First of all, I think the pre-painted shorts that JCrew showed at SS10 were pretty dumb. Paint on your shorts even though you don't paint (except your own shorts) comes off as fake. Now, I'm going to go ahead and take a stab at A Treasury Of. Ok, bro, the only time it might be okay to have paint on your pants is if you actually painted in them. These are known as your work pants and don't see their way outside of your weekend painting project. Now, I understand that your making these sample shorts accessible to a large group of people, but should we wear them? I think not. Good call on making these shorts cheaper and available, but bad call on emulating JCrew's bad call.
I saw the original blog post and it made me shake my head as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for DIY but it just seems too silly. The bottom line is it doesn't look right as part of an outfit. Maybe more paint?
i'm a scenic designer, and i paint my own sets.. i get a lot of paint on my clothes. Whenever i see people wear pre painted pants to be stylish (and you can definitely tell!) , i want to backhand them. at the same time, i'm tempted to stop throwing out my paint clothes/old jeans ripped to shreds/t shirts with holes in them and sell the shit out of them on e-bay to see what happens.
ReplyDeletethis is the best blog ever. please continue keepin' it real.
thank you.
- John
Huh.
ReplyDeleteWell, in my defense, all the men's fashion popular in today's ACL-inspired style blogs is fake. We're all aiming to dress like 1962 prepsters or lumberjacks or railroad workers and we're not. We're just cushioned city boys plunking away on Photoshop and Twitter ridiculing anything "not authentic" as if any of us are. None of us reading or making these blogs is authentic because I doubt many modern day lumberjacks or railroad workers read or publish any of these blogs. And no one is a 1962 prepster because 1962 is over. The point of fashion is to be true to yourself while nodding to something different or better than what you really are. A bit of pretending is what makes it interesting. And being bogged down by "authenticity" is hypocritical when used in the discussion of fashion inherently as fashion is about illusion to some extent. My painted shorts weren't about authenticity or inauthenticity, but about making something striking, rare, and evocative. I'm just a middle class video editor in Minnesota in 2010. Dressing authentically as that, and only that, would be visually and emotionally boring.