[Y]ou can see why men wanted to get the look. Perhaps they noted the effect Cumberbatch, by no means your standard telly hunk, had on lady viewers [...] and decided it must have something to do with the clobber. So it is that Britain’s latest men’s style icon is a fictional asexual sociopath first seen onscreen hitting a corpse with a horse whip. Surely not even the great detective himself could have deduced that was going to happen.
Alexis Petridis, “No chic, Sherlock”, The Guardian, 2010-09-04

It is absolutely no coincidence that it became cool to hate Apple just as Apple started to make products for (whisper it) ‘the masses’. Back when Apple was largely known as the provider of smooth computers to graphic designers and Guardian columnists, there was nothing cooler than being an Applehead. But then it made the iPod and the iPhone, which you can now see everyone from paint-covered builders to Romanian au pairs tapping away on, and that meant it was just another engine of ‘mass consumerism’, the thing the chattering classes hate most. So where in the Nineties, people who used Apple products were presumed to be erudite and tasteful, now people who use Apple products are ‘iZombies’ or ‘hostages’, as one columnist calls them. In the eyes of the opinion-forming classes, Jobs’ great crime was to include the little people in his techno-revolution, to give glossy gadgets to the masses as well as the intellectuals, since that robbed these gadgets of the special symbolism that allowed their users to declare: ‘I am above the crowd.’

As to the idea that Jobs was the killer of Chinese people, this, too, is fuelled by the perverse fantasies of the uncomfortable-with-capitalism cultural elite. Following some suicides at the factories in China in which Apple stuff is put together, it became fashionable here in the West to indulge in orgies of iGuilt, to whip both yourself and everyone else for wanting gadgets so badly that we’re willing to turn a blind eye to ‘enslavement’ in China. The deaths in China were referred to as ‘The iPad suicides’, with journalists saying: ‘Should you blame yourself for all those deaths at the Chinese electronics factory? Yes.’

Yet as I argued on spiked last year, anyone who looked at the number of suicides in these vast factories, which can employ up to 400,000 people, would have realised that the suicide rate was lower in these places than it was in China as a whole. The self-flagellation of iPad-using hacks in the West merely revealed how shallow and moralistic so-called anti-capitalism is these days, where the aim is not to analyse social relations, all the better to overhaul them, but rather to partake in a borderline Catholic guilt trip about the impact of our greed on their lives. In one fell swoop, Jobs-bashers manage to criminalise the material aspirations of Western consumers, the iZombies whose desires are apparently dangerous, and to infantilise Chinese workers, who are depicted as hapless victims, in need of rescue by that super-super-cool tribe of East Coast and Shoreditch hipsters who now actually boycott Apple products. Rad, man.

Leave it to ELLE Magazine to photochop the world’s most beautiful woman. Aishwarya Rai, the reigning queen of Indian cinema, model and classically trained dancer is currently on the cover of ELLE India — several shades lighter. Rai’s skin has been lightened and her dark brown hair appears to have a red tint to it.

The Times of India reported the former Miss World is “furious with the bleaching botch-up” and is considering taking legal action against ELLE.

ELLE’s mission is to make women “chic and smart, guide their self-expression, and encourage their personal power,” but their recent covers could lead readers to believe that “chic, smart and personal empowerment” only comes to those with light skin.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

Yes, it would seem that sometime in the last decade, the American people have become so fat and so happy and so inordinately lazy that they no longer want to put their own wear, sweat and stress into their Levis. Nope, it seems that the entire country will only buy jeans that have already been worn into a shambles, reduced, as new, to the rags I already had at home.

You’ve got new jeans at the Gap that look like they’ve had non-union and unlucky sweatshop employees of Sri Lanka of all shapes and sizes stuffed into them and then dragged for miles along country roads. They’ve got jeans with the off-the-rack look as if they’ve been sandblasted at a construction site in Tijuana — after Happy Hour.

You’ve got jeans that look as if the person inside them was persuaded to run through a scene of “Dirty Dancing” with a belt-sander.

You’ve got jeans that seem to have been stolen out of a wedding reception in Afghanistan after a predator strike went terribly wrong.

And you’ve got jeans that I swear have the finish and light golden color stained deep into the blue that you could only get if you buried them in a Chicago feedlot and let several herds of cattle rain down on them for a month.

Pre-shredded, pre-torn, pre-raveled at the seams, pre-faded, pre-pissed upon and a dozen other industrial or inhuman processes all combined to give me a section of men’s jeans at the Gap that looked like the changing room right next to a mass grave. All displayed proudly and marked and priced as “New.”

Gerard Vanderleun, “Pre-Owned Jeans”, American Digest, 2011-01-08

The Hells Angels are apparently going to war with British fashion house Alexander McQueen after accusing the couturiers of infringing on their trademarks.

The California-based motorcycle club, whose fearsome reputation includes the sudden and brutal application of trademark lawyers, believes the dressmakers, and its retailers, have overstepped the mark with a series of clothes and accessories featuring a skull and wings death head design.

Alexander McQueen, whose eponymous founder committed suicide earlier this year, allegedly sold items including a $495 Hells Four Finger Ring and a $1595 Hells Angels Jaquard Box Dress, the Hells Angels charge.

In today’s sour economy, however, what once seemed like waste is starting to look like wealth: assets to draw on when times get tough (and not just because of all those ads promising top dollar for your gold jewelry). Material abundance, it turns out, produces economic resilience. Even if today’s recession approached Great Depression levels of unemployment, the hardship wouldn’t be as severe, because today’s consumers aren’t living as close to the edge.

Take clothes. In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas, according to Cotton Inc.’s Lifestyle Monitor survey, which includes consumers, age 13 to 70. The typical wardrobe contained, among other garments, 16 T-shirts, 12 casual shirts, seven dress shirts, seven pairs of jeans, five pairs of casual slacks, four pairs of dress pants, and two suits — a clothing cornucopia.

Then the economy crashed. Consumers drew down their inventories instead of replacing clothes that wore out or no longer fit. In the 2009 survey, the average wardrobe had shrunk — to a still-abundant 88 items. We may not be shopping like we used to, but we aren’t exactly going threadbare. Bad news for customer-hungry retailers, and perhaps for economic recovery, is good news for our standard of living.

By contrast, consider a middle-class worker’s wardrobe during the Great Depression. Instead of roughly 90 items, it contained fewer than 15. For the typical white-collar clerk in the San Francisco Bay Area, those garments included three suits, eight shirts (of all types), and one extra pair of pants. A unionized streetcar operator would own a uniform, a suit, six shirts, an extra pair of pants, and a set of overalls. Their wives and children had similarly spare wardrobes. Based on how rarely items were replaced, a 1933 study concluded that this “clothing must have been worn until it was fairly shabby.” Cutting a wardrobe like that by four items — from six shirts to two, for instance — would cause real pain. And these were middle-class wage earners with fairly secure jobs.

. . . I immediately went across the street, bought a tailor’s measuring tape, and trudged from shop to shop, trying on various brands’ casual dress pants. It took just two hours to tear my self-esteem to smithereens and raise some serious questions about what I later leaned is called “vanity sizing.”

Your pants have been deceiving you for years. And the lies are compounding:

H/T to Mark Frauenfelder for the link.

The model featured in the Ralph Lauren Photoshop stick insect outrage — in which she was Photoshopped to within an inch of her life — claims she was sacked by the company for being “too fat”.

Filippa Hamilton suffered such an extreme digital makeover in an ad for the fashion company that BoingBoing was prompted to gasp: “Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis.”

Ralph Lauren quickly threw DMCA takedown notices at BoingBoing and PhotoshopDisasters for exposing the folly, but subsequently decided to apologise.