Dinner, drinks, and the DMV

Fashionista Friends

What a (mostly) fun week this has been! If you read my last post, Visiting the House of Igigi and a Contest, then you know I had dinner plans with plus-size fashion industry leaders, Lisa and Jim Dolan from Lee Lee’s Valise, and Yuliya and her right-arm, Ozlem from Lee Lee’s Valise. We ate a fabulous meal at Print restaurant, which is midtown on Manhattan’s west side.

As an aside at this point I want to say that I have received no compensation for telling you that I love eating at Print and I highly recommend it!

Lisa and Yuliya are focused even though they appear blurry.

I consider myself very fortunate to have been a part of a wonderful evening of conversation. Professionaly, it is always a pleasure to spend time with business owners who care about the consumer. As a member of the plus size fashion industry, it is especially delightful to spend time with those who are dedictated to providing their customers with quality apparel, and an exceptional shopping experience.

When I left the restaurant I found that my car had been towed, even thought I had parked in a legal spot. New York City is a very exciting place and sometimes our Department of Motor Vehicles gets a bit over eager. I sat in the DMV impound lot from 1:00 a.m. until my husband could take a 6:00 a.m. train from Westchester to come into the city. He arrived at the lot a little after 7:00 a.m. Thankfully, he was very sweet about the whole thing even though he had to take a day off and make an unexpected early morning trip to NYC. I thanked him for rescuing me and he took me to breakfast. By the way, if you are married you might want to check and see if both your names are on the registration. It will affect who the car gets released to if ever impounded. I learned the hard way.

Strike a pose!

Yesterday I got back to having fun when, Yuliya Raquel and her business associate Ozlem Arpaci from Igigi visited Lee Lee’s Valise for the first time. Our day together was fun and educational. We discussed the plus size industry from our different backgrounds and business models.

After lunch, Lisa and I had the opportunity to give a very appreciative Yuliya some honest feedback about her clothes – giving her detailed information about what we like and what we felt could be improved.

I was even asked to model some of Igigi’s items so that Lisa and Yuliya could check how different cuts and styles worked on my body type.

My Igigi friends fly back home to San Francisco early Sunday morning and I will really miss them. Thank you ladies for a lively visit.

Interview: Kathryn Finney, The Budget Fashionista

Quick Update to this Post to anyone reading this in a feed reader like Google Reader, or Bloglines, etc. I just realized today that the video portion of the interview doesn’t appear in your browser. Please click through and visit my website. It’s my very first on-camera interview and I am really happy about it. I think it went pretty well!
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Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Kathryn Finney. You may be familiar with her website, The Budget Fashionista, and maybe you have her books on bargain shopping. We had a really good time talking about maintaining your wardrobe on a budget and still keeping it fresh. Kathryn is delightful to spend time with as well as being informative.

I found out minutes before the interview that both our grandmother’s were seamstresses. There are some very practical words of wisdom that you learn from women who made their own clothes during the depression.

Kathryn gives sensible advice and I love that she doesn’t tell you what to buy, except for expressing her love of statement necklaces! I was also very pleased that our conversation included some encouragement for full figured women to break out of the black/brown box and wear some bright colors and bold patterns.

I liked everything she had to say: look for sales, negotiate for a better price at retail stores, ask for tailoring.

I heard on my local news a couple of years ago that if a store offers free alterations for men then they are required to offer the same for women. Kathryn talked about the importance of ironing and hanging your clothes (she said this off camera) to maintain freshness. She also suggested that you can keep your wardrobe looking spot on with seasonal trends by buying statement pieces and accessories.

Do you have any follow up questions for The Budget Fashionista? Post your comments and share your insights into budget shopping.

Disclosure: The interview was sponsored by Tide To Go and Kathryn handed me one of the stain preventing sticks as I was leaving the studio. I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t tell you anything about it, but now you know that I have one. This interview was not conducted just so I could get a free stain stick.

Skinny Jeans may cause nerve damage and other wonders from the World Wide Web

Some things I found this week on the web that I really enjoyed. Have a great weekend!

JoGeek I wish you could have met my seamstress grandmother! She would have grabbed you right around the middle, said “Oy! So zaftig! You should have many babies!” And then she would have poured you a shot of scotch while spending hours looking at your sewing patterns.

Harriet, I love you. I have your book Feed Me!: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image, and as soon as I finish it I will post something about it but I can tell you right now that you are brilliant because you are so full of love and outrage and calm and motherly goodness that every time I read you, I feel like I’ve been hugged. So thank you.

Seriously, Deb is hard core. She takes wrestle naps with Mrs. Wilson next door (you always suspected, didn’t you?) and is pretty much a genius. But I don’t want you to know because she is my precious and I refuse to share. So don’t buy her book called 5 Ways to {blank} Your Blog, which is all about your blog, how to write one, how to get people to read it, how to make purple frogs rain from the skies…ok maybe not that last one. That one is all me.

Edited Saturday morning before coffee: OK I just realized I put in the wrong bathing suit link. Whoops! Here is the one I covet! And for $24? Well…come to mama!

Do we really need another greeting card day?

I just found out that this morning is Administrative Professionals Day. I have been an administrative professional for about 20 years and I feel as moved by this day as I did about International Women’s Day, which is to say, not at all.

March 8th was International Women’s Day (IWD). Did you have as much fun as I did? All those glamorous parties honoring the achievements of famous women, the dancing in the streets, the costumes, the awards shows, the televised parade with high school marching bands and (not safe for work) giant vulva* floats in a parade down Fifth Avenue? Sigh…no, I must have been imagining it all because this day passes in the United States without so much as a whisper of mention except for a post on BlogHer, which is really kind of expected considering it’s where all the cool blogger chicks hang out.

Naturally suspicious and always looking for the catch, I started poking around the IWD website. It is a fairly simple website with no social media tools, no Web 2.0 in site, and after spending about an hour clicking around I have some idea who they are, but no clue about what they do. There is a place to upload your local International Women’s Day events to an International Women’s Day calendar with links to events being hosted by organizations around the world, seemingly of many different ideological viewpoints. There are articles about women’s issues, that come to the website via a Reuters feed if the article includes the keyword “women.”

The one mention of organizational background on the the IWD website is this:

The International Women’s Day website provides a free service to women around the world wanting to share and promote their IWD activity, videos, opinions and ideas. Please feel free to submit gender-related items for the site that you consider relevant and useful.

This service is provided by Aurora, a company that connects business and professional women and actively supports the promotion of employer brands and career opportunities in progressive organizations. Aurora believes in equality, access to information and networks, and choice. Dr. Glenda Stone who leads Aurora, has worked in various gender equality roles for almost two decades. Amongst other gender-related products and services, Aurora runs the annual Where Women Want to Work Top 50.

A quick Google search supplied some background information on Dr. Stone. She has held several public positions both in in her home country of Australia, and in England where she now lives. And according to this Rueters article, “Glenda Stone is chief executive and founder of Aurora, a recruitment advertising and market intelligence company, and co-chairs the UK Women’s Enterprise Taskforce established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.” And in this article in the U.K. paper the Telegraph, she is quoted saying; Women should focus less on their “favourite red handbag” and more on “making money”, says the head of the Government’s new women’s enterprise taskforce.

Aurora seems to be several things: a) a job search website based in the U.K., and b) a marketing firm with lots of famous brand name clients. They have put up the IWD website, which seems to be merely a place for users with a free account to read articles (without source information) that are imported with the Reuters feed and they also seem to be the people acting as webmaster for the site.

I find this website, which was supposedly created for women to communicate with each other, completely lacking in any real means to communicate, and to be merely a front for an employment agency doing some data mining and gathering e-mail addresses. Oh wait, there is a “Networking” section where you can follow IWD on an inactive Twitter account, or join a Facebook group. Of course, you can also network with IWD on Linked-In and I guess share your resume with Aurora while you are at it? Puh-leeze.

The first thing I noticed on every page are the very large banner ads with links to corporate “sponsors.” I have to wonder what that money funded. Micro Loans? Women dying from a lack of proper obstetric care? Ending violence against women? It certainly doesn’t seem so.

Overall, I’m not impressed with this website and the more time I spent clicking around, the more upset I felt. There is nothing I find more irksome than bandying about “facts” without any links to corresponding research. Such as the fun “gender facts” about women. Did you know that females in developing countries on average carry 20 litres of water per day over 6 km? And because I am the kind of woman who asks these questions, I want to know why they don’t provide any kind of backup to this claim. Which developing countries specifically, and how did they gather their data? I’m not saying that it might not be true, but I like to have some backup.

They also, sadly, include misinformation since retracted by its author, Dr. Louann Brizendine (clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco) in her book, “The Female Brain.” Dr. Brizendine asserted that women use 20,000 words a day and men only 7,000, which I always thought was a bunch of hooey and Mark Liberman totally agrees with me. Men are stoic and silent, women are gabby, blah blah blah. Same old misogyny. It’s total bullshit, another example of contagious misinformation. The truth is that men and women use about the same amount of words every day. By the way, the same is true about the Inuits and snow – they have about the same number of words for snow as anyone else.

Among the many accomplishments of this day that no one has heard of, are thousands of women marching down the freezing cold streets of Washington, D.C. on March 8, 1908. Seriously gals, if we’re so advanced, can’t we just move this whole thing to Cancun?

So why do this at all? Why have a website for a day celebrating women? Why should there even be a day singled out specifically to celebrate women?

Maybe I am too critical, and I should be looking instead at the fact that this day is recognized all over the world and that the exception is the United States. But honestly, all over the world this day is celebrated as a second Valentine’s Day. I don’t know that the lack of interest in the U.S. has to do with a patriarchy as much as the possibility that American women don’t like to be conned and this just feels like a con. See little lady, we gave you an entire freaking day so why don’t you just stop whining all ready?

For 20 years I have seen women with business degrees hired as new employees to be admins because “there would be room for advancement,” only to never advance, and men with equal degrees, ability, etc., get hired as a new employee to be an Associate Vice President. For years I have seen executives promote men and have their female assistants fetch them coffee. For years I have seen women like me, do the work their bosses give them which often includes writing the reports that their boss (both male and female) take to the Board Room with their own name on the front page. Injustice and inequality around the world and in the workplace won’t go away just by having a once-a-year, socially acceptable spa day.

Author’s Notes

:
Mark Liberman is Trustee Professor of Phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, on whom I have a huge geeky linguistic crush.

*Thanks for the Vaginacycle created by Finnish artist Mimosa Pale.