My Favorite Fall/Winter '08 Looks So Far

I'll start with the best, which is Chanel, of course.
(Video is of the Fall/Winter Haute Couture line fashion show.)

Can you believe this is Claudia Scheiffer in a wig? Words can't describe how much I love this look. Chanel always pulls out the best for fall/winter.

I LOVE when Burberry steps away from London hubbub and bright lights and pulls out the black and white, romantic ads.

You may recognize Sam Riley from Control (the Joy Division movie).

ANNA SUI

I love the mood of this photograph. The colors are all so rich and decadent, whereas the clothes themselves reach back into the folk art movement. I can really appreciate Anna Sui, although I don't think I would necessarily wear these outfits (and especially not those leggings, which remind me of high school girls wearing heavily patterned leggins in an attempt to "mix it up" or become more "alt").

PHI

Burlesque chic.

Dolce & Gabana...always overflowing with creativity. Fall/Winter '08 is all about deep colors, an elegant earthiness... These two adds really speak to both sides of the coin. Again, the folk art movement coming back with some of the clothing below. But notice how the second ad takes the same sort of "stormy" vibe and transplants that to the city. These city girls look edgier than the people in the first ad, but are somehow rooted in the same abstract place as the first. Brilliant.

LONGCHAMP...Always classy & romantic. Kate Moss at her finest.

Sometimes I get a little confused about Le Castle Vania.

I like Le Castle Vania. It's pretty catchy, danceable, unoffensive electro (I even included it in my last post about music I like this summer)... But I can't help noticing his image. If I saw him getting into his car, I'd assume there was an AFI or Senses Fail CD all cued up. Is there a wave of ex-emos gathering together to embrace electronic music (possibly emo's polar opposite)? Is this the natural progression for the "scene?" Or are long-haired, lip-ring sporting, alt bros dreading the inevitable northward spread of Mexican anti-emo violence?

What's the deal with Le Castle Vania?

Fashion or Famine: Is 2ks Fashion Actually Diminishing the Importance of Innovation?

My sixth-grade teacher once told my class that our children would be wearing spacesuits everywhere they went. It was probably one of those spontaneous, thoughtless comments, but it has stuck with me throughout my life. The concept of people walking around in aluminum foil suits with bubble heads has been seeming less and less likely, discrediting pretty much any science fiction movie ever produced about the future.

We are living in an age of imitation. Usually, this would infer the most sincere form of flattery, but can you really flatter the 80’s? Walking around Oberlin College campus, it’s almost impossible to not bump into someone wearing Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie attire, and it’s even more likely to see a Siouxsie Souix or Cindy Lauper clone dancing in the ‘Sco on a weeknight. The age of ironic apparel is neigh, confusing anyone over 40 the world over.

Batman sweaters and unicorn knee-high socks might have been your favorite articles of clothing in fifth grade, and thank God you didn’t throw them away. You are just as skinny as you were in elementary school, so you can fit the same clothes. But they now fit you in a much different way. You are ironic, and you don’t care what other people think of you. But you actually do, and don’t want people to know that you do, so you keep wearing that Snoopy backpack and the hair scrunchies your mom gave you for your ballet recital twelve years ago.

Summer in Oberlin lets every fashionista and fashionisto burst free of their winter coats and black skinny jeans, showing their true colors and making statements with their leggings and Technicolor garb left and right. Just a few years ago, the “hip” were wearing black, right? Well, we’re hipper than that now. Societal discontent and a delayed appreciation for the UK ecstasy raver trend have brought colors to a social denomination defined by apathy, artistic prowess, and pretension. These are neon board-shorted, sparkly-eye shadowed, skin-tight skinny jeaned apathetics.

After emulating the 60’s a couple years ago, the 70’s soon afterwards, and now the 80’s, where else is there to go? It is too soon to ironically bring back the 90’s, so where do we go from here?

I would suggest that the only place to go would be the 20’s and 30’s. No one wants to bring back the prudish and plasticized 40’s and 50’s, but the heavily drinking flappers and Dapper Dans of the prohibition era will probably make a resurgence sooner or later. The pencil skirts and leg-bearing dresses, as well as the skinny-legged suits cater to the starving-but-fierce trend in beauty.

Then what? Will we be dressing like Scarlett O’Hara? Marie Antoinette? George Washington? Innovation in fashion can only go so far, it seems. A creative dresser is now someone who can combine various generations to make a “modern” and “edgy” look. Are we in the midst of the time machine malfunction decade? Or are we just trying to look as silly as possible?

At this point, it is important to stress that not every twenty-something is donning the leather jackets, puffy sneakers, and waist-belts. Although some of these fashions are becoming more mainstream, slowly losing their irony, being sold at Forever 21, and popping up in the pages of Vogue, the average Joe and Jane of this millennia has been experimenting with bold, solid colors and various styles of jeans and skirts. After the body-bearing trends of the 90’s, this focus on attention via color and shape is refreshing and accepting of various body types.

Worn by the hipster elite and apathetic dressers alike, American Apparel basics and other such monotone clothing have been dominating the public eye in the past few years. The act of layering basic colors shows a subconscious recharged attention to design. Being confronted by a wall of identically cut tee shirts in 40 colors is like starting a painting with a blank canvas and many watercolors to choose from. You can buy yellow leggings to pair with an off-the-shoulders, oversized, floppy sweater, or you can buy black leggings to go with a classic cocktail dress.

There is one thing that the popular, youthful stores of today have in common. Chic vintage clothing shops let you browse through time itself until you find something you can wear proudly, ironically, or both. Multi-colored basics are all about freedom of choice and artistic layering. Even highly commercial chains like Urban Outfitters and the hundreds of such stores around the world offer differing looks for different social demographics. Maybe the trend for the 2K’s is not to look absurd, but to have the freedom to look however you please.

That being said, I will not be surprised if I see a spacesuit or two next time winter in Oberlin rolls around.

The Teenagers pop up in almost every fashion and party pics blog I look at. It seems rather unnatural to not include a Teenagers track (or better yet, a remix):
The Teenagers - "Love No (Dolorean Remix)" mp3

Some Blogs You Should Know About...And Some that You Shouldn't

Useful Blogs

Music Blogs:

Do you have lots of free time and an external hard drive? Then get blogging. Congratulations, for you have clearly made this step by stumbling upon The Oberlin Tritone.

There are hundreds if not thousands of good music blogs out there (some started by your very own peers!). Once you have found one that suits your listenng pleasure, similar pages are typically linked for you. DJs love to release digital-only tracks and remixes, so as a result, blogs are simply overflowing with downloads and sometimes-useful criticism and commentary on electronic music. Sites like RCRD LBL and, to an extent, Hypemachine, double as online record labels, legally supplying free downloads from indie artists from nearly all genres. Some sites have the occasional interview along with highly bloggable music videos. This is a basic list of sites to know and love, especially if you like electronic music.

Fuck You On Friday
Brooklyn Vegan
Panda Toes
Missing Toof
Electro Rash
Fluokids
Mochi & Beats

The WOBLOG:

This is 91.5 WOBC, Oberlin Community and College Radio’s very own blog! That’s right! You can now hear, see, and with permission from WOBC DJ’s, touch, smell, and taste the essence of WOBC. Each genre has its own division on the blog, or you can view by chronological post. Music downloads, cool videos, WOBC news, and various other splendors are just the tip of the iceberg on the WOBLOG.

Nightlilfe Photography:

Isn’t it a little weird when that person you hardly know snaps pictures of you at parties and then tags you on Facebook? “Party Pixxx” blogs take that creepy aesthetic to a whole new level, because now you can spend hours looking at people you probably don’t know, taken by someone who doesn’t know them either. The new wave of commercial photography is neigh, bringing strangers with cameras to parties around the world. If the routine of the same Oberlin house parties every weekend starts getting to you, check out one of these sites to see what’s been going down in San Francisco, Brooklyn, London, etc. The charm comes from the level of enthusiasm these partiers have for being photographed, sometimes in very strange circumstances (often in bathrooms). Maybe we should start an Oberlin chapter?

The Cobrasnake
Glam Canyon
As Cool as it Gets
We Made Out Once


Hipster Runoff:

Claiming to “blog about pretty much anything,” Hipster Runoff both parodies and defines this social demographic, so don’t let the title scare you away. If you’re still shaky on what exactly a hipster is, HRO is a good place to start. If you are a hipster and want to post comments about how the Ed Banger trend is so passé, this blog is for you. And if you hate all this stuff, the satire spilling from blogger Carles’s vowel-dropped words and pathetically self-conscious narrative might just make your day. HRO makes available the occasional free music download (usually remixes of Cut Copy or anything by The Teenagers) as well as copious amounts of linkage to both useful and useless blogs. Topics covered in the past include women with back tattoos and their antics, anti-emo gang violence in Mexico, DJ Mom Jeans, fellow blogger Perez Hilton, and the baby with two faces and its pseudo-hip parents. Below is a highly estimated breakdown of Hipster Runoff's appeal to various sub-demographics, made by Carles himself.

Relatively Useless, but Highly Entertaining Blogs

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks: Do misused quotation marks “irk” you, or do they blow “your” mind? Either way, check out this blog. It combines tongue-in-cheek commentary with photographs sent in from observers of this needless quotation mark phenomenon.

Passive Aggressive Notes: Submitted from those who have been on the receiving end of over-the-top passive aggressives in action. Includes letters to corporations, rainbow-colored notes from disapproving roommates, and angry arts and crafts.

Boing Boing: Everything you would ever need concerning media, art, or pop culture in order to waste your time most effectively. Read this all day and you can impress anyone with your knowledge of chocolate Jesus performance art and backpack TV transmitters from 1951. Boing Boing TV makes available interesting videos such as this one, entitled "Tokyology," which explores various subcultures and popular social hubs within Tokyo.

LOL Porn: Do you love LOLing at porn? So do they! Includes weight room threesomes, dudes with tanlines, interesting piercings, and other material sent in by fans of the blog.

The Pen is Mightier: You can thank Oberlin senior Nick Mayor for this outstandingly delightful blog about various neon “Power Penz.” I never had any cool pens as a ten-year-old, and reading this makes me seriously question the resultant fun I had in my youth without them. Pens featured include the Air Attack, Jet Flyer, FM Radio Rocker, and the Glamour Girl Kit, among others.

The Cigarette Smoking Blog: “Conservatism, Catholicism, Yale, film and music, one cigarette at a time.” The concept is that every time writer Helen Rittelmeyer has a cigarette, she writes something ridiculous, confusing, or cigarette-related.

23/6: A highly entertaining site claiming to be “Some of the News, Most of the Time,” with contributions from alumni David Bernstein and Drew Grant.

Zac Efron Please Stop Tanning: Dedicated solely to preventing this Disney Channel icon from hitting the tanning beds. A truly noble effort.

“Dreams People Have Had About Hillary and/or Barack and/or McCain”: This project really is exactly what the title suggests; many people have sent in dreams they have had concerning the various presidential candidates. To make it even simpler, you can designate exactly which one you would like to read dreams about on the sidebar. Dreams range from the absurd to the politically poignant. One of my favorites is this stirring tour-de-force sent in from one Sheila Heti:

“There was a shootout in my home. It was like the wild west, with the women all upstairs hiding and all the men downstairs shooting. I don't know who was fighting whom, or why. Barack Obama was there. He sat next to me on the couch but sat on my glasses so I could not see.”