two-twenty

two days late and quite a few dollars short

So far this week two-twenty has failed miserably in what amounts to the only task we have set out for ourselves: parodying, creating something satirically inspired by, or otherwise snarkily deconstructing the Times Sunday Styles section… preferably on Monday. In our defense we would like to say that this week’s SS was really fucking lame. Perhaps this coming week’s will be better. Hahahahaha I doubt it. Anyways, without further ado, two-twenty presents this week’s Things We Learned:

Another British Isles band with the article The in their name has arrived in America wearing an inventive mix of vintage clothing and knowingly-referenced branded footwear! And scarves! Scarves are SO in. Speaking of which, SS says knitting is in again, which for the NYC hipster intelligentsia is an obvious indicator that the next trend is just getting ready to crest: tatting. Lace stockings: hott! Homemade lace doilies: v. v. hott!

Waterproof! Colorful! Synthetic! Think we’re talking about your favorite vibrator, “Elvis”? No. Rather, Pulse’s featured accessory this week: the L.L. Bean Adventure Tote. SS must have a particularly WASPy intern this month.

Bob Morris, in his “Age of Dissonance” column, writes about conspicuous rejection, or the art of flaunting one’s taste by dismissing the efforts of others. Mr. Morris is close here, for in fact up until a day or two ago blogging dismissively was quite the thing. Now, however, it’s all about displaying power, not taste or class. Making wildly inappropriate assumptions based more on an inflated sense of self-worth than on the facts is all the rage. A new breed of Machiavellian “talented tenth” Platonists are showing us self-indulgent, over-educated ironists what a dead-end trend we bought into. Why dismiss when you can destroy? Why undercut when you can overwhelm? And you know what really shows your audience who’s boss? Refusing to apologize or temper your former claims even when they have been publicly proven to have more to do with your entitled sense of superiority than with the actual situation on the ground (by “on the ground” we of course mean the LES).

In tangentially-related news: we are happy to report that Amy Lee, in “A Night Out With”, explained in a concise, no-nonsense manner why we do not need to listen to Evanescence in order to know we do not like their music: “Ms. Lee [lead singer of Evanescence]… is a classically trained pianist from Little Rock, Ark., who sings Goth ballads about suicide, betrayal and the afterlife over thrashing guitar and medieval choir arrangements. She moved to L.A. three years ago after she was signed to Wind-Up Records (known for bands with Christian appeal like Creed and Drowning Pool).”

But most important, of course, was the SS front page, top-of-the-fold story, all about the magic of Fashion Designers and their fantastical “mood boards”! “Mood boards” are pastiches of inspirational images, or what First- through Third-grade classrooms might term “collages”, and suburban families might term “refrigerators”. Fashion Designers are modern geniuses who use an alchemical process consisting of nothing more than hundreds of millions of dollars and some of the world’s most beautiful people to turn these “mood boards” into mystical vestments that people of a certain net worth and/or who have a certain vocabulary obsess over for a few weeks every year. It’s quite extraordinary, really. We here at two-twenty, alas, do not exist in the rarefied atmosphere necessary for the alchemy to occur. We do, however, have a refrigerator!

Coming soon! (Update: here they are!) Images that, were we Fashion Designers, would inspire us to create our ‘whimsical impulses in leather and tweed, inspired as much by the beat poets and the recent hit “You Got Served” as by the delicately portrayed indelicacies of Edwardian-era pornography’.