Primary Color - Fashion
Part of the Primary Color packageOUR MADE-FOR-TV PRESIDENCY
Remember back when we still thought appearances could be deceiving? Now, if you make it look pretty enough -- a cool costume, a breathtaking backdrop, perfect lighting -- we'll swallow it hook, line and sinker.
Looks like democracy may finally have met its match. I refer, of course, to the way TV and movies have trained us to trust appearances.
For instance, I knew from the minute I set eyes on him that Jude Ciccolella, who plays President David Palmer's top aide on "24," couldn't be trusted. His face was too pale and puffy for trustworthiness, and his eyes were always squinched down into snakey little slits. Any experienced consumer of pop entertainment could see it coming a mile away: Of course he'd end up stabbing his boss in the back. (What I couldn't figure was why Palmer didn't see it coming. Somehow I doubt that, in real life, our nation's first African-American president will turn out to be such an innocent.)
You have to look at President Bush's Top Gun caper of a couple weeks ago in this context. People who complain that the president burned a lot of expensive jet fuel purely so he could have his picture taken looking cool in a flight suit need to wake up and smell the coffee: We judge candidates by show biz standards now, so where do we get off being outraged when a candidate -- and every president is inescapably a candidate for his whole first term -- tries to meet those standards?
Did anybody complain when Tom Cruise dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to fly a jet? Absolutely not. In fact, Americans paid $177 million to watch him do it. That's show biz.
But maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe people who think it's undignified for presidents to dress up in costumes just haven't quite caught up with the new reality. And it must be said in their defense that it is pretty new.
Look at Abe Lincoln. He's widely acknowledged to have been one of our better presidents -- despite the fact that today, no casting director in his or her right mind would cast him as anything but a psychotic misanthrope, or maybe a mad scientist. Tall, gangly, wrapped up in a giant shawl? Be serious! And that face? Let me remind you that the Albany Atlas and Argus called him "the ugliest man in the Union."
Lucky for us, at the time there was no TV, no movies, not even that much photography. So Lincoln's debating skill counted for more than his looks. Otherwise, today we could be two different countries.
It wasn't until the first televised presidential debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, that political candidates began to be judged by show biz standards. Which must've been quite a shock, at least to Nixon, who didn't bother to shave before the debate. Instead, he tried to hide his heavy 5 o'clock shadow under a coat of a pasty-looking makeup called "lazy shave." Big mistake. On camera, he looked pale, haggard and jumpy -- especially compared to Kennedy, who was clean-shaven, tanned, rested and self-possessed. Nixon probably knew more about the issues: People who heard the debate on the radio thought he'd won. But hardly anybody who saw how awful he looked on TV thought so.
Since then, the show business of politics has only gotten more demanding. I remember the first televised news conference I attended, in the office of the Philadelphia district attorney back in the '70s. Before the D.A. sat down at his desk, one of his assistants drew a heavy sky-blue curtain across the window behind him to make a pretty background for the TV cameras. How vain, I thought at the time. How fake.
But that was nothing. Now politicians understand that they're competing not just with each other, but with the people we see on television and movie screens. Do they want to look like Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford -- or like some geek in a cheesy porno movie? It's all a matter of lighting. Candidates can't afford cheesy production values anymore.
If you recall, news photos of George W. Bush published during the campaign and during the first several weeks of his presidency often made him look somewhat befuddled or momentarily at a loss. Which seemed consistent with his tendency to say things like "We ought to make the pie higher." And "I think we agree, the past is over." And "Reading is the basics for all learning." And "He can't take the high horse and then claim the low road."
You don't see those photos anymore. Now in news photos, the president looks like somebody who knows what he's doing.
A recent story by Elisabeth Bumiller in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/politics/16IMAG.html) reported the amazing lengths to which White House staffers go to make sure George W. Bush is "always ready for his close-up." My favorite part detailed their damn-the-torpedoes use of Musco lights. These are the humongous banks of lights used to turn night into day for rock concerts, sports stadiums, and any major pro golf tournament expected to run past sunset. You might think that kind of hugely expensive lighting would be overkill for a mere speech, but apparently not.
For instance, for an address the president gave last year in Bucharest -- a place many Americans would have trouble finding on the map -- a master lighting designer on the White House staff (they hired him away from NBC) rented a full complement of the giant lights in Britain, shipped them across the English Channel, and trucked them all across Europe to Romania to be able to train them on a giant stage set up in Bucharest's Revolution Square -- all so the president would look as good as a movie star just in case a sound bite from the speech made the evening news back home.
This year, when the president addressed the nation in prime time on the anniversary of 9/11, the White House production staff rented three barges, filled them with phalanxes of the big lights, anchored them at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, and turned the lights on her. As the president spoke from Ellis Island, Miss Liberty stood majestically bathed in light against the night sky just over his right shoulder. Steven Spielberg couldn't've done it better.
We've come a long way from 1863, when Lincoln produced the Gettysburg Address all by himself using nothing but a pen, a pencil and two sheets of White House stationery. (He wrote the first half in ink back at the White House, and scrawled the rest in pencil on the train to Gettysburg.)
White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told Elisabeth Bumiller why the administration's investment in production values is worthwhile: Busy Americans may not "have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals as communicators. So we take it seriously."
In other words, there may not be any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein may have had nothing to do with 9/11. More people may be losing their jobs, and fewer may be able to pay for their prescription drugs. Medicare may be underfunded and Social Security facing a rocky future. And a person who makes $10,000 may only get a dollar back with the president's proposed tax cut, while the chairman of Citibank stands to get a refund check of around $6 million. But what does any of that amount to compared to your instant understanding that the president, with Miss Liberty glowing behind him at God only knows what cost (Musco won't say), knows what he's doing and truly cares about us all?
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WHY NOBODY CAN TELL YOU WHAT TO WEAR
Once upon a time, everybody wanted to dress
the way rich people did.
Fashion magazines photographed heiresses instead
of models and movie stars.
Now people want to look a million different ways --
which makes it tougher to succeed in the rag trade,
and tougher to say what's really happening.
Ever notice how half the stuff you read about fashion gets
things exactly backward?
For instance, people who design and make and sell clothes used to do it
more or less by the seats of their pants. Or, to put it more elegantly,
they depended heavily on individual genius and inspiration.
But as fashion companies have grown and agglomerated and conglomerated, really big money entered the picture. Now a mistake -- betting on the wrong color or the wrong shape or the wrong mood -- can cost millions. So there's an incentive to invest in research -- surveying, forecasting, trend-watching, cool-hunting, whatever -- to figure out what people will actually want next. Fashion companies do this, obviously, because they know that, if people don't want the stuff they design or make or sell, it'll end up on the markdown rack.
So they invest in all this expensive research to find out, say, that people are starting to have a hankering for many shades of white, and are also beginning to like the idea of pretty, feminine summer dresses. And then, naturally, they design/make/stock up on pretty white dresses.
And the next thing you know, some fashion writer is telling
you that pretty white dresses are the latest trend, and you better get
some right away or else.
Or else -- what? You'll be exiled to Dowdyland? And anyway, where does
a $4 fashion magazine -- not to mention a 50-cent newspaper -- get off
telling you what to wear?
The only reason those dresses exist in the first place
is that a lot of people already want them. If you aren't one of them,
why on Earth would you buy one?
So you can look like everybody else? How thrilling.
Now, a fashion trend is the result of a lot of people wanting the same thing at the same time, not the cause of it. So a fashion reporter's job is to find out what people want -- and what fashion designers/manufacturers/retailers think they want. And, if possible, why, and what it might mean and what effects it might have as it all plays out.
It's description, not prescription.
But that hasn't always been true. This may be hard to imagine if you can't
remember back that far, but 50 years ago fashion actually was about "keeping
up" with "the latest thing." Instead of fashion people
twisting themselves into pretzels -- ears to the ground, fingers on the
pulse -- to figure out what shoppers might want next, Fashion dictated,
and women fell obediently into line.
Truly! Christian Dior showed long skirts and -- presto! -- every last woman in Paris let down her hems. By the next season, every woman in America did the same thing.
And before designers created trends, it was royalty. The Prince of Wales undid the bottom button of his waistcoat after a large meal, and other men noticed, and started leaving their bottom buttons undone. It looked so cool and princely.
We didn't have royalty in America, so the burden of setting styles was shouldered by rich people who liked to spend money on clothes. Fashion magazines photographed them and reported on what they were wearing and how and where they were wearing it because they knew readers would wish to follow suit. Which is how they got into the habit of telling people what to wear.
You'll still hear the occasional saleslady, trying to persuade you that you like something well enough to buy it, say: "It's what they're wearing this season." "They" being the unnamed fashion leaders we all presumably want to look like.
Except that we don't anymore. Maybe in 1935 everybody wanted to look like the famous fashion plate Mrs. Harrison Williams (later Countess Mona Bismarck), but that consensus is long gone. Now some of us want to look like J. Lo and some want to look like Laura Bush and some want to look like Morticia Addams and some want to look like Avril Lavigne and some want to look like the Olsen twins and some still want to look like Audrey Hepburn.
No wonder department store tycoons will pay experts to find out what their customers want.
What makes it even tougher for them is that what we all want, more than anything, is to look like ourselves.
Which is much trickier than looking like Mona Bismarck or Mrs. Astor or the Prince of Wales. They were known quantities; what they wore was described in minute detail. You'd just ask your dressmaker or tailor to copy it -- or, if you could afford to, you'd go to Mrs. Astor's dressmaker, or the prince's tailor.
Figuring out what it'll take to look like your own self requires, first, that you have some idea of who you are, which is difficult enough to pin down, and second, that you have the imagination and talent to translate that essence into line and shape and color and pattern.
The complexity of it all is almost enough to make you long for the good old days when some Frenchman could tell you what to wear. (And if you can't figure it out yourself, how is some garmento supposed to?)
So little wonder lots of people find a label they feel comfortable with and stick to it -- or find a singer or actress whose look they like and copy it. It's way easier to look like Jennifer Lopez than to figure out what it'd take to look like yourself. At least you start off knowing what J. Lo looks like.
TO LOOK GREAT EVEN IF YOU CAN'T STAND UP, WALK, OR ZIP YOUR ZIPPER
A book about making clothes that work for people with disabilities dares to suggest that fashion is for all of us, not just the beautiful people.
"Clothes should work better than they do," Dolores Quinn says. "If you watch a man when he sits down, you see that he pulls up his trouser legs and then he unbuttons his jacket. It's because his clothes are made to stand in, not to sit in." It's true: The minute you sit down in a chair, bend over, or stoop down to pick something up, your elegantly tailored clothes pull in all the wrong directions, bunch up, and threaten to pop their buttons.
For somebody like a TV anchor, who needs to look good sitting down, it's inconvenient that clothes are made to fit properly only when the person in them is standing. But for somebody who uses a wheelchair and can't stand up at all, it's crazy.
Quinn came to this insight 25 years ago while teaching fashion design at Drexel University in Philadelphia. One way to develop a student's ability to solve problems is to pile on constraints. At Drexel, Quinn taught a course called "Designs Within Limits" that required each student to design clothes for a particular person with some physical limitation. It had to fit this person, suit his or her taste and lifestyle, look fabulous, and also solve the (sometimes considerable) functional difficulties presented by the disability.
"It was useful for me because you broaden your views whenever you're given a new set of limitations," says Renee Weiss Chase, first one of Quinn's students and eventually a colleague on the Drexel faculty. Quinn and Chase put everything they learned about designing and sewing clothes for people with special needs into an extraordinary book, "Design Without Limits," recently reprinted by Fairchild Publications. It's one of the most enlightening things I've ever read about design.
The book does an exemplary job of showing how to make clothes work for people with various disabilities. In clear, instantly understandable drawings, it shows how to change a shirt pattern to fit a person with scoliosis, how to cut a jacket that falls smoothly on a seated figure instead of pulling across the front and bunching up in back, how to add release pleats to ready-made shirts to accommodate someone who uses crutches, how to construct a pair of sweatpants without a center back seam to reduce the risk of pressure sores for a person who sits all day.
The way it analyzes the functionality of clothes should make it required reading for anybody who wants to make clothes work better -- whether for people with special needs or ordinary ones. To make trousers adapted for sitting, for instance, you need to shorten the rise in front so there isn't a lot of extra fabric to bunch up, and lengthen it in back so the back waistband isn't always pulling down. Because it's difficult to get your hands into conventionally placed pockets while seated, pants pockets should migrate to the fronts of the thighs, like cargo pockets, or be hidden in the outseams at thigh level for a more formal look.
The fly may need to open all the way to the crotch seam and, for someone who can't stand, it should close with Velcro or buttons, since it's virtually impossible to zip up a fly while you're sitting down. (Would this occur to you? Anybody who's ever struggled to get a freshly laundered slipcover back onto a sofa knows you need to be able to pull a zipper straight to zip it, but would it occur to you that this makes it impossible to zip your fly while sitting down? It's this ability to see things freshly that would make this book useful to anybody who designs any kind of clothing.)
But what really gets your attention is its insistence that clothes for people with disabilities shouldn't just function properly, they should look wonderful. There's a weird tendency to assume that people with disabilities should be above caring about something as superficial as looks. As if, after all they've suffered, they should be beyond such vanity. Chase says that many of the disabled people they worked with when they began the project in the late 1970s seemed to have bought into this idea that fashion was for other people:
"They had just accepted it: 'This is it, there's no way I can look great, and there's nothing I can do about it.'"
But she and Quinn firmly believe that everybody's entitled to look wonderful: That's what fashion's for. Beauty, they argue, is "not something extra," it's "emotionally necessary for survival." In fact, there's an argument to be made that, since people with disabilities risk being excluded, marginalized, categorized as outside the norm, looking good can be especially useful to them.
The book's analysis of the purely aesthetic challenges that come with various disabilities is especially interesting. For instance, a person who uses a wheelchair is likely to stay seated even when others are standing -- which effectively reduces his or her height to 3 or 4 feet. As Quinn points out, we depend on height to create an illusion of slenderness and elegance. Somebody who weighs 200 pounds and is 4 feet tall is likely to look considerably fatter than a 200-pound 6-footer. We also associate height with authority, so someone who's 2 or 3 feet shorter than the norm is likely to be disregarded.
So -- as the book demonstrates with colorful sketches -- -a person who uses a wheelchair may find it useful to "dress tall" by wearing the same color from head to toe and choosing clothes with strong vertical lines. By contrast, wearing two different colors, say a white shirt and black pants, cuts the figure in half and makes the person look even shorter and broader.
The principles are familiar -- who doesn't know fat people shouldn't wear horizontal stripes? -- but when Quinn and Chase began the project, nobody in fashion was paying much attention to the aesthetic challenges posed by using a wheelchair or crutches. (Then it was all about painting leopard spots on Veruschka and photographing her nude on the sand.) To look at disability as Chase and Quinn did -- as just one more constraint to design within, like dressing somebody with flabby upper arms or an allergy to wool -- was radical.
Their objective was classic: To dress the client in a way that would make her comfortable and also make her look pretty. But you have to see a person before you can see that she's pretty. If all your attention is riveted on her wheelchair or her brace or whatever tells you she's disabled, you'll never get that far. So Quinn and Chase and their students learned -- and here they show how -- to design clothes that focus attention on the person, not the handicap. For instance, they design a blouse with a floppy bow at the neck to draw attention to the face, and a softly draped back to camouflage a dowager's hump. They explain how classic design principles can be used to make the waist and abdomen of a seated figure look narrower. They show how a soft jacket with asymmetric tucks can de-emphasize the asymmetry of scoliosis.
The specifics will be useful to disabled people who think that having some kind of physical limitation is already enough to deal with, that they shouldn't have to look geeky on top of it. Beyond that, what's striking about this book is how different its inclusive, egalitarian vision of fashion is from the exclusive, hierarchical one implicit in so much mass marketing and media.
"The fashion industry," Chase says, "is very used to the beautiful side of things -- tall, thin, beautiful models, glitz and glamour." Fashion people tend to assume that fashion is for the few -- that "fashion is for beautiful people, and all these other subsets get overlooked." The old or fat or disabled need not apply.
But think how much nicer -- and more attractive -- the world would be if Chase and Quinn's view prevailed: if fashion were for everybody. Think of the difference it would make if, instead of investing billions to make us feel inadequate -- too flabby, too blotchy, too frizzy, too uncool -- so we'll buy stuff, fashion were truly a service industry. What if, instead of focusing on our handicaps -- our blotches, bulges, frizz, flab -- it focused on our true selves? What if it gave us all the wherewithal to reimagine ourselves, create and experience beauty, and say who we are?
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