The Future of Fashion as We See It

As I'm sure you noticed, I got a little lazy blogwise over the Euro Fall Fashion Weeks and as it turns out, so did my friend Sarah (aka. Sarah Nicole Prickett, babe of the century and seriously talented Toronto-based writer... check her out!) We got to talking one night about our love/hate for the return of simple dressing, our penchant for bright lips and of course, all those pesky Pugh for McQueen and Elbaz for Chanel rumours.

So, like any proactive and opinionated fashion writers, we decided for the future-good of all, who we think should really be at the helm of taking over these two houses... while we were at it, we planned the future of Maison Martin Margiela and resurrected our favourite legacies, Elsa Schiaparelli and Paul Poiret.

We disagreed on most, both seem to love Holly Fulton, writing in chart form, and doing blog posts by hand at Starbucks.

Here's how we weighed it out...

Chandler Levack's Ode to Dawson's Creek: Part Two

Earlier this month, we introduced you to our first guest contributor, Chandler Levack, and her hilarious deconstruction of Dawson's Creek and it's role in screwing with her sex life...as promised, here goes the follow up! Enjoy, fellow Katie Girls!

Dawson's Creek Ruined my Adolescence: Part Two

In central casting, Will Davis Jr. would play a six foot tall comely North Carolinian with jeans as tight as sausage casing, who would tell anyone who listened in his thick Southern accent that he was a descendent of John Wilkes Booth. He was also as American as it gets. “What do you mean you’ve never been muddin’?” he prodded me, between shots of bourbon at our favorite bar, the Confederate-themed Wall Street watering hole, The Patriot. “I don’t even know what you are talking about.” “They don’t have muddin’ in Canada?” His grandfather had rifles mounted on the wall. His parents were Methodists. He had been turkey hunting. He ate chicken on his waffles.

Now living a block away from my apartment, Will seemed to embody Americana down to his ironized stars and stripes boxer briefs. He told me about Spring Break – where he threw empty beer cans off his Daytona Beach balcony and cheated on his high school girlfriend. He pointed out a Jeep parked on Park; similar to the one he received for his sixteenth birthday. He detailed his junior semester abroad where he romanced “a real posh girl” in London, steeping me in the smoke of his American spirits. But best of all, Will had lived near Wilmington, North Carolina where they had filmed all six seasons of Dawson’s Creek. In high school, he had auditioned as an extra and was rejected. I’m sure it was because he was already a character. “Do you want to maybe do it?” Will asked one night, during a particularly torrid make out session set to The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, and The Grateful Dead – bands culled into a genre he deemed “Americana Sorcery.” “Uh, okay.” I had joined the land of the living.

Dating Will was like playing a mid-season cameo on a generational melodrama entitled “On The L Train.” I, the plucky Canadian intern at a mid-level music magazine, immersed myself in a gang of similarly bemused Southerners, drinking mini bottles of Peach Snaaps in abandoned swimming pools, screaming out the dialogue during an al fresco airing of “Dazed and Confused.” Riding “Brooklyn style” on the back of Will’s fixed gear bicycle, we would scream the choruses of our favorite Smiths songs as we cycled back to Bushwick, in time for ironically-detached viewings of “Point Break” on TNT. And every Sunday the group would gather at the Greenpoint Coffee House for gossip and eggs benedict as Will’s dishy Keanu Reeves-doppelganger roommate made us Caesars, delicately scowling at the hordes of hipsters just like us.

But my contract was soon to be expired. “Stay,” Will implored me on my last night in New York, clutching at my American Apparel tube dress as we kissed outside the graffitied walls of our favorite Lower East Side dance club, “Trash” – the one I had to flash a bouncer to get into when my fake ID was revealed. “You know I can’t stay.” “I’ll marry you.” “Are you retarded? You’re not going to marry me,” I said. “I’ll marry you,” he pouted, butting out his American spirit.

William, was it really nothing? I treasured that summer for months, thinking nostalgically back on all the Pabst Blue Ribbons consumed on Williamsburg fire escapes, all the Vampire Weekend singles, all the times I was left stranded at house parties while Will’s friends disappeared for hours to “go to the bathroom”, returning jittery and elated. Why wasn’t the zeitgeist enough to make it last? The major problem with a television show is their eventual cancellation. Unless you land a spin-off. And who wants to watch Joanie Loves Chachie when Happy Days is on?

“I doubt that Jean Baudrilliard has ever seen Dawson’s Creek but I’m sure his head would explode,” adds Kyle. “Dawson thinks he’s going to repair his past with a piece of culture. It’s funny that it seems to be a struggle for him, because the show itself basically approves of that. It asserts that, you know what? Television can save you. These characters are better than you, and you should definitely aspire to be them. Maybe at this point, considering the amount of culture that is available to us, we should just give into the fact that we consciously desire to have our lives be like fiction – because you know what, it’s gotta get it right sometimes. But I guess that I’m just searching for something I feel could be an accessible model for my own life.”

I’m not nostalgic for high school, but I am nostalgic for all the television shows I adored, all the albums I owned, and every movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr. Is this an unfair paradox, or simply the way my generation experiences reality? Is the central crux of Generation Y a feeling of nostalgia for something we’ve never experienced, entrenched deep within pop culture? And how does this affect the way I listen to Weezer’s “El Scorcho” a song that singularly applies to every boy I’ve ever wanted to love?

“Basically”, Anderson writes in his review of the Creek’s soundtrack for SPIN.COM, (tracks like Six Pence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me”) “are the soundtrack to not knowing what you want, but definitely knowing you want something…While Beverly Hills 90210, the other major teen zeitgeist show from the ‘90s, was full of drug addictions, gambling debts, and sexual harassment of all forms, Dawson’s Creek was mostly about knowing that something has to happen after high school, and not knowing exactly what that was going to be.”

I asked Kyle if he ever feels haunted by all the experiences he’s never had.

"I think our generation not only feels nostalgic for the very recent past and for things that we think were supposed to happen, but also for things that are impossible. It’s a strange deterioration of timelines, wherein nostalgia is attached to things way outside of our own experience."

"Panic at the Disco’s publicist once told me that the reason why the band sounds like it does on their first album is that they learned rock music all at once. So as far as they are concerned, there’s no reason why Queen and Dr. Dre shouldn’t be associated — after all, they heard them at the same time. I think that’s an apt metaphor for how our own personal memories are constructed. Since multitudes of information and culture are available to us at all times, the strange chemical reaction that occurs when you get attached to something gets all thrown off. So now every time I think about my high school girlfriend — the one I’ll always be hung up on no matter how old I get or how strange she gets — the song that I attach to her is Scott Weiland’s “Barbarella,” even though that song came out years after we broke up."

Maybe Kyle's right. Maybe pop culture predisposes necessary pain – after every breakup with someone I wasn’t really dating I evaluate my personal effects – Pavement reissues, Wilt Stillman DVDs, bonne mots from Angela Chase. (“I’m in love. His name is Jordan Catalano. He was let back, twice. Once I almost touched his shoulder in the middle of a pop quiz. He’s always closing his eyes like it hurts to look at things.”) Like Dawson Leery, I’m tired of having my larger-than-life dreams compensate for my smaller-than-life life. While my stint on “On The L Train” seemed tortured and passionate for someone who had never experienced anything and certainly had never done it in the KGB Bar, the characters were flawed and uninspired, the love an amateurish imitation of how the best television should make you feel. The ending wasn’t tragic, it just ended. It ended when my parents picked me up at the Buffalo airport and I cried in the bathroom at Applebee’s. And it ended when I had to face reality, which ideally should be comparable to artifice.

Dawson: Joey, stay. We can watch bad reruns and throw sarcastic remarks at the television.

Joey: Well for the record I'm getting pretty tired of television. I mean, the metaphor alone is making me nauseous.

Dawson: What are you talking about?

Joey: I mean, every night it's the same. We hang out in your Spielberg-ized bedroom and watch movies and TV reruns. It's so predictable.

Dawson: This is a great show. This is a huge two-parter, the big cliffhanger.

Joey: Cliffhanger? C'mon Dawson, you of all people should know that a cliffhanger is merely a manipulative standard designed to improve ratings.

Dawson: No, a cliffhanger’s purpose is to keep people interested. Keep them guessing what's going to happen in future episodes.

Joey: But just like in our own lives, they are so predictable. I mean, the producers put the characters in some contrived situation hoping that the audience will think something is going to change, but, you know what? It never does. Back to the same way it was before your so-called cliffhanger. It's boring Dawson.

Dawson: Well, what if this time it's different? What if this time in the cliffhanger something changes? You wouldn't want to miss that, would ya?

I want to sail away to Cuba with the boy I love, and never bestow as much as a blowjob. I want to climb into the bedroom of the person I confide in most and know that they will always be awake. I want kisses on moonlit piers, and to be crowned Homecoming Queen, and dramatic confessionals where we always say exactly what we mean, incrediblyfastandurgently. I want a never-ending rotation of pastel cable neck sweaters, and parents who are sympathetic to my every need. I want Jann Arden to score my first kiss, and my soul mate to retake my virginity on our senior ski trip. I want Katie Holmes’ thighs and Michelle Williams’ breasts. I want true, undeniable love, but only at the expense of my own self-flagellation. I want to own a rowboat, so I can row up to your house and tell you not to go to Paris. (I only own a metro pass.) I want you to look at me as if you know who I am because we share the same blood.

‘Cause I don’t want to wait, for my life to be over. I want to know right now, what will it be?

The Katie Girls's First Guest Contributor: Chandler Levack

I think we've established that I think my friends are exceedingly cool. So much so, that I just want to talk about them as much as possible. Well, Chandler Levack is yet another awesomely talented friend on my list. A newly inducted staff member at EYE Weekly in Toronto, Chandler gave the most amazingly hilarious and SO TRUE lecture entitled 'Dawson's Creek Ruined my Adolescence' a few months ago - which she's generously let us republish. Since Chandler's brilliance spews over the typical reading time a fashion blog reader can handle...we're going to do this in two parts. Stay tuned for part two!


Here's what Chandy (as I like to call her) has to say about said lecture:

In December 2008, I did a lecture at Toronto's only unqualified lecture series, Trampoline Hall. (trampolinehall.net) Lauren Bride, who is the best person ever and a tremendous writer, curated the event. There were buttons with my name on it, auctioneering of said buttons, a discussion of lucid dreaming, and during the Q&A it was debated amongst my friends and family-members whether I had really gotten over being uncool in high school and had "already peaked" onstage. As a result, I got really drunk and wrote an exam on "Madame Butterfly" the next day, which mostly made me think about that Weezer album, convinced that "El Scorcho" was always going to mean rejection.

And without further adieu, here it is!

Dawson's Creek Ruined my Adolescence: Part One

I always say that there are two kinds of people in this world: Lou Reed people, and David Bowie people. You are either New York or London, bisexual or transsexual, Warholian or Ziggy Stardust. The same applies for late 90’s teen WB melodramas. This lecture is not about Buffy The Vampire Slayer, whose supernatural sophistry underscored the vacancy of its own bullshit. This lecture is for Metal Machine Music. This lecture is for Dawson’s Creek.

During an eight-year period between Grade 6 and Grade 11, I watched Dawson’s Creek with the kind of fevered devotion I’ll probably never feel for someone I’m in a sexually committed relationship with. It got to the point where my mom was literally banned from the living room, for fear that she would interrupt a pivotal plot point, calling out in her token embarrassment falsetto: “Oh Pacey! Oh Dawson! Sail me down the river!” No, the TV was mine between 8 and 9 p.m. on Wednesday nights, and so was the fictional landscape of Capeside, Massachusetts that so captured my imagination.

For those who never got their feet wet, Dawson’s Creek debuted on the then-fledgling WB network in 1998, pitched by “Scream” screenwriter Kevin Williamson to 90210 exec Paul Stupin as “Some Kind of Wonderful meets Pump Up The Volume meets James At 15 meets My So Called Life meets Little House On the Prairie.” Chronicling the hopes and dreams of four verbose upper capesiders, the adolescent upheavals of sex, midterms, and artistic integrity – but mostly sex - were challenged and reconstituted throughout its six-season run. There were four main characters: Dawson Leery – a sensitive, sandy-haired aspiring filmmaker in the Steven Spielberg vernacular who is best friends and star-crossed lovers with Joey Potter – a tempestuous tomboy with a drug dealer dad who loves Dawson so much she decides to skip a summer abroad to Paris to pal around in Capeside. (Seriously, does anyone in television ever realize this never works out?) The pilot opens with Joey climbing through Dawson’s bedroom window with the help of an on-suite ladder –yes, Capeside is this idyllic – as they enact their nightly bedtime ritual, bickering about E.T., lamenting their virginities, and ignoring the crushing reality that their growing hormones make it impossible for them to fall asleep. Dawson is restless and confused, he lusts after Jen Lindley – the seductive new girl by way of Manhattan with a bad girl past - as Joey spars with Pacey Witter, the rakishly handsome wiseacre who loses his virginity to his high school English teacher. Dawson’s Creek illustrates that when you’re fifteen you can’t ignore the fact that things are changing, that your parents aren’t treating you like a kid anymore, and that the only way to hide your raging erection is to accessorize it with a waist-tied over shirt.

As Kevin Williamson confessed, “It’s my childhood come to life, but now I get to go back to these places and create these situations where I can change the ending, and have it turn out like I wish it would have.” Though Katie Holmes would end up married to the craziest Scientologist in all of sham marriage history, while Oscar nominee Michelle Williams grieved the untimely death of her hottie Australian husband – Dawson’s Creek harkened back to a simpler time. More importantly it encapsulated the central problem in both my life and Dawson Leery’s – the inability to separate reality from fiction.

Did I mention that I’m a film student? I’ve spent the last five years in darkened theatres perfecting my Anna Karenina impersonation (“Je ne sais pas”), writing term papers on movies no one should ever have to see. When I was fifteen and wanted to be a filmmaker, (this after my stand up comedian phase but before I considered grad school), I framed conversations with my hands. In a film, you can end a relationship with a beautiful person and cross the sidewalk dejectedly, the strings swelling while the sun sets behind you, as the screen gently fades to black. In real life, you have to keep walking, hail a cab, go home, take a shower, read “He’s Just Not That Into You”, and drink cheap red wine until you pass out. I applaud Kevin Williamson’s attempt at revisionist history. If you could rewrite the past to make it more befitting of the present – and cast James Van Der Beek as a wittier, more football-headed personification of your teenage angst - wouldn’t you feel vindicated?

“Every idea that I have about it ends up getting really autobiographical,” admits Kyle Anderson, the online editor for Rolling Stone and author of “Accidental Revolution: The Untold Story Of Grunge”, calling from the house Jann Wenner built. (Full disclosure, Kyle is my former boss and occasional editor. He also wrote the most seminal piece of WB scholarship I have ever encountered, a review of the Songs of Dawson’s Creek soundtrack, an album he places amongst his top five all-time albums ever, edging out Notorious BIG’s “Ready To Die.”)

“I started watching in January 1998, and a few weeks later, just before Valentine’s Day, my first real girlfriend broke up with me. (She was never good with timing.) I realized later, watching three syndicated episodes a day during my first unemployed year after college, that those early episodes were always really hard to watch, because I still had all these associations of being broken up with. I hated Pacey because he was getting laid, and I wasn’t.”

“It’s very easy for me to introduce my own feelings and experiences into Dawson’s Creek – mainly because it was so boring,” continues Kyle. “As weird as it is to say now, I immediately identified with Dawson Leery. He was an artsy guy, he knew that he wanted to have a girlfriend, he was interested in sex – and it scared the shit out of him. Dawson was in a small town that was supposed to be New England, which is where I grew up. He had aspirations and ambitions and he was frustrated by his inability to obtain them. My high school experience wasn’t exactly negative, but in the present tense it seems like the worst thing in the universe. My parents never split up, my pets never died, my house never burned down, but it always seemed like I had all this energy, interest, willing and enthusiasm, but no real outlet for it.”

Ditto. In high school, I was an overweight band geek, enthusiastic drama nerd, and hyper-virginalized romantic at a small public school in Burlington, with Chet Baker pictures on my locker and Ramones lyrics etched into my heart. Like John Cusack boasts to Lili Taylor in Say Anything, I wanted to get hurt, continually disappointed by unrequited crushes that never matched the full-blown romance of “Let’s Get Lost.” Where was my soul mate – the one that sailed Joey to Cuba during the third Season finale on a boat called True Love, where they explored Latin America together but waited eight months to go down south because Pacey understood that she wasn’t ready to give it up until the senior ski trip? Was I too spiky and obtuse to be loved?

Some may criticize the Creek’s hypertensive banality, saying it was a show where nothing (even in the Seinfeld era) happened. But high school is supposed to be mundane. Adolescence is a time for navel-gazing, of being so antiquatedly self-involved that your own belly button lint starts to take shape of one’s not-so-distant future. But if I spent my teen years watching a television show about teenagers who watch television – what does that say about my own experiences? Could the Creek be to blame for the fact I didn’t lose my virginity until age 20? That I went stag to my senior prom? And that I once dressed like my spinster English teacher for a school-wide twin day – and no one could tell us apart?

My father has a theory, stemming from the semi-paranoid delusion that he is the star of his own television show, that you will only meet so many people in this world: the rest are merely extras. Why is it that we keep running into the same high school acquaintances, unattractive co-workers, and STD-ridden ex-boyfriends? Why does every cab driver and convenience store employee look the same? Does everybody already know everyone? Extras theory dictates that we are predestined to our fates and desires, prescripted by some nebbish Tisch-graduate on his third cup of coffee as everyone else fills in the crowd scenes. It dictates that we can never be the star of someone else’s life, or that we can even control our own.

When I was living in New York, I guested on my ex-boyfriend’s television show, except the television show was his life. Let me explain. I had been living in Brooklyn for a month, wandering around the Lower East Side chain-smoking cigarettes I was allergic to, stumbling into literary readings at former erotic massage parlors, between my two-day internship at SPIN Magazine. I knew approximately three people in the city and couldn’t shake the feeling of a summer wasted. Here I was in Manhattan, living a dream I fantasized about since I heard the opening strains to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue”, reading Haruki Murakami novels past last call at the Union Square Starbuck’s, feeling like an extra. “I think I’m failing New York,” I admitted to my American cousin Kent, a singer in a fledgling electro clash band named Peephole, in a bar that serves you a slice of micro waved pizza with every pint. “That’s how everyone feels,” he assured me. Two days later, I would meet Will.


Stay tuned...dear Katie Girls! Part Two awaits!