Archive for the ‘Fashion’ Category
April 25, 2026
(lots of discussion of men’s bodies in street language and similar references to sex between men, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Stylish? Or in costume? There can be a fine line here, often crossed flagrantly — in my opinion, at any rate — in high-fashion shows. And then also in the far reaches of premium underwear for men, especially from the raunchily named Breedwell company — whose name includes the sexual verb breed ‘pedicate a man bareback (without a condom) to orgasm’.
(Translation in plain, but seriously vulgar, language: pedicate is a Latinate verb for engaging in insertive anal intercourse — fucking someone up the ass — and breed is the related slang achievement verb for bareback man-on-man sex — conveying that the fucker comes (shoots his load) in the other man’s ass.)]
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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Names, Portmanteaus, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
December 8, 2024
From Tim Evanson on Facebook yesterday, this cover art by J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951): The Literary Digest of 6/12/1909:
(#1) Homoerotic soft porn in the style of classical sculpture (complete with a laurel wreath for the author au naturel); the laurel wreath identifies the writer as an incarnation of Apollo, the god of poetry, who is often depicted with a laurel wreath (recalling his desire for Daphne, a nymph who was transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god’s advances); meanwhile, the writer is nude, because he’s a god (the model for this drawing was JCL’s favorite model, also his partner in life, Charles Beach (1881-1954))
I’m a writer (among other things), and I mostly work in my underwear, but I don’t write commando. Well, I’m no Charles Beach, and certainly no Apollo.
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Posted in Art, Books, Clothing, Fashion, Homosexuality, Language and plants, Language and the body, Masculinity, Myths | 1 Comment »
September 2, 2024
From Tim Evanson on Facebook this morning:
It’s Labor Day in the United States.
Here is a Labor Day image by J.C. Leyendecker, the gay illustrator who was probably the greatest magazine cover artist of the early and mid 20th century. (Norman Rockwell blatantly copied him.)
(#1) [AZ:] JCL’s tribute to both masculinity and labor; labor is conventionally represented as a big muscular man in grimy work clothes, engaged in hard physical work, typically with a sledgehammer (as here) — as the cultural ideal of masculinity
“The American Weekly” was a Sunday insert carried in nearly all American newspapers at the time.
To come: more on JCL; and more on US Labor Day images.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Male art, Masculinity | 1 Comment »
August 12, 2024
For all seasons, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky wrote me a little while back, in recommending a Wooly Mammoth fashion plate (in wool) from the “Autumn / Winter 300,000 years ago collection” by Ruby (rubyetc_) on Instagram (where she identifies herself as “lllustrator, artist, big silly”); Ruby’s full set of mammothwear:
In wool, but also in linen, latex, and tulle (fashions for all tastes)
From NOAD:
adj. woolly (US also wooly): 1 [a] made of wool: a red woolly hat. [b] (of an animal, plant, or part) bearing or naturally covered with wool or hair resembling wool: woolly gray-green foliage | the woolly aphid. [c] resembling wool in texture or appearance: woolly wisps of cloud. …
Hence the name of the (now-extinct) wool(l)y mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), which was covered in warm fur.
Posted in Art, Clothing, Fashion, Lexical semantics, Mammoths | 1 Comment »
August 3, 2024
It begins with an arresting photo on Pinterest yesterday showing two beautiful young men in each other’s arms:
(#1) From the Fashionably Male website, “STOP & STARE Alexan Sarikamichian New Work: Agus & Adriel” on 9/26/17 — a fashion spread by the film-maker AS featuring two beautiful young models, Agustin Bruni and Adriel Pino, presented as in a bromance in which the young men “experiment with new feelings about sex, brotherhood, camaraderie”
AS is then the thread leading to the third male model, Severiano Astrada, a hunky young man projecting a tough-guy exterior as the main character in AS’s short film Severiano (2018); and to the fourth, Roman Stubrin, sometimes playful, but mostly offering an unsettling gimlet stare, intense and riveting — in an AS / Benjamin Baccetti film project (in progress) focused on him, and in an extraordinary 2024 fashion piece about him on the Spanish fashion site Fucking Young!
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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Photography, Shirtlessness, Spanish, Underwear | 1 Comment »
November 28, 2023
And now for something completely different. On 10/31 it was densely nerdy marveling at the words calceology, telamon, and hallux — I should probably have issued a technical-linguistics warning on that one — but today it’s underwear models (in a Daily Jocks e-mail ad from 9/26) wearing minimal tighty-whities that display the carnal attractions of their bodies, fore and aft, in intimate detail, hot stuff definitely calling for a male-sex-content warning. And then there are racy bonuses: the male couple in the ad is interracial, and the one presenting as a receptive / bottom is celebrated as an equal partner to the one presenting as an insertive / top.
Just to remind you: these are photos of male models playing characters in a sexual story (loosely playing with the image of a wolf pack) for a receptive audience, a story that’s intended to be at least sexually pleasing — or, better, actually arousing — to this audience and thereby to sell more of the company’s wares (DJ is an Australian company, here selling items from The Pack underwear company, distributed by Dragon Label Limited in Hong Kong). I’ve given these characters Italian names: Nero ‘black’ (note: in Italian, Nero is pronounced roughly like English neigh-roe) for the black receptive partner (who brings his tight muscular buttocks and its anal prize to the encounter, plus a focused and open facial expression) and Lupo ‘wolf’ for the white insertive partner (who brings his crotch and its genital prizes to the encounter, plus a decidedly feral facial expression, at least in the first of three photos).
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Posted in Effeminacy, Fashion, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, It's Just Stuff, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Phallicity, Underwear | 2 Comments »
August 13, 2023
From Josh Brown on Facebook yesterday, passing on an ad he’d gotten:
(#1) [JB:] Now THIS is targeted-Facebook-algorithm-marketing that I can get behind. My kingdom for a caftan!
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Color, Fashion, Homosexuality, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Movies and tv, Rainbow clothing | 2 Comments »
August 8, 2023
The title of a photo spread by photographer Jonathan Kim, of model Matteo Miretti, conveying the enervation of a hot summer day, on the Fashion Grunge site on 2/11/19. I was led to this spread by one photo from it on Pinterest yesterday, showing Miretti so knocked senseless by the heat that it looks like he’s been martyred to it:
(#1) Also, of course, showing the elegant musculature of his body; if this be death, he is beautiful in its repose
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Fashion, Male art, Photography | 2 Comments »
March 13, 2023
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, featuring the straight-leg denim favored by the spacefolk who visit us in the Nevada desert:
(#1) Levi’s 501® Originals, always the choice of the discerning visitors to Area 51 in Nevada (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
So: Area 501 is a goofy portmanteau of Area 51 and 501 (jeans).
Two parts: the Area 51 part, the 501 denim part.
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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | 1 Comment »
August 3, 2022
The killing of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri by a targeted U.S. drone strike (taking him down as he stood on a balcony) over the weekend in Afghanistan was described by an MSNBC commentator yesterday morning as
a stiletto strike: with the N1 + N2 compound N stiletto strike ‘sudden (military) attack resembling a stiletto (in being very narrowly focused lethal weaponry)’; the sense of the N2 strike here is NOAD‘s 2 [a] a sudden attack, typically a military one
Possibly it was stiletto airstrike; it went by very fast, I haven’t seen another broadcast of it, and it’s not yet available on-line, so I can’t check — but I am sure of the N stiletto and the N strike and the intent of the commentator to commend the pinpoint accuracy of the operation.
It seems that the metaphor has been used occasionally in military circles for some years, but very rarely outside these circles, so that it came with the vividness of a fresh, rather than conventional, metaphor — but while it worked well for me (evoking the slim, pointed, lethal daggers of assassins), it might not have been so effective with others, whose mental image of a stiletto is the heel of a fashionable women’s shoe (slim and pointed, but alluring rather than lethal).
Yes, the two senses (plus a few others that I won’t discuss here) are historically related, with the dagger sense the older and, in a series of steps, the source of the shoe sense. But of course ordinary speakers don’t know that, nor should they be expected to (such information is the province of specialists, historical linguists and lexicographers); what they know is how stiletto is used in their social world, and that’s likely to involve trendy footwear rather than medieval weaponry.
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Posted in Beheading, Beheading, Clothing, Compounds, Conversion, Derivation, Fashion, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Metaphor, Metonymy, Morphology, Semantics of compounds, Shoes, Truncation, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
