lynn phillips & maggie cutler

two names, one writer

Category: 2. Using it

Whether as a goad to self-betterment, or a way to entertain others, self-loathing has much to offer.

The DILFIT Fashion Disaster Award Alert…

Back in the spring of 2008, I created the DILFIT Awards for Self-Loathing in Fashion. My list of winners ran in The New York Times’ T Magazine. (“DILFIT,” as you have no doubt guessed, is the acronym for “Do I Look Fat In This?”)

I had hoped to bestow the DILFITS annually, but, lazy worm that I am, I haven’t. I am happy to announce, however, that there is a winner for the 2012 Spring and Summer season.

Rei Kawakubo's cotton ball gown SS2012

Comme des Garcons gown 2012

It is Rei Kawakubo, whose inspired creation—pictured here—so perfectly reflects the “complexity and feminist ambivalence” that Vogue’s Sarah Mower admired in the Japanese designer’s Comme des Garcons collection for Spring.

On days when a woman applies too much eye makeup, and it smears all over her face when she tries to remove it, and rubbing only makes her skin look raw, and she’s knee-deep in used cotton balls and late for work, or a date, and it’s that time of the month, this is surely what she will want to wear to flagrantly and stylishly express her dismay at being herself.

The white boots, which reminded Style.com’s Tim Blanks of technician-wear appropriate for a post-tsunami nuclear reactor melt-down, or “equally….sixties couture a-go-go,” will show off every bit of mud a determinedly self-loathing woman drags herself through.

And, yes, you will look fat in it.
___________________________________________________
If you have a nominee you would like me to consider, I’d love to issue further awards. Please use the contact form and include a link to the image as well as your reasons why the outfit reflects, soothes, illuminates or compliments self-loathing.
___________________________________________________

A Dorothy Parker Quote for Fall

“There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.”

— Dorothy Parker, when her host told her that guests in another room were “ducking for apples.”

dorothy parker

Photo by George Platt Lynes 1943

When I first heard this quote, it took me a minute to add it up; then I laughed out loud. I still do, every time I run across it. If you’re hungry for more, the Dorothy Parker Society Onlinemaintains a laundry list of lively links to all things Parker.

Parker is a great model for self-loathing women in comedy who want to use their air of self-respect to good advantage. Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands) is funny because she has no class at all, but Parker was a class act who got comic mileage out of tossing her dignity into the crowd…like a wedding bouquet.

In SL4B, I used this quote as the heading for a chapter called, “Food for Self-Loathing.”

Top Ten Secret Commandments for Self-Loathers

These commandments are so secret, most self-loathers don’t even know when they’re following them.


1.  Thou shalt not compromise thy principles, ever.
2.  Thou shalt be best at everything, else thou hast failed.
3.  Thou shalt be chill; let nothing get to thee.
4.  Thou shalt eschew banality, nor be ordinary.
5.  Please thee thy crazy parents, be they satiable
    or be they not.
6.  Thou shalt feed the hungry—every living one of them.
7.  Feel at all times happy, for moodiness is an abomination.
8.  Remember: to err is regrettable, to forgive thyself, defeat.
9.  Thou shalt trust thine own judgement, yea, even when thou art nuts.
10.  Thou shalt not self-loathe.

From SL4B; “the Building Blocks of Self-Loathing,” page 29

NY Times Discovers Self-Help Addiction

Alina Tugend, in her November 4th column, Pursuing Self-Improvement, at the Risk of Self-Acceptance, has finally noticed that America’s  self-improvement addiction has a downside. She was aided in part by a book annoyingly entitled, Good Enough Is the New Perfect (Harlequin, 2011), by Hollee Schwartz Temple  and Becky Beaupre Gillespie. The pair, Tugend tells us,

…surveyed about 1,000 mothers in their 30s and 40s nationwide and interviewed about 100 for their book. They found that the women broadly fell into two categories: “never enoughs” and “good enoughs.”

Never-enough women felt they had to be the best at everything and often agreed with the sentiment that “I need to be a superstar even if it kills me.”

As a recipe for self-loathing, that’s hard to beat. One of Tugend’s blog readers, Fritz Ziegler, moreover, noticed the Catch-22 of self-acceptance:

… Acceptance includes accepting that sometimes we act in perfectionistic ways about self-improvement, i.e., accepting that we aren’t accepting enough. This can also be said as: Complaining about not being accepting enough is just another version of perfectionism. It’s all so recursive!

Yes, Fritz; it is. You’re catching on.
 

more update

Lynn Phillips is currently blogging on addiction (from neuroscience to metaphors) at Psychology Today.

Neke Kit and Goat Carson at the Gershwin Hotel 2011Here’s a piece on the fabulous Carson brothers I did for T Mag blog…I called it “Here’s Looking At You Kids” but they retitled it “Soul Brothers.”

skirting disaster

skirting disaster

You can read “Skirting Disaster,” Phillips’s latest T Magazine (print) piece as a PDF lifted from the NY Times blog.

Rodarte stripesHere is a page of links to several T Magazine pieces, including what in print was originally a double-pager on stripes.

paws

T mag article on paw shoes

The stylish self-loather will want a pair of these hand-crafted shoes for incorrigibly flamboyant sub-human moments. This article appeared on page 100 of T Magazine’s Fall 2009 issue in the ReMix section.  You can click on it to make ita readable size. Bob Bassett and his workshop, the creators of these, do other amazing things with leather, mad masks and dragon bags, all very steampunk and passing strange.

More Fall Fashion Self-loathing

As a people becoming world-famous for locking up innocent people, isn’t it time for Americans to start to cuffswear handcuffs as jewelry?

Ever since my alt-ego, Maggie Cutler, co-founded The Shackle Report in an effort to combat (with dark, knowing laughs) the shame of complicity — however involuntary — in her nation’s incarceration policies (carried out under the baleful eye of US media) Cutler had wanted to do a fashion piece on color-coded handcuffs.

The fall in the NY Times Fall Fashion Supplement, “T Magazine,” gave me a chance to do it for her. The piece ran Aug 17th in print, and can be found online here.

The article is jumpy, because a section was chopped out about Clive Stafford Smith, the Gitmo detainee lawyer, who participated in two demonstrations against Hiatt’s factory in Birmingham England to proteest their manufacture of shackles for Gitmo. One demo was in 2005 and the other, celebrating Gitmo’s fifth anniversary, was in ’07. I had hoped to urge fashionable people who took up the handcuff idea to prepare themselves for political challenges by reading up on the issues, starting with Stafford Smith’s latest, The Eight O’Clock Ferry From the Windward Side.
buy buy buy

It goes without saying that handcuffs are a great, and relatively inexpensive way to accessorize self-loathing. Compared to more conventional ornaments, like dunce caps, prep school blazers and giant nose rings, items that suggest that you are actively loathed by others, cuffs declare that you’re not only guilty of something serious, but know it. For other tips on flaunting your self-loathing…

ClickHERE to order Self-Loathing for Beginners from Amazon.

Yea for Neigh

SJP-horse
The brilliant Website, SarahJessicaParkerLooksLikeAHorse.com site is a revelation — an excellent lesson in how to transcend self-loathing while hanging onto it at the same time. First you laugh your ass off. Then, as you click through SJP-horse comparisons, you feel guilty for being so horribly sexist and mean, but, as you keep going, SJP’s horsiness becomes deeply moving, a strange new way to see beauty. Now and then she turns into a horse-goddess — a divinity — though the horse laughs never stop.

Amy takes the cakes

amy winehouseCourtney Love
may want
to be the girl
with the most cake,
but when it comes to
cocktail-style self-loathing
(see Self-Loathing
for Beginners, p. 22)
Amy Winehouse is
the one on a roll
(bad puns go
down well with Brits).
She handled her
recent arrest
(for impersonating
a crack ho)
with crocodile sobs,
then went
scampering about
for the cameras,
celebrating her
flagrant and adorable self-loathing,
as these astounding
photos from the Daily Mail attest.
Thanks to Gawker for
shipping us across the pond
for this treat.

Postscript: Fall 2011. Amy didn’t always convey the romance of degradation when she was in the tabs or botching a concert, but her music was something else. “I’m No Good,” is a great and beautiful anthem to the exquisite intensity of self-detestation in love. For making blues the new black and being “too hard to ignore,” we love her and miss her. —LP.