Another Magazine Pet Peeve

I must apologize for taking so long to post anything new, I've had a few, ok, many, technical difficulties with Typepad.  They seem to be settled now and I have a few pieces typed and waiting and will post them in the next day or two...

 Here is another fashion magazine pet peeve of mine-the best dressed list. In the olden days of the 1940's and 50's when Elanor Lambert created her best dressed list, I think it really meant something. Ms. Lambert was a very wise PR exec and she created the list to help American fashion become more know or popular.  It was the first time American women didn't have Paris to look to as the pinnacle of fashion or as inspiration because the Nazi occupation of Paris cut the city off from the rest of the world.  In fact, Hitler wanted to move the Couture to Berlin or Vienna but the brilliant Lucien Lelong,

Lucien LELONG,	Lucien	Lucien	Lucien Lelong	Lucien Lelong

a couturier and the President of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture kept fobbing him off  (The Chambre is like the union or guild of couturiers).  He kept saying yes yes yes to Hitler and reminding him that the infrastructure of Couture was all in France and couldn't possibly be moved but that he would look into it.  He really took his life in his hands by denying Hitler and the world has him to thank for it.  But there was no more shipping of designs, gowns, or socialites from Europe to the US-we had to look to our own talent to create what we wore.  And that we did.  Claire McCardell was one of the very first American designers to make a mark in the history of fashion.  Hattie Carnegie too.

Because there was only 1 list it was an authority-now anyone can make one and slap it up on the internet. What do any of them mean, really? Vogue does a best dressed list every month, I think (I ignore it so I can't quite remember how often it is) and now Bazaar has begun one. Is this like giving every kid in the class an award of some kind at the end of the year so no one takes a blow to the self esteem? And do we really have to worry about models and actresses' self esteem?  In those days we saw really well dress women on the list, women like Babe Paley, Mona Bismark, and Jackie Kennedy.

AND!!!! These (silly) best dressed lists of the magazine's seem to show only actresses in evening gowns!?!?!?! While I'm as thrilled to look at gorgeous and high fashion evening gowns as the next glamor girl I cannot believe that if you wear jeans and a T-shirt everyday and put on a gown a few nights a year you really get to be on anyone's best dressed list! NO! You must be well dressed all the time. My husband runs into actresses all the time while working and he often reports that each wears a shrunken jacket, a T and jeans which have begun to morph into boyfriend jackets and jeans-each a fashionable look but worthy of a best dressed list? I don't think so.

And now that award show season has begun it can only get worse...

Comments

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I'm not sure you can - especially now - insist on a single, centralized "Best Dressed List"; nor am I sure you ever could - I believe Lambert's was best known and most authoritative, but hardly an isolated case (at the very least, the Hollywood "Worst Dressed" List garnered nearly as much PR). Lambert, by the way, willed the list to one of your faves, whose name escapes me, and to Vanity Fair, which is why they publish the list annually as they have for the past 5 years or so.

I'd also take issue, just slightly, with the whole notion of "Best Dressed": as we've discussed, it favors wealth, not to mention, especially in Lambert's case, a preference for a very Eurocentric, white notion of beauty and fashion sense. Babe Paley, Slim Keith, the Duchess of Windsor, Jackie Onassis - God love 'em, but they also represent notions of concentrated wealth and class superiority that are, in their way, also quite troubling. The very things we celebrate in a more democratized notion of fashion - where creativity and ability to work within budgetary limits matter as much as a good eye and swell taste - are clearly at odds with traditional notions of what it is to be Best Dressed.

And it's telling, I think, that the "official" list belongs to VF, and not to Vogue or Bazaar; a reminder, really, that the list is as much social arbitrage and a matter of name recognition over true style and deeply rooted ideas of fashion. And I think there's a constant bind for the fashion magazines - you need a vehicle to recognize who, and what, is truly fashionable. If you can't create your own list... what other option do you have?