Zeddie Little: The real reason you shouldn't run on Sunday.

If you have been spending your days reading only the A section of The New York Times lately, we can forgive you for thinking that this weekend's NYC marathon might be canceled over something as mercurial as a hurricane. After all, that's what Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said today: That holding a major event in a city while its still reeling from a crisis is potentially not the best idea. (Although hey, it certainly would be the fastest way to get over any of New York's bridges.)

And that makes sense, at least on the surface. But dig a little deeper ... say, to Thursday Styles, and you'll find out the real reason people don't want to spend Sunday running around a ghost town. They're afraid someone will take a stupid picture of them.


"Marathon Photos Often Fail to Capture the Glory" reads the led of this poorly-timed faux-trend piece in yesterday's New York Times, which claimed that photo agencies like Brightroom were responsible for all the terrible things that could possibly happen whilst one was participating in a run.

"Sadly — horribly — the list of ways these photos can and almost always do go wrong is wide and deep: Muffin top. Earthquake quads. Wind in the shorts, making it look as if you’re wearing your derrière backward. Front wedgies. Let’s not even get started on facial expressions."

Elizabeth Weil ominously adds that there are 110 official photographers expected at Sunday's marathon before interviewing a bunch of people who benefit from your neurotic fear of looking silly during a race: the CEO of female athletic wear Oiselle; the host of a new Travel Channel show with the tagline "Americans will do just about anything to entertain themselves"; the journalist's husband; an exec from Brightroom; a photographer, and a woman who has authored both Run Like a Mother and Train Like a Mother.

And while the pieces does quickly nod to the Hurricane Sandy debate twice, there's a much higher word count placed on Ridiculously Photogenic Guy Zeddie Little, whose inadvertent ascendance to handsome man meme-hood is actually to blame for people not wanting to run a marathon.

There was The Taco Stand.

Then appeared Trend Pieces.

Soon, The Hoteliers.

Eventually, the Page Six Sightings.

Now, those for whom this was once a special, low-profile place—one unmolested by the terrors of popularity with moneyed Manhattanites—ruination is upon them and their beach. Because if a New York Times trendspotting fashion piece in the Thursday Styles isn't a sign of The End, one would shudder to think what is.

Explains the Times:

It is a pleasure, then, to note that — along a length of the Rockaway Boardwalk, particularly that stretch east of the Rockaway Taco stand near Beach 96th Street informally known as Bushwick on the Beach — New Yorkers show signs that a trip to the shore is at once an occasion for getting semi-naked in public and for preening one’s fashion sense. Take the group of women riding out to the beach on the A train, a subway caravan right out of Lena Dunham’s "Girls."

Of note:

1. We don't know who informally calls it "Bushwick on the Beach," or where it's informally known as such (as a Google search turned up nothing for the term), but kudos to the Times for excavating lexicon previously unwritten for  the rest of humanity to (informally) utilize prior to this.

2. And thus, the trope of referring to Girls to characterize any group of young women traveling in a pack of four to anywhere other young, mostly Caucasian people travel in New York City was less crystallized than it was calloused.

Also of note:

And it is only here that a sunny beauty like Sabine McCalla, the woman behind the guacamole takeout counter at Rockaway Taco, shows up for work in a T-shirt celebrating Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose lead singer, Alynda Lee Segarra, is to a certain group of Brooklyn women what Sarah Jessica Parker is to readers of Vogue.

1. Fact-check: Is it only at Rockaway Beach that beautiful young women show up to work wearing T-Shirts celebrating a band?

2. And furthermore, is the lead singer of a New Orleans band with a very niche following—or "certain group of Brooklyn women"—that most people haven't heard of legitimately comparable to Sarah Jessica Parker for these women (an assertion that makes the music writers who practically discovered them scoff)?

3. Is this week's Thursday Styles dedicated to simply trolling anyone at a computer with a palm to apply to their face and a link to give them in exchange for the distinct pleasure of being prompted to do so?

You be the judge, unless you have been in Rockaway Beach for a while, in which case, we suggest you either batten down the hatches, or take refuge somewhere still too remote for the Times' intrepid Styles Section. That place was once Fort Tilden, but it, too, shall be ruined in good time.

We live in an era in which Three Mile Island may now seem the most viable option.

Boardwalk? Try Catwalk [NYT/Styles]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Without further ado, here are the ten best lines, removed from their context, without commentary*:

10. Peter’s deadpan, detached demeanor contrasts with Harry's livelier, impish quality, a witty rejoinder ever ready.

9. In a pop-culture landscape that has been populated by heir heads (any entertainment produced by the Hilton sisters or the Tinsley Mortimer reality show, "High Society," which was about as classy as the skin magazine that shared its title), the Brants could certainly elevate the medium.

8. Despite their youth, the boys are omnipresent on the social scene and staples of Patrick McMullan party photographs.

7. The Brants have almost 70,000 Twitter followers, a fraction of whom appear to be their age.

6. "I'll be watching 'Mommie Dearest,' and I'll be like, 'Oh, my God, Joan Crawford is amazing.'"

5. "I have a love of opulence."

4. They are the perfect harbingers of the "It boy," young enough that it isn’t emasculating that they don't yet have jobs, and fashion-forward enough that they don’t water down their straight-from-the-runway looks.

3. "We expect them to be good human beings and to care about other things besides clothes."

2. Ever blasé, Peter tilted his head, looked at him blankly, then turned away, showing off his strong profile.

1. But this was a brief low-culture aside.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

[*With exception to the fact that the Times managed to publish a piece—written by, it should be noted, a Patrick McMullan co-photographee with "writer-about-town" and mentor figure to the Brant Brothers, Derek Blasberg—so unilaterally dedicated to the idea of perpetrating the Brant Brothers' celebrity without hesitation, that they failed to include anything that might suggest reluctance or question of the greatness of the repute of these two young men. Like the time Peter Jr. once defended a photo in which he appeared to be engaging in oedipal tendencies with his mother in an email to Gawker, and refers to himself as "fabulous and conceited." Especially when you consider his love of 'Mommy Dearest.' Gawker, who called the Brothers Brant "The World's Luckiest Teenage Homosexuals," once concluded: "The great thing is that these two are even allowed to exist."]

Skirts: the new (old) trend story (Getty Images)

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months," Oscar Wilde once famously quipped. He was almost right. When discussing trends in fashion staples, very little is altered...not even the copy. Such is the case of The New York Times and its obsession with skirts.

"It seems parrotlike to go on repeating the statement that short skirts are fashionable," wrote The New York Times fashion reporter Anne Rittenhouse, "but it is amazing to observe their progress toward a complete sweep of the field."

Ms. Rittenhouse (a penname for Ms. Harry-Dele Hallmark) must have been looking into a crystal ball: she was already exasperated by the skirt trend stories back in 1909, when the novelty of a hemline was that it was no longer attached to a dress. Her item was titled: "What the well-dressed women are wearing; The Skirt With Separate Bodice the Correct Styles for Smartly Dressed Women This Season."

With that, The New York Times pronounced that skirts were "in." And twice a year because it lines up with Fashion Week: long skirts come back for fall, short skirts for Spring, with an almost clockwork preciseness, the parrotlike Grey Lady announces that once again, skirts are fashionable. Yes ladies, free yourself of those dowdy knickerbockers and put on a skirt...they're back in style!

The only problem? No one has ever made the argument in the last 100+ years that skirts were somehow not in vogue. Even when The New York Times was reporting on trousers and slacks as a feminine workplace alternative to skirts, they were running concurrent articles about "miniskirt mobs": women rebelling against conservative groups telling them to lower their hemlines.

The most recent example of the "skirt trend story" trend was found in a Thursday Styles piece mid-March. In "Only the Half of It", Ruth La Ferla made a passionate argument for the attire, saying "its very multiplicity, emblematic of a fashion landscape in which no single style or trend prevails, is acting as catnip to consumers, who are combining skirts, long and short, slim and wide, plain and patterned, with pieces varying from tank tops to mannish shirts, from turtlenecks to blazers."

There's even a quote from Marshall Cohen of the research firm NPD Group: "The skirt has become the new hot toy for women to play with in fashion."

Ms. Ferla's column begins with a young MTV executive whose choice of attire makes her feel left out among colleagues who wear leggings (confusing, since leggings--like tights--aren't fashionable unless you wear something over them...or are an Olsen twin), and ends with the definitive last word on the subject: “Skirts are a statement for sure.”

Really? Are they?

Even fashion insiders seem to think that the the never-ending skirts-are-in story seems dubious.

"Are you wearing a skirt right now?" Kelly Cutrone, of PR firm People's Revolution and America's Next Top Model, demanded over the phone. "Are you wearing leggings?" No, we were wearing jeans...then again, no one has ever accused us of being at the forefront of fashion.

"I will guarantee," she continued sardonically, "that in the summer people will be wearing skirts, shorts, and bathing suits." She broke into  hysterical, throaty laughter. "And no, they won't be wearing leggings, because those are cotton-poly blend and don't breathe."

Jennifer Wright, editor-in-chief of fashion and beauty blog TheGloss.com, put in her two cents as well when asked by The Observer where skirts had gone that necessitated these "Return of Skirts" trend stories.

"Where did skirts go? They went into your closet. With the rest of your spring/summer clothes. Because it was 30 degrees out. Every spring they come out again. Because it's warm again."

Now, one could make the case that most skirt stories in The New York Times have not really been about the novelty of the item itself, but the styles in which people wore them. Throughout the century, there have been endless debates over the mini, the micro-mini, the a-line, the midi, the maxi, and the pencil. But even these pieces tend to have a Groundhog Day quality to them.

In December of 1991, Bernadine Morris wrote that designers were trying to find a way to have longer skirts catch on with the public after 20 years cropped styles. "Still, the mini will not disappear," she wrote. "Designers will do their best to keep a balance."

That seemed reasonable, if that just two years prior, Ms. Morris had written almost the exact same story. Her June 13th, 1989 piece, "Summer Comfort, in Long Looks" ended with a very similar line. A woman walking down Seventh Avenue told Ms. Morris, "We don't want to invest in good clothes that cost a lot of money and then be told we can't wear them more than one season. I feel comfortable in long skirts and in short ones. I plan to wear them both.''

Of course, The New York Times isn't the only offender. Across the seas, Harriet Walker wrote in The Independenton January 17th, 2011 that long skirts were indeed making a comeback, without acknowledging that they've apparently been in the comeback stage for over two decades.

"The long skirt has, understandably enough, gained something of a reputation for being for fuddy-duddies—a bit droopy, a bit (apologies here) 'art teacher," Ms. Walker opined, before ending her piece in the style of her predecessors with a quote from Caroline Evans: "Fashion is defined by rapid style changes. It never stands still ...After all, nothing is less fashionable than the recently out-of-fashion."

"Saying that skirts are in trend is like saying pants, t-shirts or jackets are in trend," Houghton Creative Director and stylist Katherine Polk told The Observer.

Now that's a good idea for a Styles Section trend story if we've ever heard one: "T-shirts: What the well-dressed women are wearing."