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

The Bra That Wasn't There

This post was reblogged from the October 22, 2010, edition of On This Day In Fashion.


They called him an “enemy of the church,” a menace and, my personal favorite, “the Bolivar of the Bosom,” a reference to the 19th-century general who helped lead Spain to independence. But Los Angeles–based designer Rudi Gernreich didn’t have a fixation on breasts, as many critics angrily contended. Nope, Gernreich was quite happily gay, and his appreciation for nudity transcended gender and singular body parts. He insisted his interest was not in exploiting women’s bodies, but in freeing them from binding, structured garments. He aimed to create clothing that followed the tides of fashion, though most of his designs—the topless bathing suit, the thong, the see-through blouse and psychedelic color combinations—were more innovative than consequential. Which is how on this day in 1964, Gernreich came to launch the No-Bra Bra, a featherweight pairing of two bias-cut triangles of sheer nylon net molded with only a single small dart. The elasticized shoulder straps, wrote fashion doyenne Eugenia Sheppard, “are as narrow as strings…and invisible as nothing.”

Light and invisible as it may have been, from Gernreich’s perspective, the bra wasn’t small enough. “I kept trying to make it briefer,” he said, “but there’s still too much going on.”

Cinemode: West Side Story

The film starts with finger snaps, of all things. Snaps as intimidation, snaps as tension, snaps as power and control and, of course, snaps as cool. Somehow, through coordinated snapping, West Side Story sets a tone for a different way of experiencing film: through color, angles, movement and sound. It might be the coolest film ever made and one of the most stylish, too. It’s the musical for people who hate musicals, a love story for people who hate love stories, a play about guys and gang warfare adapted for the screen that guys and, I’m guessing, gang members, like as much as gals typically do. When it premiered in New York City on this day in 1961, it created a new dialogue about teenagers, immigrants and the inner city, all while looking very, very cool. It’s no wonder it won 10 Academy Awards—one of which was for costume design—and reinvented what we think of when we think of musicals.

To critique or discuss just the costumes of West Side Story without folding in all of the other elements—sets, dance, songs, choreography and dialogue—would be like telling just the fourth chapter of a 10 chapter book. Because all of the artists working on the film carefully coordinated to blend their piece of the story with the others, so that one element—costumes, for instance—are never in