fashun

Here’s an article about the nouveau vert of the 1860s, or a new synthetic green dye: On that deadly emerald green: How emerald green became fashionable, despite its poisonous past. 

Before 1859, green pigments came from arsenic mixed with copper, which, uh, killed you:

The “green tarlatan so much of late in vogue for ball dresses” contained as much as half the gown’s weight in arsenic – as one article explained. [Alison] Matthews David concurs with this assessment, adding that “a ball gown fashioned from up to 20 meters of this fabric would have 900 grains of arsenic. It was possible that no less than 60 grains could fall from the dancing gown in the course of a single evening. For an average adult, four to five grains were already considered lethal.”

(Arsenic wasn’t used in just fabric, either. William Morris, Mr. Arts and Crafts, owned a copper mine and used copper arsenite pigments in his wallpapers. He also dismissed claims of that green being poisonous up through the 1880s.)

Both Virginia Sole-Smith and Anne Helen Petersen sent out newsletters ruminating about loving clothes on your own terms, how fatphobic most fashion “rules” are, and how to keep (or get back to) the joy we all felt as kids when we out on an outfit we loved. (Plus, they both include descriptions of those kid outfits that are perfection: “My middle school aesthetic fell somewhere between Punky Brewster and Rayanne Graff, if they were also very into rainforest vibes.”)

Sole-Smith’s newsletter hits on how dressing for joy almost inevitably becomes dressing to blend in (and the thin privilege thereof), plus the intersection of navigating all of this as female:

Every creative kid goes through some process of deciding how much they want to stick out and how much they need to blend in, in order to survive their tween and teenage years. What once felt special, personal, and unique suddenly becomes “attention seeking,” which, we learn early, is one of the worst qualities a girl can have.

Petersen’s newsletter links back to Sole-Smith’s and talks about unpacking the years of blending in:

What does it look like to dress with the same joy as you did before you became conscious of your body? Is it possible to choose an outfit with the underlying supposition that the body is beautiful in it, is lovable, is sexy, simply because you have decided it is? What would it look like to talk about clothes without talking about bodies — which is to say, without talking about “flattering”?

They’re good bookends to each other. At the very least they’ll get you remembering your favorite outfits as a kid.

I’ve been thinking about what a post-vaccine world will look like for me–and by that, I mean I’m thinking about what to wear. I have no desire to be back in the office 5 days a week, but 3 days a week? Just think of the outfits!

But WHAT outfits? This tweet kind of summed it up:

i keep seeing people trying to predict what post-vax summer fashion is going to look like and the smart money is on “entirely incoherent”. you’re going to be wearing sweat pants and a beanie while sitting next to someone in a prom dress and another person in a hazmat suit

— woke capital investment advisor machine (@golikehellmachi) March 22, 2021

Even before the pandemic, I would look at an outfit and think, “It’s a little much for my team/Target/a Tuesday” but once I’m back out in the world, no more of that! I recently found Frisky Gatos on Instagram and Reddit and her concept of “listen to ur lizard” is the best way to find your “personal style” going:

Stop trying to research and analyze oneself into style and instead just listen to YOURSELF – your most primitive brain – WHAT DOES IT WANT?

I’ve always liked what I’ve sewn and feel cool wearing it, but once I’m back out in the world, I’m not gonna tone it down anymore and put a sober blazer on top of one wild print. My lizard brain wants to wear ALL the prints and ALL the colors together and I’m just going to remind my more advanced brain parts of this:

I was embarrassed what people would think of me if I wore [what I really loved]. I’ve come to realize how flawed this thought process is because it assumes that anyone cares about me and what I am wearing. Let’s be honest: no one thinks about me as much as I think about myself and everyone else is thinking about themselves all the time anyway, so who cares?

Give it a read, click to the links for examples, and listen to ur lizard!

(image from Frisky Gatos’ reddit post linked above)

I’ve been saying, “I miss wearing outfits” for about a year now but I wasn’t able to articulate why very well, or explain why putting on an outfit I used to wear to the office to work from home just isn’t the same. So this Vox article was really enlightening for me: “To all the clothes I’ve loved before: Reconciling the sweatpants-wearing me with the fashion-loving woman I was just a year ago is an existential crisis like no other.”

…dressing up at all feels futile when there’s nowhere to go and no one to see. Style, after all, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Clothes are a form of self-expression, but they are also central to our identity because they shape how others see us, says Carolyn Mair, a behavioral psychologist and author of The Psychology of Fashion. […] “We have a sense of identity ourselves by what we’re trying to project, and our identity is also reinforced through the feedback of others,” Mair says.

This may help explain why, while fashion may not rank high on everyone’s list of what’s been lost during the pandemic, for some it has felt like a significant blow.

As pandemic losses go, the loss of outfit appreciation is a minor one. But as my therapist tells me, two things can be true at once: it can be a minor loss in the bigger picture and it can be something I really miss and mourn.

Here’s a couple of articles from the NY Times* today about Black Lives Matter protestors and the dress code of anti-fascists:

The Dress Codes of the Uprising

There is a long tradition of Sunday best in the African-American community dating back decades before the civil rights movement, Mr. Ford said. In that sense, he said, the organizers of the march were not playing respectability politics as much as declaring ownership over their own history.

It was, he said, “a repudiation of stereotype and white supremacy. It’s not copying white power structures. It’s a powerful statement on its own.”

And, linked from that article, Why Anitfa Dresses Like Antifa, which is full of some delightful phrases:

(Antifa groups…trace their lineage back further, to those who fought against the rise of Hitler; generally, where there is “fa,” there’s been “antifa.”)

and

“Uniformity of characteristics” and a visual sense of equality have a way of, as research published in 2015 put it, giving “rise to feelings of solidarity.” It’s why soldiers and police have uniforms. It’s why sports teams have apparel for themselves and their fans, why brands have logos and consistent colorways, why fascists get slightly too-short versions of David Beckham haircuts and pin frogs to their lapels.

*You can get a NY Times subscription for just $4 a month, but if you’ve read all your free articles, you can also use Pocket to save them and then read them in full there.

Sure, our nation continues its descent into a dystopian nightmare, but haute Laura Ingalls Wilder was all over the spring 2020 runway at Viktor & Rolf:

If I ever feel like my own versions of Liberty florals and ruffles are too much, I’ll just look at these. Maybe next season I’ll add a hat!

I don’t know where I got the notion that I need a classic leather moto jacket but here we are, a 20-year vegetarian (who, admittedly, does buy leather shoes) pining for something not only impractical and unethical, but hella expensive.

Expensive and GORGEOUS:

(I’m not linking any of these because I don’t want to give my dad a heart attack. But first image is Madewell; second is LTH JKT, which has an eyeroll-y name but seems about as ethical as a leather company can get.)

The Dry Down perfume newsletter talked about leather fragrances last year; I dug up the archives and they’re on to me:

The leather jacket is a bizarre luxury object: Toughness, rebellion, and the ghosts of motorcycle gangs, sold by fashion houses at the same prices as a high-end handbag or an evening gown. For most of us, a leather jacket is a little bit of a fake, and a little bit of a lie. It’s promising more than we can deliver, trying to project stronger swagger than our persona can really support. Leather jackets rarely look as good as we think they will, or as good as they feel to wear. They are cumbersome, too warm or not warm enough, hard to quite match to the weather. They overwhelm most outfits that aren’t jeans and a white tank top, and paired with jeans and a white tank top they just remind you that you aren’t either young Marlon Brando or a 1990’s supermodel.

Well then.

…Did I mention there’s a sewing pattern for a classic moto jacket? And that Mood sells leather by the hide?