started at barneys, then spent about an hour in marc jacobs -- officially old navy for the monied set just like tiffany is claire's for rich people -- and then went to the north face in the hancock tower then to zara -- which had every single cardigan i will own for boston -- and then to express which had this beautifully cheap yellow shirt i might try to find here and then to burberry and then to the biggest crate and barrel i've ever been to and then to neiman marcus where i fixated on prada camouflage and tom ford's japon noir and then we went to millennium park where alex shot the skinniest photographs of me i have taken in years. we then went to the millenium park cafe for a nosh. then, we went over to ben's which is a tradition of alex and rob and then we went to kit kat club which was fun because i had two cucumber martinis and enjoyed the company of all involved. of course, this all got ruined when i got home and broke something and rob and mike both cautioned me not to tell alex because he was already in a bad mood although, again, i don't remember why. and yeah, that didn't turn out well either because the next morning alex found the pieces of the bowl and went OFF. no apology could have sufficed, but that's how we left it and then we went shopping in the neighborhood again and i bought this vintage card of the belmont "el" stop and then we went back for me to leave. it felt like a tense ending, but who knows.
on the way back home, i ruminated quite a bit over the issues i took away from the trip. mainly, the social pressure i felt to be in a long-term committed relationship. and in one with all of the signs of outward success as the one my friend alex displayed. this is exactly the thing that makes me so passionate for the cause celebre of gay marriage as a whole because even as we sat around their dinette set drinking coffee one morning with rob asking, "well, are you two going somewhere to get married legally?" they said "no" because, in the end, it'd still be invalid. the romantic in me wanted to cry out "what about the symbolism?!" but i got it. and it's funny because we live in this oddly two-faced political environment where republicans and democrats, conservatives and liberals, spout the exact same political argument when they apply to both parties equally on different topics. where is the conservative furor decrying the "uncertainty" of an uneven legal framework when it comes it issues like "don't ask, don't tell" or proposition eight in california? where happens to their cries for states' rights when it to issues like the marijuana referendum in california or physician assisted suicide? and it's funny how this administration has to thread the needle on so many of their agenda items like healthcare, immigration, military policy, and drug policy. yes, i understand these issues don't play the same way and i don't mean to apologize for this administration, but if the obama administration starts to employ the "we're not going to appeal" tactic like the executive branch in california, he doesn't get to reap the "i'm moving to the center" poltical capital, and plus, how can he mount such a vociferous battle for healthcare on the grounds that federal policy trumps all, if he doesn't do it for other issues that will probably settle the way he wants anyway? we can't have federal district court judges deciding the law for the entire country. i don't care what party's in power, a bill that's passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president deserves more than one ruling by one judge. now, supreme court or appeals court? maybe. and seeing as healthcare is his legacy item number one, he's not going to jeopardize that -- he's going to have the fight of his life for the next two years with the implementation of that with a more republican congress -- for a constituency that's going to stick by him in the end. besides, the court cases help triangulate the political effort to force the congress into action. if the courts overturn the arizona effort, how can even a republican congress not tackle the immigration issue on a federal level? if the courts uphold the pro-pot referendum in california, it could very well undermine any number of other federal policies, no? and this is why i think they feel they have to defend the "don't ask, don't tell": as convoluted as it sounds, obama is a constitutional purist that thinks the congress has the most power -- repudiating all of that unitary executive business we had under bush -- especially when it specifically directs the executive. it's the first lesson of civics, the congress makes the law, the executive enforces the law, and the courts interpret the law. it's actually quite a conservative point of view. it's something the most crazy-conservative of justices always refer to: let the congress act and if the people disagree, let them exercise their democracy.
but this issue, in my mind, really is about trying to protect a very specific type of masculinity. a very american brand of masculinity that's begun to unravel with men like the partner of my friend alex who doesn't fit into any neatly drawn stereotype, but just stands as a very good, very well adjusted MAN. just imagine them coming home with military honors and imagine them telling the story about how they saved their mostly straight platoons or whatever. it's about that iconic sailor bending the girl over with the new york skyline in the background -- as diesel satarized in their ad from the nineties. it's about those moments in the foxhole -- as siegried sassoon rhapsodized in his poetry -- and it's about this club of good old boys that tried to keep blacks out and tried to keep women out. and as we see stories about blacks rising to the test. and women earning those medals. and now, even, the oh-so-scary illegal aliens shedding blood for this country. it's really about trying to make yet another group "the other" in a way that melts away when it's in this most patriotic of contexts. this type of masculinity paired with anything they may not like is really a dangerously powerful thing. and it's this new type of masculinity that's so alluring to me at the moment. i may have seen it at chanel -- what with this midwestern model walking down the catwalk holding the hand of his two year old -- and i may just be really tired. but there's something to this.
Here is your Daily Single's Horoscope for Wednesday, October 20
Your unconscious mind is on to something that you really should know. Ponder your dreams, clear your head and scribble or write down thoughts as they come to you. Allow the truth to flow.
9th Circuit Grants Stay of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Injunction
Amanda Bronstad
10-21-2010
A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted the government's emergency motion for a temporary stay of a worldwide injunction barring enforcement of "don't ask, don't tell," the military's ban on openly gay service members.
The 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals provided no reason for its action other than "to provide this court with an opportunity to consider fully the issues presented."
The three-judge panel gave the Log Cabin Republicans, the plaintiff in the underlying case, until Oct. 25 to oppose the government's broader request for a stay of the injunction pending its appeal.
In a prepared statement later on Wednesday, Dan Woods, a partner in the Los Angeles office of White & Case who represents the Log Cabin Republicans, called the 9th Circuit's order "a minor setback."
"We didn't come this far to quit now, and we expect that once the Ninth Circuit has received and considered full briefing on the government's application for a stay, it will deny that application, and the district court's injunction, which it entered after hearing all the evidence in the case, will remain in place until the appeal is finally decided."
In a motion filed on Wednesday, lawyers for the Justice Department asked the 9th Circuit for an immediate administrative stay to give them time to argue for a complete stay pending their appeal. U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips in Riverside, Calif., on Tuesday refused to grant the government's request for a stay of her Oct. 12 injunction.
Absent a stay, wrote Henry Whitaker, an appellate attorney in the Justice Department's civil division in Washington, "the district court's order precludes the administration of an Act of Congress and risks causing significant immediate harm to the military and its efforts to be prepared to implement an orderly repeal of the statute."
The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it is telling recruiters to accept openly gay applicants -- with the understanding that the legal situation surrounding "don't ask, don't tell" remains in limbo.
The move was highlighted in court papers filed with the 9th Circuit by Log Cabin Republicans opposing the government's request for an administrative stay.
"The government has already acted nimbly in response to the district court's injunction: it has instructed its field recruiting offices to process applications for enlistment from openly gay and lesbian applicants," Woods wrote. "The fact that the government can and did issue such instructions and comply with the injunction immediately shows that the military will not sustain irreparable harm from compliance and belies the need for any temporary stay."
Woods, in an interview with The National Law Journal, said the Pentagon's action undermines the government's position.
"Typically, you have to get a stay by showing you're likely to win on appeal," he said. "And I hope we put it out on this brief that they haven't done that. You need this stay to prevent some irreparable harm to you."
The government argued that it has a good chance of succeeding on appeal for several reasons. First, Whitaker wrote, the Log Cabin Republicans lacked standing because the organization brought the case on behalf of two individuals whose membership and alleged injuries caused by "don't ask, don't tell" remain in dispute.
Also, judges historically have deferred to Congress in matters involving the military, he wrote. Third, by issuing a worldwide injunction, Phillips inappropriately treated the case as a class action, rather than one that applies only to an organization "purporting to advance the interests of two individuals," he added.
"The sweeping injunction therefore constitutes an extraordinary and unwarranted intrusion into military affairs," Whitaker said.
As for harm, Whitaker said, the injunction would force the military to conduct a "massive" revision of its regulations, including those relating to benefits, and policies involving equal opportunity and harassment.
Woods argued that Phillips had rejected all of the same arguments before.
On the 9th Circuit panel hearing the stay request are Diarmuid O'Scannlain, a Reagan nominee who was confirmed in 1986; Stephen Trott, a Reagan nominee who has been on senior status since 2004, and William Fletcher, a Clinton nominee who was confirmed in 1998.
In 2008, O'Scannlain dissented from a 9th Circuit decision denying a rehearing of a case involving a constitutional challenge to "don't ask, don't tell." A three-judge panel had ruled in Witt v. Dep't of Air Force that such constitutional challenges were subject to an elevated standard of review, making it more difficult for the government to defend the law.
The decision was a key precedent on which Phillips relied when she found the law unconstitutional. In denying a rehearing of the Witt decision, O'Scannlain wrote: "At the end of the day, Witt creates a forum in the judicial branch (rather than the political branches) to challenge the validity and the particular application of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' even though such policy infringes no constitutional right."
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Military Recruiters Told To Accept Gay Applicants
by The Associated Press
October 19, 2010
The military is accepting openly gay recruits for the first time in the nation's history, even as it tries in the courts to slow the movement to abolish its "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Some gay activist groups were planning to send people to enlist at recruiting stations to test the Pentagon's Tuesday announcement.
A federal judge in California who overturned the 17-year policy last week rejected the government's latest effort on Tuesday to halt her order telling the military to stop enforcing the law. Government lawyers will likely appeal.
The Defense Department has said it would comply with U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips' order and had frozen any discharge cases. But at least one case was reported of a man being turned away from an Army recruiting office in Austin, Texas.
Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said recruiters had been given top-level guidance to accept applicants who say they are gay.
Recruiters also have been told to inform potential recruits that the moratorium on enforcement of the policy could be reversed at any time, if the ruling is appealed or the court grants a stay, she said.
While activists were going to enlist, gay rights groups were continuing to tell service members to avoid revealing that they are gay, fearing they could find themselves in trouble should the law be reinstated.
"What people aren't really getting is that the discretion and caution that gay troops are showing now is exactly the same standard of conduct that they will adhere to when the ban is lifted permanently," said Aaron Belkin, executive director of the Palm Center, a think tank on gays and the military at the University of California Santa Barbara.
The uncertain status of the law has caused much confusion within an institution that has historically discriminated against gays. Before the 1993 law, the military banned gays entirely and declared them incompatible with military service.
Twenty-nine nations, including Israel, Canada, Germany and Sweden, allow openly gay troops, according to the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay-rights group and plaintiff in the lawsuit before Phillips.
The Pentagon guidance to recruiters comes after Dan Woods, the group's attorney, sent a letter last week warning the Justice Department that Army recruiters who turned away Omar Lopez in Texas may have caused the government to violate Phillips' injunction.
Woods wrote that the military could be subject to a citation for contempt.
Douglas Smith, spokesman for U.S. Army Recruiting Command based at Fort Knox, Ky., said even before the ruling recruiters did not ask applicants about their sexual orientation. The difference now is that recruiters will process those who say they are gay.
"If they were to self-admit that they are gay and want to enlist, we will process them for enlistment, but will tell them that the legal situation could change," Smith said.
He said the enlistment process takes time and recruiters have been told to inform those who are openly gay that they could be declared ineligible if the law is upheld on appeal.
"U.S. Army Recruiting Command is going to follow the law, whatever the law is," he said.
The message, however, had not reached some recruiting stations.
At one for all branches in Pensacola, Marine Sgt. Timothy Chandler said he had been given no direction. "As far as we are concerned everything is the same, the policy hasn't changed," he said, as others in office nodded.
Chandler said no one had come to the small office questioning the policy or asking about being openly gay and serving.
Recruiters at the Navy office next door referred all media questions to the Pentagon. Air Force recruiters said they were not authorized to talk to the media. Army recruiters referred questions to another office in Mobile, Ala.
Phillips said at a hearing Monday that she was learning toward denying the Obama administration's request to delay her order. That would send the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
After Phillips' ruling last week, Lopez - discharged from the Navy in 2006 after admitting his gay status to his military doctor - walked into an Army recruiting office in Austin and asked if he could re-enlist.
He said he was up front, even showing the recruiters his Navy discharge papers. But they told him he couldn't re-enlist because they had not gotten word from the Pentagon to allow openly gay recruits.
Smith was unable to confirm the account. She said guidance on gay applicants had been issued to recruiting commands on Oct. 15.
On Tuesday, upon hearing of the changes to recruiting, Lopez said, "Oh my God! I've been waiting for this for four years."
Lopez said he'll try again Friday and will go to a Navy recruiting office in Austin to see if he can enroll in ROTC as an officer. He is currently studying hospitality services at Austin Community College.
"I'm hoping they'll let me in because I was able to switch over from an enlistment to an officer. I'm really hoping they can accept me," he said.
* Copyright 2010 NPR
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October 15, 2010
From Boys to Men
By GUY TREBAY
HAS anyone seen the Dior man? You know the one, that scrawny rocker dude with a chicken chest, a size 36 suit and a face that seems to be sprouting its first crop of peach fuzz.
It has been almost a decade since Hedi Slimane, then the designer for Dior men’s wear, jump-started an aesthetic shift away from stiffly traditional male images that long dominated men’s fashion. Since then, season after season, designers, editors and photographers alike fell into unconscious lockstep with Mr. Slimane’s tastes in men. The image of the Dior man was so influential that it spawned a host of imitators and, not incidentally, exiled a generation of conventionally handsome and mature models from runways into the gulag of catalogs.
On catwalks and in advertising campaigns the prevalent male image has long been that of skinny skate-rat, a juvenile with pipe-cleaner proportions. Designers as unalike as Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada developed so pronounced an appetite for the jailbait type that at some model castings in Milan and Paris the new faces often showed up chaperoned by Mom.
“Men have always been defined by their jobs - always,” said Joe Levy, the editor in chief of Maxim. When the economy was flush, consumers were content to indulge designer subversions of age and gender expectations, he added. That was before the recession lodged in the landscape like an errant iceberg taking its own time to thaw. “Suddenly the notion of having a job or a career is in doubt,” Mr. Levy said. “So you fall back on old notions of what it meant to be a man or to look like one.”
You lose the T-shirt and the skateboard. You buy an interview suit and a package of Gillette Mach 3 blades. You grow up, in other words. Suddenly evidence of a new phase in the cycle of evolving masculine imagery was all over the catwalks in the runway season that recently ended. Just as suddenly it can be seen splashed across the covers of magazines, where the boys of recent memory have been transformed overnight into men.
“I was working on our new issue when I got to Paris,” Stephen Gan, the editor of the influential men’s-wear magazine V Man. Titled “The Coming of Age” issue, the new V Man features on its cover no skinny kid model but Josh Brolin who, with his weather-beaten face and crow’s-feet, looks every minute of 44.
“As soon as I got there, Carine handed me her new issue,” Mr. Gan added, referring to Carine Roitfeld, the taste-setting editor of French Vogue and Vogue Hommes International. The theme of her latest men’s-wear issue, whose cover features Matt Norklun, a star model of the ’80s, is titled, appropriately, “The Prime of Life.”
“It’s not just models, it’s actors, it’s advertising, it’s the movies,” said Sam Shahid, creative director of Shahid & Company and a force behind campaigns that first helped put Calvin Klein’s name on half the world’s backsides. “It’s trendy to do this, and everyone’s suddenly jumping on it,” Mr. Shahid said, referring to the abrupt rejiggering of masculine ideals.
“It’s also, like comfort food, about the economy,” he said. “Look back to movies during the Depression, and all you saw was real guys like James Cagney. In tough times, people want a strong man.”
Or, at the very least, they want images of men who look old enough to vote. “The twink thing seems over,” said Jim Nelson, the editor of GQ. “When people open GQ, I don’t want them to feel like they’re looking at clothes on 16-year-olds.”
It is not merely a matter of body type, Mr. Nelson noted. “When we cast, we want a model with some heft to him and a few years on him,” he said. “Someone who has aged a little bit and who feels like he’s a man.”
What they want, in short, is Jon Hamm. That Mr. Hamm’s square-jawed Don Draper so persuasively resembles an archetypal father on a time-travel visa from an era of postwar expansion and fixed gender roles can hardly be incidental to the success of “Mad Men.”
“At a time of underemployment and digitized labor that doesn’t have real products at the end of the process people want to be reminded” through images from pop culture, Mr. Nelson said, “that we as men do work, we do labor, we do still make things.” Half the story pitches the editors at GQ get nowadays, Mr. Nelson added, come from writers who want to go to butcher’s school.
Designers, for their part, alert to a burgeoning interest in the trappings of manual labor, have responded with a wholesale revival of so-called “heritage” labels and work wear. And they are casting their runway shows and ad campaigns with increasingly hirsute, well-built, mature types - men who certainly look as if they’ve never been waxed or had a manicure.
In an article in the new V Man titled “The World’s First Male Supermodel,” an interviewer remarks to the model Jeff Aquilon that early photographs of him by Bruce Weber prompted a thousand academic reconsiderations of contemporary masculinity. Like any ordinary lug unaffected by his own godlike aspect, Mr. Aquilon responds with modesty. “People were laying a lot of money on the line,” when paying him fat sums to appear in his skivvies for ads of the era, he said. His ambitions then were simple, Real Man goals: stay in shape and show up on time.
“Maybe it’s that the stylists that were in power 10 years ago are not so powerful anymore,” Jason Kanner, the president of the men’s division of Major Model Management, said of the latest development in masculine ideals. “Maybe it’s that as consumers are getting older, they want to see something that reflects what they look like in the mirror.”
Any sane man, of course, would be ecstatic to see Mr. Aquilon’s features reflected when he gazed into the glass. Yet for a long time, Mr. Kanner said, models of that type were out of favor with a business that sought beauty instead in a goofy-looking androgynous version of Peter Pan. “I’m a big believer that classic beauty never dies,” Mr. Kanner added, although until recently his was a minority voice.
“For a long time it was just those skinny guys, those boyish Prada types,” he said, referring to men like Cole Mohr - a model with jug ears and the body of a teenager - long a favorite at labels like Prada and Louis Vuitton. “I hate to use the word waif, but what else can you call all these skinny young hairless guys?”
Even Prada and Louis Vuitton embraced the new imagery in the recent runway season, casting what Mr. Kanner termed “masculine, manly men” for their shows. “The guys now look like models again,” he said. “They look like throwbacks to the days of Herb Ritts.”
Is it entirely a coincidence that Mr. Ritts himself is enjoying a posthumous revival? A new volume from Rizzoli celebrates his work as a photographer and equally the Amazons and Olympians he memorialized in his career. The sort of ripe beauty Mr. Ritts tended to celebrate owed a great deal to the ideals of old Hollywood; lavish, irresistible and lush, it also held none of the dangers that irresistible male beauty would come to symbolize after the appearance of AIDS.
When casting a recent fashion pictorial, the editors of Details were aware that in seeking a “real man” type they were looking for a nonexistent ideal. There is of course no such thing as a “real” man, Dan Peres, the magazine’s editor in chief, remarked. “But we have a product to produce that, in the end, has to be relatable to a reader, a reader who wants to be able to see some vision of himself in the pages of a magazine.” Especially in a depressed economy, the editors concluded, the Details man was not well represented by the boys so fashionable a moment ago.
So they cast Gabriel Aubry, a godlike blond Canadian who as recently as two years ago would have been thought of as washed-up in the business. “For us it was about how relatable this guy is to the reader,” Mr. Peres said. “It’s about what connection a reader is going to make with some waify 17-year-old versus a 34-year-old man, albeit a 34-year-old man who has washboard abs and who fathered Halle Berry’s kid.”
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Six-pack punch overrated as other male body types muscle in
Julie Robotham
May 24, 2010 - 3:00AM
An average-sized man is just as appealing as a bulked-up Adonis, according to Australian research that examined viewers' responses to different male body types in advertisements.
Men and women had rated images of slender or slightly chubby masculinity at least as highly as those with well-defined six-packs, said the study leader, Phillippa Diedrichs, suggesting successful campaigns did not have to portray only rock hard biceps and rippling abs.
The results will widen the debate about media presentation of unrealistic body types, which has until now focused almost exclusively on ultra-thin female models and whether they cause eating disorders among young women.
Ms Diedrichs showed mock-up advertisements for jeans, skin-care products and cologne - featuring muscular male models and men of more average dimensions - to more than 600 students in their late teens.
Neither sex responded more positively to the musclebound bodies, and the males even found ads that showed just the item - with no accompanying model - more effective than those posed by classic hunks.
Some participants in the University of Queensland study ''may have attributed the models' muscularity to vanity or homosexuality, characteristics which they may have found unpleasant or discomforting'', Ms Diedrichs wrote in the journal Body Image.
''The average-size male models [may have seemed] less concerned with their appearance.''
The results echoed Ms Diedrichs's 2008 findings that so-called ''plus-size'' female models sell products as effectively as their emaciated catwalk colleagues, and ''directly challenge industry concerns that average-size models do not appeal to consumers''.
Just as female models had become thinner ''the ideal body for men has also been transformed, and is now characterised by a mesomorphic body type, with large defined muscles, low body fat and a v-shaped upper body'', Ms Diedrichs said.
These trends had occurred while in the general population men's and women's bodies were growing larger and fatter.
Marika Tiggemann, a professor of psychology at Flinders University, last year found physique was men's greatest body image worry - ahead of penis size or excessive body hair - putting them at risk of health problems or injury from steroid use or punishing workouts.
Mission Australia's annual youth survey, which polled 48,000 teenagers last year, identified body image among the top three concerns of 26 per cent of respondents - only fractionally behind drug use and suicide.
Christine Morgan, the head of eating disorders and body image advocacy group the Butterfly Foundation, said extreme dieting or avoidance of particular food groups had doubled in men and well as women since the 1990s.
A spokeswoman for Kate Ellis, the Minister for Youth, said the government would respond next month to the report.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/fitness/sixpack-punch-overrated-as-other-male-body-types-muscle-in-20100523-w42u.html
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Shy Gandy | Ella Alexander | 18 October 2010
http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/daily/101018-david-gandys-model-insecurities.aspx
David Gandy says his appearance and career haven't helped improved his abilities with the ladies.
"I'm not confident with women. I'm better than I was, but that's not saying much," he told the Sunday Telegraph. "As a child I was pretty shy, and I'm not sure you ever lose that. It's only in the last couple of years that I've been confident enough to go up and talk to a girl."
Gandy may be the male model of the moment now but, he admits, the beginning of his career wasn't quite so easy.
"Very early on I went to a casting for Dior and they asked me to try on a suit. I couldn't even get one leg into the trousers, let alone put the jacket on," he said. "All the models were standing round going, 'Hey, who's the big guy?' There was quite an unpleasant atmosphere there, quite intimidating. I remember thinking, 'Are these guys appealing?' They certainly weren't appealing to me."
Chanel Spring 2011 Ready-to-Wear
http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/S2011RTW-CHANEL
PARIS, October 5, 2010
By Tim Blanks
Karl Lagerfeld gets a lot of his inspiration from dreams, but he didn't need any help from them today, because he already had Last Year at Marienbad, that hallucinatory slice of avant-garde celluloid from the early sixties, on his mind. Some would say that, despite its storied reputation, it's the most boring movie ever made, but for Lagerfeld-and Chanel-it inspired a breathtakingly surreal setting: a monochrome ornamental garden, complete with fountains, which mirrored one of the film's most famous scenes. A full orchestra of 80 musicians sawed through romantic arrangements of Björk, the Verve, and John "007" Barry to soundtrack the 18-minute show (positively epic by today's ADD standards). The models, meanwhile, paraded in a carefully schematic way that had a little of Marienbad's arch, rigorous formality. It all conspired to make the boldness of the clothes even more audacious.
It was as though Lagerfeld had taken scissors to Chanel-or maybe unleashed a cloud of ninja moths. The first outfits were riddled with holes that recalled Rei Kawakubo's "new lace," so radical in the early eighties. After the show, the designer said new fabrics were one of his touchstones for the collection, but he distressed them with selvedge, ragged edges, and a lattice of perforations. That chaotic quality persisted in dégradé chiffon florals or a monochrome tweed patchwork. The classic suit was reconfigured as a swingy A-line jacket with three-quarter sleeves and shorts as often as skirts. Almost everything had an unfinished feel, a thready, feathered edge. It loaned an enthralling urgency, and the fierce young spirit in the collection could be read as a swingeing riposte to the cutesiness that sometimes overtakes Chanel's ready-to-wear. There were more than 80 models in the show, and each outfit created a character so individual that the clothes truly held their own against the majestic backdrop.
Marienbad seeded the collection in another way. Coco Chanel herself designed Delphine Seyrig's clothes for the film, and they were echoed in a final passage of black lace dresses tufted with coq feathers. It was a slightly wild detail that made a perfect capstone to this captivating show, even more so when the sea of black was interrupted by Carmen Kass, undulating down the surreal allée in a quivering cloud of apricot feathers.
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Chanel
http://www.vogue.com/collections/spring-2011/chanel/review/
by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins
French gardening boasts two opposing traditions-the bucolic and the formal-which met head on at the Grand Palais Tuesday morning. The country’s biggest Monet retrospective since 1980 just went up in Les Galeries nationales there, full of hazy, vegetal canvases that depict Giverny’s pond and its prettily overgrown gardens. Meanwhile, in Chanel’s fabulous show space at the site, Karl Lagerfeld built a set that paid homage to the strict seventeenth-century garden designer André Le Nôtre, who created the formal, clipped gardens at Versailles and the Tuileries.
Lagerfeld’s set looked like a photo negative of Le Nôtre’s masterworks, with arabesque hedgerows done in black and glistening like asphalt against the snowy white gravel pathways that led models round and round and round as a full orchestra played. (It also brought to mind the groomed chateau grounds in Last Year at Marienbad, one of Lagerfeld's inspirations this season.) After importing a melting iceberg for last season’s show, Lagerfeld sent a different message this time, about controlled nature, he explained a few days earlier, not about nature gone wild.
His light tweeds were cut away from the body in a way that looked fresh, with suits done in light colors, like celadon green or straw yellow, the jackets cropped slightly and the skirts cut narrow to above the knee. An aqua-blue tweed dress wafted past, its feathered trim rippling in the breeze. A model in a boxy knit top edged in feathers, and with tiny holes cut into her skinny jeans, walked by soon after. There was a girl in a shrunken, smocked black jacket printed with painterly roses and a matching full skirt. It was the best people-watching in Paris. Lagerfeld’s lengths ran the gamut, from mid-thigh to below the calf to above the ankle, though he’s joined the ranks of those designers promoting a comfortable heel for spring. His models must have been thankful. Their tour around park Chanel was long and winding, but they did it in chunky, thick-soled platform sandals, which looked great.
By evening, Lagerfeld offered just as much variety, combining feathers and lace and tulle to create a wide range of beauties, mostly in black. Some were dramatically feathered at the shoulder and hem, as with the daywear. There were nouveau flapper dresses and other longer gowns cut Empire style, with gentle layers of fluid tulle and lace. Then Carmen Kass cruised by in a tangerine-colored cloud of feathers.
In the end, you had to be impressed by the absolute bounty on the runway. No one can do a big show like Lagerfeld can, and as Inès de la Fressange swaggered along in a black banded evening gown, it became clear that Lagerfeld, while acknowledging the history of France’s gardens, knows perfectly well how they’re used today. Those touring Versailles in Le Nôtre’s time were restricted to a very regulated court costume. Today, the gardens are open to one and all. With the sheer exuberant abundance of this collection, Lagerfeld reminded us that no matter what her age, or whether her style is precise or a little more romantic, he knows just how to dress chic women everywhere.
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October 5, 2010, 10:23 am
Casting Elegant Shadows in Chanel’s Garden
By CATHY HORYN
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Models walk the runway at the spring 2011 Chanel show in Paris. See the full collection.
Anyone who has seen the Resnais film “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) will recognize the source for Karl Lagerfeld’s black-and-white garden at the Chanel show today. Some 2,800 people saw the show, at the Grand Palais, a gorgeous display of pale colors and filmy black dresses against a white pebbled ground and black terraces. The garden extended in three directions, with a fountain in the center, and a full orchestra set up at the end of one allee.
The beautiful show gave a greater emotional charge than the winter collection. Well, no wonder - it was set around an iceberg. Mr. Lagerfeld exchanged fake fur for feathers, to convey the sense of lightness that ran throughout the collection. Many of the fabrics are not what they might appear. For instance, classic tweeds may be loosely woven ribbons in pale pink and pistachio; a gray ottoman knee-length dress with a slightly rounded shape was actually done in silver metallic threads. The clothes were light in both construction and attitude, with a disintegrated quality to tweed jackets and frayed denim. A pale pink taffeta A-line dress was slashed with holes and then embroidered with black beads. The hem was filled in with pink feathers.
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Chanel spring 2011. See the full collection.
Hemlines were long and short, and Mr. Lagerfeld kept the colors soft and pale: pink, sky blue, peach, gold and silver tones - and heaps of black.
“I really don’t think women want to go around looking like a Saint Laurent shopping bag,” Mr. Lagerfeld said backstage, referring to the bright pink and orange of the vintage YSL bag. They are also among the hot colors for spring.
Before the show, Mr. Lagerfeld, dressed in a Tom Ford black suit jacket and Dior trousers, was visiting with people backstage. Brad Kroenig, the American model who has known the designer for a number of years, was there with his son Hudson, 2, who appeared in the show with his dad - both in a cream cardigan jacket with red braid and blue jeans. When I stopped by, Hudson was playing dinosaurs with the model Angela Lindvall.
Mr. Lagerfeld said that because of the international terror alert, 200 security people were at the show, many in plainclothes.
* Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Trend tracking
Cute Overload
October 5, 2010 4:52 pm
Brad Koenig and his two-year-old son walked the Chanel runway this morning in matching bouclé. (And click here for the rest of the runway shots-which include, as you might expect, some pretty cute clothes, too.)
Photo: Monica Feudi/GoRunway.com
tags: Brad Koenig, Chanel
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August 27, 2009
Critical Shopper | Jonathan Adler
Take a Sunrise, Sprinkle It With Dew
By CINTRA WILSON
SEVERAL years ago, the stretch of Atlantic Avenue that runs from Flatbush Avenue to the East River used to be identifiable primarily for having an antique row on one end and Brooklyn’s main Arab community on the other.
Since then, independently owned businesses of a thoughtful and fashionable variety have been trickling in at a regular pace to inhabit storefronts along the invisible line between Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill. Sahadi’s, an international market, has long been a destination for those who get their kicks from bulk bins of sumac, fenugreek and olives. Fledgling designers have opened shops alongside established businesses like Butter by Eva Gentry. On the block between Hoyt and Bond, iced cupcakes fill a bakery window, and a bistro is elegantly situated behind red sidewalk umbrellas, across from an excellent Vietnamese sandwich shop.
And now, as of a few weeks ago, there is a Jonathan Adler store, which really pulls the whole look of Atlantic Avenue together.
The housewares guru Jonathan Adler is first and foremost a ceramicist. His porcelain creations evoke what Brancusi might have made if he had been the host of “The Dating Game,” and I mean that in the best possible way.
It is hard to remain disgruntled in a Jonathan Adler environment. Item No. 1 of his manifesto, printed right on the wall, is, “We believe that your home should make you happy.” Mr. Adler, as gifted with words as he is on the pottery wheel, is the author of “My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living,” which is chock-full of retro-daffy design-savvy slogans that are hilarious:
“Crank up your mood with cheery chartreuse!”
“Whomp it up with wallpaper!”
And what is now my personal mantra, “It is nearly impossible to be gloomy in a persimmon bathroom.”
These strategies actually work, apparently. The manager, the bright-eyed enchantress Anna Daugherty, originally worked in Mr. Adler’s design headquarters. “In the six months I was there, I swear, he literally never had a bad day,” she gushed in wonder. “He was in a good mood the whole time.”
Mr. Adler’s far-flung influences whiplash between highest and lowest culture with the speed of a strobe light, but the look seems to be hovering primarily around 1972: that oasis of design levity that juxtaposed pink with brown, the Barnum & Bailey circus font with mass-market paperbacks, and antique gumball machines with redwood burl. When he wasn’t toiling over a hot kiln, Mr. Adler seems to have spent his formative years poring over Sunset magazine, dreaming of Palm Beach patios with circular fire pits, and learning to pit kitsch against despair via owls on burlap and oil paintings of winsome hobos (all taken with a big grain of Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Salt).
This aesthetic comes to roost in an uproarious collection of granny-takes-a-trip needlepoint throw pillows, stitched with such home-sweet-homey sentiments as “Anger,” “Lust” and “Drugs” and apparently created for the design purpose of being thrown directly onto the record cover of “Whipped Cream & Other Delights” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
I had thrown away a horrible pillow that morning, so I was struggling to choose between a pillow featuring the letter X, and the “Palm Beach,” a double-happiness-ish chinoiserie design. To my squealing girlish delight, Ms. Daugherty informed me that my pillow could be custom-made with both designs, one on each side, in my choice of colors, for the same price as the pre-made pillows in the store: $98.
Hosannah!
FOR all the evident tongue-in-chic, Mr. Adler’s furniture - e.g., armless armchairs, upholstered benches and diamond-tuck couches like the Lampert ($3,250) - is classic, sleek and wholly respectable, and can be made to order in a range of upholstery fabrics to look as sober, or as jiggy, as you desire. Customers are also free to supply their own material, should they happen to fall in love with a singular vintage bolt.
I grabbed a ceramic coffee mug with “Love” on one side and “Hate” on the other in order to drool uncontrollably over a particular act of design larceny: a flat-loom rug shaped like a zebra skin, but woven into a Union Jack ($1,050). The rugs, also customizable, are handmade out of llama wool in the Peruvian foothills.
But the pottery is where Mr. Adler’s gifts really sing through a bullhorn. My friend Bradford is gaga for his lidded ceramic jars, labeled with such giddy subversions as “Uppers” and “Downers” and “Dolls.” The stores are currently sold out of the jar reading “Quaaludes,” but should they be remade, I will buy one ($135).
Mr. Adler’s inspirational wellspring seems to be the happiest Kodak moments of childhood. It’s that photo when you’re caught in midair, jumping on your parents’ bed with your mouth wide open, your front teeth missing, your tongue electric-blue from eating a whole box of dry Jell-O and your eyes rolling back in ecstasy because you’ve just sung your way down to 78 bottles of beer on the wall and your favorite baby sitter wants to strangle you.
His housewares suggest that this behavior must continue as long we are alive and it is physically possible. His ethos is a lesson in the art of enjoyment: proof that unchained romping is still possible in the adult world - and even rewarded, if you do it right.
“Love what you love,” Mr. Adler advises - a golden ticket to high style at any budget, as well as a map to happiness in general.
Last year, Mr. Adler married the lovely and talented Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys, in California after a 14-year courtship - which is comparable to Willy Wonka marrying the Wizard of Oz. The two have a terrier named Liberace and more than enough electric imagination to wire living the dream, happily ever after - no matter what the courts may say.
Your ability to appreciate Jonathan Adler is limited only by your joy intake valve. Each lamp is a bowl of Froot Loop mindfulness, the bang of a “Gong Show” gong - reminding us, in our darkest moments, to lighten up.
JONATHAN ADLER
378 Atlantic Avenue (between Hoyt and Bond Streets), Brooklyn, (718) 855-0017.
GLADLER The designer Jonathan Adler, boy king of “irreverent luxury,” declares that “happiness is chic” and proves this thesis with narcotically uplifting pottery, custom furniture, pillows and rugs.
MADLER A life-size white porcelain squirrel holding an acorn on a block of Lucite as a ring holder, anyone?
BACHELOR PADLER This ain’t your grandma’s tchotchke stand, pal. Mr. Adler collects “mantiques” ... like full sets of armor. In the store, scented candles in fragrances like Hashish ($68) provide that “Beyond Thunderdome” feel. (But you may find yourself strangely attracted to the squirrel.)
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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September 21, 2008
Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler
Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler were married Thursday evening at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco. Howard Steiermann, a minister of the Universal Ministries, officiated at a ceremony that included Jewish traditions.
Mr. Doonan (left), 55, is the creative director of Barneys New York. He is also a columnist for The New York Observer and the author of four books, including “Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You” (Simon & Schuster, 2008). Next month, the BBC will broadcast a comedy series based on his memoir. He graduated from Manchester University.
Mr. Doonan is the son of the late Betty Doonan, who lived in Bangor, Northern Ireland, and the late Terry Doonan, who lived in Hove, England. His parents both worked for the BBC; his mother was a clerk in the news department and his father monitored foreign broadcasts.
Mr. Adler, 42, is a potter, an interior decorator and an owner of home furnishing and design stores bearing his name. He is also the head judge on “Top Design,” a reality series on the Bravo network. He graduated from Brown.
Mr. Adler is a son of Cynthia Adler of New York and the late Harry R. Adler. His mother was a lawyer at his father’s law practice in Bridgeton, N.J.
Mr. Doonan and Mr. Adler met in November 1994 on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend.
“The bloke who set us up just had some intuition that we would hit it off,” Mr. Doonan said. And they did, for the most part. “He’s very good-looking, charming and funny,” he said. But ...
“He badgered me with lots of direct questions,” Mr. Doonan said. “In England people wouldn’t ask a lot of direct questions.”
So he chose not to answer many of them.
“He was kind of monosyllabic and a little remote on the first date,” Mr. Adler said. “But there was a little spark.”
Enough for a second date, watching the Mike Leigh film “Abigail’s Party” (“as a litmus test of his humor,” Mr. Doonan said). That sealed the deal.
“We have a ridiculous amount in common,” Mr. Doonan said. “We both hate smug people. We both rant at the same things.” And, he added, “We both drink a lot of tea.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
(Photo by Dan Wilby, for Jonathan Adler)
Jonathan Adler’s big banana hit | Jun 8, 2009 14:47 EDT
http://blogs.reuters.com/summits/2009/06/08/jonathan-adlers-big-banana-hit/
Want to know what quirky housewares are selling during the recession? Designer Jonathan Adler talks about one item that has taken off here.
and just like carmela soprano, i found myself so thoroughly put back in my place that i couldn't help but smirk. i brought six hundred dollars for a fairly short weekend in a relatively inexpensive city. by the time i touched down in chicago, this had already dwindled to five hundred (airport parking, checked bag fee, gas to run to the airport, last minute dry cleaning, etc). one hundred fifty set aside for alex and i had three fifty which officially stands as not enough to do much in a city like chicago. but before i get to the economic realities, i have to get to the things that surprised-and-delight. first, the train ride into chicago remains the stuff of legend. riding into the great downtown of that city filled me with the thrills i once felt as a child riding the trolley in tomorrowland. skyscrapers of all sorts intertwining around each other like some old redwood forest. and a compendium of people of all classes and all races and cultures crowding together on the train with lives and priorities and idiosyncrasies of their own. a near-goth african american nerd next to a clearly monied bottle blond with a nose piercing next to a handsome athlete in the chicago uniform of aviators, too-tailored jeans, v-neck t-shirt, non-descript loafers, and the mid-west form of i-know-i'm-hot swagger. i boarded the train in a after five outfit of polo button down shirt, rich and skinny dark jeans, brouges and a burberry trench, and some tourists actually asked me for directions setting me in the perfect mood. when i got off the train, i found myself wonderfully pleased that i recognized the neighborhood. the "el" stop sat right across the street from the bar, berlin, where alex had taken us a couple of years ago. on the streets, i found myself again pleased by the potpurri of the the young chicago crop and those who pushed around strollers, and when i got to alex's street, i got even more bowled over by the crazily cute and architecturally distinct buildings that lined both sides of the street. an old midwestern town house here, a starkly modern building of full floor apartments, a single family home fit for a king. when i got to alex's doorstep, reagan, their gorgeous black dog came running down the stairs, and i got welcomed by the open arms of both alex and rob. soon, i met alex's partner, mike, who effused all of those elements of masculinity that one might so soon forget should one get very immersed in our world. because of the time change, we all found ourselves catching up at an unusually early hour with little to do, so alex and i went shopping after i had set down my things and i loved the neat shopping that surrounded him. a army/navy store stood up the street with the patina of a raw trend store. think the d & g boutique at the forum shops in ceasar's palace in las vegas. seriously. while my eyes immediately got drawn to the german militaria, i found myself most besotted with the navy air force and army jackets. we also stopped in american apparel and a poster shop (how these places afford storefronts continues to boggle the mind) and then headed back so we could go to dinner. we went to the neighborhood haunt, ukai, and had great sushi and byob wine, then we went back home to get ready, which became an ordeal in and of itself as my linea pelle cross-studded belt had trouble fitting in the belt loops of my ysl jeans -- and headed downtown for alex's surprise birthday location. we pulled up to the wit hotel downtown and while i felt almost fabulous in my ysl skinny jeans, my ysl loafers, and my vintage ysl camel blazer, and we walked to the front of the line getting ushered inside with whispers into walkie-talkies tracking our every movement. "the alex party is in the lobby." "the alex party has entered the elevator." "the alex party has arrived." and though we played musical tables at first, needless to say, rob and i found ourselves woefully overwhelmed with the orgasmic view of the skyline of chicago. nested in a huddle of city lights, the bottles arrived to the table and as we guzzled down the vueve clicquot, alex gave us these lapel pins of the numeral five. quite chanel if you ask me. after we swallowed the bottle of champagne, we embarked on the mission to attack the bottle of grey goose. rob did not feel well and though the music rocked me to my core, i think there came a point where we had all had our fill because we had to invite another of our ohio state friends -- who never showed up -- and while i remember dancing and remember having fun and remember drinking, i have absolutely no idea when what where or why we left or what i did because my next memory is waking up on the air mattress in my undies with the beginnings of a chicago hangover. they told me that after my memory stopped apparently, i proceeded to give back what little sushi and the grand lot of vodka that i consumed all over the fantastic boite. yeah, the friday night city crowd of chicago what with their pretty young things and the young upwardly mobiles and every other stereotype of big city living and i vomited all over them. thank GOD i don't live there.
the next day, i tried with all my might to get up and go shopping in lincoln park, but three hours of sleep over forty eight hours plus a hangover i only know with the boys kept me asleep until the late afternoon. that evening, we went to another neighborhood haunt, mathilda, and i ran to belmont army and navy to get the air force jacket to don over my reiss double polo shirt and rock and republic skinny jeans and ferragamo suede trainers. mathilda is exactly the type of place i wanted to go when in chicago. it had a patio and funky decor and chocolate martinis that set me right into a good orbit. we caught a cab to the gold coast to the penthouse apartment of one of our old ohio state friends and while i found myself wrapped up in this nostalgia and intrigued by the art collection, the party found itself mostly a bust what with restrictions on red wine and the heat blowing through the vents -- despite the high eighty degree temperature outside -- and besides one gregarious broad and a couple of decidedly chicago looking people, no one all that interesting besides us old ohio state folk who mostly holed up in the bedroom re-living old times. after alex's mike left for another party and the gregarious broad left, we decided to off-ramp as well and went to the new york times' recommended mainstay big chicks which i had been to some years prior and after a lifechanging cab ride -- think ninety miles per hour, fully amped house music, lake shore drive situaation -- we tried to have a good time at big chicks despite our mutual cokehead ohio state friend putting our friend alex in an even worse state of being and pushing rob and i to the margins of the evening: in that moment, alex decided he needed to go home. well. we didn't really know how to react since we had just now gotten into the drink -- yeah, though slowly, i had managed to get up to number six at this point and rob had broken his pledge against ketel one on the rocks -- and we rode with him all the way home. and rob tried his best to comfort him, in the patent-pending robert crouch way, while i buzzed about the apartment not conceding the moment. and when alex threw the keys on the table and said "go out!" -- my drunkenness comingled with salesman-ness said "let's go, rob!" and though he tried to resist it, we went out and we painted the town RED. we started with roscoe's and (i think) that's where we started the night's joke that we were touring husband factories for rob and while he didn't buy in immediately, by the time we got to sidetraxx (i think), and three rounds further in, he was on board with the metaphor and my maniacal -- think will and grace's karen walker with a cocktail and a notary public stamp -- motioning like i was approving compliance documents. by the time we got to hydrate, the night was on full blast. my jacket caused a stir as we walked down the street. some black girl snapping at her friend, "no, i LIKE it," even as her respective gayboyfriend said, "i don't know." and we snaked through the hydrate (i know) just like it was 2001, well, maybe, 2003, and besides all of the anthems we heard that night -- "only girl" to "million dollar bill" -- we eventually lost steam and decided to head back with a very emotional -- "on a very special episode of" -- confessional session at subway -- where they didn't have mayonnaise (i don't know why i remember such things) -- where i confided in rob that i slept with someone he dated once upon a time that shared a building with me. at the time they dated. yeah, damned alcohol. then we went back to the apartment.
the next day, we did brunch at ann sathers where i literally exploded twice after eating so much food i died. the cinnamon rolls remain legend. after brunch, we headed downtown for a bit of shopping. we started at barneys, then spent about an hour in marc jacobs -- officially old navy for the monied set just like tiffany is claire's for rich people -- and then went to the north face in the hancock tower then to zara -- which had every single cardigan i will own for boston -- and then to express which had this beautifully cheap yellow shirt i might try to find here and then to burberry and then to the biggest crate and barrel i've ever been to and then to neiman marcus where i fixated on prada camouflage and tom ford's japon noir and then we went to millennium park where alex shot the skinniest photographs of me i have taken in years. we then went to the millenium park cafe for a nosh. then, we went over to ben's which is a tradition of alex and rob and then we went to kit kat club which was fun because i had two cucumber martinis and enjoyed the company of all involved. of course, this all got ruined when i got home and broke something and rob and mike both cautioned me not to tell alex because he was already in a bad mood although, again, i don't remember why. and yeah, that didn't turn out well either because the next morning alex found the pieces of the bowl and went OFF. no apology could have sufficed, but that's how we left it and then we went shopping in the neighborhood again and i bought this vintage card of the belmont "el" stop and then we went back for me to leave. it felt like a tense ending, but who knows.
on the way back home, i ruminated quite a bit over the issues i took away from the trip. mainly, the social pressure i felt to be in a long-term committed relationship. and in one with all of the signs of outward success as the one my friend alex displayed. this is exactly the thing that makes me so passionate for the cause celebre of gay marriage as a whole because even as we sat around their dinette set drinking coffee one morning with rob asking, "well, are you two going somewhere to get married legally?" they said "no" because, in the end, it'd still be invalid. the romantic in me wanted to cry out "what about the symbolism?!" but i got it. and it's funny because we live in this oddly two-faced political environment where republicans and democrats, conservatives and liberals, spout the exact same political argument when they apply to both parties equally on different topics. where is the conservative furor decrying the "uncertainty" of an uneven legal framework when it comes it issues like "don't ask, don't tell" or proposition eight in california? where happens to their cries for states' rights when it to issues like the marijuana referendum in california or physician assisted suicide? and it's funny how this administration has to thread the needle on so many of their agenda items like healthcare, immigration, military policy, and drug policy. yes, i understand these issues don't play the same way and i don't mean to apologize for this administration, but if the obama administration starts to employ the "we're not going to appeal" tactic like the executive branch in california, he doesn't get to reap the "i'm moving to the center" poltical capital, and plus, how can he mount such a vociferous battle for healthcare on the grounds that federal policy trumps all, if he doesn't do it for other issues that will probably settle the way he wants anyway? we can't have federal district court judges deciding the law for the entire country. i don't care what party's in power, a bill that's passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president deserves more than one ruling by one judge. now, supreme court or appeals court? maybe. and seeing as healthcare is his legacy item number one, he's not going to jeopardize that -- he's going to have the fight of his life for the next two years with the implementation of that with a more republican congress -- for a constituency that's going to stick by him in the end. besides, the court cases help triangulate the political effort to force the congress into action. if the courts overturn the arizona effort, how can even a republican congress not tackle the immigration issue on a federal level? if the courts uphold the pro-pot referendum in california, it could very well undermine any number of other federal policies, no? and this is why i think they feel they have to defend the "don't ask, don't tell": as convoluted as it sounds, obama is a constitutional purist that thinks the congress has the most power -- repudiating all of that unitary executive business we had under bush -- especially when it specifically directs the executive. it's the first lesson of civics, the congress makes the law, the executive enforces the law, and the courts interpret the law. it's actually quite a conservative point of view. it's something the most crazy-conservative of justices always refer to: let the congress act and if the people disagree, let them exercise their democracy.
but this issue, in my mind, really is about trying to protect a very specific type of masculinity. a very american brand of masculinity that's begun to unravel with men like the partner of my friend alex who doesn't fit into any neatly drawn stereotype, but just stands as a very good, very well adjusted MAN. just imagine them coming home with military honors and imagine them telling the story about how they saved their mostly straight platoons or whatever. it's about that iconic sailor bending the girl over with the new york skyline in the background -- as diesel satarized in their ad from the nineties. it's about those moments in the foxhole -- as siegried sassoon rhapsodized in his poetry -- and it's about this club of good old boys that tried to keep blacks out and tried to keep women out. and as we see stories about blacks rising to the test. and women earning those medals. and now, even, the oh-so-scary illegal aliens shedding blood for this country. it's really about trying to make yet another group "the other" in a way that melts away when it's in this most patriotic of contexts. this type of masculinity paired with anything they may not like is really a dangerously powerful thing. and it's this new type of masculinity that's so alluring to me at the moment. i may have seen it at chanel -- what with this midwestern model walking down the catwalk holding the hand of his two year old -- and i may just be really tired. but there's something to this.
Here is your Daily Single's Horoscope for Wednesday, October 20
Your unconscious mind is on to something that you really should know. Ponder your dreams, clear your head and scribble or write down thoughts as they come to you. Allow the truth to flow.
9th Circuit Grants Stay of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Injunction
Amanda Bronstad
10-21-2010
A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted the government's emergency motion for a temporary stay of a worldwide injunction barring enforcement of "don't ask, don't tell," the military's ban on openly gay service members.
The 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals provided no reason for its action other than "to provide this court with an opportunity to consider fully the issues presented."
The three-judge panel gave the Log Cabin Republicans, the plaintiff in the underlying case, until Oct. 25 to oppose the government's broader request for a stay of the injunction pending its appeal.
In a prepared statement later on Wednesday, Dan Woods, a partner in the Los Angeles office of White & Case who represents the Log Cabin Republicans, called the 9th Circuit's order "a minor setback."
"We didn't come this far to quit now, and we expect that once the Ninth Circuit has received and considered full briefing on the government's application for a stay, it will deny that application, and the district court's injunction, which it entered after hearing all the evidence in the case, will remain in place until the appeal is finally decided."
In a motion filed on Wednesday, lawyers for the Justice Department asked the 9th Circuit for an immediate administrative stay to give them time to argue for a complete stay pending their appeal. U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips in Riverside, Calif., on Tuesday refused to grant the government's request for a stay of her Oct. 12 injunction.
Absent a stay, wrote Henry Whitaker, an appellate attorney in the Justice Department's civil division in Washington, "the district court's order precludes the administration of an Act of Congress and risks causing significant immediate harm to the military and its efforts to be prepared to implement an orderly repeal of the statute."
The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it is telling recruiters to accept openly gay applicants -- with the understanding that the legal situation surrounding "don't ask, don't tell" remains in limbo.
The move was highlighted in court papers filed with the 9th Circuit by Log Cabin Republicans opposing the government's request for an administrative stay.
"The government has already acted nimbly in response to the district court's injunction: it has instructed its field recruiting offices to process applications for enlistment from openly gay and lesbian applicants," Woods wrote. "The fact that the government can and did issue such instructions and comply with the injunction immediately shows that the military will not sustain irreparable harm from compliance and belies the need for any temporary stay."
Woods, in an interview with The National Law Journal, said the Pentagon's action undermines the government's position.
"Typically, you have to get a stay by showing you're likely to win on appeal," he said. "And I hope we put it out on this brief that they haven't done that. You need this stay to prevent some irreparable harm to you."
The government argued that it has a good chance of succeeding on appeal for several reasons. First, Whitaker wrote, the Log Cabin Republicans lacked standing because the organization brought the case on behalf of two individuals whose membership and alleged injuries caused by "don't ask, don't tell" remain in dispute.
Also, judges historically have deferred to Congress in matters involving the military, he wrote. Third, by issuing a worldwide injunction, Phillips inappropriately treated the case as a class action, rather than one that applies only to an organization "purporting to advance the interests of two individuals," he added.
"The sweeping injunction therefore constitutes an extraordinary and unwarranted intrusion into military affairs," Whitaker said.
As for harm, Whitaker said, the injunction would force the military to conduct a "massive" revision of its regulations, including those relating to benefits, and policies involving equal opportunity and harassment.
Woods argued that Phillips had rejected all of the same arguments before.
On the 9th Circuit panel hearing the stay request are Diarmuid O'Scannlain, a Reagan nominee who was confirmed in 1986; Stephen Trott, a Reagan nominee who has been on senior status since 2004, and William Fletcher, a Clinton nominee who was confirmed in 1998.
In 2008, O'Scannlain dissented from a 9th Circuit decision denying a rehearing of a case involving a constitutional challenge to "don't ask, don't tell." A three-judge panel had ruled in Witt v. Dep't of Air Force that such constitutional challenges were subject to an elevated standard of review, making it more difficult for the government to defend the law.
The decision was a key precedent on which Phillips relied when she found the law unconstitutional. In denying a rehearing of the Witt decision, O'Scannlain wrote: "At the end of the day, Witt creates a forum in the judicial branch (rather than the political branches) to challenge the validity and the particular application of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' even though such policy infringes no constitutional right."
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Military Recruiters Told To Accept Gay Applicants
by The Associated Press
October 19, 2010
The military is accepting openly gay recruits for the first time in the nation's history, even as it tries in the courts to slow the movement to abolish its "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Some gay activist groups were planning to send people to enlist at recruiting stations to test the Pentagon's Tuesday announcement.
A federal judge in California who overturned the 17-year policy last week rejected the government's latest effort on Tuesday to halt her order telling the military to stop enforcing the law. Government lawyers will likely appeal.
The Defense Department has said it would comply with U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips' order and had frozen any discharge cases. But at least one case was reported of a man being turned away from an Army recruiting office in Austin, Texas.
Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said recruiters had been given top-level guidance to accept applicants who say they are gay.
Recruiters also have been told to inform potential recruits that the moratorium on enforcement of the policy could be reversed at any time, if the ruling is appealed or the court grants a stay, she said.
While activists were going to enlist, gay rights groups were continuing to tell service members to avoid revealing that they are gay, fearing they could find themselves in trouble should the law be reinstated.
"What people aren't really getting is that the discretion and caution that gay troops are showing now is exactly the same standard of conduct that they will adhere to when the ban is lifted permanently," said Aaron Belkin, executive director of the Palm Center, a think tank on gays and the military at the University of California Santa Barbara.
The uncertain status of the law has caused much confusion within an institution that has historically discriminated against gays. Before the 1993 law, the military banned gays entirely and declared them incompatible with military service.
Twenty-nine nations, including Israel, Canada, Germany and Sweden, allow openly gay troops, according to the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay-rights group and plaintiff in the lawsuit before Phillips.
The Pentagon guidance to recruiters comes after Dan Woods, the group's attorney, sent a letter last week warning the Justice Department that Army recruiters who turned away Omar Lopez in Texas may have caused the government to violate Phillips' injunction.
Woods wrote that the military could be subject to a citation for contempt.
Douglas Smith, spokesman for U.S. Army Recruiting Command based at Fort Knox, Ky., said even before the ruling recruiters did not ask applicants about their sexual orientation. The difference now is that recruiters will process those who say they are gay.
"If they were to self-admit that they are gay and want to enlist, we will process them for enlistment, but will tell them that the legal situation could change," Smith said.
He said the enlistment process takes time and recruiters have been told to inform those who are openly gay that they could be declared ineligible if the law is upheld on appeal.
"U.S. Army Recruiting Command is going to follow the law, whatever the law is," he said.
The message, however, had not reached some recruiting stations.
At one for all branches in Pensacola, Marine Sgt. Timothy Chandler said he had been given no direction. "As far as we are concerned everything is the same, the policy hasn't changed," he said, as others in office nodded.
Chandler said no one had come to the small office questioning the policy or asking about being openly gay and serving.
Recruiters at the Navy office next door referred all media questions to the Pentagon. Air Force recruiters said they were not authorized to talk to the media. Army recruiters referred questions to another office in Mobile, Ala.
Phillips said at a hearing Monday that she was learning toward denying the Obama administration's request to delay her order. That would send the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
After Phillips' ruling last week, Lopez - discharged from the Navy in 2006 after admitting his gay status to his military doctor - walked into an Army recruiting office in Austin and asked if he could re-enlist.
He said he was up front, even showing the recruiters his Navy discharge papers. But they told him he couldn't re-enlist because they had not gotten word from the Pentagon to allow openly gay recruits.
Smith was unable to confirm the account. She said guidance on gay applicants had been issued to recruiting commands on Oct. 15.
On Tuesday, upon hearing of the changes to recruiting, Lopez said, "Oh my God! I've been waiting for this for four years."
Lopez said he'll try again Friday and will go to a Navy recruiting office in Austin to see if he can enroll in ROTC as an officer. He is currently studying hospitality services at Austin Community College.
"I'm hoping they'll let me in because I was able to switch over from an enlistment to an officer. I'm really hoping they can accept me," he said.
* Copyright 2010 NPR
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October 15, 2010
From Boys to Men
By GUY TREBAY
HAS anyone seen the Dior man? You know the one, that scrawny rocker dude with a chicken chest, a size 36 suit and a face that seems to be sprouting its first crop of peach fuzz.
It has been almost a decade since Hedi Slimane, then the designer for Dior men’s wear, jump-started an aesthetic shift away from stiffly traditional male images that long dominated men’s fashion. Since then, season after season, designers, editors and photographers alike fell into unconscious lockstep with Mr. Slimane’s tastes in men. The image of the Dior man was so influential that it spawned a host of imitators and, not incidentally, exiled a generation of conventionally handsome and mature models from runways into the gulag of catalogs.
On catwalks and in advertising campaigns the prevalent male image has long been that of skinny skate-rat, a juvenile with pipe-cleaner proportions. Designers as unalike as Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada developed so pronounced an appetite for the jailbait type that at some model castings in Milan and Paris the new faces often showed up chaperoned by Mom.
“Men have always been defined by their jobs - always,” said Joe Levy, the editor in chief of Maxim. When the economy was flush, consumers were content to indulge designer subversions of age and gender expectations, he added. That was before the recession lodged in the landscape like an errant iceberg taking its own time to thaw. “Suddenly the notion of having a job or a career is in doubt,” Mr. Levy said. “So you fall back on old notions of what it meant to be a man or to look like one.”
You lose the T-shirt and the skateboard. You buy an interview suit and a package of Gillette Mach 3 blades. You grow up, in other words. Suddenly evidence of a new phase in the cycle of evolving masculine imagery was all over the catwalks in the runway season that recently ended. Just as suddenly it can be seen splashed across the covers of magazines, where the boys of recent memory have been transformed overnight into men.
“I was working on our new issue when I got to Paris,” Stephen Gan, the editor of the influential men’s-wear magazine V Man. Titled “The Coming of Age” issue, the new V Man features on its cover no skinny kid model but Josh Brolin who, with his weather-beaten face and crow’s-feet, looks every minute of 44.
“As soon as I got there, Carine handed me her new issue,” Mr. Gan added, referring to Carine Roitfeld, the taste-setting editor of French Vogue and Vogue Hommes International. The theme of her latest men’s-wear issue, whose cover features Matt Norklun, a star model of the ’80s, is titled, appropriately, “The Prime of Life.”
“It’s not just models, it’s actors, it’s advertising, it’s the movies,” said Sam Shahid, creative director of Shahid & Company and a force behind campaigns that first helped put Calvin Klein’s name on half the world’s backsides. “It’s trendy to do this, and everyone’s suddenly jumping on it,” Mr. Shahid said, referring to the abrupt rejiggering of masculine ideals.
“It’s also, like comfort food, about the economy,” he said. “Look back to movies during the Depression, and all you saw was real guys like James Cagney. In tough times, people want a strong man.”
Or, at the very least, they want images of men who look old enough to vote. “The twink thing seems over,” said Jim Nelson, the editor of GQ. “When people open GQ, I don’t want them to feel like they’re looking at clothes on 16-year-olds.”
It is not merely a matter of body type, Mr. Nelson noted. “When we cast, we want a model with some heft to him and a few years on him,” he said. “Someone who has aged a little bit and who feels like he’s a man.”
What they want, in short, is Jon Hamm. That Mr. Hamm’s square-jawed Don Draper so persuasively resembles an archetypal father on a time-travel visa from an era of postwar expansion and fixed gender roles can hardly be incidental to the success of “Mad Men.”
“At a time of underemployment and digitized labor that doesn’t have real products at the end of the process people want to be reminded” through images from pop culture, Mr. Nelson said, “that we as men do work, we do labor, we do still make things.” Half the story pitches the editors at GQ get nowadays, Mr. Nelson added, come from writers who want to go to butcher’s school.
Designers, for their part, alert to a burgeoning interest in the trappings of manual labor, have responded with a wholesale revival of so-called “heritage” labels and work wear. And they are casting their runway shows and ad campaigns with increasingly hirsute, well-built, mature types - men who certainly look as if they’ve never been waxed or had a manicure.
In an article in the new V Man titled “The World’s First Male Supermodel,” an interviewer remarks to the model Jeff Aquilon that early photographs of him by Bruce Weber prompted a thousand academic reconsiderations of contemporary masculinity. Like any ordinary lug unaffected by his own godlike aspect, Mr. Aquilon responds with modesty. “People were laying a lot of money on the line,” when paying him fat sums to appear in his skivvies for ads of the era, he said. His ambitions then were simple, Real Man goals: stay in shape and show up on time.
“Maybe it’s that the stylists that were in power 10 years ago are not so powerful anymore,” Jason Kanner, the president of the men’s division of Major Model Management, said of the latest development in masculine ideals. “Maybe it’s that as consumers are getting older, they want to see something that reflects what they look like in the mirror.”
Any sane man, of course, would be ecstatic to see Mr. Aquilon’s features reflected when he gazed into the glass. Yet for a long time, Mr. Kanner said, models of that type were out of favor with a business that sought beauty instead in a goofy-looking androgynous version of Peter Pan. “I’m a big believer that classic beauty never dies,” Mr. Kanner added, although until recently his was a minority voice.
“For a long time it was just those skinny guys, those boyish Prada types,” he said, referring to men like Cole Mohr - a model with jug ears and the body of a teenager - long a favorite at labels like Prada and Louis Vuitton. “I hate to use the word waif, but what else can you call all these skinny young hairless guys?”
Even Prada and Louis Vuitton embraced the new imagery in the recent runway season, casting what Mr. Kanner termed “masculine, manly men” for their shows. “The guys now look like models again,” he said. “They look like throwbacks to the days of Herb Ritts.”
Is it entirely a coincidence that Mr. Ritts himself is enjoying a posthumous revival? A new volume from Rizzoli celebrates his work as a photographer and equally the Amazons and Olympians he memorialized in his career. The sort of ripe beauty Mr. Ritts tended to celebrate owed a great deal to the ideals of old Hollywood; lavish, irresistible and lush, it also held none of the dangers that irresistible male beauty would come to symbolize after the appearance of AIDS.
When casting a recent fashion pictorial, the editors of Details were aware that in seeking a “real man” type they were looking for a nonexistent ideal. There is of course no such thing as a “real” man, Dan Peres, the magazine’s editor in chief, remarked. “But we have a product to produce that, in the end, has to be relatable to a reader, a reader who wants to be able to see some vision of himself in the pages of a magazine.” Especially in a depressed economy, the editors concluded, the Details man was not well represented by the boys so fashionable a moment ago.
So they cast Gabriel Aubry, a godlike blond Canadian who as recently as two years ago would have been thought of as washed-up in the business. “For us it was about how relatable this guy is to the reader,” Mr. Peres said. “It’s about what connection a reader is going to make with some waify 17-year-old versus a 34-year-old man, albeit a 34-year-old man who has washboard abs and who fathered Halle Berry’s kid.”
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Six-pack punch overrated as other male body types muscle in
Julie Robotham
May 24, 2010 - 3:00AM
An average-sized man is just as appealing as a bulked-up Adonis, according to Australian research that examined viewers' responses to different male body types in advertisements.
Men and women had rated images of slender or slightly chubby masculinity at least as highly as those with well-defined six-packs, said the study leader, Phillippa Diedrichs, suggesting successful campaigns did not have to portray only rock hard biceps and rippling abs.
The results will widen the debate about media presentation of unrealistic body types, which has until now focused almost exclusively on ultra-thin female models and whether they cause eating disorders among young women.
Ms Diedrichs showed mock-up advertisements for jeans, skin-care products and cologne - featuring muscular male models and men of more average dimensions - to more than 600 students in their late teens.
Neither sex responded more positively to the musclebound bodies, and the males even found ads that showed just the item - with no accompanying model - more effective than those posed by classic hunks.
Some participants in the University of Queensland study ''may have attributed the models' muscularity to vanity or homosexuality, characteristics which they may have found unpleasant or discomforting'', Ms Diedrichs wrote in the journal Body Image.
''The average-size male models [may have seemed] less concerned with their appearance.''
The results echoed Ms Diedrichs's 2008 findings that so-called ''plus-size'' female models sell products as effectively as their emaciated catwalk colleagues, and ''directly challenge industry concerns that average-size models do not appeal to consumers''.
Just as female models had become thinner ''the ideal body for men has also been transformed, and is now characterised by a mesomorphic body type, with large defined muscles, low body fat and a v-shaped upper body'', Ms Diedrichs said.
These trends had occurred while in the general population men's and women's bodies were growing larger and fatter.
Marika Tiggemann, a professor of psychology at Flinders University, last year found physique was men's greatest body image worry - ahead of penis size or excessive body hair - putting them at risk of health problems or injury from steroid use or punishing workouts.
Mission Australia's annual youth survey, which polled 48,000 teenagers last year, identified body image among the top three concerns of 26 per cent of respondents - only fractionally behind drug use and suicide.
Christine Morgan, the head of eating disorders and body image advocacy group the Butterfly Foundation, said extreme dieting or avoidance of particular food groups had doubled in men and well as women since the 1990s.
A spokeswoman for Kate Ellis, the Minister for Youth, said the government would respond next month to the report.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/fitness/sixpack-punch-overrated-as-other-male-body-types-muscle-in-20100523-w42u.html
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Shy Gandy | Ella Alexander | 18 October 2010
http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/daily/101018-david-gandys-model-insecurities.aspx
David Gandy says his appearance and career haven't helped improved his abilities with the ladies.
"I'm not confident with women. I'm better than I was, but that's not saying much," he told the Sunday Telegraph. "As a child I was pretty shy, and I'm not sure you ever lose that. It's only in the last couple of years that I've been confident enough to go up and talk to a girl."
Gandy may be the male model of the moment now but, he admits, the beginning of his career wasn't quite so easy.
"Very early on I went to a casting for Dior and they asked me to try on a suit. I couldn't even get one leg into the trousers, let alone put the jacket on," he said. "All the models were standing round going, 'Hey, who's the big guy?' There was quite an unpleasant atmosphere there, quite intimidating. I remember thinking, 'Are these guys appealing?' They certainly weren't appealing to me."
Chanel Spring 2011 Ready-to-Wear
http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/S2011RTW-CHANEL
PARIS, October 5, 2010
By Tim Blanks
Karl Lagerfeld gets a lot of his inspiration from dreams, but he didn't need any help from them today, because he already had Last Year at Marienbad, that hallucinatory slice of avant-garde celluloid from the early sixties, on his mind. Some would say that, despite its storied reputation, it's the most boring movie ever made, but for Lagerfeld-and Chanel-it inspired a breathtakingly surreal setting: a monochrome ornamental garden, complete with fountains, which mirrored one of the film's most famous scenes. A full orchestra of 80 musicians sawed through romantic arrangements of Björk, the Verve, and John "007" Barry to soundtrack the 18-minute show (positively epic by today's ADD standards). The models, meanwhile, paraded in a carefully schematic way that had a little of Marienbad's arch, rigorous formality. It all conspired to make the boldness of the clothes even more audacious.
It was as though Lagerfeld had taken scissors to Chanel-or maybe unleashed a cloud of ninja moths. The first outfits were riddled with holes that recalled Rei Kawakubo's "new lace," so radical in the early eighties. After the show, the designer said new fabrics were one of his touchstones for the collection, but he distressed them with selvedge, ragged edges, and a lattice of perforations. That chaotic quality persisted in dégradé chiffon florals or a monochrome tweed patchwork. The classic suit was reconfigured as a swingy A-line jacket with three-quarter sleeves and shorts as often as skirts. Almost everything had an unfinished feel, a thready, feathered edge. It loaned an enthralling urgency, and the fierce young spirit in the collection could be read as a swingeing riposte to the cutesiness that sometimes overtakes Chanel's ready-to-wear. There were more than 80 models in the show, and each outfit created a character so individual that the clothes truly held their own against the majestic backdrop.
Marienbad seeded the collection in another way. Coco Chanel herself designed Delphine Seyrig's clothes for the film, and they were echoed in a final passage of black lace dresses tufted with coq feathers. It was a slightly wild detail that made a perfect capstone to this captivating show, even more so when the sea of black was interrupted by Carmen Kass, undulating down the surreal allée in a quivering cloud of apricot feathers.
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Chanel
http://www.vogue.com/collections/spring-2011/chanel/review/
by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins
French gardening boasts two opposing traditions-the bucolic and the formal-which met head on at the Grand Palais Tuesday morning. The country’s biggest Monet retrospective since 1980 just went up in Les Galeries nationales there, full of hazy, vegetal canvases that depict Giverny’s pond and its prettily overgrown gardens. Meanwhile, in Chanel’s fabulous show space at the site, Karl Lagerfeld built a set that paid homage to the strict seventeenth-century garden designer André Le Nôtre, who created the formal, clipped gardens at Versailles and the Tuileries.
Lagerfeld’s set looked like a photo negative of Le Nôtre’s masterworks, with arabesque hedgerows done in black and glistening like asphalt against the snowy white gravel pathways that led models round and round and round as a full orchestra played. (It also brought to mind the groomed chateau grounds in Last Year at Marienbad, one of Lagerfeld's inspirations this season.) After importing a melting iceberg for last season’s show, Lagerfeld sent a different message this time, about controlled nature, he explained a few days earlier, not about nature gone wild.
His light tweeds were cut away from the body in a way that looked fresh, with suits done in light colors, like celadon green or straw yellow, the jackets cropped slightly and the skirts cut narrow to above the knee. An aqua-blue tweed dress wafted past, its feathered trim rippling in the breeze. A model in a boxy knit top edged in feathers, and with tiny holes cut into her skinny jeans, walked by soon after. There was a girl in a shrunken, smocked black jacket printed with painterly roses and a matching full skirt. It was the best people-watching in Paris. Lagerfeld’s lengths ran the gamut, from mid-thigh to below the calf to above the ankle, though he’s joined the ranks of those designers promoting a comfortable heel for spring. His models must have been thankful. Their tour around park Chanel was long and winding, but they did it in chunky, thick-soled platform sandals, which looked great.
By evening, Lagerfeld offered just as much variety, combining feathers and lace and tulle to create a wide range of beauties, mostly in black. Some were dramatically feathered at the shoulder and hem, as with the daywear. There were nouveau flapper dresses and other longer gowns cut Empire style, with gentle layers of fluid tulle and lace. Then Carmen Kass cruised by in a tangerine-colored cloud of feathers.
In the end, you had to be impressed by the absolute bounty on the runway. No one can do a big show like Lagerfeld can, and as Inès de la Fressange swaggered along in a black banded evening gown, it became clear that Lagerfeld, while acknowledging the history of France’s gardens, knows perfectly well how they’re used today. Those touring Versailles in Le Nôtre’s time were restricted to a very regulated court costume. Today, the gardens are open to one and all. With the sheer exuberant abundance of this collection, Lagerfeld reminded us that no matter what her age, or whether her style is precise or a little more romantic, he knows just how to dress chic women everywhere.
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October 5, 2010, 10:23 am
Casting Elegant Shadows in Chanel’s Garden
By CATHY HORYN
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Models walk the runway at the spring 2011 Chanel show in Paris. See the full collection.
Anyone who has seen the Resnais film “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) will recognize the source for Karl Lagerfeld’s black-and-white garden at the Chanel show today. Some 2,800 people saw the show, at the Grand Palais, a gorgeous display of pale colors and filmy black dresses against a white pebbled ground and black terraces. The garden extended in three directions, with a fountain in the center, and a full orchestra set up at the end of one allee.
The beautiful show gave a greater emotional charge than the winter collection. Well, no wonder - it was set around an iceberg. Mr. Lagerfeld exchanged fake fur for feathers, to convey the sense of lightness that ran throughout the collection. Many of the fabrics are not what they might appear. For instance, classic tweeds may be loosely woven ribbons in pale pink and pistachio; a gray ottoman knee-length dress with a slightly rounded shape was actually done in silver metallic threads. The clothes were light in both construction and attitude, with a disintegrated quality to tweed jackets and frayed denim. A pale pink taffeta A-line dress was slashed with holes and then embroidered with black beads. The hem was filled in with pink feathers.
Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Chanel spring 2011. See the full collection.
Hemlines were long and short, and Mr. Lagerfeld kept the colors soft and pale: pink, sky blue, peach, gold and silver tones - and heaps of black.
“I really don’t think women want to go around looking like a Saint Laurent shopping bag,” Mr. Lagerfeld said backstage, referring to the bright pink and orange of the vintage YSL bag. They are also among the hot colors for spring.
Before the show, Mr. Lagerfeld, dressed in a Tom Ford black suit jacket and Dior trousers, was visiting with people backstage. Brad Kroenig, the American model who has known the designer for a number of years, was there with his son Hudson, 2, who appeared in the show with his dad - both in a cream cardigan jacket with red braid and blue jeans. When I stopped by, Hudson was playing dinosaurs with the model Angela Lindvall.
Mr. Lagerfeld said that because of the international terror alert, 200 security people were at the show, many in plainclothes.
* Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Trend tracking
Cute Overload
October 5, 2010 4:52 pm
Brad Koenig and his two-year-old son walked the Chanel runway this morning in matching bouclé. (And click here for the rest of the runway shots-which include, as you might expect, some pretty cute clothes, too.)
Photo: Monica Feudi/GoRunway.com
tags: Brad Koenig, Chanel
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August 27, 2009
Critical Shopper | Jonathan Adler
Take a Sunrise, Sprinkle It With Dew
By CINTRA WILSON
SEVERAL years ago, the stretch of Atlantic Avenue that runs from Flatbush Avenue to the East River used to be identifiable primarily for having an antique row on one end and Brooklyn’s main Arab community on the other.
Since then, independently owned businesses of a thoughtful and fashionable variety have been trickling in at a regular pace to inhabit storefronts along the invisible line between Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill. Sahadi’s, an international market, has long been a destination for those who get their kicks from bulk bins of sumac, fenugreek and olives. Fledgling designers have opened shops alongside established businesses like Butter by Eva Gentry. On the block between Hoyt and Bond, iced cupcakes fill a bakery window, and a bistro is elegantly situated behind red sidewalk umbrellas, across from an excellent Vietnamese sandwich shop.
And now, as of a few weeks ago, there is a Jonathan Adler store, which really pulls the whole look of Atlantic Avenue together.
The housewares guru Jonathan Adler is first and foremost a ceramicist. His porcelain creations evoke what Brancusi might have made if he had been the host of “The Dating Game,” and I mean that in the best possible way.
It is hard to remain disgruntled in a Jonathan Adler environment. Item No. 1 of his manifesto, printed right on the wall, is, “We believe that your home should make you happy.” Mr. Adler, as gifted with words as he is on the pottery wheel, is the author of “My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living,” which is chock-full of retro-daffy design-savvy slogans that are hilarious:
“Crank up your mood with cheery chartreuse!”
“Whomp it up with wallpaper!”
And what is now my personal mantra, “It is nearly impossible to be gloomy in a persimmon bathroom.”
These strategies actually work, apparently. The manager, the bright-eyed enchantress Anna Daugherty, originally worked in Mr. Adler’s design headquarters. “In the six months I was there, I swear, he literally never had a bad day,” she gushed in wonder. “He was in a good mood the whole time.”
Mr. Adler’s far-flung influences whiplash between highest and lowest culture with the speed of a strobe light, but the look seems to be hovering primarily around 1972: that oasis of design levity that juxtaposed pink with brown, the Barnum & Bailey circus font with mass-market paperbacks, and antique gumball machines with redwood burl. When he wasn’t toiling over a hot kiln, Mr. Adler seems to have spent his formative years poring over Sunset magazine, dreaming of Palm Beach patios with circular fire pits, and learning to pit kitsch against despair via owls on burlap and oil paintings of winsome hobos (all taken with a big grain of Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Salt).
This aesthetic comes to roost in an uproarious collection of granny-takes-a-trip needlepoint throw pillows, stitched with such home-sweet-homey sentiments as “Anger,” “Lust” and “Drugs” and apparently created for the design purpose of being thrown directly onto the record cover of “Whipped Cream & Other Delights” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
I had thrown away a horrible pillow that morning, so I was struggling to choose between a pillow featuring the letter X, and the “Palm Beach,” a double-happiness-ish chinoiserie design. To my squealing girlish delight, Ms. Daugherty informed me that my pillow could be custom-made with both designs, one on each side, in my choice of colors, for the same price as the pre-made pillows in the store: $98.
Hosannah!
FOR all the evident tongue-in-chic, Mr. Adler’s furniture - e.g., armless armchairs, upholstered benches and diamond-tuck couches like the Lampert ($3,250) - is classic, sleek and wholly respectable, and can be made to order in a range of upholstery fabrics to look as sober, or as jiggy, as you desire. Customers are also free to supply their own material, should they happen to fall in love with a singular vintage bolt.
I grabbed a ceramic coffee mug with “Love” on one side and “Hate” on the other in order to drool uncontrollably over a particular act of design larceny: a flat-loom rug shaped like a zebra skin, but woven into a Union Jack ($1,050). The rugs, also customizable, are handmade out of llama wool in the Peruvian foothills.
But the pottery is where Mr. Adler’s gifts really sing through a bullhorn. My friend Bradford is gaga for his lidded ceramic jars, labeled with such giddy subversions as “Uppers” and “Downers” and “Dolls.” The stores are currently sold out of the jar reading “Quaaludes,” but should they be remade, I will buy one ($135).
Mr. Adler’s inspirational wellspring seems to be the happiest Kodak moments of childhood. It’s that photo when you’re caught in midair, jumping on your parents’ bed with your mouth wide open, your front teeth missing, your tongue electric-blue from eating a whole box of dry Jell-O and your eyes rolling back in ecstasy because you’ve just sung your way down to 78 bottles of beer on the wall and your favorite baby sitter wants to strangle you.
His housewares suggest that this behavior must continue as long we are alive and it is physically possible. His ethos is a lesson in the art of enjoyment: proof that unchained romping is still possible in the adult world - and even rewarded, if you do it right.
“Love what you love,” Mr. Adler advises - a golden ticket to high style at any budget, as well as a map to happiness in general.
Last year, Mr. Adler married the lovely and talented Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys, in California after a 14-year courtship - which is comparable to Willy Wonka marrying the Wizard of Oz. The two have a terrier named Liberace and more than enough electric imagination to wire living the dream, happily ever after - no matter what the courts may say.
Your ability to appreciate Jonathan Adler is limited only by your joy intake valve. Each lamp is a bowl of Froot Loop mindfulness, the bang of a “Gong Show” gong - reminding us, in our darkest moments, to lighten up.
JONATHAN ADLER
378 Atlantic Avenue (between Hoyt and Bond Streets), Brooklyn, (718) 855-0017.
GLADLER The designer Jonathan Adler, boy king of “irreverent luxury,” declares that “happiness is chic” and proves this thesis with narcotically uplifting pottery, custom furniture, pillows and rugs.
MADLER A life-size white porcelain squirrel holding an acorn on a block of Lucite as a ring holder, anyone?
BACHELOR PADLER This ain’t your grandma’s tchotchke stand, pal. Mr. Adler collects “mantiques” ... like full sets of armor. In the store, scented candles in fragrances like Hashish ($68) provide that “Beyond Thunderdome” feel. (But you may find yourself strangely attracted to the squirrel.)
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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September 21, 2008
Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler
Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler were married Thursday evening at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco. Howard Steiermann, a minister of the Universal Ministries, officiated at a ceremony that included Jewish traditions.
Mr. Doonan (left), 55, is the creative director of Barneys New York. He is also a columnist for The New York Observer and the author of four books, including “Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You” (Simon & Schuster, 2008). Next month, the BBC will broadcast a comedy series based on his memoir. He graduated from Manchester University.
Mr. Doonan is the son of the late Betty Doonan, who lived in Bangor, Northern Ireland, and the late Terry Doonan, who lived in Hove, England. His parents both worked for the BBC; his mother was a clerk in the news department and his father monitored foreign broadcasts.
Mr. Adler, 42, is a potter, an interior decorator and an owner of home furnishing and design stores bearing his name. He is also the head judge on “Top Design,” a reality series on the Bravo network. He graduated from Brown.
Mr. Adler is a son of Cynthia Adler of New York and the late Harry R. Adler. His mother was a lawyer at his father’s law practice in Bridgeton, N.J.
Mr. Doonan and Mr. Adler met in November 1994 on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend.
“The bloke who set us up just had some intuition that we would hit it off,” Mr. Doonan said. And they did, for the most part. “He’s very good-looking, charming and funny,” he said. But ...
“He badgered me with lots of direct questions,” Mr. Doonan said. “In England people wouldn’t ask a lot of direct questions.”
So he chose not to answer many of them.
“He was kind of monosyllabic and a little remote on the first date,” Mr. Adler said. “But there was a little spark.”
Enough for a second date, watching the Mike Leigh film “Abigail’s Party” (“as a litmus test of his humor,” Mr. Doonan said). That sealed the deal.
“We have a ridiculous amount in common,” Mr. Doonan said. “We both hate smug people. We both rant at the same things.” And, he added, “We both drink a lot of tea.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
(Photo by Dan Wilby, for Jonathan Adler)
Jonathan Adler’s big banana hit | Jun 8, 2009 14:47 EDT
http://blogs.reuters.com/summits/2009/06/08/jonathan-adlers-big-banana-hit/
Want to know what quirky housewares are selling during the recession? Designer Jonathan Adler talks about one item that has taken off here.