Spots On

Clothing, as we all know, sends messages, some less subtle than others. Take, as an example, animal prints, especially the feline variety worn by tigers, leopards, and cheetahs.

Decades ago, owning an authentic big-cat coat was a sign that in fashion terms, you had arrived. Check out Edie Sedgwick in this YouTube clip. Though clearly seeing triple at the time, she delights in putting on "the most beautiful coat in the world."

Bob Dylan, a lover of Sedgwick's, was less enamoured of the fur, and of the girl who wore it, when he wrote these lyrics:

Well, I see you got a new boyfriend
You know, I never seen him before
Well, I saw him
Makin' love to you
You forgot to close the garage door
You might think he loves you for your money
But I know what he really loves you for
It's your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Couturier Christian Dior, in his classic The Little Dictionary of Fashion, hinted ever-so-discreetly at the trouble wearing the fur could cause: "to wear leopard you must have a kind of femininity which is a little bit sophisticated. If you are fair and sweet don't wear it."

Today wearing the actual skins is a no-no due to issues of endangerment and anti-cruelty. Faux versions are the default, at prices that make them an option for most everyone. Still, a certain kind of woman tends to wear animal print. Fashion writer Hadley Freeman gets her claws out and rips: "Animal print clothing is even more grating because the message is so embarrassingly obvious and so cringingly stupid. Yeah, we get it, babe -- you're just wild, you are. In the sack, yes, yes. Like on Discovery Channel -- we got it!"

Well, she's got a teeny point here. All the ladies I know who frequently sport jungle spots and stripes do like a prowl and are big into toying with their prey. But so what? They're also great company, and a helluva a lot more fun to hang out with than their more tasteful counterparts in a pastel twin-set and pearls.

And not every woman wears feline print solely to catch some game of her own. One of my heroines is Georgie White, an adventuress who became the first person to run white-water rafting in the Grand Canyon as a commercial business. Her style signature was a leopard-skin swimsuit--not because she was looking to get lucky on the river (which, considering, she probably had to beat them off with a paddle), but because the spots "disguised the oil stains" from the boat! Great company, for sure.

What Fresh Heel is This?

OK, back at the desk after a week in fresh mountain air. Thanks to the childrens' slavish devotion to their DS, I was able to use the flight time to sink into the glossy depths of my own drug of choice, the fashion magazines. Having more time than usual to contemplate the front-of-the-book ads only reinforced how deeply silly, and out-of-touch, the coming season will be. This is nowhere more evident than at the ground floor level--the shoes.

Much to blame: last year's Balenciaga's gladiator sandals-cum-shin-guards, and Prada's (admittedly pretty) piranha-plant heels. These set dizzying heights for fellow designers to match, which they have met this year with stilt-like heels and even more outlandish design.

Take, for example, the footgear offered by Yves Saint Laurent. It's been described as "iconic" in several places, which is apparently code for hideously expensive and essentially unwearable. What was the genesis of the design? I've gotten a stiletto stuck in a grate more times than I can count. This seems a nightmarish extension where the entire foot gets embedded, and the grate somehow vacuum-molds around it. More likely--the shoe was designed using a computer-aided grid; some smartyboots thought it looked cool without a structural skin, and voila, your feet are trussed like a round of beef ready to roast (and blister in an unusually decorative way, if you're walking much farther than a couple yards).

The photo actually makes me laugh. If the poor model took two steps to the left or right, the sticks, burrs and sand of the Hollywood Hills would get so deeply embedded in the latticework that the shoe would look less like a sleekly modernistic structure than beaver's dam.

Now on to even more egregious little numbers from Dior. At first, the heels seem similarly architectural, though in this case more Frank Gehry than modernist grid. But look closer (click on the picture) and you discover that the heels actually take a human form. Like the female caryatids at the Acropolis acting as columns for a pediment, these little figures support the superstructure of Giselle Bundchen.

The problem? With their pendulous breasts, ripe stomachs and ample backsides, the figures harken to the primitive, fertility-goddess sculpture most commonly associated with sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Hard on the heels of an outcry over the lack of non-European models on the catwalks and fashion-magazine pages, John Galliano has seen fit to put the inarguably Aryan Giselle hard on the heels of a totemic Black figure, a figure which, needless to say, would never pass muster at a high-fashion casting call.

To me, it's emblematic of the deep cluelessness of the fashion establishment. And why, given the option, most women would rather wear flipflops.