I’m Sticking With You from g steg on Vimeo.

During a recent visit from her home in Alberta, regular contributor Hailey Siracky not only joined the WORN team in Toronto for an all-staff meeting, but very graciously agreed to unburden WORN’s managing editor of a few things that were clogging up her dresser.

To completely misquote Aristotle, friendship is a single soul dwelling in two closets.

Ha.

“immune” by Marina Dempster

It was easy, when I was little, to imagine myself inside fairy tales; to think Peter Pan might come to my window or enchanted lands appear in my closet. Though I’m more than old enough to know better, nothing’s really changed. There is a part of me that will always believe in outlandish, magical things - and what’s more, I’m thoroughly convinced my life is better than if this was not so. It’s also one of the reasons I’m perpetually delighted by clothing and costume. Dress is instantly transformative; an accessible door to other worlds and selves. To me, there is a particular magic in the collaboration between clothing and art. It is intimately relatable yet untethered by reality - endless possibilities in the shape of me.

So imagine my delight when, on a very dull winter morning, I saw these:

Designed by Marina Dempster, these extraordinarily ferocious shoes are such stuff as the rulers of kingdoms should wear. (Just last year, WORN was fortunate to have Dempster participate in our ART & SOLE shoe redesign exhibit with a pair of gold-winged Keds.)

From now until the end of the month, the Ontario Craft Council (as a participant in the Toronto International Design Festival) is showing an exhibit entitled Body + Object: “Eighteen artists explore the relationship between the body and the many forms in which it can ornament, present and represent itself.” While, for me, these shoes were the highlight, once I tore my eyes away I found the rest of the work fascinating and lovely and definitely worth seeing.
- g.

I am not obsessed with Sex and the City. I only mention this because it occurs to me I might have talked about SATC in another post and I want to be clear. (As a woman, I would rather distance myself from those of our tribe who have somehow latched onto that HBO phenomenon as a step-by-step guide to modern womanhood. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a chic-er version of Trekkie-ism.) That said, let’s all just admit right now that it was, whatever the over-saturated aftermath, a piece of pop-culture that did, in some way, shift public consciousness about fashion and femininity, and so does not bear dismissal (at least not outright).

In the last months there has been the expected amount of buzz about the latest SATC movie, due for release in May of 2010. Internet gossip sites are rife with photos of SJP et al, on location and dressed to impress. Sort of.

I remember the first time I watched SATC. It was the late 90s and, fashion-wise, I was feeling kind of bored. The pierced-and-dyed grunge aesthetic had become mainstream enough to be adopted by elementary-school secretaries, runway fashion was dominated by nudity (with strappy shoes) which was hard to pull off during the long Canadian winters, and the ravers had finally lost their minds completely. I wanted something else – more creative, less presciptive, intelligent, inspiring. Enter Pat Field. Her styling decisions in those early years were everything I’d been missing. The startling (for TV) mix of current trend and vintage quirk felt unique and fearless (the latter was amusingly illustrated by frequent fashion disasters that somehow came off as charming, which was a revelation to me). I found myself combing Goodwills and Salvation Armies, armed with ideas and new sense of adventure. It was really good fashion – and it felt totally accessible. I still think the first four seasons especially are some of the best (and wonderfully worst) fashion the small screen has seen since Mary Tyler Moore.

I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but somewhere in the last couple of seasons (and especially in the first film), with the momentum of snowballing popularity and the increasing demand for product placement by designers (for a while there, a high-end handbag in Carrie’s hand was worth a hundred ads in Vogue), the whole thing started to drift into Advertorial land. Pretty, sure, and well styled still – but increasingly devoid of the intuitive and street-savvy originality I’d come to crave. It was as though SATC had fallen victim to a Couture Coup; fashion was, once again, ruled by money and label. By the time they got to the movie, my love affair with Pat Field was over and, between the safe choices and designer pandering, I felt like I was being sold another bill of goods. I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me.

Good thing those first seasons are in the can. And since the New Year is a time to look back as well as forward (should auld acquaintance be forgot and all that) this post was really just an excuse to revisit a few old favourites…

g.

This one can’t go without comment. It happened in season 6 and was, hands down, one of the worst mish-mash outfits Pat Field ever put together: sweatshirt and silk cami, flannel pyjamas, pearls, disco toque and the rattiest fur coat since Fozzy Bear. It looks wildly uncomfortable and it made me impossibly happy.

-g.

Rachel’s friend Enda invited us to go dancing on a boat. “What should we wear?” we asked. “Whatever you want,” was his reply. “Something waterproof.”

As it turns out, very few of my clothes fall into that category. My old raincoat went into the charity bag this past spring. (It was hardly the sort of thing one would wear dancing anyway.) As I mentally reviewed the contents of my closet, I suddenly remembered a pair of PVC pants I’d acquired in the mid-1990s. Tight, black, and very tapered with lacing up the front, they were classic Le Chateau; cheap and cheerful. I knew they were still in a box somewhere, and I set out to find them. A few minutes later, as I yanked them out from under a stash of vintage fur collars, my next thought was to wonder if, after more than a decade, they would still fit. They did.

I looked at myself in the mirror; not only did they fit, they were surprisingly chic. With a white tank top and red flats, they were just the right mix of current and retro. They were just “new retro” enough to be edgy. Once I was done being pleased with myself for having kept them, I had a very disturbing thought: I had actually become old enough to reference myself – as an adult.

It was always normal to wear things my mother had worn (50s dresses, 60s shoes) or things my sisters had worn (disco-licious), but the clothes in my closet had been – until now – a one-round deal. This everlasting 80s revival doesn’t count either; I was only a teenager and aesthetically unrefined when New Wave was actually new, dressing at the mercy of my parents’ budget and approval. No, I was a grownup when I bought those pants. They were cool then and, somehow, I’d managed to live long enough for them to be cool again.

I am both amused and appalled. Of course, my reflections on the inexorable march of time and the cyclical nature of fashion have been validated, and my packrat tendencies have finally paid off. That’s quite nice. On the other hand, you know, I’m old.

A few days ago I was in the Salvation Army store. I found a fantastic dress – a long-sleeved, scoop-necked, black microfibre jersey thing. It’s exactly the sort of outfit Peter Lindbergh would have photographed for Vogue when I was in University. (It’s the sort of dress I would have bought myself if I could have afforded it – and if I hadn’t thought dresses too girlie by half.) I couldn’t resist trying it on; it looked great. There was nothing to do but pay the six bucks and hurtle headlong into my future – which, it appears, has been hiding in my past all along.

Ha.