Wingtips and Shell-Toes
There was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and those shoes were wrong.
...more
Posts Tagged: fashion
Karmic Moments: A Conversation with Christina Chiu
Christina Chiu discusses her forthcoming novel, BEAUTY.
...more
A Decade of Surface over Significance: Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg
A former editor at V, Stagg is no stranger to the slippage between life and editorial.
...more
If You Let Me Tell You a Story
Stories need concrete details to help you understand, don’t they?
...more
What to Read When You’re Ready to Rethink Women’s Fashion
A reading list to celebrate the publication of WHAT’S INSIDE? by Anita Davis.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview #141: Tara Isabella Burton
“I want to make a case for the serious, literary legitimacy of the female experience of self-construction.”
...more
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Kurt Wagner’s One-of-a-Kind Hat
I try not to think about fashion. It’s more that I want to settle on something to wear so I don’t have to think about it.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jade Chang
Jade Chang discusses her new novel The Wangs vs. the World, citizen journalism, and how to write an immigrant story that’s not all about pain.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Goethe, book reviews, and why you shouldn’t use TripAdvisor. The brother-figures of bear conservation. Barack Obama talks brain-bots and “chasing the unicorn.” Meet your future neighbors: oysters. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and 19th-century fatal fashion.
...moreThe Amazing Fashion Week Adventures of Michael Chabon and Son
For GQ, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon applies his discerning eye to a subject close to his heart: his fashion-obsessed son: He would lay out its components, making a kind of flat self-portrait on the bedroom floor—oxford shirt tucked inside of cotton sport coat, extra-slim pants (with the adjustable elastic straps inside the waistband stretched to […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Arielle Greenberg
Arielle Greenberg talks about her new collection, Locally Made Panties, the possibility of feminist pornography, and curating her Rumpus column, (K)ink: Writing While Deviant.
...moreNear-Taxidermic Décolleté
What does “modern single woman” even mean anymore? Over at the New York Review of Books, Lorrie Moore investigates the idiosyncratic legacy of Helen Gurley Brown, the once and future editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan.
...moreThe Power of a T-Shirt
In the latest Lenny Letter, Lena Waithe discusses how she learned how to express her identity through fashion in the vintage tee section of a thrift shop: The shirt wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t made in Italy. And unless you were a TV buff, you wouldn’t understand its significance. But it made me happy every time […]
...moreDressed to Kill
Italy has always provided the cutting edge in fashion. Now, the cutting edge is providing the fashion. Italian women in prison are now producing top-of-the-line fashion items that are pretty amazing: Here, women inmates at several nearby prisons have turned into stylists, launching a peculiar brand that goes beyond the classical made-in-Italy products. Those products […]
...moreCatch My (Trendy) Disease
Pale skin, thin waists, sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks, red lips—all trademarks of 19th century English beauty trends, and all symptoms of the tuberculosis epidemic that ran rampant until the advent of germ theory in the early 20th century. Emily Mullin writes for Smithsonian on the new connections discovered between 19th century fashion and the aesthetic impact […]
...moreLiterary Fashion
“We’re so lonely in our processes,” July laughs of the plight of so many creative types, “that it’s just fun—like, ‘Wow, we get to email with each other!’ when usually for both of us it’s a very solitary process from start to finish.” In addition to being a writer and performance artist, Miranda July also designs […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Remembering Molly
Ten years later I still wondered about those aviator glasses and whether The Breakfast Club could restore us.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Aliza Licht
Aliza Licht, former SVP of Communications for Donna Karan International, talks about her debut career guide, what she wishes she knew when she was starting out, and how to build an audience on Twitter.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Pussy Noir
Jason Barnes talks about performing burlesque, genderfuck fashion, naked contortionists, and “being above gender” as his alter ego Pussy Noir.
...more
Catalogue Broads
Still, stories are subject to a gravity of their own, leaking out of the crevasses of a person’s crafted exterior like coffee from the hairline crack of a ceramic mug.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Women in Clothes
The Rumpus speaks to Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton about Women in Clothes, a new collection of essays and art on the intricacies of femininity and clothing choices.
...more
In My Clothes
My cousin and I are in matching dresses with purple buttons, lavender yarn in our braids. Our mothers take us to Sears Portrait Studio, where we sit together in front of a marbled blue sky. I’m into it, all of it.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Ania Szado
Canadian writer Ania Szado discusses the influence of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince on her latest novel, Studio Saint-Ex, and developing characters based on personal insecurities.
...moreNamibian Fashion Spools Out a Whole World of Meaning
To many Americans, fashion is a frivolous distraction. To many women in Namibia, it’s an expression of identity hammered out of years of tradition, culture, colonialism, and genocide. Catherine E. McKinley writes about it in fascinating detail for the Virginia Quarterly Review, with incredible photos by Thabiso Sekgala to match. It’s hard to pick just one passage […]
...more
After a Fashion
Like a lot of men these days, the line between what I wear to go to work, to work out, and to sleep has gotten dangerously thin.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Alex Gilvarry
Part manifesto, part immigrant love story, part satire, part tragedy, Gilvarry’s debut novel is as moving as it is full of barely controlled anger, a tension that makes this well-written novel eminently readable.
...moreWas Re: Skinny Jeans
“Every semester that I teach my underground music course, I ask my students what they think the word ‘indie’ means, and somebody inevitably gives the same answer: skinny pants. I want to come clean here and tell everyone that I have never worn skinny pants; they look awful on me. But the answer is telling. […]
...moreNotes From The Dark Side: A New Blog by Republican Operative Roger Stone
If the New York Times is going to have Republican columnists we figure The Rumpus should too. So we invited Roger Stone, the architect of the Brooks Brothers Riot (which handed George Bush the presidency) to set up shop on our virtual pages. He was going to write an introduction but he wrote The 10 […]
...more