Sweater Girl

Fabulous pop star Shirley Manson of Garbage has no arms!

An over-the-top bra



Well, I don't think this would look right under my t-shirts, and it's a bit on the pricey side, but...gosh.

Just to let you know, the Sydney sales turned up trumps again. I now have my dress for the Hugo ceremony in Boston. List price AU$259, sale price AU$89. I love Australia.

Drag for women

Had I not wanted to make it myself, and if money had really been no object, I would've got my wedding dress from Chantal Mallett. In her own words:

The collection ranges from simple, classic dresses in traditional wedding shades to more elaborate creations, suitable for clientele with a taste for the more unusual or those with a themed wedding in mind. These include a stunning red bridal gown in crushed velvet called Damsel & a, Diva like, white fishtailed gown trimmed with feathers & Swarovski crystals named Ice Queen. My designs are a mix of the various era's & styles that inspire me: from Medieval, Gothic & Elizabethan influences to touches of pre-Raphaelite & fairytale to curvaceous silhouettes straight out of 1950's & 60's Hollywood.

And yes, there are designs for those who like both froth and frills, and those who like simple elegance.

Semiotics

Just hit a minor semiotic squick with the picture posted below. Not quite the same as Avedon's, but ... it's like gender-bending and cross-dressing are OK but lingerie for men isn't. Don't ask me why. Minds are peculiar.

Gross me out

Oh, Feorag, that was cruel.

Maybe this is a bit better?

One of my kinks is that I like men either fully-dressed or stark naked, but not in their underwear. And not in mine, either!

A tuxedo would be cool....

Let's face it, boxers are dull.

Found in the timesink that is Something Awful - Manties - Panties made for men, for the discerning gentleman who realises that women's panties simply don't fit properly.

For those nights and days, when you want to be and feel a little special, naughty, and very sexy, these Manties are for you. Once you have them on, it will be "hard" to take them off. They are made of nylon and have the extra room where you need it, for the most comfortable fit there is. Once you try a pair, you will wonder why you never tried them before.

Panties are for the gals

MANties are for the guys

Available in both brief and high cut styles, the number of designs is incredible - lacy numbers, bows and flowers and even embroidered with the days of the week.

The Umbrella Project: Aye, these garments are truly made of umbrellas. Except for the lining of both bodice and skirt, the ensemble is 100% reused Umbrella skin. The goal behind the Umbrella Project is, as you might guess, to reuse the umbrellas that people casually toss aside when they (the umbrellas) fail structurally. And it probably resists beer spills quite nicely too.

I thought hotlinks were the whole point of weblogging.

And I heard a rumor that that pop star is one of your drinking buddies, Ken.

The bra is on sale for 24 squids (on sale!), but I just love all this sheer mesh stuff it's nice to see something in it that isn't covered with heavy embroidery.

Personally I tend not to hotlink because I don't trust the other site to always be there. But then I always build my own web sites too so it is easy for me to host images. I have space and bandwidth and full control over content. I don't think you can upload pictures to blogspot.

Clearly this blog needs links to images in the same way that my own blog, or Ken's, needs links to articles. But I think it is OK to do them via ordinary links the way Ken did with the old gowns.

Two questions

1. Who is the pop star?

2. Isn't hot-linking frowned upon?

(Policy suggestions on this invited.)

Looks to me like two garmnents. There's a white slip underneath and then the black whatever-it-is on top. Doesn't seem to fit very well, but perhaps that's part of the style. Cute hair.

What is this girl wearing?

From the Wednesday-Thursday edition of Bartcop, a fabulous pop star in an outfit I can't quite understand. Wish there were more of her in the photo.

One of the advantages of spending much of my time in America is that their stores are used to the fact that even many teenagers are massively overweight. I love Layne Bryant. They try hard to be fashionable, and the smallest size that they stock is just about right for my currently expanded waistline. I feel so cool being able to ask if they don't have anything slightly smaller.

Cool stuff

Quiet here, init? (Hint.)

Anyway ... check out The Decline of Fashion Photography: an Argument in Pictures (via), and Teresa on Geek knitting and The joy of stitch.

Old Gowns

Two interesting dresses, via Teresa: a reconstruction of the Irish Moy Gown, and a rather beautiful painting by Edwin Austin Abbey (American, 1852-1911) titled 'The White Dress'. I recommend the first one in particular to any resident or visiting dressmakers or costumers. And for the second, does anyone have any notion of its design, construction and fabric(s)?

The week in bras

My mission to promote the development of the anti-gravity bra is, as usual, not bearing much fruit. Which I'm used to, but having my favorite catalog company consistently running promotions for the "Love Kylie" line just gets a bit depressing after a while. I admit some of them are cute enough that I even posted a hot-linked thumbnail of one at my regular weblog, The Sideshow, but while it makes nice eye-candy it doesn't really add anything to my choices.

Meanwhile, Gina Lynn atTechTV, who is looking for a decent sports bra, tried to reduce the amount of ignorance in the world by informing her readers of something you really think men ought to have figured out by the time they are 14: that the number in a bra size is not the bust measurement. She even tries to explain how the band measurement is determined, although she gets it wrong, I'm afraid:

Men, here's a quick primer in bra sizes. The number is the "band size" -- the part that goes around the ribcage. The letter is the "cup size" -- the part that holds the breast. You measure your ribcage under the breasts and add five inches to get your band size. (I don't know why we add those five inches to get the band size. I don't remember doing that 20 years ago.)

Not then, and not now, either; whoever told her that should be ashamed. You add two to the ribcage measurement, rounded to the nearest even number, more or less. (And depending on the style of fastening, since some bras have three sets of hooks and some have just a single clasp.)

I'm sorry, it just amazes me that men know so little about this subject. They obsess on breasts, they love numbers and stats, they like to pretend they know something about women - and god knows they wish they actually did - so why don't they just find out before they run around babbling bra sizes as if they knew what they were talking about? "She's got huge knockers, I bet she's a 44B!" they will say, completely unaware that few people seeing a woman of such dimensions would be impressed by the size of her jugs.

Meanwhile, shopping for bras in stores continues to be a frustrating experience, as this article attests. I love the idea that they actually paid a firm to find out why women don't like to shop for bras in department stores, as if most of us wouldn't happily tell them for free.

Many long years ago I once found a bra that was perfect for my purposes. It looked like it was made from a pair of stockings, it was the sheerest bra I have ever seen, and of course there were no seams in the cups. Astonishingly, it gave terrific support without underwires, and a comfortably natural shape. And I never noticed I was wearing it.

Trust me if you don't know this already, but all those qualities in the same place just do not happen once you get past a C cup, but this bra - which was all alone at the top of a jumble bin - was in my size, which at that time was a D. I wore it happily for years until I gained too much weight, but I never saw another one like it in any size.

About a decade ago I found the second-best bra I've ever had, a comfortable underwire that didn't make me feel like adjusting the straps every five minutes. It had a lace cup, but, miraculously, it was seamless and didn't even disturb the smooth look under my t-shirts. I'd worn it twice when I realized I'd finally found It - the comfortable, practical, sexy bra of my dreams. My minions and I looked everywhere to find out where I could get more of them, and discovered that I'd found the last of a run and the company was discontinuing it; they did not replace it with anything similar.

And so it goes. My current favorite is a cute little seamless-cup racer-back, but frankly I prefer back-closure bras (which, although men never seem to figure this out, are actually easier to remove). The anti-grav, alas, is still far out of reach.

Oh dear, I guess I don't dress properly for writing. Maybe I'd do better if I wore better clothes. Then again, maybe one has to be dressed properly for what one is writing about. I'm afraid I've just been reading the new Mary Gentle which should doubtless get me thrown off this list as it is thoroughly contemptuous of any form of clothing that is unsuitable for fencing in.

So for reviewing it I'm wearing a pair of leggings and an Australian rugby shirt. I'll worry about putting on something more elegant when I have Emcit #99 out of the way.

Seals and Strata

One book I'm tempted to buy in Mr Wood's Fossils is Edinburgh and Lothians Geology, which features a lot of excursions to sites of geological interest. Edinburgh is of course rich in them - for a start, it's built around the remnants of an ancient volcano - and one of the excursions is one of my regular walks. The coastal path between the Hawes Pier, just beside the Forth Bridge, to Hound Point is described in detail: fossil beds, oil shales, intrusions, all in the space of a few hundred metres.

The other day I walked through the village, past the registry office where a small crowd was gathered around a young bride (in a cream wrap coat over a tea-length straight white light satin dress) and on along the shore. As I approached the Long Pier (the one after Hawes Pier) I saw a man fishing from the slipway, a couple of metres away from a seal. Seals are a common sight around here, as are seals basking or resting on the slipway, but I'd never seen one so close to a human before. The fisherman was just giving up as I arrived, and we talked for a bit about good places for fishing (I suggested the pier at the main harbour). He threw half a mackerel from his bait bag to the seal as he left. The seal ignored it.

After he'd gone I walked over to the seal. This one was quite small, about a metre from nose to hind flipper, pale yellow-brown and mottled with black. It turned its head back, looked at me with its dark, thick-lensed eyes and snorted. Very carefully, I poked the fish a bit closer to it withthe toe of my boot.

'Look,' I said stupidly. 'Fish.'

Snort. Snort.

I backed off. Not only was this dialogue going nowhere, I doubt if the seal even identified the object almost under its nose as a fish. Seals' eyes are perfect underwater, not so on land, and to these eyes a fish is a moving flash in the sea, not a dead tail on the ground.

There's something very satisfying about seeing a seal, a wild mammal making its living in the busy industrial seascape of the Firth.

Headers

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