Pink loafers, Paul Smith-style.

What I love about interesting loafers is they so often come as a surprise in an otherwise casual outfit. It’s the difference between being thoughtless and being effortless.

Rosemary’s Baby, 1968

The horror flick that launched a thousand pixie-cuts (technically what Mia’s sporting is a five-point pixie), Rosemary’s Baby is equal parts thriller and birth control, and once again proves my personal rule to “never know thy neighbors lest they feed you donkey tranquilizers and baster up your Secret Lady Place with a Satan seed smoothie”

What? It works.

Catherines plus-size clothing is conducting their “real women model search.” The deadline for entries is November 30 via their Web site. The prizes  include an exclusive 2-year contract with Dorothy Combs Models Inc.

The Mad Fashionista was included in a recent New York Daily News article about people who wish to be on reality television (her dream, she says, is to have a show called “You Have No Taste”).  Her blog is here. The Daily News article is here. Francesca loves the photo of the Fashionista from the paper’s print version:

The Mad Fashionista and Bucky the Wonderdog.

Igigi is creating the little You Tube presence for itself (link to IgigiTV channel here). Check out the short film they produced with Brazilian plus-size model Fluvia Lacerda:

The dress she is wearing is called “Ferrera,” and is available here.

Lanvin wingtips

When did I stop loving Halloween? It’s a holiday all about candy and dressing up. I love candy! I love dressing up! Well really I don’t love candy anymore, but I like GETTING candy and then feeling all virtuous when I give it away (except Reese’s. I’ll cut you over some Reese’s) and I lo-ove hauling out my one good Halloween story, which involves a former Speaker of The House handing out pounds of pennies in white hankies made up to look like ghosts.

I think my problem with Halloween is the costume thing. First you have the lazy costumes, that’s when people wear scrubs or their pj’s. Those bug me only because I don’t like laziness. Then there are the really intricate Renaissance costumes which only bother me about as much as they normally bother me (which is to say a lot, but not enough to do anything but make fun of them on the internet, the way the Lord intended) and the Secretly This Is My Fetish But I’m Going To Pretend It’s a Regular Costume Because You’re Too Square To Recognize It, which make me INSANE because if you are 36 year old woman with that many Japanese School Girl costumes THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR LIFE AND I DON’T NEED TO KNOW ABOUT IT.

Then there are the Naughty Costumes which are so problematic both as a feminist and as someone who doesn’t feel compelled to wait until the last day of October to express my sexuality that I can’t even write about it for fear of the vein in my forehead bursting.

So, today Miss Plumcake wants to know:
What are YOU being for Halloween?

okay I’m just putting it out there, despite my rigid No Clergy rule which is carved upon my tablet of personal commandments right next to “No More Gold Lamé Toreador Outfits” there is nothing I can say about Gabriel Byrne in a cassock that wouldn’t get me fired from this blog and possibly kicked out of the Anglican Communion, and while Byrne is super hot I’m not trying to live the rest of life eating cream-of-something casserole (seriously does EVERYTHING need a Ritz cracker topping?) and pretending not to recognize people at the liquor store.

Stigmata, 1999

Stigmata is not a cinematic masterpiece like The Wicker Man or Nosferatu but it IS a great supernatural thriller, and it’s aged well as opposed to The Exorcist –fun fact: I used to have to run up and down the Exorcist stairs for crew practice– which is just a pea soup schlockfest to audiences seeing it for the first time. When I first saw The Exorcist in college I laughed and laughed and laughed. The crabwalk? Really? I’ve done scarier things than that just trying to get into a pair of jeans.

Note: do NOT watch this movie with a bunch of seminary professors unless you want your Sweaty and Angsty Gabriel Byrne Hotness to be interrupted with angry academics shouting “WRONG!” and flinging chocolate covered pretzels (ON MY WHITE COUCH!!!) as the argue over the validity of the Gnostic heresy.

Our internet friend Catie suggested that we look at women in classical Greek sculpture, and Francesca agrees. Catie wrote:

. . . what I love is that all of them are realistic (none of them look frail like some of the ‘ideals’ we see today), and some of them were meant to represent the very image of divine beauty!  . . . any time you see a goddess or woman in sculpture she is always stunningly beautiful and never of frail stature!

Here we have the wide-hipped Eirene Holding the Infant Plutus (Eirene=Peace, Plutus=Wealth)(or a Roman copy thereof):

And here we have the Aphrodite of Knidia (again, Roman copy thereof).

Francesca wishes to point out that while even today few would call Aphrodite “fat,” she has a tummy and dimples on her back, and today she would be a Plus Size model. In ancient Greece, she was considered so beautiful and perfect that, according to rumor, men snuck in at night to pleasure themselves on this statue. A normal looking woman was porn material in ancient Greece.  Imagine that.