Saturday, September 17, 2011

Modern Couples

"Jennifer Aniston beamed at Justin Theroux
as they headed to lunch in New York's West Village
today" (according to the Daily Mail)

Here is a photo of Jennifer Aniston out with her new boyfriend. She was part of that famous celebrity couple JenBrad/BradJen, which doesn't sound as meaty as the Anjelina Jolie, Brad Pitt combination Branjelina, which formed after Brad Pitt cheated on Jennifer and went on to have his exciting life with Jolie replete with Third World babies.

However much we put them on pedestals, movie stars still provide us ordinary folk with some scripts for life. For example, it's a good thing to have a multi-culti family, even though we obviously have to manufacture it through adoption or other child-producing alternatives like sperm banks or in vitro fertilization.

And of course there's fashion. Every fashion magazine or Hollywood variety show will display endless images of our favorite celebrities, and what they're wearing on and off the red carpet. And these provide us with styles for us to emulate (although we have to be a little creative with 1/100th the budget).

Well, here's Jenn in New York's West Village, and that's how to look urban and chic. Well, it's not quite the chic that InStyle would advocate, but at least it's a down-to-earth variation.

I sometimes wonder if it is men who set the style. After all, Theroux looks happy to be with Jenn, which means he must be happy with how she looks. His outfit matches hers, and somehow I don't think she's the style chief here, since she often wears lovely clothes.

I think there's a bully tactic going on. Liberal Hollywood seems to fetishistically cling to ugliness, and everything around it has to follow that code. Theroux, with his black layers of untucked shirts and sweaters, his gray, faded old (dirty?) jeans, his childish hat, and the undone shoe laces on his jackboots is dead serious about his appearance. He wears the favorite eye-gear of modern celebrities, the dark-tinted aviator glasses, to hide his expression. His infantile, undone laces are part of the jackboot foot gear, marching on and ready to kick aside any contrarian.

So poor Jenn really has no choice. Either she shows up looking like a guerrilla fighter or she doesn't show up at all. Although I think that there would be a lot of "convincing" going on to get her there to dutifully support her terrorist boyfriend.

Justin Theroux in his modern
jackboots. Untied laces doesn't
diminish the hardness
of their kick.