The Critic, by Weegee. ICP.
I read the Sunday Style section every week. It's trivial and pointless, yes, with articles so upper-crusty that they are actually offensive... but I miss New York. One week I spotted a mention of my old friend Jenny's mom eating dinner with her nephew, Liev "Hagen Dasz" Schreiber. Another week I found out that the preserved-in-amber 1960's bowling alley in our old Brooklyn neighborhood has become a hotspot for record producers and media types. We used to have to bribe our friends to go there with us.
Nowadays, it may be that I read the Style section just to be up on the ridicule. It is a broad, inanimate, and obscenely rich target for derision. The Gawker hits it hard and often, and recently introduced a scoring system for the wedding announcements that is pure genius. Bride and groom both Ivy grads? +3 points. Bride obviously quitting her job? +1 And my favorite: Groom wearing gingham in the picture nabs the couple a sometimes-crucial 1 point.
Our friend Peter Up The Street this morning introduced me to Veiled Conceits, a blog that absolutely rips the living shit out of the NYTimes wedding announcements. Savage.
But sometimes the Style section comes through for me. This week, alongside the shocking news that young people use cocaine without worrying about its ill effects (Who will save THE CHILDREN?!), there was a little feature on the only decent re-use of wedding dresses I've ever heard of: a new practice called the Trash the Dress photo shoot. The idea is that you do one last photo session in your wedding gown, and you wear it swimming, or light it on fire or roll around in the surf. Wow. That to me sounds gaspingly appealing.
I had a big white gown for my first wedding, which didn't amount to much of a marriage, and now I've had my kids and they're both boys, and therfore unlikely to want to wear my old dress if they get married. All it will ever do is sit in a box the size of a child's coffin in my mother's closet. It would be so great to get a picture taken climbing a building in that stupid, gorgeous dress.
If I could still fit into the fucking thing, of course.
I buried my wedding dress in the Mojave desert when I was mad at my husband.
ReplyDeleteMy mom used hers as a window display in the hippie art collective store she helped run while she was in grad school at UW-Madison, assuming she wouldn't have kids.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother saved hers, which is GORGEOUS, but since she's about four feet tall and two inches around, it might fit my right leg. Up to the knee. Maybe. I think she gave it to my dad's cousin, who is also tiny, and who later produced an equally tiny daughter to pass it on to.
Save it. Big Man and Mr. Four might have girls and they would LOVE to wear the Grandmother's gown. Or maybe even Big Man and Mr. Four would like to wear it themselves. (I mean for Halloween or some other costume thing.)
ReplyDeleteThe only problem I had with that article was that it was about getting your dress all wet in the ocean or covering it in marinara. So you take your big white symbol of purity and get it damp, schmutzy, and cover it in a blood substitute. Is that what happens on the wedding night? Your purity is forever compromised, so why not the dress?
ReplyDelete