Warren Beatty in "Shampoo": an odd movie for an odd time

I woke up at like 2:30am this morning with the TV still on, about halfway through 1975's bittersweet look back at 1968, "Shampoo". For those who have never experienced the magic of Warren Beatty's helmut-haired, characteristically wooden portrayal of a himbo hairdresser whose extreme dandy costumery created the template for the International Male line of clothing, it's very, uh, different.

The movie revolves around the motorcycling hairdresser who spends his days and nights cheating on an absolutely stunning Goldie Hawn with every woman who walks into his salon. The character is a blank slate with no real back story, motivation, desire (other than lots and lots of hetero fucking) or focus. He vaguely entertains the idea of opening his own salon, but gets caught fucking his financier's girlfriend, so that goes down the drain. Oh, and Goldie finds out and leaves him. Then the financier's girlfriend elopes with the financier, and after a torturous, constipated bit of Beatty acting sad, the credits roll. I guess the message is that cheating is, like, bad.

The interesting thing is the frame in which all of the frivolity is set: the eve of the 1968 presidential election, which everyone in 1975 understood to be the moment when the uber villian of that time, Richard Nixon, began his reign. The characters float around a rich hippy version of L.A. with lots of drugged out parties in enormous Hollywood Hills mansions with strobe lights and Beatles music. Everything is free and groovy as the looming bogeyman of the 1970s periodically pops up on TV screens campaigning for president.

It is impossible to understand why anybody liked this movie without understanding the deep malaise of the mid seventies. It feels like the popular culture spent a good part of the 70s asking "what went wrong?" The answer according to "Shampoo" is too much extracurricular fucking/voting for Nixon.

Anyway, "Shampoo" is really a piece of shit in the sun, rewarded by the 1976 Academy Awards with three Oscars, including Best Screenplay!

It's kind of worth a watch, just as a cringeworthy examination of the embarrassment that is Warren Beatty.

And at least it's not Bulworth.

Christian Audigier - WTF?

So up and down Broadway everybody and his brother is wearing these Christian Audigier shirts and hoodies lately. Huh? They look like King Midas threw up on a Guns 'n' Roses album. But for $200 and change you too can stroll down Broadway looking like you can't afford $200 t-shirts.

Full disclosure: in the early 90s I rocked baggy, faded Girbaud jeans to look like all those Puerto Rican kids who used to dance to acid house in front of Unique and hit the Red Zone every night. I have to believe that the effect was somewhat subtler than the Baroque mess you see here. One would hope.

But if you must:

Luxury Streetwear Produced by Christian Audigier

International Male revisited

For those of you not familiar with the now defunct clothing retailer International Male, it was a legendary over the top catalog retailer for men with highly flamboyant taste. At first glance you think, oh these clothes are supergay. Deeper investigation reveals that the aesthetic was way beyond gay, more like an alternate universe of dandyism so extreme that it demanded a gender and sexual identity of its own.

Anyway, I recently stumbled across an old Radar piece where they paid the writer to traipse around New York in International Male duds for a week and write about people's reactions. The results are hilarious (with more pictures):

Adventures of an International Male

Update: "Worst of" pics from the final IM catalog (via Jezebel)