Rough with the smooth

In earlier posts I've chatted about messing things up: wearing clashing colours and mixing looks in a way which would conventionally be considered bad taste. But something I always been more excited about personally is fucking with people's expectations around gender/sexuality and mixing up soft and hard elements in the same look.

The secret to our American Desi friend's hot look shown in these pics lies in the contrast of telling a story of two halves: up top sweet and innocent and below, a little bit rocker, a little bit saloon bar hussy. In the first pic the home-spun scene is set by the table cloth fabric and dainty cropped cardigan. The only nuance that things may not be quite as wholesome as they seem is the potentially innocent dropping of the cardy shoulder revealing flesh, and not one but two straps. A quick pan down gives us more context for that shoulder reveal and confirms that it wasn't such an innocent gesture after all. The lace underskirt is a perfect length to offer a fleeting glance from certain angles without being constantly on show and the rebellious feel of the boots is carried through to the other extremity with the arm of her cardigan messily covering half her hand. While the boots wouldn't be my first choice given free reign of the Selfridge's shoe department to choose a pair to go with this look, they're sufficient in exemplifying this contrast of rough with the smooth which makes this outfit such a success.

A less rustic take on the same look could take this in the direction of the geek-freak aesthetic made SO sexy by Thora Birch in the 2001 film version of Ghost World. For me there's no competition between this type of look and a straightforward conventional feminine aesthetic. After all, what could be as erotic as the taste of defiling the innocent, taming the rocker or igniting the undiscovered flame of the geek...

http://www.ghostworld-the-movie.com/macns/index.html



On the slate...