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Friday , May 22, 2009

A STYLE ICON/MAGNUM OPUS HYBRID: For Raymond Douglas Davies; Sincerely, Laura Jane

"If I had to do my life over, I would change every single thing I have done."
-Ray Davies, 1967.

In some ways, I'm exactly like everybody else.

Like everybody else, my greatest assets and my fatal flaws are one in the same. They are:

1) I love the dudes.
2) I spend a lot of my time thinking about the way I look, and,
3) My tolerance for phoniness is zero.

Together, these qualities explain everything about why Ray Davies of The Kinks is my All-time Number One Style Icon. And now, I'm going to explain that.

PART ONE: DUDES ARE SCARY

I am terrified of dudes.

On a given day, I see about a trillion of them. I scope them out, because I am lonely, and then realize: they are all creeps. Even when I see a dude who at first glance looks like he might have a decent personality, or at very least is a babe, all I have to do is imagine myself alone with him for ten minutes, and then it clicks: Nope! You were wrong, Laura Jane! Dead wrong. All the dudes I've ever met, or seen, in my entire life, besides five of them, are tied for "The Universe's All-time Hugest Creep."

Also, more often than not, their shoes suck.

+ Continue reading "A STYLE ICON/MAGNUM OPUS HYBRID: For Raymond Douglas Davies; Sincerely, Laura Jane"

Tags: Canceminis, Cher, Days, dudes are creeps, Dudes Scare Laura, eating disorder awareness, eating disorder recovery, George Clooney, John Lennon, Laura Jane Faulds, LJ ON JL, microgreens, not like everybody else, Ray Davies, Ray Davies is a genius, Ray Davies' front-teeth gap, Ray-Davies-Perfect, Raymond Douglas Davies, S&M, sincerity, Sir Paul McCartney, style icons, wishing today could be tomorrow

Style Icons: Jimi Hendrix + Red Hot Chili Peppers

It's hard for me to talk about Jimi Hendrix, because he's been around me my whole life. How do you talk about milkshakes, when you've never really not known that there are milkshakes, and they taste like heaven? So I almost always take Jimi Hendrix for granted, but I almost never stop wishing I lived in a more Hendrixy world, where the air's a little more crackly and sandalwood-smoky and dudes dress as flashy and foxy as chicks but in a tuff kind of way. Real life's hard, but the song "Ezy Rider" cures the pain of not living in Imaginationland. "Voodoo Child" cures boredom. "Manic Depression" cures manic depression. Jimi Hendrix is so much better than milkshakes.

Another reason I owe my life to Jimi Hendrix is he gave birth - not spiritually but physically, or maybe it's the other way around - to the Red Hot Chili Peppers (who are my favorite band on god's green earth). Jimi's look was so flamboyant and over-the-top, but it never came off clownish 'cause he's such a bad-ass and so goddamned cool. The Chili Peppers are less cool, and that's why I love them ten times more than everything. They're not clownish either - they'd probably call themselves "knuckleheads," which is something I wish all boys in the world would aspire to be. Over the years their style's mellowed out a little and they basically no longer look like aliens on acid, but they can still dress fly as the sky. To illustrate, here's what Anthony was wearing the three times I've seen him around town:

1) a pair of blue-suede shoes (Pumas, or something like them) and matching baby-blue sweater, plus some real sharp blue trousers and adorable bedhead hair. (This was at Farmers Market, and he sat in the chair next to mine at the communal table, and then I dropped dead into my bowl of tofu bi bim bab.)

2) a blazin'-white blazer over some kind of t-shirt + good jeans

3) this really groovy black sweatshirt with "La Cienega" scrawled in Coca-Cola font across the front, with a button-down dress shirt underneath; another pair of real sharp trousers, which were probably black but I can't really remember.

The last time I saw John Frusciante, at a !!! show, he was dressed up like the ghost of Kurt Cobain in a fuzzy cardigan and t-shirt and corduroys and Pumas and some really geeky glasses. It was a good look for him. And when I saw Flea at a screening of "1960s Butterfly Girl" a couple springtimes ago, he was smartly dressed in some kind of suit that I don't remember well; another time, at the street fair in Silver Lake, he was wearing a Lakers uniform. I've never had a Chad Smith sighting but I'm sure when I finally do he'll be all, "Why'd you crop me out of all the photos in your 'Jimi Hendrix + Red Hot Chili Peppers' style icons post, Liz?" and I'll be like, "Sorry, dude, but you just looked kinda boring in every shot I found. And Anthony looks boring in that pic at the bottom left too, but I'm kind of charmed by his hoodie." And he'll shrug and nod and then we'll go get a beer and it'll be my treat, and we'll all live happily ever after. The End.

Tags: beer, blue-suede shoes, Flea, Jimi Hendrix, John Frusciante, knuckleheads, Kurt Cobain, L.A. rules, love, milkshakes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, style icons

Style Icon: Cayce Pollard from William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition"

The sad thing about having Cayce Pollard as a fashion icon is that you can't see her. Not that she's invisible -- she's utterly imaginary as the main protagonist of the William Gibson novel Pattern Recognition. There's not even a movie adaptation that exists in which someone plays Cayce, nor a graphic novel. She only exists in the liminal area between Gibson's prose and the mind's eye envisioning the story. In this case, the story is about an advertising consultant, a "coolhunter" with a "spookily intuitive" sense of marketing who is called in by boutique advertising firms, giant multinationals and the like to give her uncannily accurate sense of how a brand plays. The twist is that Cayce (pronounced "Case") doesn't have this ability because she's attuned to aesthetics or loves logos or what have you -- she's acutely sensitive to brands and marketing because she's actually allergic to these things. Labels give her hives and irritate her skin so much that she has to sand off the logo on her Japanese watch and jeans buttons; even the Michelin Man gives her severe panic attacks.

You'd think such an allergy to brands would put a cramp in a girl's style, but here's the other rub: Cayce has style in spades. She may be allergic to fashion, but she still loves clothes. You can tell, because the novel talks about her clothes a lot. (And she has a girly side: she enjoys spa treatments and does Pilates, for God's sake!) Her limitations with clothing actually work to give her a strong look, which the book encapsulates best:

"CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She's a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult."

What this actually translates to is: boys' t-shirts, plain jeans, sweaters bought from prep school suppliers, plain black skirts, plain black boots and sneakers, a look that meets at the intersection between gamine schoolboy and toughie utilitarian. Her only real concession to branding she can tolerate is a certain Buzz Rickson flight jacket, which is her most beloved possession and receives prominent mention in the book. (So much so that after Pattern Recognition was published, interest in the Buzz Rickson jacket skyrocketed and the company ended up producing a version inspired directly by the novel.) Yet Cayce is totally attuned to proportion, line, silhouette -- all the subtleties of design that a style sophisticate is keenly aware of. It fits in with Cayce's exquisite sensitivity to the meaning and context of style -- what clothes say, what they reveal and hide, the real semiotics of it all.

Reading Pattern Recognition is a great experience on many levels. While it divided some of the Gibson faithful who missed the futuristic setting and the cyberpunk attitude of his other novels (oh, fanboys!), it's also one of the few novels I've read that really got into the heart on how technology and the Internet really shape people's emotional lives and experience, not to mention grappled intelligently with a post-9/11 landscape. (It's also awesome when a dude in a kind of dudecentric genre like sci-fi writes really incredible female characters that are defined by their abilities, intellect and emotional lives rather than by their plot convenience and exploited sexuality. William Gibson, you effin' rock. You are so important to me!)

But Pattern Recognition on this totally other level is kind of like a stealth fashion bible, an education into how you could piece together a kind of anti-style, how to look at it, where to get it. And in the irony of ironies, the novel that is in some part about the virulence of marketing has definitely spawned its own cult. Definitely for awhile after reading Pattern Recognition, I'd see an exquisitely minimal outfit on someone and think "That is so Cayce Pollard!" Or I'd think to myself, "I need a Cayce Pollard day" after a fashion bender. Cayce Pollard became part of the mix of influences that I brought with me when I shopped or confronted my closet for an outfit to wear each day, and sometimes I really wish she was real, 'cause it'd be super-cool to interview her and find out what perfume she would wear and what her spirit animal is. (My guess: an owl.)

There's something so pure about Cayce as a character, something both irresistibly impenetrable yet serenely composed; she's like looking at water after being surrounded by design pollution all day. She stands for the ultimate rejection of the Fashion Industrial Complex. The absolute commitment of her style and her awareness of it within the larger context of fashion and capitalism make her a grade-A fashion thinker -- a real icon, however imaginary. But what makes her a nogoodforme icon is that she has that thing we ultimately champion about style: a totally personal, passionate and individualistic relationship to her clothing, informed entirely by and of herself. No intervention. Strong and silent. Right on.

Tags: anti-fashion, Cayce Pollard, design pollution, fashion benders, minimalism, science fiction, style idols, William Gibson

Thursday , May 21, 2009

Style Icon: Courtney Love

Once upon a time I knew somebody who knew Courtney Love; it was then revealed to me that Courtney Love is a supreme liar. Which is something everybody probably assumes anyway, but it kind of really rattled me for a while. I've since stopped caring, but not because I don't care about Courtney in general. (Nay, there's a fair possibility that at age 110 my earbuds will still be blasting Hole songs into my head as I sing along and flail around stupidly just like Liv Tyler in that scene from Stealing Beauty.) The diff is that now I love that she lies.

The deal with life is there are three kinds of liars. One invents weird, fantastical hooey just to have something interesting to say; another speaks untruths as a means of escaping blame for their wrongdoing. The third kind of liar, the one we're most concerned with here, is given to telling tall tales for the sake of piecing together a persona that they can't quite measure up to. That's exactly what Courtney Love is like. Some of the time, anyway. Most often it's less about lying and more about exaggerating the hell out of everything, or at least exhibiting a seductively wackjob sort of megalomania. She says things like, "I'm a catalog artist: I compete with Bob Dylan," and you nod and go "Okay, yeah," and then you remember that Courtney Love has only ever recorded four studio albums, and Bob Dylan probably has a few more than that.

Some people get really riled up over that shit, about Courtney Love claiming her four-album catalog rivals Bob Dylan's four-zillion-album catalog, but I think it's grander than grand. I love exaggeration and hyperbole; I love blowing stuff way the hell out of proportion. Despite being a stick-in-the-mud Capricorn, I'm also a hopeless romantic, and I will always embrace every last one of romantic's lovely synonyms (i.e., extravagant, exaggerated, wild, imaginative, fantastic, improbable, unreal, fanciful, impractical). Those are all beautiful things to be. Imagine if you always had to experience and process life exactly as life really is? That would just be the pits!

So this is why I will never shout "Balderdash!" or "Poppycock!" or even "Dude, get the fuck outta town, seriously" in Courtney Love's face. And while I don't really understand all that much about fashion, I'm pretty certain that there's some sort of self-mythologizing involved - and not (to rip off Courtney Love ripping off those old Barbizon ads) in a "Be a model, or just look like one" kind of way. Also, for the most part, I love her dresses and wish I could wear them too. I'm not so enchanted by the Courtney Love repertoire of imagery as I used to be (the tattered lace and little-girl barrettes and that whole gothic-riot-grrrl look from the Pretty on the Inside and Live Through This eras), but I still get so inspired by her fucked-up lust for pretty things. Not just because I really like it when "messy" and "glamorous" get all mixed up together, but because there's some kind of shiny, stubborn joie de vivre there that seems to endure despite a whole lotta really dark shit going down. And I've quoted this CL quote here before, but now I'm gonna give it to you again: "If you can't embrace your daily life properly with an enthusiasm that's unfettered, like a child, then fuck you." I think that's probably one of my favorite things anyone's ever said. AND THAT'S NO LIE.

Tags: Barbizon Modeling School, Bob Dylan, Courtney Love, Hole, joie de vivre, liars, Liv Tyler, lying, megalomania, repertoires of imagery, romanticism, style icons, the burdens of being Capricorn

Style Icon: Marguerite Duras

...Or any older writer dame, really. I really don't think older writer dames get enough credit on the style front, so I'm righting that wrong right now. I've shouted out Joan Didion before, but I give Marguerite Duras credit for being the first writer dame to inspire me on a fashion front. Many years ago I fell in love with her novel The Lover and its poetic, intense atmosphere of suppressed violence and eroticism. (Okay, not so suppressed on that last one.) I went on a bit of a Duras kick and read tons of her other works ranging from major pieces like Moderato Cantabile to ephemera like Practicalities. (She even did the screenplay for the amazing film Hiroshima Mon Amour, one of my favorite films ever -- the movie is amazing, and the script is a work of art in itself.) Practicalities is a mishmash of little essays and bits of writing on everything from housekeeping to being an alcoholic to falling in love with a younger man. I read it ages ago, but one thing I remember is what she had to say on her style and fashion in general, about having a uniform: "A uniform is an attempt to reconcile form and content, to match what you think you look like with what you'd like to look like, what you think you are with what you want to suggest. You find this match without really looking for it." (You can read the whole essay here, actually. Yay, Google Search!)

Since then, ironically enough, I've always been looking for a uniform, whether or not I've been aware of it. And in a way, it's true -- you find it without really looking for it, because suddenly all I wear is skinny or straight-legged dark rinse jeans and boy's oxford shirts and ballet shoes over and over again, and it sort of works in nearly everything I do and everywhere I go. A lot of people think uniforms are boring, but I don't -- it's the most true thing about a person, fashion-speaking of course, a successful distillation of a person's past, present and future into a sartorial gesture. I think the moment you find your uniform comes at that exquisite moment when you know and have accepted yourself, you know and have accepted where you are going and are getting on with the big things in life. If we're talking about self-actualization, there's nothing more awesome than that.

marguerite-duras-writer-paris-may-21-1993-richard-avedon.jpg

Tags: Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, uniforms, writer dames, writers

Style Icons: Peggy Oki/Jeff Spicoli/Eva

PART ONE: TAKE MY WORD FOR IT- YOU (AND I) WILL NEVER BE AS COOL AS PEGGY OKI, AND THIS CHICK I MET AT THE EGLINTON SUBWAY STATION YESTERDAY

My name is Laura Jane Faulds, and I BELIEVE IN COOL.

Why is it so uncool to think that being cool is cool? Personally (personally, as in, AS A PERSON), I resent the implication that cool is only cool (for real?) if it's an accident. I think saying that is just a coping mechanism for losers. Does anybody ackshully expect me to believe that James Dean was "cool" by "accident"? What a crock. Not that I even think James Dean is cool, but if I did, I would think he was cool because he meant to, and PERSONALLY, I think it's cool to think it's cool to be cool. PERSONALLY, I think "cool" is a legitimate aesthetic concept, just like "rococo" (especially if you roll the R). Looking, being, acting and/or feeling cool is something totally worth striving for.

Before yesterday, the only human being I'd ever come across who was cool by accident was Peggy Oki, a girl skateboard from the late '70s who is in the movie Dogtown and Z-Boys for a total of maybe ten seconds. And then I went to therapy.

Awesome as my therapist may be, and is, this all has nothing to do with my therapist, and everything to do with Eva. The only reason I brought up therapy is because, after therapy, I was at the Eglinton subway station, and then I saw Eva. I flipped my lid, took her photograph, and then felt really stoked about my life because the Universe had just auto-given me a really kickass "slant" on my Peggy Oki/Jeff Spicoli Style Icons article.

I barely have to explain anything at all, because you've already looked at the image at the top of this post, and therefore you've already seen Eva, and therefore you've already digested how violently cool she is, and so nothing I say really matters, because the only thing that matters is Eva's coolness. We're all on the same page here, except Eva. She's on a cooler page than all of us.

PERSONALLY, I've already accepted that I'll never be as cool as Eva, and/or Peggy Oki. I have come to terms with it. Eva, I just hope you're reading this. If you are, please get in touch with me. Let's be friends. I'm cool with not being the cool one.

PART TWO: HOW TO BE COOL LIKE JEFF SPICOLI AND LAURA JANE FAULDS

If you are not one of the two people in the world who are effortlessly cool, don't freak out. It's actually really, really cool to be intentionally cool, like Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli and Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. When I just typed out the words Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I realized I'd completely forgot that Jeff Spicoli is a "character" in a "movie" played by an "actor" named "Sean Penn" for the entire time I've been working on this article. That's how cool Jeff Spicoli is- cool enough to eclipse the fact that he doesn't exist. Here's how he did it, how I do it, and how you can do it too:

1. Smoke out of a bong and take a picture of it. (If you don't smoke weed, a Big Gulp or a can of Lowenbrau work fine too. You could even try all three at once, and then be the coolest person in the world!)

PROOF THAT PEOPLE LOOK COOLER DRINKING BIG GULPS:

2. Never underestimate the power of a killer t-shirt.

3. A sick pair of Vans goes a long way.

4. Everybody looks better with a tan, and the coolest way to get one is to surf, just like noted cool person Elizabeth Barker of nogoodforme.com.

5. Think up some hilarious catchphrases, and say them constantly: (PERSONALLY, mine are "What the Helen Keller," "Go to Hell, Archie Bell and the Drells," "Who gives a wishbone?" and saying "I'm gonna jet" or "I'm gonna book it" or "I'm peacing out" in lieu of saying "Goodbye." Also, I really wish "American Idiot" wasn't playing this video)

ALOHA, MR. HAND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS: I'm sorry I didn't talk about Peggy Oki more in this article. I was planning on it, but then I met Eva, who backs up my whole "Peggy Oki is Cool" point about 495782304803x more effectively than actual Peggy Oki.

Tags: Archie Bell and the Drells, coolness, Dogtown and Z-Boys, drugz, Elizabeth Barker, Eva, James Dean: Not Very Cool, Jeff Spicoli, my therapist rules, Peggy Oki, PERSONALLY, rococo, skaters, skaters are hot, smoke, surfers are hot, surfing, The Fonz, therapy, Vans

Wednesday , May 20, 2009

Style Icon: Geri Halliwell at the 1997 BRIT Awards

Isn't it sort of sweet how uncomfortable I look in that picture? I took it about twenty-five times, then came to the conclusion that I am not Ginger Spice. I'm a sulky Canadian.

Here are some words that begin with "self":

selfish; selfless; self-absorbed; self-loathing; self-assured; self-defeating; self-destructive; self-effacing; self-indulgent; self-aggrandizing; self-involved; self-righteous.

I really like all those words. They're useful. Everybody is at least three of them*, except for Geri Halliwell. She is only one of them, but she is so much that one of them that it is equivalent to a normal person being all of them.

Geri "Ginger Spice" Halliwell is "self-indulgent." And oh God- how I love her for it.

PART ONE: THE JOHN LENNON OF THE SPICE GIRLS

The Spice Girls hit when I was eleven years old; it could not have been more impeccably timed. I was the exact perfect age for the Spice Girls to maximally impact my development. My chakras were wide open to ingesting their legendary mantras of "Girl Power" and Zig-a-Zig-ahh-ing and spicing up people's lives.

I will NEVER not be grateful for that.

"Girl Power" worked on me. I believed in it so hard. I doodled it in notebooks, I scrawled it on my hand in ballpoint. I also said it. I screamed it, in fact. I screamed it a lot. I screamed it every chance I got.

"Girl Power" provided me with a sense of belonging and identity outside of myself. It positioned me culturally and ideologically; it gave me a stance. When Spice World hit theaters, the People magazine review named Ginger the "John Lennon of the Spice Girls," which meant a lot to me. At eleven, all this Lennon Love you see today was squirming inside of me, nascent, waiting impatiently to be set free. Geri Halliwell being deemed Lennon-esque was important, though I didn't know why. I just knew it all made sense, that they were both parts of my puzzle. Like John to the Beatles, Geri was the Spice Girls' unofficial leader, the first among equals. And "Girl Power" was Geri Halliwell's "All You Need Is Love."

+ Continue reading "Style Icon: Geri Halliwell at the 1997 BRIT Awards"

Tags: 2009- The Shittiest Year Yet!, adolescence, BRIT Awards, Friedberger, genuine sluttiness vs. constructed sluttiness, Geri Halliwell, Ginger Spice, Girl Power, Greil Marcus, John Lennon, Laura Jane Faulds, sluttiness, the Ontario Science Centre, Union Jack

Style Icons: The Wassup Rockers Kids

The Wassup Rockers boys have made such fools of me; now every time some messy-haired kid with a bandana around his wrist skates past me on my way to the Echo Park library or the Venice Pier, I gape and gawk like one of those richie-hipster creeps at the Bev Hills party in the movie. It's bad and lame, and I want to make up for it by shouting something like, "I'm not like one of those richie-hipster creeps at the Bev Hills party in the movie! I like Defiance too!" But instead I just go home and blog about how I should have made "Like If the Wassup Rockers Kids Shopped at Forever 21 and Crossroads Trading" my personal fashion concept for spring, and then listen to the same Defiance song 27 times in a row. Because I don't really even like Defiance. I just bought that one song on iTunes cuz it was in Wassup Rockers.

So in some ways it's rough being a nerdy blogger-girl who'll never fit in with the 16-year-old skate punks, or even the skate punks twice as old as 16, but in other ways it's perfect. Because if I weren't that nerdy blogger-girl, I'd probably just go all eye-rolly at that scene toward the beginning of Wassup Rockers when one of the boys skates out into the middle of the street from off-camera, and then another boy does the same, and another and another and another till the whole gang's all skating together and they look soooo cool and I totally get the chill-bumps! Boys think that part's stupid. That's because boys are stupid, or at least less prone to going gaga and giddy over silly, awesome shit. And I guess one draggy thing about being a boy is that "giddiness" probably isn't a quality you're apt to display too often, whereas giddiness is generally pretty acceptable among girls. Given the choice between "cool" and "giddy," I'll take "giddy" every time, then I'll geekily push my glasses up my nose and get back to trying to work out #112 across on the New York crossword puzzle.

But yeah, fashion. I'm guessing those kids never figured they'd end up getting props in Glamour or whatever, but there's at least three Wassup Rockers-gleaned style rules we all should try to follow almost ever single day:

1. A KILLER BELT IS ALWAYS KEY

2. MEXICAN-WRESTLER MASKS MAKE REALLY GOOD HATS

3. NEVER EVER TAKE OFF THE BEANIE

(Kico is so my favorite Wassup Rockers boy, by the way. It rules how he's semi-responsible for Janice Dickinson getting electrocuted in the bathtub.)

Tags: crosswords, Like If the Wassup Rockers Kids Shopped at Forever 21 and Crossroads Trading, skaters, the burdens and blessings of being a nerdy blogger-girl, Venice Beach, Wassup Rockers

Style Icon: Lee Scratch Perry

I know what yer thinkin': What does this old dude have anything to do with the like of fashion me? Well, little whippersnappers, the answer is: EVERYTHING. Lee Perry is a god among gods in the intricate, deeply obsessive yet highly obtuse world of roots reggae and dub. The man heard sounds no one else did and made the recording studio bow to his whims in creating these alien noises. He's a bona-fide, balls-out, pedal-to-the-medal genius, not only in the musical front, but on the style tip as well. I did a half-assed entry on dub dude style that remains one of my favorite things I've written about fashion, ever, but I just want to expand here on the fashion brilliance that Scratch has consistently displayed throughout the course of his career. First of all, he does the crazy-layered, dumpster-scavenged look so well; as My Favorite Dude in the World once pointed out, he's totally proto-hipster. But really, he's so beyond that maligned label -- what's genius about his style is how it emerges organically from his commitment to his music, his culture and his Rastafarian spirituality, and how consistent it's been from his youth to age 73, where he's currently kicking it now, making records with dudes from Lightning Bolt and, uh, Andrew W.K. and Moby. (An aside: I feel like everyone who is in music after a certain amount of years will work with Moby. He's like the Jennifer Warnes of modern music.) Just watch this awesome video of Scratch at work at the famous Black Ark studio in the 70s; he's rocking a simple tank top and athletic shorts, and he does it way better than any pseudo-subversive American Apparel model:

(By the way, why does everyone in this video look amazing? I wish everything could be shot on 70s-esque film stock.)

Anyway, the lessons of style we can take from Lee Scratch Perry as a fashion guru can be summarized thusly:

(1) Don't think fashion, feel it.
(2) Love your genius more than your outfit.
(3) Live in Jamaica, everyone dresses better there.
(4) Emperor Haile Selassie is a better icon than Carine Roitfeld.

Witness!

Tags: dub, dub dudes, Haile Selassie, Lee Scratch Perry, style icons, style idols

Tuesday , May 19, 2009

Style Icon: Axl Rose

Like the 1992 MTV awards all over again, Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain got in a big messy brawl over who'd be the star of this Style Icons post. Axl won, partly cuz he's scrappy and a biter and also alive instead of dead, which goes a long way when shit comes to blows. But mostly he's victorious because he dresses/dressed way more like my all-time number-one style idol (Royal Trux's Jennifer Herrema) than Kurt did: J.H. and William Bailey Rose are both wild-haired, trashed-out glamourpusses with a penchant for pants so tight they must've been painted on, stompy boots and black leather and lots and lots of metal 'round their wrists at all times. Plus they're both L.A. babes, and L.A. babes are always best in my book. So while I'll keep on wearing my itchy cardigans and plaid flannel in a nod to the crispy Seattle weather, at the end of the day a little well-styled sleaze is way more my speed than grunge ever could ever be. And to steal a line from Axl himself: "If Seattle's so fucking cool, why did the Brady Bunch live in L.A.?"* Mighty good q, Bill! Mighty good q.

Truthfully, I'm way more of a Duff McKagan kind of girl and not really all that turned on by dudes who (as Chuck Klosterman might say) look like strippers. I'm not really sure what kind of relationship I could ever have with Axl, since I don't know many mega-volatile men prone to inciting riots and attacking people with wine bottles, but I'd so be down for time-traveling back to 1987 and arranging some kind of chill set-up wherein Axl would let me borrow those crazy boots in the above photo whenever I damn well wanted. In return I'd do my part to stroke his fragile monster of an ego, which would probably mainly involve my stupidly gasping, "Dude, 'Rocket Queen'! Arrrgggghhhh! Genius!" and then flopping on the floor and dying over and over again, and totally meaning it too. "Rocket Queen" is just that killer.

+ Continue reading "Style Icon: Axl Rose"

Tags: attacking people with wine bottles, Axl Rose, Charles Manson is a loser, Chuck Klosterman, Clueless, Guns N' Roses, Jennifer Herrema, Kurt Cobain, L.A. rules