New eyebrows, Old Labour

[imomus]

In Japan, the pace of change is unrelenting, and as the changes arrive, we here at Click Opera report them to you. Yesterday I brought word of a new art movement, today--hold the front page!--it's a new eyebrow shape that is sweeping Japanese fashion magazines. Here (from Hanatsubaki, Dazed and Confused Japan, and H magazine) are snaps of what I call the Denis Healey eyebrow.



Yes, it seems that the British politician is, like so many undervalued Western things (like Momus, indeed), a cult in Japan. Well, certainly amongst stylists on trendy fashion magazines, who are painting his distinctive eyebrow shape (stray wild unplucked hairs brushed upwards, or a tiny smudge of eyeshadow just above the brow if you want to cheat) on the faces of beautiful young models like the delicious Rina Ohta, perhaps in an attempt to spread his Old Labour values ("I'm going to tax the rich until the pips squeak!").

It's the least we Western trend-makers can do to return the favour by spreading Japanese values in the West. My new column at Wired is Water therapy for better humans, and lays out for unbathed Western barbarians the correct use of water.

Meanwhile, I'd like to thank David Fenech for introducing me to a wonderful American cultural export: the folk song collector John Jacob Niles and his gorgeous falsetto voice.

Comments

[mattcallow.livejournal.com]

What next, the Tony Benn pipe?



The Michael Foot specs?



Or perhaps the Neil Kinnock Feria 74?



God forbid what they'll make of Roy Hattersley...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Michael Foot is for me the coolest British politician ever. The fact that he scored lowest with the British public is one of about a million reasons why I'm not in Britain right now.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(And needless to say, I worship Tony Benn too.)

[(Anonymous)]

He worships tea. Pots of the stuff.

eyebrow control: marxo-freudian significances

[pressurised.livejournal.com]

Healey, of the soviet era eyebrows, reminds us that the labour party has always been led by pro-bomb, anti-worker, would-be paternalists. The subtle, almost Ray Bradbury-like, difference between then and now is precisely the eyebrows. Just as Jack Straw has ditched the specs for the sake of blandness, so the dictates of minutiae-governance would never permit such off-message visual references to the unmanaged and unmanageable.

[(Anonymous)]

OT: Have you seen this (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html)? Appiah (which you have mentioned, I believe) on multiculturalism.

der.