The Top Ten “Fuck It” Oscar Outfits
It’s Oscar weekend and you know what that means: a never-ending parade of actresses in glorified prom dresses. I hate awards season fashion. At this point, the only reason I tune in at all is for the chance that someone will pull a Barbara Streisand or Bjork and do something ACTUALLY INTERESTING (I’m looking at you, Tilda Swinton). On This Day In Fashion has a list of their Top Ten Oscar looks that just said “fuck it” to the status quo and “hey there” to sequined see-through bell bottoms.

Fashion Poweristas
And speaking of saying “fuck it” to the status quo, no one does it the way Daphne Guinness and Anna Piaggi do. The Man Repeller, also known as Leandra Medrine, and Robb Young discuss the best part of every Fashion Week: what the people on the street are wearing. At one point Medine refers to Diane Pernet as her “queen of darkness, the substance of which my dark abysmal insides are made.” Me too.

Fight Like a Pretty Boy
So, apparently, there is an underground Fight Club made up of male models? And I was not informed until now? Epic fail on your part, Internet.

Gucci: The Reinvention
I’m genuinely surprised that no one ever made a movie about the battle between Tom Ford, Gucci, and LVMH. For those who don’t know the story, Women’s Wear Daily has a comprehensive overview about the men who ended up controlling the majority of all ready-to-wear luxury brands. It’s everything I want in a fashion film: tense courtroom battles, bitter rivalries, and impossibly tan men in velvet suits.

The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art
Exactly what it sounds like. The knitting is incredibly intricate and (more amazingly) 100% accurate in representing the human brain. Doesn’t the cortex look sort of snuggly? Is that the strangest thing I’ve ever typed? The answer to both is yes.

- Haley Mlotek

Classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination. Or so said Marcel Proust. The French have an expression I adore: jolie laide. Literally, it translates to beautiful ugly; the Collins English Dictionary defines it as “a woman whose ugliness is her chief fascination.” I think that is, perhaps, too simple an explanation. When I think of jolie laide, I think of women like Anjelica Houston and Sigourney Weaver, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, models Erin O’Connor and Kristen McMenamy, and (one of our editor’s favourites) Diana Vreeland. And I absolutely think of Tilda Swinton.

Tilda Swinton, photographed by Raymond Meier

The first movie I saw her in was Orlando, an adaptation of a Virginia Woolf novel. Though the story was interesting - a man who decides never to age and, as if that wasn’t enough, wakes up one morning transformed into a woman - it was Swinton I wanted to see. Already people were talking about her extraordinary androgyny. Jolie laide. While many of the roles that came after were not nearly so unlikely, Swinton kept me interested with intense acting and unsettlingly green eyes. She could go from delicate and fragile to masculine and frightening in a space of moments. I liked her best in her stranger roles, though. As the despicable arcangel Gabriel, she almost made Constantine (a really terrible film) worth the two hour slog, and her palest of pale White Witch in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was the perfect mix of diabolical beauty and avant-garde fashion.

Tilda Swinton in Lanvin at the 2009 Oscars

I’m pretty sure Tilda Swinton’s Oscar 2009 outfit made every “Worst Dressed” list in the western world. It was, in fact, a replay of 2008, when her long, black, one-sleeved Lanvin creation excited just as much censure. And yet both outfits were lovely - both ultramodern and understated elegant. I am convinced that on another woman they would have gone unremarked. But Swinton’s severe features transform her undeniably stylish clothes. There is something in her pale, almost alien features that defies all notion of conventional beauty. A true jolie laide, Swinton is both beautiful and ugly and impossible to classify - a complexity that does not lend itself to dividing the notions of “best” and “worst”.

Unattractiveness is an important thing. It binds us to the world and everything in it, just like beauty. If there is only one, it doesn’t make any sense. Proust was right. Ultimately, the state of jolie laide is much more interesting than just jolie. Despite Hollywood’s valiant (if misguided) attempt to assert a single, empirical beauty, women like Swinton will always appeal to those who are willing to use their imaginations.

Tilda Swinton, photographed by Craig McDean for Another Magazine

Tilda Swinton, photographed by Peter Lindbergh

c.b.