-istas

since school ended, my interest in shopping has returned to its museum-employment levels. i just got back from a trip up 5th ave (the bklyn one, not the mnh one, to speak in craigslist abbreviations), only to get sucked into the new anthropologie catalog as soon as i walked through the door. anyone know any interesting shopping blogs out there? i'm tempted to post pictures of my booty (the pirate-metaphor kind, not the anatomical kind), which includes some skirts and a dress made by german designers, acquired during our trip to bonn/cologne.

i find myself, though, miffed at this season's fashions, wondering why anyone in her right mind would want to wear stretchy cotton koolats and those boob doilies known as bolero sweaters and especially those hippie empire-waisted blouses. who wants to wear maternity clothes when they're not pregnant? it's great for women who are, because they can just shop at the regular stores without having to seek out fashionable maternity boutiques, but anyone who wants to show off her waistline must make do with whatever's already in her closet. why slim down for summer when you can fit a whole chocolate cake under the halter tops they're selling now?

maybe i'm looking at this the wrong way. maybe the fashion world has finally acknowledged women's tendency to, well, eat, and i should be celebrating my stomach's independence from scrutiny. oh, except wait—those stretchy koolats don't look good on anyone who isn't already so skinny they'd look hot in a garbage bag (ahem, D.) if they decided to put one on. designers might be applauded for cutting women some slack if it weren't for the unsightly koolat cameltoe they've inflicted on all of us by making the pants in sizes above 2.

i know that fashion cycles are as demanding as 24-hour news channels, that there's a recurring space that must be filled with something new to keep people hanging on. they sold us leggings in the 80s only to have us repudiate them in the 90s so that we'd nostalgically embrace them now. there's clearly strategy at work here, some manufactured consent involving long strands of beads and stretch-cotton koolats (which i'm told were very fashionable during a decade not disclosed to me because it would've revealed my interlocutor's age), but mustn't there be limits? are there no fixed standards of taste that accompany us into the stores each season?

the popularity of the koolat suggests not. we'll be encouraged to laugh at them in 2016, to feel shame when perusing old photographs of ourselves looking wide-hipped and wedgie-ridden, but i don't need hindsight to feel shame. why don't people who, when confronted with a Mapplethorpe or a dung-strewn Virgin Mary, argue for unchanging aesthetic standards in the nation's editorial pages carry those same standards with them to the mall? art may depart from habitual notions of beauty and still be successful because no one's asking us to wear the elephant dung. but the utilitarian nature of everyday clothes should guarantee a world in which we don't prance around in humiliating outfits. somehow, that's precisely the world we live in.