los angeles Archives ⋆ Page 12 of 19 ⋆ Virginia Jones

CATFACE Attack- Or, How Can This Entire Forever 21 Be The Same Thing?

I stopped into Forever 21 to see how cheap jeans could possibly get ($7!). That’s not a clearance price. These pants were designed into a seven dollar price point.

Let’s talk about how you make a seven dollar jean. So, it’s an in-house label, so there’s no retail markup. OK, it’s made in Bangladesh. They move the fiber content to hit the lowest duty possible. The fabric costs about a buck a yard. So, if we can accept a loss leader margin of 20%, then we can get labor at about a buck fifty. Buttons, labels and shit are a quarter. You’re never going to wear seven dollar jeans. You’re just buying them because they’re seven dollars. Leave them there. Nobody has ever seen them outside of the store. They suck.

Catface

Next, I saw some t-shirts with a tiger on them. Dresses with a tiger. And tanks. More cat t-shirts. Then leopards. A cougar. What might have been a lynx. Catfaces.

Twenty catfaces were seen in the wild at the Los Cerritos Forever 21. 20% of the items for sale had some kind of catface on them.

It was as if every Forever 21 designer, in every category, was told that if their product for back-to-school didn’t have catfaces, they would be killed.

TREND REPORT: MANDATORY CATFACE

I can picture a poor designer mussing their trendy haircut and crying, “Look, I didn’t want to make a catface sweater, but I have a family!”

Now, just coming from the Fuck Yeah Fest, a ten year event based in Los Angeles, the only city with so little self-awareness it would name something that, it’s evident that young women’s fashion is pretty homogeneous.

Fast Fashion

Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, and H&M all make several lines a season, and, due to identical trend research, they tend to all look the same. Looking around the festival, you can see the options: short jean shorts, floral rompers, circle shirts, crop tops, short dresses with the waist between the waist and the armpit, and maxi dresses. That’s it. Those are the only things available. There wasn’t one pair of low-rise denim shorts. Not one, even though they were ubiquitous a few years ago.

A month ago when I went to So You Think You Can Dance, it was all dresses who were short in the front, and long in the back, schlong dresses that don’t look good on anyone. Also, lace and the color hot salmon. These things are gone now. It’s not that girls are scared of wearing last month’s clothes so much as the things they wear deteriorate by their next period.

Anyway, if you find yourself with the back-to-school crowd, they may look like a bit like a National Geographic special.

Hooray!

Les Savy Fav at FYFFest: Things That Happened

The fat man came onstage in a poncho. He took it off and spoke to us about free love.

The fat man was wearing a tie-dyed top, which he raised and began to soulfully fuck his own belly button with his finger.

The fat man took the top off to reveal a silver unitard, which he grabbed his crotch through. He left the stage to clamber up a tree.

The fat man climbed into a tree and hung upside down in a silver unitard.

The fat man asked for all the lights to be turned off, and asked for flashlights. He put one in his crotch.

The fat man got down to his underpants and sang to us. He stood onstage with the unitard pulled down to his knees and danced under the lights, his sweaty torso gleaming in the lights.

The fat man draped himself in a beige dress, which he pulls up to his tits.

The fat man produced an 8 foot ladder.

The fat man sat onstage and decorated himself in 3/8” black electrical tape.

The fat man started to climb the ladder. A roadie tried to steady the ladder while the fat man got on the top rung and was shooed away. He stood on top of the ladder, singing majestically, while I worried that he would fall off.

The fat man tried to jump off the ladder and land on his feet, but had to tuck and roll. He lays, grandiose and Dionysian, upon the stage and didn’t stop singing.

The fat man produces a tiny striped sweater. He starts trying to put the sweater on. The armpit rips out but he gets into it.

The fat man produced a box of toilet paper and threw it to the crowd, so that we could pitch it through the air in arcing parabolas, shedding twisted paper paths. I caught one but I throw it too straight and it doesn’t unravel much. I think this is because I never threw footballs. The empty box that used to hold the toilet paper is also passed around the audience, apropos of nothing, until it hits a girl in the head and we drop it. I am impressed that one forcefully thrown bog roll lands on the top of the giant truss that forms the top of the stage rig. It’s a beautiful moment but I also reflect on the fact that all of the bathrooms will be out of toilet paper by the last show, and we could have used it.

The fat man announced that it was the last song. I was caught admiring the tendrils of toilet paper everywhere and missed the moment when he laid the folded-up ladder on top of the crowd, climbed atop it, and made rowing motions until the people below began transporting him through the crowd. I walked over to where it was happening and was amused by the sea of people taking photographs of the event. We could probably make a 360 degree hologram of it at this point in composite.

It was amazing.

Camp KP3D

So, I was out in the Catskills, and we made movies with our phones, and played with a dog, and sat around a campfire, and heard all about chemtrails. Thanks to everyone.

This is the film I made about the history of the campsite, Cold Spring Lodge.

Here is a post with all our movies, they make mine make a little more sense but not much more.

Thanks to all.

Thanks go to:

Thanks to Pony for teaching me the eternal optimism of the little dog at the dinner table.

Thanks to Lisa Beth Johnson for making me want to throw up by putting tinfoil in her own mouth, and also for lending Sofiya a dance dress

Thanks to Sofiya Alexandra for being my best girl, but reminding me that Todd is always around to steal my best girl

Thanks to Brandon Vaughn for letting me know I should never take him to Brunch, and for never being more than one moment from mentioning Wolverine or Anne Rice

Thanks to Dennis DiClaudio for filming my clown obsession projected from his own brain, and for teaching me that odes to gothgirls and sea shanties should both be waltzes

Thanks to Matt Tobey for his amazing acting and joke writing. Like, wow.

Thanks to Franky Pelvis for letting me sing A-Ha and Bowie and Pixies/JAMC with him, and letting me play his guitar when I whined about it, and in general for rocking

Thanks to Mike Wiebe for making me feel like a woman.

Thanks to Jason Roeder for teaching me to walk like a man.

Thanks to Josh Abraham for being me cameraman and wingman, and for drawing me as a drag Cruella De Vil.

Thanks to Todd Sentz for teaching me what it might be, after all

Thanks to Steve Douglass for helping me write the women’s lib porn that’s gonna set the industry on its ear.

Thanks to Ahm Seventysix for being the roommate who listens to the much cooler dead person, and for teaching me what a well-orchestrated look is.

Thanks to Darci Ratliff for your amazing work, games, Mad-Libs, organization, and for bringing us together.

Behind the Scenes

I was helping out on Seraph Films‘ shoot and actor Chip Mefford put his fingers up my nose.*

Chip paid for it dearly. Did he die in a temporal loop? Or is it PA Revenge?

* Also see sleep-deprived director Gene Blalock sing “Singin’ in the Rain” with a reflector. This was right before he was wandering from person to person announcing that he liked apples.