ICFA Photos

Emerald City may have ceased publication, but the Emerald City Best Dressed Award still gets given out at various conventions I attend. You can see the results for this year's ICFA here. There isn't a formal dinner or award ceremony at FinnCon, so the next contest will be the Hugo Ceremony in Denver. I am, of course, ruling myself ineligible, which is rather a shame this year because I'm very pleased with the dress I have found. Especially as it only cost me $23.

Mostly armless

Charity-shop wedding dresses come in two kinds.

Sometimes a charity shop gets recent dresses, from a bridal shop that's gone out of business or (more often) from display stock.

And then there's the old stuff. Sometimes spectacularly ugly:




Sometimes just unfashionable:

A biologist and an artist have collaborated to produce dresses from the film that forms on contaminated wine:

Cotton is plant-based cellulose after all, and this stuff is just bacterial-based cellulose, Cass explains. Before long they had rigged up their own system for cultivating the Acetobacter, using a small shallow vat they could fill with 500 ml of red wine. The resulting sheets of fermented fabric, semi-transparent with streaks of deep red, looked a lot like flayed or badly scarred skin.

From water into wine into...dresses?

The height of throwaway fashion

Dissolvable dress

Dig those shoes



United Nude Shoes
- a Kevlar Moebius strip

More space-age fashion

Hussein Chalayan's fashion show has a lot of nearly-normal-looking clothes (except for the hats), until about the 8:30 mark, when the bubble girl shows up, and then the animatronic outfits. Weird soundtrack, too.

The Sound of Fashion

Because you need to know how your haute couture sounds.

Metal shoes and space clothes

Metal armour stiletto heels from Babylon 5 by Sword & Stone

Locable metal stilletos

Space fashion

A vital accessory

For the formal slave.

Ready-to-wear

Boing Boing links to a sufficiently bizarre outfit that seems to be a rip-off of something else, but when you get there, do continue with the rest of the collection.

Something for the weekend?

Condom Wedding Dress

Shoulders

Bare shoulders. It took me until a week or two ago to notice that the defining note of current bridal and formal isn't the absence of glop but the absence of sleeves. Strapless or sleeveless is how most posh frocks look at the moment. Why? I have no idea, except to parody the evolutionary psychologists and suggest that lithe limbs are the last measure of fitness that can't be enhanced, and in the nature of the case, legs have to be covered, so ... it's another twist in the arms race.

A flick through a recent British Brides suggests, though, that the tectonic plates may be shifting. The fashion pages look very different from the cookie-cutter corset-top ads. Lots of seventies boho chic, in white, as well as more distant influences. The cover model is wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved lace jacket. Tellingly, one of the mag's own editorial staff married in a very forties-looking number, fitted at the bodice yes, but with no boning and lots of flow, a narrow-frilled hem, and gigot sleeves. Her bridesmaids wear pale pink frocks - straight skirts, wrapover bodices, little cap sleeves - that have a charity shop in their very near future.

Alice in Vogue

Vogue story: Alice in Wonderland

Slideshow: Photos by Annie Leibovitz illustrate various scenes from Alice in Wonderland if she was dressed up in a lot of fussy designer stuff.

Stocks and skirts

Apropos of Avedon's post below. If hemlines rise or fall with stock prices, now might be a good time to sell. Stocks are high. Hemlines are low. In Edinburgh last night I was at the Book Festival launch party and waiting for a bus afterwards, at a busy corner. In the whole evening I saw two miniskirts, an endless swirl of mid-calf, several ankle-length numbers, and the first maxi I've seen since the early 70s. A maxi isn't just a long skirt: it's like a short or medium skirt with the downward lines extended. It uses darts rather than gathers, often because it's made of heavy material. Its pattern is usually big and simple. This one had six-inch squares made by criss-crossing diagonal lines. To me it shouts of slump.

But most styles recall the hot summers of 76 and 77. White frills, tiers, lace and eyelet are seen far more often on the street than in bridal shop windows. It'll be curious to see if there's a later wave of this flutter and clutter in bridal. For now, good taste prevails: corset tops and satin sweeps.

Stockmarket Skirt

Watch the hemline rise and fall.

More weird ladies' wear

I don't know how to describe this outfit, so just go here and scroll down.

Dior death debutante

Boing Boing links to an unusual Dior item, but it's not necessarily the weirdest item in the collection. When you've gone through the steps to see the details for that dress, click on the slideshow and see what else is there. Ranges from nearly-wearable to deeply unattractive.

Pink Satin Toolbelt

New frontiers in lingerie.

Obviously costumers in the making.

Duct tape prom dresses. No, really.