We were wondering rather aimlessly around Brooklyn today, having just quit our job [...] when we thought: military jackets! Why don’t we have a military jacket? And then we thought, where would we get a military jacket? And then we looked around, and we thought how cool it would be if we could take all of the fall trends we like, and then come up with three viable options for each one. Like military jackets. Then we thought, how are we going to afford a military jacket without any money, having just quit our job? And then we thought, oh, fuck it.
Anyhoo, our first option is from Topshop. Glorious, glorious Topshop. We’d like to add here that we wore our tiered skirt in Brooklyn, and truly, we swear to freaking God, got four compliments and a compliment on it in fifteen minutes. The comment was, “Do you go to dancing school?” We wore it again tonight (because God knows we’re going to get our money’s worth here) and some freak in Brooklyn Heights said, “We’re going to make you disappear.” This creeped us out, and we’re pretty sure the guy was freaked out by the skirt. This has not changed our love for it. Anyway: the Top Shop military jacket, with delightfully askew buttons, $100
We love bebe. You know what we love about bebe? They can take pretty much any article of clothing, and make it a little slutty. Red velvet? Yeah, that’s bebe. But we love the double row of buttons and the color’s actually a rather pleasant break from the endless navy, no? Red velvet military jacket, $169
This Marc Jacobs ($375) is so Marc Jacobs we kind of want to barf — it’s like, we know, oversized buttons are so cool, you’re so cool, Juergen Teller is so cool. The coolness just kind of makes us a little sleepy these days. That said, however, it doesn’t make us as sleepy as the Girls Gone Wild commercials that always seem to air just as soon as we sit down to start enjoying Dave Chappelle’s show on Comedy Central, and we don’t change the channel. Which means, in this case, that we’ll continue coveting this jacket even though it kind of gives us a little bit of a headache.
In the sense of “needed” meaning “really, really wanted and don’t actually need, in any sense, one bit.” For example: French Bull paper placemats ($12). Paper + placemats = disposable dining. Have we mentioned the time we gave away all (er, all three) of our dishes, and moved entirely to a paper-plate system? Until our friend Katie was like, “You moron, paper plates are not exactly good for the environment.” We couldn’t deal with the shame. Now we just eat off the counterop. Though maybe if we had these lovely (disposable) placemats, we’d change our sorry ways.
Because we need to thing of a time when the temperature will be considerably lower than it is at the moment (112, at least), we have decided to think about fall, and precisely, what footwear we will wear during it. We know three genuine Swedish girls. They live in one apartment, drink a lot, au pair nasty children, and yell at each other in Swedish. We wish we could be one of them. Now, we have no reason to believe that they’d lie to us, and they swear, they absolutely swear, that Sven clogs (below) are things of beautiful and grace — sort of like the Scandinavian Birksenstock. We didn’t believe them until we saw them in the window of a store in Brooklyn that never fails to stock very nice things. And then we saw the Miu Miu versions above. Trust us, people, they’re ugly, but they’re not as ugly as Uggs, which are ugly both in appearance and soul. So we say: Sven’s. Gold-card lazy girls can go faux-thentic with the Miu Mius ($345). We work with a fashion editor who would push us over a bridge if we wore clogs, even with a stacked heel, but we still say that if they’re good enough for Miu Miu, they’re good enough for us.
Unanticipated political note: Enter “flip flop” and “Bush” into a search engine, and the subject is not footwear but altogether non-fashionable debating. Er, debating is fashionable. We love healthy political discourse. We mean that the debating is about depressing geopolitical issues and not about Havaianas.
Now we’ve spoken often about our adoration for Havaianas. Give us ten minutes, and we’re not sure we could put our hands on a pair of sandals other than Havaianas, because we wear them every day. We wear them to the book store, and to the magazine store, and to the subway, and to all the apparently unglamorous places we go. Actually, we wore them to the one glamorous place we’ve been in the last six months, to our favorite Balenciaga outlet. Would we wear them to a meeting with the president? Who knows? Who can say? We’ve never been granted an audience with the president, and we’re not a champion lacrosse player.
We suggest: peep-toe shoes. Casual but sufficiently non-presidential-ire-making.
Love these Moschinos at top with the Carmen Miranda headgewar on the strap. And the green color is delovely. $395
These Kurt Geigers have the whole Marc Jacobs crochet thing going on and take it just that much farther, crafty-wise. We didn’t forget the price; the site just doesn’t say. Annoying, we know.
We would wear these Marc by Marc Jacobs every day with jeans until one morning when we’d wake up and say, “Why the fuck am I wearing pink and purple peep-toe shoes? Am I an actor in a children’s television show?” But until that day, we’d love them. $380
These SATC hypocrites every single day of the week, by the way. $581
We don’t know much about one publishing house versus another. We hope and pray that one wants to publish our book — available now! e-mail to left! — but we’re anticipating mulching it soon. Or more to the point, deleting it from our hard drive so as to make way for more downloaded Eminem videos and Jon Stewart \ Tucker Carlson face-offs. But we could love Penguin, because they are doing just the neatest thing right now for their 70th birthday. That neat thing (now we have turned into someone who says “neat”) is publishing all these mini-books (and they really are quite mini — short stories, long essays, etc.) and giving them fancy new cover art. It’s like Extreme Home Makeover for books and writers intead of exceptionally unlucky suburban households and their newly 45,000-square-foot homes. We bought something by Alistair Cooke because we’d already read the Melissa Bank and Michael Moore, but there’s lot else, and the website is freakishly functional. We kind of want all of them. They’re Beanie Babies for reader nerds.
We’re so much better at being grumpy. You know what sucks? That movie where Sandra Bullock’s identity gets stolen. Thta’s a movie? Please. The Visa commercial was funnier. Fuck you.
We feel better.
Below, contributions from Anais Nin and Virginia Woolf:
Or, as our cursing, imaginary, oil industrialist grandfather would maybe like to say, “too goddamn hot.” Then he’d spit into a gutter, and will us his palatial robber-baron estate. Ah, a girl can dream.
These days we are dreaming of icicles and snow. Because we love the summer, we love it like we love American Apparel photo shoots, but we do not love the hot. We remember our first summer in Manhattan, when we subletted somebody’s attic room in Chinatown, without air conditioning, and we’d come home and just wave the refrigerator door over us. Too hot. We recognize that people are not meant to walk around major cities in swimwear, and fair enough. But in lieu of some radical redefinition of societal mores re: acceptance (we almost just wrote “acceptability,” which should demonstrate how fried our brains are) bikinis on subways — but see, we don’t really want that either. Because, good God, that could be terrifying.
What we do want: to be wearing as little clothing as possible, but not in a slutty high school way, like the annoying girls in our grade who wore hot pants and sports bras to class. We can’t believe we live in a world where we would have to write a sentence like that, that includes the phrase “hot pants and sports bras.” Ah, central Jersey. We blame our digressions on the heat, but no more: What we want are non-slutty dresses made of the least possible fabrics. And these, we believe, are they.
Everybody loves Sass + Bide, right? Sort of like the new Heatherette, but Australian and unthreatening. And chipper. Somebody pointed out to us recently that American soaps are all about the rich, British soaps are all about urban poor, and Aussie soaps like Neighbours are all about regular surbanites. We’d like to move to Australia. It seems like all they do there is have beach barbecues, go surfing, and drink beer. Possibly in those circumstances we wouldn’t mind the heat so much. Sass & Bide at Blaec, $425
Ella Moss (above) had her moment like three years ago with the SATC credit, but they’re so inoffensive we’re not sure how we could get sick of them. Stripes? Yellow? Sure. It’s like cotton candy. Who doesn’t like cotton candy? Or … puppies? Er. Who can think in this heat? We don’t know why the model’s standing like that either. Canary pixie tube dress, $143
We’re allergic to rich people and therefore generally very sneezy around anything from DVF, but summer was made for her wrap dresses — which this one isn’t, of course, but close enough. We’re also a little scared that it’s silk — cotton is clearly the way to go — but it’s cute, and we’re trying to be less judgmental about rich people. Diane von Furstenberg Westina dress, $385
This Juicy halter doesn’t really pass the slut test, but it does pass the hot test (that’s hot climatologically, not starlet-ally or retro Morrissey hot (er, kind of). You know what we mean.
And another Sass + Bide, $449. Something about this dresses just says we can’t be bothered, and that’s exactly the right sentiment these days.
The J. Crew summer sale: as much a part of the season as barbecues and fireworks. Sometimes we want to jump off a bridge when we realize that summer is more than halfway over, but who knows, maybe we’ll spend January in Australia. Two summers a year: What could be better than that?
Anyway, for our casual weekend, a casual trip to jcrew.com, which is providing some lovely one-stop shopping.
These hip-slung jeans were $78. Now they are $19.99. Now, come on. How can we not buy these jeans? That’s just fucking crazy. True: We bought these immediately before publishing this post, so our greedy, selfish heart would not be denied its true desire. Or, the true desire as symbolized by these jeans. Our only concern: They’re J. Crew’s “lowest, and sexiest fitting jean.” We stopped paying attention at “lowest,” because we’re over wearing jeans that win any kind of awards for lowness. But still: $19.99.
UPDATE: That’s the problem with the J. Crew sale: You decide you like something, you pull your credit card out of your wallet, and by time you click through the next page to buy it, it’s gone, with only this stupid note about “unexpectedly high demand.” What is that? Is it really unexpected? That’s so insincere, it sort of makes us hate J. Crew. Because it is annoying, it is a little sad, but it is in no way unexpected. It’s an Orwellian abuse of language, if you ask us. Just say: “Oooh, that sucks. They’re all gone. But try this instead.” Stop making excuses, corporate America, and give us some fucking credit. It’s like we’re living in this world where no one can speak honestly because they’re too scared of offending ultra-touchy, resentful women with nothing to do but boycott companies that give health insurance to our boss’s boyfriend if you know what we mean, and we’re sick of it.
Er, was this about jeans? It was. At $54.99, they’re not as much of a slam-dunk, but we’re sure we’ll enjoy these “essential jeans.”
We love wearing brown in August: It should be the month’s official color. Who do you square that with, do you think? We like it even better than brown in September. Here, we have two choices: the bias silk camisole ($19.99) and er, something that sold out in the time it took us to write that entry. You snooze, you lose, apparently.
Brown and lilac is one of our favorite combinations. Particularly regarding couches and pillows, but also regarding tops and sandals. With jeans, the ultimate neutral, in between. We would be interested in addressing dissenting views. Lyla ankle-strap high heels, $59.99
And with all the money we’ve saved, a new Jocasi Lombok. Lovely! About $125
We’re putting up this picture of fifth season Sex and the City for two reasons: one, the last post had absolutely nothing to do with fashion, except in this larger sense of random consumerism, and fashion is, ostensibly the subject of this blog. Secondly, we were complaining about SATC recently, and we would like to briefly explain why: First of all, it wasn’t funny. It was never funny. Okay, some funny things happened, but we’ve overheard better dialogue at four in the morning between two girls puking into toilets at a Manhattan nightclub. Okay, that’s not a fair fight. We’ve heard better dialogue at funerals, and we mean that. And secondly (v. much enjoying the numerical ordering of our thoughts today), the whole moral of that show was: That guy who is hot and rich but basically dismissive of you? You’ll get him, you totally will, if you just hang in there. Which is not true. Candace Bushnell did not marry Mr. Big. She married the barely-legal ballet dancer who loved her. That’s how those stories end, which is a different fairy tale. A better fairy tale, by the way, because it doesn’t assume some sort of sea change on behalf on the original, asshole-y guy involved, whose own fairy tale involves strippers, cocktail waitresses, and nannies. We know. It was over a year and a half ago. Some day in the future we are going to wake up and not be angry.
On the other hand, SATC was a dreamy wonderland if you just watch it for the clothes, and this is other favorite ever. End rant. Bubble dress by David Dalrymple for House of Field. We just e-mailed him to see what he’s up to, and you know how fashion designers love random e-mail from bloggers. If he gets back to us, we’ll let you know.
For this exceptionally useful shopping alert: Kitson, perhaps the most celebrity-genuflecting store that could possibly be imagined, now has, in stock, the first shipment of Ugg’s “Rockstar” boots, with brass stud ornament. Kitson may be singlehandedly responsible for the mini skirt-Uggs combo. Where are the Visigoths when you need them?
We do this as a public service, because we want to our readers to be the first (er, after anyone who read the Times today) to know about these things, but note: Any reader who buys these boots should immediately PayPal us $5, just for making us unhappy.
We were walking down the street listening to our iPod on shuffle — we want to finish that sentence “crying because we realized we’re finally disgusting post-millennial Yuppies” — when the opening bars of a song came on, and we thought, “Oh, good, we love this song.” Then we realized it was Toby Keith’s “Stays in Mexico,” that ode to getting wasted on margaritas, cheating on your wife and blaming it on the Mexicans. Lovely. You know that music you put on your iPod sort of as a joke, like “Stays in Mexico” and Hall & Oates? We needed music to wash the ick out of our heads, and we would like to recommend, left to right, er, sort of, Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous, Ted Leo’s Shake the Sheets, Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, and O.V. Wright’s The Soul of O.V. Wright.
If we’re going to have country music superstars, we would like to endorse pot advocating, Monk-starring, alternative-oil endorsing icons like our beloved Willie Nelson. Vive, Willie!
