Lamé Identified . . .

I always wondered what lamé meant. Now I know. Kind of heavy-metal without the heavy . . .

Old Shoe Wisdom

Peerless Shoe

If the shoe fits, wear it . . . unless the other shoe is naught.

Broadway Joe: Fashion Hero?

Joe Namath and daughters Jessica and Olivia

Exposay: Entertainment and Fashion

I mentioned a few days ago my admiration for Guy Trebay's style. His literary style. He's a fashion writer -- so everybody knows his fashion style -- and in "The Rise of the Well-Dressed Man" (The New York Times Style Magazine, February 27, 2013), Trebay not only writes well and with humor, ending his article with a well-wrought punch line, he has some striking words to say about Joe Namath's early flair for fashion:

I found myself thinking about Broadway Joe. You remember him, of course, the quarterback legend and media gadfly, a self-styled cartoon whose athletic prowess was pretty nearly overshadowed by his randy off-the-field antics. Goofy-handsome and with gull-wing bangs swooping back from his forehead, Joe had woolly pecs, a dense Happy Trail and a wardrobe that called to mind a coal-town Oscar Wilde.

He wore shearling and raccoon and posed in pantyhose for a Hanes Beautymist commercial. He was an unabashed narcissist with a fondness for natty green blazers. He liked rump-hugging trousers with taut notch-pockets. He wore Brut cologne, silk foulards and white cleats on the field. Unembarrassed in his embrace of fashion, Namath was way out in front of the culture, a sartorial forerunner of all the athletes who have lately morphed from slobs wearing saggers into designer sandwich boards crowding the front rows at Versace shows.

He was -- if you'll forgive the use of a lint-covered term from the cultural sock drawer -- a metrosexual avant la lettre. Unlike the hippies and gender benders and rocker peacocks who were his near contemporaries, Joe Namath wasn't toying with masculinity. His liking for nice clothes was no particular "tell" for sexual preference. That he wore coats made from the sheared pelts of expensively farmed rodents did not mean Joe Namath secretly liked men: it meant he liked mink.

In contrast, most sports stars of those day cared not a whit about style, says Trebay, and Michael Hainey, the deputy editor of GQ, agrees:

"With the exception of Joe Namath, most sports stars in the past took a 'Who cares?' attitude about dressing."

Indeed, few men cared about fashion, until the last fifteen years, when style in clothing began to go mainstream. Did Broadway Joe play a role? Trebay thinks so:

I realized that Namath may have been slighted by historians of fashion. Maybe he is the liminal figure theory-heads are always rooting around for. Maybe, unacknowledged and in those long-gone days, it was Broadway Joe who began the inexorable march of butch dandies into the mainstream.

An intriguing perspective. I've often thought of Namath over the years, remembering his standing joke:

"I can't wait till tomorrow . . . 'cause I get better looking ev'ry day!"

That isn't happening to me these days of my decline, but maybe I can still go in style . . .

Misapprehension?

Shoed I . . . or Not?

The Hairpin

So, there I was, sitting in Starbucks, surreptitiously sipping my homebrewed coffee in an obscure corner to save money -- but nibbling on a cheap cookie I'd paid for to legitimize my being there in that 'third place,' should I by chance of bad luck be uncovered with my contraband caffeine -- and feeling all moralistic about not spending so impulsively as that thoughtless herd of others caught up in the consumerist stampede, roiled by market, fashion, or peers to buy-buy-buy, when I happened upon an article that took me aback:

How do we understand life in a commercial, consumer-oriented society? Academic traditionalists and hard-headed advocates of "practical" research often dismiss scholarship on material culture, including shoes, as frivolous nonsense. So they leave thinking about questions like why people buy shoes and what they mean in people's lives to Marxists, Freudians and others who decry commercial culture, treat consumers as powerless dupes or, at best, reduce every "unnecessary" purchase to some form of status competition.

The result is a desiccated understanding of history and culture. In an academic article, [the British sociologist Alexandra] Sherlock decries "the postmodern tendency to fetishise the shoe, both in the Marxian (commodity fetish) and Freudian (psycho-sexual) sense, for what it 'stands' for rather than what it is." Even when they contain an element of truth, such theories are as simplistic and misleading as the claim that ankle boots indicate an overly aggressive personality. Commercial culture -- our culture -- deserves better.

Good Lord, all this time that I'd been thinking myself a moral person, I'd merely been thinking like a Freudian -- or worse, a Marxist! -- casually dismissing other free-thinking individuals as dupes of commercial culture! After reading Virginia Postrel's "Boots Were Made for Talking, About Who We Are" (Bloomberg, July 10, 2012), I'll never again be able to look at my thick old Curitel cell phone without reflecting that I really ought to invest in a brand-new Apple smart phone and thereby assume a more stylish look.

And while I'm considering this, I need some background music . . .

Fashionable Gypsy Scholar

I guess that Gypsy Scholar is all the rage now, for I discovered a morning or two ago that my blog is being 'followed' by a fashion model . . . maybe even two of them, as we see from these two images:




I know what you're all thinking:

"Well, of course, fashion models read Gypsy Scholar! Everybody who's anybody reads Gypsy Scholar!"

True, but they don't usually officially 'follow' my blog. My seven other followers don't look like fashion models.

So . . . I checked the first fashion model above. She's the one actually linked as following me. Her name is Annalee Noir, and she has a blog: Noir: A Fashion Blog. The other model -- who I think is Edward Cullen (also an actor) -- doesn't officially 'follow' me, but I'm assuming that he must be an unofficial follower.

At least, I did think these things . . . that Cullen and Noir were fashion models following my blog . . . until I looked a bit more closely at the Noir site:

Annalee Noir is also known as "Annalee Hodges."

That set my mental gears whirring. Did I have a cousin named "Annalee"? I certainly have a lot of Hodges cousins, far too many to keep track of. But the name "Annalee" for a cousin struck no bells. But suddenly, something began to click. Annalee Hodges looked familiar.

"Gazer," I thought.

For a moment, I wondered why I'd thought that. But I knew that I'd met Annalee somewhere.

"Oh, of course," I realized, "she's Justin's wife."

Justin (the second 'model' above) is my nephew, son of my brother Tim. Gazer is his band. I met Annalee in Arkansas just over a year ago, in February of 2008, when I took my wife and kids to my hometown of Salem. Justin introduced me to her.

Mystery solved.

But they still look like fashion models to me. You can find more images at "Annalee Noir's Photostream," on Flickr, including photos of the band Gazer. The band also has its own website, where you can listen to some of its music:

Gazer on MySpace Music

I'll leave it up to my readers to puzzle out precisely what sort of musical genre Gazer belongs to. It ain't country, but it sounds good anyway . . . and vaguely recalls the music of Jim Morrison and The Doors, at least for me.

Consider this entry a plug for Gazer.