"Grinds My Gears" will be a new Thursday installment to this blog. Think of it has the Thursday Styles of Dunday Sinner.
You know what really Grinds My Gears? Society. More specifically, it's the media that panders to societal notions of strict gender roles. So, all media Grinds My Gears. I was reading er, another blog, and stumbled across a new! hip! word to describe a hot! indie! underground female fashion and lifestyle movement. The women wear little makeup, if any at all! They don't wear pink! They like beer! Although I call this sort of women normal or 95 percent of women I know, The New York Observer calls them "Urbane Tomboys" or, the female counterpart to the "metrosexual" male.
In the article, we are introduced to Ali Tenenebaum (Tenenebaum you say?! Her family was the inspiration for The Royal Tenenebaums). Ali (or should I say Margot..) doesn't wear penny loafers, Lacoste dresses, or fur coats; she wears "black Hudson jeans, blue J. Crew cardigan, yellow T-shirt and designer sneakers." OMIGOD! What a punk. J. Crew and sneakers?! How unfeminine of Margot! I bet Ritchie still has a crush on her.
Let me get one thing straight. Although these women wear pants, they are not lesbians. Let me repeat because you may be quite confused: pants does not equal lesbianism. I know, these are strange new times. Ellen Page, preggers Juno actress and hottest new celeb, is an Urbane Tomboy, albeit a Canadian one. Sarah Silverman, comedian turned sex symbol turned Jimmy Kimmel's lady is one. Girly-girls, while you're applying your MAC charcoal eyeliner, your boyfriend is scoping out the Urbane Tomboy.
Similar to their girly-girl antithesis, Urbane Tomboys are not above consumerism. They luv! shopping. Wearing Comfortable Prada pants for biking and work, Urbane Tomboys is not above wearing a dress to a cocktail party. Wow! How unusual, how strange.
I know what you're thinking: am I an Urbane Tomboy? I wear pants! I like to be comfortable! I drink beer! You might be. But probably not. Urbane Tomboys wear sneakers to work because they're bloggers, blogging from their home or screen printers, working from their SoHo studio. They buy $2000 pants because they can afford it and might prefer it to Lindsay Lohan's stretch pants and Uggs look.
What you are is a normal woman who enjoys fashion and looking good, but isn't obsessed with it. You prefer sneakers to stilettos because sneakers are more comfortable. You don't wear makeup because you think that painting the barn for 20 minutes a day is a waste of time.
What really grinds my gears is not the douche-journalists at the Observer who think very little of women and are starved for the opportunity to break the new trend. What really grinds these gears are the polarizing gender roles that all people are forced to subscribe to. Those who don't fit neatly into societal norms are slapped with the latest pop culture buzz word. The man who favors fashion over smashing beer cans against his head is a "metrosexual." The woman who favors comfortable clothing to whatever LindsayParisNicoleJessica is wearing is a "urbane tomboy."
Curiously, The Observer sums up their own idiotic redundancy with this statement: "the urbane tomboy’s fashion rebellion is absent political message, or anger: it’s more of a casual shrug toward the strictures of femininity."
If you dare, read more:
http://www.observer.com/2008/urbane-tomboys?page=0%2C0
1 comment:
And the observer article could be summed up with this statement: "the urbane tomboy fashion article is devoid of any political message or societal importance, it's more of the media's blathering diarrhea on nothing in particular, in order to sell papers."
Mainstream media isn't even worth reading anymore. Most of their editors and writers are asleep until anything culturally important hits them in the face, and by then it's too late to be significant anymore.
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