Warning: May trigger blindess via eye rolling
Mary Battiata, reporter, singer and DC resident, sat down last week and decided this was a good thing to send to the Huffington Post:

The Next Big Bling

Lately I've been wondering what an Obama White House might mean for the future of bling. For the fate of heavy gold, medallions, below-the-butt denim, the whole hip-hop gangsta fashion habit. What if January 20, 2009 turned out to be not just a cultural and clothing pivot point for adults -- a return to the minimalism of sleek, 60s-era sharkskin suits, the containment of golf-ball sized Barbara Bush costume pearls -- but a watershed fashion moment for teenaged boys? Picture it. On Inauguration Day next year, thousands and thousands of young men and boys from city street corners to suburbs, look up from their X-Boxes and catch a glimpse of the impeccable President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama climbing the steps of the Capitol and suddenly feel... unfashionable. Out of it. Old. What if they are overcome by the same stunned, something's-happening-here feeling that teenagers in the early 60s, their closets full of sock hop regalia, felt when they first laid eyes on The Beatles in 1964, on the nationally televised Ed Sullivan Show. For adults, this kind of moment is, at most, something to take note of. To a teenager, it's a gale force warning of imminent social tsunami, an urgent prod from the eyeballs and the amygdala that to everything there is a season, and now is the time to change, change, change. Ask not what you can do for your closet, but what your closet, if ignored, can do to you.

This, by the way, is Mary Battiata.


Maybe Michelle can help this refugee from the mosh pit at Hee Haw and her mindless embrace of urban redneck chic, as it seems to have made her patronizing asshole. Wow, it is fun to write that way.

Let me also digress here and say hip hop fashion is fuck more than baggy pants - which is still a good look, depending on the wearer. I suspect Mary's problem might be a bit of "hey you kids who are that age where'd you look good wearing a sack, get off my lawn!"

Anyway, Mary looks at the recent police state tactics against people of color in DC...and sees the real problem is those young men with their criminal outfits.

This week in the nation's capital, Washington Post's Metro columnist Courtland Milloy wrote about the street scene in the mostly African-American, inner-city neighborhood of Trinidad, where D.C. police have set up a Balkans-style traffic checkpoints in and out of the neighborhood in an effort to stem a recent spate of drug related murders. Sitting on the front porch of 67-year-old Willie Dorn, a retired corrections officer, Milloy noted the antics of a group of teenaged boys "shirtless, pants below their behinds," who, as Milloy and Dorn watched, launched a plastic bottle at a passing scooter, nearly causing an accident. "Maybe a President Obama could help restore some pride in the black community," Dorn said.

Again, shirtless in low pants is more about having 17 year old abs during an east coast heat wave than your place in the moral fabric in society.

The stupid. It burns.

The relationship of clothing to behavior is real. Clothes may not "make the man," but they shape the mind in ways large and small. Ask any stay-at-home parent, freelance writer or invalid who has spent one too many days in baggy sweats and stained T-shirts...The well-known Rx for this condition is a shower and a change into grown-up clothes, the kind with seams that may pinch the body, but can help focus the head.

Again, this is Mary B.


Slouching around in a slip and an unbuttoned Opry shirt. I guess alt country means sloppy slutty. Ding, see what I did there?

Until Barack Obama came along, the most visible pop culture exemplar of 1960s suit-and-tie style was the tightly-wound Rev. Louis Farrakhan. But Farrakhan, for all his former high visibility, was never mainstream. It's no surprise that he failed to inspire a national craze for slim suits and buffed oxfords...Barack Obama is the suit next time.

Yeahhh, because popular African Americans are just about the most unfashionable, underdressed people in our nation. A few random comparisons.





Clearly, the problem is obvious.

For an extra dose of stupid, check out the comments: "There you are, in your sagging pants and wifebeater, and there's your President, looking cool in a suit...now that the President is a black self-made man, that might cast seeds of beneficial doubt in your mind: perhaps there is something to dressing classy, speaking well and studying beyond 'acting white' and 'not keeping it real.'"