anechoicchamber:

There’s a few different ways to approach something as overdetermined as a gender binary. One of those angles is performance - female is considered to be a performed gender, while male is considered to be unperformed. This is oversimplified (and wrong) of course, but what’s interesting is the way in which more socially accepted forms of gender boundary crossing tend to maintain this axis of performance. Drag as the practice of men dressing up like women is an ancient practice, seen as odd by many but fundamentally socially legible because in performing a gender, a man must of course read as female. Similarly, when women decline gender performance, refusing to wear makeup or otherwise maintain feminine bodies, they are read as becoming-male. Some see these lines as in need of policing, but even most those who accept the practices read them through this axis of performativity.

Witness the largely successful attempts to feminize “meterosexuality” in the early 2000’s and the broadly conservative restorative movement in men’s fashion that we are currently living through. The dandyism of blogs like Put This On is an interesting counterpoint, but one that relies heavily on economic distancing as the third term between performativity and gender. What other kinds of third terms could there be in fashion?

This picture (I have no source for it, sadly) is of a girl approaching the masculine quality of sprezzatura, the studied carelessness and casual projection of power in dress that defines masculinity (and that I still regard as a hallmark of beauty). This is an emotional and aesthetic quality of clothing that implies an item has been lived in for thousands of hours. In attempting this quality this girl is approaching a double reversal of gender: a female performing masculinity. What would a male not performing femininity look like? There’s gotta be something on tumblr…

(see From a Left Wing’s post on David Beckham as a Lesbian Icon. One of my favorite pieces of hers, I re-read it on the occasion of Beckham’s retirement and have been thinking about it ever since.)

(Source: mkupperman, via imalreadyoverthis)

(Source: sinidentidades, via llevelling)

intheperiphery:

People enjoying a picnic in the middle of a highway during the 1973 oil crisis.

(via anechoicchamber)

bygoneamericana:

Traveling through rush hour traffic in downtown Los Angeles, 1949.

By Loomis Dean

Those street lamps aren’t still there, are they? Because I can’t recall a downtown boulevard with as many of this kind.

(Source: images.google.com, via lacmtalibrary)

postmodernism:

memoriastoica:

Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles, located at 5209 Wilshire Boulevard. Building is an art deco black and gold, single-story, terra-cotta sheathed building. Architects: Morgan, Walls & Clements. Date built: 1929.

Now it’s just called “The Deco Building” and it’s mainly used as an office space and for film/TV shoots. It has this funky front desk made out of a Douglas DC-8 jet turbine cowling:

Also notice that the E. Clem Wilson building, that now abuts the western side of this building, hasn’t been built yet. It would be completed about a year after this photograph was taken, during the summer of 1930.

(via memoriastoica)