All of which is a long way of saying that, no matter what you think about the novels and how they depict violence against women and the way those women recover, I don’t think creating a clothing line inspired by Lisbeth Salander glamorizes either the terrible things that are done to her or the things she does in response to them. That’s what Natalie Karneef is arguing in a post that’s produced a moderate buzz, rising up to ABC News. She writes:

And now, H&M, you have created a line of clothing based on her character: a woman who has suffered a lifetime of abuse, who is violently raped, and who is hunting down a man who violently rapes and kills other women. Lisbeth has been through hell, and her clothing is her armor. That’s her choice, and it’s an understandable choice. But you glamorize it, putting a glossy, trendy finish on the face of sexual violence and the rage and fear it leaves behind.

I wonder if you’ve considered how a survivor of sexual violence chooses her or his fashion choices…When I dress in the spirit Lisbeth Salander, it’s because I want to send a message to men: to stay the fuck away.

Anna Norling, the Division Designer at H&M, says that she is “so proud” of this collection, because Lisbeth is the “very essence of an independent woman.” Lisbeth Salander is independent woman whose mother was abused by her father, who was violently raped by a man in charge of her well being, who is harassed and bullied by men in public, and who is severely emotionally scarred.

Stieg Larsson was inspired to write The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because he witnessed a girl getting gang raped when he was 15 years old. I’ve heard it said that being raped is like getting a tattoo – it never goes away. I hope your shoppers bear this in mind before they emulate Lisbeth Salander.

There’s a lot going on here, so I’m going to unpack it step by step. It’s pretty hard to tell from either Karneef’s post or her statements to ABC, in which she says she objects to the collection because it “glamorizing surviving rape” whether she thinks Lisbeth Salander is a role model or not. Again, having read only the first book, it’s not particularly clear to me that Lisbeth is an aspirational figure. She’s painfully thin, has difficulty emotionally connecting to people, works in a field that allows her to isolate herself from human contact, and the violence she herself commits is both offputting and logistically out of reach for most women. Neither her experience nor means by and extent to which she’s recovered seem particularly glamorous.

And are we really supposed to find “glamorizing surviving rape” so offensive? Sure, a narrative where someone is brutally attacked and rises from their hospital bed dewy and saintly would be offensive, but it also would be so emotionally implausible that it wouldn’t resonate with people. Stories on the other hand that emphasize that rape and sexual abuse are horrific and difficult to recover from but that still celebrate the strength of survivors seem appropriate. But whom am I or anyone else to tell survivors where to find their role models or how to interpret the stories they find meaningful?

Second, there’s no engagement with the actual clothes that are in the collection. They’re less alluring than they are the kind of deliberately distancing outfits Karneef says she herself favors when she thinks of Lisbeth while getting dressed: ripped shirts, motorcycle jackets with ribbed padding unlike the “motorcycle jackets” for women that offer no protection at all, a hood that’s the kind of thing you can shrink into. They don’t seem like an insensitive or exploitative riff on the experience of a fictional woman who responds to a lifetime of horrific abuse by shunning conventionally pretty female attire. Karneef seems to be perturbed by the designer’s interpretation of Lisbeth as a strong woman, but I’m not sure why designers shouldn’t design clothes with a mind towards the experiences of women who have been raped or sexually abused and who might want to tell people who see them “to stay the fuck away”? Fashion may be commercial, but it’s a commercial art, and I’m loath to police the influences and inspirations of artists, or their readings of other art that informs their designs.

I think there might be an argument to be made (though Karneef doesn’t make it) that the collection encourages consumers to claim the experience of rape victims even if they themselves are lucky enough to never have been attacked. But then wouldn’t that be to reduce Lisbeth and all of her choices, aesthetic and otherwise, to her sexual trauma? Can we admire the wasp tattoo for its connection to Lisbeth’s stealth and nerve as a hacker? Her skills as a legal and journalistic investigator?

I also want to push back a little on this from Julie Gerstein, the style editor for The Frisky, who says that “basing a collection off of a dystopian nightmare of a story hardly makes for a strong and well developed fashion line.” That seems…kind of silly. The Dragon Tattoo line is a little silly because it’s a mass-market mainstream fashion line that is aimed at keeping costs quite low, not because it’s inspired by a traumatic experience. But dystopia, science fiction, and fantasy can all be rich fashion inspirations, shaking up the assumptions about what people wear and why. The artist’s statement for Alexander McQueen’s dizzying, gorgeous Plato’s Atlantic collection says:

When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin Of The Species, no one could have known that the ice cap would melt, that the waters would rise and that life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. We came from water and now, with the help of stem cell technology and cloning, we must go back to it to survive. When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came…Make no mistake, this is not sci-fi, this is evolution.

Good, meaningful fashion can come from all sorts of places. And clothing’s a more intimate kind of art because we don’t just see it — it changes how we see ourselves and each other. But that’s all the more reason for it to be interestingly, meaningfully engaged with big ideas.

When David Stern imposed the league’s reductive dress code six years ago, all this role-playing, reinvention, and experimentation didn’t seem a likely outcome. We all feared Today’s Man. But the players — and the stylists — were being challenged to think creatively about dismantling Stern’s black-male stereotyping. The upside of all this intentionality is that these guys are trying stuff out to see what works. Which can be exciting. No sport has undergone such a radical shift of self-expression and self-understanding, wearing the clothes of both the boys it once mocked and the men it desires to be.

I’d actually be really curious to hear more about the stylists in these equations, the people who mediate between the league’s expectations of the men who are the key to their profits, and those men’s expectations of themselves. If the rise of Kanye West and nerd hip-hop hadn’t coincided with the ban, what might the prevailing riff on the code have looked like? What inspirations would they have turned to—and because fashion evolves, where might they turn next? Malcolm X wore himself some crisply-cut but patterned suits back in the day is all I’m saying.

-Omelas State University.

-Another movie about journalists in war zones.

-Fashion as art.

-Woo Miles Davis biopic.

-Increasingly excited for Red Tails:

They are full of color: blues, purples, prints and tapestry woven pieces. Lymus is determined to break down many of the stereotypes about Muslim women — like the assumption that all Muslim women are docile and wear black.

“I like colors and I like flowers, and I like head pieces with feathers coming off of them, and all I do is just put it on top of my hijab instead of putting it on my hair,” Lymus says. “I am a woman — I am attracted to those things, so I really want to break down that stereotype.”

Amirah Creations takes its inspiration from the 1920s-1950s. The dresses have a lot of flow, “a lot of pouf,” and there are “a lot of very playful kind of pieces.”

“I’m inspired by that era,” she says, “but also, Islamically, it is pretty modest.”

The 1950s, Lymus says, was a period where you could be feminine, but you also could be covered. As an African-American designer who lives in Brooklyn and grew up Muslim, Lymus herself wears bright prints and colors, but her head and arms are always covered.

I really love her metallic color palate in her most recent show, and the ’50s silhouettes on her day dresses, the space age Betty Draper-ness of it all. The clothes are a reminder that, just like in movie or television storytelling, constraint can be a useful spur to creativity in fashion. Goodness knows that having absolutely no limitations whatsoever on what you can afford to do or on your sense of what’s too sexy doesn’t mean you’ll produce a collection with interesting ideas or that actual women could, or would, wear.

-Neville Longbottom is the true hero of the Harry Potter series.

-The man who bought MySpace explains why.

-Nikki Finke: “If you accept the premise that the film business is the folly of the filthy rich, and the indie film business the folly of the stupidly rich, then the fashion business must be the folly of the insane rich.”

-A good analysis of how shifting the lead in a TV show changes its ratings.

But as long as Focus on the Family hasn’t made it part and parcel of the deal that they get to slip abstinence or anti-gay pamphlets in the shoes, or required TOMS to donate to abstinence-only education, or to do anything that has a negative effect on people’s health and safety and as long as the shoes get to people who need them rather than being diverted, I have a hard time getting incredibly upset about this. You don’t need to pass an ideological test to want to make life more livable for the world’s poorest people. If TOMS shoes make it easier for more African kids to walk to school, or for folks to get to health clinics, or make it easier for them to carry clean drinking water, that’s a good thing. This collaboration may not be good for TOMS brand in the long run, and I think it’s worth watching closely, but if it works out, it could help a lot of people.

This is an interesting tactic. During the campaign and the transition, the Obama team was very big on trying to use novel communications tools but they’ve moved away from it more recently. I think it’s at least worth trying. Research on the general ineffectiveness of presidential communications strategies makes me skeptical that this will work, but at least unlike presidential speeches we don’t know in advance that it doesn’t work.

But Goolsbee really needs a suit with unpleated pants. I don’t know much about fashion, but I do know that much.

Allan wants to know about “bike commuting in winter.”

This is my first winter as a bike commuter. I’d heard bad things about it but I haven’t found it to be a huge problem. The key breakthrough was when I figured out how to make my helmet big enough to wear my hat under it. That and remembering to wear gloves. Normally, I don’t wear gloves outside unless it really gets quite cold — it’s convenient enough to stick ‘em in your coat pockets if they get a little chilly, and keeping the gloves off leaves your hand free to fiddle with your iPod or whatever. But you can’t put your hands in your pocket on a bike, and you don’t need to manipulate any small objects with your fingers — what you need are some gloves to shield your fingers from the wind.

Beyond that, in all things related to bike commuting we need to look to our friends in Europe. The top bike commuting city is Copenhagen, not San Diego. If people can bike to work in Denmark’s winter (I even saw plenty of people biking around Helsinki in December) then it can be done wherever you might be in the USA as well. Unfortunately, American mindspace about bicyling tends to be dominated by the insidious recreational bikers, who’ve gotten it into people’s heads that even on a lovely day for a bike ride the act of pedaling requires intricate performance gear including funny biking outfits. But bike commuting is a whole different ballgame — you’re just trying to get to work, so you should wear what you would wear. If it’s cold, wear a sweater and a scarf under your coat. If you need to give a presentation, bike in a suit and fancy shoes. You’re not going to set world records in a bundled-up-for-winter outfit, but the point is just to get to work. See, e.g., the Copenhagen Cycle Chic blog.

But it all starts with a hat and gloves even in weather that you wouldn’t ordinarily consider nippy enough for ‘em.

Meanwhile, because nippy weather has finally arrived in Washington, DC I put on a 66 Degrees North jacket that I bought in Iceland and thought would be suitable attire for autumn bike commuting. When I read the story about the bailout, I thought that the collapse of the Iceland economy and currency might lead to some good bargains at the store’s website. But not really. Prices are denominated in Euros and not cheap.

UPDATE: Actually, David observes that South Korea needed an IMF assist during the 97-98 Asian financial crisis so this isn’t all that unusual.

Denmark is known for its good design, and Copenhagen is one of the world’s great bike commuting cities. At the same time, bike helmets are known for making you look idiotic. So what the world needs is some clever Danish designer to come up with some bike helmets that don’t suck. And here comes Yakkay to the rescue.

Thus far, they don’t seem to have any available in the US. Which is too bad. Also all these helmets seem to be for women. But still, progress!

And then look at this slideshow about how I should dress at work:

• $3,500 suit.
• $760 shoes.
• $360 sunglasses.
• $4,400 watch.
• $515 wallet.
• $1,500 messenger bag.

Who buys this stuff? I’m hardly impoverished but can’t imagine spending that kind of money on this stuff. Even John McCain’s shoes don’t cost $760 and he owns so many houses he can’t keep track of them all. If there’s really a market for this kind of thing, then we definitely need to make the tax code more steeply progressive at the high end.

My frames, Nautica model N8606, cost much less and are rapidly becoming CAP standard-issue eyegear since Brian Katulis got a pair a couple of weeks ago.