For your consideration, here is a two minute clip from William Klein’s fashion-centric satire, Qui êtes vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966). If you want specifics, you can find them here and here - but if all you want is a reason to see it, you won’t need more than this…

As an added treat, (and in case you’re unfamiliar with her strange and wonderful face), the girl on the far left is 60s model and mod fashion icon, Peggy Moffitt. Typing her name into your browser will produce some of the best images of that decade.

Bisoux!
g.

“Her hair is bad, and I think that I can see a nose piercing. Also, she’s not wearing our best styles. She will not be considered.”

Early in the new millennium, I was working in a little vintage shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Along with second-hand fare, we were one of the first stores in the area to offer custom tee-printing right on the cusp of that particular retro trend. When we discovered American Apparel, we were thrilled. While other tee suppliers offered only standard-fit, coarse, blocky oversized tees, AA came out of nowhere, producing affordable “blanks” with a stylish fit and feel – and they were sweatshop free! Along with stock for the shop, I regularly ordered things just for myself (including two dozen pair of their incomparable “bum bottom” panties which, sadly, have been discontinued). I was totally impressed and sure that AA would soon be a household name.

And I was absolutely right. From their unfriendly business practices (AA refused wholesale to a friend because he wouldn’t match their “suggested” retail markup in his tiny, independent shop), their controversial – and yet still somehow deadly dull – ad campaigns (and let’s not forget founder and current CEO Dov Charney’s well-publicized and rather unsavoury sexual tics), the company has sparked much debate.

So I can’t say I was terribly surprised when I found these screen shots from the company’s intranet posted at Gawker (via Born in Flames). And I can’t say I’m terribly worked up about it – since it’s not something most of us didn’t at least suspect was going on anyway. I mean, what kind of job requires you submit a full-body photo with your resume? (Don’t answer that.)

It is amusing, though. Makes me wonder if some of these people weren’t once part of a sorority sisterhood…

g.

Top image from German Historical Museum.

There is a real dearth of good mail in this world. And I suppose I’m as much to blame for that as anyone. I used to send letters - long, handwritten missives to my mom and long-distance friends. I still have a stack of love letters from a diligently romantic university boyfriend. Picking up the mail was sort of exciting, the potential of finding a fat little envelope filled with scribbles and pictures. Mostly it was because it meant someone was thinking of me – you know, for longer than it took to hit “send.”

These days, mailboxes are sad receptacles reserved for bills and flyers – the only postal cockroaches to survive the e-pocalypse. So imagine my delight when, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, I found an honest-to-god parcel on my porch.

Behold – WORN contributor and generally remarkable human, Hailey Siracky, sent me my very own pair of second-hand Ukrainian dancing boots!

After I stopped jumping around like a maniac, I had this Great Big Idea. I’m calling it Postal Fashion. Somewhere in everyone’s closet there is a tee-shirt that never fit quite right or a pair of earrings that are too pretty to get rid of but don’t go with anything. Just stick them in an envelope and send them to someone you like.

Because mail should be this awesome.

- g.

When it comes to discussions of intellectual property and copyright, things tend to slant in two directions: pass stringent laws to protect creators and artists or, conversely, avoid any legislation that might encroach on individual freedoms. While these arguments address the rights of people and corporations, they tend to ignore the bigger picture. How do IP rights affect the advance of culture as a whole? Enter Ready to Share.

The Ready to Share project “explores the fashion industry’s enthusiastic embrace of sampling, appropriation and borrowed inspiration,” positing that the lack of restriction actually makes fashion a business leader and one of the most creative (not to mention profitable) business models going. The project includes participants from fashion and entertainment quarters, as well as academics, scientists, business executives and archivists, and has published several research reports. I have to say, I was really pleased to see fashion hailed as a visionary industry – especially when it’s so often dismissed as trivial by more, well, industrial types.

In the clip below, the smart and stylish Johanna Blakley explains why fashion is (or should be) the envy of innovators everywhere.

- G.