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Ralph Lauren: Still King Of Glamour1

01:07, 2009-Oct-23 .. 0 comments .. Link

Instead of ignoring the ridicule, the company foolishly threatened the sites with legal action, alleging that reproducing the ad violated its copyright. (Illustrating criticism is, in fact, a classic example of "fair use" of copyrighted imagery.) What had been an amusing critique instantly became an Internet cause célèbre. Site after site reproduced the ad, portraying Ralph Lauren as a bully with bad taste. The company eventually apologized for the "poor imaging and freshwater pearl jewelry retouching," but not for the threats.

Compounding the public-relations disaster, model Filippa Hamilton then appeared on The Today Show, claiming that the company had dismissed her in April for being too big. (She is 5'10" and weighs 120 pounds.) The company denies the allegation and says she couldn't meet her contract obligations. Whatever the truth, much of the public now believes that Ralph Lauren fired a thin, beautiful model for not looking like a Photoshopped freak. And now a second example of digital hip removal has turned up. A brand once known for wholesome images of the good life is becoming a symbol of concentration-camp chic.

So much for glamour.

As for timelessness, Ralph Lauren's most recent runway collection was unfortunately historical. Prompted by the economic downturn, he presented Depression-inspired looks: Dust Bowl cotton house dresses, tattered jeans, ripped overalls, newsboy caps. Ripped jeans are trendy, but this brand isn't about trends; instead of patina, the freshwater pearl beads collection glamorized rags. "The Grapes of Ralph," Women's Wear Daily called the collection. A Boston Globe columnist condemned it as a "fashion faux pas" that romanticized "Depression-era starvation and despair."

"Are there really folks who want to look like subjects of a James Agee and Walker Evans collaboration?" asked The Washington Post's Robin Givhan. "'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' should not serve as a style guide." And surely no one aspires to silver lamé overalls.

Despite the missteps, including the too-literal attempt to make the brand relevant in hard times, it is Ralph Lauren's dedication to timelessness and glamour that should be ideal for the moment. Classic style is well suited for a new age of thrift where clothes are less disposable. Escapist glamour is the original Depression chic. Ralph Lauren the man speaks inspiringly of tough, sexy, natural women--"women who stood up for something and who were strong," the antithesis of retouched waifs.

Time for the company to remember who it is, to forcefully reassert the brand's identity with images of strong, healthy, natural beauties in emotionally resonant settings. Time to freshwater pearl jewelry rely less on lawyers and more on longing.

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style and editor-in-chief of DeepGlamour.net. She is writing a book on glamour for The Free Press.

Ralph Lauren: Still King Of Glamour

01:03, 2009-Oct-23 .. 0 comments .. Link

Ralph Lauren, who turned 70 last week, is the most successful purveyor of glamour since the golden age of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Like studio-era movies, Lauren sells dreams of pearl jewelry wholesale transformation and escape--all those green lawns and polo fields, safari tents and Rocky Mountain ranches. His designs transport the audience out of everyday experience and make the ideal life seem palpable.

Critics may mock him as a faux WASP parvenu and dismiss his customers as "yuppie arrivistes" (as a New York Times letter writer put it in 1992), but Lauren's work has authentic emotional power. It expresses his own "yearning for something beautiful and timeless that conjures up a world and takes you there." His genius as a designer and businessman was to find a huge audience that shared his yearnings.

If fashion is of the moment, Lauren is an anti-fashion designer. "I've never designed for obsolescence," he wrote. "I've designed for longevity." Flip through the massive volume of photographs and reflections he published two years ago to mark 40 years of freshwater pearl earrings designing and you see what he means. Only the most subtle differences in silhouette distinguish today's clothes from those of decades past.

A brand built on timeless glamour faces special challenges. Glamour is eternal, but its embodiment changes with the audience. Aspirations and tastes formed in one era may not suit the next. Lauren writes that the songs of Frank Sinatra "have no time." A child of the '60s--or the '90s--would disagree.

And glamour is a delicate illusion. Anything discordant can break the spell. Lately, Ralph Lauren ( RL - news - people ) the brand seems determined to puncture its audience's reverie.
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First, the blog Photoshop Disasters caught the freshwater pearl strands company using a freakishly retouched image in a Tokyo ad. The model had been digitally slimmed down so much that her head was bigger than her pelvis. The item was picked up by the much larger blog BoingBoing, whose readers reacted with mockery and condemnation. "I had no idea Pez had a 'Fashion Week' dispenser line," quipped one. Another called the ad "pornography for anorexia."

Minister Of Scandal

12:58, 2009-Oct-23 .. 0 comments .. Link

As it happens, I know Bangkok's gay bars very well, though I cling to my dull hetero ways. My favorite is Balls, just off Silom: It's very civil, clean and well-mannered, and the men, as far as I can judge such things, are charming enough. I've spent many an evening there drinking Singha beers and admiring the "boys" in their tight pants while lip-syncing to the wish pearl gift set Ramones. Twenty-five-year-olds there, I have noticed, look about 15 and 40-year-olds look about 25. Mitterand must have lapped it up. It amuses Thais, I might add, that Westerners think they can exploit street-smart operators and come off the winners, or that Thais would even let them. And is Balls the sort of place that French television commentators are evoking as the acme of human despair? Compared to some bars I can think of in the Parisian suburb of Rungis, it's paradise.

But none of this matters. The instant assumption that gay commercial sex is pedophilia is a leap of bad faith that conflates several superstitions and exaggerations into one generalization. If you are merely against people paying for wholesale pearl jewelry their pleasures, then say so.

A few years ago the British comic Chris Norris ran a television series called Brass Eye, which mimicked the form of gritty journalistic exposés. In one episode, called "Paedogeddon," members of the public were culled for a "market research experiment" regarding measures for controlling pedophiles. They were told that the government had developed a sensor the size of a walnut that could be inserted into the offender's backside, and when activated by the sound of freshwater pearl bracelet infantile laughter it expanded to the size of a 24-inch television set. Do you approve? They were asked. Unanimously, gravely, they nodded. "Good idea," they snarled.

Minister Of Scandal2

12:53, 2009-Oct-23 .. 0 comments .. Link

Gajdusek was found guilty and condemned to a year in prison, and then promptly fled, like Polanski, to France. We might note here that many sexual fugitives from the Anglo-Saxon world seem to flee to France. The most famous of them was Oscar Wilde, who died in France in 1900 after being imprisoned and humiliated in England more or less for freshwater perl jewelry being gay. Homosexuality was legalized in France in 1791. In England, to all intents and purposes in 1967. In the United States, it was only in 2003 that the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas struck down remaining state anti-sodomy laws. For the record, homosexuality in Thailand was normalized under the law in 1956. So much for our liberalism in matters of the flesh.

Oscar Wilde died in France because there he was not a biological criminal. And since the legal age of consent in France has been 15 since 1945--as it is in Thailand--many acts of what we would call "statutory rape" in the U.S. would not be crimes at all in those countries, any more than they would be in Denmark or Germany, where the age of consent is 15 and 14, respectively.

This doesn't let Polanski off the hook. You could have sex legally with a 12-year-old in England between 1275 and 1875 (that is, for 600 years), and with a 13-year-old until 1885, but Polanski wasn't living in Merry Old England. Yet at the same time we can certainly take Marine Le Pen with a pinch of salt. On other shows the hapless Mitterand was called on wholesale coral jewelry to justify his exploitation of "la misère." How guilty did he feel having fornicated with men--that is, boys--who sell themselves for cash? He squirmed. "That depends," he began, to general gasps of incredulity. But just as Polanski is assuredly guilty (anyone who has read the trial transcripts must feel a nasty vibe going up his spine), Mitterand is being flayed with a suspect imprecision. Is it because he is gay or because he is famously of the "caviar Left," or both? And are young gay escorts unknown in loose freshwater pearl Paris, of all places?

Minister Of Scandal1

12:50, 2009-Oct-23 .. 0 comments .. Link

Mitterand's error was to refer to his Bangkok loves as "boys." He clearly meant young men in their late teens or early twenties, and his book doesn't describe anything remotely resembling pedophilia. Nevertheless, the word "garcon" itself was a red rag to inflatable castles Marine and she lost no time proclaiming Mitterand to be a kind of high-culture Gary Glitter, a pedophile predator on the run. Not only were his conquests poor defenseless children, they were third world children raised in unspeakable conditions worthy of a few pages from Oliver Twist.

I couldn't help wondering whether Marine had ever been to a Bangkok gay bar, but I suppose that's a redundant question. Marine's tirade, however, seemed to be greeted with more sympathy than is usually accorded to the Le Pen family. Why? Because the Culture Minister is a dirty old man who is both gay and inclined to purchase his delights far from national territory. We were assured that France was committed to working with international agencies to end the commercial sex business in Thailand. This is news to me, I must admit. I haven't seen any evidence of pearl jewelry wholesale the French government helping to round up all the street girls on Sukhumvit Road who are frequented by men from France and 180 other nations. Most people there have no idea what France is up to on the international morals front, if anything.

Mitterand's case calls to mind that of Carlton Gajdusek, the prominent National Institutes of Health scientist and Nobel laureate whose voluminous diaries detailing his years wandering the jungles of Papua New Guinea (written in the 1950s) were pruriently investigated by the FBI. Their investigation began after Gajdusek was accused of intimately showering with one of the teenage Papuan "boys" who lived with him while on scholarships in Maryland. The boys concerned were underage by American law, and the diaries contained some colorful escapades among the sexually liberated jungles (another gay explorer, Tobias Schneebaum, had similar "liberating" experiences). When a stranger approached a Papuan village, Gajdusek recalled, young boys went out to freshwater perl jewelry greet him, and not with handshakes but with sexual advances. Tell us another one, said the FBI.
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