2010년 11월 22일 월요일
2010년 11월 21일 일요일
2010년 11월 19일 금요일
chanel tattoo sticker
The Chanel transfers, created for the spring 2010 catwalk, on the other hand, require much less analysis (and crucially less commitment). Key designs include the fashion house's signature pearls and bag chain handles, which appeared on model's wrists, shoulders and garter-style, on thighs.
There's already a waiting list at Selfridges for these posh stickers (55 for £49), so the spoils surely go to Chanel.
Samuel Steward
Sexual Outlaw on the Gay Frontier
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 25, 2010
When the author Justin Spring finally tracked down the executor of Samuel Steward’s estate, he had no idea what this sexual outlaw and little-known literary figure had left behind after his death in 1993.
Sunday Book Review: ‘Secret Historian’ by Justin Spring (August 29, 2010)
So he was taken unawares by the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items, including an autograph and reliquary with pubic hair from Rudolph Valentino, a thousand-page confessional journal Steward created at the request of the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and a green metal card catalog labeled “Stud File,” which contained a meticulously documented record on index cards of every sexual experience and partner — Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, “One-eyed Sadist” — that Steward said he had had over 50 years.
An attic full of items contained a secret history of a little-documented strand of gay life in the middle decades of the 20th century. Steward’s experience stands in stark contrast to the familiar story of furtive concealment and persecution in the period before gay liberation. As new biographies of artists and writers like E.M. Forster detail the effects of sexual repression on their work, Steward’s history shows what a life of openness, when embraced, entailed day to day.
Mr. Spring, who has written biographies of the American artists Fairfield Porter and Paul Cadmus, became intrigued by Steward after coming across some of his witty and ribald letters. He managed to find the executor, Michael Williams, who was almost as much of an obsessive hoarder as Steward and had squirreled away the artifacts in his San Francisco home after rescuing them from the floor-to-ceiling squalor that the enfeebled Steward had built up in his final years. For nearly a decade Mr. Williams doggedly eluded rare manuscript dealers while he pondered what to do with Steward’s legacy.
“It was an Aladdin’s cave of gay paraphernalia and record keeping that was covered with dust and smelled like dog,” said Mr. Spring, whose biography “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade” is due out next month. (At the moment Mr. Spring is storing the collection.)
This unusual cache is significant because source material from this period is rare, said Martin Duberman, a professor emeritus and founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It’s a real treasure trove he stumbled upon.”
Many of Steward’s contemporaries — and their heirs — destroyed or hid evidence of their homosexuality. Mr. Spring said, for example, that Donald C. Gallup, a curator at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, bought 24 of Wilder’s notes to Steward, but did not catalog them, and they remained on a back shelf until Mr. Spring traced them.
Jason Baumann, curator of the lesbian and gay collection for the New York Public Library, said, “It’s exactly the kind of material that I constantly have historians and the general public wanting to have.”
Reconstructing Steward’s life was not easy, Mr. Spring recently explained from his sunny studio apartment in Midtown Manhattan. At first he didn’t realize that some of the odd puzzle pieces he happened upon even belonged to the same jigsaw because Steward had so many identities in an era when homosexuality could land a person in jail.
The novelist and professor at a Roman Catholic university who was born in 1909 into an austere and puritanical Methodist household in Ohio was Samuel M. Steward. But as the author of gay pulp fiction, he went by Phil Andros and a half-dozen other pseudonyms; Hells Angels in Oakland, Calif., who used him as their official tattoo artist, called him Doc Sparrow; readers of his articles in underground newspapers and magazines knew him as Ward Stames. To a close circle of artistic friends like Wilder, Cadmus, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, the photographer George Platt Lynes and others, he was simply Sammy.
Steward was able to take a step toward joining these compartmentalized aspects of his life after reading Kinsey’s landmark report on human sexuality in 1948. The study, which presented homosexuality as natural and legitimate, inspired Steward to see himself as a sex researcher and gave his life a new focus and meaning.
A colleague urged Steward to talk to Kinsey and the two met in late 1949. Kinsey quickly enlisted him as what Steward called an “unofficial collaborator,” prompting Steward to become an even more compulsive chronicler. On each of the 746 cards that ultimately made up his alphabetized Stud File, Steward listed his sexual partner’s name, his place in the lineup (i.e., the 354th person Steward had sex with), the dates and locations of every encounter, a coded description of penis size and of every specific sexual activity, and a brief comment. Of Valentino, filed under the actor’s real name, Guglielmi, R., he wrote: “Nuf sed.”
In Kinsey, Steward found a kindred spirit, a close friend and an ideal father figure. “I suppose that to a degree I fell in love with him,” he wrote in a published memoir. (The two never had any sexual contact.)
Steward’s tales of frequent sexual encounters as a teenager and undergraduate in Woodsfield and Columbus, Ohio, in the 1920s and ’30s are a counterpoint to the aggressive persecution of homosexuals during the 1950s McCarthy scare. As Mr. Baumann and other historians have noted, there was no homosexual panic in those earlier years because of a reluctance to discuss sex in any detail and the resulting widespread ignorance.
Mr. Spring said: “It’s all about language. If there are no culturally accepted words to describe an experience, it remains off the radar.”
According to Mr. Spring’s book, Steward came to understand himself only when he was a teenager and found a copy of Havelock Ellis’s “Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion,” which had been pinched from the restricted section of an Ohio library.
As a student at Ohio State University in Columbus, Steward said he had many sexual encounters with “straight young men.” As quoted in the biography, he recounts the atmosphere in one of his pulp fiction stories: “None of us was coy in those days. ... We all liked to experiment [and] we found the direct approach daring.” According to Mr. Spring, only those who performed oral sex were then considered homosexual.
Ultimately Steward abandoned university life and entered the tattoo artist’s demimonde full time, but his determination to indulge his sexual identity fully came with enormous physical, professional and psychological costs. In Mr. Spring’s telling, the frustrations of living in this closeted era combined with his obsession drove Steward to alcoholism and prevented him from living up to the early promise he showed as a novelist. He suffered through long periods of dark depression, loneliness and self-destructive behavior. Dangerously violent characters and sex fascinated Steward, and his overtures and adventures frequently landed him in the hospital.
“He paid the price for being himself,” Mr. Spring said, “but at least he got to be himself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/books/26secret.html?_r=1&ref=tattoos
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 25, 2010
When the author Justin Spring finally tracked down the executor of Samuel Steward’s estate, he had no idea what this sexual outlaw and little-known literary figure had left behind after his death in 1993.
Sunday Book Review: ‘Secret Historian’ by Justin Spring (August 29, 2010)
So he was taken unawares by the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items, including an autograph and reliquary with pubic hair from Rudolph Valentino, a thousand-page confessional journal Steward created at the request of the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and a green metal card catalog labeled “Stud File,” which contained a meticulously documented record on index cards of every sexual experience and partner — Rock Hudson, Thornton Wilder, “One-eyed Sadist” — that Steward said he had had over 50 years.
An attic full of items contained a secret history of a little-documented strand of gay life in the middle decades of the 20th century. Steward’s experience stands in stark contrast to the familiar story of furtive concealment and persecution in the period before gay liberation. As new biographies of artists and writers like E.M. Forster detail the effects of sexual repression on their work, Steward’s history shows what a life of openness, when embraced, entailed day to day.
Mr. Spring, who has written biographies of the American artists Fairfield Porter and Paul Cadmus, became intrigued by Steward after coming across some of his witty and ribald letters. He managed to find the executor, Michael Williams, who was almost as much of an obsessive hoarder as Steward and had squirreled away the artifacts in his San Francisco home after rescuing them from the floor-to-ceiling squalor that the enfeebled Steward had built up in his final years. For nearly a decade Mr. Williams doggedly eluded rare manuscript dealers while he pondered what to do with Steward’s legacy.
“It was an Aladdin’s cave of gay paraphernalia and record keeping that was covered with dust and smelled like dog,” said Mr. Spring, whose biography “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade” is due out next month. (At the moment Mr. Spring is storing the collection.)
This unusual cache is significant because source material from this period is rare, said Martin Duberman, a professor emeritus and founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It’s a real treasure trove he stumbled upon.”
Many of Steward’s contemporaries — and their heirs — destroyed or hid evidence of their homosexuality. Mr. Spring said, for example, that Donald C. Gallup, a curator at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, bought 24 of Wilder’s notes to Steward, but did not catalog them, and they remained on a back shelf until Mr. Spring traced them.
Jason Baumann, curator of the lesbian and gay collection for the New York Public Library, said, “It’s exactly the kind of material that I constantly have historians and the general public wanting to have.”
Reconstructing Steward’s life was not easy, Mr. Spring recently explained from his sunny studio apartment in Midtown Manhattan. At first he didn’t realize that some of the odd puzzle pieces he happened upon even belonged to the same jigsaw because Steward had so many identities in an era when homosexuality could land a person in jail.
The novelist and professor at a Roman Catholic university who was born in 1909 into an austere and puritanical Methodist household in Ohio was Samuel M. Steward. But as the author of gay pulp fiction, he went by Phil Andros and a half-dozen other pseudonyms; Hells Angels in Oakland, Calif., who used him as their official tattoo artist, called him Doc Sparrow; readers of his articles in underground newspapers and magazines knew him as Ward Stames. To a close circle of artistic friends like Wilder, Cadmus, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, the photographer George Platt Lynes and others, he was simply Sammy.
Steward was able to take a step toward joining these compartmentalized aspects of his life after reading Kinsey’s landmark report on human sexuality in 1948. The study, which presented homosexuality as natural and legitimate, inspired Steward to see himself as a sex researcher and gave his life a new focus and meaning.
A colleague urged Steward to talk to Kinsey and the two met in late 1949. Kinsey quickly enlisted him as what Steward called an “unofficial collaborator,” prompting Steward to become an even more compulsive chronicler. On each of the 746 cards that ultimately made up his alphabetized Stud File, Steward listed his sexual partner’s name, his place in the lineup (i.e., the 354th person Steward had sex with), the dates and locations of every encounter, a coded description of penis size and of every specific sexual activity, and a brief comment. Of Valentino, filed under the actor’s real name, Guglielmi, R., he wrote: “Nuf sed.”
In Kinsey, Steward found a kindred spirit, a close friend and an ideal father figure. “I suppose that to a degree I fell in love with him,” he wrote in a published memoir. (The two never had any sexual contact.)
Steward’s tales of frequent sexual encounters as a teenager and undergraduate in Woodsfield and Columbus, Ohio, in the 1920s and ’30s are a counterpoint to the aggressive persecution of homosexuals during the 1950s McCarthy scare. As Mr. Baumann and other historians have noted, there was no homosexual panic in those earlier years because of a reluctance to discuss sex in any detail and the resulting widespread ignorance.
Mr. Spring said: “It’s all about language. If there are no culturally accepted words to describe an experience, it remains off the radar.”
According to Mr. Spring’s book, Steward came to understand himself only when he was a teenager and found a copy of Havelock Ellis’s “Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume II: Sexual Inversion,” which had been pinched from the restricted section of an Ohio library.
As a student at Ohio State University in Columbus, Steward said he had many sexual encounters with “straight young men.” As quoted in the biography, he recounts the atmosphere in one of his pulp fiction stories: “None of us was coy in those days. ... We all liked to experiment [and] we found the direct approach daring.” According to Mr. Spring, only those who performed oral sex were then considered homosexual.
Ultimately Steward abandoned university life and entered the tattoo artist’s demimonde full time, but his determination to indulge his sexual identity fully came with enormous physical, professional and psychological costs. In Mr. Spring’s telling, the frustrations of living in this closeted era combined with his obsession drove Steward to alcoholism and prevented him from living up to the early promise he showed as a novelist. He suffered through long periods of dark depression, loneliness and self-destructive behavior. Dangerously violent characters and sex fascinated Steward, and his overtures and adventures frequently landed him in the hospital.
“He paid the price for being himself,” Mr. Spring said, “but at least he got to be himself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/books/26secret.html?_r=1&ref=tattoos
New York tattoo
1.A photo, circa 1940, of "Captain Elvy" and his tattoos. His back features a clipper ship, roses, flying fish, eagle, American flags and a banner reading "United We Stand."
2.A sheet of "flash," or tattoo designs, circa 1962, by "Sailor Eddie" Evans, a famed tattooist in Philadelphia and Camden, N.J., from the 1950s through the 1980s.
project: second skin
Body bio.
Fuel revisits the graphic storytelling of Russian criminal tattoos
Published on Monday, 18 October, 2010 | 9:27 am
Danzig Baldaev’s original tattoo drawings, made famous by his Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, are to be exhibited in London next week by Fuel Design, writes John Ridpath. Baldaev collected his drawings while working as a prison guard between 1948 and 1986, creating a fascinating record of a dark, indelible tradition. In ‘Written all over the body’ (Eye 53), Rick Poynor discussed the encyclopaedia and its topic: ‘This is a realm of unexpected graphic complexity. The tattoos are not mere decorations and there is nothing arbitrary about any of their elements. They are a form of speech, and every symbol has a meaning that can be understood. A thief’s entire biography can be written on the body.’
Tattoos are used to indicate a criminal’s background or status in the underground, and gangs have particular symbols and designs to mark out their members. Some designs are simple compositions of basic symbols, or words; others are more complex, incorporating detailed drawings of political leaders or sexually explicit images – sometimes both at the same time (below). But this is no autobiography – those who have committed crimes that other inmates disapprove of are tattooed by force, often on the face, as a form of punishment and branding.
Baldaev’s drawings reproduce tattoo designs out of the body context: they are sketched onto yellowing skin-like paper, numbered in sequence with annotations on the back of each sheet. This exhibition will add a new dimension to these images: they will be accompanied by a series of photographs by Sergei Vasiliev, taken in Russian prisons and reform settlements between 1989-1993. Seeing these designs in situ, on the stomachs, arms and faces of real-life criminals brings home the physical permanence of these dark biographies.
For more on tattoos, see ‘Body type’ in Eye 72.
30 October to 28 November 2010
Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive
4 Wilkes Street, London E1 6QF
Thursday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm.
http://fuel-design.com/
Eye magazine is available from all good design bookshops and at the online Eye shop, where you can order subscriptions, single issues and back issues. The Autumn issue,Eye 77 is on press. For regular updates, please sign up for the editor’s newsletter.
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Fuel revisits the graphic storytelling of Russian criminal tattoos
Published on Monday, 18 October, 2010 | 9:27 am
Danzig Baldaev’s original tattoo drawings, made famous by his Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, are to be exhibited in London next week by Fuel Design, writes John Ridpath. Baldaev collected his drawings while working as a prison guard between 1948 and 1986, creating a fascinating record of a dark, indelible tradition. In ‘Written all over the body’ (Eye 53), Rick Poynor discussed the encyclopaedia and its topic: ‘This is a realm of unexpected graphic complexity. The tattoos are not mere decorations and there is nothing arbitrary about any of their elements. They are a form of speech, and every symbol has a meaning that can be understood. A thief’s entire biography can be written on the body.’
Tattoos are used to indicate a criminal’s background or status in the underground, and gangs have particular symbols and designs to mark out their members. Some designs are simple compositions of basic symbols, or words; others are more complex, incorporating detailed drawings of political leaders or sexually explicit images – sometimes both at the same time (below). But this is no autobiography – those who have committed crimes that other inmates disapprove of are tattooed by force, often on the face, as a form of punishment and branding.
Baldaev’s drawings reproduce tattoo designs out of the body context: they are sketched onto yellowing skin-like paper, numbered in sequence with annotations on the back of each sheet. This exhibition will add a new dimension to these images: they will be accompanied by a series of photographs by Sergei Vasiliev, taken in Russian prisons and reform settlements between 1989-1993. Seeing these designs in situ, on the stomachs, arms and faces of real-life criminals brings home the physical permanence of these dark biographies.
For more on tattoos, see ‘Body type’ in Eye 72.
30 October to 28 November 2010
Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive
4 Wilkes Street, London E1 6QF
Thursday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm.
http://fuel-design.com/
Eye magazine is available from all good design bookshops and at the online Eye shop, where you can order subscriptions, single issues and back issues. The Autumn issue,Eye 77 is on press. For regular updates, please sign up for the editor’s newsletter.
No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)
2010년 10월 29일 금요일
2010년 10월 28일 목요일
2010년 10월 27일 수요일
The Fashion Conservatives By RUTH LA FERLA
October 20, 2010
The Fashion Conservatives
By RUTH LA FERLA
A WOMAN seeking political office in 2010 faces a fashion quandary. The choice, in simplest terms, comes down to this: to follow the lead of Sarah Palin or cast a style vote with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At a glance, Ms. Palin — she of the designer jackets, rump-hugging skirts and knee-high boots — would seem to have been a game changer, loosening up a restrictive, if unwritten, campaign dress code with one that expresses a more conventionally feminine look. Her bright, curve-enhancing garments and loose, shoulder-grazing hair — even her rimless glasses — have been taken up by a handful of candidates on the climb. This is especially true of fellow Republicans like Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who appear to be following Ms. Palin’s style cues with striking fidelity.
Lisa A. Kline, the image consultant behind Ms. Palin’s controversial $150,000-plus fashion makeover during the 2008 campaign, views her client’s embrace of an overtly female archetype as a signal of rebellion. “Women want to change their image.” Ms. Kline said in an interview. “They had been in the mimicking-men phase for so long. Now they are going for femininity.”
Well, look again, Ms. Kline. For all the ridicule that Mrs. Clinton’s boxy pantsuits have generated over the years — she seems to own one in every color, like turquoise and fuchsia — her mannishly functional wardrobe remains the go-to choice for women on the path to power.
On their own steam — or perhaps at the suggestion of a battery of campaign advisers — the majority of candidates are retreating, as they have for decades, to the relative safety of an anodyne uniform. Understated to a fault, its chief components are a formless suit, flat or low-heeled shoes and a noncommittal hairstyle. It’s a brusquely masculine image tempered occasionally by a strand of pearls and dainty, never dangly, earrings (the latter deemed too distracting for television cameras).
“A Palin effect? Show it to me,” said Christine K. Jahnke, a media trainer who advised Mrs. Clinton during her presidential campaign. “Women aren’t trying to look like Sarah Palin. That would be a mistake.”
They are for the most part “still walking a tightrope,” said Ms. Jahnke, who advises female candidates to adopt a high-quality, low-key wardrobe befitting a corporate chief executive. “You have to look approachable and, at the same time, look like you can handle the job,” she said.
Siobhan Bennett, president of the Women’s Campaign Forum, a bipartisan group that seeks to get women elected, sees plenty of Americans adopting Ms. Palin’s glasses and “bedhead” coif. “But that’s in the general populace,” Ms. Bennett stressed, “not on the campaign trail.”
Indeed, there is much to suggest that women who aspire to office continue to dress defensively. Frightened, even terrified, of committing a wardrobe gaffe on national airwaves, most adhere to a rigid, patently dated style that has all the allure of a milk carton.
The prevailing look, modeled on corporate executives, with an occasional nod to the astringent style of female news anchors, is anathema to professional style-watchers. When, during her presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton declined an invitation to appear in Vogue magazine for fear, her handlers said, of appearing “too feminine,” Anna Wintour fired off a scathing editor’s letter.
“The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously is frankly dismaying,” Ms. Wintour chided. “I do think Americans have moved on from the power suit mentality. Political campaigns that do not recognize this are making a serious misjudgment.”
But even a cursory rummage through news clips and Web sites indicates that women courting power still adopt a strategic style of dress conceived to keep their curves — and their characters — neatly under wraps.
Among those candidates, including Palin acolytes, sophistication is in short supply, said Sharon Graubard, a senior executive with Stylesight, a trend-forecasting firm in New York. “These women have yet to figure out a way to project a confident femininity,” Ms. Graubard said. They have yet to work out “an elegant look that doesn’t rely on ill-fitting suits and bad colors.”
The $2,500 Valentino suit that Ms. Palin wore at the Republican convention is cited by Ms. Graubard as an example. “The quality was an improvement over typical campaign wear, but the styling certainly didn’t push any envelope,” she said. Despite her pricey fashion face-lift, Ms. Palin, she said, “looked like a mall mom.”
Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, has attempted to temper such arguments with a dose of common sense. Writing last week in Slate, he argued that flamboyance and politics are mutually exclusive. “Leave the Cavalli jumpsuits and Balmain new-punk to we constituents,” Mr. Doonan pleaded.
While common sense would seem to dictate that an essentially conservative formula is being adopted chiefly by women over 45, that is not necessarily the case. In matters of wardrobe there is no discernible generational divide, according to Ms. Jahnke. The tendency among women of varying ages is to adopt a style that is “office appropriate,” she said, “and that by definition is conservative.”
There is a generational divide in the way these women approach their appearance. “Younger women almost instinctively know they have to pay attention to how they look,” Ms. Jahnke said. “They’ll say: ‘Help me fix my hair. What makeup do I need for high-definition television?’ ” Older women, she said, tend to be less focused on appearance. “You need to convince or cajole them to update their hairstyle, their eyeglasses, their suits.”
Didi Barrett, a Democratic candidate for the State Senate in New York, favors a wardrobe of all-occasion shirt-jackets custom-tailored by a seamstress in Rhinebeck, N.Y. At a Democratic rally in Hyde Park last week, she wore a plain-Jane teal jacket and windowpane shawl. “When you are courting voters,” she said, “you need to accommodate their expectations.”
Barbara Jeter-Jackson, who represents Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in the Dutchess County legislature, was turned out at the rally in a chalk-stripe pantsuit that echoed the garb of her constituents, who, regardless of age, for the most part wore unlined jackets or cardigans and loose pants. Ms. Jeter-Jackson made sure her suit would violate no unofficial taboos. After all, as she said, a woman in office “can’t be too provocative.”
OR too careful, it would seem. In an age of punctilious correctness, commenting on a candidate’s attire is perceived more than ever as trivializing, if not sexist or downright demeaning. Yet women seeking office continue to attract the kind of physical scrutiny that is rarely directed at a man.
In a 2008 article, “Cutting Women Out: The Media’s Bias Against Female Candidates,” Erika Falk, who studied eight races in the 2008 elections, concluded that “coverage of how women candidates look — while ignoring such observations about men candidates — has been an ongoing problem.”
Ms. Falk, who runs the master’s degree program in communication at Johns Hopkins University, found that each of eight female candidates that year received about “four physical descriptions for every one that described a man.” At the time, she added, about 29 percent of articles about Hillary Clinton contained a physical description.”
“Historically, we’ve associated masculinity with leadership,” Ms. Falk said in an interview. “If you’re a woman politician, it makes pretty good sense to come off in a stereotypically masculine way.”
To ignore that assessment is to invite the pointed and often distracting comments that continue to pepper mainstream media coverage. A July profile of Ms. Haley in Newsweek began by observing that the candidate wore “a snug, saffron-colored suit and stilettos you could impale a small animal with.”
In September the Daily News coyly observed that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is seeking re-election in New York, has become “a leaner, meaner campaign machine ... showing a slimmer silhouette as a tough election battle looms.”
Only last week the Daily News took a swipe at Mrs. Clinton, observing that she “has had more hairstyles than a beauty-school dummy.”
Senator Gillibrand, who, with Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, is often singled out as a smartly tailored fashion role model, likes to deflect that sort of commentary. “You would never write about Chuck Schumer’s shoes,” she told a reporter for New York magazine in response to a question about her flats.
Yet she submitted to a fashion makeover in the November issue of Vogue, shedding her earnest navy or gray tailored suits for a form-fitting Michael Kors sheath and a reefer coat. Was Vogue’s sartorial endorsement a boost or bane for her campaign? Senator Gillibrand’s office declined to comment.
Which underscores the quandary. Ignore current fashion and you risk seeming out of touch. Embrace it too warmly and you undermine your credibility. Ms. Bachmann, it might be argued, is a case in point. Her expensive-looking wardrobe, Ms. Jahnke maintained, “puts her out of step with her district,” which has a high unemployment rate.
A successful politician, Mr. Doonan wrote in Slate, must appear Prada-oblivious: “Any hint of dandyism or vanity would indicate a superficial, self-indulgent character.”
Politicians, he added, “dress as to be unremarkable.”
He might have been describing Ms. Barrett, the State Senate candidate, who has tried to distance herself from flashier peers by giving up the biker boots and folkloric scarves she wore in her pre-stump days. Appearance is a concern, she acknowledged. “But in the pecking order of campaign priorities, I don’t think it’s a significant one.”
Still, she said, after a beat, “When I see myself on television, I think, ‘Ah, image.’ ”
The Fashion Conservatives
By RUTH LA FERLA
A WOMAN seeking political office in 2010 faces a fashion quandary. The choice, in simplest terms, comes down to this: to follow the lead of Sarah Palin or cast a style vote with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At a glance, Ms. Palin — she of the designer jackets, rump-hugging skirts and knee-high boots — would seem to have been a game changer, loosening up a restrictive, if unwritten, campaign dress code with one that expresses a more conventionally feminine look. Her bright, curve-enhancing garments and loose, shoulder-grazing hair — even her rimless glasses — have been taken up by a handful of candidates on the climb. This is especially true of fellow Republicans like Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who appear to be following Ms. Palin’s style cues with striking fidelity.
Lisa A. Kline, the image consultant behind Ms. Palin’s controversial $150,000-plus fashion makeover during the 2008 campaign, views her client’s embrace of an overtly female archetype as a signal of rebellion. “Women want to change their image.” Ms. Kline said in an interview. “They had been in the mimicking-men phase for so long. Now they are going for femininity.”
Well, look again, Ms. Kline. For all the ridicule that Mrs. Clinton’s boxy pantsuits have generated over the years — she seems to own one in every color, like turquoise and fuchsia — her mannishly functional wardrobe remains the go-to choice for women on the path to power.
On their own steam — or perhaps at the suggestion of a battery of campaign advisers — the majority of candidates are retreating, as they have for decades, to the relative safety of an anodyne uniform. Understated to a fault, its chief components are a formless suit, flat or low-heeled shoes and a noncommittal hairstyle. It’s a brusquely masculine image tempered occasionally by a strand of pearls and dainty, never dangly, earrings (the latter deemed too distracting for television cameras).
“A Palin effect? Show it to me,” said Christine K. Jahnke, a media trainer who advised Mrs. Clinton during her presidential campaign. “Women aren’t trying to look like Sarah Palin. That would be a mistake.”
They are for the most part “still walking a tightrope,” said Ms. Jahnke, who advises female candidates to adopt a high-quality, low-key wardrobe befitting a corporate chief executive. “You have to look approachable and, at the same time, look like you can handle the job,” she said.
Siobhan Bennett, president of the Women’s Campaign Forum, a bipartisan group that seeks to get women elected, sees plenty of Americans adopting Ms. Palin’s glasses and “bedhead” coif. “But that’s in the general populace,” Ms. Bennett stressed, “not on the campaign trail.”
Indeed, there is much to suggest that women who aspire to office continue to dress defensively. Frightened, even terrified, of committing a wardrobe gaffe on national airwaves, most adhere to a rigid, patently dated style that has all the allure of a milk carton.
The prevailing look, modeled on corporate executives, with an occasional nod to the astringent style of female news anchors, is anathema to professional style-watchers. When, during her presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton declined an invitation to appear in Vogue magazine for fear, her handlers said, of appearing “too feminine,” Anna Wintour fired off a scathing editor’s letter.
“The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously is frankly dismaying,” Ms. Wintour chided. “I do think Americans have moved on from the power suit mentality. Political campaigns that do not recognize this are making a serious misjudgment.”
But even a cursory rummage through news clips and Web sites indicates that women courting power still adopt a strategic style of dress conceived to keep their curves — and their characters — neatly under wraps.
Among those candidates, including Palin acolytes, sophistication is in short supply, said Sharon Graubard, a senior executive with Stylesight, a trend-forecasting firm in New York. “These women have yet to figure out a way to project a confident femininity,” Ms. Graubard said. They have yet to work out “an elegant look that doesn’t rely on ill-fitting suits and bad colors.”
The $2,500 Valentino suit that Ms. Palin wore at the Republican convention is cited by Ms. Graubard as an example. “The quality was an improvement over typical campaign wear, but the styling certainly didn’t push any envelope,” she said. Despite her pricey fashion face-lift, Ms. Palin, she said, “looked like a mall mom.”
Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, has attempted to temper such arguments with a dose of common sense. Writing last week in Slate, he argued that flamboyance and politics are mutually exclusive. “Leave the Cavalli jumpsuits and Balmain new-punk to we constituents,” Mr. Doonan pleaded.
While common sense would seem to dictate that an essentially conservative formula is being adopted chiefly by women over 45, that is not necessarily the case. In matters of wardrobe there is no discernible generational divide, according to Ms. Jahnke. The tendency among women of varying ages is to adopt a style that is “office appropriate,” she said, “and that by definition is conservative.”
There is a generational divide in the way these women approach their appearance. “Younger women almost instinctively know they have to pay attention to how they look,” Ms. Jahnke said. “They’ll say: ‘Help me fix my hair. What makeup do I need for high-definition television?’ ” Older women, she said, tend to be less focused on appearance. “You need to convince or cajole them to update their hairstyle, their eyeglasses, their suits.”
Didi Barrett, a Democratic candidate for the State Senate in New York, favors a wardrobe of all-occasion shirt-jackets custom-tailored by a seamstress in Rhinebeck, N.Y. At a Democratic rally in Hyde Park last week, she wore a plain-Jane teal jacket and windowpane shawl. “When you are courting voters,” she said, “you need to accommodate their expectations.”
Barbara Jeter-Jackson, who represents Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in the Dutchess County legislature, was turned out at the rally in a chalk-stripe pantsuit that echoed the garb of her constituents, who, regardless of age, for the most part wore unlined jackets or cardigans and loose pants. Ms. Jeter-Jackson made sure her suit would violate no unofficial taboos. After all, as she said, a woman in office “can’t be too provocative.”
OR too careful, it would seem. In an age of punctilious correctness, commenting on a candidate’s attire is perceived more than ever as trivializing, if not sexist or downright demeaning. Yet women seeking office continue to attract the kind of physical scrutiny that is rarely directed at a man.
In a 2008 article, “Cutting Women Out: The Media’s Bias Against Female Candidates,” Erika Falk, who studied eight races in the 2008 elections, concluded that “coverage of how women candidates look — while ignoring such observations about men candidates — has been an ongoing problem.”
Ms. Falk, who runs the master’s degree program in communication at Johns Hopkins University, found that each of eight female candidates that year received about “four physical descriptions for every one that described a man.” At the time, she added, about 29 percent of articles about Hillary Clinton contained a physical description.”
“Historically, we’ve associated masculinity with leadership,” Ms. Falk said in an interview. “If you’re a woman politician, it makes pretty good sense to come off in a stereotypically masculine way.”
To ignore that assessment is to invite the pointed and often distracting comments that continue to pepper mainstream media coverage. A July profile of Ms. Haley in Newsweek began by observing that the candidate wore “a snug, saffron-colored suit and stilettos you could impale a small animal with.”
In September the Daily News coyly observed that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is seeking re-election in New York, has become “a leaner, meaner campaign machine ... showing a slimmer silhouette as a tough election battle looms.”
Only last week the Daily News took a swipe at Mrs. Clinton, observing that she “has had more hairstyles than a beauty-school dummy.”
Senator Gillibrand, who, with Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, is often singled out as a smartly tailored fashion role model, likes to deflect that sort of commentary. “You would never write about Chuck Schumer’s shoes,” she told a reporter for New York magazine in response to a question about her flats.
Yet she submitted to a fashion makeover in the November issue of Vogue, shedding her earnest navy or gray tailored suits for a form-fitting Michael Kors sheath and a reefer coat. Was Vogue’s sartorial endorsement a boost or bane for her campaign? Senator Gillibrand’s office declined to comment.
Which underscores the quandary. Ignore current fashion and you risk seeming out of touch. Embrace it too warmly and you undermine your credibility. Ms. Bachmann, it might be argued, is a case in point. Her expensive-looking wardrobe, Ms. Jahnke maintained, “puts her out of step with her district,” which has a high unemployment rate.
A successful politician, Mr. Doonan wrote in Slate, must appear Prada-oblivious: “Any hint of dandyism or vanity would indicate a superficial, self-indulgent character.”
Politicians, he added, “dress as to be unremarkable.”
He might have been describing Ms. Barrett, the State Senate candidate, who has tried to distance herself from flashier peers by giving up the biker boots and folkloric scarves she wore in her pre-stump days. Appearance is a concern, she acknowledged. “But in the pecking order of campaign priorities, I don’t think it’s a significant one.”
Still, she said, after a beat, “When I see myself on television, I think, ‘Ah, image.’ ”
YOU VOTE FASHIONISTA OR POLITICIAN?
Does a candidate’s appearance affect his or her chances of being elected? As Election Day nears, candidates have ramped up their public appearances and placed their television commercials in heavy rotation. What messages do the candidates convey? Do you think that, consciously or unconsciously, you assess candidates for office by the way they look and dress?
In the article “The Fashion Conservatives,” Ruth LaFerla writes:
A woman seeking political office in 2010 faces a fashion quandary. The choice, in simplest terms, comes down to this: to follow the lead of Sarah Palin or cast a style vote with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At a glance, Ms. Palin — she of the designer jackets, rump-hugging skirts and knee-high boots — would seem to have been a game changer, loosening up a restrictive, if unwritten, campaign dress code with one that expresses a more conventionally feminine look. Her bright, curve-enhancing garments and loose, shoulder-grazing hair — even her rimless glasses — have been taken up by a handful of candidates on the climb. This is especially true of fellow Republicans like Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who appear to be following Ms. Palin’s style cues with striking fidelity.
Lisa A. Kline, the image consultant behind Ms. Palin’s controversial $150,000-plus fashion makeover during the 2008 campaign, views her client’s embrace of an overtly female archetype as a signal of rebellion. “Women want to change their image.” Ms. Kline said in an interview. “They had been in the mimicking-men phase for so long. Now they are going for femininity.”
Well, look again, Ms. Kline. For all the ridicule that Mrs. Clinton’s boxy pantsuits have generated over the years — she seems to own one in every color, like turquoise and fuchsia — her mannishly functional wardrobe remains the go-to choice for women on the path to power.
In the article “The Fashion Conservatives,” Ruth LaFerla writes:
A woman seeking political office in 2010 faces a fashion quandary. The choice, in simplest terms, comes down to this: to follow the lead of Sarah Palin or cast a style vote with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At a glance, Ms. Palin — she of the designer jackets, rump-hugging skirts and knee-high boots — would seem to have been a game changer, loosening up a restrictive, if unwritten, campaign dress code with one that expresses a more conventionally feminine look. Her bright, curve-enhancing garments and loose, shoulder-grazing hair — even her rimless glasses — have been taken up by a handful of candidates on the climb. This is especially true of fellow Republicans like Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who appear to be following Ms. Palin’s style cues with striking fidelity.
Lisa A. Kline, the image consultant behind Ms. Palin’s controversial $150,000-plus fashion makeover during the 2008 campaign, views her client’s embrace of an overtly female archetype as a signal of rebellion. “Women want to change their image.” Ms. Kline said in an interview. “They had been in the mimicking-men phase for so long. Now they are going for femininity.”
Well, look again, Ms. Kline. For all the ridicule that Mrs. Clinton’s boxy pantsuits have generated over the years — she seems to own one in every color, like turquoise and fuchsia — her mannishly functional wardrobe remains the go-to choice for women on the path to power.
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