#TailorSnarkWars Battle 1: Donnie & Vladdie Wear The Clothes (Original thread: July 16 2018 Twitter)

Okay, I’m doing this. Donnie & Vladdie wear the clothes. And starting with a history lesson. @SamuraiKnitter requested.

I’ll try tomorrow. I do read suits, but Dampnuts is too easy. His gay tailor has been making him the butt of a joke for 15 years, and Two Scoops is too dumb to get it. I swear he stiffed a tailor’s bill once, and now they’re ALL out to get him.

To understand Russian tailoring, you have to understand the 300 year relationship of Russia, London & Paris. Always delicate, but Russia has always consumed and modified western culture for their own use rather than supplying it to London & Paris. Especially under Lenin/Stalin.

1. (I’m specifically talking tailoring – menswear – here. Which is just as expressive, but with a limited palette, and for the past 200 years, has been defined by exquisite labor & material, not ornament. This is also true for women’s bespoke clothing for Russia, but more so.)

4.They’ve also borrowed from their east; there’s still much Mongol influence in menswear/cold weather wear that’s not western drag – shoulder button, double breasted coats & jackets; ankle length coats; the furry barrel hats. Steppe winters are horror movie cold. So is Moscow.

1. Under the Tsars, everything the fashionable 500 wore originated in Paris or Savile Row but often locally produced by talented copyists. That continued under the Soviets for the party, except a lot of talent died because tailors who worked for Tsars became enemies of state.

2. In the 50s & 60s, there was a branch of intelligence called Kremlinology that examined publicity photos for information about what Moscow really did. They looked at cuts of suit & made assumptions that narrow lapels & skinny trousers were due to economic deprivation...

3. But no, Moscow seemed to like the Teddy Boy look coming out of London. Moscow fashion can be as capricious as the rest of the world’s, and it has tastemakers. It’s liminal, since it’s the intersection of West & East & it’s a remix culture. So all assumptions carry caveats.

4. That said: Putin is almost always v well clothed. Too well, per U rules in both UK and US Old Money. His suits always fit perfectly, and are always impeccable, and show so little wear that they’re fairly obviously newly made for the occasion. That’s what scratches the record.

5. A man’s suit that looks new shouts “New Money! Arriviste! Nouveau Riche!” (For a costuming example: look at Mad Men, first couple seasons – Roger Sterling vs Don Draper. Roger has had those suits for years. Or Prince Charles’ suits vs Tony Blair’s.)

6. Putin’s tailors are very good – he’s a small man and we all forget that because his clothes give him extra broad shoulders, a long neck and a long torso. Note how rarely we see his back or the backs of his legs. (Or his legs at all, come to think of it.)

7. But that’s also both Russian and New Money tailor signaling; the latter unintentional. Russian pride or Vlad’s ego – which are deeply intertwined – doesn’t permit him to be a small man. He must be biggest, baddest bear in the forest. Thus, his shoulders are heavily padded. See?

8. (Note that 🍊💩’s shoulders are also padded, though much worse quality. It’s mostly the same thought process, except shoulder pads are also used to mask a prominent or protruding tummy & to balance out short arms. Difference: you can SEE DJT’s pads in outline. Can’t see Vlad’s.)

9. The long neck is also an illusion thanks to serious talent. In Vlad’s infamous shirt off on the horse photo, his neck is nothing to write home about. It’s about 3 fingers width from collarbone to chin or to jaw. Average. But in suit? Halfway to ostrich.

10. You do that by cutting the suit collar to lay very flat over the upper chest/collarbones, and scooping out the back, standing collar by millimeters, so there’s just a titch more shirt collar showing without looking like anything is over or undersized. Serious props to tailors.

11. And yes, Vlad gets a bit of credit here: he knows how to wear & move in his clothes. That takes study, time and practice. (Yes, I am calling him vain as a phlebotomist‘ s nightmare.)

12. But remember how little we see of his legs. How often we see him sitting, or when standing, using the camera angle to seem as tall as the person beside him. Vlad is Angela Merkel’s height – 5’5”. DJT claims 6’3”, is really about 5’11”. Now look at today’s presser pics.

13. (Part of the reason the Obama-Putin stare down pic is so revealing is because it caught Vlad’s side angle, so it’s clear Obama towers over him. And that Obama is not intimidated. Also... Hillary Clinton is slightly taller than Vlad, and not easily intimidated. Hmmm...)

14. But in today’s press pics, Vlad and 45 are on the same level. I’m gonna guess slouching, boxes, cushions and angles. It’s basic stage-craft. The MCU does it all the time for Robert Downey Jr because he’s tiny and Chris Evans isn’t.

15. As for DJT: his suits are custom, but his tailors intend him to look like he slept in an off the rack suit that everyone else left on the rack. I assume he wears worsted wool, but it looks & drapes like poly-rayon. His sleeves are too long and baggy from elbow to wrist, but...

16. ...His biceps are too tight because fat upper arms. His shoulders don’t fit. If he were wearing off the rack, it’s because he’s buying to cover his gut. But he’s wearing custom, so it’s tailors making fun of him. (For sewists, he needs an Full Tummy Adjustment.)

17. Shoulder pads ameliorate it a little, but not enough. Fat men can wear clothes, they just have to trust their tailor. Since 45 has never trusted anyone but Vlad, well.... Not gonna happen. And no, I’m not fat-shaming or size shaming. I’m saying DJT chooses to be badly dressed.

18. (I say this as a woman who requires a 5 inch Full Bust Adjustment. Not 5 divided by 2 halves, but 5 inch on each side. Patterns are made for B cups; I’m an FF. There is no shame in needing custom clothing, and tailoring can handle any body shape and size. That’s the JOB.)

19. Donald refuses to admit he needs good custom clothing & his vanity can’t admit he’s no longer a man in his 30s. He hasn’t updated his internal profile picture in decades. He sees his Art of the Deal photo when he looks in today’s mirror. (Which is unsettling in cognitive sci...)

20. Dampnuts is still wearing what was fashionable in the late 80s, when he was flying high. Back then, baggy suits, wide shoulders, long ties, and a rumpled look were fashionable. But those do look best on slim men with torsos shaped like a Dorito, not torsos shaped BY Doritos.

21. And nobody around him can say (and be heard), “daddy, you don’t look right. Let’s fix this.” Either they don’t care or can’t get through.

Which ties to my other wheelhouse- behavioral psych: client wardrobe is highly revealing, and attitude towards clothing matters.

/end

PS! That thing I said about stage-craft? Look at this from the last 24 hours. Chris Wallace is 5’10”. Note that Vlad’s seat is lower to the floor, the chair is upstage from Chris, the angle is canted a bit to mask the difference, and they’ve got the chyron. (Also Vlad’s heels.)

Part II

#TailorSnarkWars Foundation (Original thread: October 6, 2018, on Twitter)

Let me tell you the story of the State Lege trips.

My mother comes from a small town; her family has been in the area for almost 200 years now. Her great-great-great-grandparents on both sides founded 3 of the small towns in the area. She’s related to everyone.

Yes, it’s possible to be both local aristocracy & white trash.

Smother is also one of those people who will claim someone else’s tragedy if it attracts attention to her, especially if she’s far enough away that she doesn’t have to actually DO anything about the tragedy.

Which happened. When I was a small child. A distant family member got HIV from a blood transfusion, got kicked out of school, and Smother became an HIV/AIDS activist, 2000 miles away from the actual sick kid. Her activism consisted mostly of throwing parties (aka fundraisers.)

The kid had been my sometimes playmate & was someone I loved as much as a little kid can love, when separated by many hundreds of miles & extremely expensive long distance.

But even fundraising is valuable. Somebody’s gotta hang crepe paper & make cheese balls, right?

So... at 8, I started being an activist. Which at 8, meant making soup & freezer casseroles for people who were too exhausted to cook & clean. I did laundry. I swept porches. Kid stuff. It was something I could do. It helped.

A couple years into this, mother got bored. That’s her mode. But by then, I had built relationships that I needed in the HIV/AIDS/LGBT community, so I kept up to the best of my ability. I had time after school, I knew how to use a phone, so I kept doing the work.

The best that can be said for my parents is they sure as hell made their kids self-directed. They wouldn’t pay for music or sports; they didn’t drive us to after-school stuff. If I wanted to do something, I was allowed, as long as I got myself there & back, & paid for it.

So I called the HIV center (at a local church) or stopped on my way home from school; I wrote letters & did chores & made soup. By then, we lived in a small, mostly base town, in a conservative state, but the advantage of a smallish town? Everything was walking distance close.

I was the latchkey kid, even during summer, because I was responsible enough to be left on my own, and my siblings were TOO young to be in my care, but the parents didn’t want to pay for daycare for a 10 year old, so I got to do pretty much what I wanted when not in school.

(No one said I have good parents, but benign neglect was preferable.)

Let me be clear: even in a community that small & remote from the big centers, I owned a funeral dress. At 10. And I used it, about once a month, in the bad years. Black cord jumper, white blouse.

There was no HIV funding; the federal government’s attitude was something along the lines of “let them die & god will sort it out.”

So sick people loaded themselves, and their oxygen tanks, and their IV bags, into minivans and lobbied the State houses, hoping for scraps of funding.

Articulate little kids who can talk about a ‘cousin’ & can sit still & have benignly neglectful parents & are willing to touch someone with AIDS?

Propaganda GOLD.

So... yeah, during summers when my parents weren’t paying much attention? I went to more than a few lege hearings.

3 hours in a car, 3 hours in the hearing room, 3 hours in the car.

In the desert southwest, 3 hours is not a long trip.

Those trips were treats for me: Air Conditioned cars & lege buildings. (My parents like 92 F. Me? 67 is getting a tad warm.)

I didn’t use much seat space.

Those trips were exhausting and shortened the lives of my friends, but it was that important to them.

Because they were literally dying.

This was the crucible, and all I can say is I still have my pin. And it still makes me cry.

That’s my first experience of activism: existential threat.

That warps someone, but in a good way.

It means that when things go bad now, I can look at the law & who is getting hurt, and that’s how I make my decisions. I’ve been lucky that for most of my adult life, I’ve been able to focus on mental health activism.

Yes, people with mental illness have been dying of police violence & suicide and social neglect, and for the last many years, we didn’t have BIGGER existential threats rolling around.

The last 20 years have felt so very easy compared to growing up.

But we’re back to bigger existential threat.

Children are dying from medical neglect. Respiratory disease thrives in confined conditions.

At least six* children have died because they didn’t get medical care. More will follow. (10, as of 12/2018)

We’ve got a TYPHUS epidemic breaking out in LA, because the SoCal housing market is so fucked that 15K ppl are living on the streets, which means body lice have a chance to spread, which leads to the disease that killed Napoleon’s army, and in the concentration camps.

(Correction: Closer to 100K. I found a better census.)

TYPHUS.

This BTW, is worse than regular typhus, because this is flea typhus. Which are harder to eradicate than body lice. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/typhus-outbreak-los-angeles-county-surpasses-100-patients-n926496

Women are being jailed for ordering grey market drugs to end pregnancies. Women are being neglected to death during and after pregnancy because we focus on the baby, not the mother. Women are being forced to continue pregnancies because their insurance doesn’t cover abortion.

People are medicating themselves to death because we don’t have functional health care, and when the medication runs out, they turn to heroin & fentanyl, because they’re available.

All of these are part of an intentional plan called Feudalism With Better Plumbing (for some).

I don’t know why some people turn money into score-keeping and desire control and domination over everyone else they can manage to screw.

Let it be they’re assholes & stop worrying about their motives. Their motives are selfish. That’s all we need to know about their motives.

Oh, and that they’re old and they’re dying.

This time, we can outrun & outnumber & outplan & out-organize & out-fight them.

We can make them waste their money.

We can annoy them into a stroke and irritate them to death.

And we have to.

It’s existential again.

We give them nothing.

If they’re family? No holidays at our table. No $5 token gifts. We don’t return their calls. We don’t babysit their kids.

It doesn’t matter if we love them. We must isolate & reject them because our attention is our only leverage.

If they’re customers? They don’t get second chances on their paperwork. They don’t get more assistance than we’re required to give. Follow every regulation, every single rule. No smiling. Their convenience is more than our job’s worth.

Cooperation & accommodation are voluntary.

A coworker? You only have to cooperate as much as your job description requires.

You don’t have to make the coffee. Don’t have to share cookies. Don’t have to participate in their party or plan their birthday. Why provide emotional labor to someone who would happily see you dead?

They’re your elected official? You do know that you can rent your own robocaller to call their office(s), right? robotalker .com (Use carefully, mostly with state GOP & county GOP offices. They’re not listening anyway.) Make their staff miserable.

(Lotsa cheap robot services.)

Never forget the goal of Simple Sabotage: make people quit hurting others by making them so miserable they capitulate.

Causing physical harm is counter-productive; better to humiliate & frustrate & irritate them. Make them waste their money and time and attention.

When my friends got Medicaid funding? It wasn’t because anyone in the state lege gave a damn about gay people. They still wanted my friends to die. But they didn’t want my friends dying in their office.

They didn’t want to see the Karposi’s sarcomas and feeding tubes.

We made them so fucking uncomfortable & ashamed of themselves that they gave us what we wanted so we’d go away and die quietly elsewhere.

By being dying people in their offices, we made HIV deaths untenable.

And we got what we wanted. Most of it, anyway. Research $$.

The existential crisis is here again. So spite them. Make their lives suck.

Thrive on oppositional defiance and anger and being a pain in the ass.

The time for demonstration and petition and asking nicely is over. We’ve spent 2 years being nice & it’s made conditions worse. It’s time to get to fucking work. And if our work breaks their shit? Oh fucky-darn. Better to frustrate their shit than break our lives. Better to frustrate them. Better to make them waste their time picking TP out of trees or scrubbing chalk off their windows/sidewalks EVERY DAY.

Non-violent action doesn’t mean pure passivity. It also means passive aggression.

Rosa Parks didn’t sit there because she was tired. She was a) making a damn point and b) being a pain in the ass.

We are now called to be pains in the ass.

SO: Think like a pain in the ass.

It is unnatural, but do your damnedest to figure out ways to frustrate and irritate your GOP neighbors, co-workers, family members & elected reps.

Especially ways that are perfectly legal but irritating as fuck.

Make it a game.

If you have the resources to afford a night in jail that is likely to be dismissed/misdemeanor, find your local Friends Service Committee or ACLU or Peace & Justice center, and get their training. Get prepared for it. If you can’t, then still contact those orgs, and be on the bail team. Because arrests and occupation and being difficult is what’s coming. Sorry. We have squandered our demonstration time. Now it’s all about direct action.

Welcome to Dresden. Sorry it’s Hell.

(Part III tomorrow)