A few years ago; I graduated with an arts degree, a humongous student loan and no knowledge whatsoever about economics. I realized I might want to learn something about money, seeing as how I’d like to have some. And so I began to research. I read books and articles and discovered it was much more fascinating than I’d imagined. Since then I have kept up with economic literature and my own situation has improved moderately (I’m still an artist after all).

It’s because of the knowledge I picked up that the economic crisis of last year did not come as a shock to me. I noticed that while the price of housing, good and services were ballooning and corporate profit was going stratospheric; the wages of middle-class people had stagnated. Not only that, full-time jobs with benefits were slowly being replaced by freelance and contractual work. You don’t need to be a math genius to realize that the numbers weren’t adding up. The past year has been a very interesting time. And I can use the word “interesting” instead of “tragic” because I personally did not lose any money.

I’ve learned that when it comes to money; knowledge truly is power. Women and artists are especially vulnerable to poverty because of societal myths that we shouldn’t or wouldn’t be interested in money. Both women and artists often work for altruistic reasons thus aren’t adequately compensated. With the money we do earn; we don’t know always know how to invest it wisely.

The myth that artists are terrible with money and exist outside of the mainstream economy, has, unfortunately, self-perpetuated to the detriment of artists and culture. The modernist ideal of the Artist who works solely for self-expression and not for personal gain has only served to keep working artists poor and lower the quality of our creative production. Even commercial artists bear the brunt of this stigma; with low pay, poor working conditions, and lack of benefits. The truth is that the arts generate a lot of revenue for this country and artists should be empowered to ask for adequate compensation for what we do.

North American women have come a long way in gaining education and career options. However, we still have financial obstacles to deal with. Women still make less money than men. Our work culture has a problem with pink collar ghetto-ization; where industries that women gravitate to (like teaching and publishing) pay employees less than more male-dominated industries. Women who have children often take a break from their careers, and if they divorce their finances take another beating.

Statistics, if one would bother to look them up, support these points (since I’m an unpaid blogger not a journalist you’ll have to look them up yourself at StatsCan). Beyond facts, a psychological gender divide exists when it comes to wealth. There’s a strange paradox in our culture. Women are expected to covet luxury and look like a million bucks, but we’re not expected to aggressively make and invest money. In fact, a willful ignorance is encouraged. And this ignorance is just as harmful as a Madoff investment.

If you’ve made it this far and would like some advice on personal finance, here are my recommendations. There’s loads of money books on the market, but most of them are repetitive. Borrow a copy of “The Wealthy Barber” from your library. Its short, its Canadian, and its easy to read. Read the business section of the paper occasionally, check out The Economist magazine for a global perspective, and two blogs I like are Get Rich Slowly and Mint.

 

I, Miss Adele Garamond, come from a long line of fake French ladies. You’ve heard of Miss Piggy, je ne crois pas? I owe much to my mentoress. Therefore, I know a little something about the proper way to be faux French. And you, Miss…. Authoress of Entre Nous, are not it.

Americans invented everything, and I do believe they created the idea of being fabulously French. The Francais were going along their daily business of eating croissants and drinking café au lait when suddenly, the Americans dropped by and conceived of this mythological art of être Francais.

I myself practice this singularly American art form. I wear stripey shirts, scarves and hats often. I watch French cinema and complain of ennui. I eat baguettes & croissants whenever I can. I have been known to dance the can-can in my apartment. When upset I yell “Sacré-coeur!” Sometimes I hear voices and am compelled to lead the French peasantry to war against the English.

There are a number of books and movies on the subject of becoming French; Le Divorce by Diane Johnson; French Women don’t get Fat by Mireille Guiliano; An American in Paris; A Year in Provence, the list goes on. In my recent browsing through bookstore display tables; I found a new addition to the genre called Entre Nous by Debra Ollivier. As I’m always seeking to refine my air of pretention; I picked it up.

But what I found was not savoir faire. No. It is a book of rules on how one should compose oneself to fit a narrow definition of a French woman. And it is all wrong!

1. No one should ever follow a list of rules of how to act. I highly doubt a French woman would.

2. French women share habits, culture, traditions, etc.; but they do not all share the same personality.

3. If she did have this personality Mrs. Ollivier describes; I would find her dreadfully dull.

Luckily I’ve also done a lot of research on how to be Francais and can save my readers the trouble. Being French, I’ve discovered; is no different from being North American. She suffers the same problems of insecurity and flakey men, only with better wine and cheese. Rather than aspire to become a genuine frog, be Fake French. And for that there is only one rule; “Always treat yourself like you are a beautiful woman, regardless of your age, weight, and looks.”

Coco Chanel revolutionized women’s wear by creating simple, elegant, and comfortable designs. She is probably the most important woman in fashion history, and certainly invented the concept of 20th century French chic. The new film about her early life, “Coco Avant Chanel” is a marriage of two of my favourite things; French film and fashion. Thus I had high hopes for the film, and was a little let down as it focused most on the two loves of her young life and less on her fashion business. The film briefly touches on her childhood and fast forwards into her young adulthood working as a seamstress. She meets and becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, Etienne Balsan, and thereby enters into a higher social circle. Finding herself in this situation, Coco decides to assert herself with tools of wit and an iconoclastic fashion sense.

Audrey Tatou portrays a formidable, aloof, and completely individual woman who spends nearly the entire film in a handful of recycled, drab, shapeless outfits. We watch her create outfits out of basic materials, that are simple and comfortable rather than imitate the Aristocrats she finds herself amongst. It is not until the very end of the film that she wears the elegant clothes that have become her namesake. I was a little befuddled by the costume direction; wouldn’t Chanel have sewn herself slightly nicer outfits? I suppose they wanted to emphasize her poorhouse roots contrasted with the opulence of early 20th century dress, and perhaps to over-make the point that this was her big thumb-to-nose to the social circles that wouldn’t quite accept her. Her style instincts are revealed as a rebellion from status, class, and gender roles.

It’s a funny thing about period pieces. The lacy corseted gowns, the lovely manors and the gentlemanly romantic leads all distract the modern female audience from the fact that if you were living in that era without money and a good husband, your life was shit. “Coco Avant Chanel: doesn’t shy away from revealing how suffocating the gender roles are; literally as Coco, panting, rips off her corset in frustration.

Indeed, much of the movie is uncomfortable to watch as she lives as a mistress with no freedom to work or do much of anything. She’s completely dependant on Balsan for her living arrangements and even the social connections she seems to both desire and despise. I felt a sense of claustrophobia and wanted to fast forward to scenes of her sewing and snipping her empire into shape. We do get a taste of that at the end, but not quite enough to wash that taste of subjugation out. Perhaps I would have preferred a movie about Coco Pendant Chanel.

“Everyday is Halloween” by Ministry was the anthem of my teenagehood.  Yep; I’m a recovering goth.  Like any 12 step program; you can never consider yourself completely cured.  My problem was not so much a devotion to the undead but a love for dramatic theatrical costumes, and goth bars were one of the few places I could get away with wearing vintage items, parts of costumes saved from ballet recitals, jewelry from hardware stores and stuff from Queen West shops all in one outfit.  If you draw on thick black eyeliner and tell people you’re goth, no one bats an eye that you’re wearing a tutu at 1 pm on a weekday, to a coffee shop.

Some of you may assume, given my obsession with fashion, that I spend a lot of money on clothes.  Truth is I run a very tight ship when it comes to my staple everyday wardrobe.  Where I fall apart is a lust for unique, bizarre, costume-y, statement pieces.  Recently I spent $70 on a fedora.  It was a beautiful hat with a Greta Garbo-esque peek-a-boo brim, and sized to fit my exceptionally small head.  (Proper fit is another of my obsessions, perhaps another column?) Unfortunately, I have very few occasions to wear a fedora, particularly one that looks like I stepped out of a noir film.

The problem when I face my closet is that I either have jeans and t-shirts, or fedoras, polka dot dresses, platform architectural shoe things, snake-skin pants and random whimsical items.  For all my blather about sustainability, personally I have to stay away from thrift stores because I will buy things that make me laugh.  Kensington Market, H&M, Queen West are also danger zones.  I now have to add Bebe to the list when they stocked their fall shelves with burlesque inspired fashion; including, (and run over and get one if they still have it), a skirt made of ostrich feathers!  Drool.

I had a crisis recently where I was searching for a pair of elegant black stilettos to wear with a sweater dress.  Shoe box after shoe box revealed a literal tour through the decades of shoe fashion from forties platforms to disco shoes to nineties combats but I could not find a simple pair of black heels. Between buying basics for work and my drama fetish, I have a dearth of simple, elegant, quality clothes and shoes.

I can never give up costumes altogether, I love the theatrics too much, but I’m beginning to dislike the gimmickry.   When you adhere too much to a look, particularly one that is based on a specific character, you can wind up looking like a silly caricature. It becomes less about who you are then who you want to be.  Take the example of so many Hollywood famewhores; overdoing it just makes them look like they have too much to prove. I’ve also found out the hard way that novelty items are cheaply made and totally not comfortable.

I didn’t buy the $100 dollar ostrich skirt (even though, a hundred bones is totally reasonable for a skirt made of bird feathers). I won that battle; but I have to take it day by day.  I just have to remind myself that I’m saving up for a pair of well-made, quality shoes that I can wear for years.

I had a simple goal today: buy some boxes to put my junk in and look for a good Italian cookbook. I had bought Giada de Laurentiss’ Everyday Italian and was really disappointed by the gruel-like dishes that resulted. My itinerary included stops at The Cookbook Store in Yorkville and Solutions (organizing solutions for small spaces) at Yonge & Eglinton. Of course, along the way I got distracted and spent the good part of an hour wafting around the new Anthropologie, indulging in their French Provincial/Gilmour Grls/East Coast Bohemian fantasy of clothes, accessories and décor.

I stopped at a display consisting of a wireframe dressed in a retro apron, surrounded by cupcake cookbooks, and if you are too lazy; candles that smell like you’ve been baking all day. I sniffed the candles for five minutes, imagining an apartment smelling of sickly sweet vanilla and cinnamon. I was trying to decide if it was a yummy or puerile scent, and whether it was worth $16 when I heard two women snorting with laughter at another apron display. One was standing in an apron and giggling while the other yelled, “So you’re gonna wear this apron all Mad Men style while… cooking a roast for your husband? HAHA”

OK. So the fantasy isn’t entirely impervious to reality. And it got me thinking of the importance of lifestyle, and the business of marketing lifestyle. My interest in style started with fashion and graphic design, and is slowly evolving to include my apartment, cooking, and entertaining. Most women view their apartments as extensions of themselves; I was a little late to the party because I’m just not domesticated. My philosophy of lifestyle was always that one’s apartment should be cheap enough to afford a social life outside of one’s apartment.

But as I mature, I’m appreciating the importance of a well-maintained home and life. Your day to day routines, the space that you live in, and what you eat make up who you are. But what to do if you don’t have the Martha Stewart Living budget and consumerist zeal? Until it folded, Domino magazine filled the gap between student dorm and four bedroom house. Currently; I turn to Etsy and blogs like Apartment Therapy and Bohemian Hellhole for inspiration on fashionable, DIY, crafty and affordable approaches to living. You could call this trend Lifestyle Design.

An observation from the Helvetica film I recently reviewed applies to the trend of Lifestyle Design: a designer was talking about young people using the web and choosing a font to represent themselves, whereas twenty years ago, fonts had little significance to the average person. In the same way; there is a trend towards self-representation in various media that was once the domain of the “expert”. Household management; cooking, cleaning, and decorating has morphed from the fifties good housewife model to our postmodern mélange of influences and philosophy of sustainability.

But I sometimes wonder, after I’ve spent $29.95 on a cookbook and $30 on ingredients and an evening chopping and sautéing something only barely edible; is this emphasis on fine living just another time and money sinkhole and exercise in feeling inadequate? Aren’t there better things I could do with my time? Like… running for office or writing the Great Canadian Novel? Or maybe I should be re-beading vintage lamps, knitting ironic scarves, cooking organic pot roasts AND running for office WHILE writing the Great Canadian Novel?

When I start having these thoughts I remember something I love about Toronto. We have excellent take-out, and it gets here as fast as it takes to download a movie.

The heavy, highly legible, sans serif font that dominates much of our written world is the subject of Helvetica, the documentary. Interviews with legends of type design make the film a must-see for any type aficionado, and accessible for the uninitiate.

Type design is the arcane world that exists within the flashier, fun time Graphic Design. The film begins with older designers talking about their craft; some of whom have been designing type since it was carved in metal, one letter a day. The premise of the film is that by studying the minutiae, one can begin to see the patterns within the larger picture. Helvetica was more than just a font; it embodied the philosophies of the time by straining to be as legible and evenly weighted as possible. It emerged out of the nationalist, post-war European philosophies of order and democracy of which clear communication is a cornerstone.

The font has been so successful, indeed, replicated so many times on every surface that it has become banal. Younger rebellious designers like David Carson (designer of the defunct Raygun magazine) and Paula Scher talked about how much of their work was a reaction against Helvetica and the minimalist ad design of the 60s. At this point I felt that the documentary lost its footing. Yes; album covers, niche magazines and advertisements became more experimental but they never really penetrated dominate forms of communication like signage and mainstream publications. The documentary only touched on screen fonts; which is fast surpassing all forms of written communication. I would have been interested to hear about the relationship between Helvetica and Arial; the screen font based on Helvetica that is always the default on PCs.

Helvetica is modernism expressed; and one of the final frames of the film was a peeling sign of its letters. Modernism has become old, sometimes passé, and sometimes ironically retro like the tongue-in-cheek American Apparel brand.

Personally, I’ve always dreaded working with Helvetica as it is so ubiquitous. I now have a new appreciation for the font and am excited to try using it in design. If I have to remember one line from the movie it’s from Manuel Krebs, “If you are not a good designer; just use Helvetica Bold, in one size. It looks good.”

Every new, independent designer needs a cheap, easy place to display and sell their fashions. This summer, Portobello East Market opened in Toronto; an expansion from Vancouver’s Portobello West Market. The Portobello Market began in 2006 and was inspired by the artisan markets of Europe. The idea is to showcase unique and local designers and artists. It runs on the last Sunday of every month.

I attended the August 30th market held at the Distillery. The event gave me a nice excuse to visit the strange, lovely and somewhat cheesy Adult Art Playground that is the Distillery District. After brunch we headed to the market where we sifted through a small but vibrant selection of clothes and accessories. The market is new and therefore did not have a lot of vendors, but that allowed me to really look through the booths I liked. My only complaint was the $5 admission to shop, which apparently was everyone’s complaint as the website proudly states that admission is now FREE.

I only bought a $15 hairband, but lusted after some corset style leather belts by Susana Erazo that ranged between $60 to $200; some draped orientalist pieces by Desperately Different, and trinket jewelry by Curious Oddities. Rather than buying; I took home cards to bookmark their websites. And I wonder, does the ease of online shopping reduce the urgency to buy at the market? Regardless; it still worked as excellent advertisement for indie designers I might never have heard of.

If you want to be able to shop indie fashion markets any day of the week, I love the Blue Banana in Kensington Market. It’s like a one-stop, Wal-mart of sustainable, ethical, indie crafts and fashion. The focus is more on ethical goods than up and coming local fashion; and the fact that it is open year round makes it less exciting.

Portobello East fashion and art market is open July to December on the third floor of the Borroughes Building, 639 Queen Street West, on the last Sunday of the month from 12pm to 6pm.

Blue Banana Market is open Monday to Friday and  located at 250 Augusta Avenue, which is one block south of College in the heart of Kensington Market.

My style changes with my mood, and lately I’ve been rocking a look I like to call “Balkan Gypsy Refugee,” a hodgepodge of intense sandals, ethnic prints and the harem pant.  I first met, and got obsessed, with harem pants in Argentina.  At first I was highly skeptical; I’m 5”2, and old enough to remember MC Hammer.  But when you’re in Rome… the pants were so soft, and ideally suited to the temperamental spring of Buenos Aires that was tropical one minute and cool the next.  They evoked gypsies and oriental caravans… and they were cute paired with thong booties.   I also thought they were emblematic of Buenos Aires; which upped their appeal immensely, and made me feel like some sort of globe-trotting, vino-drinking, Borges quoting asshole.  To quote Jezebel.com;

Look, you may think you look like the heir to a Swiss chocolate fortune who's going dancing in Ibiza or needs a cover-up over your bikini when driving your moped from one side of Mallorca to the other when you wear these. But actually, you look like you've shit yourself and need to change your diaper. Trust. http://jezebel.com/5273953/5-hideous-things-urban-outfitters-wants-you-to-wear-this-summer/gallery/

Imagine my disappointment when warm weather hit Toronto and I realized that harem pants were not unique to Argentina.  They’re just a season ahead of us due to that planet rotation thing and this was actually a global trend.

As with music; fashion has found an ideal medium with the internet to propagate and proliferate amongst street style and personal style blogs and websites.  The time between the germination of a trend and its appearance in mall stores has shrunk incredibly as designers have access to style photography from all over the world, and a savvier consumer who is more creative and willing to try something new every season.  Rather than a couple major trends per season, we now have several micro-trends that run in and out of each other.  Its all very meta.

When and where did the current harem pant trend start?  It may indeed have started in Argentina.  In 2001 their economy crashed on a scale much like the US is experiencing right now.  As importing clothes became rather expensive; a homegrown fashion industry developed.  And as prices fell in Argentina and the peso devalued; Europeans and Australians flocked to Argentina to take advantage.  Buenos Aires became the Prague of the 2000s, and cool-hunting tourists certainly borrowed some ideas to take home.

If you don’t have the money to travel because you spent it all on sky-high studded platform shoes; you can always check out street style and personal style blogs from all over the world to give you an idea of what fashionistas are wearing from Berlin to Beijing.  A huge part of the new rapid-fire dissemination of trends is the fashion blogging culture that started a few years ago.  Originally begun as a quirky hobby, street style blogs are now a respected fashion medium.  The Sartorialist, one of the original and best street style photographers, became a regular contributor to Vogue’s Style.com.

What makes blogging a perfect medium for fashion is that it works as a digital sketch/scrapbook to immediately record images and thoughts about fashion, and share instantly.  My favorite street blogs include Copenhagen Street Style (Copenhagen), Hel Looks (Helsinki), Hi Styley (Los Angeles), The Style Scout (London), Stil in Berlin (Berlin), The Streets Walker (Tel Aviv) and Garance Dore (Paris/New York).

For those who don’t want to wait for a photographer to find them on the street looking awesome and would rather use a tripod and auto-timer, the personal style blog is an option.  Personal style blogs are more myopic, focusing on the obsessions of the author.  Some of the better sites include Lady Melbourne (Melbourne), Le Blog de Betty (Paris), and What I Wore, (New York).  Personal style documentation works best when pooled with a community of fashionistas.  I check the flickr pool Wardrobe Remix (North American based) regularly.  Anyone can upload photos of their outfits; its strength is that it celebrates all styles, budgets, and body types, without editing by a third eye to decide who is or isn’t attractive.  The emphasis is on mixing stuff you already own with store-bought, handmade, indie and vintage items in interesting ways.

Like Argentina after 2001, North America will be experiencing our own style evolution as the focus shifts from luxury brands and status fashion to creative, DIY, ethical fashion.  The kind of fashion that nerd girls have been wearing all along.