Posts tagged clothing
Tokyo vintage
The story about vintage clothes in Tokyo goes like this: A Hollywood actress, after a successful crash diet, sold her size 6 wardrobe to a thrift shop in Santa Monica. Three months later she came to Tokyo to promote her latest movie and one afternoon wandered into one of the city’s landmark vintage clothing shops, called Santa Monica. What should she find there but her own shorts and several party dresses, unobtrusively displayed under a sign that read: “Santa Monica Style.”
The story is credible for the simple reason that Tokyo has now reached a point where it’s safe to call it Planet Vintage. Among the 400-plus shops scattered over the city, myths like this abound.
The good news is that it’s not all rumor and folklore - according to a fashion stylist, Keiko Okura, “the quality of Tokyo vintage products are unmatched.”
Like the mass popularization of smiley face buttons in the early 1970s, which coincided with another oil and economic crisis, Life is good T-shirts have caught on among people who feel the products are spreading a positive message in a troubled world.
The invention of the smiley face is largely credited to Harvey Ross Ball, an advertising executive from Worcester, Mass., who drew the symbol in 1963 to improve worker morale at an insurance company that had merged with another.
It later became a fad when printed with the slogan “Have a nice day,” selling countless pieces of merchandise as an almost subversively counterintuitive message that in many ways seems to be repeating with “Life is good” today.
“The years when the company has thrived the most have been the most economically, politically and socially challenged years,” Mr. Jacobs said, adding that the company is on track to reach $135 million in sales this year through retail stores and a Web site. (In addition to the 4,500 stores that carry the Life is good merchandise, there are about 105 independently owned shops in airports and cities across the country that sell only Life is good products.) “The people who face the most adversity are the ones who embrace ‘Life is good’ the most,” he said.
Perfectly unfashionable
Girls Gone Mild pays tribute to young women who have tangled with corporations and campus authorities to challenge the status quo. One such heroine is Ella Gunderson, who at age 11 appealed to Nordstrom for more modest clothing selections. It began with a shopping trip with her mother, 13-year-old sister Robin, and friends. When Robin tried on jeans that they agreed were too tight, they asked for the next size up--only to have the Nordstrom clerk advise them, “No you don’t want that size, you want the smaller size, the tighter size, because it’s The Look.”
That didn’t sit well with Ella. She wrote a letter to the company (her mother didn’t find out until Ella asked for help addressing it) expressing frustration at clothes cut too tight and too low and clerks too narrow in their concept of fashion. “I think you should change that,” Ella told Nordstrom.
A few months later—while the Gundersons were helping produce a local Pure Fashion show—they were surprised to receive two apologetic responses from the company. Ella’s letter and the Nordstrom responses were added to press kits prepared for the fashion show. Soon the story made the front page of the Seattle Times. Radio and television interviews followed, including an interview on the Today Show. Today‘s Katie Couric also interviewed Pete Nordstrom, who acknowledged receiving such complaints from other teenage girls for some time. A question raised at a stockholder meeting pressed the matter further with the company: “What do you plan to do about the Ella Gunderson issue?”
Albania’s sworn virgins
The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct that has been passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than five centuries. Under the Kanun, the role of women is severely circumscribed: Take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same - 12 oxen.
The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and death. If the patriarch of the family died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.
They dress like men, adopt a male swagger and spend their lives in the company of other men.