Sleevehead: 2008 post of the year: Seeing the forest from the trees                                                          

2008 post of the year: Seeing the forest from the trees

    It appears the 2008 discussion thread of the year enjoyed a brief revival since my post last month. This generated additional discussion that, in turn, has led me to award the 2008 post of the year to Styleforum member DocHolliday. He writes:
I find the quality comparisons of high-end RTW interesting in that they focus on details that, for me, make little difference in terms of the actual wearing of a coat.
This is truly a gem of a post worth pinning up. It's pitch perfect because it remembers to focus on the fundamental task at hand, namely, the enjoyable, useful wearing of clothes in your everyday life. This insistence on the sum of the parts rather than the parts in isolation is a key message in my proposed book. It's probably the one question that really matters in the end - not the pick stitching, handpadded lapels or level of handwork. Yet these are the minutiae that often form the lifeblood of the clothing forums.

Honorable mention goes to a passage in Mike Albo's recent New York Times article on clothier Paul Stuart. Albo describes with comic accuracy the kind of men and women that until recently were the style fixtures of our time:
It has been just three months since the end of the Age of Excess, but I can already picture how that era’s fashion will be remembered. An image easily springs to mind: some D.J. jerk with neck tattoos and lines shaved in his eyebrows wearing $600 distressed jeans and a gold brocaded Ed Hardy hoodie, getting out of a white Hummer clutching a bottle of Cristal. Next to him is his girlfriend holding a Chihuahua and gargantuan Frappuccino, wearing bug-eyed sunglasses and expensive pink warm-ups with the word “tart” on the backside.
I have nothing against Ed Hardy, tattoos or Chihuahuas but this was too good not to laugh at.

And quote of the year goes to this LL post by member Camlots: "Tradition means to care for the fire, not to adore the ashes." Very pithy. It sounds like a line out of a Thomas Mann novel - and that's a very good thing in my opinion.

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