Where Are The Men? Everywhere.

A brief response to the post Where Are The Men? by Karen of Did You Make That?

There are plenty of men blogging about fashion and numerous other creative endeavours online.

For example (good) coding can be far more creative than fashion/garment design/sewing because everything ‘wearable’ has been done before (as a species, we humans have existed in our current phenotype for approximately a hundred thousand years now, most of which we’ve spent covering ourselves with something or other) whereas often, writing code involves making something completely new and functional that may never have existed before (like writing a program to stitch together fragments of genomic data in a format that has never existed prior to today).

The same goes for hacking the real world (from Instructables to Ikea hacks to behavioural hacks) most of these (extremely creative) areas are dominated by male writers and bloggers (although no one’s claiming that any of the above are exclusively male domains: here’s a sewing-machine-hack blog by a lady hacker). There are heaps of men in creative fields like photography, advertising, architecture, and industrial, graphic and web design. Responsive web design (which takes into account the fact that the same website may be accessed by mobile, laptop, widescreen computer and tablets and needs to look good and be functional on them all) was invented by a man.

As for fashion blogging, I would suggest to any uninformed person that thinks men are behind in these fora to make a quick visit to lookbook.nu. I would then remind said person that the whole street-style-fashion-blog sh’bang was initated by the work of one man. I would even go so far as to suggest that the bar for entry into female fashion blogging is now so low as to be non-existant (a point that seems to popup repeatedly, in discussions and comment sections over at IFB, usually in the vein of it’s so hard to break into the industry with all these commoners around, the early adopters had it easy wahwahwah etc).

This is illustrated in particularly spectacular fashion by the look below. It does not appeal to me in the slightest, neither in its construction (which is facile to say the least) nor in its functionality. And it does nothing at all for the wearer (who happens to be a model).

Whereas this, I would jump into in a heart beat. (I’d probably jump on it in a heartbeat but that’s neither relevant to, nor appropriate for the current discussion).

Aside: Think he’s cute? Then this will blow your mind (love, love, love). More (virtual) ~~cradle-robbing~~ Male Fashion eye-candy at Zoli’s blog.

Just so you can check for yourself, here’s a brief snapshot of some of the creative males in my RSS list (in no particular order):

Who	What
Will Smidlein	A 15 year-old programmer.
Terminally Incoherent	Coding, Sci-Fi reviews, other things of interest to me.
Dan Stiles	Artist. Makes awesome gig-posters (yes, he has designs in the Birch Fabrics range).
Tad Carpenter	Artist. His style is reminiscent of mid-century children’s books illustration.
Joost De Cock	Sartorialist, pattern maker.
Jeffery Diduch	Tailor, bespoke garments-maker.
English Cut	Saville row tailoring.

And of course the inimitable Joe and Kyle of itsokaytobesmart and sciencebasedlife respectively.

Now, can we please stop giving airtime to people making discriminatory (and/or incendiary) comments about gender and society and leave the outrage generation to the tabloid bullsh%t machine?*

Extras: Forums for men’s and women’s tailoring here.

Practical Dress Design book update: For those of you that wanted to have a play with the illustrations, here’s some hi-res versions of the same (I scanned all of the full-page plates at 600 dpi, which is the limit for my dinky little desktop scanner).

If you want to link any of the documents or images on this blog please link the post URL and not the document URL. I use Google drive to store all my documents and it doesn’t like direct linking. Anyone using a direct link will be told by Google to request access which I cannot grant because I’ve already made the document publicly available here. Play nice people.

*And Bust magazine-every third Facebook post from those ladies seems to be aimed either at generating fresh outrage, or describing some stale outrage of days gone by..

Also, I still haven’t been able to track down the original article as evidenced by the tweet-eraction below (no, I’m not interested enough to pay for the e-version of the magazine).

Disclaimer: All non-self-generated images remain copyright of their respective owners and are used here for the purposes of illustration, discussion and review. Click on the images for a direct link to the relevant maker’s page (thanks Zoltán, for the use of your images).

Disclaimer 2: This post is basically a bunch of thoughts I had on reading Karen’s post and the blog post that inspired it. I am a humanist (earthling-ist?) and feel that everyone should be treated fairly, equitably and with kindness. I’m pro-equality so please don’t explode in righteous (or otherwise) anger at my opinions. Cheers.