Dahabian/Getty Images

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So You Want To Look Rich?

So, you want to look rich? Well, you’ve come to the right place. And no, I won’t be peddling any “quiet luxury” nonsense here (barf). I’m here to show you the cheapest way to get the biggest, boldest piece of artwork in your home. Because nothing says “Daddy Warbucks” quite like art that eats an entire wall for breakfast.

“HoOooOoOw does this make meEeeeeEe look riiiiicCccCCh?” you ask. Well, if you’ve ever tried to frame anything in this godforsaken town, you know it’s astronomically expensive. And sure, I respect the craft—cutting glass, sanding wood, fastening a perfect corner joint? Not easy. My wallet, however, does not share the same sentiment and admiration for *~craft~* (one day). Large-scale framing is expensive, so having large-scale art in your home must = wealth. Is this girl math?

Lucky for you, I’m scrappy/good at connecting dots and figured out a workaround that gets you art + a frame for around $200(ish). And when we’re talking large-scale art? That’s not not highway robbery!!!!!!!!

So, here’s a breakdown of exactly what you’re going to do:

Step 1:

Buy this huge-ass frame from IKEA. As someone who has spent far too much time on the hunt for large-scale frames at a kind price, let me tell you, this frame is a godsend.

Step 2:

Head to the National Gallery’s website and dive into their free image archive. I first discovered it in college thanks to my genius art history professor Brantl (miss you, legend). Their open-access archive lets you download high-res images of various works, totally free. Pro Tip: make sure the free image download filter is turned ON.

Feeling overwhelmed by the options? Don’t panic, hun. That’s what I’m here for. Below are some solid search terms and filters to get you started:

Search Terms: Horse Race, Shaker Drawings, Edgar Degas, Flora and Fauna, Alfred Stieglitz, Post Impressionist, Pierre Bonnard, Holger Hanson, Tamarind Institute, Robert Frank, Spanish Southwest, Realist, George Bellows, John Sloan, Abstract Expressionist, Mark Rothko, Kenneth Noland, John Frederick Peto, Realist (Subject>Still Life, Photography (Themes>Motion), Landscape, Painting (Subject>Place Names), Ernst Kirchner, Charles Logasa, Drawing (Subject>Objects), Paul Klee, Walter Griffin, Drawings (Subjects>Flora & Fauna), Index of American Design, Mina Lowery.

Here are some fun ones I found:  [ed. more...]

Step 3 (Edited):

Hit! That! Download! Button! And throw your chosen artwork into Photoshop. Crop it to your frame size (78.75" x 55"), then head to ‘Image Size’ and bump the resolution from 72 to 300 PPI to keep things crisp. Then (important!) grow the artwork by 3 inches, bringing it to 81.75" x 58". That extra bit will help it sit just right and tight in the frame.

Step 4:

Next, head to www.bagofloveuse.com (I’m serious), toggle over to the Fabric & Leather Printing menu, and upload your artwork under the “Print on Fabric” section. You’ll want to input custom dimensions and choose a fabric that prints rich, saturated color with zero shine. I went with the 6.28oz cotton twill and can’t recommend it enough. It has weight, texture, and looks way more expensive than it is. Also, because you added that 3-inch border around your artwork, you can opt for the “uneven scissor cut,” which is free (I swear I’m not usually this cheap).

One note: Bags of Love now caps their print width at 57.09 inches, but since that’s still wider than your frame, you should be fine. You’ll just have to be a bit more precise when snapping it in. Horizontal images still work best, but if you’re feeling bold with a vertical, go for it. You do you.

Step 5:

Time to get that m-effer in the frame! I recommend doing this with a friend (free labor, obviously) because getting the fabric pulled taut and snapped cleanly into the back of the frame is much easier with an extra set of hands. Like most things IKEA, the setup is pretty painless and requires little to no tools.

Step 6:

Honestly, I wish there was more to it, but that’s it. Hang it up and you’re done. You look rich, and now everybody wants to be your friend!

Anyway, without further ado, here are some gorgeous examples of large-scale artworks in homes I love. May they inspire your walls: [ed. more..]

by Juliana Ramirez, Search Terms | Read more:
Images: Andy Williams; John Decker, Green Plums, 1885; Peter Henry Emerson, Marsh Weeds, 1895.

[ed. See also: Everyone’s Moving (thoughtful gifts for new beginnings). Lots of good links.]

The Man in the Midnight-Blue Six-Ply Italian-Milled Wool Suit

The Dream

A fine suit made just for me. From the best fabrics. By the best tailor. Paired with the best bespoke shoes.

A suit that would make me feel at ease, while declaring to others, “Here is a man who feels at ease.” A suit that would be appreciated by the world’s most heartless maître d’. A suit that would see me through the immigration checkpoints of difficult countries. A suit that would convince readers that the man in the author photo has a sense of taste beyond the Brooklyn consensus of plaid shirt and pouf of graying hair.

The suit would serve as the perfect carapace for a personality overly dependent on anxious humor and jaundiced wit, a personality that I have been trying to develop since I saw my lightly mustached punim in the mirror as a pubescent boy and thought, How will I ever find love? The suit would transcend my physicality and bond with my personality directly. It would accompany me through the world’s great salons, the occasional MSNBC appearance, and, most important, the well-compensated talks at far-flung universities. The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.” Finding this perfect suit, made by the most advanced tailor out of superlative fabric, would do nothing less than transform me.

The Body

Before there is a suit, there is a body, and the body is terrible.

First there is my shortness (5 foot 5 and a half, with that “half” doing a lot of work). Being short is fine, but those missing inches are wedded to a narrow-shouldered body of zero distinction. Although I am of Russian and Jewish extraction, the continent whose clothing stores make me feel most at ease is Asia. (I once bought an off-the-rack jacket in Bangkok after the clerk examined me for all of three seconds.) However, this is not exactly an Asian body either, especially when I contrast myself with the natural slimness of most of my Asian friends. Just before my bar mitzvah, I got a set of perfect B-cup knockers and had to squeeze into a “husky” suit to perform the ritual yodeling at the synagogue. But that’s not all. Some hideously mismanaged childhood vaccination in Leningrad created a thick keloid scar running the length of my right shoulder. The shame of having this strange pink welt define one side of me led to a slumped posture favoring my left shoulder. When I finally found people to have sex with me—I had to attend Oberlin to complete the task—my expression upon disrobing resembled that of a dog looking up at his mistress after a bowel movement of hazmat proportions.

Before the Suit

The clothes before the suit were as bad as the body.

I was born in the Soviet Union in 1972 and was quickly dressed in a sailor’s outfit with white tights and sexy little shorts, then given a balalaika to play with for the camera. The fact that Russia now fields one of the world’s most homicidal armies can partially be explained by photos such as this. On other occasions I was forced to wear very tight jogging pants with a cartoon bunny on them, or a thick-striped shirt dripping with medals from battles I had never seen. These outfits did make me feel like I belonged to something—in this case, a failing dictatorship. I left the U.S.S.R. before I could join the Young Pioneers, which would have entailed wearing a red tie at a tender age, while prancing about and shouting exuberant slogans such as “I am always ready!” (...)

Growing Up Tasteless

High school found me trying to blend in with a suburban outlay of clothes that my now middle-class family could finally afford. These were surfer T-shirts from Ocean Pacific and other brands that suburbanites who survived the 1980s might remember: Generra, Aéropostale, Unionbay. Unfortunately, I did not go to high school in Benetton Bay, Long Island, but in Manhattan, where these shirts were immediately a joke. (This would become a pattern. By the time I figure something out fashion-wise, I’m already two steps behind.) At a high-school job, my boss bought me a set of colorful Miami Vice–style shirts and jackets. These proved ridiculous at Oberlin, where dressing in janitor uniforms from thrift shops was considered the height of style. (Ironically, I had worked as a janitor during the summer, at the same nuclear laboratory that employed my father.)

After college, I fell in with a crowd of artsy, ketamine-addicted hipsters, and together we managed to gentrify several Brooklyn neighborhoods during the late ’90s. One of my friends, who was especially fashion-conscious, began to dress me at the high-priced secondhand emporium Screaming Mimis. The clothes she told me to buy were very itchy, mostly Orlon and Dacron items from ’70s brands such as Triumph of California, but these tight uniforms, like their Soviet predecessors, made me feel like I was playing a part in a grander opera, while also serving as a form of punishment. On nervous dates, I would sometimes have to run to the bathroom to try to angle my acrylic armpits under the dryer.

Because I was a writer who worked in bed, I mostly did not need a suit, although when I got married, in 2012, I went down to Paul Smith to get a herringbone number that I thought was just fine, if not terribly exciting. I bought a J.Crew tuxedo for black-tie benefits. Once, I did a reading sponsored by Prada and was given a nice gray jacket, pants, and a pair of blue suede shoes as compensation. Come to think of it, there was also a scarf. As a final note, I will say that I am incredibly cheap and that shopping for clothes has always raised my blood pressure. Leaving Screaming Mimis after spending more than $500 would always end in me getting terribly drunk to punish myself for the money I had blown on such a frivolous pursuit.

The Dream Begins

When I reached the age of 50, mildly prosperous and with a small family, I met a man named Mark Cho. We discovered each other because of a mutual love of wristwatches (a costly middle-aged hobby I had recently acquired), and because I knew about his classic-menswear store, the Armoury, with locations in New York and Hong Kong. The Armoury has been called “a clubhouse for menswear nerds”; if you’re looking for, say, a cashmere waistcoat in “brown sugar,” you have found your home. I had even given one of the characters in my latest novel, a dandy from a prominent Korean chaebol family, an article of clothing from that store to wear.

We met for dinner at Union Square Cafe, and I liked him (and his clothes) immediately. Mark was almost always dressed in a jacket and tie, and would often sport a vest along with spectacles made of some improbable metal. What I loved about him was how comfortable he appeared in his medley of classical attire, and how, despite the fact that all of his garments had been chosen with precision, he gave the impression that he had spent very little time and thought on which breathable fabrics to settle over his trim body. He looked like he was, to use my initial formulation, at ease.

Later, I would learn that this whole look could be summarized by the Italian word sprezzatura, or “studied carelessness,” and later still I learned of something that the Japanese had discovered and refined: “Ivy style,” which is basically studied carelessness goes to Dartmouth. For the time being, I knew that I liked what I saw, that my inner lonely immigrant—the one who is always trying to find a uniform that will help me fit in—was intrigued. Mark once gave me an Armoury safari jacket, the very same one worn by the character in my novel, and its light, unflappable linen proved perfect for my summer readings around Germany and Switzerland that year. Everywhere from starchy Zurich to drunken Cologne to cool-as-fuck Berlin, the jacket would pop out of a suitcase and unwrinkle itself in seconds, yet it was also stylish and seemingly impervious to the odors of my non-Teutonic body. It was, to use Hemingway-esque prose, damn well perfect, and I immediately knew I wanted more.

I had lived in Italy in my 30s and met many aristocrats there. Those bastards had sprezzatura to burn, but when I asked them the make of their suits and jackets, they would smile and tell me it was the work of a single tailor down in Naples or up in Milan. Ah, I would say to myself, so that’s how it is. Given my outlook on life, owning a bespoke suit was not an outcome I was predestined for. The Prada jacket I had been given, which fit me well enough, was the most that my Calvinist God would ever grant me.

But over more martinis and onglets au poivre with Mark, I began to understand the parameters of a fine bespoke suit and its accessories: bespoke shirts and bespoke shoes. I also began to timidly ask questions of a financial nature and learned that the price of owning such a wardrobe approached and then exceeded $10,000. I did not want to pay this kind of entry fee. Given my own family’s experience in fleeing a declining superpower, I try to have money saved with which to escape across the border. Unlike watches, a suit could not be resold in Montreal or Melbourne.The suit would be nothing less than an extension of myself; it would be a valet preceding me into the room, announcing with a light continental accent, “Mr. Gary and his suit are here now.”

A brief but generative conversation with my editors at this magazine soon paved the way for my dream to become possible. At a particularly unsober dinner with a visiting Japanese watchmaker, I whispered to Mark the extent of my desires. Yes, it would take a lot of work, a lot of research, and possibly travel to two other continents. But it could be done. At the right expense, with the most elegant and sturdy of Italian-milled fabrics, and with the greatest of Japanese tailors, a superior suit could be made for anyone, even for me. (...)

Yamamoto-San Arrives

On May 24 of the fateful year 2024, a plane from Tokyo landed in New York City, carrying one of the most meticulously attired men in existence. His name is Yuhei Yamamoto, and he is the preeminent representative of Ivy style, that mode of dress that Americans appreciate yet only the Japanese fully understand.

The British suit, in all its City of London severity, morphed into different shapes around the world. The Italians made particularly interesting work of it. The Milanese suit was the most British-like, but as you traveled farther down the boot to Florence, Rome, and Naples, the tailors became more freehanded; the colors and fit became jauntier and more Mediterranean, more appreciative of bodies defined by crooked lines and curves and exploded by carbohydrates. Meanwhile, in America, as always, we went to work. The suit became a uniform that stressed the commonality and goodness of Protestant labor and church attendance without any further embellishments. It came to be known as the “sack suit.” In the 1950s, Brooks Brothers furthered this concept with an almost subversively casual look: a jacket with natural-width shoulders that hung straight from the body, and plain-front trousers. This, along with other American touches, such as denim, became the basis for Ivy-style clothes that the Japanese of the ’60s made into a national obsession, and that culminated in a wholly different approach to workwear, office wear, and leisure wear. Today, you can’t go into a Uniqlo without seeing the aftereffects of Japanese experimentation with and perfection of our “Work hard, pray hard” wardrobe ethos.

I met Yamamoto-san at the Upper East Side branch of Mark Cho’s Armoury empire. The moment I first saw him, I was scared. No one could be this well-dressed. No one could be so secure in a tan three-piece seersucker suit that didn’t so much hang from his broad shoulders as hover around them in expectation. No one’s brown silk tie could so well match his brown polka-dot pocket square and the thick wedge of only slightly graying hair floating above his perfectly chiseled face. This man was going to make a suit for me? I was not worthy.

Yamamoto-san examined me briefly and said, “Sack suit.”

by Gary Shteyngart, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Leung Man Hei and Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

René Lalique, Winged Maiden Moonstone Enamel Brooch

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Texas vs. Virginia: Cover Your Breast

School officials in one part of the Lone Star State are no fans of the lone nipple on the Virginia state flag, so they have nixed an online lesson that included a picture of the banner.

Virginia’s flag and state seal feature Virtus, the Roman goddess of virtue, whose name suggests a buttoned-down gal but whose toga tells another story — draped so low on her left that one breast is fully out there for God Almighty and everybody else to see.

Some people call that art. The Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, in fast-growing territory west of Houston, calls it “frontal nudity” — something banned from its elementary school materials. (...)

Lamar’s school board voted 5-1 in November to update its library materials policy, which included adding this provision: “No material in elementary school libraries shall include visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity.” The Virginia lesson disappeared within days... (...)

“We have unlocked a new level of dystopian, book-banning, and censorship hell in Texas,” the Texas Freedom to Read Project declared on its website. (...)

Virtus has graced the state seal since it was created in 1776 and the state flag since 1861, with a few makeovers over the years changing the figure’s appearance. She started out fully clothed but her left breast has been exposed for more than a century.

A case of early 20th-century gender confusion led to the breast baring in the first place. In 1901, Secretary of the Commonwealth D.Q. Eggleston complained that Virtus “looked more like a man than a woman and wanted to correct it. He instructed designers to add the breast to clarify her sex,” the Virginian-Pilot reported in a 2023 deep dive into how Virginia wound up with the only state flag boasting an exposed nipple.

Bare breast aside, Virtus is a fighter, not a lover. She holds a spear and sword, one foot planted atop a defeated tyrant sprawled on the ground. Instead of a come-hither look she telegraphs the state motto: “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which means “Thus Always to Tyrants.”

by Laura Vozzella, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Minh Connors/Washington Post

[ed. C'mon. Who's against seeing a nipple now and then. Texans? Really?]

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What’s More Vacuous Than An Endless Vacuum?

Well, I watched every second of the buildup, flight and aftermath of the first Blue Origin all-female space trip. You’ve heard of one small step for man? This was one giant leap backwards for womankind. I’m kidding, I’m kidding! What could be more empowering or something than watching Lauren Sánchez make going to space sound like brunch with the girrrrrls. Sally Ride could never.

Anyway, if you missed this, Jeff Bezos’s fiancee took an 11-minute trip to the edge of space on one of his Blue Origin craft on Monday, alongside some all-female passengers – sorry, “crew” – who included CBS anchor Gayle King and pop star Katy Perry. So yes: the Woman’s World video is no longer the most plastic feminist thing Katy’s done.

Given the mixture of freebie rides and seats sold to the super-rich, the thing people always say about Blue Origin tickets is that prices range from zero to $28m dollars. A bit like a seat on a RyanAir flight to Tallinn. But these spots were all personally gifted by Bezos and Sánchez because this was an Important Mission. Which also meant the whole thing was exclusively documented by Blue Origin’s Pravda-like web channel. Here, the anchors and reporters kept explaining that – unlike when men went to space in the past – this mission was all about emotions. But look, it’s great that we’re valorising emotions above all things, because it gives me permission to say how very much I hated this entire, hilariously vacuous spectacle.

Lauren already bills herself as a children’s author, helicopter pilot, journalist and philanthropist, and kept being told she was adding “astronaut” to the world’s longest multi-hyphenate. How did she find the trip? “I don’t really have the words for this, like … ?” OK but can you at least try? “I can’t put it into words but I looked out the window and we got to see the moon.”

Back at the viewing platform in the West Texas desert, commentary was provided by, among others, Kris Jenner and a bottom-tier Kardashian (Khloé). Khloé glossed the moment of landing with the words: “it’s literally so hard to explain right now”. Other insights? “There’s one woman whose grandfather is back there and he is 92 and they didn’t even have transportation back then.” I mean, the guy was literally pre-horse. Historic scenes.

Amid extremely stiff competition, the most hardcore gibberish emanated from Perry, who served up an entire word salad bar involving the “feminine divine” and being “super-connected to love”. “It’s about making space for future woman,” she explained. “It’s about taking up space.” Imagine going to actual space and talking instead about therapy-speak “space”. When Buzz Aldrin beheld the surface of the moon, he described it as “magnificent desolation”. Honestly, if he wanted to feel desolation he could have just tuned into this corner of West Texas on Monday afternoon. When a Stem advocate came for her post-flight interview, we got to see the apparently lobotomised reporter shriek: “How do you look perfect after just going to space?!”

In truth, how the women looked had been an overwhelming part of the buildup, and by their own design. In an Elle magazine joint interview with the passengers, Lauren showed off the hot space suits she’d personally commissioned, inquiring rhetorically: “Who would not get glam before the flight?” “Space is going to finally be glam,” agreed Perry. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” A former Nasa rocket scientist said: “I also wanted to test out my hair and make sure that it was OK. So I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good – took it for a dry run.” Still want more? Because there was SO much of it. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!” explained Lauren. “I think it’s so important for people to see us like that,” explained a civil rights activist. “This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion. We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick.”

Ooof. I always thought space travel was futuristic, but this was the first time it came off as travelling back in time, in this case using their little capsule to take us back to the most ludicrous inanities of 2010s girlboss feminism.

by Marina Hyde, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Can't even generate the energy to cringe. Everything is so sad.]

Bad Taste or No Taste?

Bad taste? Balenciaga coffee cup bag is luxury fashion’s latest everyday flaunt (The Guardian)

Images:Diggzy/Backgrid, Edward Berthelot, Jacopo Raule/Getty Images

[ed. Almost feel sorry for them. Fashion for late-stage capitalism. It must take a lot of effort just to keep those trend antennas up (no matter how ridiculous, but what else do they have to do?). Fortunately, there's something more hopeful on the horizon:]

The real star of The White Lotus? Natural teeth (Harper's Bazaar). [See also: How this 'White Lotus' star's teeth stole the show — and sparked a reckoning (MSNBC).]

Bad Influence

Alyssa Sheil has what some would consider a dream job: she shops online for a living. Every day, an Amazon delivery truck pulls up to her home to drop off jewelry, handbags, desk chairs, fake plants, and transparent birdhouses that allow you to see the inhabitants make a home inside. So many packages arrive in a week that she doesn’t know the exact number when I ask.

Some of these items suck. The ones that don’t might eventually make it into one of Sheil’s videos, shared to her more than 430,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram with titles like “Amazon summer shoe haul,” “ASMR Amazon vacay jewelry unboxing,” and “Amazon kitchen finds I’m obsessed with.” (...)

Sheil runs what is essentially a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people to buy things they often don’t really need. Every time someone purchases something using her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. Shopping influencers like her have figured out how to build a career off someone else’s impulse buys. (...)

But all of this — the videos, the big house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is currently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas lawsuit in which she is being sued for damages that could reach into the millions. (...)

The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis.

Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set. (...)

In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheil’s uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Gifford’s own earnings. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos.

Walking through the space, I can’t help but recognize a few furniture items that I also saw in Sheil’s home, which I had visited the day before: cream bouclé stools that double as storage; a curved full-length mirror propped up in the corner; a set of circular nesting tables that appear often in both her and Sheil’s videos.

In another world, these two parallel lives could go on indefinitely, accented by the same cream furniture, without crossing paths. But the same systems that make the careers of Sheil and Gifford possible — fine-tuned recommendation algorithms, affiliate marketing, fast fashion and cheap home goods — are now entangling them in a legal battle around ownership, style, and the creator industry.

So, who influenced whom?

In a complaint filed in the Western District of Texas this spring, Gifford accuses Sheil of “willful, intentional, and purposeful” copyright infringement in dozens of posts across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Gifford says there’s been a pattern of copying: days or weeks after she would share photos or videos promoting an Amazon product, Sheil shared her own content doing the same thing. In dozens of cases, Gifford says the angle, tone, or the text on Sheil’s posts ripped off hers. Exhibits submitted in court include nearly 70 pages of side-by-side screenshots collected by Gifford comparing her social media posts, personal website, and other platforms where she says Sheil copied her. In one instance, Gifford promoted gold earrings in the shape of a bow, modeling them by gently swooping her hair back to show them off. Just a few days later, Sheil posted her own photos of the same earrings, similarly photographed. In another example submitted to the court, Gifford unboxes and tries on a white two-piece top and short set; a few weeks later, Sheil did the same. The pattern continued for around a year, Gifford alleges.

“It’s obviously very frustrating because I put a lot of time and effort into my business. I work very hard at what I do, and I love what I do,” Gifford says. “It felt like somebody took a piece of my business and is profiting off of it as their own.”

Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negotiate with enormous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected. When things go wrong for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their entire existence. Influencers may turn on other influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is a direct result of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the one between Gifford and Sheil, in other words, was a long time coming. (...)

Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s specific videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys write in a response filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”

Her response to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.

Sheil and Gifford have a similar online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s often set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens.

They are what the internet calls “clean girls.”

The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — one that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most famous clean girl is perhaps Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is a fairly obvious slippery slope when you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially when components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not enough to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend a lot of time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align exactly with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational. (...)

Amazon influencers like Gifford and Sheil don’t make content just to inspire people. They post on TikTok and Instagram to redirect audiences back to Amazon. In some ways, it is the most ruthless version of influencer marketing, where every item appearing onscreen is an opportunity for micro-earnings. Amazon declined to provide data on the number of people in its influencer program or how much money the company has paid out. That the company ultimately profiting from the sale is one of the largest retailers in the world makes the whole enterprise a bit off-putting — an empire built on fast, largely low-quality products that look great in photos but come from faceless companies that manufacture mountains of crap, much of which will eventually end up in a landfill. These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs (which sold for $460,000 at auction, according to Christie’s); they are $800 decent-looking dupes that give the impression of luxury. If the argument is that Sheil is duplicating Gifford’s existence, there’s something to be said about the fact that the items both of them promote are also imitations of someone else’s work. (...)

“The really hard part for the plaintiffs in this case is to prove that in these photos and videos there is something protectable by copyright — that there is creativity going on here that was copied,” says Blake Reid, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. The photos in question are relatively banal: images of a figure wearing generic clothing; a shot of a desk with a chair tucked in halfway. Sheil’s lawyers argue that the imagery Gifford claims was ripped off is actually just standard fare for influencer content that reappears again and again and which nobody can lay claim to — it’s the Amazon haul equivalent of swinging saloon doors in a country Western film, Reid explains. (...)

Reid says the outcome of Gifford’s lawsuit will depend on whether a judge or jury takes influencer content seriously as a creative endeavor. On one hand, it could be framed as “low-value commercial content” that all looks the same, in which case Gifford’s lawsuit could be seen as an attempt to lay claim to a template of mass-produced marketing — something that copyright law isn’t really for. But a judge might see influencer content as having enough creative weight to merit bringing copyright law into the picture.

“It depends a lot on what judge lands this, how they perceive it, [and] how it gets framed in the litigation,” he says.

“This is federal law with giant amounts of money on the line, coming in and regulating these nascent creative spaces where the rules and the social norms are just getting hashed out,” Reid says. “And then somebody’s like, ‘How about we bring this giant sledgehammer of copyright law in to sort it all out?’”

by Mia Sato, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Montinique Monroe and Liam James Doyle
[ed. Interesting legals, inane profession, obnoxious Amazon incentives. See also: This Ocean Wave Has Rights (legal protection for nature - Nautilus). ]

Sissel Tolaas: NOEA perfume (2004)
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[ed. Not at Walmart. Currently.]

Utah Hair

Everyone's Talking About Utah Hair (WSJ)

Image: Disney

[ed. Not me, but apparently everyone else :]

“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a new reality TV series, is full of juicy storylines involving fraying friendships, divorce and dating. But for all the drama the show’s eight young stars face, nothing is sparking more fan conversation than their hair.

“Utah curls,” as they’ve been dubbed on social media, have received outsize attention after being featured front and center in the Hulu show, which premiered in September. The hairstyle is a cascade of waist-length, thick locks, curled into beach waves with straight ends. In the show, where the characters juggle the demands of faith, family and relationships, fans have noticed that nearly every cast member wears their hair in an identical style. 

[ed. See also: The One Thing About TV Hairstyles You’ve Probably Never Noticed (Fashion).]

The Joy of Clutter

In 1990, a young Japanese photographer named Kyoichi Tsuzuki began capturing a rarely seen view of domestic life in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Over three years, he visited hundreds of Tokyo apartments, photographing the living spaces of friends, acquaintances and strangers. These images, eventually published in Tokyo Style (1993), looked startlingly unlike the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki’s photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.

In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.

In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.

Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese. (...)

All of this paved the way for Marie Kondo, whose Jinsei wo Tokimeku Katazuke no Maho (‘Tidying Magic to Make Your Life Shine’) arrived in 2011. She singled out Tatsumi by name in the first chapter, and unabashedly wove Shintō spiritual traditions into her method. The English translation, retitled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014), came out in the US three years later. The subtitle is telling: now decluttering was no longer a form of housework but an Art, with a capital A, echoing austere pastimes such as inkbrush-painting or the tea ceremony. (...)

There was just one issue. In the hyperconsumer societies of Japan and the West, minimalism is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, let alone maintain over the long term. If it were easy, we wouldn’t regard gurus like Kondo with such awe, nor would we be moved by the austerity of Zen temples or Shintō shrines. They exist as a counterpoint to our mundane lives. And think back to Tsuzuki’s pictures of Tokyo homes. They hinted, even insisted, that a life surrounded by stuff wasn’t unusual or pathological. It could be invigorating, even nourishing. If the people in Tsuzuki’s anti-tidying manifesto could make it work, was clutter really the problem? (...)

Yet as Japan provides a roadmap to simplicity, it also gives us a vision of clutter. The nation may or may not possess the magic of tidying up, but its untidy spaces can be magical in their own rights. There is a dreary sameness to so much of modern culture, rough edges smoothed into comfortable averages by the power of market research and algorithms. It’s why the movies we watch are sequels of sequels, or the music we listen to feels like samples of samples, or the fashions we wear turn out to be copies of copies.

Cosily curated Japanese clutter-spaces are different. There is a meticulousness to the best of them that is on a par with the mental effort poured into simplifying something: a deliberate aesthetic decision to add, rather than subtract – sometimes mindfully, sometimes unconsciously, but always, always individually. Clutter offers an antidote to the stupefying standardisation of so much of modern life.

by Matt Alt, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Lee Chapman

Chappell Roan’s makeup artist breaks down her VMAs look (CNN)

Image: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

[ed. See also: The best red carpet looks from MTV’s Video Music Awards 2024 (CNN). Yikes, who are these people?]

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The Knotty Death of the Necktie

Not long ago, on a Times podcast, Paul Krugman breezily announced (and if we can’t trust Paul Krugman in a breezy mood, whom can we trust?) that, though it’s hard to summarize the economic consequences of the pandemic with certainty, one sure thing is that it killed off ties. He meant not the strong social ties beloved of psychologists, nor the weak ties beloved of sociologists, nor even the railroad ties that once unified a nation. No, he meant, simply, neckties—the long, colored bands of fabric that men once tied around their collars before going to work or out to dinner or, really, to any kind of semi-formal occasion. Zoom meetings and remote work had sealed their fate, and Krugman gave no assurance that they would ever come back.

Actual facts—and that near-relation of actual facts, widely distributed images—seem to confirm this view. Between 1995 and 2008, necktie sales plummeted from more than a billion dollars to less than seven hundred million, and, if a fashion historian on NPR is to be believed (and if you can’t believe NPR . . . ), ties are now “reserved for the most formal events—for weddings, for graduations, job interviews.” Post-pandemic, there is no sign of a necktie recovery: a now famous photograph from the 2022 G-7 summit shows the group’s leaders, seven men, all in open collars, making them look weirdly ready for a slightly senescent remake of “The Hangover.” As surely as the famous, supposedly hatless Inauguration of John F. Kennedy was said to have been the end of the hat, and Clark Gable’s bare chest in “It Happened One Night” was said to have been the end of the undershirt, the pandemic has been the end of the necktie.

Such truths are always at best half-truths. Sudden appearances and disappearances tend to reflect deeper trends, and, when something ends abruptly, it often means it was already ending, slowly. (Even the dinosaurs, a current line of thinking now runs, were extinguished by that asteroid only after having been diminished for millennia by volcanoes.) In “Hatless Jack,” a fine and entertaining book published several years ago, the Chicago newspaperman Neil Steinberg demonstrated that the tale of Kennedy’s killing off the hat was wildly overstated. The hat had been on its way out for a while, and Jack’s hatless Inauguration wasn’t, in any case, actually hatless: he wore a top hat on his way to the ceremony but removed it before making his remarks. Doubtless the same was true of the undershirt that Gable didn’t have on. They were already starting to feel like encumbrances, which might explain why Gable didn’t wear one. And so with the necktie. Already diminishing in ubiquity by the Obama years, it needed only a single strong push to fall into the abyss. (...)

What we now think of as the necktie—cut on the bias, made of three or four pieces of fabric, and faced with a lining—was actually a fairly recent, and local, invention, that of a New York schmatte tradesman named Jesse Langsdorf. What we call “ties” generically are, specifically, Langsdorf ties.

The Langsdorf necktie that emerged early in the twentieth century was, to be sure, hideously uncomfortable. (It is no accident that a necktie party was a grotesque nickname for a hanging.) Their constriction made them perhaps the masculine counterpart of the yet more uncomfortable fashion regime—high heels—forced upon women. (...)

Examine any now unused collection of ties, and you will find that they are full of tightly compressed meanings—once instantly significant to the spectator of the time and still occultly visible now. Not only the specific meanings of club membership but also the broader semiotics of style. In any vintage closet, there are likely to be knitted neckties that still reside within the eighties style of “American Gigolo”—which, believe it or not, helped bring Armani to America. The knit tie meant Italy, sports cars, daring, and a slight edge of the criminal. There are probably ties from Liberty of London—beautiful, flowered-print ties whose aesthetic ultimately derives from the Arts and Crafts movement, with its insistence on making the surfaces of modern life as intricate and complexly ornamental as a medieval tapestry or Pre-Raphaelite painting. If the closet is old enough, its ties will show a whole social history of the pallid fifties turning into the ambivalent sixties turning into the florid seventies. The New Yorker cartoonist Charles Saxon captured these transitions as they occurred, in a career that can be seen as a dazzling study of ties and their meanings. The neatly knotted ties of Cheeveresque commuters give way in the early seventies to the ever-broadening ties of advertising men, flags they waved to show off their desire to simultaneously woo the counterculture and keep out of it.

The tie could sometimes get so compressed in its significance as to lose its witty, stealthy character and become overly and unambiguously “loaded.” There is no better story of suicide-by-semiotics than that of the rise and death of the bow tie, which, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, became so single-mindedly knotted up with neoconservatism, in the estimable hands of George Will, that to wear one was to declare oneself a youngish fogy, a reader of the National Review, and a skeptic of big government. The wider shores of bow-tie-dom—the dashing, jaunty, self-mocking P. G. Wodehouse side of them—receded, and were lost. It became impossible to wear a bow tie and vote Democratic. (...)

Of course, the human appetite for display will never end, and, so, as the concentrated symbolism of the necktie evaporates, the rest of our clothes must carry its messages. The purposes of Warburgian pattern have now spread everywhere: to the cut of your jogging pants and the choice of your sneakers and, well, the cock of your snook. Where once the necktie blazoned out a specific identity from the general background of tailored gray, now everything counts. The most obvious successor garment to the necktie is the baseball cap, which declares its owner’s identity and affiliation not with some tantalizing occult pattern but the painful unsubtlety of actual text—the club named on the cap.

by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Jaedoo Lee

[ed. Cock of your snook? Look it up yourself, I'm not doing it for you.] 

Randoseru: The Book Bag That Binds Japanese Society

In Japan, cultural expectations are repeatedly drilled into children at school and at home, with peer pressure playing as powerful a role as any particular authority or law. On the surface, at least, that can help Japanese society run smoothly.

During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, the government never mandated masks or lockdowns, yet the majority of residents wore face coverings in public and refrained from going out to crowded venues. Japanese tend to stand quietly in lines, obey traffic signals and clean up after themselves during sports and other events because they have been trained from kindergarten to do so.

Carrying the bulky randoseru to school is “not even a rule imposed by anyone but a rule that everyone is upholding together,” said Shoko Fukushima, associate professor of education administration at the Chiba Institute of Technology.

On the first day of school this spring — the Japanese school year starts in April — flocks of eager first graders and their parents arrived for an entrance ceremony at Kitasuna Elementary School in the Koto neighborhood of eastern Tokyo.

Seeking to capture an iconic moment mirrored across generations of Japanese family photo albums, the children, almost all of them carrying randoseru, lined up with their parents to pose for pictures in front of the school gate.

“An overwhelming majority of the children choose randoseru, and our generation used randoseru,” said Sarii Akimoto, whose son, Kotaro, 6, had selected a camel-colored backpack. “So we thought it would be nice.”

Traditionally, the uniformity was even more pronounced, with boys carrying black randoseru and girls carrying red ones. In recent years, growing discussion of diversity and individuality has prompted retailers to offer the backpacks in a rainbow of colors and with some distinctive details like embroidered cartoon characters, animals or flowers, or inside liners made from different fabrics.

Still, a majority of boys today carry black randoseru, although lavender has overtaken red in popularity among girls, according to the Randoseru Association. And aside from the color variations and an increased capacity to accommodate more textbooks and digital tablets, the shape and structure of the bags have remained remarkably consistent over decades.

The near totemic status of the randoseru dates back to the 19th century, during the Meiji era, when Japan transitioned from an isolated feudal kingdom to a modern nation navigating a new relationship with the outside world. The educational system helped unify a network of independent fiefs — with their own customs — into a single nation with a shared culture.

Schools inculcated the idea that “everyone is the same, everyone is family,” said Ittoku Tomano, an associate professor of philosophy and education at Kumamoto University.

In 1885, Gakushuin, a school that educates Japan’s imperial family, designated as its official school bag a hands-free model that resembled a military backpack from the Netherlands known as the ransel. From there, historians say, the randoseru quickly became Japan’s ubiquitous marker of childhood identity. (...)

Grandparents often buy the randoseru as a commemorative gift. The leather versions can be quite expensive, with an average price of around 60,000 yen, or $380.

Shopping for the randoseru is a ritual that starts as early as a year before a child enters first grade.

At Tsuchiya Kaban, a nearly 60-year-old randoseru manufacturer in eastern Tokyo, families make appointments for their children to try on different-colored models in a showroom before placing orders to be fulfilled at the attached factory. Each bag is assembled from six main parts and takes about a month to put together. (...)

Each Tsuchiya Kaban bag comes with a six-year guarantee on the assumption that most students will use their randoseru throughout elementary school. As a memento, some children choose to turn their used bags into wallets or cases for train passes once they graduate.

In recent years, some parents and children’s advocates have complained that the bags are too burdensome for the youngest children. Randoseru can cover half of the body of a typical first grader. Even unloaded, the average bag weighs about three pounds.

Most schools do not have personal lockers for students or much desk storage space, so students frequently carry textbooks and school supplies back and forth from home. And in a culture that puts a high value on hard work, patience, perseverance and endurance, the movement to relieve children of the randoseru burden hasn’t gotten very far.

“Those who have no heart say that ‘recent children are weak; back in our day we carried around those heavy bags,’” said Ms. Fukushima, the education professor.

A few manufacturers have developed alternatives that retain the randoseru shape while using lighter materials like nylon. But these have been slow to gain traction. (...)

At the end of the day, Kaho Minami, 11, a sixth grader with a deep-red randoseru stitched with embroidered flowers that she had carried throughout elementary school, said she never yearned for any other kind of bag. “Because everyone wears a randoseru,” she said, “I think it is a good thing.”

by Motoko Rich, Hisako Ueno, and Kiuko Notoya, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Noriko Hayashi
[ed. Back in the day in Hawaii when I was in grade school, everybody had plastic Pan Am or Hawaiian Airlines bags - sqaure, two handles, side logo (where did we get them from?). Either that, or boys would just carry their books sidearm and girls would clutch them to their chests (always - you never wanted to be caught doing the opposite!).]

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End Game: From Taylor Swift to Stephen Tennant

You don’t have to have attended Taylor Swift’s Eras tour yourself to be aware of it. After 18 months, it has become an inescapable international juggernaut, with documented effects on economies, infrastructure and policy. Perhaps the closest historical parallel is the Great Exhibition of 1851 – except, while that promised “the works of industry of all nations”, this spectacle showcases only those of Taylor Alison Swift.

That this phenomenon boils down to just one woman is staggering, a reflection of both Swift’s once-in-a-generation talent and the direct relationship she has forged with her fans. I started listening to her in 2011, sucked in by the girlish fantasy of Love Story, and never looked back. Many of my closest friendships were built on a shared appreciation: proof of the virtuous cycle started by Swift’s honest expression and vulnerability.

At the same time, I’ve never felt so alienated by my favourite artist. This year I have felt not so much a Swiftie as a conscript, roped into some broader project of streaming, spending and posting so as to cement and grow her cultural dominance – though it’s hard to imagine who, now, could possibly dislodge her.

Barclays estimated that the average Eras tour attender spent nearly £850 on tickets, travel, accommodation and expenses, including £79 on official merchandise. More than one city playing host to the tour has been renamed in her honour. The Beatles joked about being bigger than Jesus, but Swift really is bigger than music. She is spoken about in terms more commonly used for land masses, like GDP or earthquake magnitude.

The cultural tide behind Swift is so sweeping and powerful that I’ve struggled to hang on to my fandom, and the personal relationship to her music that’s always underpinned it. This may sound like I’m holding Swift’s success against her, that I liked her better before she got big (though, it bears repeating, no pop star has ever been this big). But I’ve been perturbed by signs that Swift is not just being overexposed, but actively tightening her grip on the spotlight.

Eras is already the highest grossing tour in history, generating $1bn last year and a further $261m from the concert film in cinemas. Yet Swift hasn’t stopped hustling, even after more than 100 sold-out shows. (...)

Swift is the biggest celebrity in the world and a billionaire, on track to make $2bn by Eras’ end. The suggestion that she is somehow dissatisfied or threatened is offputting, and raises very human questions about her motivation. Even five-star reviews of the tour have wondered about Swift’s endgame, where she possibly goes from here. (...)

But without any more insight into what is driving her, you’re left to assume it’s just money, or maybe revenge. Neither makes me feel more connected to her as an artist. Her songwriting may be personal, but seeing Swift perform I felt as though I was being engaged in a brand activation by a global behemoth like Nike or Apple, delivering focus-group-tested excellence. Even the friendship bracelets being hawked seemed less like a groundswell of fan camaraderie than brisk, industrial trade.

My uneasy feelings were later articulated by the culture writer Jonah Weiner, describing the insidious “co-opting of ‘community’ into a sales strategy”. Weiner was talking about luxury fashion brands, and the exploitation we are willing to overlook to feel part of a club. But his point about how our human desire for connection and belonging is hijacked and reduced by corporate interests seemed to me an apt description of the Eras tour, the economy that’s sprung up around it and our enthusiasm to participate in it.

The show’s supposed community is built on a basis of economic productivity; like a queue for a new Apple product or a sneaker, it “contains the possibility for meaningful interpersonal connection only in spite of itself,” Weiner writes. Not only that, it is actively at odds with building relationships and communities that might nourish us for the long term. 

by Elle Hunt, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Ennio Leanza/EPA

[ed. From the marketing/branding/money-making juggernaut of the Eras Tour, to an overwrought/tortured argument in favor of keeping up with new fashion styles, to a short essay describing one of the gayest sissies in modern history (Stephan Tennant - The Man Who Stayed in Bed). All in three easy jumps! What a world. By the way, 1950 feature film referenced in the second fashion link, Munekata Sisters, by Yasujirō Ozu is in fact a knock off of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters (excellent):]

***

SERIOUS PLEASURES The Life of Stephen Tennant. By Philip Hoare. Illustrated. 463 pp. New York: Hamish Hamilton/Viking. $29.95.

In 1910, when Stephen Tennant was 4 years old, he ran through the gardens of his family's Wiltshire estate, Wilsford Manor, and was literally stopped in his tracks when he came face to face with the beauty of the "blossom of a pansy." Thirty years later, so precious and high-strung that he sometimes took to his bed for months at a time, he was coaxed outside by a friend for a ride in the car on the condition that his eyes be bandaged, since passing scenery might make him too "giddy." Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch -- believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.

According to Philip Hoare, the author of "Serious Pleasures," the witty and amazing life story of this great sissy, Cecil Beaton was one of the first to encourage Tennant's eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life -- but doing it with great originality and flamboyance. Completely protected by class, Stephen Tennant couldn't care less what people thought of his finger waves, his Charles James leopard pajamas, his makeup ("I want to have bee-stung lips like Mae Murray") or his dyed hair dusted with gold. Who would dare criticize this "aristocratic privilege," this self-described "fatal gift of beauty"? As The London Daily Express, in 1928, so succinctly summed up Tennant's attitude toward life, "you . . . feel that condescension, indeed, can go no further."

Although many who knew Tennant later in life maintained that they "could hardly believe the physical act possible for him," the one real love affair of his adult life was with Siegfried Sassoon, the masculine, renowned pacifist poet old enough to be his father. Sassoon brought to their relationship "his fame, his talent, his position," while Tennant's only daily activities were "dressing-up" and reading about himself in the gossip columns. Looking at the photos of the two lovers in Mr. Hoare's book, Tennant posing languidly (vogueing, really), way-too-thin and way-too-rich, as Sassoon looks on proudly, even the most radical Act-Up militant might mutter a private "Oh, brother!" But the author makes us see that Tennant's extreme elegance was close to sexual terrorism, as it flabbergasted society on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century. (...)

To confuse things further, Tennant's idol and great friend was Willa Cather(!). It is hard to imagine the notoriously no-fun author of "O Pioneers!" hanging out with a man whose beauty tips included "an absolute ban on facial grimacing or harsh, wrinkle-forming laughter," but Cather, Tennant's "surrogate mother/nanny figure," always encouraged him to write, even though "Lascar," the novel that obsessed him for the last 50 years of his life, remained unfinished at his death.

After World War II, Tennant became, in the words of Osbert Sitwell, "the last professional beauty." From then on, it was time to hit the sack big time. (...)

"Reeking of perfume," "covered with foundation," with ribbons hanging from his dyed comb-over hairdo, he rested "non-stop" for the next 17 years in "decorative reclusion." Unconcerned about his grossly overweight figure (" 'But I'm beautiful,' he would reason, 'and the more of me there is the better I like it!' "), he lay in bed surrounded by his jewelry, drawings and Elvis Presley postcards while, as Mr. Hoare puts it, his "decorative fantasies were running amok" (the pink and gold statues in the overgrown garden, the fishnets and seashells everywhere, the tiny uncaged pet lizards, the bursting pipes and rotting carpets, the mice still in the traps). Happily re-creating the "perfervid environment" of his youth, Tennant calmly painted the tops of his legs with pancake makeup and proudly showed his "suntan" to astonished visitors like Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. David Bailey, Christopher Isherwood, David Hockney, even Kenneth Anger all made pilgrimages and, though they may have laughed good-naturedly afterward, none laughed as hard as Tennant himself, who, after all, was in on the joke from the beginning. "To call Stephen affected," the artist Michael Wishart recalled, "would be like calling an acrobat a show-off, or a golden pheasant vulgar."

In his later years, as the antiques dealers circled outside his estate like vultures, waiting for the end, Tennant would sometimes stop traffic in nearby country towns by going shopping wearing tight pink shorts or a tablecloth as a skirt. His family had given up on him long before, exhibiting only "bemused resignation," a wonderful English trait sorely missing in America today. V. S. Naipaul may have described Tennant best when he noticed "the shyness that wasn't so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight."

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[ed. See also: Deco Japan, Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945 (SAM). Highly recommended.]

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