Wherein I Discuss Fashion and Culture

I was in the midst of the premier episode of Glee's 3rd season when Hulu interrupted my regularly scheduled program to bring me an Old Navy commercial.

Now, for some time I'd mentally associated Old Navy with sometimes quasi-cute and also clever commercials, but it turns out I was probably mixing them up with Gap--attributing their 1998 Khaki Swing video to Old Navy. (Can you tell I don't watch much TV?)

If models do it, we probably should, too. Right?

This video was instrumental in publicizing swing dancing (already experiencing a re-occurrence on college campuses all over the nation in the 90's) and making it more socially acceptable. 

It just so happened, of course, that what Gap was promoting actually rocks the socks off of basically anything else.

Best kind of first dance ever? Yes.

Swing is classy, and our culture could use some more classiness--as will become abundantly clear as this post continues. In general Gap models perhaps should not decide what that looks like, but Classy Boss icons Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers certainly should:

To re-quote ad nauseum: "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, 

but she did it backwards and in high heels."

To return to my point about Old Navy and Glee: the moment I saw there was a commercial I popped off to another tab to do something more fun than a commercial. I was drawn back to it, though, by pure curiosity. Basically, what I heard reminded me of something very painful.

For the record, it hurt me physically to type 

"Old Navy Presents it's new blouse" into Blogger's 

youtube search engine. 

Then I realized I'd missed noticing the "a". Whew.

I have nothing against breezy blouses. As a matter of fact, I personally would go to the actual Old Navy store and spend money for the white--and possibly also the green--one in this video and then wear them both on a regular basis. 

I'm not really going to go into why this is a bad commercial. Except for the part where there's no way that she orders extra whip on her lattes. 

The reason it's a bad video is because the first thing that came to mind when I heard it was this:

Damedesu yo (translation: "she jacked my swag").

There are many amusing things about this video. Some of my favourites are these girls' lack of boobs but total desire to work it on the runway, and that they bring in some black dudes to give a real feel from da hood, except the dudes have blackberries and wear Ralph Lauren polos. 

Basically this video is about a bunch of really rich kids worrying and triumphing over things normal people worry and triumph over: designer jeans.

Oh, wait.

At least I gave you cool dancing videos to watch. Despite the fact Ashley Tisdale jeans exist as a thing, and models pretend to drink lattes with extra whip, and rich kids can spend their days going around making music videos as soon as they get their braces off, there is swing dancing. It is popular, and it is wonderful.

And God made swing and saw that it was good.