Reject du jour: more clothes and when less is more, more or less
(image: carolita johnson)
During a fitting yesterday just off Bryant Park I noticed through the 12th floor window that the park was covered in some sort of white substance, like a giant spider web. It was the fashion tents! Fashion week starts tomorrow! For anyone who likes that kind of thing, here’s the schedule, thanks to NY Magazine.
For me, all it means is that all my usual haunts will be crawling with very skinny women in very silly outfits. Actually, the outfits are not so bad, it’s just the way they’re worn that’s silly. Seeking attention and approval. Well, it’s all right for some, and I love the parade it all constitutes, but I think the thing that carries off a look that might otherwise be silly is a person’s innate sexiness. Being sexy starts where self-consciousness ends. Be sexy, and you can wear a burlap bag and pull it off (or have someone else pull it off). (Burlap bags are very inexpensive, by the way, and one size fits all, just ask Sue Spiegel.)
Which brings me to this rejected cartoon. It has not only been rejected by The New Yorker, but it’s even been rejected by fellow cartoonist Matt Diffee, when submitted to his “Rejection Collection,” coming out on October 3rd! (I’m in it!) How rejected can you get? I’ve been told it’s a “ladies’s cartoon,” and that may well be the case, because only ladies know just how ridiculous that phrase, “I think I’ll go slip into something more comforable” really is. Something more comfortable might be: sweatpants.
NB: By the way, in case you’re getting revved up to complain that the clothes being shown in the tents aren’t made for real humans, rest assured, they will all be refitted afterwards on people like me, bringing the fit closer to the average reality.
Also, this might make you feel better (Spain is banning models with abnormally low Body Mass Index results).
September 8th, 2006 at 4:33 am
I think it’s a great cartoon. What, ladies shouldn’t laugh?
September 8th, 2006 at 6:31 am
Yeah, so what’s if it’s a “ladies cartoon”?! We make up just a teensy bit more than half of the population of the earth—and quite a sizeable portion of The New Yorker’s readers. It’s not like you skewed it to an incredibly obscure demographic, like…blind, left-handed dentists.
I, for on, chortled at this one, and so did my husband (not a lady) who wryly recalls my lukewarm reaction, back during our courtship days, to his occasional little gifts of complicated, “sexy”-but-uncomfortable undergarments. He’s long since given up: Boxers and T-shirts beat those things any day.
September 10th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Funny gag and sexy drawing!