Da Fashionista.com

The Scene
Still lost in thoughts of Micheal. And in the deluge of words being written about him. Including Maya Angelou's:

"We Had Him"

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing, now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind.

Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace. Sing our songs among the stars and walk our dances across the face of the moon.

In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing. No clocks can tell time. No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure.

Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone.

Only when we confess our confusion can we remember that he was a gift to us and we did have him.

He came to us from the creator, trailing creativity in abundance.

Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love, and survived and did more than that.

He thrived with passion and compassion, humor and style. We had him whether we know who he was or did not know, he was ours and we were his.

We had him, beautiful, delighting our eyes.

His hat, aslant over his brow, and took a pose on his toes for all of us.

And we laughed and stomped our feet for him.

We were enchanted with his passion because he held nothing. He gave us all he had been given.

Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana's Black Star Square.

In Johannesburg and Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England

We are missing Michael.

But we do know we had him, and we are the world.

Gawd to be able to put pen to paper like that. So affecting. So soul stirring. So sad.



In an effort to cheer me up, Mr. Diabolina took me out to sushi. But even at the restaurant I found a reminder. UGH, IS THE LA WEEKLY TRYING TO KILL ME WITH THAT COVER?

Fantastic article in the Weekly about Micheal - about how race and sexuality played out in his very American story. It's something I've been wrestling with over the past week. Wish I'd been able to articulate this salient point as well in recent posts:



Many of the tributes being written, especially by Negro males, think they’re bestowing the ultimate praise on him by positioning him alongside conventional, traditional soul men or icons of Negro male cool. Make that unquestionable hetero Negro male cool. But the thing about Michael was that he resonated so powerfully precisely because he upended and shimmered beyond gender convention.

It seems especially noteworthy that he cemented his solo superstar status during the gender-bending/gender-fuck era of the early ’80s, alongside Boy George, Annie Lennox, Prince, a funkily reinvigorated Grace Jones — though he was a seasoned old pro in comparison to all of them. (It was his second start at a solo career.) Because his gender tweak was subtle relative to those artists, it doesn’t really get commented upon.

But Michael evolved from childhood mimicry of the masculinity of soul titans to something more complex and more layered. And it eventually housed a much more problematic sexuality. It’s difficult to know the ways in which his abusive childhood, the adult responsibilities carried on his childhood shoulders, and the paradoxically sheltered and wide-open pop-star lifestyle he had at an early age all contoured his sexuality, and to then fully know what inclinations and fetishes might have been innate and which were externally shaped.

Heady stuff, no? Fascinating how one person can be so layered, can mean so many different things to so many different people. What a gift and a curse. Can't get enough of the duality of it all.



The Outfit
Forever 21 dress

The Accessories
Raybans
Marc Jacobs bag
Bruno Magli slingbacks
H&M bow belt

The Grade
B






The Commentary



Old old dress that felt new new new when paired with belt today.





























Belting a summer dress equals instant reinvention, instant easy chic.

























Especially belting a floral one and rocking it with bangs























One pretty kitty that is intimately aware of the transformative power of a belt and who has fierce bangs is Sheena Matheiken, the cutie behind The Uniform Project. For those of you haven't heard about it, here's the NYTimes' take:



Matheiken has set out to wear the same dress every day for a year to see just how aesthetically creative she could be despite that limitation.


















The dress is a little black number, custom designed by Matheiken’s friend Eliza Starbuck with this project in mind. The garment (actually, there are seven identical versions of it) can be worn with the buttons facing front or back, or open, as a kind of jacket. In some cases, wearing the dress in its tuniclike form over a completely different outfit reduces the garment itself to a sort of accent piece.


The exercise was designed to attract online attention, as it is also meant to be a yearlong effort to round up donations for the Akanksha Foundation, a nonprofit that supports education efforts for underprivileged children in India. By late June, about 60 days into the project, she had raised $3,313. And she had certainly attracted online attention, from a variety of enthusiastic fashion bloggers and Web publications and (of course) a pack of Twitter and Facebook supporters.














Here's Sheena's tribute to Micheal the day after his death.





Love the idea and the cause and the fact that a daily fashion blog is getting so much attention.



















I just know she's gonna get a book deal out of all this. Ironic that she doesn't write more than a line every day. Sigh. I gotta get crackin on a sell-able framing concept for my book. If you have any brilliant Julie/Julia ideas, I'm all ears. (And fucked up bangs - SIGH!)