And what I wore to grade

I started the day in jeans and a tee shirt, which I hadn't planned to photograph. But during my laundry haul (3 1/2 flights of narrow stairs, necessary greetings to folks on the street, and 1 1/2 blocks of lugging), they kept sagging and falling, until I was almost guilty of pants on the ground, so I changed in this thrifted dress I haven't figured out how to wear yet.
I like the dress, and I have been on the thrifting look out for a denim dress since it's now quite trendy. While this petite dress generally fits (even at the waist), the shape is a wee bit awkward. But the more I've worn it today, the more comfortable I felt. Even though this lacks the strong utility elements of more current denim dresses, I like this dress because it feels functional but still femme-y. It's a bit late 90s with its princess seams and angled breast pockets, but the late 90s weren't so bad.
I have some ambitions of lightening the dress through a salt wash or other methods. Has anyone has any luck fading denim?
(and I'm still grading. Stupid laundry and other household labor has taken me away from my work duties).

Edit: Yes, I coiled the laces, highly imperfectly. The blogosphere tells me that it's called an Eastland Knot. Click here for a tutorial, complete with awesome illustrations.

Dress: Talbot's petites, thrifted
Belt: from a pair H&M pants
Necklace: street vendor in Hawaii
Shoes: Eastlands, via Alamo Shoes (Chicago)

Jumping into it

Thanks for your interesting comments, bloggy buddies. And for indulging my over analysis of probably spurious faux academic thoughts about fashion. Graduation was fine. It took a while but the students were really happy and really cute. I especially liked the following:
- Honorary degrees: The people who get them are generally amazing. This year's crop included a history-changing (no joke) investigative journalist (old school kind, not the silver fox Anderson Cooper variety) and a social justice oriented actor/playwright.
- Shoes! We can only see their shoes under their robes, and they did not disappoint. Towering, staggering architectural stilettos, intricate gladiators, earthy 70s style platforms, flip flips with sequins- you name it, I saw it. The dudes' shoes were also cool but less impressive. My very nice chairperson asked, "How can they walk in those shoes?"
- I was there last year but I've forgotten about it already. My chair said, "Be prepared for some Liza Minelli song on the way out." The faculty walked in on Pomp and Circumstance and the exit song? "New York, New York." The students and the parents were dancing and singing along. Corny, but adorable.

OK, now that I have a day or so of grading ahead of me, this means summer. I have many goals, but in the short term, I do need a little break. I'd like to reactivate my fledging, mostly vegetarian cooking blog, which has dwindled this semester. I'm hoping the CSA veggies will help. And to get a leg up on that break, Brilliant Analytical Philosophy professor and I (herefore referred to as BAP) got started on the jumpsuits. Did you think I had forgotten about that? Like many women, we are a bit longer in the torso, which makes buying jumpsuits hard, but making jumpsuits more doable. Since we're no seamstresses, yesterday we did the muslin shell. As you can see, we pinned a couple seams the wrong way, but it worked for fitting. (There's a joke here about how many PhDs it takes to pin a 1970s jumpsuit).

This is view 2 of this Simplicity pattern, which many readers liked. While I originally wanted to make the longer pants version, I realized that I needed a perfect bike riding outfit. It is probably about a 1/2 inch too short in the length. We'll slash the traced pattern and add some length. And don't worry, this is only the shell for fitting the torso. The actual pants will be much longer.


But to satisfy my need to be a Charlie's angel, we are also making view 1 of this pattern, although we'll shorten the sleeves to elbow length. We aren't making view 2 because it doesn't have awesome cuffs or a fab button tab. This will be in a grey doubleknit.



I took about 10 shots of the fabric, but this was the best I could do with my open source photo editing software. The top blue woven fabric is for the bike outfit. I want to look like one of the workers in Germany or London that I saw during my time there, who'd wear zip up jumpsuits and carry lunch pails. A combination of those worker dudes and Rosie the Rivetor. (I don't know why, but construction workers in the U.S. with their bright orange plastic vests and overalls are less inspiring for me, fashion wise).

Do any of you folks have creative, non-academic/work goals for this summer?

Hemlines, recessions, and correlations

Today is graduation ceremony. We are converging in an iconic location in midtown Manhattan where there are often many big shows, and we the faculty get to sit and blink in bright stage lights while the students and families feel proud. I dislike being a prop, but I like the excitement that students feel. So as a result, I am going to rebel by wearing something not so solemn under my robe (which DMed confirms were created to keep stinky, chubby clerics warm back in the day, in drafty stone walled early European Universities).

Yesterday, I read my student evals from the prior semester. Nothing to report (3 or 4 haters, but mostly a lot of love), but one student did mention that she appreciated my "modern style" and envied my "tall and lean figure." OK, I guess that's pretty cool. All in all, it was an irreverent set of comments (including the students who signed their names on their comments sheets, and the one person who wrote, "I HEART PROF RAD" across the bottom half of a page).

On a somewhat related note, I present to you the second installment of "fashions in academia" although maybe for today, I can call it "fashioning claims in academia." I found this article "The Long, Lean Backlash to the Mini," from Thursday styles section of the NYTimes to be interesting. Evidently, a fashion forward (fringe) trend is the dark, lean maxi skirt/dress. Not to be confused with the bright and beachy styles of last year, these new styles are typically paired with "harsher" pieces, like motorcycle vests and thick soled boots. I'm actually pretty into this look. Some of these dresses are amazing, and I always want to wear more unstructured styles.

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The woman on the right found her dress at a local Goodwill (!!!) I really like the simple style of the middle tank dress. I could probably fake that with some jersey fabric. The "midi" length is a little hard (between knee and ankle) but the higher heels can make up some of the loss leg length.

What I especially liked were the attempts at explained why this style has emerged. The article claims that the emergence of these "fluid by rigorously plain" maxi dresses/skirts are the result of "shifting cultural climate born in the wake of the Dow’s collapse." A fashion director at Saks argues that reflects women's desire for less show and more quality.
Never mind that the Times and most major media outlets have (prior to the Euro-panic of the past couple weeks) been been publishing "recovery" articles since January. The quote reminded me of an oft cited dicta about hem lengths and the economy. Economist George Taylor created the "hemlines index" back in the Roaring 20s, arguing that hemlines tended to go up during flush times, and down during recessions. This makes sense when you think of how hemlines first rose during the 1920s. The Maxi first came into style during those awesome stagflation days of the 1970s.
Such a prediction was popular for a while, during the start of this Great Recession, or whatever you'd like to call it. Glamour.com's "Slaves to Fashion" blog also predicted lower hemlines in January 2009, but as you know, this hasn't happened in a noticeable manner yet. Yet high hemlines are still the norm, both in mass marketed retail and on tastemakers. In addition, a fashion writer in the Guardian claims that historically, this has not been true. Another Financial Times piece in late 2008 confirmed that empirical evidence goes against this maxim. (A write for Jezebel says, "bah!" to the idea that fashion is as culturally or socially relevant as it once was, in response).
Yet here we are again, in 2010, possibly on the cusp of a [what Rad will argue her face off to be] temporary [jobless] recovery, and fashion experts explain a marginal trend of longer flowing skirts as relating to an unstable economy. Do you buy this at all? Could my permanently pessimistic view of our current account deficit driven American economic* model be responsible for my desire to flock to the simplicity of these long and elegant dresses? Or are you, like me, annoyed with how economists try to create spurious, unimportant relationships between ridiculous variables? Will you try the

(Did I just over professor myself? Ack, stack of final papers to grade that will likely make my eyeballs bleed. I miss those students already Over and out.)

(By the way, if you dig the look and wanna thrift some lovely lengthy skirts, but are puzzled on how to style them, Sal at AlreadyPretty has an awes tutorial.)

*This is a fancy word for we spend more money buying stuff from abroad than we make.

B*tchin' Camaro

When my young, single mother first came to the US, she worked hard on her English, passed the registered nurse licensing test, and worked in Arizona as a nurse, making something like $5/hour. After a while, she saved up some money and bought herself a Camaro, and posed in front of it in an outfit very similar to this one, back in 1975. The jeans were a bit tighter and higher waisted, the sunglasses bigger, the shoes were cork instead of stacked rubber soles, and the shirt may have had some embroidered flowers. She sent this photo to a young man, a pen pal introduced by a minister, who later became my dad. When I wear any outfit like this, my mom just kind of shakes her head about the way fashions repeat themselves (but she's flattered to be my style icon).

Today is the last day of exams. I am of the mindset that it's fun to dress casually during exams, since projecting authority isn't as big of a deal now (this may come back to haunt me, but most of the grief I get now is via email). I like these old jeans, which feel as thin as paper and breezy as linen. I didn't wear them for a couple years because dark denim was so prominent. I almost cut them into shorts but Blokey told me they were too nice. I'm glad I listened.

Shirt: H&M
Jeans: BDG (2003)
Necklace: street vendor in Hawaii
Scarf: via Ebay
Shoes: Aerosoles (thrifted)
Sunglasses: DKYN, Macy's (via Mom)

Tricky hemline challenge

Today is going to be hot, so I wanted to pull on one of my many summer dresses. However, they are mostly from a few years ago during my last years of graduate school, which I clearly spent flashing poor Minneapolis drivers from my bike. While I don't mind showing leg, this dress/tunic is both just a tad too short and a bit too loose for me to wear comfortably. I am taking a cue from my Swedish friend, who like to layer South American style tunics over fuller skirts, and looks amazing doing it. At first, I wasn't sure about this outfit, because it goes from full to fuller, and creates a kind of dropped waist, but I think it works OK. The skirt is stretch chambray/light denim, so it the outfit very light. (I try to eschew leggings on a hot day). Since I have several more short dresses, and no longer have teaching obligations for a while, I'll try to challenge myself to lengthen hemlines for the next few weeks.
I read a cute article yesterday in the Times about photographer Phillipe Halsman's "Jumpology", which was his method of photographing celebrities mid air. I mention it because it's a pretty significant fashion/style blog convention. Halsman said that when the subject is jumping, they focus on the vertical motion and this makes the "mask" fall, so you can capture the "true" subject. Jumping photos are really cute, but I probably won't do one (I'm not outside, and I'm probably too reserved). Still, finding the jumping photo (referenced in the article) of Nixon, as the VP under Eisenhower, made the article worth it:

If I had biked...

Today I am giving one of my final exams, but I dressed pretty casually because I had planned to bike to school with the DOT's NYC Bike Month guided group. I live in central Brooklyn, but teach in midtown. It's about 10 miles, which is not a big deal, but I am kind of scare of navigating downtown Brooklyn and very lower Manhattan. I fell asleep relatively early but this morning, I got an email from a colleague who wanted a phone meeting earlier than I'd hoped, so I had to hop a train instead (I found this out AFTER I was dressed). Oh well, utilitarian outfit. I'll use you another day, when I am less scared and more prepared.

I had a great time in Delaware. We actually spent quite a bit of time in Philly, since the college town my buddies live in is quite boring (it doesn't feel like the edgier college towns in the midwest, like Madison, Urbana-Champagne, or Lincoln, NE. These towns have their own arty, hippie vibes that this town lacked. Maybe it's just different out East). I really really liked Philly, which I haven't been in as an adult. Cute neighborhoods, nice coffee, well planned developments (like in North Liberty). Folks were super nice, especially to the kids. So much for that stereotype.
But since this is a style blog, one of the things (among many) that we talked about this weekend was the difference between clothes shopping for little kids in the US v. Sweden. My friends had been living in Sweden for the first year and half of their first child's life, but then moved to the East Coast. They were dismayed at how gendered the little kid's clothing was, especially the shoes. I found this out when going to Target/Payless (my mom believed in only buying growing feet cheap shoes) to pick up shoes for my kid sister years ago. There were all these pointy little high heels everywhere, and then some sparkly sneakers. I am not saying all high heels or sparkles are bad, but rather it's amazing how the American market* gives you little choice in the matter. At mass retailers, they said that the choices for girl's shorts were all super short, and shirts are all sleeveless. But in Sweden, children's clothes are basically androgenous until the age that secondary sex characteristics start to develop (10-12 for girls? Maybe 13-15 for boys?). Even then, there is choice between very girly and less girly outfits. Since this is what they value, my friends bought their pre-schooler boys clothes.

(Maybe you can't see well, but she is wearing Einstein's face with his tongue sticking out)

I mention this because the blogosphere was buzzing over this infamous Instyle magazine cover a few months ago about Shiloh Jolie Pitt's style, which is very tomboyish.

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The fact that this became an magazine cover doesn't mean that all Americans are obsessed with normative gender socialization, but that fact that retailers seem to think this way is pretty telling.

The Swedes told me that folks come up to them and say things like "Why does your son have long hair?" or "How come your son is wearing a pink hat?" Someone even got angry once for their failure to adhere to gender norms. While my friends don't care if a stranger correctly identifies their daughter's gender, I found it interesting that other people cared about this pre-schooler's performance of gender. Very strange. (I do know that it is difficult to buy baby clothes that are neutrally colored. A friend of mine told me that the purple organic cotton onesie I gave her daughter was the only non-pink article of clothing she received. Colleagues of mine told no one the gender of their child before his birth to avoid an influx of blue items).

Has this been your experience as well? If you're not American, are there norms of dressing children in ways that emphasize their gender?

*That the brilliant clip-on pacifier on the toddler's pink owl shirt (from H&M) is made by a Swedish company and not available here. Everyone in town is jealous of this clip on chained binky. The dad claimed that the idea that free markets in the US provide everything that consumers need is suspect. "Swedish social capitalism, baby!" was his rallying cry.

(I learned a few Swedish words since the kids speak both, like bunny rabbit, stupid, and piss. Ah, the company of young children).

Delaware bound

I just sent off what I've finished for my writing group deadline a few hours ago. Now, I'm off to Chinatown to grab a $20 bus to Philly, where I'll meet old friends from grad school (from Sweden) and their amazingly beautiful children. I actually had difficulty dressing because I'll be sitting on a bus for 2 hours, and it's hot out today (I can feel how it's going to be hot), so I want to be comfy but not rumpled. Since the bulk of this afternoon will be spent with 4 year old Inge-Lisa, I coudn't wear anything that was too short (Blokey sighed at my last minute outfit changes. Poor fella). Plus, I hear that she's quite sartorially rule bound (she evidently expressed her horror at what the the students at the University were wearing. "Pajama pants? You're not supposed to wear pajamas outside!") so I need to dress to impress. The other child is about one, so I needed to pack highly washable clothes. So this is my Inge-Lisa/bus/baby proof (hopefully) outfit.

Please excuse the look of despair. I'm quite happy and excited but the marathon writing sessions are hard on the looks. And instead of sleeping immediate at 3, I started reading this long NYTimes magazine article on Stieg Larsson. I am a woman obsessed (with Sweden, evidently. Blokey's mum's family is called Erickson, so there's another reason).

Dress: Me(el) (from Canada!), via Cliche
Jacket: GAP (from mom)
Tank: H&M
Slightly more than flip flops: Havianas