Unsolicited Advice #22: Dress your boyfriend like a man

Residing in a wonderland of hipster delights, we briefly entertained the notion that a visit to a swanky men's store would allow us to inject a little freshness into our boyfriends' wardrobes.  However, our trip to Stag on South Congress was an unmitigated disappointment.

Gentle reader, we hail from the dark north woods.  We ply chainsaws up there, and one of us is no stranger to the utility of the quilted padding on the right shoulder of a plaid chamois shirt.  We appreciate the beautiful utility of men's outdoor work wear and we sympathize with the erstwhile businessman who wishes he spent more time engaged in manly outdoor pursuits.  These days we wish we did too.

There is an undeniable sexiness to once-stiff articles worn down by a single body's exertions into a shape at once intimate and protective, an unselfconscious record of experience.  Machine-worn articles just don't fit the same way.  

Rather than spending $150 on a butter-soft dove grey chamois shirt for your office-bound boyfriend at Stag, head to Cabella's and buy him a solid-color Woolrich chamois shirt.  Make him wear it on a bunch of hikes.  See if you can get him to split some wood.

We promise good results.

Tasteless Flaunting

Bumper stickers are at very best minimally tasteless. But the perfusion of round, bubble lettered, grotesquely-cute-figured bumper stickers proclaiming that "Life is good" fulfill every criterion of tastelessness we know.

While we certainly condone flaunting curvaceous earlobes, flouncy hips, and delicate ankles, we do not condone flaunting privilege. The issue here is similar to the distinction in tastefulness between costume jewelry (eminently tasteful) and gaudy displays of precious gems (horribly tasteless). If you have the strange fortune to live in the most-consuming country in the world and drive an SUV (or wear t-shirts, or do anything really), for golly's sake don't proclaim in stupid bubble letters that "Life is good."

Trends #2: For The Birds

This feathery friend, which can be found on etsy, is merely the foreflier of a flock as vast as that which menaces the characters in Hitchock's The Birds. Why are birds, particularly those of the quasi-biblical swallow varitety featured in this necklace (from Sabine Cayet Tucci of Pudding), so ubiquitous?


This highly stylized little charm is one of many manifestations of a general return to the aesthetics of art deco.

Trends #1: Hideous hybrids

Sketchers Voyager Trip

Allegiance by Poetic License

Sugar Women's Smokin Cat Flat

The above featured abomination, hybrid offspring of ballet slipper and Converse tennis shoe, is characterized by playful canvas prints, toes "dipped" in rubber, and unconventional fastening devices. This cheeky shoe dares you to call it ugly. I accept the dare.