I love Shopgirl. The film and the novella. I can’t help it. If you’ve never seen or read it, it’s about an insular artist, Mirabelle (Claire Danes), who works as a glove salesgirl at a high-end department store in LA. There she meets Ray (Steve Martin), a wealthy logician in the computer industry who wants to date her without the complication of, um, love. Jason Schwartzman plays a poor, boyish designer who’s into Mirabelle but really needs to get his ducks in a row.

Our discussion of shopgirls and class transformation inspired me to give the film another look. The film has been described by some as a kind of Pygmalion, but I think that’s somewhat misleading. In the film, Mirabelle works at Saks, a magical site where a financially challenged young woman such as herself can stare mockingly at reality TV stars, engage people from far-away lands, and be noticed by rich dudes.

Mirabelle has a classy, vintage-y look that she achieves, as Martin describes in his book, by mixing recycled clothing with Saks’s sale items (on top of which she can add her employee discount). As she dates Ray, he gives her presents which she mistakes for signs of emotional closeness. Many of these presents are clothing, and though Mirabelle’s essential sense of style remains the same -- lots of ‘40s and ‘50s style dresses, often floral -- one notices that the cuts of her costumes seem more updated and well-tailored.

No Henry Higgins, Ray appreciates Mirabelle’s fashion sense and never directs where her clothes should come from or how they should look, with the exception of one trip to Armani (Steve Martin’s Givenchy, you might say).

It is never overtly stated, but I think it could be argued that the confidence Mirabelle has in her new, expensive, better-fitting clothes (Danes, perfectly cast for this role, has a long angular body that reads as gawky, not anorexic) and the sense of self-worth she derived from having someone buy them for her, outlast her relationship with Ray and give her the guts to ditch her glove-counter job for a gig at an art gallery -- another site interestingly positioned in the film for inter-class mingling.

mimetic desire

I posted previously about the possibilities of disarticulating the production of "femininity" (conceived of as performative) from its ostensible raison d'etre, the male gaze.  Naomi Wolff, in "The Beauty Myth," broached one possibility of such a disconnect between femininity and the male gaze, when she argues that women's magazines say that such-and-such is the "look" that men are going for, when the truth of the matter (says Wolff) is that it is the advertisers who want to sell their products who are promoting that particular "look."

In "Clueless," the idea of a disconnect between what advertisers promote and what "the guys" are looking for, is broached when Tai says that Josh reports that guys prefer college girls to girls in high school because the former wear less make-up.

In "Hamlet," there is much misogynistic talk about women and their make-up, constructing a false face to hide the one that nature gave them.

What exactly is the heterosexual male *stake* in the production of femininity-with-all-the-trimmings, if it is so often talked about (in male circles) in a rhetoric that deplores it, a rhetoric of dishonesty, duplicity, and declension from the "natural"?

Well, you know the idea from Rene Girard (or is it Sedgwick) about the triangular structure of male heterosexual desire, wherein male desire is mimetic: a man desiring a woman is in fact looking out of the corner of his eye at another man who is desiring that same woman: the focus is not on the woman so much as it is on the male rivalry, which is so intense as to libidinally overshadow any professed interest in the woman, who is indeed just a pretext or pawn in the male homosocial game.

It seems that the production of femininity-with-all-the-trimmings, insofar as it does desire to reach a male target audience (and isn't all about aesthetic/tactile/self-expressive play), alludes to or activates such an intensely homosocial context, in which the important thing is not that "I" [hypothetical male] have found a companion or lover, but that the other guys *see* that I have annexed a woman--I make sure that they see me walking around with a woman on my arm, whose femininity should be coded *loudly* so that they don't miss her.

Beauty is recession-resistant??

Here's an article I just saw in the LA Times "Image" section.

My Secret

A few weeks ago in a blog post, Ashley mentioned going on a shopping trip to a store recommended by a fellow student (me) but couldn’t reveal the name or location as she had been sworn to secrecy.

Well, I’ve decided to stop being so greedy and selfish and to share with you all my shopping secret, solution, and savior. The store’s name is Shareen Downtown, and was founded by Shareen Mitchell. I grew up in LA and have been to pretty much every vintage clothing store (and shopping destination) in the greater Los Angeles area, and this is by far the best. You can find anything: from party dresses, to evening gowns, rompers, tweed suits, summer shifts, shoes, hats, and cheap!! Shareen is a crazy person, a fast-talking and philosophizing former model, turned actress, turned nanny, turned vintage clothier. But despite her eccentricities (just sign up for her newsletter and you’ll see exactly what I mean), she has an incredible eye for clothes, and she will tell you if something looks bad or isn’t right for you.

I started buying from Shareen when I was 15 and she had a small booth at the Melrose/Fairfax flea market. And although she has moved on to bigger and better things; she now has two stores, styles celebrities, and has her own line (one of her dresses is called the “jewell” dress, which only signifies the extent of my obsession), she has stayed dedicated to keeping her prices affordable. And in times like these, that really is refreshing.

Wearing vintage clothes has long been my solution to my quantity over quality problem (as I’ve said, most of my clothes cost a dollar, but I don’t know if I’m ready to reveal my dollar sale secrets ) and to the ridiculous prices of new clothes. Plus I find the cuts more interesting and the construction tends to be of a higher quality.

So please go to Shareen’s and enjoy! She just opened a new store in Venice, and I haven’t been there yet. A few words of warning: the “downtown” location is actually in Lincoln Heights in a pretty sketchy warehouse district (but don’t mind the questionable surroundings, the treasure inside is worth it!). Also, no boys allowed. There are no dressing rooms, so be wary if you are particularly modest (I’ve creepily seen quite a few celebrities in the buff), but the atmosphere is really comfortable and everyone oohs and ahhhs over each other's choices. I’ve obviously never gotten over my childhood “dress-up” phase, where simply by putting on a princess dress (actually, for me more like a Scarlett O’Hara crinoline or a Ginger Rogers evening gown) you became a princess. Shareen’s perfectly fills that void for me.

I linked the title of this blog to her website (if you want a taste of what Shareen is like read her blog, which is linked on the site, it's really juicy), and here's an LA Times article on the store: http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/17/image/ig-shareen17

"You are what you drive" (a random post)

Here is the all new 2010 Toyota Prius

2010 Toyota Prius looks like this

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/uptospeed/2008/10/the-2010-toyota.html

As the ultimate “anti-status”-status symbol in our uniquely “you are what you drive” Angeleno car culture, your motor vehicle represents more than just a mechanical device to get you from point A to point B. Here, Toyota’s internal combustion-electric medium “is the message” (borrowing from McLuhan’s phrase) and the hybrid vehicle, particularly the Prius, evokes sentiments of environmentalism, frugality, and political activism with “yuppie appeal.” This new Prius appears the answer the complaints that focused on the car’s lack of aesthetic appeal –it appears more “sporty” with more “aggressive” front facia—changes that reflect a direct response to charges that it’s looks were very “vanilla” and “effeminate.” I’m curious to hear what others have to say about the cultural gendering of automobiles or automobile style—how certain cars get labeled as ‘chick cars’ while other forms of automobile styling is referred to as being masculine.

"Maid in Manhattan" as "progressive text"

It was commented upon in class, I believe, that "Maid in Manhattan" centers Jennifer Lopez at the expense of abjecting other, darker-skinned characters, as though to apologize for putting her in the center to begin with by highlighting her relative "lightness" in contrast to the darker-skinned characters in her orbit.  

Rita Felski however, albeit writing on the novel, gives us a means of potentially giving a text some credit for this move, instead of reflexively indicting it.  She writes: "Rendered as social allegories or assumed unworthy of scrutiny, entire categories of persons--servants, those of non-Western origin, the working class--were long relegated to the status of minor characters in fiction.... In an ingenious argument, however, Alex Woloch proposes that this patent unevenness of novelistic attention, the disproportionate space allotted to major and minor characters, does not blindly acquiesce to prevailing prejudice, but exposes and comments on it.  The effacement or the asymmetrical treatment of persons in fiction, their routine rendering as flat or one-dimensional types, is a means by which the novel registers and reflects on the pervasiveness of social hierarchies" (Rita Felski, "Uses of Literature," Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p. 93).  

While one might indict "Maid in Manhattan" of tokenism, then, one might also view it as a decided improvement upon "Steel Magnolias," in which race is altogether effaced, given no visibility whatsoever.

Consumer Capitalism and the Perpetual Superwoman

The linked article about Diane von Furstenberg's new fashion comic book, linking images of cartoon superwomen with the pursuits of fashion, seems to resonate well with this past week’s readings (especially the one on the lucrative love affair between designer and celebrity). I’m thinking specifically of how imagining the female subject and the thrusts of consumer capitalism seem to coalesce around celebrity and even more so, the celebrity designer and how consumerism sustains the notion of the everyday superwoman. Also interesting that some 3o years (and a million critiques) after wonder woman’s debut, there is still zero hint of irony in pairing “empowerment” with a swimsuit-clad Barbie named “Diva”. One would think the inventor of the wrap dress would know better…

Unrelated spoiler: I still can’t believe Leanne managed to win using all of 2 colors in her entire line!