Monday, October 29, 2012

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Lady Isabel 'America' x Paph. sukhakulii 'Big Guy'

So I recently discovered the blog Fashion It So,1 which fills a part of my life I didn't even know was empty by supplying snarky recaps for episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that focus primarily on what everybody is wearing. There is a surprising amount of weird late-80s fashion going on in TNG, it turns out, and although a lot of the outfits look like crap, one respects the costume people for attempting to do something interesting, instead of just dressing everybody in whatever was actually fashionable at the time and pretending that 80s fashion was timeless.

(Sample snark: "Cable-knit sweaters: Ireland’s lingerie")

I bring this up partly because it's an exciting new time-wastey thing for me, and partly because the orchid of the day has a certain Next-Generationess about it.

Paphiopedilum Lady Isabel 'America' x Paph. sukhakulii 'Big Guy.'

I'll grant you that the costume department at TNG was not much into burgundy-on-mustard-yellow pinstripes, or stripes in general, actually. This is about as stripey as things got, in the handful of pages I've read so far:


(There's actually a really good reason why a TV show costumer might want to avoid closely spaced stripes, which I will put in a footnote for you.2)

But, anything as shiny and lavender-pink as the orchid's labellum is going to make me think of TNG. Lavender-pink was such a hot color in the late 1980s. E.g.:

Tell me you don't see a resemblance there.

This doesn't have a lot to do with the orchid, I know, but there's very little to say about the orchid. I mean, the parentage is right there in the title, and both parents seem to exist. (Google doesn't turn up much about the clone names 'America' or 'Big Guy,' but the grex Lady Isabel exists, as does the species Paph. sukhakulii, so I'm satisfied.) Also everything was spelled correctly, so I don't have that to complain about. Therefore, digressions about 25-year-old television shows.

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Photo credits:
TNG: from Fashion It So, though photos have been altered in size, sharpened, and color-tweaked.3
Voyager sickbay: Memory Alpha.
Orchid: me.

1 (Thank you, IO9.)
2 Closely-spaced stripes, when translated to a TV screen, will produce strobey Moiré patterns instead of looking like stripes. Sometimes this can be cool, but usually it's just annoying.
The husband and I have been watching "Star Trek: Voyager" lately, because neither of us cared enough about it to have ever watched when it was actually airing and because we occasionally need something to watch that we don't have to think too hard about, and the Sickbay set in "Voyager" has this insane black and orange stripe pattern in the background a lot of the time, which means that about half the Sickbay scenes are basically unwatchable.
Every time the camera moves, the background pulsates orange. Whoever designed that shit should never be allowed to work in television again.
3 Screencaps of TV shows are always ridiculously dark, for unknown reasons.


5 comments:

Kenneth Moore said...

Watched Voyager during Saudi time, Deep Space Nine over the spring/summer, and now on The Next Generation. The boy and I just finished season 3, and damn, that blog is quite on the mark.

I *have* to find a post about that episode in the first season with those people who run everywhere but don't touch the grass in fear of being put to death. Those outfits were deadly.

mr_subjunctive said...

Kenneth Moore:

WISH GRANTED.

Liza said...

That is the nicest cable-knit halter top I've ever seen.

Pat said...

The cable-knit is nice but the macramé detailing is a bit much.

Diane C said...

I heard one of the challenges of "Sex and the City" movies was to predict what the current fashion would be when the movie came out. Must really make it hard on a costume designer.