Is the cardigan the new jacket?  Last I week I heard two award-winning up-and-coming creatives, an architect and a web designer, present their work at a design industry event.  For the auspicious occasion both men (who were meeting for the first time) came dressed practically identically, in white dress shirts, dark cuffed jeans, beautifully crafted shoe-boots, and fanciful sweaters.  One wore a striped V-neck cardigan and the other a color-blocked pullover with a shawl color.  Both of them seemed fresh energetic, and serious.  The look wasn’t casual at all, but supremely polished.

This new type of sweater is worn more purposefully than the way Mister Rogers wore his cardigan to kick around at home.  And it’s worn with less ostentation than the way Bill Cosby wore his crazily-patterned Missoni pullovers.  Sweaters like the ones these two young men were wearing aren’t to be thrown on thoughtlessly: they’re to be coordinated carefully with (potentially contrasting) trousers and dress shirts, and to be fitted as meticulously as a suit jacket.  The trend owes a great deal to Thom Browne, who has raised the level of detail and fit in mens knits.  He’s made the sweater formidable.

There was a controversy when it was announced that actress Zoe Saldana would portray legendary songstress Nina Simone in a movie biography, and then another when photos of Saldana in costume as Simone, with pancake makeup and a prosthetic nose, were leaked.  Simone’s daughter, Simone Kelly, responded obliquely, and others launched a petition to recast the role.  Some of the fuss was because Saldana isn’t a singer, but the fiercest of it was because she doesn’t look like Simone; she’s lighter-skinned and slimmer-nosed than Simone is.  Why not, some have asked, simply cast an actress who looks like Simone?

The controversy might have less to do with principles of open casting than with notions of what we collectively find beautiful in women — including light skin and slim noses — and our reluctance to acknowledge how persistent, and persuasive, these notions are.  In Argo Ben Afflek plays real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez, a gentleman far less conventionally attractive than himself, and no one seems bothered by the incongruity.  Affleck doesn’t wear prosthetics to look more like Mendez or crouch to diminish his stature.  He doesn’t look like Mendez but the story comes out right.  Yet Saldana is remaking her complexion and bone structure to play Simone.  For women appearances are considered, still, today, somehow, essential; they define who are and fix our place in the world.  In all the discussion about Saldana’s casting, it’s Simone’s skin and nose, rather than her voice and vision, that are considered essential to who she is.  It’s as if her appearance, which is singular, was a hindrance, something she needed to overcome before she became an artist, and something that only another woman who looks like her can understand.

Portrait by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1965.

This New Year’s Eve was mild, so the spirited young women who stepped out that night in sparkling mini-dresses and high heels, and little else, weren’t too cold.  But I was surprised, as I headed home from a party, to see so many of them wearing sheer, flesh-colored pantyhose.  New York City ladies aren’t shy about showing off their legs, even in the winter.  If they do don hose it’s typically colored or opaque, and for warmth or graphic impact rather modesty.  Now, with Michelle Obama attending state events bare-legged, and gentlemen beginning to experiment with the medium (mantyhouse, guylons), it’s a bit old-fashioned for a woman to wear nude pantyhose.  Even the word itself — pantyhose - seems outdated.

Kate Middleton, who is required to wear stockings in public by Buckingham Palace, and usually chooses to wear sheer, nude hose, might be responsible for the resurgence.  I can remember getting my first pair of pantyhose in the seventh grade, and how impossibly grown up they made me feel.  But in college, as I became vaguely politicized, I realized that no shade of nylon could mimic my flesh and abandoned them for opaque black tights.  Sheer hose can hide blemishes, but in smoothing over a woman’s legs they also disguise some of the finest, most expressive parts of them, like the tendons at her ankles and knees.  They give women eerily shiny, smoothed-over limbs.  Sheer pantyhose offer little protection in cold weather and are insufferable in warm weather.  Some years ago a group of California artists started a Giant Bra Ball, a collection of women’s most uncomfortable, unflattering and ugliest bras.  Isn’t it time to toss the flesh-colored hose too?

Vintage pantyhose package, 1970’s.

The best part of Argo, a based-on-fact political thriller set in 1980, is its historically accurate stylings.  The people we see have CRT televisions, corded phones, avacado-colored refrigerators, bushy haircuts and hippyish clothes.  Ben Affleck looks great in his streaked-with-grey mop cut and droopy moustache, though the meticulously buffed torso he exposes at one point is decidedly anachronistic.  I don’t think people back then, without trainers and pilates, had bodies like that.

Now that it’s standard practice, for both men and women, to wear one’s jeans low-slung, tight, and long, it’s particularly hilarious to see everyone in high-waisted flares.  My companion laughed out loud when one gentleman appeared on screen sporting light blue bellbottoms with heavy topstitching that made a giant, upside-down “U” on his bottom.  They overwhelmed any grace there was in his figure, swallowing his legs and midsection.  What made men wear these kinds of trousers, that seem to us today so obviously unmanly?  Was it androgyny?  Or was the Carter era a less complicated, less conventional age, when both men and women felt free to wear anything they felt like, however unpretty it was?

Vintage Landlubber corduroy flares, 1970’s.

The drag queen heroines of Kinky Boots and Any Day Now, two movies I just saw back-to-back, couldn’t be more different from one another.  In the first Chiwetel Eliofor plays a majestic amazon who inspires those around him with physical and moral courage.  In the second Alan Cummings plays a slight, emotional train wreck who struggles to piece together his professional and romantic lives.  While the first queen is dazzling, it’s the the second that breaks your heart.

It’s a platitude to note that drag is an exaggeration of a woman’s traditional role, a heightened expression of femininity.  But there’s a more universal appeal to it too.  Drag performers turn themselves into a fantasy of who they want to be, which is something most of us are doing a lot of the time.  We make and remake ourselves continuously to meet an idea we have about what is beautiful or good or strong, an image that isn’t always within reach.  There’s something deeply human in the striving.  This might be why the Alan Cummings character is so moving.  He’s expressive about who he wants to be (artist, father, lover) and fights all-out to get it.  His high heels, makeup, and glittery dresses are more than fashion; they’re combat dress.

Unknown French model, Burt Glinn, 1960.

Ivy Style, the new clothing exhibit at F.I.T., hits close to home because so many of the pieces on display (khakis, oxford shirts, pullover sweaters, duffle coats) are things that even those of us who don’t identify ourselves as preppy have hanging in our closets and don’t consider to be particularly fashionable or innovative. 

There are some smart stories about the origins of particular garments.  Blazers were originally red jackets for rowers, Weejuns are an adapatation of Norwegian fishing shoes, and saddle shoes began as gym shoes at Princeton.  (In decades past Princeton, it seems, was a hotbed for fashion innovation.)  While there’s plenty of ivy clothing on display there isn’t a whole lot of bracing ivy style.  Most of the mannequins were dressed not-so-differently from real people you might see at the mall.  My companion observed that we take this kind of clothing for granted, and don’t appreciate how innovative it really is to dress in unprecious, unironed, mix-and-match pieces.  But preppy clothing, with its enthusiastic layering and color-mixing, might lend itself to its own kind of high fashion.  There are some sophisticated ensembles by Thomas Browne on display, like a woman’s stewart plaid jacket work over a contrasting campbell plaid shirtdress.  But there’s not much of the pizzazz that’s evident in the joyously multicolored madras jacket on the catalog cover.  I wanted more of this; I wanted to see how preppy could turn its old-fashioned image inside out.

Chipp, madras jacket, circa 1970.

At the beginning of Lincoln we see the president addressing a small crowd at the opening of a new business.  After he’s introduced he steps forward, lifts his top hat, pulls a paper out from under it, reads a short speech from it, and then folds the paper and puts it back inside his hat.  It’s hilarious and humanizing, and gives the big hat a sense of usefulness.

The movie focuses on the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and depicts the House of Representatives, where it’s reviewed and just barely approved, as one big frat party.  Men laugh, jeer, applaud, thump tables, talk over one another, and shout down any designated speaker.  It’s a clear-eyed vision of the “noisy and messy and complicated” (as our current president put it on the night of his reelection) process of democracy.  These men, stymied by personal and regional interests, might not be so different from those who currently represent us in DC.  What distinguishes them is their extravagant dress and hair.  The gentlemen’s  fitted waistcoats and frock coats, high collars, and silk dressing gowns are as ostentatious as the ladies’ dresses.  And their sideburns and moustaches are teased into outlandish puffs that make them look like talking animals from Dr. Seuss.  Lincoln’s top hat, an icon of rustic simplicity, is also a theatrical piece of headwear that adds about a foot to the president’s already imposing frame.  Could he, like his contemporaries, have been something of a peacock?

Seeing the Antonio Lopez show at The Suzanne Geiss Company in SoHo is like stepping back into the city in the early 80’s.  More accurately, it’s like stepping into the fantasy of that place I had as a high school student in suburban Connecticut, one that I cobbled together from issues of Details and Interview.  In this world, I believed, people hung out at CBGB’s and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, wore asymmetrical Japanese clothing, and survived on coke and champagne.  One gallery wall at Geiss is covered with Polaroid portraits of the Lopez’ glamorous lady friends including Grace Jones, Paloma Picasso and Grace Coddington, women who weren’t natural beauties but brittle, self-styled divas.  The gallery itself has been painted a dazzling white and decorated with lush potted plants and a neon light, like the interior of contemporary Richard Meier house.

I’d always thought of Lopez as a fashion world character, but this exhibit shows what a skilled and versatile illustrator he was.  He handled a broad range of materials comfortably: watercolors, pencil, pastel, ink, photography and collage.  And he rendered with a vivid, fluid hand, one that captured details of garments faithfully while also charging the entire image with a seductive, kinetic energy.  His finest work is soaked in fantasy.  There’s a lovely, lyrical pencil drawing of a naked woman sitting with her hands across her lap while antlers grow out of her head.  Lopez’ imagination perfectly served the pulsating, eccentric energy of the time.

Illustration by Antonio Lopez from the New York Times Magazine, 1966

The Eye Has to Travel, a documentary about the life of legendary Vogue and Harpers Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland, a hero of mine, is aptly named.  It roams between magazine layouts, family photos, fashion shows, feature films, newsreel footage, television appearances, and contemporary interviews.  The movie scatters itself over so many places that it’s virtually impossible to detect what Vreeland accomplished: she made beauty the eighth virtue.  Her own books, D.V. and Allure, remain more powerful representations of who she was.

It’s fun in the film to see off-the-radar tastemakers like Penelope Tree and Veruschka talk about working with the great lady.  [Spoiler alert: it wasn’t easy.]  But it’s pointless to hear, over and over again, from other fashion celebrities, what a legendary kook she was.  Perhaps because I knew so much about Vreeland beforehand I feel the movie didn’t bring me any closer to her.  It certainly didn’t capture what she did best in her magazine work, which was to show us beauty where we hadn’t found it before.  Towards the end of the film one of the interviewees (it might be John Fairchild), throws his hands up in the air and says, “She understood the genius of vulgarity,” and I imagined that the movie might then show us how she cared so little for good taste and instead veered toward melodrama and the baroque.  But this insightful comment gets lost in a montage of similarly spicy quotes.  It gives us a lot of people, including Vreeland herself, talking about her ideas about fashion instead of showing them to us.

This week everyone’s talking about the reddish brocade Tracy Reese cocktail dress Michelle Obama wore when she spoke at the DNC and, in contrast, the cherry red Oscar de la Renta shirtdress Ann Romney wore when she spoke at the RNC last week.  Full disclosure: I liked Ann’s look better.  But I remain far more captivated by what Bill Clinton wore when he took the podium last night at the DNC.  His performance was magnificent, perhaps because he was given the adoring the audience he craves without any of the attendant responsibilities.  He wore a two-button navy blue suit (Donna Karan?), which, as handlers know, photographs better than black.  It fit his tall frame gracefully, far better than the suit he wore two years ago at Chelsea’s wedding, which looked as if it had been sized for the pre-heart-attack, Big-Mac-guzzling Bill.

But it was his silk necktie, a striped, muted red with blue undertones, that clinched the look.  Just as Bill explained, midway through his speech, that Obama values partnership over partisanship, the red-mixed-with-blue of his tie, which was both not-true-blue and not-true-red, went far to suggest ideological subtlety and sophistication.  Compare it to the necktie Mitt Romney wore for his RNC speech, a schoolboy, stop-sign red one with narrow cobalt stripes.  Mitt’s necktie wasn’t about anything but the color red.  While there’s a huge divide between red and blue states, red is used across the board at mainstream political events to symbolize upstanding American politics.  One has to admire both men for having enough sense to stick with the classics.