#Hairy-legged ladies of the post-apocalypse

[entomancy]

(Fic) An Enterprising Endeavour

Trying to get out of the utter creativity hole that this writeup has wrought. So, having a little play with my lovely ladies. This will go well >:)

(Statesman ‘verse; no warnings)

Part 1: Setting the scene

The city itself was quite typical of State architectural design.  Walled, girded by several storeys of Y-shaped concrete slabs, its angular buildings in civic centuriation along a grid of streets.  The raised, dark midlines of vehicle roads cut down the centre of the footways, radiating outward from the squared spire of the central militia hub and linked in to the fenced-in space that hugged the outer walls.  Everything was planned.  Efficient.  Deliberate.

Or at least, it had been.

A lot of things had ended with Mother’s Fall.  The broken dome of the central power plant was testament to that: metal and plastic and artificial stone alike, torn open from within like a ruptured boil.  Shards the size of hanger doorways still jutted from the buckled skin of nearby buildings, and the force of the detonation had ripped into the structures themselves, cracking them open to reveal the blank, unfinished interiors.  Roads had buckled, cheap tarmac warping when the embedded power lines overloaded, and every window was a gaping, glassless gaze, ringed in fragments.

In truth, it had never been completed.  Mass-manufactured shells, just another link in a failing Chain, funded by frontier-hope and the desperate desire for renewal from something already dying.  Perhaps if the end had been less sudden, if the murder and fury in the City – the real City; the metal toothed monster that all these far-flung spores were but hollow copies of – had not ignited when it did, this place might have been somewhere more to lose.  But the shot had been taken, and the world had turned on an aching heartbeat.

And this city died, before it lived.

Devh Trask knew none of this.  Oh, sure, she could see it was a Statey build.  There was a look to everything them Motherfuckers shat out; couldn’t deny that.  But the whys and the wheres, and the rest of it, didn’t worry her so much.  What did – what did – and why she was sitting here, lurking in a Chargesdamn bush like a chokin’ peeper, in the rain – was that while this city might be dead, the little encampment of Bluelight wasn’t the only scavenger gettin’ settled on its outers.  

She shifted position again, swearing under her breath as she wiped greasy rain off her monocular lens, and peered out again at the humps of construction tents, lights and movement visible within even in this weather.  The place was almost directly on the other side of the walls, compared to where Jangles had set his first vans down, and was about as far out this side too.  Didn’t look like anyone wanted to get too close to the half-finished husk, and Devh had her theories on that, but right now she was wondering exactly who it was that was getting comfy out here.  The Bluelight broadcast sure got this far, so they knew that the fledgling trade post was there.  

Hadn’t even said hello. So she was getting’ real curious –

- and, as the meaty hand slammed down abrupt onto her shoulder, its heralding footsteps masked by the hammer of the rain, Devh realised she wasn’t the only one.

“Ehy, Trask.  Fancy seein’ you out ‘ere.”

…ah shit.

[starryeyedsolange]

Petition for women in post-apocalyptic movies to stop having shaved legs/underarms

[awed-frog]

It’s not that exciting, really - I just get irritable and disappointed when I witness something that’s weird enough not to be completely plausible and yet so boring that even if this should turn out to be a supernatural event, who the fuck cares, uh? Nobody, that’s who. Like, this one time I saw two ladies I’m pretty sure were shifters, but they weren’t really doing anything worth mentioning (I stood there and watched them for a while, but they just seemed lost and also there was a siren in my lizard brain going DANGER DANGER, so I finally drew the curtains tight and hid under the bed), and this other time a drunk werelady walked down my street but she just barked at some cars before disappearing?, and that’s almost worse than nothing happening at all. And as for Apricot Man - long story short, I hate working around people but this stupid heatwave has forced me from my house, and the closest liveable option around here is the Physics Library, so here I am, minding my own business and trying to ignore how I’m surrounded by smug, unfriendly books I have zero chances to ever read or understand, when this fucking guy walks right in and sits right next to me and why do people do that? Why? He’s got a whole fucking library, and it’s mostly fucking empty, because it’s August and normal people happily wandered off to any place that’s not this one, but nope - he’s got to come here and he’s got to sit here and this is the third day in a row he’s done that and seriously what the hell?

(My boyfriend pointed out it’s likely I’m the intruder - that poor Apricot Man always sits there and now he’s suddenly forced to share his living space with me - to which I answered that a) nice try, b) the common law in this country is to stay the fuck away from one another whenever possible and c) this desk is not the Magical Desk of Destiny carved out of the Blessèd Yggdrasil Itself or anything like that, so you literally lose nothing if you sit somewhere else and d) I got here first, anyway, because I’ve been here since ass o’clock in the morning and he normally comes in after six and also e) Apricot Man is clearly a cryptid, which means it’s his God-given duty to blend into the landscape and trying to pass as human so as to not alert hunters to the presence of a nest.)

So, yeah, here I am, minding my own business and doing honest, grown-up work when this guy rolls in - literally rolls in: he’s got these 90s skates I haven’t seen in twenty-fuck years (God, I’m ancient) and it’s just not practical, let me tell you that, questionable choice right there, because he’s almost seven feet tall and with those things, Jesus, every. single. time. he moves he’s got to duck or risk being beheaded by doors and shelves - but never mind that, he rolls in and sits down next to me disregarding the fact the library is basically a post zombie apocalypse wasteland of nothing at all and it’s just me and this desperate smol student two rooms down and that’s it, turns a computer on, and then proceeds to pile about three pounds of apricots in the empty space between us (and they’re not even in season anymore, so this is not some ‘his mom’s got a tree and what is he supposed to do, poor guy’ situation - this is a deliberate and expensive and horrifying choice on his part). And on top of everything else - I mean, we’re all allowed to do our own thing and yay for self-determination and the illusion of free will, but something else that’s just nope about him is that he’s got long, unkempt hair and it’s not clear what his deal is - if he’s got no running water at home, if he’s not washing it out of some political reason, if he’s actively going for some kind of mossy hay aesthetic, who knows - also I did a double take on the first day because he looks like he’s not wearing any pants? Which? What? And as it turns out, he is wearing pants, but he’s wearing something that’s two inches away from being a jeans thong, so when he’s rolling around his t-shirt covers it completely, you know?, and all you see if you’re sitting down is six feet of bony, hairy legs moving around seemingly on their bloody own and you’re lazily, vaguely wondering what’s missing until you realize you were fully expecting to see a swinging free-range penis doing its own thing there in the middle and swish swish swish and wheeee? But whatever, it’s hot and I’m fine with that, who cares - what I’m less fine with, to be honest, is that the entire time he’s here, the only reason he feels the need to sit at this precise desk for three hours every night is to check out mattresses on eBay? 

(Mattresses. On eBay.)

And he’ll do that, he’ll scroll down one page, then another, and then he’ll start on those fucking apricots - I’m seriously doing my best not to notice here because I’m polite like that, also I’m working and I’ve got two novels to finish and an urgent deadline and watching people is not really my thing, but fuck - you know those egg-eating snakes, how they open their jaws wide and just gobble up that white and shiny and juicy egg whole, shell and all, ‘cause they’re snakes, right, and that’s what they do and bless their little snouts? Well, this is how Apricot Man eats his apricots. Swear to God. Instead of halving them like any reasonable person would (if you don’t halve your apricots, don’t even try to defend or justify your poor life choices, idgaf), he pops them in his mouth, one after the other, and I’m pretty sure he swallows them whole, stones and all? It’s seriously disturbing how he does that, and how focused and relentless he is - like, I’m sitting here and adding yet another irregular verb to my list of doom and all I can hear is this gulping noise - glop, glop, glop - and after those three hours he’s been allotted out his magical cage are up, that’s it, all the apricots are gone, there’s no stones anywhere, maybe he’s bought a mattress, or two, or twenty, who even knows - he turns the computer off, tightens his skates, and off he rolls.

You see how that’s not normal? And yet so peculiarly uninteresting that yeah, maybe this guy is some kind of mage or a shifter or a gull stuck in a human body, but who cares? Who the fuck cares? This is not the kind of magic I signed up for. These are not the monsters I need in my life. 

(Jesus Christ - a fruit-swallowing mattress enthusiast? These are the cryptids we’re stuck with? Most cursed timeline indeed.)

So, anyway, the only difference today is that he rolled in carrying a melon and a tub of yoghurt that was easily the size of a paint bucket (and yeah, maybe it was paint, who even knows) and then proceeded to eat that entire thing with a teaspoon and I don’t even know where he bought it, okay, because I remember I once needed an insane amount of yoghurt for some Christmas recipe and as it turns out, shops just don’t sell buckets of the stuff because what we’ve built here is a normal and God-fearing and civilized society and also we’re fully human and fuck off.

But the melon - the melon is still there.

Fuck.

I was determined to pull an all-nighter if necessary, to sit here and force him to actually dislocate his jaw to swallow that thing whole so I can have irrefutable proof that people who’ve got no sense of personal space actually do belong to a different species, but sadly that’s not happening because - unlike him - I’m human and I have human things to do and I don’t care, in any case - I don’t want this, I demand better - dragons and selkies and morally ambiguous fae princes - I don’t care about this melon eating monstrosity - he can have his Very Special desk and I hope he’ll find a mattress long enough for his bug legs and soon he’ll be gone, anyway - there must be a migrating pattern for things like him, I’m sure of it, and maybe I can help him out - start a conversation and tell him South Africa is now growing avocadoes the size of a bloody coconut and watch his transparent eyes light up, poor guy.

(Imagine the stone inside those things.

The dream.)

[biofunmy]

The Climate Crisis Crowds the Catwalks

PARIS — On a rainy morning here, the day after Greta Thunberg issued her end-of-days clarion call at the United Nations, another young woman made an environmental statement of her own that was impossible to ignore.

It took place on the windswept sidelines of the Hippodrome D’Auteuil, on a grassy knoll speckled with wildflowers, where two big aluminum pipes had been laid above ground, along a garbage bag-covered pair of runways. “Imagine … by hiding in caves and shelters deep underground, small, but illustrious groups have survived the Apocalypse — climate wars, heat waves, mass extinction,” read a text handed out at the entrance. Then the Marine Serre show began.

Billowing black moiré anoraks swallowed the head while oily jumpsuits were lit by blinking red hazard lights; leather motocross body suits were spliced with fragments of red scarves and cloudy party dresses patched together from the odds and ends of nighties and shawls and tablecloths. Shells and other found objects swung together on chains. Boxy ladies-who-lunch skirt suits had been made from carefully fringed black toweling, and all of it was marked by the tribal signage of the crescent moon that has become Ms. Serre’s equivalent of a logo. She must be the only designer working who has managed to make her “It” accessory a pair of tights (also, now she’s making underwear; the world may be ending, but business must go on).

Imagine the Road Warrior by way of Madame Grès, and you’ll get the idea. There were dogs and a pregnant woman on the runway; community, and a touch of grace. The clothes were 50 percent upcycled, detailed with hope. If this is what a wardrobe for the end of the world might look like, the woman who made it, paradoxically, represents the future.

It has taken fashion a while to come to the climate crisis table, both internally and aesthetically. Ms. Serre, 27, has been there since she won the LVMH Prize for young designers in 2017, but she is no longer alone. It is just that when designers think about climate change and what it might look like, they have a tendency to reduce it to one of two things: plants or disaster.

(Well, no one ever said it had to be complicated.)

Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior, for example, who has made it a mission to find a female muse for every collection, this time settled on Catherine Dior, Christian Dior’s younger sister: said to be the “Miss” in Miss Dior, and the first woman to have a license to sell flowers commercially at Les Halles, Paris’s central market, according to the brand. Then Ms. Chiuri teamed up with Coloco, a creative collective that focuses on the environment and public projects, to create a forest of more than 150 trees inside a specially-built structure in another Hippodrome (this time, the Hippodrome de Longchamp). They stood there in their burlap nests, ready to be distributed to parks around the city and neighboring communities.

But first, through their leafy, dappled shade wove a flood of very pretty gardeners in woven raffia skirts, fecund with blooms, under crisp sky-blue shirting. Pen-and-ink patterns of wildflowers wove their way over raw linen suits, and botanical prints grew on airy silk dresses. There were little straw hats and woven espadrilles, striped shorts and smock coats, misty tie-dye and filigree embroidery.

It can seem facile to fall back on plant life to express your commitment to sustainability and it is, a bit. But there’s nothing facile about the clothes themselves. And before eyes are rolled, remember that in 2012, at Raf Simons’ debut for Dior couture the walls were papered with one million flowers — without much thought about what would happen to them later. And remember that since taking over at Dior, Ms. Chiuri has had a tendency to speckle her ready-to-wear collections with feminist message T-shirts, just to hammer her points home. This is progress, on both counts.

The same could not be said of Lanvin, however, where Bruno Sialelli set his sophomore collection among the greenery of the gardens outside the Quai Branly Museum (parks, parks, everywhere), and then declared in his show notes that it was because they “encourage daydreaming and contemplation, far from the tribulations of the outside world.”

The rain kind of ruined that idea, as did all the plastic ponchos (encased in little plastic bubbles) that were handed out for protection. As did the confusion of a collection that added many pointless flaps and straps to otherwise elegant tailoring, mixed an old comic book strip (“Little Nemo in Slumberland,” from 1905) with pajama suiting (for men) and Fortuny pleats (for women), threw in some gingham and potholder weaves, an old Lanvin cartoon print that apparently depicted bathers but looked like an unexpected takeoff on a Kama Sutra plate, hairy sneakers and metallic “Pharoah Loafers” (don’t ask), and then culminated in lovely short Grecian gowns, glimmering with gold. Mr. Sialelli has talent — he can cut a terrific jacket — but he lacks discipline. Titled “Slumberland,” the result was as irrational as many dreams.

It lacked the serenity of Maison Margiela, where John Galliano was dealing with another kind of modern disaster (so said the show notes, and such has become his signature theme): “the chaotic noise of the social media debris” and the way it has “hacked” our memories and sense of history. In toggling between the now and the then, however, instead of his usual freneticism, he found a calm control.

Using the classic forms of British men’s wear, especially the military, hunting kind, he ballooned army green satin into capes and cut holes in trench coats and giant trouser legs-turned-strapless, corseted dresses, the skirts fluted out at the knee. Iridescent organza bustles printed with silk screens of berries were strapped behind utilitarian short suits with taffeta corset tops. It was all very fin-de-next-siècle — if we make it there.

Before the collapse, however, the party.

Or that is what Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent seemed to be thinking. (Telfar Clemens, too, at the end of a show that ripped out the seams between tourism and the T-shirt, cargo pants and Jamaican flag knits, the British rapper Lancey Foux came out and all the models — and some of the audience, including the playwright Jeremy O. Harris — began dancing.)

In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Vaccarello laid a field of 414 spotlights, which proceeded to rotate around like an army of alien Roombas and send beams of light shooting in various patterns into the stratosphere, like we were on some kind of outer galaxy post-plant planet. Instead of trees: Lasers! Beam me back in time, Scotty.

Through their lines stalked haute rock chicks in knee-high boots and micro shorts of many kinds (leather, pinstriped, beaded), under sharp-shouldered jackets atop peekaboo shirts. Gold devoré headwraps became gold devoré peasant blouses became gold embroidered peasant dresses became gold leopard disco glam. At the end, a series of glistening Smokings, sequined and beaded, finished it off. The look was Loulou de la Falaise in the 1970s, at her louchest.

There is little question we are teetering on the edge of the volcano, after all, so why not dance instead? And it is not quite as irresponsible a message as it might seem. All that electricity used in all those spotlights came from generators powered by biofuels, according to the brand.

Good to know! But it’s also true that sometimes a fabulous escape from the issues is enough.

Sahred From Source link Fashion and Style

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