“Alain, in Martin du Gard’s Lieutenant Colonel Maumortsays that the first rule—he calls it the rule of rules—is the art of challenging what is appealing.  You will notice that he describes this as an “art”: it is not enough to simply to set oneself up as a person who distrusts majority taste as a matter of principle or perhaps conceit; that ways lies snobbery and frigidity.  However, it will very often be found that people are highly attached to illusions or prejudices, and are not just the sullen victims of dogma or orthdoxy.  If you have every argued with a religious devotee, for example, you will have noticed that his self-esteem and pride are involved in the dispute and that you are asking him to give up something more than a point in argument.”

—Christopher Hitchens,Letters to a Young Contrarian

At first, I was going to end this quote right before the bold.  “I already know that, and that’s not the point I’m trying to make,” I told myself.  Something kept me from that, though.  I don’t know what it was, but eventually I asked myselfwhyI thought that information was unnecessary.  Why was I so confident that I had already understood the message?  It couldn’t hurt to do some self-examination, I thought, and thus was lead to the more important question:what convictions do I have that make up the definition of myself, and should I let go of them?

I am just starting to understand that most of my being, even my feminist beliefs, is answers absorbed from culture as opposed to formed from within.  I adopt beliefs to fit into a category, and in doing so I obliterate myself and become categories.  Even if the combination is unique to me, it is still unexamined.  It is still compiled as opposed to constructed.

I want to reconstruct myself.  I want to be more than the adhesive; I want to take down every brick and patch, polish, or replace it until I am nothing but me. 

I think it’s time to change my “About Me” page.

This is so perfect, right down to the amount of skin her flats show.  And that bag?  Ugh, how awesome.

(Source: thewearableart)

newpurse:

Detail of Construction dress, Yohji Yamamoto spring 2000 Ready to Wear.

Just got this in the mail today. I peeled off the plastic wrapping like a virgin bringing a great lover to bed, I shit you not.

The glowing firefly squid of Toyama, Japan

 

(Source: dirtyprettything)

yaah:

wait sorry who designed this pls tell me again one more time

This is hilarious and so accurate.

A friend of mine came in to work recently in a button-down shirt.  “Someone’s spiffy today!”  He had been looking at houses earlier and said he wanted to look…well, I don’t even know.  I don’t remember what he said, but the implication was, “I wanted to look appropriate.  I didn’t want to look like a slob.”

For the record, he isn’t one.  He wears jeans and t-shirts, but they are interesting and well-fitting which places him above many others in this town.  Anyway.  The point is he got dressed up.

He and his wife are looking at houses, and whenever he mentions it to me, he talks about growing up.  It’s time to settle down, it’s time to get a real job.  I think that’s a very middle-class way of thinking, “real job.”  Only the middle class have to work to get one; the rich are often guaranteed it by birth.  Only the middle class have a fake (?) job to leave; the working class know that any job that pays money is real.  Do they even consider leaving a job unless the conditions are unbearable or they are suddenly presented with something better?  To the working class, is having a “career” a requirement for adulthood?

I wonder, when I’m thirty, will I feel the need to dress up and look at houses?  Or will I believe I’ve been an adult since I turned eighteen, no matter what I was doing?

When do we stop dressing up to become adults and actually turn into them?  Have I been an adult all along, and this twenty-something crisis is just a trick of the culture I was born into? 

Maybe I should stop judging myself and others for not being there yet and just enjoy the ride.

“When I get a tweet from a girl who’s like, “I’d love to watch the show, but I wish there were more women of color.” You know what? I do, too, and if we have the opportunity to do a second season, I’ll address that.” —Lena Dunham

Thanks?

I really should be in love with this show.  It tastes like the 2010’s—desperate, emotionally erratic people who were told we could have it all only to find out that, no, the world is harder than we expected, harder than our parents expected, so we’re all running around crowded streets with no idea what to do and no one to look out for us.  Oh, and we’re all white. 

Wait, that’s not how the world is?  That’s not how NYC is?  Well, let’s hope for that season two, then!

I mean, for fuck’s sake, Scott Pilgrim had an Asian.

It’s times like these that I realized how much I missed by not paying attention during the 90’s.  I never watched shows like Girlfriends or Living Single, and now I’m craving to see some sort of representation of myself on television.  Yeah, I’m a woman in my twenties, but I have to deal with a whole host of different issues that white women just don’t, and it leaves a girl wondering where the hell she fits in when this issues are constantly ignored.

I’m just tired of this sort of thing being so simply dismissed.  You’ll “address” it?  What does that even mean?!  I can picture it now—a board room full of Hollywoods throwing around words like “urban,” “diversity,” and “ethnic,” and utterly clueless to the fact that they’re circling the same drain they’ve been in for years.

It’s time we move on from addressing this problem and work to solving it.

“What is an aristocrat?  A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, though she may be surrounded by it.”

—Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. I’m a great believer in vulgarity—if it’s got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”

—Diana Vreeland, D.V.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that term lately, “vulgarity.”  The first quote moved me so much that I’ve considered incorporating it into a tattoo.  The second, well, Diana Vreeland is held as such an authority on fashion that I feel compelled to listen to her.

Of course my initial reaction was that one person couldn’t believe both.  A second later, my brain kicked in and remembered that context clues are an actual thing and not a classroom time-waster.  The first quote is about manners and, more importantly, mannerisms; Renee (a protagonist) and her friend Manuela are having tea together, and Renee is commenting on how the two have transformed themselves from working class into royalty merely by their words and actions.  Renee and Manuela are technically vulgar people—they appear horribly uneducated, they work menial jobs (the former as a conceirge and the latter as a housekeeper), and they are not blessed with the tools to be fashionable, “respectable” women in Paris.  Yet, they hold themselves to the same standards they demand of the rich apartment-dwellers and use what tools they do have to meet those standards.  They may appear vulgar, but they never truly are.  The whole book dwells on this topic, how “poor” and “aristocratic” are mutually exclusive and how odd (even unacceptable) it is for these standards to be broken.  I don’t think Renee even finished high school, but that doesn’t stop her from reading Husserl and watching Ozu.

Here, vulgarity is anything—life, actions, education, class.  Do not let your surroundings possess you.

Diana Vreeland, of course, was talking about conformity versus freedom.  Bad taste is both a source of derision and a potential marker of the individual.  With bad taste, you are no longer sophisticated, chic.  Bad taste is what separates us from television, why it’s a whole separate world from our on.  Bad taste is the 99%.  Accepting bad taste is ignoring the new American dream, the desire to be loved by the entire world.  Vreeland says, “Who cares?”  Better to have bad taste than no imagination.  Better to be free in your choices than a slave to the zeitgeist.

Do not let your surroundings possess you.

In conclusion, I should do some more thinking about what to put on my body.