anthropometaphors

Ruby

That’s Ruby, or what Barbie would look like if she were a size 12/14.  There’s an interesting story behind Ruby, who is now banned from appearing in advertisements.

I wonder what it would have been like to play with Ruby dolls as a child.  Instead I had hand-me-down Barbies.  One day I discovered I could use the cement curb as a form of sand paper; I ground Barbie’s chest down to nubs.  After making significant progress toward “correcting” the small collection of Barbies we had, the post-op dolls were discovered, and  I was reprimanded for mistreating my toys.

Interacting with Barbie was a perfect introduction to the concept of “supermodel”.  While I no longer have dolls, I see Barbie everywhere.  Mostly she is a walking, size zero androgynous waif who, like Barbie, has the sole purpose of modeling how clothing should look.

A size 12 model leads the final walk-out at the Mark Fast catwalk show at London Fashion Week. The designer used size 12 and 14 girls alongside more conventional-sized models to showcase his knitted dresses

I was intrigued when I saw a post in femail about knitwear designer Mark Fast and his decision to use curvy women to model his new line of dresses.  A deliberate move, Fast intended to challenge the obsession with size zero models by showing how “fuller” women may actually look better in his slinky creations.

It’s impossible to ever be a perfect women, it seems.  I certainly can’t walk around airbrushed and flawless from every angle.  I’m glad there are voices challenging the way women are represented in society, voices like AnyBody who are anchors to help ease into accepting the body we have:

Remind yourself that the images in magazines are all digitally touched up, stretched and lit in extraordinary ways and that they are there to make us buy products rather than being pictures of real women.

(Thanks for the links, Sadie and Kat!)

I’ve made the jump from eating simple veggie-matarian fare into the land of the big vee; I am only eating vegan food.  I still eat honey, which I’ve heard can be a controversial issue.

For some time now I’ve chosen non-leather products.  What was once known as vinyl is now green, and considered a vegan-friendly alternative to leather.  While I’ll purchase canvas and the occasional vinyl item, I’m not sold on the environmental aspect of using vinyl as an alternative to leather.  There are so many variables to consider when deeming something “green”, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn a graduate student was writing their PhD dissertation on the results of their analysis of the leather vs vinyl debate.

It’s great to come home from work, open the gate and see a package waiting for me on the porch.  Or to find one in the mailbox.  Heck, I’m happy with one laying on the dirt after having been tossed over the fence by UPS.

Today I came home and there was a package on the walk (not quite into the dirt); clearly the result of a trip over the fence.  As I unlocked the front door I caught a shimmer of light from the stamps on the package.  My first impression was the stamps were beglittered.  Upon closer inspection, I saw the stamps were from Finland (as was the entire package) and were not sparkly as previously thought — the stamps were braille.  I’m impressed by postal stamps that are in braille, what can I say?

So taken was I by the stamps, that I forgot to open the package for 3 hours.

Inside the package were two lovely pillow covers, hand screened printed by Nuka on Etsy.  I adore the pillow covers and the Finnish stamps I saw today.  I simply heart Etsy.

Doily pillow cover (Nuka)

Based on Ben Pearce’s RETRO stream on flickr, it seems the 1970s generated a lot of NSFW content (turn SafeSearch off).  The collection is chock-full of “pre-feminist” images.  Exercise-mania (and the requisite flashy workout fashion) seems to have been all the rage.  Speaking of which:

What is the difference between a trend and a cult?

Seriously.

A trend is a summary of the general direction or tendency in a situation. Trend also means to be in style, cool, slamming, or whatever the synonymous slang term happens to be for the time and place in question.  By it’s very nature of being related to a given setting, the actual word used will co-vary with setting change.

The recent 30th year commemoration of Jonestown underlines the negative connotation cults have in the US.  Once used as an insult and fear-mongering tool, cult as a word has been co-opted to define a literary (or intellectual) fad to take pride in being a part of.

Buried within each of these definitions is pride.

If Jesus were alive today, would he have a blog, a book and a movie (with a trailer on YouTube)?

I’m not sure if I’m joking.

FYI – A chapter in the book by Callie Janoff is entitled The Church of Craft: Making our own Religion.  I’m not sayin’…I’m just sayin’.

Street fashion is a hotbed of style mutation and evolution.  Fashion can describe what a city — or a neighborhood — is.  Street trends emerge so quickly in London, for example, there is a blog dedicated to charting style by city district:

londonstreetfashion.com

There are so many street fashion blogs.  I go for those demonstrating folks who have a talent to fuse high fashion, vintage and self made clothes into a very interesting mix of colors, shapes and materials.  While new is nice, a proper collage is nicer and shows more personality.  One such blog is StilinBerlin, a parade of style from Berlin.  While I could go without the chrome plate, these boots from a recent post are simply precious:

A Czech style blog worth clicking through is madeonstreet.  And of course there’s street fancy, for all the people I inevitably miss bumping into in SF.

Sadly, the author of trendybogota stopped taking trend shots around Bogota, Colombia in 2007; the final post was entitled, “Fashion won’t pay the bills”.  Ouch.