Manolo for the Big Girl

Good morning mein schnauzers! (I don’t really speak German, although I HAVE seen Cabaret a bunch of times. Plus I stole the line from the occasionally NSFW Mr Peenee anyhow.)

Today’s blog post is going to be Law and Order style: Ripped from today’s headlines.

Except by “Today’s” I mean “Yesterday and quite late the night before” and “headlines” I mean “conversation I was having with an aerialist cum chef pal of mine who may or may not also breathe fire.”

The question?

Whether one might learn to be photogenic.

Listen, I’m not going to lie: I take a hell of a picture. In person I look like an extremely posh cartoon frog and I’m at peace with that, but on camera? I’m Myrna freakin’ Loy.

See, the things that make people beautiful to look at in real life don’t necessarily translate onto film, so there is absolutely no use hating bad photos of yourself. You DON’T really look like an off-Broadway musical revue staring Lady Bunny as The Elephant Man. It’s just a bad photo.

BUT you can hedge your bets by learning how to fake being photogenic.

How? Easy. Learn how to work your light.

You do this two ways: through makeup (easy) and through posing (easier).

Makeup first:
Most people who wear makeup focus on their eyes and lips and don’t pay much attention to their skin. This, particularly when it comes to photographs, is a mistake. Even if you want to go for “the natural look” for a photo, a little foundation or powder will even out the way light bounces off your face, making for a much smoother look.

For the look above -which was taken last night after an evening out celebrating the newest acquisition of the Château Gâteau Collection of Enormous Sparkly Things: a vintage Kenneth Jay Lane necklace the size of a sheep– I’m actually wearing relatively little on my lips and eyes.

The lips are just a generic tinted lipbalm and for the eyes I simply took my trusty MAC 217 brush and blended Paradise Pearl pure pigment from Coastal Scents over the lid, ran a bit of Milani’s Mediterranean Blue eye pencil along the waterline and along the outer corner of my eye and topped it with a lick of Rimmel Sexy Curves mascara.  I just cleaned up and shaped my brows using an old brown pencil whose make and model have been lost in the mists of memory.

What I did spend a lot of time on was the highlighting and contouring of my face.  For those of us who are fat of face or otherwise not blessed with an aquiline nose, cheekbones so high and sharp people try to commit suicide off them and the generally accepted number of chins (i.e., one) highlighting and contouring the face can be a godsend.

The painfully lovely and exceedingly talented Chapman sisters can teach you this and pretty much everything else you’d ever wanted to know about l’art du maquillage (I say that in French because it sounds nice, the sisters themselves are from Norwich) through their wonderfully accessible tutorials.

Sam Chapman Contouring Tutorial

Of course it doesn’t hurt that Sam Chapman might actually be the most gorgeous woman to ever have lived and if Crystal Renn ever got a look at her she’d be cowering in her technically-plus-size Martin Margiela boots.  I highly commend these videos to anyone with even an sprinkling of interest in makeup. If you’re an old hand, they’ll be inspiring and if you’re new to the wonderful world of better living through eyeliner it’s a great place to start.

So we’ve got the makeup down, right? Now on to posing.

Any small success I had as a photographer’s/artist’s model (my plus-size fashion career was as short as my too-short-for-fashion neck) was because I knew how to literally put myself in the best light.

Part of that is just being aware of your face and how the light hits it. You know when it’s nice outside and you turn up your face to get just that perfect sweet spot of sun? That’s a really natural example of finding your key light.

The undisputed queen of key light was Marlene Dietrich.

Killer bone structure notwithstanding, Dietrich wasn’t a great beauty (and let’s not even talk about the tragedy that is Jean Harlow’s wighat)

but she knew how to play to her light when a camera –moving or still– was on her.

Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor worked lights well too, but they had the disadvantage of being actually breathtakingly beautiful, too, so it’s not as useful from an academic perspective.

A silly “key light” finding exercise, is to set up a spotlight in your house (yes, this can be a flashlight or a can light on a music stand on your commode) and practice just moving your face around in the light.

Odds are you’ll find some positions where the light just feels better, feels right.

That will get you in the habit of paying attention to the light, so the next time someone wants to snap your photo and you have a second to pose, just lengthen your neck, find your light and you’ll be surprised how much better your photos turn out.

Now someone go find me that charming Mister DeMille.

Yesterday we talked a bit about how developing or expanding your personal style can be daunting, and today we’re going to talk about developing a vocabulary.

When I say “developing a vocabulary” I mean two things: having some understanding of the fashion lexicon and being informed in at least the broad strokes of what’s coming down the catwalks.

Before you get on your huffy bikes about having to do homework for something as simple as getting dressed in the morning, think about this: knowledge is power, and the more knowledgeably you can speak about something, the more control you have over what you do and do not want.

I call this the Cerulean Sweater Principle:

The most time-efficient way to get yourself a working knowledge of fashion terms is to spend an afternoon or two immersing yourself in a glossary, the absolute best of which comes courtesy of apparelsearch.com. It’s the best on the web and  a great combination of useful fashion stuff and arcane terminology.  Click on a letter and skim skim skim.   Also useful is Stylopedia, a brief illustrated glossary you could skim through in 30 minutes.  I can’t over-emphasize how important this is since it will give you both practical knowledge AND the confidence to hold your own in the face of opinionated sales assistants, well-meaning but crazy-making mothers and that frenemy from college who wore white to your wedding.

The second element to developing a vocabulary is a bit slower going, and that involves knowing what’s  happening on the runways.  Are you ready for some heresy? Burn your fashion mags. Unless you get British, Paris or Italian Vogue –all worthy publications and available for around $250/yr– pretty much any fashion rag you’re likely to encounter is going to be pre-chewed, thoughtless pap that’s useless at best and soul-wreckingly counterproductive at worst.

What you want is pure, unadulterated access to information, so you can form your own opinions without undue influence. Well, you know, except for mine.

See, there are a whole heap of so-called fashion experts, especially online, who wouldn’t know their ascots from a hole in the ground. They’re going to try to tell you what the “in colors” are this season, or the “hot shapes” but odds are unless you know they’re poring over the runway shows themselves (which is time consuming and tedious to say the least) like as not they’re  just swallowing what’s being fed to them by advertisers and clothing companies or just making stuff up.

So what’s a girl who likes to think on her own two brains to do? Go straight to the shows.

Style.com offers every look for all the significant shows (and some not so significant)  from New York, London, Milan and Paris and is an invaluable resource.

But how do you know what shows to watch for premium trend-spotting? Here are ten of the most important houses to watch:

Alexander McQueen
Balenciaga
Balmain
Chanel
Christian Dior
Jean Paul Gaultier (and his work for Hermès)
Lanvin
Prada (also Miu Miu)
Marc Jacobs (also his work at Louis Vuitton)
Yves Saint Laurent

Of course, if you can’t stand to do all ten, just be sure to hit Prada, Marc Jacobs, Dior, Chanel and YSL.

So why are we watching impossibly skinny women wearing impossibly expensive clothes for created for events that in our daily lives seem well, impossible?

Because runway shows are about ideas, not pieces; and it’s ideas, not pieces that make us who we are.

Case in point:

Over the past few seasons, designers have been showing clothing with extremely defined, sometimes over-extended shoulders.  These strong shoulders don’t just exist because Christophe Decarnin at Balmain decided to tack on some extra material.

A strong shoulder signifies strength, protection and disciplined power. It references military apparel and toys with androgyny, but also nods to the early 40’s and the Make It Do bonhomie of wartime rationing. (Interesting side note: part of the reason big shoulders were so in during the ’40s was that embellished clothing was in short supply so  women turned to creating increasingly baroque hairstyles. The broad pads were used to balance out these complex ‘dos, which would’ve visually toppled a softer shoulder).

When a look appeals to us, it’s more than likely not the clothing itself but the message that clothing conveys. By thinking about the message the designers are trying to convey we can decide if that’s something that applies to us.

Do you like the designer’s ideas? If so, did you like the execution? If you liked the execution, what elements struck your fancy the most?

It’s from there that we pluck out an idea or two, refine it and incorporate it into our wardrobe. More on that tomorrow, ducklings… same Plum-time, same Plum-channel.

While I believe firmly that some people are simply born with tremendous amounts of style, those fashionable freaks are the exception, not the rule.

Most folks with any sort of chic at all take a heavily revisionist hand to their early sartorial development.

Case in point: legend has it, moments after emerging from my mother’s womb I took one look at the delivery room wallpaper, said “Mauve? Really?” and popped back in until I could be brought into this earth surrounded by more suitable wallcoverings, perhaps something in a William Morris print.

What I fail to mention is the time in 8th grade history when Mrs Cheeseman made me go to the bathroom to wash the purple lipstick off my face, or my middle school years which were heavily punctuated by Liza-with-a-Z quality rayon “big shirts” (the bane of the Big Girl of which I still have the horrors) and deeply ill-advised trapeze top/leggings sets, the most famous of which was a head-to-toe Holstein print bestowed upon me by my grandmother who, despite all evidence to the contrary, really did love me at the time.

(this is less than ideal)
The point is: It’s a process.

As with most processes, you’ll naturally want to tweak here and there, otherwise you’ll end up in a rut and before you know it you’ll be That Lady. The most obvious examples of That Lady is the middle-aged woman who wears her hair the same way she did in high school or the sweet old lady who could stun a yeti with her “signature perfume” which she’s been wearing since 1954, immune to the idea that her nose is dead to the scent.

I can’t tell you how many folks I talk to get frustrated with their own ruts.

They complain how “it” seems to come so easily to some people while they struggle along and can’t add something to their wardrobe without feeling like it’s a costume. They shove the piece they love in the back of the closet because they felt uncomfortable wearing it, or like it was wearing them and then these poor souls feel they’ve let themselves down, like they can’t wear Capital F Fashion and might as well go back to the jeans and t-shirts, because at least then they won’t look stupid.

It just breaks the heart.

Because here’s the thing: a sophisticated sense of style takes practice and getting mad at yourself for not being good at it right off the bat is just, well forgive my language, doofy.

For the next few days we’re going to talk about the process from inspiration to realization of incorporating elements into your personal style so it feels like a natural, easy extension instead of a gimmick or costume. This is valuable for absolute beginners as well as folks who already feel they’ve got a handle on advanced fashion but want to branch out.

Stay tuned, it should be fun.