I present you Haven / Veritas: The Quest fanfic. To, no doubt, a resounding chorus of 'I don't know either of those fandoms', and 'I'm busy reading Yuletide'.

Brown-Eyed Handsome Man (2139 words) by Ankaret
Fandom: Veritas: The Quest, Haven
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Calvin Banks, Duke Crocker
Summary:

Cal is Duke. Duke is Cal. Audrey has a headache.

Found via bipagan on the Yuletide LJ community:
( cut for large image )

OK, Justin Bieber isn't singing 'I wanna be shoddy with you'. That makes a bit more sense, I suppose.

The Earl Of Proxima Centauri.

I blame this conversation I was having with clanwilliam and antisoppist.

I have been reading Lucy Siegle's To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out The World. I didn't agree with all of it, and I couldn't read the chapter on fur farming at all, but I found it fascinating and on the whole I'd recommend it.

Siegle begins with the image of an overstuffed wardrobe, and like a sort of self-flagellating sartorial Bunyan, goes off in search of what she terms the Perfect Wardrobe, an ethical city on a hill. On the way she discusses not only the usual suspects - sweatshops, polluted water, urban legends about Primark customers - but also the consequences of too many cashmere goats, the question of whether fabric alleged to be made of bamboo actually has any bamboo in it at all, and what will happen when the late 2000s surge of skinny jeans hit second-hand sellers in Africa.

It's written in an easy, journalistic style, but is fortunately free of most of the annoying tics of fashion journalism - there's no 'lumps and bumps' or 'lotions and potions'. There is rather a lot of casual anti-fat prejudice, though most of it from eco firms Siegle patronises rather than from Siegle herself. One man will helpfully classify your wardrobe's carbon footprint into a faux-BMI category, the top two categories being 'fashionably overweight' and 'fashionably obese': another yarn firm describes their eco offerings as 'skinny'. With attitudes like this floating about in the sustainable fashion community, it's no wonder that my attempts to find non-sweatshopped, eco-friendly clothes in a size 24 are so often thwarted.

Throughout most of the book, Siegle is clearly mostly interested in getting the facts in front of consumers and making the case that it's all more complicated, and often a case of doing the least harm rather than no harm. In the final chapter, she moves on to 'trying to create a debate' and the results are a lot more mixed.

For example, she's iffy about buying vintage because she thinks people just do it to get a buzz of self-satisfaction; whereas she's in favour of clothing swaps, because... they give her a buzz of self-satisfaction. As far as the clothing swaps go, she's also annoyingly privileged: she admits that commercial clothing swaps are open only to those who have barely-worn designer clothes to offer, but she doesn't seem to see that as a problem.

She isn't very pro charity shop, because clothes often get sold on into the Third World, thus depressing local clothing industries, which... I can see is a worry, but I'd still sooner my discarded clothes were on someone's back than in landfill. She's also bafflingly dismissive about the percentage of donated clothes that actually show up on the rails, which seems odd: whenever I give to the local shops, I generally see my clothes on the rails a week or so later.

On the other hand, she is very much in favour of 'upcycling', which I have to admit is a word that makes my heart sink. Siegle tells a heart-warming story of a tailoring firm who turned the first suit she ever bought into a dress, which she now wears, and if upcycling was always that kind of skilled repurposing - or even if it was people altering their own clothes, in however punk and individual a way, for their own amusement - I'd be in favour of it. But in general, it means 'I ruined a perfectly good t-shirt / vintage dress / pair of jeans and then I put it on Etsy'.

Franca at Oranges and Apples also has a really interesting response to this book, which is well worth a read.

If you are planning to buy Sarah Wendell's Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Romance Novels, buy the hard copy. The Kindle edition is really badly formatted. At one point there's a double-page spread chart which has been munged into two Kindle pages so that some of the information is missing, and all through there are interruptions in large print with a heart decal which I think in the print edition are probably side bars or something, but which in the Kindle edition just serve to infuriatingly break up your reading by telling you something you just read. 'The ideal man is not the one with the biggest bank account or the extreme sports habit, but is the one who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic' may be good advice, but I don't need to read it again in large print when I've just read a paragraph about it.

At this point, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to stick it out to the end of the book, and I'm not feeling the love enough to want to pay for the book twice.

A great post from Franca at Oranges and Apples, on going out clothes and sexual attractiveness, in which she talks about the perceived sexual message of going out in skimpy clubwear, and says:

'These kinds of 'going out clothes' people wear on a girly night out are just a particular way of dressing. They're a sign that you've made an effort, that the night is in some way special. It's a bonding thing between girls more than anything.'

I think she's absolutely right, and that it's a point that often gets missed. There was a post a few years ago that caused a lot of discussion (warning: this is an early example of the self-righteous failing to get it and telling women off for not being more sexually available that eventually blossomed into the Open Source Boobs fiasco) in which the writer arrogated to himself the privilege of knowing what women dressed up for and then pop-psychoanalysing them on the strength of it. And apparently, six years later, his kind of person still needs telling that it's All More Complicated.

I'm not saying that dressing up for a night is never about attracting attention from the kind of sexual partner you would prefer - obviously it often is - but I think that dressing for one's friends is more of a factor than people often recognise. I've never done the skimpily dressed mainstream clubbing thing, but I used to spend a lot of time in goth clubs, and I preferred the kind of club that didn't let pissed townies in after the pubs let out to the kind that did, because there were always a few of the pissed townies who read 'Up for it with anyone!' from ensembles whose wearers generally meant something far more along the lines of 'We are a tribe, goddammit' or 'Hey, I bought this new thing!' with only an occasional side order of 'I am trying to attract the attention of a friend-of-a-friend who recently got out of a long-term relationship'.

Also, in case you need a shot of common sense after all that, another link from the archives: You Don't Have To Be Pretty.

They fuck it up, the ones in power
Sometimes it's what they meant to do
Sometimes they meant for something else
But by bad luck, they shat on you

But they were fucked up in their turn
By spin and graft and please-the-mob
And ambition and hope and pride
And never having a proper job

Man hands on misery to man
Infectious as a flash-mob dance
If Scotland gets out while it can
At least maybe they'll have a chance.

With many apologies to Philip Larkin