one of Socality Barbie’s greatest accomplishments has been to draw attention to the fine line between the cult of “sharing” and commoditization of things that were once considered sacred
The demise of Socality Barbie was devastating, but mitigated by getting to write this tribute in the National Post.
The hierarchies of fashion show seating are well known, but York University’s Rebecca Halliday is probably the first person to write a PhD on them. My new story about her work appears in The Walrus’s January/February 2016 issue on vices.
September is a peanut butter month. Whole Foods, Loblaws, Metro — the stores have put out their brands prominently on the end aisles, along with “school safe” and other alternatives. It’s also been in the news. As soy-based peanut butter lookalikes such as Wowbutter come on and off the menu in school boards across the country, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that “high risk” babies be exposed to peanut butter in their first year — not kept away from it, as previously thought.
What is clear is how much we all apparently want to eat peanut butter, in spite of the increasingly loaded nature of this once-apparently innocuous food. Nine in 10 Canadian households have bought peanut butter in the past three months, according to the Canadian Peanut Council’s pleasingly named newsletter, In a Nutshell. We consume it at surprisingly disparate times of day; breakfast is dominant (72 per cent), but 12 per cent of households have peanut butter at dinner.
First published in the National Post (September 25, 2015).
I could count 12 per cent of my own dinners as peanut butter, not necessarily out of planning, but because of the number of times I return home from some event where there was no real food, to stand on one leg, still in my dress, and eat peanut butter on rice cakes. My fridge at home is normally stocked with both “junk” and “healthy” kinds, almond butter (the result of an ongoing, if plaintive, effort to eat more alkaline food), and a jar of Sunbutter left by a peanut-allergic friend, whose habit of eating it with celery has stayed with me long after the visit had ended.
Peanut butter has a solid history as a survival food. It was a Canadian pharmacist (Montreal-born Marcellus Gilmore Edson) who first patented the product, in 1884, as a source of nutrition for invalids. It has long been touted as an economical source of vegetarian protein (even though it contains a lot less of it than we think; about 4 grams a tablespoon). A nutritional paste called Plumpy’nut developed by a French pediatrician is considered by some to be a potential saviour of lives in the developing world — partly because the taste of peanut butter is so liked by children worldwide.
I suddenly realized that peanut butter was the only thing that binds this life I’m living
I thought of this recently when I arrived at a friend’s borrowed apartment in New York, rattled and starving. In the relatively un-gentrified neighbourhood I was unable to find any familiar brands (notably Cream Nut, a kind of retro-health brand that has been around for 80 years). I would have settled for the exuberant Peanut Butter & Co., which comes in a dozen flavours including the inevitable Pumpkin Spice; my preference was for something organic (for health) and chunky (for substance). I went far afield to fancy-looking delis and random supermarkets, only to leave empty-handed. The search for peanut butter soon became bound up in other things, such as the safety of home and my own competence.
I suddenly realized that peanut butter was the only thing that binds this life I’m living. In this case I couldn’t bend the conditions of my actual need to Jif and Skippy. “You loser,” I thought, “have you become so privileged that you can’t handle what is ‘normal’ for most people?” It’s a far cry from the place I come from (Saskatchewan), where peanut butter comes in a tub from the Coop. My father buys it in 5 kg tubs and eats it through the winter. I love that, too.
I first started to write about shopping 15 years ago, and one of the things that led me to the subject was the sense that the kind of experience I’m talking about isn’t about “shopping” per se. It’s about identity, and feelings of survival, and the burden of decision-making — even when the pursuit is objectively trivial. One anthropologist, Daniel Miller, sums up a case study about a graduate student shopping for her baby: “You had a choice of a well-known brand and the supermarket’s own brand. The latter was a good deal cheaper and you are in more debt than you care to admit to yourself. But nothing is more important than that child, the mere thought of her sends waves of emotion through you.” We are all children when it comes to peanut butter.
This week, Peanut Corporation of America owner Stewart Parnell was sentenced to the equivalent of life imprisonment for knowingly releasing contaminated products, including peanut butter, from his company’s factory; at the peak of the epidemic, around 2008-2009, a known 714 people had fallen ill of salmonella poisoning (nine actually died). A threat to a primary food cuts us close to home. In the words of the CNN story about this week’s verdict, “Suddenly, one of America’s favourite foods had turned into a killer.”
I found “my” peanut butter through a friend who kindly directed me to Doughnut Plant. I wouldn’t have thought of this local landmark, a gourmet dot on the surrounding landscape, as a source of anything other than enormous, cushion-sized doughnuts. But what glazes their famed PB&J doughnuts is a surprisingly good peanut butter, now carried by the jar: dark-roasted, concentrated, devoid of additives. It is a peanut butter to eat, standing on a leg, overlooking the city. At $8, it wouldn’t the solution for everyone, at all times. For a lonely Canadian in Manhattan, it provided a taste of home.
Every year, my mother takes a day off to deal with my father’s socks; otherwise, they pile up in laundry baskets and closets all over the house, clean but unfolded. Once, she left me a message, in a voice thick with fatigue: “Big, thick woollies turned out to be twenty-nine pairs and sixteen odds. The whites were thirty-nine pairs, forty-four odds. I found eleven pairs with logo, nine straight up, some with grey soles. I haven’t done the greys, but that’s enough.”
First published as “What Was the Spinster?” at The Walrus (May 2015).
My mother, a feminist who once led women’s groups in our living room, says that she finds it easier, after decades of marriage, to sort my father’s socks herself, rather than to nag him or turn a blind eye to the chaos. Strangely, I have found myself doing the same. I folded socks while my first boyfriend, in university, became a writer. I folded socks while my most recent live-in boyfriend watched football, did work, and—actually, I have no idea what he was up to, because I was folding his socks (and sometimes ironing them). No one asked me to do this. I didn’t mind. There is a real sense of satisfaction in finding a sock, rummaging for its mate, and lovingly pairing them, all in the service of someone else. But ever since that last relationship ended, more than five years ago, I have viewed any potential partner through this lens: would it be worth taking on his hosiery with him? And, every time, the answer has been no.
In 2011, The Atlantic published a story, “All the Single Ladies,” that went viral. The author—thirty-nine-year-old Kate Bolick, a single, professional woman—asked for a radical favour: that she not be pitied. In fact, she argued, she was doing fine. With the rise of women in the workplace, and the softening of gender roles generally, there are fewer traditional, high-earning “alpha” males with which powerful women can partner up. Marriage no longer holds the social and economic advantages it once did. Given a choice between “deadbeats” and “playboys,” women can, instead, opt for neither.
This idea was not exactly breaking news to anyone who has dated the aspiring novelist or the something-slash-DJ. But it reversed a truism endlessly drilled into women who came of age in the 1980s and ’90s: that we have “forgotten” to have children, or have prioritized our careers so much that, by the time we are ready, our fertility is fading, and men no longer want us. Instead, the fault for our singlehood might not lie in us but in the changing nature of relationships. Her further audacity was to suggest this might be a good thing. The resulting digital cocktail of backlash and support, along with coverage in media outlets worldwide, helped her turn “All the Single Ladies” into a six-figure book deal. Summoned to account for herself before society’s ultimate tribunal, morning news, Bolick was unapologetic. “It’s an opportunity for women in general, and for marriage as an institution,” she explained to a bemused host of The Today Show.
At the time, I was wary of the discussion. Even as a feminist retelling of the spinster fable, Bolick’s point seemed to confirm one of my real fears: I might, in fact, be alone for the rest of my life. It also sounded disingenuous. In my group of friends, which includes single women in Toronto and New York, I think it is fair to say that everyone would like to be married. Finding a husband and having children remain standing topics of discussion at brunch. The world around us, from Jennifer Aniston’s latest attempt to find happiness to the well-meaning relative who asks if you’ve considered freezing your eggs, reminds us that it’s not too late. A forty-seven-year-old acquaintance of mine recently gave birth to twins. No matter how you dress it up, the idea that we should be fulfilled by single life—first dates; spoiling our nieces with tiny Moncler jackets; guys who, in the words of one of my girlfriends, “just want to pull on their pants and leave”—is depressing.
Bolick’s new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, depicts a gentler, more encouraging view, even if it is set in the ruthless world of Manhattan dating. Both a personal and social history, it retraces her decision, at age twenty-eight, to leave the kind of relationship my mother would have urged me to stick out: nice but unsatisfying. Bolick spent the next decade trying to understand what she was looking for, via a whirlwind love life and a series of characters that will be familiar to many single female readers: the sexually satisfying but emotionally distant older man; the fun younger guy who poses no threat to her independence but isn’t looking for anything serious.
All this makes the book sound narcissistic. But, as a woman in roughly the same situation as Bolick, I can tell you that the endless social interrogation of our singlehood practically forces us to be narcissistic. Those 3 a.m. nights, staring at the ceiling: Is it that I’m just too picky? Have men changed because of Internet porn? Is it this time on earth, the city I’m living in? Am I this century’s Joan of Arc—somehow destined for solitude? The book is similarly elliptical, self-reflective: we go back to Bolick’s mother, who died when the author was just twenty-three. “I had my own aspirations to live out,” Bolick writes, “but also hers.”
In the search of an alternative, Bolick looks to earlier, inspirational spinsters. All are literary, perhaps because, in the early days of women’s rights, journalism and “dabbling” were two of the only occupations available for respectable women. These foremothers include Maeve Brennan (The New Yorker’s “The Long-Winded Lady”); Neith Boyce, whose column The Bachelor Girl debuted in Vogue in 1898; Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose impeccable poems captured her sexual appetites; and Charlotte Perkins Gillman, a staple of the women’s studies canon for her story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” (Here, however, she is depicted not as a victim of post-partum depression, as I took her to be, but as a shrewd social critic.) When they spoke, many of these women sounded surprisingly modern. “I never felt that I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper,” writes Susan B. Anthony, in a letter to the reporter Nellie Bly from 1896.
Above all this looms Sex and the City. It is worth noting how singular that show, now almost twenty years old, remains. There is little else as a model for how modern single women can live; its influence is at this point tautological. I remember one critic calling it out not for its heroines’ behaviour—sleeping around, spending the rent money on Jimmy Choos—but for their selfishness. That may be the real throughline of this discussion. Bolick admits that avoiding marriage—the ultimate season finale—leaves her feeling guilty, self-involved. “Why must women always be leaving marriages to find what they want? ” she recalls asking as far back as her early twenties. At the end of the book, Bolick is in her early forties and dating a younger man. Even if she remains unmarried, she concludes that, whatever else happens along the way, she can still lead an interesting life.
The word spinster was first used to connote independence—literally, a woman who spun fabric, indicating that she could provide for herself and did not have to marry. Over the centuries, it evolved to mean a woman who had not married and, most recently, a woman who cannot be loved. That insinuation of unacceptability—the individual as unfuckable—is at the root of our fear of being alone. “Workin’ on my night cheese,” one of Liz Lemon’s most memorable lines from 30 Rock, sung off-key as she eats in front of the TV, depicts the unmarried woman as so far outside social norms that she has devolved into a dude. If one removed the stigma of the spinster, what would she be? A bachelor, having a good time. George Clooney before Amal Alamuddin.
In an attempt to be kind, my therapist once encouraged me to think of myself as Clooney: a good-looking, successful person who had a hard time finding his equal. “No one questions the value of George Clooney,” she said. As Bolick writes, this distinction—between making a choice and having been chosen—takes freewheeling bachelorhood off the table for women. “Are women people yet? ” she asks, rhetorically. Feminists have posed that question to gain the vote, win reproductive rights, retain maiden names. Bolick is, in the end, not decrying marriage so much as demanding the right to be alone—something men have long taken for granted.
But, until recently, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might never get married. It came as a surprise that, having “done the work” in my last relationship—seen the therapist, read the books, tried all the patience and humour and lingerie—my own family wound up begging me to leave. “I’ll get a truck this weekend,” my dad said. “No questions asked.” The promise of finding my “real” husband was what finally gave me the courage. I figured it would take a year. It has been five. In that time I have graduated from beginner to intermediate hip-hop class. I have ascended the corporate ladder. I now make more than my ex-boyfriend did. I have also met a number of interesting men, some of whom have become lovers. But none of them “stuck.” They passed by as a parade of half-hearted commitments, their exits marked by a few mumbled words of apology, if not outright “ghosting”—a reality of the OkCupid era and a real Cosmopolitan topic. It may be that we’ve entered a new age of non-commitment, as some experts suggest. What has changed, Bolick might argue, is that this could be a good thing.
It’s hard not to consider, in all of this, the impact of divorce. Many of us grew up in the 1970s and the ’80s, when the norms of custody and child support were being established. There were custody battles so rancorous that one family I know did the weekly handoff on the police station’s front lawn. What grown woman hasn’t seen the consequences of marriage after the love is gone? Our own peer group is littered with the detritus of first marriages. I suspect that, like a lot of children of divorce, I grew up determined to avoid the mistakes of my parents’ generation at all costs.
As a single person, love seems like the most abundant natural resource around: it’s in every Tinder match, every set-up, every Craigslist Missed Connection. The problem is how to keep it—or, rather, how to process this raw crude of the heart into marital fuel. Bolick’s book is a messy introduction to a conversation that nobody knows how to have. In what amounts to a thesis paragraph, almost at the end, she writes, “It’s important to remember that the widespread practice of marrying for love—not responsibility to family and community—is only about two hundred years old. Women have been pursuing professional careers for half that time, but in significant numbers only over the past forty years.”
I remember the first time I knew that I wanted to be someone’s wife. I was twenty-seven. We were in the car, driving back from a night in a hotel, or maybe it was a weekend in Montauk. The morning light streamed through the window. We were listening to jazz. The man who was driving was an inconceivable combination of a professional and an artist, and lived in Manhattan. He was ten years older, and in that moment I saw the advantage of being at his side. It seemed a tremendous but worthy sacrifice of my girlhood.
Of course, we didn’t last. With the kindness of one who recognized the situation for what it was, he let me go at the end of the summer. What I have since come to realize is that a smart woman doesn’t have to marry that man to achieve the vision he inspires. She can become him instead.
David Balzer’s new book is about the rise of the celebrity curator in the art world and the turn of regular people to curating — whether that means programming a music festival or building a sock puppet collection. Block magazine is beautiful, limited-edition and a bit hard to find outside Toronto, so I've posted this roundtable interview with their permission.
DAVID BALZER: In the art world, everyone looks down their noses at people in popular culture who call themselves curators. My idea is that there’s more in common between those who call themselves Twitter curators and those who call themselves museum curators than you would initially think.
SOPHIE HACKETT: One of the most common questions I heard when I was hired at the AGO was, “What do you actually do?” Everyone knows what I’m doing when I’m working on an exhibition; it’s less clear in the months leading up to it and after.
First published as “Object Lessons” in Block (Spring 2015).
DB: Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography is a project that recently put you, Sophie, in the forefront as a curator, culling works from various time periods and things that you’ve been interested in throughout your career. It put you in the ambassadorial role of the star curator—you became the spokesperson for the exhibition.
SH: Fan the Flames was an exhibition I put together on the occasion of WorldPride of work from the AGO collection but also from other artists and collections in the US and Canada. It put forward queer positions in photography, video and film and other ephemera, like the famous Vanity Fair magazine with Herb Ritts’ photograph of k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford. That show was exciting because it felt timely for the city. It was a risk for the institution, and yet it felt like something we should do. As a curator, I see myself as a sort of public servant—to make art open and relevant to as many people as possible.
NICHOLAS MELLAMPHY: Was the show successful?
SH: People did come. It was well frequented.
DB: Institutions can use curating to show enlightenment and forward thinking. A
show like Fan the Flames is a way for the AGO to say, “We’re part of World Pride.” And that’s the performance aspect of curation. I talk about it in my book—the curator as agent, ambassador, organizer, facilitator and provocateur.
NM: I don’t feel like a curator, although I guess I do curate the collections that I buy. For me, it’s more organic. I think a curator is building a thesis. I’m not doing it at that level—obviously, I want to make sure that a collection is going to make sense grouped together, that it tells a sort of story—but I’m not picking things to be smart.
SH: What does that mean, to “tell a story” in retail?
NM: I try to celebrate the creative process of the designer. For me, it’s important that when I present their collections, designers can still see fragments of their original thoughts. I want to see the pieces that excite their makers. I’m sure it’s the same way when you curate shows. You need to make it exciting for the audience. In retail, it’s often said that the customer is always right. We know that the customer is not alwaysright. Customers are coming to you almost to challenge their ideas about what is beautiful or about what they want.
DB: The Starbucks Hear Music label is an incredibly curatorial gesture. Bookstores, too, are doing what Starbucks is doing, in a larger sense. Indigo is half books ...
NM: ... and blankets!
DB: Even Type, an independent bookstore in Toronto, offers cute tote bags and postcards. You can’t just sell a book anymore. You have to sell the culture of the consumer who buys the book.
SH: I think such gestures are extensions of an experience we create in our minds as customers. Indigo is offering all the things you think you need to read. That’s a way that curatorial practice has gone. Retail environments have infiltrated the sensibility of an art fair like Art Basel Miami, which is a form of art-world Fashion Week.
DB: Capitalism is driven by newness, right? What’s new and what’s hot. The art world is, too. Maybe curating, or the acceleration of our interest in curating, is a symptom of the recession. Curating hit the retail market hard about 10 years ago; we saw that with concept stores. With less money, your choices have to be more meaningful, and businesses have to perform more aggressively to attract consumers. I don’t think we know what comes after this hyper-curated existence. Maybe I love Moby Dick, but it’s not enough; I need a T-shirt of the vintage cover of Moby Dick to proclaim my love. I think we’ve reached a saturation point in terms of how much we can articulate our identities through consumerism.
SH: Maybe originality is no longer the primary goal. I love the way that you ended your book: “Curationism, it seems, has forgotten the very root of ‘curator’: cura or care and, by extension, genuine curiosity.”
NM: There are way too many influences out there—maybe that’s why there isn’t as much originality. There used to be those original kids who would go and do what they wanted,but now everyone has access to what’s happening in all the corners of the earth. There’s so much openness to different ideas, it’s hard to see that one person going in his or her own direction. When you see that, you go, “Wow, this person’s doing something interesting.”
DB: Maybe we’ve reached a point where it’s become simpler —where rather than paying attention to trends, it’s okay just to say, “That looks really good on you.” I feel like we live in a very freeing time. There’s so much noise that it’s like there’s no noise.
David Balzer is the author of Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else. Sophie Hackett is Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Nicholas Mellamphy is a vice-president at Hudson’s Bay and the buying director for The Room.
One hot summer night, I was sitting in a dive bar with friends. The '80s-slash-'90s revival was at its peak, and a roundup of the recent trends was on parade: diaper shorts, pops of neon, feathered hair. When you work in fashion, you get used to its cycles: Hemlines go from short to long, conservatism and punk interplay, contemporaneity gives way to nostalgia. Yet the past 10 years' worth of in-your-face coloured jeans and "night for day" had begun to look homogeneous. To move forward seemed to require more than a new type of legging, jegging or jodhpegging; we needed a clean slate. It was starting to feel like the best way to be avant garde right now would be to go back 100 years.
I didn't come to this idea on my own. One evening at a party, I found myself talking to designer Jeremy Laing about Game of Thrones (in a word: cloaks!). At the time, the fashion world had also become enamoured with Ulyana Sergeenko, a Russian it-girl turned fashion designer whose beautifully crinolined skirts and parasols presented an ironically refreshing originality. What didn't occur to me, as a girl who grew up immersed in Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie, was that this somewhat fantastical period style might actually come round again.
First published in Flare (December 2013).
Then, a ladylike brigade of tea dresses and "Madame has arrived"-style hair started showing up on runways. British designer Alice Temperley led the charge, sending out frankly historical-looking dresses for fall 2012 (blown-up prints and fluid fabrics made them look modern, covetable). The ever-romantic Alberta Ferretti and Jenny Packham, a favourite of that consummate lady of the manor, Kate Middleton, took it to the red carpet. For her spring 2014 show, Packham found inspiration in the murder mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock (set in an Edwardian boarding school).
It's odd to call an actual historical period a trend. (Never mind a bit disrespectful to our foremothers, who had to suffer through it with wringer washers and 18-inch waists.) The Edwardian era, with its off-white palettes, unstructured dresses and many variations on the blouse neckline, only officially lasted from 1901 to 1909; the new incarnations of period style find their influences everywhere from the Victorian era to the 1930s. The idea, whether expressed in the well-mannered dresses at Dolce & Gabbana or in Thom Browne's tailored tweed suiting, is simply olde school.
It would be natural to ascribe our sudden interest in great lengths and upswept hair to pop culture, and a litany of period productions is indeed in the air right now, from Mr. Selfridge — the PBS series about the department store magnate, which is set in 1909 — to Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, which is sure to be a theme at many an Oscar party. But one of the things that strikes me about Downton Abbey, which returns next month, is that its real influence is not so much literal (after all, we 21st-century women aren't forgoing makeup, as its actors mostly have) as it is the figurative effect it's had on our idea of what pretty can be. The show romanticizes the ritual of dressing, with its many deliberate layers.
This isn't to say the past decade of fashion hasn't been fun. Jeans have gotten so good, what with stretch and engineering, that we don't need to do anything to disguise our figure flaws. At the same time, excess of freedom has its costs. There's a Marc Jacobs top I only find the nerve to wear about once a year. It's sheer and one-shoulder, and thus worn braless; when I have it on, I need to keep my arms perpetually folded. The question is: Can a sensibility that wouldn't have been out of place in our great-grandmothers' dressing rooms look "now"-and subtly sexy-in a world where sexuality has never involved so much exposure? Even if it meant looking like an extra in Downton, I was willing to abandon my Acnes in order to find out.
Shopping for the perfect piece wasn't easy. Fingering a $4,000 Céline coat that Keira Knightley could have worn in Anna Karenina, I thought: Well if one were going to the ball tonight, this would be a possibility. I found a circa-1879 ladies' waistcoat at Divine Decadence Originals, a high-end Toronto vintage store, but 10 minutes after removing it I was still gasping for air (corset required!). And anyway, to really test this trend, I needed to engage the latest iteration of pre-First World War wonderful — vintage wouldn't work. I wanted something current but not costumey.
At Isabel Marant, usually one of my favourite designers, a trio of high-necked blouses from her Étoile collection first looked like the perfect blend of Then and Now. But seeing myself in one, even with jeans and boots on, made my heart sink. If you buy this, you will never have sex.
Here, we come to the "hard limits" (to borrow a term from the revolting 50 Shades of Grey) of trying trends. Some women don't bare their arms; others never wear certain colours. My biggest fear remains looking like a nerd. In Grade 7,1 chose to wear a denim skirt to the school dance. As I made the long walk to my desk, everyone dressed in more casual cords and jeans — it was the mid-'80s, and nobody veered too far from Ralph Lauren — stared. I took this to mean that the world had seen me for the odd duck I was. Since then, I've learned that being yourself is the only real way to achieve success, in style or otherwise. And a creative director did once tell me that the 1890s were my spirit decade...
Easing in with street wear, I eventually paired a re-cut western blouse from Preloved with a floor-length denim Citizens of Humanity skirt. It was very "panning for gold." I wore it to work and no one said a word, which proved my suspicion that in fashion, you can get away with almost anything once. Then I brought out a floor-length dress with a high neckline from Horses Atelier. When I bought it, I envisioned walking over the sticky floor at an indie rock show, my boyfriend's eyes lighting up at my unworldly femininity. In reality, at lunch: "I love your dress!" said a friend whose style I have long admired. "It's so Holly Hobbie."
Lagging on the fashion front, I knew I would find an ally in my hairdresser, Pamela Atkinson. In the decade I have sat in her chair, discussing the usual issues around boyfriends, work and aging, we have often touched on femininity and its constructs. I knew she would understand my desire for a flattering look that had pedigree.
Now, if you, like me, have long hair, chances are you spend a fair amount of time with it up in a "bun" — actually a half-hearted ponytail, the end not entirely pulled through the elastic at the final twist. Consider, instead, the Gibson tuck. Named for the Edwardian-era illustrator Charles Dana Gibson's idealized depictions of femininity, it takes only a few moments longer than a rat's nest to create with a couple of hairpins and an inverted ponytail.
Test driving my tuck on Toronto's Queen Street, I felt new drifts of attention-in a sea of beach waves and bed head, my hair was done. And paradoxically, rather than seeming old-fashioned, it made me feel younger.
Edwardian fashion, with its corsets and pinning, is inherently a look of leisure; having a maid (read: stylist) is one of the titillating factors of Downton. Is this all just about a longing among those of us who work long hours and clean our own toilets-a form of lifestyle porn about being a lady? Adopting period dress might be interpreted as a throwback to a less empowering time, and, in fact, there is something about showing off your delicate wrists, never mind having to gather up your skirts to get onto a streetcar, that is equal parts delightful and unsettling.
Marlis Schweitzer, author of When Broadway Was the Runway and an expert in fashion circa 1890 to 1918, says that the turn of the last century was actually anything but traditional. "It's a fascinating period because of the changes that were taking place in silhouettes," she says. Around 1908, women abandoned the S-shaped corset (think of a bustled Queen Victoria) for the empire line-all the better for learning the new dances (the bunny hug, the grizzly bear).
Early suffragettes used fashion to their advantage, turning rallies into dress-up occasions. "They were saying, We have brains and desires and political will, so we care about our bodies and how we look" says Schweitzer. "I think there's something about that aspect of fashion a smart woman today might find appealing." Indeed, we're in a time (led by young feminists like Tavi Gevinson) when being feminine and being fashionable aren't mutually exclusive. Thus identified as part of a sisterhood, I felt more at ease.
I clung to the notion of finding the singular item, the Edwardian equivalent of a statement piece. And then a friend who knew nothing of my project came back from a sample sale with an ankle-length Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons dress she had bought on spec. "Something about this reminded me of you," she said. From fall 2012, it's in bias-cut velvet, with a floral burnout pattern: beautiful, if not for the delicate flower. I wouldn't say it's sexy, but it does make me feel like a lady, a lady who can take care of business. (Maybe that was always the point.)
Because it's all one piece and slips over your head, it's fairly easy to incorporate it into regular life: at work, to restaurants and even during fashion week. "I love your dress!" a friend said to me as she was taking her seat. "It looks warm." And it was. Nobody knew I was wearing granny panties, either.
It was not obvious how to accessorize. With boots, the dress goes grunge, subverting the idea entirely-and with most flats, it can too easily look like you just stepped out of a daguerreotype. A pair of Thom Browne high-heeled lace-ups might have to be my next purchase.
A vagina is a responsibility, a pleasure, and an enigma every woman is born with, but it comes with no official user's guide, let alone a decent app. This leaves the playing field wide open for feminist bestseller-maker Naomi Wolf and her latest book, Vagina: A New Biography. In terms of the Zeitgeist, it couldn't be arriving at a better time. The women's website xojane.com tweets about vibrator testing, The Vagina Monologues' author Eve Ensler just delivered a TED talk, the S&M novel Fifty Shades of Grey was the year's biggest publishing phenomenon and Lena Dunham named the abortion episode of Girls "Vagina Panic." But in the meantime, U.S. congresswoman Lisa Brown was silenced for responding to a vote to restrict abortion access with the words: "I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but no means no."
Despite our apparently desensitized culture, publicly and personally we're still surrounded by misinformation, confusion and shame about this essential part of our bodies. When you got your period, maybe you had an awkward talk with your mother about menstruation suggesting that she, in spite of her obvious qualifications on the subject, didn't necessarily have more of a handle on this stuff than you did. Or maybe she was wary of telling you too much, out of fear that, once given the keys to the car, you'd drive it like a Maserati, not a Volvo.
First published as “Anatomy Lessons” in Flare (October 2012).
The blood first announces itself with shocking boldness, unpredictably and erratically light or heavy, until it segues into something you accept, if never understand entirely. After 25(!) years, it's still a surprise when I get my period. The drama, the lack of choice about when and where it arrives, not to mention the ramifications about life and death: It all seems so unlikely, as much as it is a relief that everything still works.
No one talks about this stuff much in the open. At work, it's clear other women have vaginas (as evidenced by the rustling of wings in the next washroom cubicle), but whatever private hell or heaven each woman is experiencing while going about her day remains, for the most part, unacknowledged.
So social commentator Wolf's desire to take on the totality of this organ is laudable. Hers is a revisionist approach to a part of the body that has been alternately rejected (think of the "I don't feel fresh" Massengill douche ads), deemed unmentionable, or alternately (almost unnervingly) worshipped. But as she writes revealingly in the book's opening pages, Wolf's interest in the topic wasn't driven by a desire to tune into the hum of the culture waves but rather by a scary personal experience. Several years ago, when she was 46, Wolf lost orgasmic sensation from a back injury that pinched her pelvic neural network. Previously she had experienced what she describes as a transcendent combination of sensual and spiritual expansion through orgasms. The debilitating impact this diminishing pleasure had on her mental health — as well as body — led her way, way down into the dark continent's (as Freud called woman) darkest country.
As with The Beauty Myth, the book that made Wolf famous in the early '90s, this non-fiction narrative revolves around an original premise: that the vagina has a mind of its own (literally). She has this revelation, when, through fortuitous surgery, she regains her emotional and intellectual well-being along with the great sex.
Through her back surgeon she learns about the pathways that connect the vagina, clitoris and G spot to the central nervous system and up to the brain. From there — although it's intuitive, and, despite her best attempt to prove otherwise, still seems more personal than scientific — she makes a connection between the vagina and consciousness. "The well-treated vagina is a medium that releases, in the female brain, what can be called without exaggeration the chemical components of life itself," she writes.
It's a conclusion that will either resonate with you, in annoyance or appreciation, or it won't — but chances are you're repressing something if it doesn't hit some nerve, pelvic or otherwise. When she writes that the vagina "mediates female confidence, creativity and transcendence," I can't help thinking that most of my equivalent breakthroughs have occurred from drinking coffee. Then again, I haven't written eight books, two of them bestsellers (her liberal call to arms The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot also hit the New York Times list in 2007). Nor have I experienced the psychedelic episodes after intercourse that Wolf describes. Related? It's a stretch, but as an idea, not without intrigue.
Since The Beauty Myth made Wolf a regular voice on women's issues, with subsequent writings on promiscuity to pregnancy, she has emerged as an increasingly polarizing figure even among feminists (earlier this year, Katha Pollitt's column in The Nation was titled, "Naomi Wolf: Wrong Again on Rape"). I'm glad I was armed with some critical perspective before entering the Wolf fray because coming at this cold is a bit like reading about alien abduction: Sure, it sounds fine in theory, if you don't examine the details.
Wolf paints a picture of the vagina as an erratic, highly suggestible creature who can lay us low enough to ruin our actual sense of balance forever (a scientist shares groundbreaking studies of rape victims who have a kind of permanent vertigo), or define the heights we can travel creatively (she ascribes Edith Wharton's best work to her period of good orgasms with a lover).
Over 400 pages, Wolf travels from the eclectic, as in a section called "The Blues Vagina" — devoted to analysis of the lyrics of female blues singers from the 1920s to 1940s, including Bessie Smith ("I need a little sugar in my bowl") — to a Montreal researcher who stimulates rats with a tiny brush. She liberally sprinkles leading statistics to reach conclusive statements with inconclusive data — such as the fact that the average woman takes sixteen minutes to climax to the four minutes of the average man. (Would the sixteen minutes start from "when a nipple has been seen," the definition from Seinfeld? What about masturbation versus intercourse?) Several times a suspicious footnote led me to a citation for one of Wolf's previous books. The result seems less "biography" of the vagina than its flagged Wiki page.
After a certain point, I abandoned my usual reporting habits and simply started highlighting everything in pink that struck me as an interesting idea, and in yellow everything that seemed like crazy talk. To my surprise, they worked out to be almost exactly the same in weight. Here are some take-aways:
Neglect not your nipples. Whether you can achieve the legendary "nipple orgasm" or not, the nipple communicates with pleasure centres in the brain and in the vagina. This releases oxytocin, a hormone that bonds a woman to her baby and to her sexual partner. It can enhance sex with someone you love — but also intensify your attachment to someone you don't. "Women should be aware that if they want to have hot anonymous sex with some guy but don't want to fall in love with him - they should discourage him from interacting with their nipples," writes Wolf. As the anthropologist Helen Fisher has written, there is little that is truly "casual" about casual sex.
The vagina is a network, not a place. Part of the autonomic nerve system, or ANS, the region encompasses far more than a passage for a penis. Constructed in a somewhat different pattern from woman to woman (just as no two snowflakes are alike, neither are we), its tendrils reach to the clitoris, the G spot, the cervix and the anus. While Wolf can't solve the age-old dilemma about clitoral and vaginal orgasms, she presents findings that suggest more of a fluid (if you will) continuum. As Wolf explains it, most women can probably experience deeper waves of pleasure if sex is holistic, rather than targeted exclusively to clitoral stimulation or vaginal penetration - another argument for foreplay, although in her book "foreplay" begins to seem less and less like the appetizer to intercourse's entree, and more and more like one of many significant courses on an elaborate tasting menu.
As with so many things these days (food! sleep!), we are having intercourse too fast. Wolf argues that in spite of the acceptance of vibrators and the availability of online hookups, sex may have been better when we didn't have it as often, but had more time for it (I'd like to press Wolf on when this fictional time would have been when I think of my grandmother who had six children, made her own sourdough and had a reporting job for the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.) "Relaxing allows for female arousal," Wolf explains, filling in what many of us already know: that it's easier to have great sex on vacation and harder when your brain is consumed by more immediate tasks such as doing the laundry while emailing your boss. However you interpret the facts, stress and environmental conditions decrease genital blood flow, and may also convey to the body that it's just not a good time to mate. And for anyone who has spurned a lover's advances and felt guilty, it's not necessarily about "you" — and it doesn't mean you have a low sex drive.
Smell is important. We've all had variations on that discussion with friends about the highly suitable guy who's dying to marry you but just doesn't "smell right." And in the wake of studies indicating that birth control may block women's normal use of smell in the choice of a mate, these plaints might be more significant than mere feminine pickiness. Vagina follows up with research showing the function of smell in the ongoing chronicle of a relationship. The developed world's nine-to-five routines may keep partners away from each other, so we don't smell enough of each other, and thus have a diminished sex life. It may well be worth booking a standing lunch with your husband.
We may not be as biologically beholden to our male partners as we assume. One of the telling cautionary tales of modern life is that of the "great" girl (pretty, successful, emotionally stable) who, in her desire to have children, has settled for some slacker for his sperm alone. New evidence suggests that having the baby with the beta man may be a socially-imposed compromise, when what we, evolutionarily speaking, want is to have the baby (and sex!) with an alpha man, and keep the beta man around to care for it and us. We just don't get to do what we want without censure. The idea that women are naturally monogamous while men are inclined to spread around their genes seems to be more of a culturally convenient fiction than a biological reality.
Even if you disagreed with all of the above, it would be fuel for a whole season's worth of dinner party debates. I found myself nodding when Wolf expressed something in accord with my own experience. Other times, a line such as, "When you spend time in a rape crisis centre, as I have done, it is hard to avoid wondering if men are monsters," discredits her entirely. It rewinds the very project feminism has been working on for generations — the search for equality and fairness between women and men — with a tossed-off remark that might have been saved for an off-the-record conversation.
A few years ago, one of my friends gave me the stealthily subversive Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement, and Reproductive Health by Toni Weschler, a high-level public health nurse. It was a gynecological aha! moment. Ostensibly a straight-talking guide to the biology of ovulation, it pointed to what life could have been like had I, and every woman I know, been taught its lessons at age 16: how to tell when you're ovulating, how to tell when you're about to get your period. I probably wouldn't have spent so much of my early sexual years with STD-free boyfriends still worrying about pregnancy (and sacrificing sexual pleasure for it). I also probably wouldn't have wondered (as so many women do): Am I even fertile? The answer is written on the body — if you know how to read it.
Wolf had an opportunity to do something similar with this book for sexual pleasure. Instead, she conflates facts and feeling. It's a shame it isn't presented as the memoir it secretly is, because that would make it easier to forgive Wolf her sloppiness and root for her more. Wolf's own history is her most interesting material. Her descriptions of her heartbreak at losing her mind-bending, whole-body orgasms are not only interesting: In good faith, Wolf really wants all woman to have what she has, the life-altering experiences of the "well-treated vagina."
Wolfs book might best be interpreted as a set of instructions to her own ideal lover. Here's what that sex would look like:
A man has to begin surreptitiously. Start in the day by completing small chores to show he's a nice guy, and closer to the event, appeal to a woman's environmental sensitivity with a neatly-made bed and candles. Brush her hair or kiss her neck in a "non-sexual" way. Then tell her she's beautiful, even if it sounds disingenuous (according to a study, even if women know men are flattering them to seduce them, it works) . At this point, the woman should be primed. While making out, he ought to touch her nipples and spend a lot of time touching her entire vaginal region — G spot, clitoris, even her anus if she's into it. Then, not when she says "I want you" but when her vagina seems to employ suction (here I can't help thinking of the "winking" of horses in heat), he should let her draw him in. At that point she should be sufficiently aroused — nerve endings stimulated all over her body — to know what she wants. In any case, he's done his best.
Wolf's vagina (and by extension, a woman) comes across as in constant need of soothing, teasing, and placating. And if that's your reality, fine, but it doesn't account for what my friend Georgia recently described as "the value of having someone throw you up against a wall." It also seems to put a lot of the responsibility for female fulfillment on men. At one point, she flatly suggests that most men are not "trained" properly to give pleasure to women. If that's true, who is responsible for the training?
Most of the men I know are not senseless boors who think they know everything about women; they're a bunch of nice guys who find themselves as confused about it all as we do. To place on them such unreasonably high expectations puts all of us at a disadvantage. (And to a single woman, it's a bleak message: Where is she ever going to find this patient, self-sacrificing, expert Romeo?)
The book's narrative climax is an interview with Mike Lousada, a U.K.-based "sexual healer" who massages women and their intimate parts for $155 to unlock memories of bad sexual experiences and other emotional issues that might inhibit pleasure or orgasm. "So what happens to them sexually afterward, when they are healed?" Wolf asks, speaking to Lousada over Skype. "Do their vaginas actually change?" Lousada agrees that vaginas feel less rigid, more responsive. "It is as if the tissues of the vagina receive emotion that is poured into them," he says.
This metaphor of an infinitely malleable female part — as opposed to the penis's seemingly more rigid truth — risks affirming the version of woman tossed about since Shakespeare and before: that we are changeable, fickle and capricious and therefore flighty, illogical and driven by emotion. Ever since I lost my virginity in university, with a man who would become my best friend, sex has presented a more complicated reality more interesting than this traditional male-female dichotomy our bodies, as presented by Wolf, would seem to uphold. It offers a shifting balance between euphoria and the humility of its physical realities, a sense of power at one's appeal and an attendant sense that it may not last. Grace involves being able to be yourself in both extremes.
A few years ago, walking down the street, I realized I had found my perfect weight. I also realized I could now spend the next 364 days trying to maintain it through PMS and workouts, Christmas dinners and dinners of cereal, or simply accept that that ideal would always be a moving target. What seems like a lack of control can sometimes be a strength, and I think it's the drawing of attention to this, even through its own wobbly logic, that gives Wolf's book an unexpected profundity.
It's hard to leave it and not think about all your lovers — and cast who was "good" in a new light. The one who was good for you, making you feel relaxed — like your real self — not necessarily the biggest "catch" or the one you fought the hardest for. And that's a view of sexuality, however you respond to this book and its portrayal of the vagina, we can all agree is a turn-on.
In 1992, Richmond Hill, Ont. was not the cosmopolitan Toronto suburb it is today. If you were in high school, you hung out in the basement and bummed rides to the mall, where you shopped at Suzy Shier.
There was one bright spot, though. Once a month, you could walk to Shoppers Drug Mart to see if Sassy had arrived. The magazine, edited by Jane Pratt while she was still in her 20s, was a lifeline holding the promise of a better existence ahead – as well as a guide to surviving your current one. On its pages, a group of older, much cooler girls imparted such wisdom as how to cut out the crotch and feet from a pair of pantyhose and wear the results as a top; they also debated whether you needed armpit hair to be a feminist and seemed to be on a first name basis with musicians such as Courtney Love and Kim Gordon – whoever they were.
A cover story on Juliana Hatfield from September, 1992 perfectly illustrates the aesthetic of the magazine, if not the era itself. Hatfield’s famous guitar is raised across her body; she wears leggings, John Fluevogs and what appears to be a cardigan. Makeup, if there is any, is minimal, irrelevant. To girls like me everywhere, such iconography represented more than just big city life; it also suggested a world in which girls could be as politicized as adults and a desire to subvert the conventions of femininity as defined by publications such as Cosmopolitan.
First published as “Jane Addiction” in The Globe and Mail (May 3, 2013).
That’s why it was a surprise – even knowing the cyclical nature of fashion – to see designers go grunge this year. (The look, big for spring, is likely to stick around. At the recent fall shows in Paris, Hedi Slimane’s collection for Saint Laurent showed babydolls with biker boots. In Toronto, Chloé Comme Parris paraded plaid shirts tied around the waists of slip dresses down the runway to Nirvana’s "All Apologies".) In the heady early days of the riot grrrl era, clunky shoes, flannel shirts and messy hair were an exhilarating antidote to the big-haired supermodel ideal of the mainstream. But flattering?
“It’s a look that’s very easy to wear,” offers Marisa Meltzer, one of the coauthors of the 2006 book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time. “Flannels, leggings, jeans that weren’t too tight: You could find them in any store. It wasn’t a designer look.”
Now as then, Meltzer adds, “there’s something about it that feels authentic,” even if it’s designers who are exhuming the aesthetic.
As distinctive as the grunge uniform may be, however, Sassy was always about more than just clothes. The same, happily, is true of its 21st-century offspring, Rookie, the online magazine that fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson launched for teen girls in 2011 when she was 15 (and which, not coincidentally, lists Pratt as a “guardian angel” on its masthead). Rookie pays homage to the music and eyeliner of the nineties, but, more importantly, reflects its aims through its political articles and new paeans to girl power. (One recent piece was titled "The Body Says Whoa: You Don’t Have To Have Sex To Be Sexual".) Of course, it has less to say to original Sassy fans, now older and (hopefully) wiser.
That’s where Jane Pratt comes in – again.
xoJane.com, Pratt’s online magazine, might seem like the perfect synthesis of the past and present. Every week, it delivers her signature blend of first person confessional, political treatise and wildcard feature such as "Jane’s Phone", which reproduces photos and texts from Pratt’s personal life. “It’s exactly the same,” she says of the relationship between xoJane’s 1.5 million monthly readers and the girls who wrote heartfelt letters to Sassy. What differs, obviously, is the content: Enabled by the Internet, innocent stories about kissing have been replaced by vibrator tests and STD confessions.
Pratt, though, feels the magazine has matured in other, more significant ways. Where Sassy once delighted in “tearing down” self-satisfied celebrities and plastic women, xoJane strives to be inclusive. “I feel like that’s done everywhere now,” she says. “I’m not interested.” Indeed – and unlike the Sassy of yore – xoJane is less a suggestion that readers are in some kind of club and more a celebration of female differences. (A writer who contracted three STDs, for instance, shares space with the author of "It Happened to Me: I’m Married to a Virgin".)
The promotion of individuality and acceptance may in fact be Sassy’s greatest legacy, even as its descendants expand the original envelope. “A Sassy of today would have to delve beyond … subversive music and fashion and movies. It would have to [show] subversive thinking,” Gevinson said at a TED talk in Toronto, suggesting that, for women of all ages, the challenge is to find an authentic self in a highly consumerist culture.
Which brings me back to the mall. When I saw that Dr. Martens had come out with a new boot collection featuring floral prints and candy colours not long ago, I was excited, imagining that I could reappropriate icons of my university days in peppier form. (It didn’t work – they just made me look like I was trying too hard.)
I Want – I Got blogger Anita Clarke, meanwhile, had a more soulful take. “Through all the different styles I went through in high school and university, Docs were a constant,” she recalls, her reaction to the new versions having more to do with nostalgia than trendiness. “It’s that weird excitement for something that has no baggage,” she continues. “It’s just worn from the heart.”
I used to work in an architecture magazine in downtown Toronto and when it got busy in production I'd slip quietly out of the mayhem and visit the near-secret Lee Valley store. It was quiet, and sometimes I'd be the only customer; a bit like visiting a church in the day. I'd stock up on their soft-leaded HB pencils or find some other tiny thing that made life seem, suddenly, well-outfitted and executable.
I first learned about Lee Valley from one of my oldest friends, who eventually became a carpenter. He used to pore through the catalogues and our household in Vancouver reaped the benefits in curlicues of wood shavings (from his hand-turned wooden spoons) and the company's now-famous microplane zester, which we used to make gimlets.
This Christmas I got my brother, a new father, a Lee Valley gift certificate and he just sent me this picture of his spoils. I don't know what our collective love for Lee Valley, which started as a family-owned woodworking and gardening company in 1978, really means. Maybe it lives up to the old-fashioned idea of a general store, in a world where it's rare for a customer to feel nurtured. In my day I befriended a female clerk, who over time made me feel equally taken care of and as if the two of us were part of a secret club in the industrial district where neither of us belonged. I still use the tiny pair of gardening scissors she recommended to me every day — most recently to open a bag of prunes.
When I first came across a cheerful, fashion-inspired pinstriped tissue box design in 2004, I tracked down the designer and wrote a story about it. Now with a bad cold and trying to find a replacement for the recently discontinued box among the sand- and shell-themed prints out there, I realized how much we still have a tissue issue.
What with all the runny roses around right now, you would think people would be happy just to find a tissue when they need one. Not so, as I recently found when talking to some people about their Kleenex problems. Whether it’s a fetish, a phobia against kittens, or just a passion for design, people have issues with tissues.
Like my colleague, whose husband has bad allergies but who balks at buying him the hypo-allergenic tissue he requires because of the frolicking kittens on the high-end brand. Or my weeping friend, whose boyfriend recently banished Kleenex from their bedroom altogether as a decor conflict.
“Why isn’t there a white box?” she demands. “Where’s the Calvin Klein of Kleenex?”
First published as “The Tissue Issue” in The Globe and Mail (January 24, 2004).
All around us, the world is filled with tissue shame. Why else would a department store cosmetics counter hide the tissue to the point that customers have to beg for one while their weeping eyes are burning? Or the upscale spa that one of my colleagues recently reported on. “Nice bathrooms,” she said. “Pity about the Kleenex.”
Some people will go to any lengths to disguise a tissue box. One design lover I know recently reported gleefully on a decorator who stocks his tissues inside a Louis Vuitton handbag on the back of the toilet.
Enough is enough! The tissue is ripe for a revolution.
As everyone knows, for inexplicable reasons, the conventional target for a tissue box pattern has very specific taste. She likes faded lilacs, frolicking kittens, and patterns with apples and blackboards on them, except when she’s buying for her husband. Then, it’s the Floating Pool Ball set or the “Man Size” plaid box with tissue so big that it comes with its own warp and weft.
So, when I recently saw a box of tissues that made me turn my head, my heart actually skipped a beat.
The box, which comes in four colour schemes — pink and brown, blue and green, yellow, and a denim mix — was striped in the manner of a shirt by U.K. designer Paul Smith.
Trembling, at first I wasn’t sure what I should do. Tell all of my friends and risk causing a stampede, let alone lead to a shortage that would snatch my new tissues away? Buy up a whole case and stockpile them like some kind of tissue fool, in the event the design soon gets replaced?
In the end, I just called Shopper’s Drug Mart.
The design, it turns out, was no accident — or the tissue equivalent of a million monkeys typing and eventually cranking a better version out. It was part of a re-vamp of the entire Life brand after Shopper’s Drug Mart gained a new CEO, Glenn Murphy (formerly of Loblaws fame).
Before the redesign, Life Brand’s aim was to imitate the look of national brands. “Whatever they launched, we would do the same,” says Ellen Ma, vice president of advertising, in Toronto.
Now, the company wants to make its own style statement. “Martha Stewart was my style maven, way back when,” says Ma. “I still decant my dishwashing liquid into a beautiful glass bottle. One day, I thought, why don’t we make the containers themselves counter-worthy? So now we’re going through the entire line, even the diaper begs and the pop bottles, so you want them out for a party.”
The tissue was one of the first new package designs because the company felt it could take a risk with a product that costs only $.99. Even if it failed (although it’s hard to say how — customer nostalgia for the old days when cats were king?), the stock would run out quickly.
In fact, the boxes have flown off the shelves. “I wonder if people are actually stocking up and keeping more around?” muses Ma. “I know in my house, I have kleenex [sic] in more rooms than I used to.”
The designer, Maria Kennedy from Vancouver’s Karacters agency, was both surprised and touched.
“I guess it was kind of a challenge for me,” she says. “I thought, could we take something that was really basic and make it into a design statement?”
Like many, she despaired at the average tissue box design. Kennedy was inspired by fashion trends. “Paul Smith, Kate Spade, and a lot of others have been using stripes lately. I was thinking about something that could match your interiors,” she says.
She thinks the box, in many ways, is a designer’s dream. “It’s a canvas,” she says. “You rip off the part that has all the type on it, and you have the box on your desk as a statement.”
For the person who can’t stand any tissue boxes in sight, one answer might be the Toro ring. The idea is a stream of tissues that dispense indefinitely through a simple ring — aka a “portable hole.” There is no box. Toro was invented by New York’s Scott Christensen, and recently won a design competition sponsored by i.d. magazine. It is sold by Vessel, a stylish housewares company.
Stefane Barbeau, one of Vessel’s owners, says the demand is big. “We’re getting calls from everyone from design appreciators to, I’m happy to say, little old ladies who say they’ve been waiting a long time for something like this.”
While to the eye, the tissue ring looks a bit hard to believe, it does dispense tissue when you pull one out. The ring is a bit like Escher’s drawing of the staircase that has no end. When you pull one tissue through the hole, another one rises automatically from beneath.
“There’s a bit of magic and a bit of surprise to it,” says Barbeau. “Sometimes, even when people see it, they don’t really believe it works.”
As to whether all that tissue lying exposed can be hygienic, Barbeau is reassuring. “We’ve discovered that in a couple of places, especially in the bathroom, the Kleenex is not as protected as it would be in a box, around wet towels, say,” he says. “But in terms of dust, we’re not that worried. The top Kleenex becomes the protection in itself. This is one of those things where the benefits outweigh the minor disadvantages.”
The ring if for the kind of person who would view a box of Kleenex as furniture. Chances are, those people don’t have that much dust lying around, anyway.
The other night a friend asked what I’m reading and, the way that happens when you’re at a party, I couldn’t remember anything. When I got home I took this picture.
Red Doc> I love Anne Carson. When I was a younger editor I tried so hard to do a story on her, and she was so elusive (her voicemail message: “Carson is out.”). In the end, I had the idea of getting her together with Margaret Atwood for a discussion. Margaret Atwood’s idea was that they should go to a spa. In spite of my repeated entreaties Anne Carson never responded. Like her Autobiography of Red, this book is beautiful and lyrical, surprisingly impassioned and rhetorical.
Gloria I read this book by Keith Maillard about once a year. I also lend it to friends, i.e., if someone is having a baby and “needs a good book for the hospital”, this is what she gets. I think he’s one of the greatest living writers.
Dogs at the Perimeter Madeleine Thien is an old friend who has been traveling, and with whom I haven’t spoken in over a year. The book is fierce, incredibly researched and intriguingly structured. Having it on my bedside table makes me feel that Maddie is near.
Satantango I know next to nothing about this book. At the time I bought it I was interested in non-linear narratives.
Then We Came to an End My friend Neil recommended this novel by Joshua Ferris because I’m working on a book told in the first-person plural.
The Year of Magical Thinking I have this on my bedside table pretty much all the time. Anything I can say about it, is already known. My mother bought it for me for Christmas, and let it drop that she had actually read the copy before giving it to me. I was like, “What”? She answered, “Well, of course I had to read it — with that title.”
Life in a Medieval Village I first saw this in my friend Paul’s office, along with some review copies. I wanted to take it but had no justification (why would I have a book about life in a medieval village?) Later, I saw it in a friend’s apartment and thought, that’s weird. I couldn’t imagine that another person shared my interest. Later, Paul brought me the book anyway, and I was so pleased.
When the Cathedrals Were White I bought this at The Monkey’s Paw in Toronto. One of the store’s many books with an equivalently good cover/title combo. As with Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, I have high hopes for the content.
Bang Crunch Paul, who is also Neil’s editor (above), couldn’t believe I’d never read this book even though Neil is one of my best friends. Paul said that we had to have a Neil Smith book club.
The War of Art My friend Peter recommended this when I said I was having a problem with perfectionism. It actually is really good. Since few self-help books are, it’s worth noting.
The Rebecca Notebook: And Other Memories My friend Sara lent this to me when I was staying with her in Montreal. We are hoping to do a project on du Maurier. This book chronicles du Maurier’s coming to write her famous novel of haunting.
P + O This seems like the most provocative of books to have on your bedside table. It’s an abstract interpretation of the love story of Popeye and Olive Oyl without any words. Every now and then I pick it up and read a handful of pages.
The other night my friend said that she had bought this for her 8-year-old to learn on. Another friend, who also happens to be a musician I admire, said that she had the same one. “It’s good," she said. In my head was an idea that I, too, should get a Korg.
Like many people, I played when I was growing up, but my mother was a pro and I was always conscious of never being the musician she was. When I left home, I didn’t live with a piano for 20 years. If someone asked me I would have said I didn’t know how to play any instruments. It was my sister who recently reminded me of my piano playing: “You would practise for hours when I was a kid." It was the first time in a long time I felt hope. One of the things I’ve realized lately is that you’re better than you think at a lot of stuff, even if you feel like an apprentice. The bar is lower than it is in your head for performance, musical and otherwise.
Jessica Johnson @thegoodshopper - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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