Who does not envy ladies their imperviousness to fashion?

Not long ago, admiring a film by Roberto Rossellini (a natural reflex, after all) on Louis XIV, we neglected many things, a hedgehog's strategem, of how to make sharing so few things, last so long. The giblet we reserved for today is only the scandal upon which the entire French state was erected, the curious tendency of males to take an interest in each other's attire. Only the other day, an especially shrewd blogger remarked on the solace of school uniforms, as a means of suppressing this curiosity in favour of others more pressing. Yet if one were but to venture only the most tentative navigation into blogdom, sites of 

extravagant fixation on boyclothes would seem to cast great doubt on the school uniform, for having only deferred a phase of infancy to be gotten past in real time. Now, left to their own, repressed devices, we find that great explosion of interest in men's clothing spilling virtually off the plate of abstract curiosity, into something resembling envy. And it's true, every morning we find dwellings spilling bodies as if born on that very day, and fewer and fewer years before their last excursion on the street. Where might this end?

I give you the latest thing in epaulettes. Does nobody recall the natural shoulder as the sine qua non in deltoid wear? Possibly Thierry Mugler could have been raised in his native Strasbourg to forcefeed geese, but somebody allowed a less humane endeavour to distract him. And now he fits right in, as beltloops fail restraint of flopping ends, and zippers chafe the throat's own claim for space. It isn't so much that something must be done, as that it's been done, to place men in the position of being taken for siblings at a birthday party. And what little treat is this, that I must have?

One has respect for the nervousness of those who observe a naïve tendency toward nakedness in our evidence, but the alter-native grows greatly more disturbing with each passing day. A blog can be a tuning fork, resonating in the key of every vessel on which it lights, or it can adopt the insulation of the female against these variations, by tolerating fashion as an aspect of personal style, fulfilling the individual, perhaps, but modestly eschewing any taint of imitability. The mastery of an original nonsense is threatened only by that chronically haunting sensation, one hasn't a thing to wear. 








Brett Kallio on brick
Boys, San Marino, ca 1955
Clashing with the International Style
Mathias Lauridsen