Admit it, this holiday season sucked. As did the entirety of 2015, so far. Did anyone buy you perfect wedge boots? No. No they did not. And now, here you are, stepping in cat puke in your bare feet. What's wrong with the cat? You'll figure it out tomorrow. Today is for buying your own damn boots.
First there were the jackets. A vintage Levi’s jacket that my mother still perceives as royal-hued denim, despite how it has faded. The leather label on the inside back, between the shoulder blades, having long since been blasted through, the brand is legible in the rivets down the front and at the cuffs, undisturbed after nearly forty years of wear. The cuffs themselves hang suspended by threads; unfolded, the denim is darker, preserved. My mom…
I was killing time waiting for my daughter to meet me for dinner when I spotted the perfect leather jacket, adorning a headless mannequin in a fancy department store.
Liz Watson's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
There is no article of male clothing more maligned in contemporary online culture than the fedora. Once the favored hat of gangsters and sexy archaeologists, around 2011 the fedora came to be internet shorthand for a Certain Kind of Dude: a basement-dwelling, Cheeto-eater who loathes his contemporaries and seeks refuge in TV and video games. A guy who believes in the
Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but that monster could describe a dress. "She lay in bed, propped up on pillows of pale green linen. Her bed jacket was pale green satin, worn with the untouched perfection of a window model; its lustrous folds looked as if the crinkle of tissue paper still lingered among them. The light, shaded to a tone of apple blossoms, fell on a table that held a book, a…
Hello! This has been a rather serious week (between this and this and a whole host of other stories) and I thought it might not be a bad idea to plug resources and services for people who have experienced sexual assault, rape, and domestic violence.
Standing in the men’s dressing room at Nordstrom, I am afraid I’ve made a mistake. My new suit from Topshop was designed for only the thinnest and cruelest of bargain-hunting British men. I am a five foot three American queer in Texas. The sleeves hang so far over my hands they disappear. The pants gape around my waist and cling to my ass. We have just spent $400 on this thing, and I look ridiculous.
Since that time was the Victorian era, and ladies were tight-lacing themselves right into punctured lungs, this provided an excuse for upper- and middle-class ladies to celebrate recreational and sartorial mobility, a dovetail of causes for the rational dress movement, and a perfect storm of social reform fought in the public opinion. It was a defining moment in late 19th-century aesthetics, and became…
According to Herodotus, when Greek soldiers met the Scythians in battle, they were amazed to see Scythian women on horseback fighting alongside the men, all wearing pants and decorated armor. When they went back to Greece they immortalized those Scythian women for posterity as the legendary Amazons in their poetry and art. Painting them looking both chic and fierce, their pictures of the Amazons are some of the earliest Western artworks showing women
As far as I’m concerned, bathing suits are the problem. Bathing suits shouldn’t even exist. You should be bathing (or sunbathing?) naked (or slathered with sunscreen.) A bathing suit implies that it has no functionality, just pure decoration and I just cannot tolerate that. Swimsuits, on the other hand! Different styles (bi-, tri-, tank-, mono-, bandeau- kinis, one piece, trunks) have different advantages and disadvantages, but whatever you’re wearing, swimming is not a sport for…
1. When you wear a home-made, puffed-sleeve, colonial-esque, lace-front dress, styled after your Felicity doll, to every Bible study your mom attends in the 3rd grade and wonder why the other kids aren’t taking your suggestion to form a Harriet-the-Spy spy club seriously. 2. When you realize the hand-me-down jeans you’ve been proudly wearing for all of 5th grade belonged to your male cousin, not your female cousin. No wonder the crotch area…
When I finally decided that California was going to happen, I compiled a mental list of full of logistical questions. Where would I live? How would I get around once there? What in the name of all that was holy was I going to do about my clothes and shoes? I worked in apparel retail for nearly four and a half years during that second stay at home, and no matter how responsible you say…
