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Lindsay Lohan launched her debut collection as artistic director of Ungaro on Sunday. As soon as the last model existed the runway, snobby editors stormed out the door. Lohan was in tears. That the clothes would be widely panned was no surprise, of course. WWD called the collection "an embarrassment," "cheesy and dated" with an "overworked" heart motif. Style.com said the show quickly “devolved into a bad joke of a fashion show, one with questionable color combinations, ‘bad eighties’ draped silk jackets and drop-crotch pants, old-fashioned and ill-judged fur stoles, and, yes, tasteless sequin pasties.”
The looks were inelegant, off-trend, and styled with about as much je ne sais quois as a drunk teen let loose inside a Forever 21. But you know what? I loved this fashion show, and I think that it was a genius move—promotional and otherwise—by Ungaro CEO Mounir Moufarrige. The press has been covering L’Affaire Lohan as a desperate and misguided attempt to import a crass marketing ploy of the American department store—the celebrity designer—to the hallowed Paris runway.
But what if we choose to see Lohan not as a celebrity designer but simply as a young woman who has taken on the task of making clothes that she adores with the help of a designer (that would be chief Ungaro designer, Estrella Archs) and an atelier full of skilled dressmakers eager to take her direction? Seen this way, we are reminded that fashion need not be the province of professional designers. It can be made collaboratively between women who have their own aesthetic sensibilities and others who possess the technical skills to translate the looks from idea to reality. “I feel like it’s pretty much a fairytale," Lohan told People. "It’s certainly more than I could have ever imagined, more than I’d ever hoped for. I couldn’t be happier. Seeing everything pulled together, is simply amazing.”
Before fashion was controlled by fashion dictators—designers who invent seasonal looks for women without regards for what women actually want or whether women want anything new at all—women used to collaborate with skilled dressmakers. Other than used clothes or homespun frocks, this was the extent of fashion. Back then—that is, before the 1860s—women got all the credit for their looks too, which meant fervent compliments or gut-wrenching ridicule, but their self-cultivated appearance had nothing to do with designers or labels or brands and everything to do with what went on privately between a woman and her dressmaker. Like Lohan, we could walk into a dressmaking establishment and play artistic director, or as WWD sees it, we could be “a nonskilled judge with theoretical veto power hovering about.” Well, that’s all fashion meant to women for centuries until Charles Frederick Worth opened the first designer shop and declared, “I don’t want people to invent for themselves; if they did, I should loose half my trade.” Fashion week celebrates this idea: the idea of women not inventing for themselves.
What would it be like if women could do what Lohan did and invent? Probably many of us would be overwhelmed or simply uninterested. But throngs might also welcome the shift. According to the New York Times, Lohan loved the experience: “’This is just so cool,’ Ms. Lohan said, turning her attention to a white minidress splattered with sequins. ‘It needs more rhinestones, just so it pops.’ Off to the seamstress it went.” This sounds a lot more fun and interesting than shopping.
So what if the fashion press was “aghast” at Lohan’s aesthetic? I think it’s great that a nondesigner got to work with a team of skilled French dressmakers. Although the looks are cheesy, at least the 45-year-old house of Ungaro is shaking up the boring runway establishment. Moufarrige is onto something.
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Photograph of Lindsay Lohan by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images.
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The first five minutes of the new Disney film The Princess and the Frog wound up online yesterday—the unfinished clip seems to have been leaked, since the video’s since been pulled from YouTube, but as of right now it can still be found in a few places. Jezebel also has a dozen screen grabs.
The hand-drawn images are gorgeous—not to mention the fact that it’s really fun to see the animation in progress—but I’m particularly thrilled to see two Disney rarities here: girl friends and a doting mom. Is it too much to hope that both survive the rest of the film?
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Of course abortion and birth control have a large role in bringing down our fertility rate in America, as they have elsewhere. (I have spent much of the past decade-and-a-half writing about both.) But there is no need to be reductive; this is not an either/or issue. There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility, including both the ability to control when and whether to become mothers and the policies that affect mothers’ quality of life.
I don’t think the issue is just affording a child. It’s also, as I already reported, about not feeling professionally ready, i.e., not wanting to sacrifice hard-earned successes at work. Of course, many people just don’t want children (and, by the way, I have zero interest in coaxing anyone to do it). But for some women—again, we don’t know how many—the decision to have a child is more complicated than simply wanting to or not. Given the lack of part-time and flexible work options, as well as paid maternity leave and sick leave, and affordable childcare, women know that having a child can and often does derail women’s careers. For many, that knowledge is part of the calculus.
Since we’re offering personal stories, here’s mine: I waited quite a while to have children. For a long time, I didn’t feel ready. By the time I did, I encountered age-related fertility issues. I managed to have children anyway, but if I hadn’t, I think I would have felt sad about it.
As for whether the decline in women’s happiness is statistically valid, you can argue it either way—it’s small, but it’s there. What you cant quibble away is the fact that, without the support for working women that largely exists in other countries, life can be particularly difficult for working mothers in the United States. And that’s sad.
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The British Psychological Society just posed a question to leading psychologists: Even with all your expertise, what's the one nagging thing you still don't understand about yourself? The best answers out the experts for falling into the very human traps they write about so often. If you're an avid reader of the psycho-literary self-help book, what's the one thing you do even though you know why you do it (and why you shouldn't)?
Of all the psychologists responding, David Buss nailed it best, although in fancier language. Why, he asked, if I know people are prone to certain mistakes, do I still make them myself? His personal bugaboos include expecting long-term happiness from short-term accomplishments, underestimating the amount of time he takes to finish things and (my favorite) "misperceiving a woman's friendliness as sexual interest." Robert Cialdini overcommits. Paul Rozin never learns from experience. David Lavallee indulges in lucky charms and rituals. They've spent years of their lives studying the way people behave under the influence of their various mental ticks—and yet they can't control their own.
There's nothing I enjoy more than a little self-help nestled snugly in a bed of easily digestible psychology, so I'm a sucker for books like Stumbling on Happiness and Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. I know that things that will make my present self happy will anger my future self, and that I'll eat more food off of a bigger plate. I like to fancy that all that reading has given me special insight into the one nagging thing I can't fix about myself: I know that I will, at any opportunity, let optimism triumph over experience. Of course I can get it to you by 3 p.m.; we'd love to bring our four kids to the opening of your glass-blown sculpture show; why not get another dog?
It falls to a nameless colleague of Elizabeth Loftus' to remind us that—of course—there's a psychological explanation for why we repeat behaviors that we claim to know aren't working: somehow, some part of us benefits. Her anxiety dreams, someone suggests, persist because she so loves the feeling of waking up and realizing that she won't miss a plane or a meeting. David Buss enjoys his expectations. David Lavallee rests secure in the knowledge that at least he's done all he could to make that putt.
Does the rush of making that optimistic promise and the thrill of anticipating its fulfillment outweigh the stress of, say, housetraining the resulting puppy? Apparently. I admit it—I'm secretly kind of proud of my supposed failing. Will knowing that help me say no to coaching my daughter's hockey team again this year? Probably not.
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When I was in college, I did what every aspiring journalist did back then, in the dark ages of the 1970s—I would research and write an article, type it out on my portable electric typewriter, put it in an envelope, lick a stamp, and mail it off to a glossy magazine in hopes of getting it published. How quaint every step of that process seems now, right down to the stamp. Writer’s Market was my bible, a fat directory I’d leaf through to get editors’ names and addresses for the magazines in which I longed to appear. Oh, to have my words printed on the pages of Esquire, the Atlantic, Saturday Review, or that pinnacle of sophistication and beautiful prose, the sanctified New Yorker.
The first national publication to respond positively to my earnest submissions wasn’t quite in the league of my idols, but it was enough: Modern Bride. When I heard yesterday of the magazine’s death as part of Condé Nast’s economizing excisions, I grew nostalgic—remembering, as it were, my first time. Remembering the thrill of that moment, standing at the mail table in my apartment house in Evanston, Ill., opening up my own shiny copy of Modern Bride, finding my own article and my own unfamiliar, newly-married byline—a moment both delightedly public and very, very personal.
With that Modern Bride article—called, I cringe to admit it, “How To Write Your Own Marriage Ceremony”—I felt like I was on my way as a journalist. This was how I became validated in my chosen career. This was how I started satisfying my ambitions.
My two daughters and my nephew are journalists now—something in the blood, or the genes, or in having them see by my example that living a life devoted to words and ideas is not only gratifying, but possible. But today I’m wondering, What have I done? Will any of this be as much fun again?
The loss of four big Condé Nast titles, including my own one-off, first-time outlet, drives home for me how different journalism will be for the next generation. Whatever niche Modern Bride filled seems to be more than adequately filled by blogs and websites; my older daughter demonstrated that when she planned her wedding last year by devotedly visiting (and posting to, and seeking guidance from commenters on) IndieBride—and not once cracking a bridal mag. But what about the niche these magazines filled for aspiring writers? When the half-life of everybody’s first-ever piece of published writing is measured in days, or even hours, what happens to the thrill? When your clipping file is a series of links instead of a drawer full of manila folders stuffed with yellowing pages, is that as satisfying? I don’t want to sound like an old fogey—hell, I outgrew that electric typewriter decades ago, and I facebook (is that a verb?) with the best of them—but it makes me sad to watch the old magazines fold. Because as they disappear, what’s also disappearing is the chance to have something hefty and shiny and tangible that lets you know you’re on your way. The loss of Modern Bride and the others reminds us that what is passing is not just a magazine, but something important in the life of a writer.
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Ah, the Internet! A vast playground of pixelated amusements! A technological feat the very thought of which makes one immediately proud of the human race’s collective intelligence. That is, until you realize that for every Stephen Hawking there is a waiter who will submit to easily avoided job termination all because he couldn’t help but out Hung star Jane Adams as a tip skipper on his very public Twitter feed. In the words of Homer Simpson: DOH.
According to Defamer, the Beverly Hills-based waiter, Jon Barrett-Ingels, had committed Twitter faux pas on the job before, once tweeting that Heroes actress Ali Larter was dining sans bra, and that Office star B.J. Novak was hungover. But it was Adams who stormed in a month after the incident and personally scolded Ingels for his tweet before informing the management about his itchy fingers. A few days later the restaurant kicked him to the curb.
Sadly, online disclosure diarrhea is nothing out of the ordinary: A recent study conducted by Internet security firm Proofpoint found that 8 percent of companies have dismissed an employee for careless social media posts. Remember the widely blogged about Cisco-tweet fiasco last March? A prospective employee tweeted about his job offer, typing, “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” Not only did he not get the job, he earned the online moniker "Cisco Fatty" and his humilation was memorialized in a website.
For his part, Ingels took his revenge to the L.A. Times, where he griped about Adams: "All she could think about was herself and her pride and her ego." Which may be true in some respects, but, Jane Adams still has a job, so ... .
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Sharon, I have to agree with Kerry that there's no evidence to suggest that large numbers of women are yearning for children they couldn't have due to lack of support, and that's dragging down the levels of happiness. There's a simple and likely explanation for why the number of women 40 to 44 who are deliberately childless has grown so tremendously. That's the generation that first came of age when effective contraception and abortion were legal and normalized. Prior generations simply didn't have the choice to avoid motherhood. Now that the choice is given, we've learned large numbers of women will take it.
I'm sure some women would change their mind and have children if they had more support, but I wouldn't put too much faith in survey responses from childless women about finances or career. Folks who've worked in compiling statistics on abortion will be the first to tell you that women who cite "can't afford a child right now" on a survey for why they're getting an abortion often put that because it's easier than admitting what our society tells women they can never admit, which is that they're not particularly eager to have a baby. In an interview I did with Frances Kissling, she said as much. Many women who have every resource available will say they can't afford a baby, because it feels true, even if they technically have the resources necessary to raise a child. I'm a willfully childless person, and I'll admit that I hide behind the financial excuse when asked why I don't have children.
I'll also add that I'm not entirely sure that a debate about why women are "sad" reflects the statistical reality. The data that kicked off this discussion doesn't seem to show a significant enough shift in women's self-reported happiness to draw any real conclusions. As you can see here, there was not actually any real rise in the number of women who said they were unhappy from the '70s until now. All the researchers found was a shift of less than 6 percentage points of women from the "very happy" to the "pretty happy" column. In other words, they're still happy. A shift this minor probably points to a minor cause; my guess is that sitting in traffic alone could account for the difference. At the most, I'd say feminism has created in women a desire to be more and have more, so they are more likely to suffer disappointments that could move 6 percentage points from one column to another. But so what? Men wouldn't take kindly to being told to dial down their expectations and demands so 6 percentage points could move from the "pretty happy" to the "very happy" column, and neither should women.
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