I Like Socks

There are a couple of things, during this season of costumes, that are asked about by customers at work.  One of my favourites is “how do I get the stockings (leggings?) the Alice character wears in Resident Evil: Extinction?”

The internet is mildly clogged with answers to finding the right holsters, or you can look at images of the original costume and really, it isn’t that difficult to get info.  But there wasn’t anything I could find (at this time) specifically about the stockings, which are basically self-gartered.

Tights are, in general, a bitch to fit.  If you’re leggy, or rounded, or some combo of both, odds are the crotch of the damn things end up somewhere lower than they’re supposed to, giving you that sexy penguin waddle.  So chopping the legs off a pair of tights and tying them back on will just lose you precious length in the leg.

So, here is a simple step-by-step to get the self-garter look.

1. Find yourself a pair of tights or leggings. Foot Traffic’s Combed Cotton in Brown, Chocolate, or Heather Mocha are all good bets for the Alice costume, and are comparable to Rit dyes I’ve worked with before, so you can match the shirt to the tights.
2. Put the tights on, making sure the legs are straight (this is important to positioning the “garter”).  Now, using a fabric marker or pen that will wash out, mark the center-point of your thigh.  Do this at the height you want the self-garter to be.
3. Take the tights off.  Laying them flat and even, make two marks to either side of the center-point you just made.  You want the total width to be about 1.5 inches.
4. Using the marks you’ve just made as a guide, cut a shallow wedge from the sides in.  Set the pieces you’ve cut out aside.
5. Almost done.
   
6. Now, take those bits you cut out and tie them around the self-garter you just made, back and front.  Wrap them around several times, it bulks up the “knot”.  I find it’s easier to do this when they’re on, as you can judge things a little better.  Trim any extra ends.
7. BAM. You actually get a little extra length this way, even.

A month or so ago my co-workers and I travelled up to Seattle for an event.  The car we took was the newest vechicle I’ve ever been in and the inside looked like a spaceship.  Well, really, what the current present regards as a spaceship, which reality falls a touch short of.

I off-handedly noted that car design was tending towards a super-future look to give us the feeling of personal space vehicles that our past predicted and future denies us.  We can’t have the future so we’re creating a façade around our everyday objects in an attempt to placate our desires.

The past several seasons (and what has been popping up in between) is tending in the same direction.  Though some designers have always “looked ahead”, today’s idea of tomorrow is permeating through collections in ever more obvious ways.  And I’m not even looking at shoes and accessories, because I’m not trying to draft a thesis paper here, just pointing a couple things out.

I can’t pretend to know why, and I will ignore the obvious fall backs, like escapism to a time and space of ready cash to drop on the latest couple-thou frock.  Everybody says stuff like that and, on average, everybody is wrong.

I’m just sayin’ is all.

The retro-future aspects of some of the looks is like a one-two punch—pulling nostalgia from a past that wasn’t to a future that probably won’t.  But, I mean, the future is now, right?  We’re looking at Resort: 2010 (thankfully not designed by one, though pity not the other).  The cycle of retro-retro and futuretasma is congealing into a present of structure and shiny that just won’t be denied.

Personally, I adore watching designers try to reinvent the mid-1980s—I am fond of the look for a multitude of reasons.  To be more precise, it’s more that era’s take on the future of design that I truly love.  Science & speculative fiction’s relationship with fashion is something that just about anybody is aware of by now.  The ability to not be bounded by tradition and/or possibility is (finally) really spilling over into the most commonplace venues.  This, in turn, widens the skies for the truly expansive ideas.

During this beautiful dreaming, comparatively simple jewellery and accessories seem to be popular.  Maybe it’s the portability and modular aspects, the general un-scariness of it.  It’s such a gateway though, I mean—there’s such a short jump from sweet lovey ideas to slightly invasive useful tools to implanting things and gently pushing the definition of humanity.  But let’s not prod that interesting beast with a stick right now.  What we’re looking at here are accessories, gadgets and usefulness.  Or non-usefulness.  It depends on your definition.

Social networking sites, for instance.  The internet and how we use it in general.   An MIT student group have made this thing, it projects information and “virtual gadgets” into what they charmingly call the “tactile world.” Bonus: you can interact with it.

In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes’ goal is to harness  computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses . . . When he encounters someone at a party, the system projects a cloud of words on the person’s body to provide more information about him — his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests.

Talking about this with a friend, her first thought went to implants.  My first thought went to accessories. Because really, how boss would that be?

I mean, really.

Design and tech are starting to go steady and I like it.  Secretly because I am a huge nerd.