Fashionopedia

I think I got double-schooled this week from the usually geeky news industry. In nearly back to back articles, the NYT and Slate laid down the index on modern fashionista reference materials, all online, and none of which I check out. My online fashionista-ing usually extends only so far as heckling WaPo’s Talking Fashion (Whaddya mean you can’t think of a single place to find a decent Kamali knockoff for less than three hundred bucks?! Why do you then extol the virtues of Nine West flats, given their shelf life of six working days?) and playing around with Polyvore.com, a nifty feature that lets you upload or copy images at willy nilly on to a fashion board- fashion plate if you will (chortle). Ok, sometimes I go to US Weekly to vote on outfits, but really, that’s it, and it’s just because I feel bad that the adventurous or curvy girls always lose by a ten percent margin.

Anyhow, apparently all yalls have been going online to look at the glossies in scroll down style. But really, have you? How popular are these styles? And given that people are still wearing those lousy peace scarves from two years back like it the hippest happening since heydom, is fashion really such a rapidly altering art? I suspect not. I was recently approached by a local media team, who offered me free botox if I would just try on some wedding gowns and make a few statements about demanding perfection on my wedding day. Then I went on to Craigslist's tv jobs, and saw all the ads for people by the local news outlets for the kind of stories the news wants to be true. I am beginning to think all news-related hype and trend are manufactured! Perhaps NYT and SLT just needed something to write about.

But am still going to read up, just in case.

Special attention should be mentioned for http://www.flickr.com/groups/wardrobe_remix/pool, where readers upload pix of them in their outfits for feedback. Very gutsy and cool, but I have to say. I would have adored them more before the last year of devotedly watching TLC’s What Not to Wear. I have come to realize there are subtler ways to play up the funk then a peace scarf, Ray-Bans, and ratty chucks with a sun dress. I won’t name anyone here but you know who you are and what street market you frequent for those terrible plastic earrings…….