#rips off my shirt revealing another shirt underneath that says i love red vox

[sawsquared]

hopelessly, united in entropy

[kalluun-patangaroa]

Now you see them: It's been a long time since there was a pop phenomenon like this - frenzied fans, rhapsodising reviews . . . Suede, it seems, might be the future of rock and roll. Then again, they might not.

The Independent

Sunday, 21 March 1993 

Written by William Leith

A THURSDAY in March 1993, 7.20pm. The Top of The Pops presenter, Mark Franklin, introduces the latest video from Suede; the studio audience gives a youthful cheer. Brett Anderson, Suede's lead singer, appears on the walkway of a nasty tower block. He wears: no shirt, a tight black leather jacket, so short it reveals his midriff, black trousers low on the hips, so you can see his angular hip-bones, a cheap-looking necklace. He looks pale, almost ill, a figure from an early 1970s nightmare. His lank fringe covers his whole face.

The camera rushes down the scummy walkway into a dark room, where a coloured light flashes sickeningly; over the fuzzy guitar noise Anderson sings - or rather, he wails: 'Like his dad, you know that he's had / Animal nitrate in mind / Oh in your council home, he jumped on your bones / Now you're taking it time after time.'

This is 'Animal Nitrate', Suede's third single, a song about - what? Domestic violence, drugs, child abuse? It's thick with filthy undertones - and people are wild about it, just like they were wild about Suede's first two singles, 'The Drowners' and 'Metal Mickey', so wild that a concert-goer told me: 'It's not just girls who pack themselves at the front of the stage and try to rip Brett's clothes off - it's boys, and it's nothing to do with homosexuality . . . it's everybody, it's a mania.'

In his careless, Mick Jagger twang, which he has to a tee, Anderson tells me: 'Yeah, there's been a lot of hysteria at our gigs. But we're quite bored with playing live already. Once you have captivated a couple of thousand people, got them in the palm of your hand, and had them salivating . . . you don't really know where to go from there.'

They're still in their infancy, but Suede have snared the imagination of a certain type of rock fan - the sort of people who latch on to thin, angst-ridden white boys, the caste who worshipped the Smiths in the Eighties and David Bowie in the Seventies. Most important, Suede have become the darlings of the rock press. Melody Maker, the New Musical Express, Select, Q, Vox are wild about Suede, too; Suede have had more hype than anybody since the Smiths, or possibly even the Sex Pistols. The reviews are florid, poetic, half-crazed; they express the almost lascivious delight of journalists hungry for something to pin their hopes on. Suede, says the New Musical Express, are: 'The triumph of decadent aristo-foppery over prole pop.' They are 'Out there, so alone, brilliantly vulnerable' (Melody Maker). Or, as Select magazine put it: 'Never mind the bollocks. Here's Suede.' Needless to say, Suede's publicists, Phill Savidge and John Best, won the Music Week award for the best publicity campaign of 1992. The judges said they 'took Suede from obscurity to accolades to being hailed as the best band of the year'.

In the past year, Suede have been pictured on 19 magazine covers (including six Melody Maker covers, four New Musical Express covers, and, unprecedented for a band who have yet to release an album, the cover of Q magazine, which appeals to older fans). The Christmas edition of the NME, on which Brett Anderson posed as Sid Vicious, was the biggest-selling NME for a decade.

But Suede haven't yet released an album; their first three singles reached, respectively, 49, 17, and 7 in the chart. This is not the big-time yet; it's not U2 or Simply Red or the Cure. In an important sense, Suede haven't happened yet; they are in an interesting limbo. They might not happen. Lots of bands have got this far - or nearly this far - and no further; what happened to the Stone Roses, to Sigue Sigue Sputnik? They seemed like great ideas at the time.

What will Suede's fate be? Nobody knows; the world of rock music is too fickle to predict. When I met Brett Anderson, he said: 'I do want to have a place in history. I really do.'

'And what does it take for a band to have a place in history?'

'I think . . . three great records. Three great albums. But then again . . . the Sex Pistols did it with one, didn't they? I don't know. I don't know.'

BY THE end of 1992, when the height of Suede's chart success was still only a No 17 single, journalists were drooling over Brett Anderson. They practically had him on the couch. They loved his angst, his preoccupa-tion with himself, his ability to verbalise. He was perfect - he was everything they could possibly want.

In a typical exchange, he told Melody Maker: 'When it comes to writing, there's something to be said about being unhappy. I know I've been at my most creative when I've been sexually unsatisfied. When I'm sexually satisfied I write a load of old rubbish.'

Melody Maker: 'Are you sexually satisfied now?'

Anderson: 'Yeah.'

Melody Maker: 'So you're writing a load of old rubbish.'

Anderson: 'Yes, and it's a problem, because we're supposed to be doing our debut album . . .' He even had an exact position on sex, which was: 'I see myself as a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience.'

Perfect. As soon as they spotted Suede, the rock press knew they were on to something. The journalist who first wrote about Suede was John Mulvey of the NME. Suede were nobodies, playing third on the bill at the University of London Union. Mulvey says: 'They had charm, aggression, and . . . if not exactly eroticism, then something a little bit dangerous and exciting. Brett was a brilliant frontman. He has a certain edge to him which most people don't have, like Ned's Atomic Dustbin or Kingmaker, who are woefully bereft of that spice.'

'That spice' is something the rock journalist needs to find, if he is to make a living. Week in week out, you trudge to seedy bars and clubs, desperate to find something exciting. When I was a rock journalist in the Eighties, people would come into meetings every week, excited, with their discoveries. This is it! One week it was Stump, another week it was the Soup Dragons. We had the Shrubs, the June Brides, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Half Man Half Biscuit; they were all the talk of the NME office for days, or weeks; sometimes they held out for longer, as long as there was still a chance of starting a cult, of getting people excited enough to rush out and buy the magazine. The strike-rate is very low; mostly, these discoveries fizzle out. So when the music press is faced with something that might go the whole way . . . it explodes.

'Here was a British band it was possible to get excited about,' says Danny Kelly, editor of Q magazine. 'The kids have to wait for the Smashing Pumpkins, or Hole, or Come, to come over from America. Whereas Suede is a very real, very immediate thing - they are around and playing.'

Kelly continues: 'In the last 10 years bands have been very apologetic; they've thrived on the attitude that 'we're the same as the audience'. Suede's attitude is 'we're brilliant; we're the stars, and you're the admirers'.'

Steve Sutherland, editor of the NME, says: 'When I first saw Suede, it was one of the few times I can honestly say I saw a band and I was utterly convinced they were brilliant. Often, you get a band with attitude, or a gimmick, or good songs, but seldom everything together.'

Kelly says: 'Also, Suede allude so knowingly to things that rock journalists are comfortable with - Seventies glam, Cockney Rebel, the Smiths, sexuality, asexuality, male violence. If there is a game to be played, they're playing it very well . . . they are skinny white boys speaking to other skinny white boys about their inadequacies.'

This week's NME cover story is the transcription of a meeting between Brett Anderson and David Bowie, who listened to a tape of Suede's first album sent to him by Steve Sutherland. Bowie told Sutherland: 'Of all the tapes you've ever sent me, this is the only one that I knew instantly was great.' The two singers, the 'Thin White Duke' and the star-in- waiting, chat about sex, drugs, Nazism and the ins and outs of being a pop star. Talking about Bowie's recent, relatively anonymous, period, Anderson says: 'It's funny that, when David started Tin Machine, it was the start of the cult of non-personality . . . maybe you were just feeling the times.' The article is headlined: 'One day, son, all this could be yours.

HE COULD, conceivably, be the next David Bowie, the next Mick Jagger. Or it could all come to nothing. Who knows? Brett Anderson sits with his feet up on the table, talking quietly about his chances. He wears: black corduroy trousers, cut low, a thin jumper with nothing underneath, shoes with holes in the soles, a reaction against his recent, more stylised image, which included an appearence in the NME with an elaborate shirt painted on his body.

'Are you conscious of the way you dress?'

'Yes . . . I'm feeling pressure on how to dress in that I don't like being made into a cartoon. There's a certain element of the music press that deals in comedy and turn you into a two-dimensional thing. The whole foppish thing is getting quite boring really.'

Sitting, as he is, in stardom's waiting-room, Anderson is hyper-aware of the traps he might fall into. Recently, for instance, a tabloid scoured his earlier interviews and found them to be larded with references to drugs. 'They said there was a backlash against Suede because parents were worried for their kids,' he says. 'The whole media's a huge dangerous web.'

'Do you ever think that all this might just be hype? That you might never go the whole way?'

Anderson, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head in his hands, says: 'The British music press are notorious for getting it wrong, for leading people up the garden path, because they just . . . they're too obsessed with the idea of things. But we never really felt it wouldn't happen. We knew we had a bit of substance over the style.'

Anderson believes he's going to be a star. He's happy with Suede's first album, Suede, on the cover of which is depicted a couple kissing - an ambiguous picture, which could be a man kissing a man, a man kissing a woman, or a woman kissing a woman. 'I chose it because of the ambiguity of it, but mostly because of the beauty of it,' he says.

He also says: 'There's an elegance and a beauty to our music that people haven't heard yet, and I want that to come across - the flow of it, the swoon, to a certain extent.'

Anderson comes from Haywards Heath, where he met Mat Osman, Suede's guitarist, at school. 'He's always known he was going to be a pop star. He was very arrogant,' says his childhood friend Alan Fisher.

'I'm quite glad that Haywards Heath was such an ugly place,' says Anderson. 'Being born on the outskirts of London, being able to just peer in but not quite see what's going on, is a really tantalising thing - it makes you hungry and gives you a certain amount of ambition.' He lived in a council house with his father, a taxi-driver, his mother, an artist, and his sister, who 'escaped' at the age of 15. 'I didn't go to any gigs,' he says. 'I didn't like all the bands that were around - Echo and the Bunnymen and all that stuff.' Anderson's taste was more obscure - he liked hard, punky bands - Crass, the Exploited.

After attending Manchester University for two weeks, Anderson moved to London with Osman. 'Before we met Bernard,' he says, 'it was just me and Mat in my bedroom with this rubbish drum machine, writing awful songs.' Then they auditioned for a guitarist, and chose Bernard Butler, who worried Anderson because he was 'too good'. They also auditioned for a drummer, and picked Simon Gilbert, who tells me over the telephone: 'I heard a tape of their early stuff. I said, this sounds really good, but they need a drummer.'

'And then it just . . . took off?'

'Oh, no. We played all the shitty gigs for a year and a half. We played the Amersham Arms in New Cross to one person.'

'Do you remember the moment when the rock press discovered you?'

'Yes. I remember the first few reviews. I'll get it out of my scrapbook if you like.'

BRETT Anderson, sitting precariously on the window-ledge, with his feet balanced on the radiator, talks about Suede's first album. His favourite song is 'So Young', a full-tilt anthem of slashing guitars and pained howling, a great song - which, like so much of Suede's material, recalls the prancing confidence of Marc Bolan, of early Bowie. 'It deals with the knife- edge of being young,' says Anderson, who is 25. 'There's the desperation and all the pitfalls, but then actually turning them into something hopeful and beautiful that looks forward and that isn't negative.

'It's a rejection of the traditional English character,' he goes on. 'A desire to push all the claustrophobia and tat and bits and pieces away, and stride into the future, which isn't the most original thought in the world, but maybe one of the most important.'

'So will success spoil you as a musician then? What if you get comfortable?'

'I don't really feel as though I could ever be comfortable.'

And now, a week before the release of Suede's first album, Anderson must go to a studio to meet Bernard Butler and write songs for the second album, tentatively scheduled for release early in the new year. He has also been thinking about the video for the next single. 'Up to now,' he says, 'we've been playing on the grittiness of it all. But I wanna take it all to a different level; I wanna use nature more. I've got this image in my head of these horses galloping, and then I'd have it superimposed, and make it a lot more beautiful, a lot more floating, a lot more . . . implied.'

Anderson gets down off the window-ledge. By the time the stuff he will write this afternoon is in the shops, he might be just a vague memory. Then again, meeting him is something I might boast about to my grandchildren. Who knows? Nobody, yet.

[theconservativebrief]

There’s a reason movies employ costume designers, why celebrities hire stylists, and why you changed outfits no fewer than three times before your last promising first date — fashion choices broadcast nuanced details about a person’s identity and personality.

The same, of course, holds true for fictional characters in novels. The choices that authors make about apparel and accessories can bring a character to life, or they can push fiction into fantasy. Remember when Carrie Bradshaw picked apart Jack Berger’s novel because he dressed his character in a then-unfashionable scrunchie? Select the right pieces and your character will feel real; select the wrong ones and readers won’t believe a word.

Scrunchies aside, stylistic choices have turned so many moments from capital-L Literature into memorable scenes. In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara whipped up an iconic gown out of green curtains during the poverty-stricken days of Reconstruction, when she couldn’t afford to purchase a dress. In Jane Eyre, the protagonist refuses to wear the brightly colored silk and satin gowns Mr. Rochester offers her in favor of the drab dresses she feels are more appropriate for her position as a governess. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood immediately divulges by page three that she rushed over to Bloomingdale’s on her lunch break to purchase black patent leather shoes with a matching belt and handbag to prepare for her summer of working at a magazine in New York — that’s how important her accessories are to her. And who can forget The Great Gatsby’s Jay manically tossing up shirts, or American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman reciting a list of designers and brand names with the reverence usually reserved for church?

If these scenes seem particularly vivid to you, it might be because each of these classics has been adapted onscreen, as so many best-sellers are (including two of the books below). That creates further opportunity for these looks to come to life.

I asked the authors of five buzzy novels to select one important look they’ve created for a specific character and dissect what the ensemble means to the character. How does she choose to dress herself, and what does that signify about who she is? The outfits themselves vary wildly from a disheveled 1940s ostrich feather ball gown to a worn-out Lilly Pulitzer tank top, but each author emphasized the same point: Their choices were intentional. Nothing was accidental or poorly thought-out. One author went on an online shopping frenzy to dress her character for a wedding; another even brought in an outside stylist to ensure the clothes were up to date.

The next time you pick up a novel, pay special attention to what each character wears — every outfit is a road map of their values, tastes, history, and insecurities. Below, five authors reveal how they use fashion as a tool in fiction.

Half the fun of zipping through the rollicking family drama of Crazy Rich Asians is the fashion. Kevin Kwan makes it clear that among certain circles in upper-crust Asian society, you’re only worth as much as the labels you choose to wear — and the tackiest thing you can do is to dress above your station. “When I write all my characters, I really imagine from head to toe every single thing they’re wearing,” Kwan says. “If I didn’t already know the piece, I would scour the internet, looking at collections and creating outfits for the characters.”

Astrid Leong in her VBH earrings.

Crazy Rich Asians follows Rachel Chu, an American-born professor, who travels to Asia to meet her boyfriend Nick Young’s astronomically wealthy family for the first time. Astrid Leong is Nick’s beloved cousin; she’s a stay-at-home wife and mother, as well as a fashion icon among the elite. She flies to Paris every season for custom couture and had a close friendship with Yves Saint Laurent (RIP), but she’s not afraid to wear a dress off the rack from Zara … as long as it’s styled just so with museum-quality Etruscan bangles.

“Astrid is very much inspired by one person,” Kwan says; he tried to recreate her style for the book. “Astrid sees dressing as her only form of artistic expression. She lives in this very cloistered world where she has to put the right foot forward at all times. Fashion, for her, is a way of being rebellious, and it’s a way of asserting her own creative expression into her life.”

Kwan discovered this Alexis Mabille white peasant blouse back in 2010 and was inspired to dress Astrid in it for a Friday night dinner at her grandmother’s house, where a more relaxed outfit would make sense. She’s dressed down in order to detract attention from her new VBH earrings — a splurge that would make her slightly less wealthy husband uncomfortable. “She pairs the earrings with something that’s just kind of more fun and casual so the earrings look like costume jewelry,” Kwan notes.

While writing the next books in the trilogy, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems, Kwan turned to Cleo Davis-Urman, now the Fashion Director of Saks Fifth Avenue, to source apparel and accessories for his characters. “I was so frantically busy trying to meet my deadlines that her help in keeping up to date on the latest fashions was invaluable,” he says.

Crazy Rich Asians hit theaters this summer, with costumes by Mary Vogt (her past projects include Hocus Pocus and Men in Black). Kwan says that Vogt often mirrored exact outfits from the book, like Araminta Lee’s gold jumpsuit at her bachelorette party and the beige linen suit Nick wears to greet Rachel at Tyersall Park for the first time.

Social Creature is what would happen if an overgrown Eloise at the Plaza had a wardrobe full of stained vintage dresses and an eccentric pack of friends — and if she wound up dead. The glamorous thriller follows Louise Wilson, a mousy underachiever whose life changes overnight when she meets Lavinia Williams, a madcap bombshell who frolics at the opera, trades witty barbs at secret bookstores, and dances at a stand-in for the McKittrick Hotel.

“My vision for Lavinia is the little kid who goes into her parents’ wardrobe and comes out wearing everything,” Tara Isabella Burton (a staff writer at Vox) says. She swathes herself in vintage from the 1920s through the ’50s, but she doesn’t have the self-care skills required to preserve her delicate clothes. “She definitely leaves her clothes rumpled in a pile on her floor when she stumbles home drunk. She does not fold things neatly. She is constantly drinking and spilling shit,” Burton adds. From afar, thanks to her class privilege and sheer force of personality, Lavinia succeeds in looking like an effortless sylph. But up close, she’s a mess.

Lavinia with her gorgeous dress caught on a door.

She comes from a wealthy family and veers wildly between using her money to attract and keep friends and feeling self-conscious about her background. She’s likely to spend hundreds at a curated vintage store but lie and say she found a dress at a thrift shop for $5. “It’s very much in the Upper East Side, WASP-y vein to downplay and be like, ‘Oh, this old thing? It was on sale! Of course I didn’t pay for it!’” says Burton.

The first time readers meet Lavinia, she flies into the brownstone she shares with her teen sister, Cordelia, at 6 am. Louise, Cordelia’s SAT tutor, has been up all night waiting for Lavinia to come home to pay her. Lavinia accidentally slams the door on the ostrich feather hem of her 1940s ball gown and sheds feathers everywhere she walks, like an injured bird. Louise is able to mend the dress for her, which sparks the beginning of their dangerously codependent friendship.

At the New York launch party for Social Creature, Burton wore a similar ostrich feather gown in pale pink. She says she didn’t intend to match Lavinia but liked that the gown “felt very Social Creature.” She also Sharpied on a “More Poetry!!!” arm tattoo, like the ones Louise and Lavinia get together in the book. At the party, Burton’s fake tattoo smudged off onto her dress, and she dabbed out the stain with a wet napkin. Unlike her character, she could take care of her vintage duds.

Imagine this: You get stuck in an elevator with your dream guy. He invites you to be his plus one to his ex’s wedding, less than 48 hours away. That’s the meet-cute that kicks off The Wedding Date. To dress Alexa Monroe and the other characters in the book, Jasmine Guillory thought carefully about how their wardrobes would function practically in their lives.

Alexa in her red dress.

Alexa is the chief of staff for the mayor of Berkeley, and her wardrobe is mostly work clothes. She opts for colorful shift dresses and blazers from department stores; she’s a little preppy and likes J.Crew. She’d love to wear a Theory suit, but she’s busty, so blazers don’t always fit her the way she’d hope. For the past few weddings she’s attended, she’s either been a bridesmaid or done Rent the Runway, so she has to scramble for something to wear. She summons her best friend Maddie, a stylist, for a day of shopping.

“I did a lot of mock online shopping for what Alexa would wear to this wedding,” Guillory says. “I wanted her to feel like the star version of herself, like she has a glow about her the whole night.” Guillory — or Maddie — ultimately selects a red fit-and-flare cocktail dress with a low neckline. The cut of the dress was intentional; Guillory wanted Alexa to be able to wear it without Spanx underneath, in case she happened to later undress in front of her wedding date, Drew Nichols. Instead, she would be able to wear the dress with a pretty, sexy bra and panty set.

For Alexa, the dress inspires a serious confidence boost. “Normally, she would think, ‘Oh, a guy like this would not be interested in me,’” Guillory explains. “But with that dress on, she feels like Cinderella. … It’s kind of a magic dress and a magic night, so she might as well flirt with the hot guy. Why not?”

High school freshman Chloe Sayers can fit in with anyone in her small New Hampshire town: She looks like a popular kid, dreams of life as an artist, and is best friends with misfit Jon Bronson, who’s secretly in love with her. Jon is kidnapped, only to mysteriously return four years later with no recollection of what has happened and with strange powers that threaten those around him. Meanwhile, in Providence, Rhode Island, Detective Charles “Eggs” DeBenedictus is investigating a string of seemingly healthy young people who keep dropping dead. The genre-bending novel follows their three separate but interconnected lives.

Chloe in her casual hometown outfit.

More than a decade later, Chloe is a hotshot New York artist whose portraits of Jon have made her a star. She’s been deeply uncomfortable dressing up ever since her high school prom, when she wore a revealing dress she didn’t like. Typically, she’s in paint-splattered cutoffs and big, old T-shirts — easy pieces to throw on when she’s making art. She’s keenly aware that setting and context matter: When she’s back home in New Hampshire, god forbid she dress up and offend people’s casual sensibilities; when she’s out in New York with her Entourage-loving financier fiancé, she knows to dress for his newly urban tastes, even though he’s from her small New England hometown too. “She wishes she didn’t care so much, but she does,” Caroline Kepnes explains.

The morning after her big engagement party in her hometown, Chloe is getting dressed to reunite with Jon. At first, she chooses a little pink dress, but she knows her fiancé’s family would sneer and call her overdressed. Instead, she throws on an old Lilly Pulitzer tank top and denim cutoffs. Her fiancé’s sister-in-law sneers, anyway. “Chloe doesn’t wear Lilly in New York,” Kepnes explains. “She wears it in Nashua to fuck with her would-be sisters-in-law who read Lilly as, ‘So you think you’re better than me, huh?’”

As a teenager, in the wake of Jon’s disappearance, Kepnes says Chloe’s “whole identity was constantly nitpicked and torn apart, so she’s more relaxed. She’s like, ‘No matter what I do, they’re going to say something, so I’m just going to wear what I wear.’” Depending on whom you ask, a classically printed Lilly tank top is either obnoxiously preppy or sweetly nostalgic; for Chloe, in this moment, it’s a form of expression and rebellion.

Lara Jean Song Covey is the 16-year-old protagonist of Jenny Han’s trilogy To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (the Netflix adaptation came out this August). A true romantic, she writes letters to every boy she’s ever had feelings for and stashes them away in a teal hatbox given to her by her late mother. When the letters accidentally get sent to each boy in question, well, Lara Jean’s life quickly gets pretty interesting.

Lara Jean in her iconic knee socks and cardigan.

“Her look is 1960s retro meets 1990s meets Asian streetwear,” Han says. “It’s aspirationally romantic schoolgirl, and as an introverted person, it’s her way to express herself.” Lara Jean draws inspiration from Asian fashion blogs, wears clothes that her aunt sends her from Korea, and likes to shop at vintage stores. Han referenced the movie Clueless and Korean fast fashion from sites like Stylenanda to develop Lara Jean’s style. She gave her three recurring style signatures: a hair bow, a heart-shaped locket, and knee socks.

The socks have become such a fixture among fans, Han says, that readers often wear them to book signings as a tribute to the character. “Her style came together in a way that made sense to me because of her romantic nature, her fascination with the past, and her idea of what love looks like,” she says.

This outfit is something Lara Jean wears for a regular day at school. It also appears in the final scene in the movie. “I had extensive conversations with the producers in regard to Lara Jean’s style,” Han says. “I sent them mood boards.” This particular silhouette — a button-down with a short skirt — is used frequently.

Ultimately, Lara Jean’s look is also somewhat influenced by Han’s personal tastes. “It’s very similar to my style,” she says.

Original Source -> How do you choose an outfit for a fictional character? 5 authors explain.

via The Conservative Brief