Manolo for the Big Girl

I’m tired and I’m working on day three of Satan’s own hangover which has assaulted my person despite the fact my total alcoholic consumption (excluding funerals, which don’t count) in the past week consists of one Black Velvet on Saturday morning and two ciders on Saint Patrick’s Day. The weather is gorgeous and I’m taking the rest of the day off.

I’m going to wax my legs, put on my new Lacroix espadrilles which are so fab it makes me want to DIE, and go out to Pork Chop Friday at Perry’s with some members of my very favorite vicious circle until I get myself into a pork coma.

THEN I’m going to go home, remove my Lacroix espadrilles along with every other stitch of clothing on my fine alabaster frame and –after appropriate sunscreen application (except on my tum, because my doctor said so)– am going to loll naked in the glorious Texas sun, unseen by human eye thanks to the Moroccan-style cabana cum casbah I CONSTRUCTED MYSELF (seriously, I drew the schematics and everything!) and have never gotten to properly enjoy.

HOWEVER:

Because I am a good blogger and love you all very much I will leave you with a parting gift. There is an enormous sale going on at Lane Bryant today, and if you use the code 000202077 you get 40% off your purchase over $100 and a whopping 50% off orders over $200. Except for Spanx, but that’s okay because Spanx suck, especially on Pork Chop Friday.

I am particularly fond of:

Fab little sequined skirt you’ll own for a million years

This is what happens. You buy this skirt now, but you think you’ll never wear it. Until you get called for cocktails or a nice reception or have a hot date, and you just grab it and toss on a dead simple ivory cashmere top, or a simple shell and maybe a great colored long cardi and you look fabulous and effortless and you spent about three seconds figuring out to wear. This you will do again and again for the next decade.

Painterly dirndl skirt

This reminds me of the stuff YSL and Prada have been doing the past few summers. There’s been a lot of this dirndl business around lately, and I like it. Granted it’s not the most slimming choice, but it’s not as embiggening as you might think, and besides who cares? If that’s the only thing you worry about then just buy a million black a-line dresses, get them tailored and find another hobby.

Harem-esque pants

I KNOW none of you are going to be on board with this one but I don’t care because I’m going to be so hopped up on porcine goodness that I will suffer the slings and arrows OF YOUR TOTAL WRONGNESS in beatific bliss. If you take a look at the picture of them in olive on the site, you’ll see it’s not really a dropped waist and they have these incredible side pleats on the side for drape without a ton of added fullness. I love them.

Sarong pants

I am admittedly a little less sure about these but I’ve seen them deployed really well and I’m just so curious.This whole Left Bank by way of Malaga, Rossy De Palma in the late 80’s vibe feels so fresh to me right now. I want to wear them with a slim cut gauze top and some really slick caramel leather bracelets.

Algerian blue  swimsuit

Love. It. LOVE IT. This is a broad-shouldered pear’s dream suit as it balances everything out visually and still is interesting, and, Thanks be to God, doesn’t try to suck you in and up and down and every way to Sunday like so many plus size suits. It’s on my very short list of possible swimtogs for an upcoming girls’ weekend in Las Vegas for poolside lounging.

IN CONCLUSION:

Me = naked and happy and full of pork chop
These Clothes = fabulous and on epic sale
You = shopping, possibly also naked and happy and full of pork chop, but the point is, I won’t be here to think or hear about it. I’ll catch you on the flipside.

Francesca has been mulling some of the new offerings at Igigi. (Yes, Francesca knows that their customer service leaves MUCH to be desired, but  there is no getting around the fact that their clothes are distinctive, feminine, and flattering for many “difficult” body shapes.)

What say you about the Ayla colorblock dress? In the back it is all black.

Part of Francesca is thinking “kewl,” and part of her is thinking “that episode of Star Trek.”

Here we have the “Brilliant Ideas” dress in green, which would look superfantastic on the top-heavy or hourglass woman, but is sadly terrible for the woman of apple-ness (the oval-shaped).

Look! The beautiful “Francesca” dress (natch) now comes in a gorgeous shade of purple:

Finally, before we head off for the weekend, what say you about the “Exceptional Ruffle Dress,” shown here in Chocolate?

Francesca loves the belt and thinks this would look terrific in the office, but cannot bring herself to embrace the ruffle.

Ruffles have been showing up with increasing frequency lately on the fashions, and despite her love of lace and feminine styles, Francesca is not excited. “Lacy” and “Frilly” are not the same and do not have to go together like love and marriage.

Anyhow, have a happy weekend! xoxo

When building a wardrobe, it’s important to make sure you’re highly visible in it. By that I don’t necessarily mean bright colors or wildly dramatic cuts. Of course I’m hardly against either of these things, but right now I’m talking about something much, much subtler. What I mean is that your personality should be visible in your clothing choices.  When you find something that makes you feel entirely yourself, that piece has power.

For one woman it might be a brightly colored wrap dress, for another a soft grey turtleneck, and for yet another a pair of amazing leather boots. You are the only one who can identify your power pieces. Whether the thing that makes you feel most like you is a pair of cat’s eye sunglasses, black lace, paisley,  or linen trousers, you need to make room for it in your wardrobe. Don’t pick just any piece that fits the description, though. Shade, cut, proportion, comfort and construction still matter in these pieces. In fact, they may matter even more than usual because this is your calling card.

My calling card? Hats. It all started when I was fifteen with a visit to the Renaissance Faire. Yes, Ren Faire, Plummy. Deal. My mother whipped up an indigo blue Tudor flat cap for me to wear with the amazing early Elizabethan court gown she’d made me for a school play. I fell in love with the Faire, but even more I fell in love with that cap. I started wearing it everywhere. It was the perfect shade of blue to make my eyes sparkle and my skin glow. It was the perfect proportion to make my rather small head with the very flat straight hair look just a touch bigger. It kept my nose from burning when the sun came out, and kept the rain out of my eyes in stormy weather.

I wore it with everything, to every event. I wore it to school, to my job (I had a paper route and washed dishes at a Russian Orthodox Church), to rehearsals for school plays, to concerts, to the grocery store and the mall. It rapidly became a signature.

Eventually the hat died a sad death from overuse. I have mourned it ever since.

By that time, I was the Girl in the Hat. I did the only thing I could imagine: I got more hats. First was a Greek fisherman’s cap and my grandfather’s Homburg. They were both great, but only for casual wear. I picked up a gorgeous winter white beret with a spray of white feathers. By the time I was twenty, I had a collection of wonderful hats. I’d figured out what my best proportions, styles, and colors were. I knew what angles looked best on me and knew to avoid even trying anything too square or entirely brimless.

In short, I found something that spoke to who I was, learned the tricks that made it work on me, and made it my calling card. It’s so much my sartorial thing that there are people who have known me for as much as five years who have never seen me without a hat. When I recently got a dramatically different new haircut, there were friends who didn’t notice it for weeks because I had the hats on.

I have hats for formal and casual wear, hats for sun and hats for rain, subtle colors and bright ones, straw, fabric, felt, heavily ornamented and plain. Believe it or not, I’ve packed all that into less than a dozen hats, bought (and received as gifts) over the course of the last fifteen years or so.

The point of all this? When you find something that makes you feel the most you, it’s worth investing in it. Time, money, thought, and effort are all worth putting into these powerful pieces. In them, you feel good about yourself, and that can open surprising doors in life.

One more note  about operas and fat ladies (see what I did there? With the note? Because it’s like music, get it?)
Soprano Daniela Dessi walked out of the role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata when director Franco Zeffirelli--you’ll remember him from the Romeo and Juliet we all saw in junior high with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting– said she was too fat to sing one of opera’s most famous consumptives.

THIS is La Dessi (with friends):

What
a
COW.

By the way, that is EXACTLY what I wear each morning as my favorite houseboy attends to my toilette (in my head).

Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with La Traviata or La Dame aux Camélias the Alexandre Dumas fils novel (his daddy wrote The Three Musketeers which incidentally has 30% less fat than other classic French adventure novels) on which the opera was based, it’s your tried-and-true Consumptive Parisian Hooker with a Heart of Gold story à la Moulin Rouge except for, you know, not awful in every conceivable way (I’m sorry it just IS and not even Ewan McGregor’s hotness is going to change the fact that Baz Luhrmann directs like a coked-up housefly with electrodes on his balls.)

Marguerite, renamed Violetta in the opera, was based on courtesan Marie Duplessis with whom Dumas fils had a torrid affair before she died at 23.

She’s seen here wearing a white camellia. Apparently Duplessis wore a white camellia when she was available to entertain guests  and a red one when she was having her Special Lady Time, which I suppose is a lot more elegant than MY tell which involves taking the safety off my .38.

So if Zeffirelli –who has always been for realism in casting– wanted to cast a sickly-thin 23 year old in the role, then why didn’t he? Is his Google finger broken? Because a quick image search showed me exactly what La Dessi looks like.  MAYBE it’s because it’s nearly impossible to find someone that young who can carry a principal with meaning and artistic flair and even LESS likely to find someone capable of singing that role who doesn’t weigh at least a buck fifty.

In fact, the only one I know to have done a credible job –and I’m not saying there aren’t others– is Beverly Sills when she sang Violetta in 1951.  The “youngest prima donna in captivity” was 22 and although she was a good bit slimmer than Dessi, no one was going to confuse Bubbles with a consumptive waif.

Ms Dessi says:

‘I can accept criticism before I put pen to paper but not afterwards. I was working well with the conductor of the orchestra but the problem these days is that theatrical directors have too much say.’

Ms Desi [sic] added: ‘I’m stunned. I still can’t believe what I heard him say. I am 1.60 metres tall, weigh 65 kg and take a size 44. There – that’s the first time I have given my vital statistics in public.’

So basically this woman  is 5′3″ and wears about a size 14, she had the role and had been rehearsing. Then Zeffirelli calls her “too portly to perform” and Dessi walks out, as does her husband who was playing the male principal and the show went on with two lesser voices.

Perfect!

I mean, I’m not super bright, but isn’t a big part of opera the singing? Because I kind of think it is.  Like,  if  it was just a bossy woman with a great rack and interesting taste in headgear  yelling at people for three hours  then I feel like I’d be offered more roles than I am, instead of the current number which is –let me rummage through my datebook– exactly zero.

Shout out to Sarahbyrdd for being the first reader to bring this to my attention!

So I was clicking through Style.com’s “12 Reasons to be Cheerful in 2010” with a bit of fear and loathing. Conde Nast is not historically a friend of the fatly, so I was interested to see three of their reasons –that’s a full 25% in some quarters– had something to do with fashion beyond the double-zeros.

First there was the downer we discussed yesterday, which was all about how Prada refused to design for non-model extras as the costume designer of the Met’s production of Attila. Bah and humbug and, as you may recall, suck it.

Then there was the bit about Mark Fast scoring a line with Topshop.  Fast, if you’ll recall, was the young buck who used to make his clothes only in one size but who sent down three plus-sized models the runway for Spring 2010, causing two of his stylists to quit.

I very much Do Not Love his clothes, but I love Mr Fast for using plus size models as models, not as tokens in his ultra-shredded sexpot show.

Then there was a note –and this is the most hopeful of all– about how models like Lara Stone (a size 4 sometimes 6) and Catherine McNeil –who has been getting a lot of flack for gaining weight and now looks to be a size 4– are getting tons and tons of work as the trend swings away from stick-thin and back to merely very slim.

According to style.com:

“If McNeil, Stone, and Gemma Ward—another reemerging catwalker dealing with negative body-image hype—were the new prototypes for healthier-looking models, we’d be much relieved. For now, there’s always Crystal Renn.”

This is exciting. This is REALLY exciting. Because one size 12 model in a lineup of thirty double-naughts is a gimmick, this is CHANGE. If we can get back to where a size 6 is model-normal, then maybe a size 12 model won’t seem so out of the ordinary. Maybe young girls won’t be so likely to develop eating disorders to starve themselves into a shape they’ll never EVER naturally be.  We’ve been in Waif World for about 15 years now –remember when Kate Moss was the thinnest model on the runway?– and there’s a change in the air. Whee!

When it comes to the fashion world, especially the modeling world, I am a cold, cold jaded shrew.

I know most plus-size models are size 10/12 and travel with their own set of pads to make them look bigger. I know there’s only ever one famous plus-size model at a time and I know nine times out of ten, if there’s a plus-size model in a straight-sized shoot, she’s there like a token black model would’ve been in the early 70’s.

And it’s not that I’m bitter. I had a blast when I modeled. My neck was too short for me to ever be a real success, but I was popular enough as an artists’ model to pay my bills for a while and I got to do the occasional charity runway thing which was all kinds of fun (Mama can STOMP. IT. OUT.) and I got to meet all sorts of cool artist guys I’m glad I never slept with. If you’ve ever wanted to model and have the required beauty, thick skin and good head on  your shoulders, I say give it a try.

But when you’ve been in and around the industry for a decade or so, you can get a little jaded. You realize Crystal Renn is just the new Mia Tyler, who was the new Kate  Dillon who was the new Sophie Dahl etc etc etc.  Now granted, all those girls –except for Sophie who is back to a straight size and just as gorgeous as ever– are still working as plus size models, but only Crystal is getting the covers.  Crystal is a damn good model but I’m just about exhausted of all the kerfuffle made over her each time she gets an editorial. It’s nothing new. She’s just the token “fat chick” who is virtually indistinguishable from a skinny chick.

THIS, however, is new:

V Magazine preview courtesy of models.com

V Magazine preview courtesy of models.com

(click on the photos to view more previews, you know you want to)

What we have here are four gorgeous undeniably plus-size models in V Magazine’s upcoming “Size Issue” and you know what these photos say to me?

Supermodels are back.

Good old-fashioned Gianni Versace schmoozing, George Michael lip-synch, don’t-get-out-of-bed-for-less-than-$10,000 quoting, early 90’s supermodels and it’s

About

Damn

Time.

Because this? Is gorgeous and lush and LONG overdue. It is full on glamor and I LOVE it because dammit, life is HARD right now for a lot of people and by God if ever there’s been a time to be allowed to do a smoky eye AND a major lip, it’s when we can’t afford anything BUT a new red lipstick and some kohl pencil.

Do I think we’re going to see a preponderance of plus-sized women on the catwalk and in major fashion editorials any time soon? Not hardly. But I DO think it means we’re moving away from the size 00 models and might start seeing fours and sixes again. I think the pendulum will swing away from the hard, post-modern space-age praying mantis ideal we’ve got now back to lushness and a certain over-the-top natural sexiness that just cannot happen when you don’t have any vavas to voom.

So well played, V Magazine. Well played indeed and I  hope this is the start of something big –as it were– for all of us.

What the H-E-Double swizzle sticks is going on here? Because yesterday’s post was an earlier draft and I spent HOURS writing a totally inspiring edit that had pretty much nothing to do with that one and it disappeared like a senator after an intern’s pregnancy test.

Anyhoodle, it’s Tuesday which means I really ought to do one of those “What Plumcake Is” things, but I’m not going to because I’ve pretty much been in a Christmas coma for the past 11 days. Basically the twelve days of Christmas find me in a sort of perma-stupor, all hopped up on Mr Kipling’s “exceedingly jolly” miniature mince pies and bad champagne, which has been magically turned into GOOD champagne by the cunning addition of Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur:

So culturally speaking, I’m pretty useless until Twelfth Night which is one of my favorite feast days because I get to wear jewelry on my head and there is mandatory cake. I LOVE mandatory cake. Do you know what I also love? Booze Emotionally unavailable men with hot accents having a really good lawyer Pretty much all of Kiyonna’s dresses right now, which are all an additional 20% off until midnight tonight if you use the code RESOLUTION.

Here are some of my favorites.

Can I tell you how much I’m loving this? It’s so Studio 54. Not in a Liza or a Bianca way –although if any of you say a harsh word against either of them I will Ban You Forever– but sort of in a Marisa Berenson, sleeping with a Rothschild/wearing Grandma Schiaparelli’s old furs  continental chic way.  Plus I love the way they styled this model.

Also, how glad am I that the early 90’s are back? Back when models were models and Gianni was the only Versace that mattered (oh wait, he still is).

I love the full-on Cindy/Naomi/Christy/Linda supermodel look, and I’m hoping this lush look will bring more voluptuous models back to the catwalk because the skeletal waifs who do bizarre and other-worldly so well don’t do the glamazon thing any justice.

In a continuing theme of cat, check out this purple leopard print wrap dress:

CLEARLY not for the shy, this wrap dress is a sign that the colored animal print brought famously to the forefront with Lanvin SS09 –as notoriously sported by Maggie Gyllenhaal– can be done at a boutique level without looking like a hot mess.

although I don’t believe for a SECOND that MyBoyfriendAlberElbaz didn’t have another leading lady in mind when he designed a one-sleeve blue leopard gown:

Love. Her.

On a more conservative note, you know how I’m always yammering on about getting investment pieces that look amazing and you can wear to work/dinner/theater for three seasons if not all four?

THIS is what I’m talking about. In fact, if I didn’t have two blue dresses in almost this exact cut, I’d buy this up with a quickness. They’re also DEAD easy to dress up –think Big Jewelry- or down –flats and my own personal trick, an Hermès foulard tied kerchief-style in your hair– get it in both blue and merlot. You won’t regret it.

Finally my favorite guaranteed-to-look-good-on-everybody pick:

The “Flaunt” dress.

I. Love. This. Dress. I love that it’s simple enough for it to be one of those things you just throw on but the back is sexy without even a hint of skank. Now, I’m not one of those people who thinks “princess seams” are for apples, because they’re just not. Pretending you have a waist will not make it so. The key to dressing an apple shape is neckline neckline neckline. The particularly wide square one on the Flaunt is perfect for our apple tarts, while the a-line shape does lovely things for our pear-shaped jewels.

Happy, happy Thanksgiving!

Today we are pricing down, to Fashion Bug, which  sells Misses and Plus size casual-wear and lingerie. At the top of the home page, you can opt to shop according to size, including 16-34, 16-32 short (they couldn’t call it petite? Whatever.), and 16-32 long. (Warning: Short and Long selections are limited.) (Misses sizes start at 6). Their sale page is here.

Today they are having the Thanksgiving Day sale, online only, on all their Fall clothing here.

YES

Francesca had a hard time with the “Yesses” and “Maybes” because her personal idea of “casual” is “suede jacket with boot-cut jeans.” So let us get it out of the way: If you are looking for your basic turtlenecks (on sale today for $6 apiece), polo shirts, jeans, panties, and the like, this is a good place to go. It is a good value for the price.

And now for the slightly more Francesca-esque items. Click for outfit suggestions and/or purchase info:

NO

MAYBE