Unattractive Mannequin Men

I went to town to post something, it was a warm spring day, people were out and about. Liking my fashion, I noticed what the young and trendy things were wearing; their new spring clothes they had been waiting to show off. There’s been this trend for very clean-cut hair and casual summer tailoring on men - straight from the catwalk. I don’t remember a time when men’s fashion was so literal, blatant and contrived. I’m not sure where it comes from, who started it? But, I can’t think of anything more unattractive as a vain, self-conscious man. On another chilly cool day a few weeks ago, I saw a guy in full summer clothes, pastel coloured casual suit, turnup hems, no socks, and those deck shoes everyone’s been wearing (since last summer!). This was down Camden town, not fucking Milan.

Seriously, it’s like they looked at some fashion mag and went out and bought the whole outfit, down to the hair product and even measured the length of stubble to finish ‘the look’. And it’s not just a random few; it’s like every other twenty-thirty-something. A few years back and I would have thought he was probably gay, in the fashion business, or a hairdresser (which, if you follow stereotype, would have equalled the same). When I come across one of these fashion victims, my heart sinks and I think to myself, there goes a good looking man, spoiled. Guys, please don’t try so hard, at least don’t make it so fucking obvious that you love yourself, you just look fucking gay (no offence to my gay friends).

I can just see them now, a bunch of them trying to out-do each other, going to the mens toilet and checking themselves out in the mirrors. You guys were so cool and you didn't even know it...Fuck, what happened to London guys?

From askmen.com:

what is a fashion victim?

Below are three definitions of the term "fashion victim."

The first definition comes from Karin Eldor, a fellow fashion correspondent at AskMen.com. She describes a fashion victim as "someone who takes all the trends of a given time and ends up looking like a store mannequin; in a word, absurd."

The second one is courtesy of a friend of mine, who I consider a sleek dresser. To her, a fashion victim is someone who:

a- only purchases brand-name apparel;
b- is a compulsive shopper;
c- will only consider wearing an item that is "the latest trend," regardless of whether he can pull it off or not.

I found a third definition on a fashion website while researching the expression. The definition states that a fashion victim is "someone who buys an outfit that is perfectly in style, but when he wears it, he looks perfectly ridiculous."

my definition

According to yours truly, the term "fashion victim" encompasses all of the above and more. A fashion victim is someone who wants to be trendy so badly that he'll buy whatever the fashion authorities claim is stylish (at the moment) and then combine it awkwardly, giving him an over-the-top style and making him stick out like a sore thumb... not a good thing.

If you spotted a fashion victim on the street this summer, he'd be wearing a pink or yellow T-shirt, white knee-length pants with a pastel colored belt, white and pink flip-flops, and a pair of metallic shields (those sunglasses that look like protective eye gear). The lesson? If you want to look cool, don't overdo it.

A fashion victim is also someone who can't put himself together, whether his threads are worth $50 or $5,000, because he tries so hard to look hip. Don't get me wrong, looking sharp does require a certain amount of effort, but ultimately, your clothes have to fit right, and suit your style, image and personality. Remember, it's not about the clothes you wear -- it's about how you wear them.

In the end, these guys just lack personality and any individual style, making them deeply unattractive and sad.

Le Cuir A Paris - Couleurs

No longer just a bored or simply interested spectator, we have become author, actor, part of the performance. Giving into spontaneity, we allow ourselves surrealist dreams, ramblings and infringements.

We have digested the natural and outraged the virtual.

We create as part of a group, or as a solo initiative. We swap the "I, me" for the "I, us". We throw the dice up in the air without knowing the result.

Our references jostle and pile up, thrusting us into tomorrow. We add a zest of dissidence and lots of irony, to dive headlong into a season that we want to be measured, joyful and impertinent.
Archaic Garden

Archaic Garden

So we cultivate an archaic garden where primitive joins forces with antique. Where archaeologists decipher hieroglyphics that speak of Gods, of man and plants unknown.

Forbidden fruits and flowers bear forgotten names: Kumquat, oponce, papyrus, tuberose, rosewood.

Nestled in shadowy niches, worn mosaics hide behind twisted and dried branches of ivy. Collapsed columns and arches form a mound of worn stones, hiding fossils.

Colors
The range is whitened, stony, mineral or delicately fruity. The softness of faded, evanescent, light and serious colors.

Underwater Variation

Ebbing and flowing with the tide, we swim "under-current".

Dive into abysses, explore the ocean depths. We discover marine flora and fauna, submerged cities, buried amphora and pots.

A mysterious world, an aquatic and amniotic bubble. A stormy summer's day, bright with magnetic lightening, the horizon plunging into the ocean.

Colors
The range delves into the blue, and extends to an aqua green. Sea anemone pink is enhanced by inky blues and purples. Navy and brown darken the landscape. White soap bubbles refresh the saturated atmosphere.

Tropical Dramaturgy

Wild nature plays all its cards, calling on Rousseau to lure us into a game of paradise lost with all its misleading tricks.

Pretty green vines encircle us, exuberant flowers are giant to better devour us.

The beaks of multicolored macaws pinch the cheeks of lost Janes.

Colors
The range is solar, incandescent, spicy and suffocating. Yellow singing at the top of its voice, uninhibited parrot green, the orange of Tibetan monks, the entire spectrum of reds from purple to salmon pink. Bushy brown, deep blue.

Enchanted Picnic

Folies in Versailles, rave party in Schönbrunn, Murder in an English garden.

Jacques Tati on vacation in a golden carriage.

Pretty DIY by Lewis Carroll, Fragonard gate-crashes the camp site.

Hansel and Gretel sample molecular cuisine. Technical research and reasoned ecology show their impertinent sides.

A festival of glamorous and fun materials. The dawn of artificial preciousness.

Colors
The range sets your teeth on edge. The neon colors are whitened. Jelly pink is transparent, the pastels are over-bright. The brights are on fire, tempered by a reasonable grey and a measured beige.

Shadowy Shores

A static place, metaphor of elsewhere. An undefined place between Cyrene and Cartagena, between Libya and Syria. Desert of sand, desert of sea, wreckers, pirates, warriors from another era. Alternation of ambiguous shade and dulled light. They illuminate, or dissimulate, the decks of ships run ashore, rusty anchors, ragged sails, driftwood, soft-shell crabs and tortoise shells.

Colors
The range is tinged with vegetal colors. Bathed in red, boat hull; dark navy, hut; strong green, canvas. Or lightened colors, bleached by the salt, faded by the sun and the sea.

See the words: Le Cuir A Paris

American Pastoral

Then he saw Dawn at Upsala. She'd been crossing the common to Old Main where the day students hung out between classes; she'd been standing under the eucalyptus trees talking with a couple of the girls who lived in Kenbrook Hall. Once he followed her down Prospect Street to the Brick Church bus station when suddenly she stopped in front of the window at Best & Co. After she went inside the store, he went up to the window to look at the mannequin in a long "New Look" skirt and imagined Dawn Dwyer in a fitting room trying the skirt on over her slip. She was so lovely it made him extraordinarily shy even to glance her way, as though glancing were itself touching or clinging, as though if she knew (and how could she not?) that he was uncontrollably looking her way, she'd do what any sensible, self-possessed girl would do, disdain him as a beast of prey. He'd been a US marine, he'd been engaged to a girl in South Carolina, at his family's request had broken off the engagement, and it was years since he'd thought about that stone house with the black shutters and the swing out front. Sensationally handsome as he was, fresh from the service and a glamorous campus athletic star however determinedly he worked at containing conceit and resisting the role, it took him a full semester to approach Dawn for a date, not only because nakedly confronting her beauty gave him a bad conscience and made him feel shamefully voyeuristic but because once he approached her there'd be no way to prevent her from looking right through him and into his mind and seeing for herself how he pictured her: there at the stove of the stone house's kitchen when he came trundling in with their daughter, Merry, on his back--"Merry" because of the joy she took in the swing he'd built her. At night he played continuously on his phonograph a song popular that year called "Peg o' My Heart." A line in the song went, "It's your Irish heart I'm after," and every time he saw Dawn Dwyer on the paths at Upsala, tiny and exquisite, he went around the rest of the day unaware that he was whistling that damn song nonstop. He would find himself whistling it even during a ballgame, while swinging a couple of bats in the on-deck circle, waiting his turn at the plate. He lived under two skies then - the Dawn Dwyer sky and the natural sky overhead.

But still he didn't immediately approach her, for fear that she'd see what he was thinking and laugh at his intoxication with her, this ex-marine's presumptuous innocence about the Upsala Spring Queen. She would think that his imagining, before they were even introduced, that she was especially intended to satisfy Seymour Levov's yearnings meant that he was still a child, vain and spoiled, when in fact what it meant to the Swede was that he was fully charged up with purpose long, long before anyone else he knew, with a grown man's aims and ambitions, someone who excitedly foresaw, in perfect detail, the outcome of his story. He had come home from the service at twenty in a rage to be "mature." If he was a child, it was only insofar as he found himself looking ahead into responsible manhood with the longing of a kid gazing into a candy-store window.