Hello, tailor.

Teen Wolf: "Fireflies".

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:32:00 +0000

Previously on Teen Wolf: Chaos Rising.

This episode was mostly about people running around and doing unnecessary backflips, but was still highly enjoyable because Morgan Leigh and I were briefly in the same country, meaning I got to watch it with her! True Internet Friendship is when you're happy to meet someone from Twitter at the house of a complete stranger in order to watch a show about teen werewolves at 9.30am on a Tuesday.

Anyhow, in lieu of a "real" "review", you're going to get an itemized list of all the things that were super-awesome about this week's Teen Wolf. Because let's face it: at least 50% of this episode was slow-motion shots of people snarling at each through pointy dentures. (The other 50% was Isaac Lahey's snood.)

1. Chris Argent
The third participant in Teen Wolf brunch was my friend Jackie, who had never seen the show before and was thoroughly confused by the entire experience. Morgan and I tried to explain things (Scott is a Teen Wolf. Shirts vanish for no reason, all the time. And Dylan O'Brien deserves to win 30 EGOTs for having beautifully expressive eyelashes.) but in the end we just gave up, because Teen Wolf is too sublime for explanations. Jackie just had to interpret things for herself. Like for example, the fact that famed Hot Dad Chris Argent is totally Ser Jorah from Game of Thrones. How had I not noticed this before?? Badass fight skills! Unabashed love of the Matriarchy! Facial scruff! Sad puppy emotions! Unfailing loyalty! Hot Dadness! It's all so clear to me now. SER JORAH: WEREWOLF HUNTER.

Chris Argent's role in this episode was particularly beautiful because it really highlighted how stupid everyone else is. Ditto Allison, to be honest. One of the best moments in "Chaos Rising" was when, after Derek, Stiles and Scott had spent 12 hours frantically trying to figure out how to break into a derelict bank vault, Allison just walked through the fucking door. ARGENTS. THEY'RE JUST SO COMPETENT. Meanwhile Derek, Isaac and Scott stand around like the male models in Zoolander, just before one of them lights a cigarette near a petrol pump and blows everyone to smithereens.

2. Ms Blake
Or, as Jackie called her, Jenny Calendar from Buffy the Vampier Slayer. I loved Ms Blake in this episode, for similar reasons to why I love Pepper Potts. Never mind the fact that her reasons for actually being there (working really late at the school?? Fetching paper from a poorly-lit boiler room, because a damp underground cavern is a good place to store office supplies??) were kind of dubious.

Female characters are often perceived as being one of two extremes: total badass, or total damsel. If you're fearless and able to kick everyone's ass, that's awesome. But if you're not like that, then you must be pathetic. I always found it pretty weird that some people saw Pepper Potts as somehow "weak", just because she wasn't Lara Croft, and I feel like Ms Black may fall into the same category. I liked the fact that she was clearly shit-scared to be down in that basement, because that was a completely realistic reaction to the situation. Much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf strikes a good balance between "tough" characters (ie, werewolves; people like Allison who have actually had training), and people for whom it makes perfect sense to be scared when a fanged hellbeast is coming at you in an enclosed space.
I've already received a message from someone asking if I thought the Derek/Ms Blake undertones were poorly handled, but honestly I thought it was great? It made sense for Derek to stay with her while Isaac and Scott took care of Cora and Boyd. Derek was probably too weak to carry a body very quickly, but also Isaac and Scott are both students. This way, Ms Blake wouldn't have to learn their secret. Plus -- and this is just a personal theory -- I think seeing Ms Blake was almost like a reward for Derek? Not in the sense that "Ms Blake is a reward", because that trope is THE WORST, but more because it's so rare for Derek to a) successfully do a good thing, and b) see actual real-life proof that he's helped someone. He went into that basement expecting to either die, kill his sister, or both, so seeing Ms Blake alive and relatively calm was a near-unique example of a Nice Things Happening To Derek Hale.
Re: shipping it, I admit I'm already intrigued by the possibility of a Derek/Ms Blake relaysh, not least because she's an older woman. Was Kate Argent one of Derek's teachers while they were having their affair, or is that just a fandom thing? Either way, it adds different connotations to the Derek/Ms Blake dynamic than if they were the same age -- or if Derek had a different history. But Ms Blake seems classy and nice, and Derek needs some of that in his life (not to mention, adult companionship other than his psychotic undead uncle). Who cares if the first time she laid eyes on him, he was covered in blood and they were locked in an unlit boiler room? In Beacon Hills, that's practically a meet-cute!

3. Derek Hale's never-ending agony.

"LOL." -- Jeff Davis.

Derek and Scott were pretty much equal when it came to tragic stupidity in this episode, but at least they seemed very, very aware of it all the way through. Scott's high point was when he emotionally manipulated Chris Argent into helping them, whereas Derek's finest achievement was... not killing his sister? Probably? God. That guy's life really sucks.

GIFs via the Teen Wolf Tumblr.

4. Stiles Stilinski's enormous bambi eyes, glistening with unshed tears.
Also: imagine a show where Allison, Chris and Stiles all worked together in a well-organised team. EVERYONE'S PROBLEMS WOULD BE SOLVED. Although I can't help thinking about how hilarious it would've been if all those murders had nothing to do with virginity. GUYS, STILES' LINE OF QUESTIONING IN THAT HOSPITAL ROOM WAS SO SKETCH. "So, traumatised girl... why were you camping out in the forest with your girlfriend? Nothing weird, my dad's totally a cop. He asks this kind of questions all the time." STILES.

5. Isaac Lahey.
Isaac Lahey's face. Isaac Lahey's snood. Every line of dialogue spoken by Isaac Lahey. ALL OF WHICH IS MADE DOUBLY HILARIOUS by the fact that his characterisation is just allll over the place. Like, some stuff can (I GUESS) be explained away by the fact that he's a traumatised 17-year-old who lives in the a giant, echoing Gotham City apartment with an even more traumatised 24-year-old who bit him and turned him into a monster, but, like... no.
Morgan and I were continuously dying of Isaac all the way through Fireflies because remember when he was a tearful, confused child whose father locked him in a refrigerator?? Remember when he was a stone cold psycho at the end of season 2?? Remember when he was adorable and kind of crushing on Scott?? Remember in this episode, when he was a bitchy sassbasket and wore a stylish hipster snood while out on a fun murder trip to the forest?? REMEMBER HOW ALL OF THOSE ARE THE SAME PERSON? He's just a multifaceted guy, I guess.

6. Lydia
Someone fetch me a stiff drink. Every time I think about Lydia, I fall into a pit of despair. WHY CAN'T NICE THINGS HAPPEN TO HER. WHY IS NO ONE HELPING HER WHEN SHE'S CLEARLY HAVING A MENTAL BREAKDOWN. Why doesn't she take off her 4-inch stiletto heels when standing next to a corpse-garnished swimming pool in the middle of the night.

Sterek Rating: x/10 (No interactions.)
Shirtlessness: A shocking ZERO occurences.
Snoodwatch 2013: 8/10. A very impressive showing, but it's always important to strive for improvement.
Dylan O'Brien EGOT alert level: Off the charts, as per usual.

Thought for the week: I still yearn for someone to explain the logistics werewolf facial hair. WHY NO HEAD HAIR ON BALD BOYD? WHY NO MOUSTACHES ON ANYONE, EVER? Does Cora have tons of hair extensions IRL, or is that a werewolf transformation thing? And where does everyone's hair go when they turn back into humans? Does it get sucked back into their follicles?? A mystery for the ages.

Previously on Teen Wolf.

Man-Child of Steel.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:03:00 +0000

This isn't gonna be a review so much as a written depiction of my gradual descent into a nervous breakdown while watching Man of Steel -- an experience I shared with the two five-year-olds sitting in the row in front of me. Definitely introduce your children to Superman via this movie, because it contains all sorts of child-friendly features! Such as a childbirth scene, Superman snapping a dude's neck in the middle of the vaporized ruins of Metropolis, and a complete lack of humour or a sense of fun. (HAHAHA NO SPOILERS THOUGH LOL no.)

Everyone spends the entire time stating the obvious. I'm not joking. 80% of the dialogue in this movie is like a masterclass in how to break the first law of writing: "Show, Don't Tell". Before anyone does anything, they tell everyone what they're about to do. And once they've done it, someone else explains what just happened. Sample scene:

"I'm very strong, and have no morals!" growled Zod. "I don't care about anything except Krypton!"

"But I will stop you," Superman replied. "Because I grew up on Earth. I'm going to defeat you!"

Superman punched Zod. Zod punched Superman. "Oh my god!" screamed a nameless extra. "They just punched each other! They are both aliens!"

"I hate both of them," said another extra. "Because aliens are a new and confusing thing, and we humans are afraid of things we don't understand."

Then a building fell and crushed all the extras, killing them and everyone they knew. Sadly, Superman did not know or care about this, because he was busy listening to someone explain why Zod was a very dangerous man who needed to be stopped.

The worst part was that it wasn't even expository dialogue. It was completely unnecessary, because even the traumatised five-year-olds in the audience could understand that the bad guys were evil murderers, and the big scary spaceship was dangerous. I'd like to imagine that this was an homage to vintage comics when everyone explained everything in their speech bubbles, to make up for the limitations of having to tell an awesome superhero story in eight pages and three colours. But no. It was just deeply, deeply stupid dialogue.

Superman has no personality. The two things you need to know about Superman's origins in this movie are as follows:

He's the first natural-born Kryptonian in centuries, and therefore the only Kryptonian who isn't genetically engineered to play a specific role in society. In other words, his parents created him as an avatar of free will.
On Earth, his purpose is to be a leader and a role-model to humans.

Man of Steel's Superman is even more Jesus-y than usual, to the extent that it gets kind of embarrassing. Like in the scene where he (INEXPLICABLY) goes to a priest for advice, and there's a giant glowing Jesus right behind him. Or when he floats into space in the shape of a Crucifix. Of course, it isn't really a problem for Superman to be Jesus-y, because that's kind of his thing. It's more that they really, really don't need to hammer the point home like that. WE KNOW. WE KNOW HE'S JESUS. HIS FATHER SENT HIM TO EARTH TO SAVE US AND TEACH US A BETTER WAY OF LIVING. PLEASE STOP POINTING IT OUT. Particularly since, while there are a whole bunch of allusions to Jesus, Superman's behaviour isn't terribly godlike. Like that one time he kills a guy. Or obliterates half of Metropolis while needlessly fighting Zod. Or fails to make any life choices for himself, like an adult.

In Man of Steel, Clark Kent is a likeable enough guy, but he really... doesn't... do anything. For a bastion of free will and leadership, he sure doesn't make very many decisions. Or even give the impression of thinking about anything at all. Instead, he passively does what other people tell him to do. As a child he takes Jonathan Kent's advice and as an adult he takes Jor-El's advice, but at no point does he ever formulate his own moral code or mission for life. He's a Super Man-Child.

As an origin story, Man of Steel is total garbage because there is just no character development at all. Instead of actively rebelling against Jonathan Kent -- or, indeed, going the "I don't want to be a hero" route and then changing his mind, like Peter Parker -- his journey from "nice young guy with a secret" to "nice young alien alien superhero with a secret" is smooth and conflict-free. Even his anonymous gap-year (with obligatory cameos from Angst Beard and Blue-Collar Job) is free from the kind of learning experiences we see in the Wolverine and Batman movies. In a film where so much emphasis is put on the role of free will, he comes across as a bizarrely passive protagonist.

Krypton makes no sense. Even taking into account the fact that Krypton is a decaying society run by traditionalist morons, it's still difficult to understand why anything is the way it is. Yeah, the ~~Vulcan high~~ council has mined the planet's core to the extent that it blows up and kills everyone, but how... does all the genetic engineering stuff work? Like, if you're gonna design some people to be worker ants and some to be soldiers, why would you engineer the soldiers to be immoral, psychopathic killing machines? Wouldn't it make more sense for soldiers to be tactical, logical and highly moral, so as to avoid, you know, highly-trained killing sprees? Also, WHY DOES KRYPTON EVEN HAVE A MILITARY? They're ruled by a single government, apparently have no outside enemies, and their empire is shrinking inwards rather than expanding. I DON'T UNDERSTAAAAND.

Genetically engineeried predestination is something that works as a science-fiction thought experiment, but is absolute trash garbage if you try to apply it to a real-world setting -- even if the "real world" is an alien planet. It could probably work if the genetically engineered people were a downtrodden underclass, but if they're leaders, scientists, warriors? THIS COULD NEVER HAPPEN. Not unless you actually removed everyone's free will, which just... wouldn't work. That's not a thing you could do, and still turn out characters like Zod, Jor-El, Lara, and the councillors. Instead you'd have a race of mindless slaves, run by genetically engineered "wise overlords", which is patently not the case here, because all the people in charge are idiots. Man of Steel's Krypton was a poorly-organised, science-phobic Avatar/Vulcan crossover planet that nobody ever wanted or asked for.

Even Kryptonian designs don't make any sense. Lara wears a flowing medieval gown at all times, including during childbirth. Everything everywhere is made from polished marble, and looks about as comfortable as a refrigerator. The only way to access stuff on the space ships is by plugging in a USB stick. And don't even get me started on the Kryptonian military armour, which is covered in about 400 extraneous spines that will catch on literally everything and turn the wearer into one of those deer who get their antlers caught in a tree and then die of starvation.

Most noticeably, the armour has a weird, rigid collar that makes it impossible for anyone to comfortably turn their heads. I'm pretty sure the reason why the Jor-El/Zod fight scene at the beginning had such shaky cinematography was because if they zoomed out and focussed properly, we'd be able to see that the actors could barely move in that armour.

The fight scenes are nonsense. All superhero movies have to end in a big fight scene, so it's easy to fall into the trap of just escalating a bunch of explosions until you reach the end. So while I do enjoy action movies, I tend to find "final battle" scenes in superhero movies to be pretty dull -- with the exception of The Avengers. The final battle in the Avengers went on for half an hour but was still entertaining because each of the characters had an interesting role to play, and it was full of jokes and snappy dialogue. Unfortunately, there are no jokes or snappy dialogue in the entirety of Man of steel, never mind the fight scenes.
Logistically speaking, the extended final battle sequence in this movie made no sense at all. From an ethical and strategic standpoint, every one of Superman's decisions were a nightmare. Most of the fights took place in heavily populated areas and he made no attempt to, you know, fly Zod out into the desert or something, where he couldn't raze any more skyscrapers to the ground. Seriously. SO MANY PEOPLE DIED IN THIS MOVIE. And in really unnecessary ways.

Spider-Man and The Avengers both have major fight scenes in inner-city areas, but that's because Spider-Man and the Avengers have to defend the city. Superman is in the unique position of being powerful enough to at least try to move the fight somewhere safer, like space, or the middle of the ocean. In Man of Steel, Superman is fighting Zod because... well, Zod Is Bad. So they have to punch each other a lot. But once the spaceship has been destroyed, there's definitely no good reason why they'd still be fighting in the middle of the city. So why do they keep going? For hours and hours? Sorry, Metropolis. RIP.

For a guy who usually seems ridiculously nice and caring (Henry Caville's Superman is great boyfriend material, if you overlook the part where he snapped a guy's neck), he is oddly callous about the vast number of civilians who die during the course of this movie. As are the audience, because the film never makes an effort to illustrate the real, human casualties of Zod's attack. Instead, characters just sort of... talk about it. Because that's what people do in this movie. They tell each other really obvious things, but totally fail to illustrate or express anything on a deeper level. Which is more or less the opposite of what you want to be doing when you make a film.

Man of Steel is far from groundbreaking, but the movie it most reminded me of was Thor. A really, really bad version of Thor. In Thor, the main character goes through some awesome character development, changing from a well-meaning spoiled brat into a sensible, adult warrior. In Man of Steel, Superman is sent to Earth by his father (like Thor) and ends up fighting people from his home planet on the streets of smalltown America (like Thor), but there the resemblance ends. We never see him struggle with his heritage, and he never really learns anything or comes up against a challenge more complicated than the physical fight between him and Zod. The whole thing was framed as a serious, grittier version of Superman, but in the end it far less intelligent and emotionally complex than the "lighter" movies of the '70s.
To cap off this semi-coherent rant, I thought I'd mention that there were a couple of things I did like. In no particular order:

Lois Lane. SHE WAS AWESOME. I can't believe that Zach Snyder and Chris Nolan teamed up to create a movie starring a dynamic, interesting female character in one of the lead roles.
Perry White.
The hilarious casting of about a million "hey, it's that guy!" actors from Battlestar Galactica, The West Wing, Dollhouse, etc.
Jor-El's Kryptonian dragon thing. Really, just Jor-El in general. Is Russell Crowe's new hobby just taking roles where he's unintentionally hilarious all the way through? My favourite part was when he was pointing out directions to Lois by materialising in front of her every five steps. How was it that "Jor-El is a holagram" was instantly understood by everyone, but things like "We're in danger because someone is shooting at us!" had to be loudly and repeatedly explained by multiple people all the way through??
The final scene where Lois says "Welcome to the Planet", ie the only funny or charming line in the entire movie.
The fact that we now know that as well as traditionally using his baby blanket as a cape, Superman actually IS fighting in his underwear. Because that whole body-suit thing is literally Kryptonian underwear.

Postscript: Most unintentionally funny moment in the movie: When, standing in the ruins of central Metropolis, surrounded by (presumably) the corpses of thousands of civilians crushed by buildings needlessly destroyed by Superman and Zod, someone stood up and said loudly, "He saved us!"

Teen Wolf: Chaos Rising.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:31:00 +0000

Previously on Teen Wolf: Tattoo.

Character 1: I just had a really terrible idea.
Character 2: Great! Let's do it!

-- Teen Wolf

On the bright side, this episode showed us that most of Teen Wolf's main characters are learning from past mistakes. I say "bright side" because as always, everything in Beacon Hills is terrible.

The main thing Allison has learned is how to be genre-savvy about living in a horror movie. Like for example, if the bruise on your arm looks like a mysterious symbol? Chances are it's a mysterious symbol. Lydia is doubtful, but that's mainly because she's a very rational person, and isn't used to the kind of gut feelings that Allison, Stiles and Scott have honed after two seasons of exposure to weird supernatural bullshit. Too bad Derek doesn't listen to Allison -- he's the one character who NEVER LEARNS, both in this episode and in general. Which is probably because he's a 50/50 split between "traumatised teenage boy" and "30-year-old hardened criminal": he never got a chance to, you know, learn how to think things through and make sensible decisions like a real adult. More on that later.

Scott and Stiles' party scene is extremely important because SHANTAL RHODES. Shantal is living the good life, somehow managing to go to teen parties in Beacon Hills and not get involved in any werewolf gang wars. I think she must go to the "other school" (the source of Stiles' new love-interest, Heather), which is presumably where all the human, relatively teenage-looking teens hang out. Anyhow, she and Heather are awesome, and have one of those rare teen TV show sex talks that bridges the gap between "ridiculous sex fantasy" and "actually kinda realistic".

Too bad Heather immediately gets punished, horror movie style, for wanting to lose her virginity. Out the window she goes! Interesting fact: this is actually what happens if you break your Silver Ring Thing chastity pledge. Invisible demons show up, fling broken glass at you, and drag you directly to Hell. NO SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE. Poor Heather. Meanwhile, I'm screaming into the void because Stiles has just told her that he hasn't turned 17 yet. STILES? IS? STILL? SIXTEEN??? Tumblrites: You're all going to jail.
I'm pretty excited that we get to see Derek's new loft in this episode. Despite the fact that it's ostensibly an actual apartment with furniture and running water and everything, it's almost less realistic than when he was living in the burnt-out shell of his family home, or on the mysterious (but similarly charred) subway-car-without-a-subway. Continuing with Beacon Hills' ability to simultaneously be a sleepy Californian town and a sprawling haven of urban menace and a dangerous supernatural forest, Derek's loft looks like it's located in either Gotham City or a post-apocalyptic steampunk video game.
Later in the episode Peter Hale makes fun of Stiles for assuming he lives in an underground werewolf cavern rather than "an apartment downtown, duhhh", but honestly, is that even fair? Especially since in this very episode, we learn that the Alpha Pack are chillaxing in an abandoned bank vault made from inexplicable werewolf kryptonite, with a corpse propped up in the corner. Also, Peter, if you're gonna try to raise the profile of werewolves are normal people, getting an apartment is the least of your worries. Maybe try to stop kidnapping innocent teenagers, or seeming 100% Hannibal Lecter whenever you talk to anyone.
That being said: gotta love Peter Hale. When he strolls into Derek's inconceivably gigantic aircraft hangar of a loft apartment, he's accompanied by an instantaneous KAPOW of guitar riffs. I'm pretty sure that's the actual real sound he makes when he walks into a room. "Boys," he smirks, flinging his leather jacket onto Derek's steampunk hat-stand. "What the Hale is going on here? Don't all take your shirts off at once." (Side note: what happens when Peter Hale and Deucalion inevitably meet? Do two become one??)
Back at school, Scott and Stiles are attending METAPHOR CLASS. The three classes we always see in teen TV shows are as follows: 1) that one bio class where you have to dissect a frog, 2) analysing a novel that has huge significance to the show's plot and the emotional journey of the main characters, and 3) nonspecific metaphor class -- in this case a business lesson where Scott has to decide between hard work or taking the easy road. The most important thing here is that the class is taught by Finstock, ie Jeff Davis' crowning glory when it comes to totally fuckin' weird side-characters. Meanwhile in the library, 27-year-old high school juniors Allison and Lydia are checking out two 23-year-old high school freshmen. Also, in a moment of stark realism, Allison uses a butcher's apostrophe when looking up a Mysterious Symbol Clue. Luckily she isn't using Google, so at least the NSA won't know about it.

"logo's"

Chaos Rising was particularly exciting for me because we got a whoooole bunch of Deaton. Deaton originally struck me as being rather bland, partly because he's been landed with the unenviable role of playing distant-yet-helpful mentor figure to a bunch of people who don't want him to be their mentor. Also, half of Teen Wolf's storylines would collapse if he was always around to explain what's going on. However, as soon as you realise that Deaton is kind of a troll? All this shit becomes awesome. He's like the Peter Hale of people who actually have a moral centre.
This week on Deaton's Puppy Sanctuary for Troubled Teens, he decided to reenact the scene from Inception where Leonardo DiCaprio bursts out of a bathtub full of water. Except instead of using a PASIV device to access Isaac's memories, they're just gonna refrigerate him like a giant margarita until he goes into a "trancelike state". On the bright side, Isaac is a pre-Raphaelite beauty, so he looks great while they're doing it. If you plopped me into a bucket of ice water, I'd probably turn bright purple and then throw up on your shoes. Isaac Lahey, however, has creamy skin, inch-long eyelashes, and generally looks like a cherub. Additionally, we're now two-for-two on scenes where Isaac is in agonising pain for no good reason. Teen Wolf knows its audience, and Isaac Lahey turns most of us into serial killers, whispering "You're beautiful when you cry" into one of his pale, shell-like ears. (BRB, going to jail.)

OK, now for the serious shit. I was hoping for an actual heist scene where Derek and Scott rappelled down into the bank vault, but for obvious reasons (the fact that each episode of Teen Wolf is filmed in 4 days on a budget of $12 and some energy drinks), we only got to see Derek punch his way through a cardboard wall. Which happens maybe twice per episode anyway. But once we're in there? HOLY SHITTTTTT. First of all, we actually got to see Erica's corpse, which was beyond horrifying -- particularly for Allison. But mostly? CORA!!

Ever since we learned that All Of Dereks' Family Are Dead™, I've been waiting for one of his dead relatives to show up. Of course, it's never gonna be a happy ending. In shows like this they always turn out to be a shapeshifter, a hallucination, or an evil clone. In this case... well, we don't really know yet. But Derek's already had to fight her, and she's now run off to god know's where, to maul some innocent bystanders (if there are even any of those left in Beacon Hills). Whatever happens, it's 100% agony because even though Derek is a proven idiot and occasionally an accidental moral sinkhole ("I'LL JUST PUNCH MY WAY THROUGH IT," he growls, glowering at a crowd of civilians, a pile of rubble, and a dumpster. "I'M THE ALPHA."), he doesn't deserve this kind of emotional torment. First his sister is given back to him, then she's torn away again, and I can only assume Jeff Davis is going to vomit up some further horrors for them later in the season. Don't kill her off!! Just let Cora and Derek move into a nice suburban house and go to therapy! THERAPY!!

I mentioned earlier that this episode was partly about how much everyone has learned. Well, Derek has learned nothingggggg. While part of Scott's season 3 makeover is a newfound ability to strategise ("Maybe we should find out what's going on before we climb into an underground full of werewolves??" he wonders. "NO," Derek replies through clenched fangs. "PUNCH THROUGH WALL."), Derek's self-destructive streak is reaching Harry Potter levels of bad decision-making. Presumably next week will see him locking himself in an enclosed space with his rabid sister, out of sheer desperation. Meanwhile outside, Scott phones Stiles: "Maybe we should Google something?" he says, wondering if they should take Cora to a medical professional rather than tying her to a plank of wood in Derek's kitchen. "Or make a plan??" Well done, Scott. Well done, Allison. Well done everyone except Derek, pretty much. For god's sake, somebody just give him a hug.

Miscellaneous

Ms Morrell is hanging out with Deucalion?? Is she undercover?? I DON'T KNOW IF I EVEN CARE ABOUT THIS. There are so many characters now that I barely even recognised her when she first came onscreen. Same with Cora, who I briefly mistook for Allison. This is the eternal Teen Wolf problem: everyone is so good-looking and symmetrical that sometimes I can't actually tell them apart. Whatever happens, I'm still holding out for the big reveal that she's still Kendra the Vampire Slayer, and The Girl from 3x01 is her apprentice.
I can only assume that the Celtic knotwork symbol on Allison's coffee cup will come back to haunt us. Everything is a symbol!! Everything is meaningful!! Beacon Hills' Generic Starbucks knock-off is a haven for demonic forces!!
Someone needs to make a montage of all the times the camera swoops down to hip level for a shot of a character revealing their Werewolf Manicure.
I saw a great Tumblr theory that all the school-age characters who look 25 (DANNY) are actually undercover cops. Now I'm imagining a Danny/Ethan relaysh like Maebe's love-interest in the new season of Arrested Development, where she thinks she's dating an undercover cop in a highschool, but really he's just an over-developed 16-year-old. You know you want it, Internet.

Previously on Teen Wolf.

Teen Wolf: Tattoo.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:28:00 +0000

Previously: Teen Wolf 101: An introduction to the eighth wonder of our world.

Welcome to Teen Wolf! The show where the shirts are off, and the pants don't matter. Last year's season finale saw about 9000 things happen, including one character stripping naked and turning into a lizard, and Evil Grandpa Argent roaring "MOUNTAIN ASSHHHH!!" in one of the most magnificent line-deliveries in TV history. What a masterpiece. (Teen Wolf showrunner recently described this episode as a "clusterfuck", but let's not dwell on the past.) I could recap all that stuff for you, but it'd require too much googling, so let's just watch that MOUNTAIN ASHHH clip again, shall we? OK. You're ready.

Season 3 opens with a subject close to all our hearts: curly-haired cuteboy waif Isaac clutching onto someone dear life. This time round, it's a badass lady with a motorcycle and a dubiously plausible lightning taser gun. "Into every generation, a slayer is born," she explains, back-flipping off a burning building onto her motorcycle. "She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness." OK, I kid, but seriously. She's awesome. Plus, she shares a gloriously ridiculous new plot point: Some alphas can steal your memories just by touching you, because what Teen Wolf really needs is a magical amnesia subplot. But apparently that isn't enough, because she immediately moves on to introduce the latest male models to join Teen Wolf's cast of top-tier ab-actors (abtors?). These guys were cast via an open call from (I kid you not) TeenWolfTwins.com, and they rip their shirts off within five minutes of appearing onscreen.

Actually, to be 100% accurate, they rip their leather jackets off to reveal precisely zero shirts underneath. This actually makes a lot of logical TV sense because they then glue their torsoes together to make a kind of Alpha Werewolf Megazord. A legit reason for shirtlessness! Thanks, science! BUT WAIT. What happened to the pants? Were they just kinda sucked into the double-werewolf icecream swirl, like how the Animorphs could always turn into animals without taking off their clothes? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PANTS.
I'm a big fan of the ~hidden meanings~ in the Teen Wolf intro, so I'm 100% ready to hear fandom's theories about the new changes. Shirtless Derek is still shaking off the powdery ashes of his dead family and Stiles is still just kinda standing around, but there are a couple of major alterations. Firstly, Jackson is gone (to "London" -- AKA a lucrative recurring role on the CW's Arrow, where he and John Barrowman are now BFFs), and Lydia's intro now includes her being split in two, which is certain to be ~meaningful. Also, Scott levitates, a hand bursts out of a grave (that classic staple of the horror genre) and the sequence ends with a (MOUNTAIN ASH?) tree. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?? Answers on a postcard, please.

Teen Wolf is one of those shows that definitely improves once you know something about the cast and crew. For example, Stiles and Scott's conversation about Scott's new tattoo seems a lot like something Dylan O'Brien and Tyler Posey would say in real life. "Don't you think your first tattoo should, like, mean something?" asks Stiles/Dylan, CROL-ing silently as Scott/Tyler reveals his new tattoo of... two black stripes across his arm. "No, I just like it," is the answer. To be honest, I'm with Scott on this one. Any tattoo idea that seems meaningful at age 18 is definitely gonna be an enormous embarrassment in later life. Best to just stick with your minimalist black stripes. Which turned out to be a more meaningful choice than Tyler Posey ever suspected, since Jeff Davis decided to write the tattoos into the show, imbuing them with some kind of ~mystical symbolism.
Conveniently, the teen show genre includes a ready-made explanation for the chronological gap between seasons: school holidays! What have you been doing for the past four months, Allison? Oh, I've been in France. (Beacon Hills' summer break is apparently four months long, perhaps to balance out the school's intensive curriculum of lacrosse games, teen romance, and dramatic showdowns in the boys' locker room.) And what have you been up to, Lydia? Just making the most of living in a town populated by Calvin Klein underwear models, no biggie. "Freshmen," she purrs at Allison, as they return to school. "Fresh... Men." Because in addition to the existence of werewolves, Teen Wolf's fictional universe features 14-year-old boys who look like ripped 23-year-olds. Just go with it.

"Lydia, they're fourteen." (source: mamagwendo.)

This episode was very light on Stiles, which I think was a smart decision. Stiles is enormously popular, but that doesn't necessarily mean he deserves a great deal more screentime. The structure of the show still relies on Scott being the main character, and too much Stiles might have been overpowering for the introductory episode of a new season. Instead, Tattoo focuses on Scott's summer vacation makeover, a wise choice because he ended season 2 by acting like an utter bag of dicks. Thankfully he's a teenager, so poor decisions and abrupt personality changes can be explained away, more or less.

One of Teen Wolf's most impressive feats is making us like Scott McCall, a character who might otherwise have been one of those bland leading men surrounded by a supporting cast of more interesting characters. In Season 1 I might have been bored by a Scott-centric episode like this, but now I'm totally into it because Scott's Word of the Day calendar? ADORABLE. Luv ur face, Tyler Posey.
If I'm gonna be irritated by any Scott-related development, it's the implication that he's somehow important to the alpha pack. One of the things I really appreciate about this show is the lack of "destiny" vibes. Like, Scott McCall isn't the Chosen One: he's just a guy who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and now has to deal with the consequences. If they introduce some kind of plotline where he's prophecied to be the enemy of the Alpha Pack, I won't be happy. While I do love Hero's Journey stories like Buffy and Harry Potter, Teen Wolf is a refreshing change in that it's a story about normal people choosing to fight against chaos rather than heroic superhumans battling a sworn enemy because it's their Fate.

It's still unclear to me whether this episode's attitude to the Season 2 finale is "Let's pretend that never happened," or if there simply wasn't enough time to tackle it while introducing the Alpha Pack. The finale saw Scott betraying Derek in a pretty horrifying way, but this season Derek has either forgiven him... or he's so beaten down by the horrors of life that he just doesn't care any more. At the moment I'm leaning towards the latter, because Derek's kind of a slow-burner. At first you think he's just this tall-dark-handsome loner who only has one facial expression, but the more you watch, the more you realise that he's being slowly crushed by the weight of years of trauma. Derek's newfound "This is my problem," attitude doesn't so much seem like he's protecting Scott, but rather that he's just given up on trusting him.

Miscellaneous thoughts.

Sterek rating: 2/10. Sorry, shippers.
I'm already super into the animal-related Signs and Portents. But if they mean Lydia's gonna go through even more agony then I already need pre-therapy to prepare me for that shit. I LOVE YOU, LYDIA.
Luv that Beacon Hills includes what seems to be several square miles of deserted and poorly-lit industrial warehouses. Can someone please draw a map of that town? HERE is the abandoned subway car where Derek used to live, despite the fact that the town has no subway. HERE is the tattoo parlour and the gay bar where Jackson turned into a lizard. HERE is the giant, mysterious forest that is somehow right next to the school but also miles out of town, depending on the episode. HERE is the Sheriff's office where every single deputy was viciously murdered four months ago.
Does Sheriff Stilinski really not know about werewolves, even though Mrs McCall found out last season? Did I miss something?? IS HE JUST TROLLING EVERYONE NOW?
I've listened to this song like 500 times already today. It's almost like this show is on... MTV...
Isaac's douchey surgeon was one of my favourite moments of the episode. Jeff Davis is brilliant at writing these weird, memorable little one-shot characters, which always kinda puzzled me because Teen Wolf's main characters can often seem oddly lacking in background. Like, where are Lydia's parents while she's skipping the first day of school to have morning sex with some random body-builder? How did Derek Hale shower or get internet access when he was living in the burnt-out shell of his family home? Shhh, don't think about it.
Glad to see that they're maintaining Derek's agonising combination of sassy one-liners and crippling survivor's guilt. I always got the distinct impression that if he wasn't constantly on the brink of emotional collapse, he'd be one of those guys who finds literally everything hilarious. "I need a favour," says Scott, which in Beacon Hills usually means disposing of a body. Happily, all Scott wants is some werewolf tattoo advice. "LOL," whispers the tiny corner of Derek's mind that isn't occupied by thoughts of his dead family and imminent werewolf territory disputes. "LOL," he thinks, mournfully.

Previously on Teen Wolf.

The costumes of Stoker: A vampire movie without the vampires.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 31 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

I've been watching a lot of Hannibal recently, and I've come to realise that Stoker could be the origin story for a female analogue to Hannibal Lecter. While there are plenty of psychotic male antiheroes out there, India Stoker is a rare breed: an ambiguously amoral female character who isn't depicted as a bitch, a slut, or a straight-up villain. Like Hannibal, Stoker is a vampire story without the vampires.

Stoker GIFs from here.

Stoker begins with the kind of premise that I generally find depressing: a mother/daughter love triangle, with the mother envying her daughter's youth. In this case it's Evelyn Stoker competing with her daughter India, who in true cliche spirit is "on the cusp of womanhood". Following the death of India's father Richard, long-lost uncle Charlie shows up at the funeral. Exploiting Evelyn's loneliness and India's sulky passivity, he moves into the Stokers' huge country house where he begins seduce both mother and daughter -- in very different ways.

Until we see her go to school, India's age isn't immediately clear. Mia Wasikowska's clean-faced appearance allows her to seem anywhere from mid-teens to late twenties, and India's living situation fails to provide many clues: one can easily imagine her and Evelyn growing old together in the Stoker house, Grey Gardens style. Her costumes are consciously frumpy and virginal: loose-fitting, Alice In Wonderland pinafore dresses and the flat-heeled saddle shoes that take on such important meaning later on in the film.

Clothes On Film has a great post about those shoes as a symbol of Charlie's obsessive desire to control India. He sends her a new pair every year, and thinking they were a gift from her beloved father, they're the only shoes India ever wears. In one scene she lies in bed, surrounded by seventeen years' worth of shoeboxes, and it's never quite clear whether she feels betrayed or intrigued when she finally discovers that they came from Charlie all along. India's shoes may also be a reference to Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks, whose transition from black-and-white saddle shoes to red high heels symbolises her journey from schoolgirl to seductive adult woman.
A lot of thought went into the costumes of Stoker. India is a Wednesday Addams figure, dressing like a child from another era while her mother wears a series of vampy, feminine designer outfits. One of my favourite scenes is when we finally see India leave the grounds of the Stoker house and go to highschool. Until then the film seems like it exists in an arthouse cinema bubble of stylised costumes and mannered colour palettes, but in fact it's only the Stokers who live there. As soon as India arrives at school, we realise that the movie is taking place in the "real" world after all, as the stubbornly bizarre (and now by comparison, utterly bizarre-looking) India goes to class alongside stereotypical 21st century jocks and teen girls.
Charlie's appearance is particularly disturbing because of its Stepford Husbandish attention to conventional detail. All of his clothes are a parody of preppy, all-American style, to the extent that subconsciously, you just know that it's a costume rather than being his "real" appearance. A wolf in WASP's clothing -- or a vampire in disguise. This feeling is exacerbated by the overt hints that despite his charm, he doesn't fit in with normal society -- for example, arriving at his brother's funeral without mourning clothes or even a black tie. Plus, because Charlie is meant to be an object of both fear (India) and desire (Evelyn), Matthew Goode is filmed in a way that mesmerisingly combines "horror movie monster" with "look at this hottie".
One of the reasons why I wrote this review (so long after the movie came out, that is) is the number of questions I've received about Stoker's costumes, particularly the colour-scheme. Charlie's yellow v-neck sweater is a far less noticeable costuming detail than India's shoes or her mother's luxurious formalwear, but it's still ripe for analysis. Charlie is an intriguing combination of two movie psycho stereotypes: charming, virile killers (Hannibal Lecter) and childish or sexually ambiguous weirdos (Norman Bates). As he charms Evelyn and lurks vampirically over India while she plays the piano, we can only interpret him as being in the first category. But as the film progresses, we learn that he also has a great deal in common with the less glamourous breed of onscreen serial killers -- the ones who sleep with a body-pillow of their mother, or collect creepy china dolls.
Charlie's monstrous nature is rooted in his childhood, and once we see the flashback scenes between him and Richard, it's easy to see him as being a partly childlike figure beneath that veneer of seductive American charm. The yellow sweater fits in with this characterisation: the colour of baby blankets, fluffy ducklings, or the kind of pastel shade associated with the implicitly queer villains of media from the mid-20th century. And as this post points out, the recurring colours of red and yellow are a noticeable theme in Stoker. From Charlie's yellow umbrella to India's bloodstained yellow pencil, both colours are in the foreground throughout.
In true vampire movies, the virginal girl's transformation into a bloodthirsty monster is usually signalled by a sudden fondness for corsets and sultry makeup -- a link to the vampire's metaphorical role as an experienced older man who inspires her sexual awakening. Stoker subverts this trope, with Charlie entering into a murderous pact with India before trying to seal the deal with a pair of crocodile skin stiletto heels. In his mind, the shoes are a symbol of him finally bringing India into the fold as his adult lover/fellow "vampire", but India rejects this in favour of going her own way. Rather than transforming into the sexy, aggressively stylish lady those crocodile heels represent, she ends up putting on her mother's blouse, her father's belt, and the shoes as an afterthought. A fitting finale, considering the fact that her style and personality are both a product of the incestuous nature of her family.
Related: Movie costumes I have loved: Hanna.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Too many dicks on the Enterprise.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:02:00 +0000

[From my Star Trek Into Darkness article at The Daily Dot.]

In 2009’s Star Trek, JJ Abrams successfully made the effort to appeal to new viewers as well as dyed-in-the-wool Trekkies. This time round, he seems to be going further afield— and alienating the original fanbase entirely.

The publicity for Into Darkness has been solidly high school: Don’t worry—it may be Star Trek, but it’s not for nerds anymore! In an interview with Jon Stewart this week, Abrams made it very clear that he’d never liked the show as a kid, because it was “too philosophical.” “I stopped listening when you said you didn’t like Star Trek,” Stewart joked. “I saw your mouth moving, so I assume you apologized.”

It’s not actually necessary for a director to be a lifelong fan if they want to make a successful adaptation. In fact, JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek movie was proof of that. But it’s another thing for an adaption to leave most of the original show’s values in the dust, which is what Into Darkness seems to be doing. The dialogue is snappy, the action sequences are fun, and the characters seem real enough, but the heart and the brain are now gone.

In 1966, Star Trek broke new ground with its international crew of hopeful explorers, scientists, and adventurers. True, the show was full of heavy-handed Cold War metaphors and casual 1960s misogyny, but its central messages were obvious: Racism is bad. Give peace a chance. That kind of thing. Men and women, Russians and Americans, aliens and humans: all could work together on a more-or-less equal footing. For many viewers, Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) was the first woman of color they’d seen playing anything other than a maid. Star Trek was pushing the envelope.

In 2013, not so much. [READ MORE]

Interview with Michael Kaplan, costume designer of "Star Trek" (2009) and "Star Trek Into Darkness".

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:59:00 +0000

I interviewed the Star Trek Into Darkness costume designer for Wired.com! You can read it here.

Since Star Trek first made its way to the big screen, its costume design has veered away from the classic color-coded uniforms in favor of experiments with red double-breasted uniforms and unfortunate flesh-colored jumpsuits. But for the 2009 J.J Abrams Star Trek reboot and its recently released sequel, Into Darkness, costume designer Michael Kaplan helped move the sartorial stylings of the Enterprise crew forwards by looking backwards–at the trusty old red, blue, and gold. It’s a comfortingly familiar detail amongst Abrams’ trademark lens flare and glowing spaceship interiors: a conscious chromatic nod to the vintage style of the original costumes.

“I wanted the film based in the ‘60s,” Kaplan told Wired. “Not literally the ‘60s, but I wanted my thinking to be grounded in the concept of the original Star Trek, almost like an homage…. I had a lot of books in my library that I’d consult: [André] Courrèges [inventor of the mini-skirt], designers like that. To keep things rooted in that, even if when you look at the movie, you don’t say, ‘Hey, this is the early 1960s.’" [READ MORE]

The evolution of the Star Trek uniform.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:15:00 +0000

Just in time for the new Star Trek movie, I wrote this article for Empire Online! It follows the original series Starfleet uniform from the 1960s to the present day -- but don't worry, there aren't any spoilers for Into Darkness. You can expect a post about that sometime next week, after the US release date. :)

Even Star Trek’s most devoted fans wouldn’t dare claim that the original series was a high-budget operation. In among the cardboard sets, guest stars had to wear a selection of costumes that ran the gamut from the baffling (an evil baby in a silver lamé toga; girls in hot-pink fur bikinis) to the plain ugly. In one early episode, an entire alien species is kitted out in a vaguely familiar fabric that one later realises is also used for all the bedspreads on-board the Enterprise.

But in the original series Starfleet uniform, Star Trek struck costuming gold. [READ MORE]

How I learned to stop hating and love GOOP.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:51:00 +0000

[I've been pretty busy recently, but we should be back to regular HelloTailor updates in a couple of weeks! :) In the meantime, have this article I wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow's beauteously delusional millionaire lifestyle website, GOOP.]

If the experts at People magazine are to be trusted, then Gwyneth Paltrow is currently the most beautiful woman in the world. Happily, this means that beauty now comes with a comprehensive instruction manual. Thanks to her lifestyle newsletter, GOOP, it’s possible for us mere mortals to follow Gwyneth’s own advice on how to be exactly like her—that is, perfect.

According to its website, GOOP (cheerily named after Paltrow’s initials) is “a digital media and e-commerce company.” Its free weekly newsletter includes style tips, recipes, vacation recommendations, and miscellaneous words of wisdom from Paltrow’s rich and famous friends. The writing style is particularly intriguing—primarily first-person Paltrow, with occasional additions from a mysterious editorial “we” whenever Gwyneth wants to interview herself.

GOOP may not sound like it has much of a market aside from people who really, really like to read about quinoa and $350 yoga pants, but it’s mesmerizingly readable—mostly because of its Marie Antoinette–esque detachment from reality. It's a glimpse into a magical alternate universe where money is limitless and the most important things in life are selecting the most authentic Corsican spa for a weekend getaway and teaching one’s children to enjoy buckwheat grains. [READ MORE]

Hannibal: "Apéritif”

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:20:00 +0000

(Note: No major spoilers.)

Hannibal is a rare breed in that the first episode is genuinely good, mostly because there's no need for clumsy exposition. Anyone with half a brain already knows what's going on: Hannibal is a cannibal, but it will probably take at least one season for anyone on TV to work that out. It only takes a couple of minutes to illustrate who Hugh Dancy is: a guy who frowns a lot because of Confused Emotions, and whose brain is a holodeck for blood-spattered crime scenes. Hugh Dancy means we can watch people get murdered in dramatised flashback form, instead of having some generic CSI person explain it to us with Science.
Mads Mikkelsen is, obviously, fantastic. But for me, the harder sell was always going to be Hugh Dancy's character, criminal profiler Will Graham. Not because I'm familiar with his character (I'm not) but because the crime/mystery genre is already overflowing with cute-ish men in their 30s and 40s. Luckily Graham sidesteps the two main cliches of "asshole genius" and "dorky everyman", and is interesting enough to be a worthwhile foil to Hannibal. Still, like most stories about serial killers, Hannibal mostly features women as side characters or in the role of naked, brutalised corpses. In The Silence of the Lambs, this is less of an issue because Clarice Starling is just as important as Hannibal Lecter, but there's no real need to make a TV series about Clarice. We already know her story too well.

Hannibal Lecter is the ultimate glamorized serial killer, so it was a smart decision to keep him on the sidelines and use the first episode to focus on Will Graham's horrified empathy. While it's pretty easy to film gore and violence, it's harder to make the deaths in a crime show seem as emotionally "interesting" as the investigation process. Audiences are just too used to watching CSI and horror movies. In a serial killer mystery, the victims (as ever, a series of attractive young women whose interchangeable photos are pinned to a map) are often treated like little more than roadblocks on the journey to finding the murderer. Hannibal doesn't make a huge effort to humanise its various corpses (horrifying as they may be), but Will's awkwardness and disgust are very effective.

Visually, I'm already very satisfied. And not just by the pointless but deliciously nerdy set-design nods to The Shining. Even the promotional materials lean pretty heavily on the image of Hannibal as the vampiric centrepiece of a 17th century oil-painting, usually surrounded by fruit and skulls and slabs of raw meat. It must be difficult to avoid going overboard with all that gothic imagery, to be honest. Hannibal's already almost a parody of himself, sitting in a darkened room full of expensive furniture, eating exquisitely flambéed human lungs while the Goldberg Variations play in the background.

Mads Mikkelsen's costumes simultaneously crack me up and make me sigh because they are soooo good. Here, we're getting to see Hannibal at his absolute peak: taller, better-looking and better dressed than anyone else onscreen. The rest of the cast are serviceable crime procedural characters wearing everyday American TV clothes, but Hannibal looks like... well, exactly what he is. A luxury-obsessed European aristocrat and connoisseur, secretly looking down his nose at all the small-minded American plebs who eat food from chain restaurants and dress like Will Graham.

Graham is deliberately dressed to look soft and harmless, in the wrinkled shirts of an academic who doesn't care about his appearance and sleeps on the floor with ten stray dogs. Hannibal is the absolute opposite, his clothes just another extension of the obsessive care he puts into every other aesthetic aspect of his life. When we see him apart from Graham and the FBI (at his office, or at home by himself) he wears beautifully tailored suits with grace-notes in the form of pocket squares and a tie so wide it's practically a cravat. When he goes on the road with Graham, I suspect his toned-down outfit is for Graham's benefit. Since Hannibal wears a red pocket square and a jacket with metal buttons to eat dinner by himself, I doubt that his sudden adoption of open-necked shirts and conservative v-neck sweaters was for his own comfort.

Mike Lunsford's "fully-dressed redesigns" of superheroine costumes @ The Daily Dot.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:41:00 +0000

Supergirl may be a woman of steel, but is a red, blue, and gold cheerleader uniform really the most practical outfit for fighting crime? While many superhero costumes can be a little beyond the pale (Ben Affleck’s red pleather catsuit in Daredevil comes to mind), their female counterparts are almost always worse.

Image by Mike Lunsford/ze-tarts.

Superheroine costumes can be a major point of contention for comics fans. Wonder Woman’s red bustier and star-spangled short-shorts are iconic, but do all female superheroes need to wear a swimsuit and heels when battling the forces of darkness? NBC’s failed Wonder Woman pilot tried to redesign her suit with pants rather than a skirt or shorts, but the end result was something that looked more like a Halloween costume. [READ MORE]

Star Trek: The Motion Picture -- A costume design nightmare.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:51:00 +0000

Previous Star Trek posts.

I came to Star Trek: The Motion Picture pre-warned. Kind of. It's famous for being The Worst Star Trek (a title for which there is already some stiff competition) and I'd already heard the various nicknames: The Motionless Picture, The Motion Sickness, etc. But even that didn't prepare me for what was in store. I mean, what were they even thinking?
In fact, watching The Motion Picture, it's pretty clear what they were thinking. They were thinking, "Let's make 2001: A Space Odyssey!" Except it turns out that if you give Gene Roddenberry a quadrillion dollars and too much creative leeway, what you actually end up with is a three-hour screensaver interspersed with shots of William Shatner emoting into the middle distance. Plus music. There are whole sequences where nothing happens except kaleidoscope space-travel effects and an impressive orchestral score for minutes at a time. Come to think of it, it's probably a great movie to watch while high. Thanks, 1979.

In all seriousness, this scene lasts for about 100 years in real time.

The many faults of this movie will surely be evident to anyone who watches it. It goes on for far too long. It's humourless. It lacks the emotional depth that made the original Star Trek series so compelling. The camera spends way too much time panning over William Shatner's increasingly luxuriant middle-aged arm hair. And then there's that whole situation going on with the costumes.

We need to talk about this.

Star Trek's original series ran on a budget of $3.75 per episode and regularly featured guest stars wearing bikinis made out of curtains and tinsel. Yet somehow its costumes still managed to look more plausible than the unsettling fleshbags we see in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Starfleet's oldschool "red shirt/blue shirt" uniforms are iconic for a reason. They're extremely simple by sci-fi costume standards (which is why the 2009 reboot movie barely had to update the uniform at all), and make it easy to differentiate between characters when they're running around. The Motion Picture's uniforms, on the other hand, are distractingly terrible in every regard. The palette runs from beige to pale blue -- a selection of colours usually restricted to hospital scrubs and control underwear. Worse still, they're actually less practical than the original series uniforms, which in 1979 were seen as frivolous and outdated.

The original intention of The Motion Picture's Starfleet uniforms was to depict a futuristic society where people wore egalitarian, recyclable, organic clothes. Sadly, the eventual result was the creation of some of the worst outfits in science-fiction history. While 1960s Star Trek revelled in tinfoil armour and various other accoutrements of classic sci-fi ridiculousness, its cartoonish atmosphere allowed for a certain suspension of disbelief that The Motion Picture never quite managed. Supposedly designed by the best minds in the galaxy, Starfleet's new uniform was a nightmare in every regard:

Physical impracticality. Catsuits with shoes attached to the legs are pointless and stupid. This is a prime example of what I think of as "idiot futurism". It's perfectly acceptable to design a stupid costume if it's for, like, Barbarella or Flash Gordon, but if you're trying to conceptualise a functional future society, then your costumes should make sense. If your cast is threatening to go on strike because they can't go to the bathroom without an assistant, then chances are your costumes aren't as great as you think they are.
Visual impracticality. From the perspective of the viewer, the new uniforms were downright confusing. The colour-coded science/communications/command uniforms of the original series provided a useful visual shorthand as to the positions of each crewmember, while the new uniforms had a near-incomprehensible internal logic. In an attempt to make Starfleet seem less militaristic, everyone had the same three uniforms: the dress uniform (the belted tunic thing Shatner wears in the picture above), plus two more casual outfits, which were (maybe?) interchangeable. The end result was that everyone on the bridge was wearing different outfits, all of which looked terrible.
Eye-boggling hideousness. This is already a problem from the perspective of someone watching the movie, but it's also pretty terrible as a worldbuilding detail. If Starfleet is meant to be so utilitarian and clever, then the uniforms wouldn't be so goddamn ugly.

There are so many contributing factors to the ugliness of the 1979 Starfleet uniforms that it's kind of miraculous. They're like the holy grail of bad fashion. In terms of colour, the problem is immediately obvious the first time you get distracted by a background extra who looks naked because they're wearing a skin-coloured body suit. Although of course, wearing flesh-tone clothes is already kind of an aesthetic disaster. For those of you who always feel guiltily puzzled when someone describes two colours as "clashing": it's similar to the Uncanny Valley. The closer two colours get to each other, the more uncomfortable they are to look at. This is doubly true for skin-tone clothes, because one of the colours that looks gross is you.

There is at least one scene in The Motion Picture where a male character ends up in an unfortunate moose-knuckle situation thanks to those flesh-coloured body suits. It's just not a good idea, is what I'm saying. The best type of uniform is one that's comfortable and practical enough that you can forget that you're wearing it, and it's difficult to forget about what you're wearing if you look really terrible in it. An argument could be made that 300 years in the future, people just don't care as much about appearances as we do in the 21st century, but this is plainly untrue because characters in The Motion Picture have a wide variety of hairstyles, makeup and jewellery. Anyhow, it's difficult to take your coworkers seriously if they're wearing beige catsuits that lovingly cling to every bra strap and roll of paunch, just like it's difficult to take Captain Kirk seriously when he's dressed like someone who works in a health spa onboard a luxury cruise liner:

The one breath of fresh air in this nightmare of taupe taupe onesies and weird Teletubbie belt-buckles is... Spock. Beautiful, beautiful Spock. When we first see him, he's on one of the most painted-on alien planet sets I've ever seen in a legitimate blockbuster movie. There's a giant glowing red foot statue that's probably meant to be made of volcanic rock but looks more like Lego, and a bunch of Vulcan notables wearing a selection of A+ robes. That's more like it.

Then once Spock inevitably decides to go back to the Enterprise, he's dressed in a cool hipster-goth cape and trousers. Not only would I happily wear this outfit myself, in real life, but it looks equally practical to the terrible Starfleet uniforms. Hell, take the poncho-cape off and he'll just be wearing a shirt and trousers, which is better than what Kirk and McCoy have to wear for 90% of the movie.

You can tell everyone on the bridge agrees with me, because they're all, "Holy shit! Someone wearing clothes that let him move around without getting a wedgie!" Spock is the fashion messiah. Which is kind of intriguing when you consider the fact that Vulcans are supposed to be ultra-rational and unconcerned with material things. I always found Vulcan fashion to be a particularly clever element of the visuals of Star Trek, because it's this blindingly obvious visual clue that Vulcans are nowhere near as logical as they claim. The intricacies of Vulcan style are completely in keeping with their love of tradition, ritual, and symbolism.

The weirdest thing about the costumes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is that the same costume designer, Robert Fletcher, worked on the next three Star Trek films as well. In hindsight, this movie was an experiment that went embarrassingly wrong, and even the most intense Trekkies are hard-pressed to say much in its favour. I tend to assume that the costumes were another indicator of Gene Roddenberry going mad with power, and that Fletcher fared better when working with other directors.

Coming soon: The costumes of The Wrath of Khan.

Previous Star Trek posts.

Fight Like A Girl.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:18:00 +0000

Just realised I'd posted this on Tumblr, but not on my blog! Along with a variety of cool sci-fi/fantasy/YA writers from around the world, I'm participating in the Fight Like A Girl short story anthology, a book focusing on strong female protagonists like Katniss Everdeen, Hermione Granger or Lisbeth Salander. If you're into fandom at all, you might recognise the screennames of a few of the authors involved: gyzym, jibrailis, bookshop, eleveninches, and many more!

We've already received an amazing amount of support for our Kickstarter, which has almost reached its goal of $8,300, so we only need a few more people to pledge before we can get this thing published! And we have a bunch of awesome additions we can implement if we get much funding over the original goal.

You can pre-order the book from our Kickstarter, along with a bunch of other rewards for funding pledges. Plus, a few of the authors (including me!) are going to be on the podcast/radio show fandomspotting tonight! If you have any questions for myself or any of the authors involved, send them to fandomspotting's Tumblr askbox or tweet us @fandomspotting and we can answer them on-air! Plus we can read/answer any questions or comments sent to the show while it's still in progress. Fandomspotting's youtube channel is HERE, and we'll be on air at 7pm EST/11pm GMT.

Capitol Couture: Catching Fire.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:18:00 +0000

Previously: Capitol Couture in The Hunger Games.

Capitol Couture is back, but I'm a lot less optimistic about it than I was last time round. Although I love the Hunger Games books and thought the first movie was an excellent adaptation, the costumes leave much to be desired. I'd hoped that they might kick the weirdness up a notch after the relatively tame aesthetic of the first movie, but these publicity images seem to imply the opposite. From Star Trek to Blade Runner, futuristic sci-fi offers an opportunity to dream up some seriously interesting clothes that often end up influencing real-world fashion trends, but most of the costumes in the Hunger Games could easily be from everyday photoshoots of the actors.

Katniss Everdeen

In the books, a great deal of emphasis is put upon the lavish eccentricities of the people who live in the Capitol. On top of that, all the Tributes have stylists whose job it is to make them look as unique and eyecatching as possible. Why, then, did all the costumes in the first movie look like they'd been bought at the same store? And why are the promo pictures for Catching Fire so damn similar? Katniss, Effie and Johanna are all wearing some variety of frilly Alexander McQueen gown, while almost all of the men are wearing some type of suit.

Effie Trinket

In response to my review of the first movie, someone pointed out that the reason why so many extras in the Capitol look alike is because Effie Trinket is a trend-setter. This is a definite possibility, but we have to remember that during the first book/film, Effie Trinket is upwardly-mobile but not yet famous. She's the representative for one of the least interesting Districts, and presenting Peeta and Katniss to the Capitol is her big break. Considering the similarity between her clothes and the rainbow-coloured outfits of other characters in the first movie, it's more likely that she's following the extreme end of a particular fashion trend -- but even that, to me, seems slightly out of character.


Peeta Mellark

The Capitol is explicitly written as a society where appearance is key. Because Capitol citizens live off the wealth of the Districts, most of them don't "need" jobs, eliminating the direct connection between money and fashion. People try to look as individual as possible, because the ultimate status symbol is for people to applaud your originality as a trend-setter. To be a successful style icon in the Capitol, one must look fresh and new, have an easily recogniseable personal "brand", and be willing to put a great deal of effort into one's appearance -- including body modification. Effie's costumes would be perfect if they existed in a vaccuum, but their resemblance to the costumes of background extras detracts hugely from the overall effect.

Johanna Mason

Catching Fire introduces a whole new cast of Tribute characters, and their District-themed costumes should, in theory, give each one an opportunity to stand out. The most interesting outfits probably won't be revealed until the movie is released, but the pictures we've seen so far don't exactly fill me with confidence. Johanna Mason, who is portrayed in the books as looking spiky-haired, shameless, and implicitly butch, is wearing what looks like a bridesmaid's dress for Katniss' wedding. This outfit doesn't convey one iota of Johanna's personality or role in the movie, either within the context of the story (where she has her own stylist) or as a marketing image for the movie itself.

Gale

President Snow

Among the pictures we've seen so far, my favourites are probably Peeta, Beetee and Cinna. Cinna is relatively easy because his style is so subdued and cool, and Lenny Kravitz may or may not literally just be wearing his own clothes for the role. Peeta's costumes are good for similar reasons, because his aesthetic role is to complement Katniss rather than stand out. His image is "cute farmboy", and he knows it, so it makes sense for the Capitol stylists to dress him in comparatively simple outfits. As for Beetee, I enjoy the way the fabric of his waistcoat and trousers looks a little like circuit boards.

Beetee

Caesar Flickerman

Cinna

Finnick Odair is kind of an impossible character. In a movie full of attractive people in stylish outfits, he has to outshine all of them with his incandescent hotness. But even taking those difficult expectations into account, I'm not all that impressed by Sam Claflin -- partly because his name makes me think "COL = Claflin Out Loud", and partly because he's so blandly good-looking that I couldn't pick him out of a lineup of Taylor Kitsch lookalikes. (See this amazing Tumblr post about Jesse Williams as Finnick. WE COULDA HAD IT ALLLLL.) Hopefully his actual performance will be imbued with a Veela-like sexiness, but right now I'm not really feeling it. That being said, I do rather like his ocean-themed outfit, which is far more District-appropriate than any of the other new Tribute pictures we've seen so far. I could be wrong, but the sarong/trousers he wears look a bit like Thai fisherman's trousers?

Finnick Odair

Costume design and movie/TV review masterpost.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:26:00 +0000

In an attempt to make Hello, Tailor easier to navigate, I try to update my masterpost every few months. This post obviously doesn't include every post on the blog, but if you feel a real yearning for reviews of catwalk shows from six months ago then feel free to faff around with the tags. Try stuff like fashion week for more general posts, or Spring 2012 for more specific timeframes. More recent fashion posts are also organised by designer, ie Chanel; Alexander McQueen. Aside from that, the rest of the blog is mostly dedicated to costume design and TV/movie reviews.

My favourite costume design posts can be found under the movie costumes I have loved tag, which begins with A fan's introduction to costume design. Otherwise, I've divided this masterpost into various movie and TV subcategories, which are probably easier to browse than my tags.

Movie costumes I have loved.

Master & Commander Part 1 and Part 2.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Hanna

A Knight's Tale

True Romance

Doomsday

Skyfall: the costumes.

Superhero movies

The Marvel and comics tags are a good place to start, but here's a more conclusive rundown of my superhero posts:

Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Thor.

Movie costumes I have loved: Pepper Potts in the Iron Man franchise.

If there's no such thing as a vintage Captain America venereal disease PSA then I'm going to be so disappointed.

Some hopes and dreams for The Dark Knight Rises.

Avengers costume design posts:

Pre-Movie Avengers post: Loki's costumes, armour, and image-consciousness.

The costumes and characters of The Avengers. Part 1: SHIELD. Part 2: Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, and Bruce Banner. Part 3: Steve Rogers, Captain America. Part 4: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

Iron Man 3 promo pics.

Alien series

The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation. & The costumes of Alien. Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

The costumes of Aliens, or, James Cameron says Put A Gun On It.

Disturbing viral marketing for Prometheus: Happy birthday David, from Weyland Industries.

Prometheus: Proof that epic sci-fi doesn't belong in the Alien franchise.

Prometheus and the fannish mindset: Plotholes Aren't Everything.

Costume design and the crew of the Prometheus.

General movie posts.

The iconic menswear of James Bond.

Skyfall: Bond as a blunt instrument, and the new Bond Girls.

The new Judge Dredd movie is a great chick-flick.

Les Miserables: Seriously, Javert? Seriously??

The Hollow Crown series: Richard II & Henry IV, Part 1 & Henry IV, Part 2.

Bill Cunningham New York

Oswald Boateng: A Man's Story.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, H&M, and the difficulties of marketing a female action heroine, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review post.

Dressing For The Apocalypse: a guide to post-apocalyptic movie fashion.

Capitol Couture in The Hunger Games.

Snow White & The Huntsman: How to tell a fairy story. and Snow White & The Huntsman: The prince doesn't get the girl; the girl gets the kingdom.

TV shows

The Teen Wolf tag should lead to all Teen Wolf posts, beginning with Teen Wolf 101: A guide to the eighth wonder of our world.

The Elementary tag should lead to all Elementary posts, beginning with From Arthur Conan Doyle to New York City's "Elementary": The Costume Design of Holmes and Watson, and Elementary: characterisation, the unaired pilot, and its relationship to Sherlock Holmes canon.

Check the Doctor Who tag for posts about Doctor Who.

Person of Interest: The man in the suit.

Costume design and The Hour: Freddie Lyons and Bel Rowley, Menswear, and Womenswear.

The Bletchley Circle (a female-led 1950s detective drama) and its costume design post.

The Revenge tag should lead to all Revenge posts, beginning with New style crush: Nolan Ross in REVEEEENNNGGE.

The Good Wife: Parenting Made Easy.

Star Trek's original 1965 pilot episode: The Cage.

The Killing (AKA Forbrydelsen), and the iconic status of Sarah Lund's jumpers.

The most important thing about BBC Sherlock's "A Scandal In Belgravia".

Game Of Thrones: Unwashed Northerners, royal conspiracies, and decapitations all round.

Miscellany

One Direction, teenage Tumblr fandom, and how to stay safe and private online.

Honour Among Punks: Sherlock Holmes like you've never seen her before.

Star Trek Into Darkness teaser trailer theories.

Secret Avengers #1.

Neil Marshall set to direct "The Last Voyage of Demeter".

Girl Walk//All Day

Dolce and Gabbana, Fall 2013.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 14:52:00 +0000

Entirely by accident, this season's Dolce & Gabbana turned out to be incredibly topical. Inspired by the Vatican and showing at Fashion Week just after the news broke about the Pope's retirement, this collection was guaranteed to appear prominently on the pages of every fashion magazine in the known universe. The only thing better than tall thin ladies wearing sparkly clothes is tall thin ladies wearing sparkly clothes in a newsworthy context. For this reason, I'm going to take a few moments to consider the implications of our briefly Popeless world. NEWS.

photos from Style.com

You know in movies when there's a retired cop (probably played by Bruce Willis) who is brought back for One Last Job? Well, I'm kinda wondering if it's the same with popes. Like, if in the next couple of weeks there's an unexpected demonic armaggedon, can we call Pope Benedict XVI out of retirement to lead the faithful into holy war? Ignoring the fact that it's kind of illogical already to be able to hand in your resignation from being the earthly voice of god, I'm curious about the Pope Emergency issue. Hopefully we can still rely on Ratzinger to come to our aid in times of Biblical disaster.

Back to D&G: this show was so luxuriously detailed that it looked more like Couture than Ready To Wear. The embroidery and beadwork was inspired by Catholic art such as the Byzantine mosaics in the cathedral at Monreale, although the focus was more often on D&G's home island of Sicily.

The aesthetic was a combination of celebrations of Catholic imagery, and outfits inspired by the red vestments of Cardinals. If anything, this show offered a classier view of the Catholic church than is currently being projected by the church itself, as the focus was purely on the beauty of its art rather than any deeper meaning.

The only real low point was the interlude of ten grey tweed outfits in the middle of the show. Why were these outfits even there? They were certainly more traditional for Fall/Winter RTW styles, but the transition from the red and gold luxury of the Vatican to old-fashioned grey tweed seemed needlessly abrupt.

The shoes were a major highlight, with their intricate gold designs fitting perfectly with the theme. Rumour has it that the Pope's red shoes used to be manufactured by Prada -- perhaps D&G are angling for a Papal endorsement?

Les Miserables: Seriously, Javert? Seriously??

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 22:34:00 +0000

At the very end of its theatrical release schedule, I have finally gone to see Les Miserables. To be honest, I'm pretty impressed with myself because I managed to remain completely information-free about the whole thing. As in, I knew nothing whatsoever about the book, the musical or the movie prior to actually watching it. In fact, here is the sum total of my Les Mis background knowledge as of this morning.

It's a musical.
It's set in France.
Anne Hathaway plays a prostitute who gets her hair cut off for some reason
There are some cute young guys that Tumblr seems excited about. They might be revolutionaries?

Also, I sort of assumed that because it was categorised in my head as "a musical", there would be a) some spoken dialogue, and b) dancing. Wrong on both counts, but NBD.
Anyway, it was definitely the movie to watch if you like your onscreen emotions turned up to 11 on the Overwrought-o-meter, and are OK with the camera being rammed up Hugh Jackman's nose at all times. Like seriously, chill out with the close-ups. People had actually warned me about this beforehand and I was all, "No, what do I know about cinematography? I won't notice." But no, I noticed. It was like someone's parents were there with a camcorder, trying to zoom in on every important moment of their kid's school play. ZOOM IN MORE ON ANNE HATHAWAY'S SNOTTY NOSE WHILE SHE'S CRYING!! ZOOM IN MORE ON HUGH JACKMAN'S FACE WHILE HE'S EMOTING ABOUT GOD!! ZOOM IN MORE ON THIS TRAGIC STARVING KID WHO DOESN'T HAVE ANY FACIAL SORES LIKE THE OTHER KIDS, BECAUSE SHE'S THE STAR! etc etc.
The main thing I got from Les Mis, though, was that Russell Crowe's Javert is A+++ hilarious. Like, every time he came onscreen I started laughing uncontrollably because he was 100% straight-up doing an impression of when Harry was obsessively stalking Draco in Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince. JAVERT JUST REALLY WANTS TO CHAIN UP THAT TALL, SWEATY, MUSCULAR CRIMINAL, OK? HE WANTS TO CHAIN HIM UP AND CONTROL HIM AND PUNISH HIM FOR HIS SINS

I couldn't help imagining what all the other cops must think of Javert. Javert thinks he's the most upstanding, hard-working, god-fearing guy in the entire police force, but the other cops totally talk about him behind his back: Do you know that Inspector Javert guy who always looks like he hasn't showered in a week, and stands slightly too close when he's talking to you? Yeah, yeah, he's literally been stalking this random ex-con for like thirty fucking years. Not like a murderer or anything. This guy stole some bread and now Javert's all up in his grill, following him around the country, I don't even know. One time I went to his house to pick up some paperwork and it was just a mattress bed on the floor with Wanted posters of Jean Valjean taped all over the walls, the ceiling, the windows, every-fucking-where. Some things you just don't want to know, you know?

Aside from the roiling tide of Javert's sweat and/or self-loathing obsession with that evil, villainous thief who totally has the muscle power to lift an entire cart on one shoulder, I... guess there was some other stuff in the movie? Like, Anne Hathaway was good but I wouldn't personally have given her an Oscar for Fantine. But then again, I would have given her an Oscar for Rachel Getting Married in 2009, so all's well that ends well. I admit I started to feel a little tired whenever Helena Bonham Carter came onscreen, because she really does play herself in every role now, and not necessarily in a good way. Philosophically speaking I don't have anything against never brushing your hair, but if you're an actor it's kind of helpful to look slightly different in each role, you know? Whereas Helena Bonham Carter, charming though she is, looks like she's been wearing her own clothes, hair and makeup in every role she's played in the past 5 years.
Someone who knows more about the literary merits and background of Les Mis will probably have to explain to me just what the impact of the story is meant to be. Perhaps I'm a pessimist, but all I thought when I came out of the cinema was "revolutions are pointless, and there are definitely going to be food poverty riots in real life, near where I live, in the near future". The fact is that I don't actually think revolutions/direct action/political protests are pointless in the slightest, but all the cute young idealist boys in Les Mis certainly were hideously familiar. Particularly Marius. It's very difficult to warm to a poor-little-rich-boy character in a movie where are starving on the streets in every scene -- even if he does have cute freckles and the guileless expression of an anime character.

Threeasfour, Fall 2013: The 13th sign of the zodiac.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:10:00 +0000

Thirteen outfits long, this collection was based on the signs of the Zodiac. Technically Ophiucus, the so-called thirteenth Zodiac sign, is actually a Zodiac constellation and therefore not directly connected to the exacting and fact-based science that is astrology, but whatevs. The combination of mysticism and stargazing made for an intriguing mix, resulting in some excellent sci-fi priestess outfits: one for each sign.

pics from Style.com

Sadly I couldn't work out which was which. The first was Ophiucus, but where did it go from there? Perhaps there's someone out there with some more astrology expertise who can help me out. But I don't think the designs are very literal. There certainly wasn't any single outfit out there that reminded me specifically of a bull, a ram, or a pair of twins.

New Age themes aside, this was an interesting and well-developed collection. Threeasfour tend to be a little eccentric anyway, but they're consistent in their eccentricities. Lots of asymmetrical tailoring and patterns made up of repeated circles, as seen in previous seasons.

One of my favourite aspects of this collection was the headwear, which was straight out of Gallifrey. Laser-cut (presumably?) from leather and what may have been cardboard, these crowns looked like clockwork or 3D renderings of mathematical diagrams.

We can only theorise who will actually end up wearing these designs. They'd make excellent costumes for a high-budget 1970s sci-fi movie, but sadly not many people in the real world actually dress like this. However, Threeasfour have successfully managed the weirdness of their brand for several years now, so I can only assume (and hope) that there are some people out there who are enthusiastically willing to spend $$$ on grey woollen chaps and wraparound Zodiac robes.

Person Of Interest: The man in the suit.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:36:00 +0000

Person Of Interest is three different genre shows stuck together. For Detectives Carter and Fusco it's a police procedural drama, whereas John Reese lives in a spy thriller and Harold Finch's story is gradually edging towards being a full-on dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi. Overall it's marketed as a crime show, more or less, which is what it mostly looks like on the outside. Like the majority of characters in procedural cop shows Carter and Fusco have very boring dress-sense, for practical and professional reasons. In costume design terms, the real interest lies with Finch and Reese.
Before I even saw the show, Reese had been described to me as a man who wears his clothes like a uniform. When he first appears he has nothing: no home, presumably no money, no real identity... until Finch comes along and sets him up with his very own apartment and a wardrobe full of identical black suits. Mysterious benefactors are a popular theme in fiction -- who doesn't wish a nameless billionaire would show up and randomly gift you with a new house? -- but Person Of Interest has a refreshing way of tackling the subject. Rather than twisting himself up in knots about receiving so much help from a total stranger, Reese just takes it.

What with his CIA training, subsequent betrayal, homelessness and total lack of friends or family, Reese is a man who has been stripped down to his bare bones. The things that normal people care about just do not bother him any more. Actually, Finch is like that as well, but for him it's more because he's been elevated beyond ordinary society thanks to his wealth, genius, and devotion to the Machine. With Reese there are scenes in almost every episode where you see him just fail to react to things that would have any normal person shying away in discomfort.
He doesn't care about people touching him or getting in his personal space. He doesn't care about money. He doesn't care about being watched and tracked constantly via CCTV. He doesn't care about getting beaten up, except in the sense that it's an inconvenience. When Finch picks him out of the gutter and sets him up in an enormous loft apartment with his own private arsenal, the only thing Reese is openly thankful for is that Finch has given him a purpose again. When you get right down to it, the only thing he really cares about is efficiency, which is why he wears the same outfit every single day of his life -- barring necessary disguises. Not having to think about clothes or look in the mirror every morning just removes another obstacle between him and his mission.
From a purely practical standpoint, Reese's monochromatic wardobe of identical suits is a stroke of genius. For all that you can compare the John Reese/Harold Finch duo to Batman and Bruce Wayne, Reese's main strength lies in his complete lack of distinguishing features. Although he's definitely good-looking enough to get by with a little superficial charm when the need arises, Reese is forgettable enough to be the perfect spy. The fact that his nickname during the police manhunt was "the man in the suit" tells you all you need to know, because as soon as he changes out of the suit? They don't even have a physical description. The sheer boringness of the outfit just amplifies how forgettable he can be, never mind how ridiculously easy it is to get into almost anywhere when you're a white, middle-aged man in a suit.

Finch's attitude to clothes is the polar opposite of Reese. Just by looking at him you can tell that he really enjoys dressing up -- even before you find out that he's a tailoring nerd. While Reese dresses to look as forgettable and generic as possible, Finch dresses for himself. Despite the fact that he spends most of his time alone in a disused library, he wears a three-piece suit almost every day, often including a pocket square. He definitely has different grades of suits, though. When he's just going to be sitting in front of a computer he wears softer, more comfortable outfits in warm colours like brown and maroon, whereas on days when he's going undercover in one of his millionaire personas he wears suits that are more obviously businesslike and luxurious in appearance.

Both Finch and Reese's suits have been cleverly matched up to the physical appearance intended for each character. Jim Caviezel, who is in reality beginning to look rather thicker around the middle than is ideal for a elite special-forces agent, looks far slimmer in his black suits than in anything else he wears on the show. His jackets are very rarely buttoned, both because an open jacket allows for more flexibility during fight scenes and because it's far more flattering to Caviezel's broad-shouldered frame. Finch's suits are typically quite soft by contrast and the waistcoats make him look a little rounder, which fits in with his list of harmless, birdlike cover identities: Finch, Crane, Wren, Partridge. Like most stories that focus on a partnership, the two characters have to balance each other out. While brains/brawn would be an unfair description considering Reese's skill as a tactician, it's certainly the case that much of Reese's strength lies in his ability to physically intimidate, whereas Finch relies on people mistaking him for the boring, fussy middle-aged man he appears to be.

Teen Wolf creator answers fan questions about season 3.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:05:00 +0000

Jeff Davis, Teen Wolf's creator and lead writer, was answering fan questions on Tumblr last night! He's given a whole bunch of hints about season 3, as well skillfully dodging most of the Sterek-related questions. ;) Click here to read the highlights.

Secret Avengers #1

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 17:26:00 +0000

Previously: The costumes and characters of The Avengers: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

As someone who has quite happily been using fanfic to cut through the Gordian Knot of Marvel comics canon for years, I found Secret Avengers #1 very easy to understand because it basically is Avengers fanfic. Clint and Natasha are bros, a reasonably Clark Gregg-looking Coulson shows up, and the story focuses on the mysterious Budapest incident Joss Whedon namedropped in last year's Avengers movie. There's even an explanation as to why Clint and Natasha might remember the incident in different ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean this comic locks in perfectly with movie canon. For one thing, Nick Fury is a field agent.

Images from Secret Avengers #1, which can be bought here.

Following Battle Scars (yes, another comic I read because Coulson was in it, shut up), we know that "this" Nick Fury is the illegitemate son of "original" Nick Fury, and was recruited to SHIELD at the same time as old army buddy Coulson. Apparently some Marvel fans are butthurt about the Fury switcheroo, but I'm tempted to attribute that to boring old racism -- particularly since I remember people complaining about this exact same "problem" a couple of years ago. The thing is, superhero comics canon is already such utter chaos that updating Nick Fury from David Hasselhoff to Samuel L Jackson almost makes things seem less complicated. Secret Avengers is aimed pretty solidly at fans who were introduced to the characters via the Avengers franchise, so why bother reintroducing 1980s white Nick Fury when we already know the other guy from like four different movies?

Anyhow, this issue was a promising prologue to what seems like a vaguely Dollhouse-esque storyline. Coulson recruits Hawkeye and Black Widow to join a taskforce that requires them to have their memories wiped after every mission, which sounds to me like a great way for SHIELD to avoid paying them. As for connections to the movie universe, it's kind of difficult to see how much characterisation carries through. Coulson was satisfyingly Coulson-y, but the focal character in this issue was Hawkeye, who for obvious reasons had very little character development in the Avengers movie.

Mostly I'm interested to see how the movie and comicbook canons converge and divide. You can do so much more with a comic than a film, mostly because it's way easier to suspend disbelief when you're looking at a cartoon instead of a real human person with split ends and mud on their shoes. While Marvel's Hollywood adaptations restrain themselves to relatively realistic robots and supersoldiers, in one 22-page comic we've already had Jason Bourne-style amnesia, a presidential assassination attempt, magical portals, a Hungarian wizard arms dealer, and Hawkeye being kidnapped and tied up in a room with a giant, unexplained Cthulhu statue in the corner. You couldn't get away with that shit on the big screen.
The only real problem I had with Secret Avengers was Natasha's painted-on suit. I haven't read superhero comics since I was in highschool, and I'd kind of forgotten how Hawkeye Initiative the costumes can get -- even when the characters are just standing around talking. Like, have you met boobs? Boobs don't just stand around like two separate water balloons duct-taped to your chest, not unless you've specifically tailored your catsuit to encase each breast separately in its own boob-pod. Which would be kind of an unusual choice, tactically speaking, for someone who has to scale walls and kick people in the face on a regular basis. I know that there's an Uncanny Valley of superhero comic realism, but at the same time I find it kind of implausible for Black Widow to be infiltrating Eastern European terrorist cells with her suit unzipped to her sternum. Especially since we've all seen Scarlett Johansson's equally skin-tight but way more practical Black Widow costume in "real" life.
Final note on the tangled web of alternate canons: I'm curious to see what relation, if any, this comic will have to the SHIELD TV series. At this point I'm not hugely optimistic about a Black Widow or Hawkeye/Widow movie ever happening (IF ONLY), but Coulson has only shown up in a couple of comics so far. I say it's entirely possible that they'll graft his comicbook backstory onto the TV show's own canon.

Previously: The costumes and characters of The Avengers: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

Womenswear and The Hour.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:44:00 +0000

Previously: Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon & Menswear and The Hour.

As a kind of doomed swansong for The Hour's recent cancellation, here's the third and final part of my series of costume posts.

Marnie is absolutely the classic stereotype of 1950s womanhood. In season 1 she doesn't get much to do, but by season 2 Hector's terrible behaviour has shaken her up enough that she transforms into what I can only really describe as a 2010s-style ultra-femme liberated woman. Probably my favourite detail of this was the fact that she clearly had an affair at some point, but it was so subtle that we'll never really know who with. With any other character I'd dismiss this as meaning they didn't have enough time to include it onscreen, but with Marnie you know that it's because she's just so damn discreet -- unlike Hector, whose affairs are all an unmitigated disaster and end up splashed all over the tabloids.

Marnie dresses like confectionary every day of her life. She's terrifyingly put-together, at first because she's a rich young aristocrat and has nothing else to do except look good, and later because she'll be damned if she'll let things slide just because she's done the unthinkable and got herself a career. I particularly loved her super-coordinated pink swirling skirts and aprons for when she was appearing on television -- in black and white. In some ways Marnie can look a little cartoonish because of her permanent glossy smile and carefully arranged layers of brightly-coloured skirts and petticoats, but the fact is that the fashionable colour palette in the 1950s was a lot brighter than nowadays. Meaning that oddly enough, Marnie's candy-coloured costumes are actually more realistic than Bel's skin-tight businesswear.

Sissy is a relatively minor character, but her costumes are so good she draws the eye whenever she appears onscreen. To me, Sissy looks a lot like a modern woman dressing up in retro/vintage styles, because she's so incredibly on-trend while still wearing the kind of widely available working-class clothes that show up in vintage stores in the 21st century. Marnie's brand of femininity is such that she wears pretty much nothing but frothy, full-skirted dresses, which is actually a look that shows up at weddings and upper-crust social functions even today. Essentially, the idea of what we think of as super-feminine formalwear has not really changed in about sixty years. Sissy is part of the next generation of fashion-conscious girls, following inner-city London trends, going to mixed-race nightclubs and moving in with their boyfriends before they get married. Sissy wouldn't look out of place in Camden in 2013.

Freddie's wife Camille is kind of the flip side of Sissy. They're both very modern, young and trendy, but Camille represents the hipster (in the old sense of the word) beat-generation side of 1950s pop culture. She wears men's sweaters and is a member of the fledgling Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She and Freddie live in an unfurnished flat in a neighbourhood run by a Rachman-esque slumlord. Camille's main role in the show is to introduce some conflict into the Bel/Freddie story, so we only ever really see her in a negative light. I suspect they gave her less screentime on purpose, because the more we saw of her the more likely we'd be to empathise with her. She moved to another country to be with her husband, but as soon as they arrived he transformed from a cool, poetry-loving bohemian into a BBC workaholic who clearly has some kind of ongoing thing with his female best friend. Really, Camille is better off without Freddie.

source

It's difficult to pick out a favourite character from The Hour because everyone is just so brilliant, but if I had to choose one I'd go for Lix Storm. I can't even just call her "Lix", it has to be LIX STORM all together: the coolest name for the coolest lady. In season 1 she was mostly a side-character, providing pithy commentary and drinking at two in the afternoon ("Whisky is God's way of telling us he loves us and wants us to be happy."), but her season 2 plotline with Peter Capaldi's Randall Brown was one of the most gripping aspects of the show.

Lix has some of my favourite character-based costume design on the show. She dresses in a purposefully masculine way, to the extent that some of her suits are a direct analogue for menswear. In a show full of well-written female characters, this isn't the two-dimensional indicator of tough womanhood that it might've been in another show. Instead, it's a nod to her backstory. In her role as a kind of surrogate mother/mentor figure to the younger people at The Hour, Lix is the voice of experience -- and the voice of the past. She's a war reporter who was on the ground, alone, during the Spanish Civil War. And unlike Bel and Freddie, she can remember WWII from an adult perspective. Lix's dress-sense is stuck in the 1940s, when for practical purposes womenswear fashions skewed more towards masculine styles. Even though she's working in an office in central London in the 1950s, she's still dressed as an on-the-ground reporter ten years in the past.

If we're going to get over-analytical here, I'd say that in the offices of The Hour, Lix, Bel and Sissy represent three different generations of women in the workplace. Similarly, we see three generations of womenswear on the show. Lix is the practical wartime woman, wearing a limited selection of simple, durable shirts and trousers, whereas Marnie is the postwar New Look woman who dresses as girlishly as possible in reaction to the clothes rationing and utilitarian styles of the 1940s. Sissy and Camille are both edging towards the 1960s, with Sissy representing the working-class trends that would rule the later decades of the 20th century, and Camille representing the counterculture.

Previously: Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon & Menswear and The Hour.

Petition to save The Hour.

Fall 2013: Thom Browne Womenswear.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:38:00 +0000

Previously on Thom Browne.

Amazingly, this is Thom Browne's Ready-To-Wear collection. If you've heard of Thom Browne, chances are it's either because of his rather eccentric menswear or because Michelle Obama wore one of his designs to this year's Inauguration -- you know, the dress that made her look kind of like a Vulcan. This collection drew far more from his menswear than from his more sedate womenswear designs, however. Not because it was remotely masculine in appearance, but more because of the exaggerated proportions and Browne's unique ability to make grey look like the loudest colour on the spectrum.

Many of the outfits on display this week reminded me of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, not just because of the red rose imagery but because the styling seemed so in tune with Helena Bonham Carter's hair and makeup as the Queen of Hearts -- and her personal appearance in real life. The overall themes, however, were not particularly gothic. This wasn't so much a Twilight rose with sharp thorns as the image of a rose taken from girlish embroidery or cake decorations.

Thom Browne loves to play with gender in his designs, and viewed through the lens of his recent menswear shows, this collection does show some aspects of that. Where the silhouette of his menswear designs was rounded and soft (even if it was the roundness of overly-padded muscles), many of the coats and dresses in this show were angular in the extreme, going well beyond the squared-off shoulderpads of the 1930s and '80s. Some of these outfits reminded me of nothing less than the duo of oblong-torsoed spies in Belleville Rendez-vous:

As well as the resolutely right-angled 1930s box suits, there were a few nods to 1950s Dior, in the form of ladylike dresses with nipped-in waists. Even these were exaggerated, however, with Browne including bulky crinolines at the hips.

This collection was a real breath of fresh air when compared to the multiple New York Fashion Week shows that focussed on leather trenchcoats and conservative cocktail dresses. While obviously very costumey, most of the clothes were far more season-appropriate than much of the other supposedly "Fall" designs I've seen on the runway over the past few days. Following on from the beautifully weird suits and gowns at the beginning of the show, the final few outfits focused on outerwear, featuring rose-red fur and layer upon layer of heavy wool tweeds.

images from Style.com

Youtube guide to watching New York Fashion Week online.

A Youtube guide to New York Fashion Week.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:05:00 +0000

Thanks to the snow storm that buried New York this weekend, watching Fashion Week from the comfort of your laptop is suddenly seeming a lot more appealing than being among the models and movie stars who have to freeze their extremities on the red carpet.

Not every Mercedes-Benz FashionWeek show is available online (this season, anyway), but there are still many to watch each day, including such big names as Vera Wang and Oscar de la Renta. If you don’t have time in your schedule for livestream viewings, we already have a few recommendations from the first couple of days of shows...

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Elementary: "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist", Part 2.

noreply@blogger.com (The Fashion Harbinger) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 18:49:00 +0000

Previously: "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist, Part 1.

I hope everyone else was as invested in Clyde the turtle as I was. Sherlock used him as a paperweight. He said he was going to make him into soup. If you don't find this unspeakably, twistedly adorable then I despair of you. SHERLOCK FAILS THE VOIGHT-KAMPFF TEST. SHERLOCK IS A REPLICANT. IF SHERLOCK SAW A TURTLE ON ITS BACK IN THE DESERT, HE'D MAKE IT INTO SOUP.

On top of the introduction of this vitally important new supporting character, "The Deductionist" was another legitimately good episode all round -- except, perhaps, for the opening scene. Man, could you lay on the whole "we're pandering to the Superbowl audience" thing any thicker? There were a few seconds where I was like, "wow, has Sherlock seriously hired a couple of hookers to do a criminal roleplay striptease for him?" but no, it was pretty much just a gratuitous girls-in-underwear scene. I can't be bothered getting all angry feminist about that, but I will say that right now, Holmes' sexuality seems like the weak point in some otherwise very solidly-written characterisation. Some moments, such as when Holmes is being up-front about his sex life to the point of social awkwardness (ie, when he's talking to Watson about the profiler in "The Deductionist") seem very in-character, but other things just don't ring true. One scene that comes to mind was when Holmes was waving off a couple of hot blonde twins at the beginning of one of the earlier episodes. That brought me right out of the show because it just seemed like such a cheap shot: "I AM MAN".

Maybe this is just me being unnecessarily neurotic, but the writing for Holmes' sex-life feels very unbalanced. I'm totally willing to remain open-minded about Sherlock Holmes as a sexual being, particularly since Elementary is already such a different setting from the original stories, but it seems a lot like the writers went too far in the other direct and are now hanging in mid-air, windmilling their arms around. What is Sherlock, really? Is he an emotionally damaged former addict whose attitude to relationships was ruined by the death of his ex-girlfriend, and who now can only engage with sex workers? Is he the man we saw in the pilot episode, who views sex as a passionless bodily function? Is he a submissive who hires professionals because he wants to be in experienced hands? Or is he the guy who engages in dire American teen-boy TV fantasies like threesomes with a pair of blonde twins?

Overanalysis of Sherlock's sex-life aside, I'm hoping that the story structure of episodes like "M", "The Red Team" and "The Deductionist" will be carried through to the rest of the season. The main issue with the crime-writing the first 11 episodes was that they were trying to emulate the structure of a classic Holmes short story in a modern crime TV style. Unfortunately, weird set-ups and overly complicated resolution scenes do not a Holmes story make. "M" wasn't just good because it was an emotionally-charged backstory episode, but because there was no need to liven up the story with unnecessarily wacky twists and turns. Like "The Deductionist", it was a chase story in which audiences and characters both (more or less) already knew the culprit. Apparently, removing the whodunnit factor from Elementary makes it a significantly better crime show -- who knew? "The Red Team" was more similar to an early Elementary episode, except the silliness of its storyline fit in perfectly with the silliness of many classic Holmes storylines. Secret cabal of anti-terrorist war game geniuses, slowly being killed off one by one? Straight from Conan Doyle's typewriter, seriously. (Although the smarmy old rich white guy in the sweater vest turning out to the murderer was maybe the least surprising development ever.)

I've never been to NYC so perhaps this is just me being a n00b, but I looooved Joan's pornstar subletter storyline. I mean, it's always cool to see these hints of how Joan is gradually becoming a detective in her own right (which is something Elementary does better than any other Holmes adaptation I've seen, I think), but "subletters making a porno in my apartment while I'm not there" seems like such a NYC horror story that I had to love it. It was practically a Sex And The City subplot.

As for costuming, I adore the almost religious attention to consistency the designer has been putting into Joan's outfits. As well as the purple/grey colour scheme that she and Sherlock share in many scenes, Joan's clothes are incredibly uniform: mini-skirts, opaque tights, an untucked shirt or t-shirt and soft knitwear in pretty much every episode. Plus the costume designer shops specifically at realistically affordable stores like H&M. Sherlock, I think, has been getting more formal recently. In the last couple of episodes we've seen way more appearances from the shirt-and-waistcoat combo rather than all the thriftstore t-shirts, although that may just be coincidence. The best detail of all was when Sherlock barged into Joan's room while she was asleep and laid some clothes out for her to wear.... and then later on in the episode you see that she's wearing the outfit he picked out for her.

Previously on Elementary