NOTICED:AGING LIKE A FINE CHEESE

This year, on my birthday, I resolved to do something radical (it happens to fall on the vernal equinox, so I tend to celebrate it as if it were New Year’s). No, it wasn’t a “big” or important birthday, just another cheery turnstile on the road to senility, decrepitude and death. And no, I didn’t jump out of a plane, climb a distant mountain peak at dawn or book an appointment to have my eyes, tits or ass tucked, and/or drained and lifted. And I most certainly did not hold a fashionable “rebranding” party for myself, where, apparently, one invites all their friends over, serves them cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and then has to listen their “constructive” advice as to how and what one should really work on in order to become more marketable or more appealing to the outside world.

 What I decided was not to do any of those things. And by not doing them, not get any older. Let me explain.  Continue reading…

NOTICED: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PHILIPPE STARCK

(First published, En route, 2007)

Lest you think he’s merely a household name, Philippe Starck is a bona fide style guru. The same enfant terrible who brought us the boutique hotel before we knew enough to want to stay in one, his latest effort to bring design off its high horse is steering the coming tidal wave of branded designer lofts (his first Canadian project, a joint venture with Freed developments, is Seventy5 at 75 Portland in Toronto). In short, he’s one-man style revolution in ripped jeans and bedhead. And he has a lot to say (with his hands, a Gallic shrug of his shoulders, and irrepressible humour) about what’s next. Continue reading…

NOTICED:THE SHADOW GENERATION

The Shadow generation, or why I’m not a Boomer (first published 2006)

Dear David Foote:

You, sir, are an accomplished demographer, and highly regarded author and pundit. I am but a lowly style writer. Your work, Boom Bust and Echo has so convinced everyone that the Baby Boom generation is comprised of those born between 1947 and 1966 that last weekend, when this paper devoted an entire section to the Boomers, they used your parameters. But on behalf of myself and everyone else I know who was born in the early 1960s and feels unfairly labeled as a member of a generation which only cast us in its looming shadow from the moment we were brought home from the maternity ward until now, as they turn 60 and we have to hear endlessly about it–I cast down the gauntlet.

 By your calculations, I would qualify as a Boomer. But I know that I am not one, and here’s why. Continue reading…

NOTICED:SMART IS THE NEW FAB

Okay, okay, the sky is falling. But for all those Chicken Littles out there who can’t even look forward to Barack Obama’s first day in office because sure, he may be impressive, but he’s inheriting way too many problems to be able to make any kind of difference, may I suggest that the soon to be inaugurated U.S. President has already made a huge difference (and not just because he was able to convince Americans that they have moved beyond race). Thanks to him, and his brave band of arugula-eating, Harvard-educated policy wonks, stupidity is no longer in fashion. So much so that smart is the new fabulous. Continue reading…

NOTICED:ITS ALL BEEN FIXED

The ugly rumours about Michael Jackson’s self-destructive path of drug abuse and anorexia will, sadly, not be buried this week along with the superstar. And yet the unfortunate legacy of the endless tv loops documenting Jackson’s physical transformation over the decades from freakishly talented black kid to bleached, age-and-gender-free freak prove something we always suspected: Jackson was a star for our times not only because of his great gifts as a musical performer. Even more than his musical contemporary, Madonna, who is widely credited with a knack for constant reinvention, Jackson was such a literal shape-shifter, so committed to playing out his fantasies, it was as if he chose to live his life inside Adobe Photoshop. Continue reading…

NOTICED:PLAYGIRL, R.I.P.

I have to admit that my first thought, upon hearing that the current issue of Playgirl magazine will be its last, was, is it still around?  Continue reading…

NOTICED:PHONIES

Thanks to the marvel of 21st-century communications, there are now two types of people in the world. Not the haves and have-nots, because there is no not-having of wireless devices any more – not even in have-not countries, where the sight of someone outside a shack chatting on a cell is commonplace.

I’m talking about the growing divide between people who are physically and spiritually present, in the sense of being “in the room,” and those who aren’t. This latter group I have no choice but to call “phonies”: people who exist somewhere in between the actual time, place and conversation occurring in front of them and another place, somewhere at the other end of the phone. Continue reading…

NOTICED: GENERATION US

Back-to-school means it’s that time of year again. Time to buckle down, get serious, reassess your priorities and life goals – and, while you’re at it, start shopping for the kids whose pants and sneakers are suddenly two sizes too small (or, in my case, for a 17-year-old whose shoes still fit but is leaving home for university).

Time, too, apparently, to start accusing us parents again of getting it all wrong. The latest volley being fired at us is that by turning parenting into such an active verb, we are creating a generation of monsters: giant, useless toddlers overwhelmed, if not incapacitated, by our concern and love.

We are supposed to be appalled by the horror stories of thirtysomething children camped out in their parents’ basement, and parents taking a week off to “help” their 23-year-olds settle in to graduate school. But what critics such as Robert Epstein, whose buzzy new book The Case Against Adolescence argues for an “ageless society” fails to appreciate is that we are already there. Continue reading…

NOTICED: THE MOM MYSTIQUE

Who is in the driver’s seat of the minivan next to you? Sorry, it might look like her, but, it’s not really Mommy.

Thanks to the vogue for “consensus” or “democratic parenting”, our children are now the ones who decide whether they are ready to leave without kicking up a fuss, and when they’re ready for bed. Not only are we unable to say “No!” to our three year-olds (who don’t seem to suffer the same difficulty), we are asking them where we should go next on vacation and which restaurant we should go to for dinner. If there is anything we could have learned from our own mothers, surely it is that being a mother means never having to say you’re sorry: Our mothers’ wrath could be swift and arbitrary, perhaps even, to our childish sensibilities, unfair. Yet one never heard, as one does today, on the street, or on the new parenting reality shows like Supernanny, Mommy’s pathetic apology for losing her patience with a horribly misbehaving child. Until now, any self-respecting mother felt no qualms reducing her offspring to jelly with a single raised eyebrow– if only as an exercise of her Mom mystique. Continue reading…

NOTICED:MASTERING THE ART OF FAME

Sometimes when I think about everything that’s happened, I just want to pinch myself! I mean, a couple of years ago, nobody knew me from a hole in the ground. There I was, living in a crap apartment in Queens, working as a temp just to pay the rent, with no particular skills or interests other than a huge sense of entitlement, and poof! Next week a movie opens all about me, starring Meryl Streep! LOL. Continue reading…

NOTICED:LADY LOUTS

A male friend cornered me at a cocktail party recently. “What is it with women?” he asked. “All the women I know are behaving like louts. It’s not the husbands any more. It’s the women who are all having affairs and walking out on their marriages.”

I was too drained by the question to even begin to answer. Did he really want to know? But now that a New York Times report on two independent studies has everyone throwing their two cents’ worth in on the growing “happiness gap” between men and women – survey says women are less happy and spend more of their time on things they find “unpleasant” – it’s time to start making a list. Continue reading…

NOTICED:FEMINISM IS OUT OF STYLE

NOTICED:HOW THEY RUINED SHOPPING

First published in the Globe & Mail, October 20, 2007

Small honours can be telling. For instance, my little brother, who as a child found all food suspicious but for bacon, pizza and milkshakes, once received a congratulatory transistor radio from Pizza Pizza along with his 1,000th order of home delivery (by the way, he is still a picky eater). I, on the other hand, was once so frequent a Goodwill habitué that I proudly carried in my wallet a Goodwill VIP card (bet you didn’t know they had those, but apparently they were reserved for the special few who rarely let a day pass without popping in to troll the ‘as is’ section). Continue reading…

NOTICED:IS LUXURY DEAD?

First published in the Globe & Mail, 2007

Ever since Giorgio Armani proclaimed two decades ago that fashion was dead, news of the last gasps of the industry have come in waves. The latest call to mourning is a hot new book called Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre by Newsweek fashion writer Dana Thomas, wherein the author argues–quite convincingly–that luxury isn’t just feeling under the weather, it’s flatlining.

 It’s an interesting conundrum: At the same time that the luxury goods industry–as Thomas describes it, “a $157 billion business that produces and sells clothes, leather goods, shoes, silk scarves and neckties, watches, jewelry, perfume and cosmetics that convey status and a pampered life” –has never been so prosperous (each of Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Armani, Hermes and Chanel currently boast annual revenues in excess of $1 billion), it has never been so much in jeopardy. Continue reading…

ART IS THE NEW BLACK

First published in the Globe & Mail, 2007

Coco Chanel may have been visionary, but could she ever have imagined that in the year 2007, the fashion house she founded would announce a traveling conceptual art show, curated by Yoko Ono,  and shown in a mobile container resembling the Starship Enterprise by architect Zaha Hadid, to “take the iconic Chanel quilted handbag into the future”? Continue reading…