I'm featured on Kelley Moore's blog, For the Love of Design, today!

I'm honored to be featured on lifestyle expert Kelley Moore's blog, For the Love of Design. In her Ramblings column, a Q&A with design-centric types, I share my biggest pet peeves, greatest extravagances and how I feel about fashion police. If you don't read a lot of design magazines and are not familiar with Kelley, I suggest you click over to KelleyLMoore.com and spend some time getting to know her work—it's endlessly inspiring.

Credits: Photo by Benjamin Benshneider for the Seattle Times.

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Top On This Day In Fashion Moments in 2010

Is it too soon in the history of On This Day In Fashion to create a top-moments list? And can a top-moments list be such a thing if the items are in no particular order? We’ve been up and running since June 27, but had so much fun over the past six months, and ‘tis the season, after all. I couldn’t let 2010 close without commemorating a few favorite moments, like an On This Day In Fashion six months of Greatest Hits:

Um, we made the cover of Seattle Magazine? Crazy! I still pretty much shake my head in disbelief over this one. I remember on the day I went in to do the shoot for this cover, I had to quickly run off to interview NBA Hall-of-Famer Lenny Wilkens for an unrelated assignment, and I thought to myself: Is this day real, or am I going to wake up soon? I don’t care if it’s narcissistic: This cover will forever hang framed on my office wall!



On This Day In Fashion on the TV! Think of it like an “On This Day In Fashion in Seattle…” segment, in which we homed in on the anniversary of Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis’s seminal grunge collection, the moment in fashion history when

Ali on the Radio!

I just finished a really fun segment on 94.9-FM's KUOW Presents, about vintage December-released films that offer great take-away fashion. All three films were recently featured on On This Day In Fashion: Morocco (1930), starring Marlene Dietrich and her tuxedo; Saturday Night Fever (1977), starring John Travolta and his 19-year-old polyester-clad ham; and Out of Africa (1985), starring Meryl Streep and her amazing hats.

This is the second time KUOW has hosted On This Day In Fashion, and I don't think I was quite as relaxed as the first time around, but maybe it was just because I love these three films so much. You be the judge. Writers Katrina Ernst and Kristine Lloyd brilliantly wrote the Cinemodes about the films—The New York Times even picked up and linked to Saturday Night Fever (!!)—so big kudos to those writers.

You can listen to the five-minute segment on

Me on the Tee-Vee

Exciting news: Today I did a short fashion segment on Seattle morning show New Day Northwest, to talk about the November anniversary of Marc Jacobs' notorious grunge collection for Perry Ellis in 1992 and the return of grunge style in 2010. I teamed up with the stylistas at Ajentse, representing photographers, stylists and hair and makeup artists, and Heffner Management, the largest modeling agency on the West Coast, to put together a cool segment and fashion show that illustrated the "new grunge," the rebirth of a Northwest style.


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Watch the video above and read all about it On This Day In Fashion.

Q&A with Rebel Without a Cause Screenwriter Stewart Stern

Back in 1999 at the beginning of my magazine career, I interviewed Rebel without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern for Seattle magazine, where I was an editor. In the spirit of today's Cinemode, Rebel without a Cause, I thought it would be fun to dig up this lost interview after all these years and post it on On This Day In Fashion. The short Q&A with Stern centers around how I'd recently discovered that the screenwriter—the nephew of Paramount Pictures founder Adoph Zukor and actress Mary Pickford, and first cousins to the Loews, who ruled MGM—had traded in the jungles of Hollywood for the wilds of Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, where he was a hiding out as a docent with the gorillas. Stewart was a peach, and we talked in his garden and living room for about three hours. I didn't ask him about fashion or style, but he talked about James Dean and surprised me with a cool Jim Morrison story and another about his aunt, the legendary actress and "It" girl, Mary Pickford.

It took me hours to find this little gem—probably the fourth or fifth story I ever published—on an old disk, and now I'm determined to find the mini-cassette tape I recorded the whole thing on. I don't remember exactly what was on that tape (lots of family bits and a conversation about the homosexual undertones of Rebel comes to mind), I only remember that as a young writer I was devastated at all the words I had to cut. When (if) I ever find that tape, I'll maybe transcribe it and post the whole long-lost interview. In the meantime, this conversation is what made the cut for publication:

Cinemode: Rebel Without a Cause

It was supposed to be filmed in black and white. Rebel without a Cause was already in production when the studio made the decision to switch to color Cinemascope, introducing entirely new concepts for the cinematographer and costume designer. Thanks to the inexplicable change of plans, when Rebel was released on this day in 1955, audiences were able to drink in James Dean’s saturated red jacket, bright white shirt and deep indigo blue jeans. These three everyday items of clothing worn together by Dean have become the most iconic jean-and-T-shirt combination in movie history, and literally changed what teenagers perceived as cool. For the first time, dressing down was more favorable than dressing up.

The film about a troubled heartthrob looking for love and respect followed the success of Blackboard Jungle and The Wild One, the first films to depict young people as complicated and unhappy rather than obedient and cheerful. Director Nicholas Ray was passionate about wanting to depict the teenagers as realistically as possible, and he obsessed over every minutia of detail, even homing in on the symbolic use of color and how the costumes interacted in a landscape of primary tones.

Skirting the Law

I haven't posted a story about the history of the skirt in a while, but this item is too good to pass up. Yesterday the mayor of Castellammare di Stabia, a southern Italian resort town, "has ordered police officers to fine women who wear short miniskirts or show too much cleavage, as part of a battle to raise what he describes as the level of public decorum," according to an article in the Guardian today.

Banning short skirts and arresting women for the length of their hemlines began long before the miniskirt was introduced in 1964, though Tunisia was the first country to ban the skirt altogether, soon followed by other African and Muslim nations, including Malawi, Madagascar and Swaziland. Twenty-six years later miniskirts were again outlawed in Swaziland in 2000 when it was believed that wearing them encouraged the spread of AIDS. Many men vocally defended the ban, vowing to rape any women they saw wearing miniskirts, saying, "They want to be raped and we're giving them what they want." The classic "they're asking for it" theory often comes up when a skirt ban is on the books. One example is from 2006, when then South African deputy president Jacob Zuma allegedly raped a 31-year-old AIDS activist because she crossed her legs in a knee-length skirt, signaling her desire to be raped, according to Zuma. "In Zulu culture you can't leave a woman when