It’s a gloomy, retrospective day for fashion.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a meeting was to have taken place today between French Prime Minister Francois Fillon and a group of government advisers, luxury titans, and master craftsmen. The purpose? To discuss subsidies that might save feathermakers, milliners, embroiderers, and dressmakers from extinction. (To witness some of these artisans at work, check out the documentary Signé Chanel.) The French luxury sector has been hard-hit by the recession, the article explains: This year, business has dipped 30 percent. The fear is that the recession could kill off the remaining 115 businesses that cater exclusively to the high-end fashion and haute couture industries.

But it’s not just luxury fashion workers who are at risk. New York City’s ready-to-wear industry is in peril as well, as tonight’s HBO documentary Schmatta illustrates. Simply put, both traditions—Paris haute couture and New York ready-to-wear—can’t compete with overseas production.

You may recall that designer Nanette Lepore wrote an op-ed during Fashion Week outlining the benefits of New York City-based production and the necessity of rent stabilization of Garment Center lofts. There are a host of reasons why her suggestions makes sense. The most compelling to me, as a fashion lover, is that a lot of new designers can’t afford to produce in China because to do so requires large production orders. The death of the Garment Center impedes small-scale production and blocks out the little guys, which means less variety and, potentially, less affordable variety. Schmatta doesn’t wrestle with these considerations, however. It emphasizes how the mass exodus of factories to Shenzhen and beyond has impacted the American fashion worker. It paints a very grim picture.

In 1965, 95 percent of our clothes were made here. Today, it’s 5 percent. Cheap nonunion labor, giant production lines, and the shipping container—basically everything that permitted for the explosion of Wal-Mart—offered too many incentives for profit maximization, and so the garmentos skedaddled. Schmatta challenges viewers to ponder the revival of worker-based fashion economy (and, hence, a worker-based economy generally). Its timing couldn’t be better.

Taken together, the Wall Street Journal article and the Schmatta documentary ask the question: Who is the fashion industry for?

If so few customers are willing to pay for Lesage embroidery, then artisanal work must be utterly passé. If the clients can’t support them—these are, after all, some of the richest women in the history of civilization—then there’s an argument to be made for the retiring of these craftsmen. They are obsolete. Truth be told, the death of the craftsmen would be less of a loss to fashion itself than to the marketing of fashion, which promotes money-losing confections in order to hawk perfume and purses to the hoi polloi, to put it rather crudely.

But ready-to-wear is far from obsolete! One could argue that the project of producing respectable clothing for the masses has reached its saturation point: Probably clothing cannot get any cheaper, or any more stylish, than it is right now at H&M or Wal-Mart. But the cheap prices have been thrust upon us so that the overseas factories can run 24-7 and pass on “the savings” to us (“consumers,” never “people”) through sheer economies of scale.

So what if the average American Jane coughed up a little bit more to purchase her glad rags? Schmatta doesn’t get into this—it’s beyond the scope of the film—but it certainly left me wondering. Indeed, what if women were okay with spending a little more on everything for domestically produced goods? Could this resuscitate the American workforce and the labor movement? After all, what’s the point of looking stylish if your livelihood is in constant peril, your retirement an impossibility. We’ll all look dandy as our ships goes down. And then what? Shenzhen will not save us.

Tags: craftsmen, haute couture, nanette lepore, ready-to-wear, schammta, the garment center, Wal-Mart

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 30

When I first read about the pregnant Arizona woman whose hospital stopped performing VBACs, prompting her to plan to drive 350 miles to Phoenix to a hospital that would allow her to deliver her baby vaginally, I sympathized. I wouldn’t have made the same choice, but I sympathized.

Now, though, the Daily Beast reports that the woman painted her minivan to say “Page Hospital, enter my body without permission ... Sounds like rape to me.” She’s not alone in her sentiment. The mom at birthtruth.org has an essay titled “8 years later” in which she talks about her “grief” over her C-section and reprints a poem from a mom who discusses her “mourning” over hers. Birthcut.com is full of C-section horror stories. The Daily Beast’s Danielle Friedman writes: “Women who feel violated by the notion or experience of a C-section often feel misunderstood—family and friends can’t grasp why they can’t just get over it and move on.”

Well, count me among the clueless who just can’t understand. That might sound heartless, but I feel uniquely qualified to be judgmental. Many years ago, I was raped by a man who broke into my apartment and threatened to kill me. I have had three C-sections. I can tell you: One ain’t nothing like the other.

Rape is a horrible, disgusting act of violence. Perpetrators are seeking dominance and control over another human being. A C-section is a medical procedure performed by qualified doctors that can save the life of the mother and child involved. Is it traumatic? Yes. Is it violent? No.

The United States admittedly has an inordinately high number of C-sections. Some of them are unnecessary. There are probably doctors who steer women toward C-sections because it’s easier for them. (They can be scheduled! No 3 a.m. phone calls! No 12-hour shifts in the hospital waiting for babies to be born!) But doctors, even those with gruff bedside manners, are generally not trying to take away women’s freedoms. Hospitals are not refusing to do VBACs because they are operating under some Dark Ages mindset that women are silly little things whose opinions and concerns doesn’t matter. To perform VBACs safely—and their job is to keep you safe, no?—they have to have more staff on hand, which is expensive. Up to 40 percent of VBACs result in a C-section, and this article claims that “failed VBACs also accounted for the most expensive total birth experience.”

When I was pregnant with my oldest son, I planned on a normal delivery. When I went past my due date and the ultrasound tech laughed and told me that my baby was measuring at 10 pounds, I didn’t believe her. When the doctor, a female doctor at an all-female practice full of OB/GYNs, nurse midwives, and nurse practitioners, suggested that I have a C-section—“And we almost never recommend that women have C-sections,” she told me—I politely declined and said that I’d rather be induced. And two days later I was. And 10 hours after that, I was wheeled down to the OR for an emergency C-section. I’d come down with a fever, my son had gotten a fever, and that was that. And he weighed 10 pounds.

When I became pregnant with my middle son, my doctor gave me the choice between a C-section and a VBAC. After talking to her and looking at the risks—and there are risks with either method—I decided on the C-section. One of the risks with a VBAC is a ruptured uterus, and I didn’t want to hurt my chances of having more kids. When the third kid came around, I didn’t think twice. I’d had good outcomes with my previous births.

Yes, I was lucky. I had a choice. And I realize that not having that choice can be frustrating. But to compare it to rape is unfair to doctors, hospitals, and—yes—actual rape victims. There are still hospitals that perform VBACs. If yours doesn’t, you can find another one. You might have to find a different doctor, but in the end, it’s your choice. You are prioritizing your chosen method of delivery over your choice of doctor and place of delivery. The fact is, for all our hand-wringing over the different procedures, both are relatively safe. A C-section does have a longer recovery, and I’ll never wear a bikini again, but I’ve got three healthy boys and I remember all of their births just as fondly as if I’d pushed.

There is so much emphasis today put on couples having “birth plans” and making childbirth into a magical, memorable experience. When so much energy is spent crafting an experience, you’re bound to be disappointed if it doesn’t go exactly as planned. But childbirth is momentary. Parenting is forever. And one of the lessons of parenting is that things don’t always go according to plan.

Photograph of surgeons from below by Ryan McVay/Getty Images.

Tags: C-sections, caesareans, childbirth, Rape, VBACs

Hanna, I think you’re exactly right that Where The Wild Things Are is alternately too boring and too scary for kids. And as counterintuitive as it might sound to say about a beautifully shot movie featuring overly emotional, jeering, violent, hybrid beasts who bicker, build forts, and knock holes in trees, I think it just might be a failure of imagination as well.

If Wild Things existed in a cultural universe that was not saturated with twee, quirk, and thirtysomething ennui—if, in other words, it existed in a universe where the McSweeney’s aesthetic was fringe—this movie might be fresh. Even as it is, the decision to make the wild things neurotic, angsty, misbehaving, and nitpicky initially plays like a surprising choice. When we first come upon the monsters, arguing in the forest, it’s jarring that they sound like unhappy versions of the teenagers from Dazed & Confused. Whatever you imagined the wild things to be like when reading the original, this wasn’t it.

But Wild Things doesn’t exist in such a cultural universe. In fact, it exists in one that, in a few weeks, will deliver another movie to theaters based on a beloved children’s book about wild animals. Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, adapted from the Roald Dahl book, posits that walking, talking animals sound, think, and dress exactly like all the charmingly eccentric neurotics and big talkers that populate The Royal Tennenbaums (the fox of the title is a sloppier eater, at least). In other words, Spike Jonze and Wild Things screenwriter (and McSweeney's editor) Dave Eggers, Wes Anderson and his co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach, were given a chance to make movies about strange, weird creatures and chose instead to make movies about creatures who need Prozac. They took creatures that could be anything and decided they needed to be in therapy. They took creatures that could be from anywhere and transplanted them from a Woody Allen drama.

In fairness, I don’t know how you turn the teeth-gnashing, short-spoken brutes from the Sendak book into rich, deep characters worth paying attention to for an hour-and-a-half. But I refuse to believe that there is not some way to do so that does not foster the sneaking suspicion that, when the camera pans away, the wild things are debating the merits of organic produce and what happened to their misspent youths. Of course this movie doesn’t work for kids: It was written by adults who are so consumed with their own experiences they’ve forgotten how to use their imaginations to dream up something different.

Tags: dave eggers, movies, spike jonze, where the wild things are

From the same Chicago schools system that saw 16-year-old Derrion Albert bludgeoned to death, another troubling story:

It is a Chicago public school full of energy and spirit. It has about 800 girls, and 115 of them have something in common – something you might find disturbing. ...

All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High School. It's not a school for young mothers, it's a neighborhood school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention talk.

If you want to know why, the people closest to the situation say there's no simple explanation.

Chicago Public Schools says it does not track the overall number of teen moms in the district. But Robeson Principal Gerald Morrow knows the count at his school in Englewood ... To put it in perspective, their school pictures would fill roughly six pages of their high school year book.

Why is it happening at Robeson?

Good bloody question. We've all heard about the same thing happening in the white, working-class enclave of Glouscester, Mass. This state of affairs seems a far cry from the infamous Grease scene wherein the drive-in crowd plays telephone with the news that "Rizzo's got a bun in the oven." At Robeson, no one seems to care that over a hundred young women are now raising children alone (the write-up barely mentions any male co-conspirators or caretakers). Even the article's author seems careful to hedge on whether one "might" find the pregnancy epidemic "disturbing."

The expressed desire to minimize the absurdity of one in seven young women being with child raises the question of whether these minors should be in a high school created specifically for young mothers. Though there is a new teen parent program at the school—a former crack house is being converted to daycare for the dozens of babies with mothers still struggling through PE and prom—the school administrator interviewed didn't seem to think that differentiating between maidens and mothers is important. "We're not looking at them like 'Ooh, you made a mistake,'" he said. "We're looking at how we can get them to the next phase, how can we still get them thinking about graduation?"

That's a valid perspective—but is there an advantage to keeping young mothers segregated? The Washington Post printed two stories in the last year on local high schools dealing with young mothers (Ann Hulbert writes relatedly here). One school provides regular classes, day care, and too-good-to-be-true emotional and logistical support; the other was an embattled, full-time residential school for mothers. The latter institution was closed in June for abysmal academic performance. But at both, the normalizing of such pregnancies was a constant concern. "I'm amazed—and concerned—by the apparently nonchalant attitude both these girls and their mothers exhibit in front of teachers, administrators and hundreds of students each day," wrote (male) author Patrick Welsh, about the school where mothers and nonparents were integrated.

Why is kiddie integration so dangerous? At Freakonomics, Janet Currie has the grim statistics.

Teen moms are less likely than other women to attend or complete college, and their marriages are more likely to end in divorce; about 50 percent of women who married younger than age 18 are divorced after 10 years, compared to 20 percent of women who married at age 25 or older. In turn, single mothers have the highest poverty rates of any demographic group, and 60 percent of the U.S.-born children in mother-only families are poor.

In other words, it's bad to have a baby before becoming an adult. Policymakers, including educators, should take every opportunity, large or small, to emphasize that. You can't "catch" a baby like, say, H1N1, but integrating parents into high schools sends a message to young people that life before and after pregnancy is pretty much the same—which may wellhave contributed to the Bush-era increase in teen births (the nonsense abstinence thing is hurting, too). Bouncing pregnant teens (send the dads, too!) out of the mainline public school system is a way of countering this narrative—rather like the "uncle's farm" to which women of the Mad Men era were dispatched.

This may sound retrograde to a culture that's flippantly agitating for maternity leave for childless women, but what's more, emphasizing not only the seismic lifestyle changes that parenthood brings but ways to prevent pregnancy and care for kids seems more likely to stick in a learning environment that is specifically targeted to those aims.

So why does it seem taboo to say so?

Tags: Chicago schools, Grease, schools for teen mothers, teen mothers, teen pregnancy

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 0

Within the seething morass of second guesses and good intentions that is the mind of a parent, there shines one beckoning truth: that everything is your fault. When your kids are late, you're the driver. When they're hungry, you're without snacks. When they're quarantined in China, you put them on the plane. And when that single truth paralyzes all others—when you're down on your knees—what you need most is company. And this is why I'm glad that Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, as the New York Times Style section put it on Sunday, "write it all down."

I took Bad Mother with me to China this summer, traveling with three kids, my husband, and my own mother to adopt our fourth child. Punctuating my parenting low moments, such as the seat-belt-free ambulance ride to the unknown quarantine destination, and the helpful email from a friend detailing all the ways adopting another child would ruin the lives of the first three, were Waldman's lows. Amidst my highs were her highs. When I needed to get out of my own head, there was hers, waiting.

At home last week, busy ruining the lives of now not just three but four children, I read Manhood for Amateurs in the evenings, usually after the kind of ruthless bedtime you hope isn't what your kids most remember. Our lives remain fraught, achieving at best an uneasy, post-quake rhythm, and so it isn't Chabon's highs and lows that stick with me this time but his stories—stories that take those highs and lows of disruption and aftershock and smooth them out in a rosy rearview mirror. Disruption and aftershock, now catalogued and appreciated—lesson learned. His book was less a trip into his head than a trip into the future: With Waldman, I walked through the trees. With Chabon, I see the forest.

The NYT writer seems amused by their pairing. Here is a family truly leading the examined life, and look, they see it differently: Here is Michael Chabon planning parties and lauding the family musical efforts; here is Ayelet Waldman puncturing his balloon. But I'm grateful that Chabon and Waldman share the writerly impulse to tell, and a willingness to tell it differently. I look more deeply at my life when I'm reading about theirs. If I sometimes want to pinch Waldman and tell her to open her eyes—she's secretly proud of some of the "bad" things she's done—then I have to own my belief that tough moments make tough kids, and stop berating myself for every forgotten pick-up, sibling injustice, or terrifying midnight wake-up call at the hands of a still-Communist regime. If I want to bust Chabon for letting a 6-year-old watch Dr. Who, I have to hear my own envy talking. Quarantine? Not my fault. But the choice to go with a TV-as-babysitter episode of Dora the Explorer instead of putting aside the laundry to sit down and watch something a little more challenging together? That one's all mine.

Together, Waldman and Chabon take that single beckoning truth of mine and flip it over. No fault lies with one person alone, just as there is never only one telling of any story. There is the way it feels when it happens, there is the way it feels later, there are the things you tell and the things you leave behind. I've reached for many parenting memoirs in the last few months, by everyone from Heather Armstrong to Shirley Jackson. Above all, I'm looking to hear that this, too, shall pass. Chabon and Waldman have been the best possible kind of company: chatty, entertaining, undemanding, but leaving behind a pretty decent parting gift: perspective. Doubly so.

Tags: Ayelet Waldman, Bad Mother

First there were the TV interviews. Then the pseudo-folksy “Me and Mrs. Palin” article and the pistachio ad. Now our Levi is going for the ultimate exposure, posing in his skivvies for Playgirl. He’s the talentless teenager who won’t go away.

Whether he’s showing his johnston or not in the photo spread is still to be revealed. What is clear is that Levi, in his attempts to milk his sudden fame for all it’s worth, has fashioned himself into some kind of ironic representative of failed conservative ideals. (His ad for pistachios riffs about “using protection.”) The only thing is that the joke’s not funny anymore. It’s sad. Not because the realist message he’s awkwardly promoting isn’t true (there is, after all, a baby somewhere to prove it), but because he’s so talentless that his only path to success (monetary at least) is to sell himself as a déclassé example of bad choices. I can already taste the "Who could be abstinent with THIS body?" jokes that are going to accompany his nude photos.

I feel for the kid. His story reads like a bizarro version of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington: A young naïve man is thrust into the national political scene and gets in way over his head. Only in this rendition, incapable Levi doesn’t stand at a pulpit reforming politics for the better, but does the only thing he can—cashes in on his predicament through tabloid spectacle. Blatantly criticizing him for taking advantage of a situation he was dragged into to begin with seems a little like putting a dog in a room full of bacon-wavers and then getting mad when he bites. So I won’t neg him for stripping down, but I’m still going to secretly pray we’re spared a Living Levi reality show.

Tags: levi johnston, pistachio ad, playgirl

Thanks for the warning, Hanna, that the movie Where The Wild Things Are isn't for the kids the book was written for. All the more reason for me to hold to my determination to boycott. I don't care how whimsical and stirring critics keep saying it is. I hate the whole idea of this film, as I ranted about months ago when the trailer came out. Maurice Sendak's Max is a deliberately two-dimensional character in a short picture book. That's who Max should remain. I do not want a fleshed-out version with a divorced mom or a gloomy sister. Not even if—especially if—Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are pullling the new strings. And I certainly don't want the monsters Max meets on his imagined voyage to have back stories. The Sendak story is indelible as myth and archetype. Max represents the child who gets punished and scared and then comforts himself, as you say. The monsters are wild sketches of imagination. That is all he and they should be. When movies fill in the outlines of stories like these with details, they push out our own individually imagined renderings. I object!

Dana says in her review that the movie could have been a great 20-minute short. Maybe. Or maybe the two-minute trailer—which is pretty great, even I have to admit—was all we ever needed of a real Max on screen. It intrigues without overanswering. Unlike the movie.

Tags: dave eggers, maurice sendak, spike jonze, where the wild things are

Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress have released a report about women and work that manages both to be interesting and not at all surprising. The report perfectly captures Americans' contradictory attitudes about women working: We're fans of the money women bring in, but we don't show a strong willingness to make the necessary adjustments at home so that women's unpaid labor isn't as necessary. Women make up half the workforce, and mothers represent two-thirds of breadwinners, but women are still doing most of the housework. Changing that and making women's lives easier means rethinking gender roles in profound ways, and Americans don't seem quite ready to do that yet.

The report really captures the way Americans quickly embrace progress after it occurs, but hesitate when it comes to embracing scary new kinds of progress. That 75 percent of Americans feel positively about women's contributions to the economy demonstrates merely that 75 percent of Americans can absorb reality and draw conclusions about the obvious. I'm mostly alarmed about the other 25 percent. Who are these people? Do one in four Americans really not believe that a woman's money spends as good as a man's, or that women are as likely to be competent at their jobs? I have to assume that these are the same 25 percent of Americans who are out of touch with reality in general, the people who would vote for Bush again if they had a chance.

Women who want some relief from the second shift—the feminist term for all the unpaid work like housework and child care that still falls primarily on women's shoulders—will find this report a bit of a downer. Americans embraced women drawing paychecks because we had to; we needed the money. But even though moms across the nation are exhausted, relieving their burden would require men to pick up dishrags of their own free will more often, and so far there's no reason to think that will happen spontaneously. After all, while 55 percent of women claimed that women do most of the housework even when they had full-time jobs, only 28 percent of men agreed. The likeliest explanation for this disparity is men simply can't/won't see all the work that women do that makes their lives easier.

Instead, the standards of cleanliness for two-parent families have slipped, and the country at large fantasizes not about men doing more work, but about having a June Cleaver pop in to take care of it all. That's why 75 percent of Americans can support women working, while 65 percent can claim that the decreasing number of children who have a stay-at-home mother has been an overall negative for family life. In a nation where women don't have enough time and men don't have enough will, of course we're all going to end up fantasizing about having a fleet of undemanding housework fairies who can get all that work done for free.

Tags: economy, feminism, housework, women working

Manohla Dargis said the movie “startles and charms and delights.” The book is fantastic. It was cold and rainy all weekend. So I took my children, of course, and was startled to discover a heavy divorce drama that alternately terrified and bored. There are many sublime and original moments in the movie. But overall, the experience is like being trapped in an est session from the 1970’s, with lots of people yelling and haranguing one pitiful little boy, and family breakdown (and Jim Nelson) looming in the background. Needless to say, it was barely appropriate for kids.

The movie starts out promisingly. Max is alone and his sister won’t play with him, so he plays with the fence and a new snow fort he’s just built. He starts a snowball fight, gets hurt, and cries. It matters and it doesn’t matter. This is perfect. It’s not in the book, of course, but it preserves the spirit, by animating the extreme emotions of an ordinary day through a spirited child’s imagination.

But then Max sees his mother kiss her new boyfriend, and it’s all downhill from there. The movie becomes about a singular boy whose parents are getting divorced, whose mother is stressed out, and whose dad has disappeared. Instead of being 6 or 7, as he is in the book, Max is more like 10, which means he picks up on dark feelings but can’t really translate them.

The wild things are parallels to his broken family; it begins with them smashing their houses—get it? The Tony Soprano wild thing is his dad, and the women are parts of his mom, in a good and bad mood. The inscrutable owls—around which there is much confusion—are the mom’s new boyfriends. From there, the plot of Kramer vs. Kramer unfolds. His mom is unreliable, while his dad is angry and depends on him. Max feels both omnipotent and invisible.

It’s too specific to be allegory, so instead it's just plain boring, or terrifying. Unlike in the book, the adventure takes place outside, not in his room, which raises the possibility of true abandonment and danger. At one point the Tony Soprano wild thing (Carol) gets out of control, and almost bashes the boy’s head in. In the end Max leaves, neither triumphant nor enlightened. He learns, and admits that he has no power, but this realization only leaves him depleted and helpless.

The original Where the Wild Things Are picks up on a common theme in children’s books. Through their imagination, kids regain control of scary or confusing situations. They get to tell lies, master the monsters, and then go home to a hot supper. Not celluloid Max. In the final scene of the movie, his mom hugs him and gives him supper. But then she FALLS ASLEEP. She is still the overworked, harried divorcee she always was.

Of course my kids were not offended or annoyed. They mostly had no idea what was going on, because this was a tale told from a 60-year-old psychoanalyst’s point of view. “I’m bored.” “I’m scared.” That’s what my 6-year-old son kept repeating. The hipster in suede Pumas sitting next to us—the movie was intended more for him, after all—glared.

Tags: where the wild things are

Jessica, I, too, was touched by the death of Nan Roberston. I met her sometime in 1986 when I was a student at Columbia University J-school and she was a guest speaker in one of my classes. I remember thinking back then that she was a pistol, brimming as she was with energy and an uproarious sense of humor. And boy, was she blunt. It was four or five years after her harrowing experience with toxic shock syndrome and she recounted it for us in Technicolor detail, including telling us about passing out on the bathroom floor after loosing control of her bowels to violent diarrhea, if memory serves me. She wriggled those partially amputated fingers for us to see and bragged about learning to type with them. She spoke proudly of having won the Pulitzer Prize, and told us how she kept the citation on a small pedestal in her living room. She seemed to be the sort of gifted storyteller who could make you laugh and cry in one breath. She was about 60 years old back then, which seemed ancient to me, but I was awed by this older woman and remember thinking that I’d be happy if my future journalism career involved even a fraction of the adventures she'd experienced over the course of hers. Alas, it has not, but hopefully I still have enough time to try. Her example is a reminder that "lady journalists" can do serious work and still have fun living out loud.

Tags: death, nan robertson, new york times reporter, pulitzer prize winner