The NY Times wants to convince you that men’s fashion blogging is the new bull-fighting.
In an inadvertently hilarious piece titled ‘Straight Talk — A New Breed of Fashion Bloggers’, it sets out to prove that Tweeting and Tumbling about tie pins all day is really, like, butch.
NOT every fashion blogger is a 15-year-old girl with an unhealthy obsession with Rei Kawakubo. Some are older. And some are men.
Well, that’s a relief. Even thought I don’t know who Rei Kawakubo is.
And not just any guy with an eye for fashion.
You mean, not just another fag? Phew!
There are hyper-masculine dudes who “look at men’s fashion the way other guys look at cars, gadgets or even sports,” said Tyler Thoreson, the editorial director of Park & Bond, a men’s retail site.
“There’s the same attention to detail.”
Don’t stop. I’m getting hard.
In other words, these are macho fashion bloggers, writing for a post-metrosexual world. “It’s translating this sort of very-guy approach to something that’s so traditionally been quasi-effeminate,” Mr. Thoreson added.
Very-guy? Or just very–gay? In the worst possible sense of the word.
The whole piece, especially the ‘hyper masculine dude’ and ‘macho blogger’ with a khaki fetish profiled first, whose ‘Dislikes’ include “Pants that are too tight and too short, men who are getting too pretty, and guys wearing fedoras” is of course incredibly faggy. Much faggier than anything flaming could ever be. He sounds like the kind of queen who comes up with the strictly-enforced ‘real man’ dress-code for leather bars.
This kind of guff isn’t ‘post-metrosexual’ at all. It’s so pre–metrosexual it’s positively pre–Stonewall.
And is it just me, or did the NYT just call straights ‘breeders’ in that headline?
This guy here (if indeed it is a guy) is the only ‘macho’ men’s fashion blogger anyone will ever need. Strangely, he wasn’t included in that piece by the NYT. He probably terrifies the poor poppets. He certainly scares the shit out of me.
Tip: Lee Kynaston
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HH: ‘Continuous Lean’ seems to me to be hipsterism pretending to be dandyism. There’s something deathly about hipsterism. Hipster fashion blogs look more like archeology than anything else. That’s why you don’t see many people. Just the things they left behind.
We probably shouldn’t forget the role of class here. Most of those NYT fashion bloggers strike me as being middle class (in the proper, i.e. non-American sense of the word). In my experience, working class men into fashion tend to be much less ‘restrained’ than the middle class types, who are usually terrified of vulgarity and of their own bodies. The time-honoured class strategy of attention to ‘detail’ (instead of, say, EFFECT) as you say is a wonderful way of both keeping yourself safely trussed up and keeping the hoi-polloi at bay.
The NYT is of course the paper of record for American middle class neuroses.
Accordingly, the Grey Lady has been losing her marbles for some years now.
They may not be retrosexual, but they’re certainly retro-orthodox.
Harking back to the 1960s is way too easy for them. The first item on today’s Continuous Lean, January 16, is about a bunch of guys who got together to resurrect an 1859 workshop-apron company. That’s a three posts above Churchill in the top hat.
With the exception of our pal Mr. Mort, these cybernauts of man-clobber tell men to hide among the details, attention to which the Times so loudly praises.
It’s a fine masculine tradition. Men used to hide among the details of their cars, baseball stats, fishing rods, stock deals, cuban cigars, or any other damn thing they could talk about. As long as it wasn’t about themselves.
Look at how Jake Davis praises Donwan Harrell’s office. The place is so swamped in detail that…well, it’s an aesthetic mess.
What strikes me, especially with A Continuous Lean, is how many objects there are, and how few people wearing them. It is kind of like an IKMEA instruction booklet on how to dress, without the occasional smiling cartoon.
They remove any form of self expression from choosing clothes. As well as a good deal of the overt sex.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily. A refined fashion or aesthetic sense needn’t be loud, or highly sexualised.
But an obsession with detail isn’t the same thing as a passion for style. Quite the opposite.
The major menswear item they seem to recommend is a good old-fashioned emotional straitjacket.
These guys reminds me why I choose to read Esquire.
BTW, on “indavertent hilarity”; the Grey Lady has grown tone deaf of late. Have you caught up with the “Truth Vigilante” cyberstorm, Mark?
“Fashion blogger?” Isn’t that pretty much the same thing as “professional wanker”?
I’d like to get paid for playing with myself and writing about it, too, but then I find most “fashion,” men’s or women’s, a total turn-off.
The poor old Times is just desperate these days, like all print publications. Their concept of “gay” has just about caught up to the 1980s.
All I can say to the NYT is “Get U, Girlfriend!”
Ha! Nichelson Wooster does indeed look about a thousand times better dressed than any of those dweeby blogger guys the NYT went gay for.
Rock on Daddy!
Check out my take here. http://culvermccall.tumblr.com/post/15836938256/pitti-uomo-2012-the-boys-are-having-a-moment