How (not) To Accessorize

So Mae and Jane realize that they seem to be really bad at keeping up with their blog. A collective “ooops” and “sorry” from us. A lot has happened since we left off. Specifically a presidential excursion around the world. Now we will leave the speeches and policies alone and speak specifically about one incident: President Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia where he was greeted by King Abdullah and presented with the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit. Basically this order of merit is a gaudy gold necklace that hangs almost to Obama’s waist. And let’s face it, Obama is no short dude, so that chain is long. You know those lyrics “I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more…”? Well The Proclaimers were a little ahead of their time and even they didn’t know that they were talking about opening this order of merit and unfolding the necklace. Basically, if you were to hike along this necklace you would have to walk 500 miles and then 500 more to see the other end of it. And the Proclaimers proclaimed that they’d be more than happy to do it (how prematurely jingoistic)! Chanel said that women should look in the mirror and take one piece of jewelry off before going out. After seeing the order of merit, the fashion industry added to that statement and said that men who wear that necklace should take it off before they go out. (Unless, of course, you are sitting in the GILDED CHAIR that Obama was perched on after receiving the necklace. He matched the furniture! Did somebody say "wallflower"? No, not in that necklace....) The order of merit certainly has enough gold to be fit for a king or Elizabeth Taylor and it has the girth to be considered as a prop for Flavor Flav. Seriously, just insert an alarm clock into the medallion at the end…. no big! (But it is big.) America’s president now owns something that can be seen from space (and Martians think it's ostentatious, too.) And it’s really convenient that he flies on Air Force One because if he were flying commercial, the addition of the necklace to his checked luggage would certainly incur extra fees for weight (Mae and Jane have always wondered what you would have to put in a bag to make it weigh more than 50 pounds. We’re sure this necklace could almost weigh that much by itself, a feat their shoes and hair dryers could never accomplish.) And we’re pretty sure William Jennings Brian is rolling over in his grave at the missed opportunity to give a “medallion of gold” speech. “… you shall not burden the neck of labor with a medallion of gold, you shall not trip us up with such a long necklace!” Perhaps the next Democratic National convention can somehow work this in….

Graduation is not a Fashion Show

In Mae and Jane’s family education is very important. This weekend was very exciting as we celebrated Jane’s graduation from college. Now that was a festival of interesting (from the fashion perspective).

The academic regalia worn was in reflection of tradition dating back to the 13th century. According to the program, the traditional robe serves two functions as it indicates rank and it keeps the wearer warm. Seriously, part of this long standing tradition comes from people going to school and being cold? In the future academic regalia should involve a hoodie and jeans since that’s what we don these days to keep warm in our drafty classrooms. I guess we should all be glad this tradition didn’t start in a more tropical region and we don’t have to wear shorts or swimsuits depending on our cumulative GPA. (You may only pierce your bellybutton if you're in the top 3% of your class....) The program failed to delve very far into the origins of the mortarboard. Apparently, though, it was worn by bald people (most of whom were probably men). It is unclear whether or not it was worn just for the purpose of keeping the head warm. The mortarboard seems, to graduates, the very last hurdle that college has to offer. There is not a cute way to wear a mortarboard. And don’t forget that bangs are in this season… (Take this advice: if you’re graduating in the next couple of years, stay away from bangs!) The mortarboard flattens bangs and makes it look like your hair line starts at your ears. And doesn’t everyone want to look like their hair dresser had a freak razor accident and accidentally shaved just the front of their head? There is one way you can wear your hair for the ceremony and it is dictated by the mortarboard (at least your photos will be timeless!) And the tassel has so much meaning but mostly it is just this annoying thing that dances around just out of your line of sight so you think you’re about to be attacked by a bee or something and you keep turning your head quickly as it catches your eye which just makes you look like you’re missing some parts of a chromosome and the wiggling tassel just gets worse. While none of this dress is very becoming on anyone, we’d like to note that Jane didn’t care what she was wearing when she finally got her chance to walk across the stage to receive her diploma cover. (And she didn’t trip! But she almost did when her row stood up to walk to the stage…)

Now since everyone who is on the stage is in the same boat with the interesting looking regalia, we should hit on something else that isn’t cool at graduations: the majority of the speeches. (Honestly, Jane would rather listen to a lecture in class than some of the speeches). Apparently when you ride a bike there is a headwind and a tailwind and you notice the headwinds more than the tailwinds. We assume that this is a metaphor for life but there was a lot of rambling about biking and headwinds and tailwinds and different kinds of winds (seriously, this lady wasn’t a meteorologist, but by the end of her speech she probably was qualified to give windy weather forecasts and announce for the Tour de France. But we’d decline if we were ever given the chance to listen to her deliver another commencement address.) And seriously, if she’d taken as much time to ride her bike in Fort Collins as she said she did, she would have spoken more about the crosswinds which are, in Jane’s opinion, the most annoying kinds of winds. We took this in stride because it was the commencement address and we were still excited for the distribution of the diplomas. But after the diplomas had been doled out (during which time we could have completed another bachelor’s degree) we were addressed by a man who probably should have received the “most boring voice in the world” award. The closing remarks he gave really closed some eyelids. Every time Jane tuned out and back in, she would have sworn he was saying exactly the same thing he was saying when she tuned out. It seems that professors need to be pulled aside and someone needs to tell them that commencement isn’t about them. And it’s not about students donating to the alumni committee. It’s about the group of students sitting in front of them for the last time who reverted back to kindergarten and couldn’t figure out how to put their silly hats on that morning. Students who are restless. Students who know they will not be tested on the speeches the professors are giving.
Congrats to the class of 2009!

Fashion Yearbook

It’s been a while since Mae and Jane have sat down to the keyboard and blogged. This is because we are finishing up our school years and could not justify writing a blog instead of writing the paper that we had coming up. Mae still has some time left in school. But Jane just finished her last finals, papers, and homework assignments before she will graduate. So we thought we’d commemorate some of Jane’s more horrendous achievements in fashion as an undergraduate. (We’d also like to take a moment to be cliché and say we’re looking forward to all of her fashion endeavors!)

Now, Jane was fortunate enough to have a roommate who was thirteen gazillion times cooler than she was when she entered college. We’ll call this roommate “Lynn”. Also lucky for Jane, Lynn was forward. It took about one week for Lynn to say “Hey, stop parting your hair in the middle!” If you ask Jane today she will tell you that’s the best advice she’s ever been given in college. But at the time, she was a little hesitant to try it. She was so hesitant, in fact, that Lynn helped her do her hair for the next week. Seriously. She saw people with side-parted hair in magazines, but she thought “who am I to part my hair like that?” Well there is a quote “Be the change you want to see in the world” and Jane lives by a quote that is similar (in that it is totally a parody of the quote); “Part your hair like the person you want to be in the world”. Sheer poetic genius…

Mae and Jane believe that tanning is a slippery slope. It is also a blotchy, streaky, skin-cancery slope. But one wintery night before Lynn was to go to a formal or something important, Lynn and Jane decided to try self tanner. The kind that you spray and it tans you all at once…. We entered college way before the days of the lotion that you put on every day and it darkens your skin gradually (that statement makes us sound old so we'll clarify "way before" means approximately "1 year before". But that's a long time when you're talking about sunless tanner.) Lynn finally decided it was a bad idea and went to get her tan professionally done but offered to spray the tan on for Jane. First of all, if you’re going to spray tan someone, read the bottle (and then go get a psych consult if you still think the stuff that Banana Boat thinks you can spray on will do anything for you… Seriously! The directions are so detailed with the occasional bolded print and ALL CAPS and sometimes BOTH, they seem to indicate that self tanning is as complicated as launching a team to the moon. Jane will tell you it’s harder than that, even.) When it recommends holding the bottle 10 inches away, do not spray from less than 10 inches away (ie: do not spray from 1 inch away… The failure will be greater than that of Apollo 13.) So Jane ended up looking like she had been prepped for surgery. Her torso looked as if someone had wiped iodine all over it to disinfect the area. Also, the tan was dripping and streaking. So of course Lynn and Jane invited everyone in to see… Jane may never live that down.

Every few years the ponytail comes back into style (as if it ever goes out of style).... But this means that the ponytail can be worn everywhere! It can be worn to the gym, to school, to parties. This happened during a particularly busy year for Jane, who likes to multitask and "kill two birds with one stone" and all of that. She could wear the same ponytail all day and save some time! Well, we’ll just tell you right now that the gym ponytail is tremendously different than the party ponytail. It’s like night and day. (Okay, it’s still a ponytail so it’s like night and later that night…) And people can often tell if you wore your ponytail to class all day and didn’t even attempt to refresh it before you came to their party.

Jane is fearful of bad haircuts (it even rivals her fear of certain arthropods). And near the end of her junior year, the unthinkable happened. She was on the receiving end of some seriously terrible layers (seriously). Some of her close friends offered encouragement but she could not shake the feeling that her hair looked a little like a mullet. So she walked around with her new haircut for a couple of days until she was mentioning her concerns to a friend before class. A girl who she would call more of an “acquaintance” than a “friend” (only because they didn’t know each other very well) burst in with “Oh, don’t worry! It can be fixed!” That was exactly what Jane needed to hear. Two lessons were learned here. Do not let a friend walk around with a bad haircut that can be fixed! And if you think you’ve received a hideous trim, don’t take your friends’ word for it… go get it fixed! You don’t need their permission and they don’t have to slouch under the weight of silly hairdo (seriously, have “Atlas” come talk to Jane the next time he thinks he has a lot to hold….)

If we had a nickel for every time Jane fell victim to a terrible fashion choice, well, we’d probably go have lunch… The point is that none of these terrible fashion decisions became habits… because her friends and classmates were there to push her back into line. But it really does take a village….

A New Way To Go Green... (Sort of)

You know what’s cool? Laughing at your own jokes, tooting your own horn, and directing all of the attention of everyone around you to yourself . . . Wait, it’s not? Oh, okay. Well someone should tell that to the reckless girl who was driving a red Toyota sedan through the parking lot on Jane’s campus today. It’s not that it was a red sedan, or that it was made by Toyota (but, seriously, the American economy would have appreciated the moolah she shelled out on a foreign car … we need to stimulate and spend but I think that Obama meant for that to happen on goods manufactured in America). Anyway, this is not our point. The other thing that was going on was this car was accompanied by so much buzzing, we were POSITIVE that we would turn around and see a truck full of a million bee hives. But, no. It was just this girl in her little red sedan playing her music much too loudly with too much bass. But you know what? She had a crappy sound system so all we could hear was the buzzing of the plastic shell of her car. It was as if someone put a speaker into a red Tupperware and turned it on full blast until it buzzed around the countertop like a cheap wind-up toy from a child’s happy meal. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if this was an attempt at a do it yourself pseudo-economy car. In order to save gas and go green, she just sticks her car in neutral and she is propelled forward by the vibrations generated by her music. I could see how this would work. She puts on some Ruben Studdard with his low tones when she goes through school zones and when she’s cruising on the highway she bumps some Mariah Carey who’s high pitch propels her down the highway like a rocket. (Leading us to wonder about a couple things that are very important: can you actually “bump” to Mariah Carey? And we’ve always wondered if there are actually notes on her CDs that are too high pitched for anything short of a dog to hear. How would we know?) Turning the radio off is the equivalent to popping the e-brake. Donuts, anyone? They’ve never felt so effortless! But automakers are scrambling to fix the one design flaw (47,000 automakers, in fact). Your car must be jump started every few miles since the radio runs down the battery. Unfortunately we suspect (as does anyone who is logical) that this ridiculous intrusion of buzzing and noise that momentarily ruined a fine walk on a wonderful Colorado day was just the result of this girl’s disregard for the conversations of others going on around her. So everyone, turn your music down. We don’t want to hear your music. And we promise you don’t want us to hear how cheap your sound system is.

Being Nice is soooo Fashion!

So it has been a while since Mae and Jane have sat down to offer up our sarcasm. And while we realize that we are usually funny, we are going to take today to be outraged about a disturbing American trend. We flipped on the ABC’s “World News with Charles Gibson” to hear the anchorwoman talking about a “signature crime” for April in America. What is our signature April crime, you might ask? The anchorwoman was referring to the fatal mass shooting in Binghamton, New York. (Other large scale fatal shootings have happened in April in previous years.) Now, this is a different type of trend than we usually write about. But we want to take today to remind you all that there is nothing cool or fashionable about violence. And we express our condolences to anyone personally touched by the tragedy in New York.

Which Way to the Clown Car?

Mae and Jane attended a riveting lecture together over the past week. Too bad we couldn’t hear it over the professor’s shirt and necklace which were louder than a Russian drum quartet playing a marathon concert of metalcore rock fused with heavy metal. Chanel always said that women over-accessorize so they should look in the mirror before they leave and take one thing off. This professor should have taken all three gaudy necklaces (speaking of heavy metal…) off and left them at home. Had we been able to concentrate past the deafening shirt, or see the board past her giant necklace display, we still would have been very distracted by her large clown pants. Seriously, they reminded us of the episode of “Friends” where Phoebe tries on all of her maternity pants. She was a slim-ish woman, but she was doing herself zero favors by wearing pants that clung to her widest part and then flowed downwards. This means the rest of her looked just as wide as the widest part of her. If that wasn’t enough, her already boxy looking lower half was covered with a boxy pattern. That is correct. She was wearing plaid pants. And guess what? It was working for her about as well as riding that fox across the river worked for the Gingerbread Man. Now had these pants fit they would have been cute. A couple of days after this less than stellar outfit crossed our paths Jane’s eyes were offended by someone else wearing plaid dress-pants incorrectly. This time the pants looked like they’d fit, but she needed a belt. She was sagging dress pants! If you’re going to wear dress pants, you should not look like you are about to get on a skateboard or go on a walk through the hood. Also, we are in college, act like it! We are pretty sure that when you receive your high school diploma, you must fork over your right to sag your pants. Seriously, ladies! Start wearing your big-girl pants like, well, a big girl!

Feeling Especially Native North American Today?

As the weather gets warmer, Uggs are (thankfully) being shoved (or banished) into closets as flip-flops and ballet flats take their place as the footwear of choice. Last season’s boat shoe has been swapped with the similar, yet very different, moccasin (reverse assimilation?). Now Mae and Jane think the moccasin is cute when done correctly. Unfortunately we’ve seen some tarnished moccasins that would be disrespectful should they appear at an upcoming pow-wow (unless they were being donated to be burned at the bonfire). So heed our warning: moccasins are in but the house shoe or slipper that resembles the moccasin is not. So what is the difference? Not much. In fact, they could be the same shoe. But the moccasin is convincing as a shoe that is meant to be worn out while the house shoe or slipper is convincing as a shoe that has been worn to take out the trash every day (or judging by the looks some of these shoes, twice a day for the last decade), chewed up by your dog (or your dog and your best friend’s dog , your neighbor’s dog and then left for the angry pack of dogs in an alley in Detroit), and worn by Marion Jones for the duration of her pre-prison career. What we mean is your brand new cute skirt, perfectly pressed shirt and full scale hair and make-up are dulled by your insistence on wearing shoes that probably should have been tossed approximately half a decade ago. Remember the “Boho” (or “hobo”) look that dis-graced the covers of all the fashion magazines a few years back? In case you need a reminder: this is when all the fashionistas lost their minds and scavenged for their looks in trash dumps (the more rips in your jeans the better) and the only rule was that their clothes could not fit (seriously, the straitjackets they were given when they were institutionalized looked better than the garb they were prancing around the streets in). Well, ladies, your dirty grungy moccasins would feel right at home during that fashion trend. But since no one has patented a time machine yet, we will need to assume that one does not exist and move forward with our looks. That means wearing shoes that look like you meant to wear them with the rest of your outfit. So we applaud you for noticing the coming moccasin trend and trying to assimilate (or unassimilate), but we encourage you to run to your local mall and get some that won’t offend the local Native American tribe.