That’s right friends and lovers, your pal Plummy is going to be blogging it up on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Manolo’s Shoe Blog. The straight-sizers have been deprived of me too long. What does this mean for the Big Girl blog? Not a thing, it’s just more of me to go around. Do me a favor and say hello.
Are bleached eyebrows coming back? Because I am NOT doing that again.
Let me take you back to a dark and mysterious time I’d like to call the fall of 1997. A young and not-quite-sartorially-together Miss Plumcake was a college freshman with peroxide red hair and bleached eyebrows.
Let me give you a complete list of people who thought that was a good idea:
Let me give you a list of people who thought that was a good idea and were right.
But it was everywhere in the September issue of Vogue.
At Prada:
At Versace:
At Balenciaga:
(Gingers can be tricky, so I looked up Marton Dorfler’s catalog. He definitely has eyebrows)
At Alexander McQueen:
At Pucci
I’m so glad Amber Valletta is still working. If you want to see how models have gotten so much thinner in the past 20 years, just look at Amber Valletta’s early covers. Not a sunken eye socket or hollow cheek to be seen.
Gucci
Jil Sander and Bottega Veneta
Readers will recognize Codie Young —the scapegoat for last year’s Topshop Photoshop debacle— as the model for Jil Sander.
And while it works editorially –although Mert and Marcus, the photographers behind many of the best campaigns and editorials, can make anything work– I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it for daily wear.
Still, it’s an interesting look. So what do you think? Would you bleach your brows?
Well, I’ve been left on my own for more than 24 hours for the first time in 2012, and apparently I’ve turned into my grandfather because now I’m just one of those people who stands in the middle of the house in her underwear looking for things.
One of the manifold splendors of living alone is when you put something somewhere, it stays put.
So if I put my teal suede d’Orsays in the oven after a Grace Jones night in mid-spring with the intention of letting them sit unmolested in their glittery glory until suede came back in season in the fall, that’s where they’ll stay.
Now I just stand flapping helplessly while Hot Latin Boy –who commandeered all Putting Away of Things after I proved chronically incapable of remembering not everyone can reach the top shelf– patiently explains that the dog shampoo is in a box marked gloves behind the yellow wok, next to my 2007 tax return. Well, obviously.
I’m determined to go through all the cabinets and drawers and make an inventory of each one in my little green notebook, so next time I need to locate my spare bottle of OPI’s You Don’t Know Jacques, my trusty notebook will tell me it’s in the Twinings Transport Bus, along side an empty Nuva Ring box, Dozer’s heart worm pills and my passport.
So that’s what I’m doing this weekend. Well that and I managed to get the last copy of the September issue of Vogue –the only issue of American Vogue I ever read– so I’ll be working on my upper body strength by hurling it against a wall repeatedly.
Next week I’ve got a review on Eloquii (hint: get some of their camisoles with a quickness), my favorite dance shoe for the fat of foot and a few more goodies.
What’s on your plate this weekend?
Sometimes all I want in the world is a really good trench coat. One that’s tailored well enough to be a dress, but can be worn as an actual coat. With my annual month-long sabbatical to DC coming up and two weeks in Barcelona and Rome meeting with important magazine-type people, I need some sort of water resistant outerwear.
Outwear is a real blind spot for me. I’ve got that ridiculous lynx an old admirer had made for me –because nothing’s more practical for someone living in the middle of Texas than a gigantic fur coat– a blonde mink stole I last used as a pillow outside a rest stop in El Paso and an emerald green pea coat that smells like a lamb shank in the rain.
That leaves me with a serious trench gap, and although precipitation here is limited to the first three months of the year, I’d like to get my hands on one before I have nothing to protect me from inclement weather of Rome but prayer and a strategically-held copy of La Repubblica.
I love this shot of Glee’s Amber Riley from Essence Magazine.
Granted, Amber is 5’3″ and I like the trench-as-dress trope much more in editorial than I do in real life –there are always fabric and flow issues– but it works the way a trench coat should work for a big girl.
The shoes are Rene Caovilla and the belt is by Ports 1961 but the trench?
Joan Rivers for QVC.
Do you have any secret outerwear resources? Share them in the comments!
Frustration. We all have it. Why? Because people who aren’t us insist on Doing It Rong.
Doesn’t matter what it is, from running a government to running a Piggly Wiggly, someone somewhere along the way is going to figuratively get on our tits without the decency of doing it literally first and it’s going make us yearn for the good old days before ugly phrases like “DNA evidence” and “toxicology reports” were bandied around our judicial system the way they are now.
Frustration is about as close to anger as many women feel allowed to get. Angry women are unreasonable. Angry women are crazy or hormonal. A woman should never be president because what if she gets her period and decided to blow up the world, harharhar…sigh.
Listen, if a woman can get past senior prom, not to mention any number of meetings, job interviews and day-to-day interactions where her worth is judged by the same criteria most commonly used to evaluate a finger sandwich –is she delicate, small, easy to handle and generally pleasing to all senses?– without hauling off and murdering someone, go ahead and give her the football. Trust me, she’s good.
The fact that we’re not encouraged to even experience, much less show our anger or frustration leads to, say it with me now, MORE anger and frustration. That’s when we get those toxic mean girls who grow up into horrible people.
I’m all for harmlessly channeled aggression. You wash your face to get rid of dirt, you take that weird pill once ever 90 days to get rid of parasites (you think it’ll all beach blanket bingo down here in Baja?)…there’s got to be some way to get out anger and frustration without damaging yourself or others, at least not more than necessary.
Time was, I’d just go down to my beloved Red’s Indoor Range and shoot at things until I felt better. It’s not that I especially like guns but for me, there’s no better reminder about the destructive power of uncontrolled anger than holding something that, unless carefully and thoughtfully handled, can literally kill me and everyone around me. Call it Texas Zen.
Guns are like babies except guns are illegal in Mexico (yet somehow Mexico’s numbers were left off the little Facebook graphic that listed firearm-related deaths for countries with gun control) and babies are most definitely not. There’s something inherent about them that says “hey, you might not like me or want one in the house, but it would be a bad idea to drop me.”
So how do you handle your anger and frustration? Hit the gym? Sleep it off? Yell and yell and yell and yell? Is it constructive or destructive? If you’re still not comfortable with your anger, why not? What steps are you taking to treat this like just another strong emotion like love or sorrow?
Hey gang, the past few weeks have had be running hither and yon and my posting schedule has suffered for it.
While most of the hithering is over, I’m still yonning a great deal, so to make it up to you, I thought we’d have one of those rare days where you can ask pretty much anything in the comments and I will do my best to answer you.
I get a lot of questions via email and Facebook, and I can’t always answer them all, so now’s your chance. Ask away. Just keep it clean!
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