Fashion Police Brutality

You might not know it to look at me, but I love fashion. Always have. As a little girl my favorite pastime was playing dress-up, and I saved my allowance to buy issues of Vogue. There was a time I dreamed of being a fashion designer, but my attempts at sewing resulted in a black and orange swimsuit that fell apart almost instantly, by which I mean in the water with me in it. The boys were pleased, but I gave up sewing forever, and my dreams of a couture life were dashed.

Today, my style is all about comfort and trying to minimize what has multiplied over the years (chins, rolls, etc.). Oh, I make the odd attempt at glamour, but I usually fail catastrophically (fabric softener stains, I'm looking at you). I do, however, still love fashion.

Enter The Fashion Police Files, one woman's perspective on what the A-listers are wearing.

Sigh. Where to begin. Ok, the minute I saw that this was a Live Journal blog, I knew I was in for it. Live Journal, to me, is for 13-year-olds who are too geeky for MySpace. I just can't take it seriously. Granted, I don't frequent many (ok, any) Live Journal blogs, but my experience with them leads me to believe that functionality is nonexistent and design is problematic.

This blog just reinforces that belief. It's godawful ugly. And listen, if you're critiquing how other people look, you really should do so from a place of pretty, right? I don't mind the lacy gray background, and I love purple, but the purple is too bright, the font is boring as hell, and reading white text on a dark gray background makes me go all Le Chiffre with the crying blood. Wendy, your center panel is too wide. Readers need shorter lines, dark text on a light background, and font size larger than roach turds. And what the hell is up with your tabs at the top? I never would have known they were there if I didn't get so frustrated with your lack of navigation that I went searching for them. They are invisible (on Firefox and Safari, at least) unless you roll over them. Yeah, that's all kinds of helpful.

Wendy uses those click to read more links, which I hate. I'm here now, I want to read it all in one fell swoop, don't make me click again or I'm liable to just go away. What's more, when you click to read more you wind up on a white page with no design to speak of, and that's a cop out. I don't know if Live Journal forces this or what, but it's further proof that Live Journal is blogging for preteens. Although that might be giving preteens a bad name because I suspect they could find a way to make Live Journal work, what with all their hacking and frying their brains on computers rather than getting outside for some sunshine.

Now, the writing. There are far too many of these !!? (apparently Wendy is as excitable as squirrels on speed), and they're all preceded by a space, which is bizarre. Also, Wendy pulls a Tinkerbell and sprinkles her sentences not with fairy dust but with commas. The thing about commas? They, don't just go, any,where. And I'm not even going to go into the whole ellipses thing again. Y'all know how I feel about that. But now we have a new grammar crime: random capitalizations. Is German your first language, Wendy?

Most of the writing involves illustrating what is already illustrated in the pictures. Unless you're making your blog ADA-compliant, we don't need a running commentary on what the pictures look like. We can, you know, see them.

Frankly, what I liked most (relatively speaking) about this blog were the pictures. The commentary that went along with those pictures was rambling and far too long, especially considering all the random grammatical weirdness. There were some bits I liked: "ravishingly awful," "you can have too much blue and purple animal print, you know." But the good parts are so ever-loving hard to get to.

Look, this is an audience-specific blog. I'm guessing no one who reads Ask will give a damn about this blog, but people who like to look at pretty (or terribly, unutterably wrong) pictures of fashion might. And if you want to cater to those people, get away from Live Journal, get a real blog with a pretty design, lay off the detailed explanations of each dress/outfit, tighten up your writing, get a grammar refresher course, and start all over. I'm pretty sure, given your background, that you could do a lot better. Clearly, you have the experience to back up your opinions. Your critiques are insightful and informed. But you lose us (well, me -- I can bet most others gave up long before I did) with all the crap. As it is, this blog is a hot mess and guilty of crimes against the blogosphere (I can't believe I just used that word).

For your truly terrible, hard to navigate, impossible to read design, you get






I mean, really. You want to cite others for poor taste?

For the concept and the writing, you get







Others are doing it better.

Because I liked some of your commentary and really did enjoy the pictures, you get






And now, I want to watch hours and hours of Absolutely Fabulous. Oh, who am I kidding? I always want to watch hours and hours of AbFab ("Lacroix, sweetie").