Crossposted at LP in exile, where readers may leave comments during LP’s server woes!

There has been more and more mainstream media coverage lately about issues of ethics in fashion, which is giving consumers this kind of knowledge. Sue Thomas’s opinion piece lays out most of the main things that consumers should consider, and there was a recent Sunday lifestyle story (which I can’t seem to find online) directly comparing the environmental footprint of various fabrics (taking into account the water and energy needed to grow and/or process them into fabrics, the energy to transport them to factories and retail outlets, their durability (hence how often they’d need to be replaced) and the energy, water and detergents needed to launder them. I remember taking from this article that organic cotton used extravagant amounts of water and that polyester was surprisingly environmentally friendly because of its durability and the fact that old garments can be broken down and recycled into new synthetic fabric.

It’s an interesting post that argues that the ethics of fashion are not straightforward.

Adding to this complexity, in addition to couture, ready-to-wear, knockoffs and vintage we need now consider the ethics of online fashion.

While there are certainly still environmental problems involved in letting a virtual you glam it up, it certainly helps to solve problems like water wastage, animal rights and landfill to have original fashions that can be worn without leaving the drawing board.

It also removes problems such as practicality from the equation; if you wanna wear a cupcake, wear a cupcake.

Iris Ophelia takes a tour of Second Life style here.

Even fashion protesters are getting in on the act.

*am I the only one who thinks that Footpath Zeitgeist is not updated often enough?

Ps Speaking of the 90s, good to see Angie Hart back!

Anyway, the day before yesterday I went to have my hair cut and coloured at the campus hairdressers, and was very surprised to find out that the woman who had owned and run the salon for fifteen years had sold it last week, and the new owner was doing my hair. While I was in there four different people came in wanting to use the solarium, and to my initial surprise, all were turned away. Because they’d paid in advance for lots of sessions, one or two went off a bit disgruntled, even though the new owner took their details to send them refund cheques. She told me that she’s getting rid of the tanning bed as soon as she can, and she won’t be replacing it with a spray-tan booth either. “I don’t think it sends a good message to the students,” she explained. She went on to say that since the death of Clare Oliver last month a huge grass roots change has begun to take place in the salon industry in Victoria in terms of its attitude to solarium tanning. The small to medium operators are getting out of the business. She thought it would be next to impossible for her to dispose of the salon’s tanning bed by selling it, and she added that even if she’d wanted to continue offering tanning sessions, she wouldn’t have been able to justify paying the massive increase in the salon’s insurance premium which sunbeds are now attracting.

In Victoria, South Australia, and I understand federally, there are indications that bills will soon be put forward to regulate the solarium industry, but, happily, it almost looks as if sunbed numbers and usage might be declining under the more enduring influence of market forces and public opinion anyway.

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/hatbox.JPG"

Pinup girls by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Vintage orange by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Paddo house by *phenomenologist on deviantART

NB: One thing I don’t like to do with my weekends is sit around writing bile filled comments on blogs. Apparently some people do. I’m in a very disillusioned mood with political blogging at the moment, impressed neither by the stoushing on this thread nor by the attack of the flying monkeys on this one, and questioning the worth of the activity generally, so any snarky comments on this thread will be deleted ruthlessly. No correspondence will be entered into.

For readers who have done their bit for the nation’s fertility rate, Pixar: 20 Years of Animation might be a more appropriate show to see than the one with frocks by French blokes. The retrospective gives an insight into the process of making such wonderful movies as Toy Story and Monsters Inc. Particularly interesting are images that suggest such films could have been much darker if they did not have to appeal to children. The charcoal drawings of the sharks and the silhouette of a little girl “on the outskirts of Monstropolis” are quite menacing. Pixar: 20 Years of Animation is showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) until 14 October 2007. While you are at ACMI, take a look at the animated shorts on offer, including the sad His Mother’s Voice by Dennis Tupicoff. People living in Brisbane might recall that in the mid-1990s “ …the DPP dropped a charge of manslaughter against Brisbane man Greg Bateman, who shot 16-year-old Matthew Easdale during a break-in at Mr Bateman’s home in Rochedale south.” (The Sunday Mail 27 March 2005). Tupicoff’s film is both based on and given sound by a radio interview with Matthew’s mother. His Mother’s Voice is a reminder that behind the headlines there are real people who are suffering.

The Age 2007 Melbourne Fringe Festival begins at the end of the month, and like most festivals it promises to be terrific, average and awful. Definitely worth a peek will be the return of Lawrence Leung Learns to Breakdance. Leung’s hilarious take on being a geek was one of the highlights of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF). While Leung played to relatively big crowds at Trades Hall during MICF, Selina Jenkins was stuck in the Wee Room in Melbourne Town Hall. Jenkins, who is a talented singer and a genial performer, managed to transcend the somewhat tired “drag” thing and present an entertaining act. Her Fringe Festival offering is titled Beyond the Flannelette. The Needle and the Damage Done – Extended Remix will give Fiona Scott-Norman the opportunity to inflict even more bad, ridiculous, sexist and whatever else records on audiences. Scott-Norman’s The Needle and the Damage Done was another MICF winner. Hopefully, those blonde victims of a Nazi mother, Prussian Blue, will feature again.

Even John Howard and Kevin Rudd were asked to opine on this great matter of state.

But the Prime Minister, John Howard, told Melbourne radio: “I think that is way too young and I don’t think it should happen.” Mr Howard said introducing a ban on models younger than 16 in fashion shows, as some European countries have done, “would make a lot of sense”, adding: “There should be age limits … We do have to preserve some notion of innocence in our society, surely. Catapulting girls as young as 12 into something like that is quite outrageous and I am totally opposed to it.”

Yes for a week poor Maddison became the sum of everyones fears and Howard and Rudd were happy to oblige a few quotes in this climate of moral panic. But now the parents have struck back with a veiled threat and a great punch line.

“Without knowing us, how dare they make those comments,” Mrs Gabriel said. “I would suggest both of them contact my family before they make any more defamatory remarks about us. We as a family deserve an apology from both of them.

“As politicians, you would expect that they would know how things would be misrepresented and maybe they should have known what our side of the story is before they made those types of comments.

“I believe the Prime Minister is getting very doddery. He does not know exactly what 13- and 14-year-old girls are like. I used to vote for him.”

Boom Tish! Anyway, Maddison did a turn on the catwalk last night, that of course is as it should be given the obvious parental involvement and supervision.

Said colleague observed a female student sitting the exam, wearing a medium-length skirt, and intermittently hitching up the skirt and looking at her thigh. At one point the colleague glimpsed what were presumably crib notes written on the students’ thigh. Being a gentleman of reasonably senior years and great circumspection in his conduct towards students, he was at a loss as to what to do. The student was almost certainly cheating, yet he was unable to think of a non-offensive way to ask her to show him the crib notes. And if he had, this would still have left the problem of finding a non-offensive way to secure the evidence in a form usable by the Course Convenors and other University decision-makers.

A form of cheating such as this clearly defeats all attempts at detection and penalisation. The only remedy would seem to be prevention, namely the imposition of an exam dress code which requires the wearing of long trousers for students of both genders. At University level this should be unproblematic.

However the question which must be asked is whether the student hit upon this method of cheating at University, or whether she learned the trick in secondary school. Of the great majority of secondary schools which require their students to wear uniforms, most not only permit but force their female students to wear skirts, dresses or tunics as part of the uniform – in flagrant breach of relevant State anti-discrimination laws and Education Department policies. Whilst I deplore academic cheating at any level, I deplore sexism at least as strongly, and it seems to me that schoolgirls who take advantage of the opportunities which stupid, archaic, sexist school uniforms afford them to cheat in exams are very cleverly striking an oblique blow at the patriarchy. Similarly, schools which force their boys to wear shorts in certain grades or at certain times of the year likewise have themselves to blame if the lads resort to the same ruse.

Dress codes and uniforms imposed by dominant groups on subaltern groups are invariably designed to signal the lowly status of the wearers. It behoves democrats of all stripes to oppose such dress regimes wherever they exist, and to support those who subvert them.

Australian researchers are making dresses from fermented fabric, using bacteria to grow slimy dresses from wine and beer.

…

To ferment fabrics, Mr Cass and his colleagues deliberately let vats of wine go off to produce cellulose.

To get the shape of a dress, they lift the layers of slimy cellulose off and lay them over an inflatable doll.

After each dress has been completed, they deflate the doll and remove it, leaving the dress intact.

“It’s the bacteria that are weaving all these fibres together,” Mr Cass said.

“We’re not using any machines, sewing machines and so forth.”

Mr Cass says other alcoholic drinks can be used to ferment fabrics.

“As long as we have alcohol, these bacteria will do their job,” he says.

One of the dresses has a clear panel made from beer.

Well known breast blog [for the irony challenged, follow the link] Feministing links to a cultural history of breasts and bras. It’s a pretty light hearted read, but it got me thinking about the tension in bra design between comfort/support and sexy. I don’t need, I think, to spell out the gendered nature of this dichotomy. Which then got me thinking about how the least favourite Valentines day present for a lot of women, I think, is sexy lingerie, often marketed as “a present for you and her”. Now some gals might be into it. With a bit of a swimsuit fetish myself, who am I to judge whether suspender belts and “size enhancement” bras might not be to some women’s taste. But, isn’t the whole point of buying a present for your partner/main squeeze/love of your life/blah blah to demonstrate your care and affection for her not for yourself?

Elsewhere: MsFits looks at the tackiness that is the classified Valentine.