Happy Hookerween

It's that time of year again... the time when all fashion rules go out the window in favor of wearing as little cheap fabric as possible and freezing your rear off.  What do I mean?  Here, let Lindsay Lohan explain:



(Good lord she looked fantastic when this movie came out.  But I digress.)

That's right ladies, it's time again to ask yourself why children and grown men get a selection of actual Halloween costumes while we get about 90% stripper-wear and 10% "cow suit with squirting udders."  Can someone please explain this to me?  When did Halloween become the day when women are all expected to freeze our extremities off because we're wearing some cheap, shiny, probably unflattering costume bastardization of a beloved character or archetype?  You can't be an angel, you have to be a sexy angel.  Sexy fireman!  Sexy nurse!  Sexy gangster!  You can't even be an athlete – you have to be a sexy athlete.

And it just gets dumber every year.  This year I feel like the costume companies have really gone above and beyond to provide truly surreal examples of "sexy" costuming.  Here are a few of the most disturbing and confusing:

Sexy Sesame Street:  Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Elmo. 
Whoever decided Elmo should be sexy should seek therapy.

Remember Freddy Kruger? Disfigured undead child molester Freddy Kruger?
He's a sexy she now.

Sexy Optimus Prime and Bumblebee of the Transformers.
Because nothing says cheesecake like robots that turn into cars.

Sexy Brian from Family Guy.
Yes, this is a sexed-up costume of a male cartoon dog. No, I can't explain it...

 

...but it doesn't even hold a candle to Sexy Chewbacca.

I just don't even get it anymore, people.  It's almost like the costume companies are competing against one another to find the most unsexy things possible to convert into skimpy, ridiculous costumes and then sit back in giddy anticipation to see how many women are actually willing to walk around wearing the insane getups they've made.  A massive conspiratorial practical joke is really the only explanation that makes sense to me.  It's all just gotten too weird. 

So what's a girl to do?  Well, Ricky's NYC, the city-based beauty retailer, has a pretty extensive  Halloween Shop that includes a terrifyingly expansive selection of "sexy" costumes (everything I've shown here except Chewbacca comes from there – Sexy Chewbacca will run you $200+ here) but also has plenty of other costumes as well as a wide assortment of wigs, makeup, and accessories. 

If your taste tends toward the surreal but away from the revealing, check out the collection of costumes Simon Doonan (Creative Director for Barney's NY) designed for Target.  It includes something called a "Glamour Ghost" (a white robe emblazoned with the phrase Chic or Treat) and a Vegas-style Elvis vampire.  Target also has a large stock of less campy costume options. 

If you're crafty, of course, you can always make your own costume.  I'm not all that crafty but over the years I've amassed a lot of random accessories (cat ears, horns purchased at the renaissance faire, sparkly wings and a tunic from the year I was Tinkerbell, etc.) to be able to MacGuyver something together at the last minute – because I always wind up waiting until the last minute and then there's nothing left at the stores but that stupid squirting cow suit. 

But whatever you do or wear this Halloween, I implore you: don't fall victim to the Hookerween Conspiracy.  You'll only wind up freezing and possibly turning someone's warm childhood memory into a weirdly kinky trauma. 

It was bound to happen eventually... the 90s are back.

Fashion, they say, is cyclical.  Everyone has heard someone say (or has said themselves) that it's no use throwing away clothes because "everything comes back in style."  (Incidentally, this is terrible advice – by the time it comes back in style it probably won't fit you and/or you'll be embarrassed to ever have worn it.  When in doubt, throw it out!  Or better yet, donate it.)  In a world of seemingly finite ideas, fashion is bound to repeat itself.  And since we finally seem to be coming to the end of the dark days of 1980s retro it looks like the 1990s are on their way back.

Elaine Benes, retro style icon.

Remember when we were all wearing floral-print dresses with big clunky shoes?  Guess what?  It's a bona fide trend in New York.  They're calling it a resurgence of Elaine from Seinfeld, but I remember the shapeless floral sack spreading far beyond that show.  I even had a few myself.  And the socks with granny shoes is sort of a natural combination between this summer's awful socks with sandals trend and the less offensive menswear-inspired Oxford shoes that are all over the place.  Toss in a pair of leggings (and lord knows those don't seem to be going away) and you've got yourself a full-on retro chic ensemble.

Remember yesterday
when I said mixed prints
were a trend for fall?
I give you Angela Chase.

One fashion editor is calling this look "Upper West Side Grunge," which is sort of ironic since the original look was a natural offshoot of the original grunge trend.  So much of fashion in the 1990s was about meticulously putting together a look designed to send the message that you didn't care how you looked.  It was sort of an over-correction for the excess of the 1980s.  Everything was baggy and incongruous and mismatched – and if you were really devoted, wrinkled as well.  Oh, and by the way?  Grunge is coming back in it's way too.  Check out how much plaid Old Navy is showing this fall.  Big plaid shirt + distressed jeans or leggings + boots = grunge.  Only this time around it's a little more polished and less... well, grungey.  We don't so much mind people knowing that we care what we look like now. 

Thanks for bringing sexy back, Katie.

Lest you think it's just grunge making a comeback, the other end of the spectrum is seeing a resurgence as well.  1990s prep is back in a big way – let's go back to Old Navy and have a look at their "perfectly preppy" page, where argyle reigns supreme.  The September issue of Glamour even featured a "how-to" guide for accurately dressing the preppy part.  We can thank Katie Holmes for bringing pegged jeans back into style – she started doing it two years ago.  And let's not forget the oversized blazer, worn with everything from leggings to jeans to those shapeless dresses and everything in between. 

Even our retro is retro!  The whole Mad Men craze sweeping the nation?  The one that has women in full skirts and men in tailored suits?  It feels just a little like the 1990s swing revival, where women were wearing full skirts and hot red lips and men were wearing tailored zoot suits and slicked-up hair. 

There's a saying:  if you're old enough to remember the trend the first time, don't wear it the second time.  It's usually good advice since the things we wore at a younger age look inappropriate once we're older.  But in the case of 1990s wear I think it's safe to say I'll be avoiding some of these rerun trends because I'm still cringing at the pictures of myself wearing them the first time.  (If baby tees and baggy jeans come back in style, I don't even want to know about it.)  So no thanks on the pegged jeans and floral sacks – though I may pick up a plaid shirt or two.

Mostly I think we're safe as long as men don't start shaving stripes into their eyebrows again and as long as we women don't start walking around looking like this:

We call those "mom jeans" now. And let's not even discuss that ruffled blouse.

Trends: the bad and the ugly

Ah, trends.  The terror of the fashion-phobic, the delight of fashion editors and advertisers looking for new reasons to tell you to throw away all your clothes and buy new ones.  I think it's important to be choosy with trends – to find what's appropriate for your own age, shape, budget, and style instead of trying to follow everything.  I love stores like Forever 21 for trendy accessories and accent pieces because their prices are low, so you can experiment without breaking the bank. 

Sometimes it's tough to choose between picking up on a trend and skipping it.  But sometimes?  Sometimes it's really really easy.  Take, for instance, this list of the year's worst fashion trends. 

Sandal booties?  This might actually be worse than socks with sandals being considered stylish.  What's the point of these things?  It's like wearing socks in the heat of summer but without any of the actual benefits – your feet are still uncushioned and exposed to the elements.  Isn't the whole idea of sandals to expose feet?  I know that fashion is supposed to be innovative and sometimes subversive, but I don't get this new push toward taking shoes designed to be open and making them stuffy and sweaty. 

Also?  They're ugly.  There's no way strap-on cankles are flattering.  And don't even get me started on the pointlessness that is open-toed boots.

The list also includes ill-advised items like harem pants, jumpsuits, and clogs – the kind of things that sometimes work on models in magazines, but almost never work on real people. 

Where I live a lot of teenage girls fall into one of two groups:  the girls who wear barely-decent miniskirts with Ugg boots (ugg is right) in the summer or (for some reason) with flip flops in the winter, or the girls who wear sweats or pajama pants and hoodies everywhere with their hair sloppily pulled up in a bun but with a full, perfect face of makeup.  I'm sure the fact that neither of these looks make any sense to me means I've officially become old, but I find myself wanting to shake these girls and shout at them about frostbite and/or the merits of a comb. 

Then I remember that I once wore nouveau-hippie trapeze dresses, neon, and acid-wash jeans (why are those back in style?!) tucked into my socks.  Youth is made for bad decisions and fashion is no exception.  But as an adult, I'm more confident about developing my own style and choosing which trends I want to follow. 

With that in mind, Refinery 29 has compiled a list of fall trends worth skipping. 

New dumb trend: socks with sandals.

One of my favorite things about summer is the fact that I can pack away all my socks until it gets cold again in favor of bright pedicures and sandals. Well, bad news for me, because apparently socks with sandals is now a trend.

I ask you, does this look cute?

Image courtesy of NYMag.com

That's actually not the worst example they've got – you should really check out the slideshow. This look was all over the spring runways, too.

I don't get this. Isn't the point of sandals and open-toe shoes to be... open? Isn't that why they exist in the first place? So we can enjoy one less layer of fabric in a hot season? I don't know what the weather is like where you are, but here in New England it's hot and sticky. The less unnecessary fabric I can get away with, the better. Even worse, all the socks in the New York Magazine slideshow look like they're mostly nylon – can you think of a sweatier, less desirable fabric to wrap around your feet in the heat of summer?

Sorry fashion world, I'll be sitting this one out. I'd rather flaunt my brightly-polished toes in your disapproving faces than deal with sweaty, hot, smelly feet. Also, I'm not really interested in taking fashion tips from this guy:

Image courtesy of Top10Kid.com

What price beauty?

Keep young and beautiful,
It's your duty to be beautiful!
Keep young and beautiful,
if you want to be loved.

So says the Annie Lennox song:



But sometimes we get a little crazy in our quest for beauty. The search for that miracle cream that will sweep away blemishes and wrinkles, or the magical hair product that will give us luster and shine, can lead us to some outlandish places.

One salon in London is offering clients a protein treatment made from – wait for it – bull semen:

Touted as “Viagra for Hair,” this 45-minute treatment ranges from £55 to £85 ($90-$138 U.S.) and uses semen from Aberdeen Angus bulls. Hari’s combines the sperm with the root of the protein-rich plant Katera. The protein-enriched potion is massaged into the client’s hair after it has been shampooed. Then the client is put under heat so the treatment penetrates the hair. The final step is the blow out, which gives the hair an awful lot of body, as well as shine.

As someone who has spent plenty of cash on different conditioners and treatments in the pursuit of frizz-free, shiny hair, I can honestly say this is a bit much for me. But it's nothing compared to using urine as a facial treatment. Urine! On your face! It seems to me that if your body had much use for what was in that urine, your body would have kept it in the first place. But don't worry about that, because you can skip the urine and get a facial that uses synthesized human sperm or snail slime instead.

Total Beauty has a list of ten strange beauty treatments that includes the bull semen hair treatment as well as procedures involving live fish, the feces of nightingales and crocodiles, and placenta.

Vanity is a strong force, isn't it? We spend so much of our lives being judged on how we look that it can make us crazy and the next thing we know we're paying hundreds of dollars to have things smeared on us that we'd otherwise avoid in the hopes that it will make us beautiful or keep us young for a little longer. I certainly have nothing against natural remedies – I'm a fervent champion of honey and its many many uses. (I use it mixed with my conditioner and occasionally with crushed aspirin tablets as a facial mask.) But there's a difference between embracing the idea of alternative methods and leaping into any unproven (and/or gross) new thing just because it's trendy. A few years back Gwyneth Paltrow caused a stir when it was rumored she was using a facial moisturizer containing snake venom because the paralytic venom was believed to have a Botox-like effect on the face. Like a lot of these types of things, the claims were unproven and the side effects potentially dangerous. But tell women the stars are doing it (or just charge a lot of money) and we'll line right up.

Some of these things do have a basis in science – the bull semen hair treatment is high in protein, for example. But you can get any number of protein-packed hair treatments without spending that much cash or drenching your head in bovine bodily fluids. In fact most of these trends have lower-priced and less insane counterparts. If you look at what's supposed to make it work, it's usually based on the ingredients and science already present in the beauty products you can get at any drug store. (Well, maybe not the live fish that eat the dead skin off your feet... but that's another story.)

The Beauty Brains are a great resource for topics like this. The site, run by cosmetic scientists, explains the science behind beauty in terms anyone can understand and debunks a lot of the claims made by trendy beauty treatments.

It comes down to research. Before you try any new "miracle" treatment or product, do a little Googling and a little reading. It might save you some cash and some time.

Yet another dumb way to cover your assets.

Remember the Backtacular? The silly-looking bedazzled patch made to cover your ass crack in low-waited pants? Well apparently ridiculous crack-camouflage is a growth industry. I give you the Hip-T:

Image courtesy of Refinery29.com

In case you think your eyes are deceiving you, yes, that is a band of fabric made to do nothing but sit around your waist and look like you're wearing a tank top underneath your shirt. To which I ask... why not just wear a tank top underneath your shirt? Most retailers make nice long tank tops now – I have a long waist and I own plenty that are more than long enough for me. And all of those tank tops cost less than the $14.95-19.95 that they want for the "Hip-T." $20 for a band of useless fabric! For the price of two of these things, you could get a pair of jeans that covers your ass! (I'm sorry, Hip-T calls it "bum cleavage." I guess that's better than calling it a "coin slot.")

I really just don't understand why there's a market for overpriced items like this. This one is especially confusing – what keeps it from riding up? Or just bunching itself up into a rumpled sloppy belt? What's the point of paying money for a glorified ace bandage to mummify your middle? I have to agree with the folks at Refinery 29 who covered this before me: you're better off just buying pants that cover you. Or invest in a few long tank tops for layering.

Don't believe what you see!

It used to be you could trust a photograph to show you a factual representation of a source or subject. But not anymore! Why? One word: Photoshop. I confess, I am a Photoshopper. Any photo of me that touches my computer gets "fixed:" teeth whitened, color corrected, blemishes banished. But magazines and advertisers go a lot further than that. They use Photoshop to take an existing image and turn it into something that not only doesn't exist, but sometimes can't possible exist.

For example, Ralph Lauren caused a controversy last year over the image on the right of an impossibly proportioned model (her shoulders are wider than her hips!).

Image courtesy of the Huffington Post.

Before that, Redbook caused a stir with a heavily retouched cover shot of Faith Hill. More recently, ads featuring Demi Moore and Julia Roberts have been so heavily altered that it's hard to tell that these already beautiful women are even human.

Not even Betty White is immune! She's 88 years old and they've removed all her wrinkles. Is it no longer acceptable for an 88-year-old woman to have wrinkles?

In a world where women are expected to aspire to beauty ideals, these types of images create an even more unattainable idea of the beauty norm. (Though if you can find me an actual adult human woman whose shoulders are wider than her hips, I'll consider a retraction.) We're constantly bombarded with images of women who are impossibly thin, ageless, and devoid of imperfection. How can any woman feel comfortable in her own skin surrounded by this crap?

Fortunately, the wide exposure of recent years has started a backlash and is – slowly – beginning a movement in opposition. Jessica Simpson famously posed for the cover of Marie Claire with no makeup and no retouching a few months ago. (And if you ask me, she looks fantastic.) And now a UK department store is openly displaying before- and after-Photoshop shots of a swimsuit model in their stores:

Image courtesy of NYMag.com

It's a refreshing move, but there's still a long way to go. The truth is that Photoshop is never going away. It will always be used to clean up flyaway hairs and blemishes and correct color at the very least (and you can pry my copy from my cold, dead hands!). But until the fashion and beauty industries scale back the usage to those parameters we're going to have to treat every image we see with skepticism. Jezebel has a really interesting gallery of Photoshopped images here. Check it out and see just how much you're being fooled.

Wash before wearing!

This one is not for the faint of heart or obsessive compulsive.

A while back the Today show performed a little shopping experiment:

The news team removed price tags and hygienic strips from panties, stained them with baby oil, and marked tags with two black dots for identification purposes.

Wouldn't you love to be the intern assigned that job? Anyway, they then returned the panties to several retailers in the metro New York area and then went back to the store later to find that the untagged, soiled panties had been returned to the sales floor.

Gross.

They went back for a post-exposé check and found that all the stores they had busted had changed their dirty undies – or at least stopped selling them. That's the good news. The bad news is they caught new retailers selling soiled panties and swimsuits this time around.

The full story and list of stores is at the link, but the point is always wash before you wear when you buy swimwear or lingerie no matter what the corporate office says their policy is. There's always the chance that some lazy employee didn't correctly process used garments.

An example from my retail experience:

I worked for a popular mall store that sells prank gift items for a year in college. During one of my first shifts I learned that one of our assistant managers had been taking returns on "personal massagers" and returning them to the sales floor. Nauseated, I asked him if he did this a lot and wound up spending the rest of that shift going through the entire product shelf looking for open packages to drop in the damaged merchandise bin. (That was not my favorite job and I should state for the record that I'm pretty sure re-selling the used items in question was not the company norm.)

I also worked for a popular clothing retailer a few years ago, however, and we had a strict policy not to re-sell any clothing that had been worn by the customer. Swimwear, intimates, winter coats, it didn't matter. If it was used, it got sent back to corporate. (That was a much better job.)

But like I said, all it takes is one lazy employee to give you some free bacteria with your purchase. Personally I tend not to buy intimates or swimwear without a tag or hygienic strip, but it's always a good idea to wash those items before you wear them anyway. Even if the item isn't used, you never know if you're getting a formaldehyde bra like Victoria's Secret was apparently selling a few years back.

The "simple" math of fashion and attraction

Ladies, are you trying to attract a man? (Of course you are!) Do you go out to clubs every night just hoping someone will ask you dance, but instead you go and you stand there alone like you're living inside a Smiths song? Well fret no more, for England's Telegraph has solved your man-hunting woes once and for all!

And the answer is this: you're not showing the right amount of skin:

Using tape recorders hidden in their handbags, the researchers took note of what female clubbers were wearing and how many times they were approached by men asking them to dance.

For the purposes of the study, each arm accounted for 10 per cent of the body, each leg for 15 per cent and the torso for 50 per cent.

Women who revealed around 40 per cent of their skin attracted twice as many men as those who covered up.

However, those who exposed any more than this also fared worse. Experts believe that showing too much flesh puts men off because it suggests they might be unfaithful.

It's so simple! All you have to do is show exactly 40% of your body's skin. Too little and men will think you're a prude; too much and men will think you're a tramp. And what's really nice is that this super simplification of human attraction isn't insulting or patronizing at all.

It does raise a few questions, though. For instance, does my face count? Is this like the SATs where I'll get 200 free points just for not leaving the house in a ski mask every day? And given that the study was performed in England it seems only fair to ask what women are expected to do in the winter. Should we just suck it up and get hypothermia or expect men to ignore us if we choose to avoid frostbite? Do men find amputated limbs sexy as long as their uncovered? A truly thorough study would have addressed these things. After all, we women need this information so that we can achieve our true purpose for existing: attracting a man!

Obviously we need more information. For that, I direct you to this clip from The House Bunny. At 47 seconds in there's a primer on "skimplifying" which I think is very helpful for just this sort of thing. Except of course for the part about revealing your torso, because that will make men think you're going to cheat on them. So just ignore that part.

Ladies, you do not need this.

The fashion world is full of genius little innovations that make our lives easier. I'm talking those little stick-on treads for shoes with slippery soles, bra strap extenders, those cool towel turbans that button on so you can actually move your head, etc. I've even come to find the Snuggie brilliant for sleeping with a fresh manicure, because I can keep my arms warm without risking sheet marks on my shiny new nails. (So thanks for the Snuggie, Mom!)

But some products are really just stupid.

For example, I give you the Backtacular:



The Backtacular is a patch, bedazzled with little crystals, designed to cover your ass crack (they're calling it a "coin slot," but let's not get euphemistic now) when you're wearing low-rise jeans.

Here's my question: if you're so modest where said crack is concerned, why are you wearing jeans that will show it off in the first place? Maybe this product is just a lower back tattoo for the commitment-phobic, but even then they make better looking removable tattoos that cost less than $15. That's right, $15. For a sticky patch covered in fake crystals that goes on your ass.

I might understand if the actual patch was flesh-toned. Then it might just look like a newish take on the vajazzling trend. But the patch is black and quite obvious, so I just don't see the point.

Ladies, if you think you need to throw down $15 on a sparkly ass patch, please reconsider. Instead I suggest putting that money aside for a pair of pants that will cover your assets in a less ridiculous way.