Keep Your Basket Covered in the Woods

Let me preface this with saying I donated. I donated as soon as I could; I tossed my money at them, paying thirty-five dollars for a digital copy of the movie, a t-shirt, and a digital copy of the script. I would have done the fifty dollars, but I found another campaign I wanted to finance, which needed twenty-five dollars, so I somewhat split the difference. 

I then called Meg, flipped out at her answering machine, and spent the rest of the day watching numbers climb. Last I checked, they were somewhere around 2.6 million dollars. We freaked out, planned Veronica Mars rewatch live-texting with each other, and Tumblr exploded with more Veronica Mars fans than I ever knew I followed. It was lovely.

And then, of course, the other natural Tumblr reaction began.

The most oft-heard argument I heard was “why didn’t you put that money towards fighting world hunger,” or, to paraphrase many different arguments, towards providing funds for an NGO or non-profit organization in order to fund charitable work in X place, for X reason. The fact that the money was going for a movie (a movie about a straight white woman, etc.) was what made the gathering of money invalid. It should be going to helping people.

And there is where we start the argument: it is helping people.

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So I’ve been seeing all this art and music and dance and theater lately, and a lot of it has been modern and protest-based or at least working through issues that the artist has with society, and it’s always both fascinating and alienating for me to watch these things, because what we’ve seen of this kind of art so far has been very recognizable as what is is. It’s like, “LOOK AT ME I AM PROTEST ART.” There’s no way for it to be anything else.

And that’s cool, and power to them, and people should see more of it, but I tend to feel disconnected from it, somehow.

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I fucking hate National Coming Out Day.

Some of us are selectively out, sort of out, or don’t care enough in most situations to be out. Some of us can’t be out for safety and financial reasons. Some people are still hating themselves for their gay, or their queer, or their trans, or whatever, and they are a LONG fucking way from coming out.

Not everyone needs to be waving a flag, for fuck’s sake.

Could we have a National Queer Hugs Day? National Congrats On Your Personal Acceptance of Your Own Damn Sexuality That is No One’s Business But Your Own Day? National Even If You Hate Yourself We Still Love You Day? 

I’m serious.

Day of Silence and National Coming Out Day are like, my least favorite fucking things. 

This is Erica. Say hello, everybody. 

Erica is from Teen Wolf, that one show that I’m ruining everybody’s life with. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about today. Today, we will be discussing chronic pain/illness, choice, and teenage angst that can be fixed via werwolf bites. 

Erica, pre-werewolf, was severely epileptic, with her epilepsy either not totally under control with medication or unable to be controlled enough for her to be totally safe. In the show, she mentions several scenarios where it was out of her control, including at last one time where she had a serious seizure and wasn’t helped by her classmates, and ended up pissing herself in front of them. This is probably not an isolated incident, and she is clearly bullied and left as an outsider because of her disability. 

Then, she gets offered the bite, that can make all of it go away.

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I JUST WANT TO WATCH MY DRUNK KITCHEN AND LET MY NAILS DRY.

Also eating a sandwich right after using nail polish remover? Bad idea.

Gross.

Ya’ll know I love me some haute couture. I’ve done serious Dior, Chanel, Valentino, etc. spams. I even liked Valentino’s Spring 2012 line, which (admittedly) mostly consisted of dresses patterned like wallpaper and heinous matching shoes, except for that one white dress that everyone and their mother wore to every red carpet event/magazine spread ever. Seriously, it was at the Oscars AND the Met Gala AND in Vogue AND In Style AND Elle. That was enough of that dress.

But this season is so disappointing I could just cry. 

The big story this season is the Dior show, with a new show runner, Raf Simons, and how amazing the fact was that he a) harked back to ‘50’s and ‘60’s classic Dior silhouettes and b) paired them with cigarette pants. The big thing in the collection was a heavily beaded, blinged-out peplum shirt or blouse with black silk cigarette pants.

Ya’ll, I saw one of the girls working at the Limited wearing that last week. The only difference was the quality, and the fact that she was wearing a huge statement necklace instead of beading. That’s it. It isn’t revolutionary. The silhouettes aren’t new, and neither is their pairing. I’ve seen it in street fashion for the past year, since peplums came back out last fall. I loved the line— except for the weird trend of sheer over the boobs that everyone seems to love, because McQueen and a bunch of other people did that ages ago and it was weird then, still weird now— but it wasn’t anything super revolutionary. It was interesting and fun, but it didn’t quite feel couture to me.

Jacket reconstruction as the other big hot thing? Bitch, please. We have seen those jackets before. I own one with contrast material piping and a statement lapel from White House Black Market. You aren’t surprising me with that. You surprised me, Simons, by using some fucking color in your line, because apparently Valentino and Chanel and Givenchy didn’t get the memo that something other than black, gray, and navy can be nice, sometimes.

What the other big hitters also forgot about was basic construction to fit the female form. I know they were working with European models, who are the thinnest of the thin, with hardly any hip or boob to work with, but you aren’t designing for men. Only Gaultier does that for couture weeks, and his men had more feminine silhouettes than Chanel did. The women were wearing boxes— in Chanel’s case, ugly, tweedy, patchwork boxes that look like an inexperienced quilter vomited up a coat— that weren’t swingy or even well constructed. This is haute couture, ya’ll. Step up your game. There’s making a boxy swing jacket or mod dress, but even those have darting to fit backs and shoulders and careful measuring out of the hem to allow for booty and hip and still hang straight. There is attention to detail. 

Ya’ll, couture is not supposed to bore me to fucking death, but it did. I’ve seen more sumptuousness in Marchesa’s ready-to-wears. Most designers seemed to forget the spirit of haute couture, in which is opulence and daring, a place for art to overwhelm reason. Couture is where you can do what you want, make wearable art in place of fashion, use strange colors and construction and fabrics in order to create something new. It’s an artist’s dream, and the biggest designers this year squandered it.

In fact, I think that the rules of the couture game need to be changed. Lately, it seems that some designer’s ready-to-wear lines— McQueen and Marchesa, mentioned earlier, come to mind— are more in the spirit of couture than the actual couture lines are. There is intricate, obsessive beading in white-on-white for Marchesa, experiments in sheer and volume and how-much-before-it’s-too-much. Sarah Burton (and previously Alexander himself) have achieved grandeur enough in ready-to-wear gowns to already be archived in museums. The line carries enough artistic weight to have it’s own Met exhibition after not even being a line for more than fifteen years, and maintains two standing pieces in the V&A’s much smaller but equally as prestigious Costume exhibit (an entire ensemble, from dress to shoes to bag, from a 1996 fall show and the huge feather dress from Burton’s first show, Spring 2011). What does it say that Ready to Wear has eclipsed couture shows in grandeur? 

The best shows, I think, were Dior, with very interesting fabric and beading use as well as COLOR, thank you very much, Giambattista Valli, with an interesting forest nymph concept that actually played out well in florals and volume, and Ulyana Sergeenko, with a somewhat fifties silhouette and a fun play with drama, texture, and pattern. Versace wasn’t bad, and had some great beading, and I always love Gaultier, who really seemed the only person to get the memo for extravagance.  Valentino and Chanel were boring as all hell, Elle Saab was okay, and Margiela used the face mask motif that McQueen did better in Spring 2012 RTW. 

We will be spamming the Dior, Valli, and Sergeenko shows nearly in full, with favorites from other collections pulled in (Andrej Pejic walked in the Gaultier again, for instance, and we will always have Pejic on this blog). This will be followed by the McQueen and other resort collections, because resort will always be my favorite season, bar none. 

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Fucking JESUS ALL OVER EVERYTHING I READ IN HISTORY EVER.

YOU FLEE FROM THE CATHOLICS AND THEN THE PROTESTANTS GET YOU. THERE IS NO ESCAPE, ESPECIALLY NOT IN WESTERN HISTORY BECAUSE:

“YOU CAN’T BE MORAL WITHOUT JESUS. THEN YOU’RE A GODLESS HEATHEN COMMIE WHO IS GOING TO DESTROY THE WORLD.”

Quote from: EVERYONE FUCKING EVER THAT OPENS THEIR FUCKING MOUTH IN AMERICAN HISTORY, I SWEAR TO YOU.

I PREFER THE GODLESS COMMIES, THANKS.

I’m supposed to talk about this rationally tomorrow and I know I’m going to open my giant fucking mouth and tell everyone to that the American preachers of the 1870’s should take their moral uprightness and shove it so far up their ass that the fucking rainbows they shit come out of their mouth.

And I’m going to enjoy saying it.

And then I will be lectured by EVERYONE EVER about how UNACCEPTING I am of other religions and how dare I suggest that Christians have PRIVILEGE because OF COURSE THEY DON’T THEY ARE PERSECUTED, WOE IS THEY, ETC even though that is a LOAD OF BULLSHIT and I WILL PULL CONTEMPORARY ISSUES INTO THIS DEBATE, SO HELP ME I WILL PULL THIS HISTORY VAN OVER AND PARK IT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE LANE. I AM THE ONE WHO HAILS FROM CATHOLIC SCHOOL. DON’T YOU TRY YOUR “AMERICAN MORALS” SHIT WITH ME.

I have to write a coherent response to this.

I hate everything.