Teen Wolf: Tattoo.

Previously: Teen Wolf 101: An introduction to the eighth wonder of our world.

Welcome to Teen Wolf! The show where the shirts are off, and the pants don't matter. Last year's season finale saw about 9000 things happen, including one character stripping naked and turning into a lizard, and Evil Grandpa Argent roaring "MOUNTAIN ASSHHHH!!" in one of the most magnificent line-deliveries in TV history. What a masterpiece. (Teen Wolf showrunner recently described this episode as a "clusterfuck", but let's not dwell on the past.) I could recap all that stuff for you, but it'd require too much googling, so let's just watch that MOUNTAIN ASHHH clip again, shall we? OK. You're ready.

Season 3 opens with a subject close to all our hearts: curly-haired cuteboy waif Isaac clutching onto someone dear life. This time round, it's a badass lady with a motorcycle and a dubiously plausible lightning taser gun. "Into every generation, a slayer is born," she explains, back-flipping off a burning building onto her motorcycle. "She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness." OK, I kid, but seriously. She's awesome. Plus, she shares a gloriously ridiculous new plot point: Some alphas can steal your memories just by touching you, because what Teen Wolf really needs is a magical amnesia subplot. But apparently that isn't enough, because she immediately moves on to introduce the latest male models to join Teen Wolf's cast of top-tier ab-actors (abtors?). These guys were cast via an open call from (I kid you not) TeenWolfTwins.com, and they rip their shirts off within five minutes of appearing onscreen.

The costumes of Stoker: A vampire movie without the vampires.

I've been watching a lot of Hannibal recently, and I've come to realise that Stoker could be the origin story for a female analogue to Hannibal Lecter. While there are plenty of psychotic male antiheroes out there, India Stoker is a rare breed: an ambiguously amoral female character who isn't depicted as a bitch, a slut, or a straight-up villain. Like Hannibal, Stoker is a vampire story without the vampires.

Stoker GIFs from here.

Stoker begins with the kind of premise that I generally find depressing: a mother/daughter love triangle, with the mother envying her daughter's youth. In this case it's Evelyn Stoker competing with her daughter India, who in true cliche spirit is "on the cusp of womanhood". Following the death of India's father Richard, long-lost uncle Charlie shows up at the funeral. Exploiting Evelyn's loneliness and India's sulky passivity, he moves into the Stokers' huge country house where he begins seduce both mother and daughter -- in very different ways.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Too many dicks on the Enterprise.

[From my Star Trek Into Darkness article at The Daily Dot.]

In 2009’s Star Trek, JJ Abrams successfully made the effort to appeal to new viewers as well as dyed-in-the-wool Trekkies. This time round, he seems to be going further afield— and alienating the original fanbase entirely.

The publicity for Into Darkness has been solidly high school: Don’t worry—it may be Star Trek, but it’s not for nerds anymore! In an interview with Jon Stewart this week, Abrams made it very clear that he’d never liked the show as a kid, because it was “too philosophical.” “I stopped listening when you said you didn’t like Star Trek,” Stewart joked. “I saw your mouth moving, so I assume you apologized.”

It’s not actually necessary for a director to be a lifelong fan if they want to make a successful adaptation. In fact, JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek movie was proof of that. But it’s another thing for an adaption to leave most of the original show’s values in the dust, which is what Into Darkness seems to be doing. The dialogue is snappy, the action sequences are fun, and the characters seem real enough, but the heart and the brain are now gone.

In 1966, Star Trek broke new ground with its international crew of hopeful explorers, scientists, and adventurers. True, the show was full of heavy-handed Cold War metaphors and casual 1960s misogyny, but its central messages were obvious: Racism is bad. Give peace a chance. That kind of thing. Men and women, Russians and Americans, aliens and humans: all could work together on a more-or-less equal footing. For many viewers, Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) was the first woman of color they’d seen playing anything other than a maid. Star Trek was pushing the envelope.

In 2013, not so much. [READ MORE]

Interview with Michael Kaplan, costume designer of "Star Trek" (2009) and "Star Trek Into Darkness".

I interviewed the Star Trek Into Darkness costume designer for Wired.com! You can read it here.

Since Star Trek first made its way to the big screen, its costume design has veered away from the classic color-coded uniforms in favor of experiments with red double-breasted uniforms and unfortunate flesh-colored jumpsuits. But for the 2009 J.J Abrams Star Trek reboot and its recently released sequel, Into Darkness, costume designer Michael Kaplan helped move the sartorial stylings of the Enterprise crew forwards by looking backwards–at the trusty old red, blue, and gold. It’s a comfortingly familiar detail amongst Abrams’ trademark lens flare and glowing spaceship interiors: a conscious chromatic nod to the vintage style of the original costumes.

“I wanted the film based in the ‘60s,” Kaplan told Wired. “Not literally the ‘60s, but I wanted my thinking to be grounded in the concept of the original Star Trek, almost like an homage…. I had a lot of books in my library that I’d consult: [André] Courrèges [inventor of the mini-skirt], designers like that. To keep things rooted in that, even if when you look at the movie, you don’t say, ‘Hey, this is the early 1960s.’" [READ MORE]

The evolution of the Star Trek uniform.

Just in time for the new Star Trek movie, I wrote this article for Empire Online! It follows the original series Starfleet uniform from the 1960s to the present day -- but don't worry, there aren't any spoilers for Into Darkness. You can expect a post about that sometime next week, after the US release date. :)

Even Star Trek’s most devoted fans wouldn’t dare claim that the original series was a high-budget operation. In among the cardboard sets, guest stars had to wear a selection of costumes that ran the gamut from the baffling (an evil baby in a silver lamé toga; girls in hot-pink fur bikinis) to the plain ugly. In one early episode, an entire alien species is kitted out in a vaguely familiar fabric that one later realises is also used for all the bedspreads on-board the Enterprise.

But in the original series Starfleet uniform, Star Trek struck costuming gold. [READ MORE]

How I learned to stop hating and love GOOP.

[I've been pretty busy recently, but we should be back to regular HelloTailor updates in a couple of weeks! :) In the meantime, have this article I wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow's beauteously delusional millionaire lifestyle website, GOOP.]

If the experts at People magazine are to be trusted, then Gwyneth Paltrow is currently the most beautiful woman in the world. Happily, this means that beauty now comes with a comprehensive instruction manual. Thanks to her lifestyle newsletter, GOOP, it’s possible for us mere mortals to follow Gwyneth’s own advice on how to be exactly like her—that is, perfect.

 According to its website, GOOP (cheerily named after Paltrow’s initials) is “a digital media and e-commerce company.” Its free weekly newsletter includes style tips, recipes, vacation recommendations, and miscellaneous words of wisdom from Paltrow’s rich and famous friends. The writing style is particularly intriguing—primarily first-person Paltrow, with occasional additions from a mysterious editorial “we” whenever Gwyneth wants to interview herself.

GOOP may not sound like it has much of a market aside from people who really, really like to read about quinoa and $350 yoga pants, but it’s mesmerizingly readable—mostly because of its Marie Antoinette–esque detachment from reality. It's a glimpse into a magical alternate universe where money is limitless and the most important things in life are selecting the most authentic Corsican spa for a weekend getaway and teaching one’s children to enjoy buckwheat grains. [READ MORE]

Hannibal: "Apéritif”

(Note: No major spoilers.)

Hannibal is a rare breed in that the first episode is genuinely good, mostly because there's no need for clumsy exposition. Anyone with half a brain already knows what's going on: Hannibal is a cannibal, but it will probably take at least one season  for anyone on TV to work that out. It only takes a couple of minutes to illustrate who Hugh Dancy is: a guy who frowns a lot because of Confused Emotions, and whose brain is a holodeck for blood-spattered crime scenes. Hugh Dancy means we can watch people get murdered in dramatised flashback form, instead of having some generic CSI person explain it to us with Science. 
Mads Mikkelsen is, obviously, fantastic. But for me, the harder sell was always going to be Hugh Dancy's character, criminal profiler Will Graham. Not because I'm familiar with his character (I'm not) but because the crime/mystery genre is already overflowing with cute-ish men in their 30s and 40s. Luckily Graham sidesteps the two main cliches of "asshole genius" and "dorky everyman", and is interesting enough to be a worthwhile foil to Hannibal. Still, like most stories about serial killers, Hannibal mostly features women as side characters or in the role of naked, brutalised corpses. In The Silence of the Lambs, this is less of an issue because Clarice Starling is just as important as Hannibal Lecter, but there's no real need to make a TV series about Clarice. We already know her story too well.

Mike Lunsford's "fully-dressed redesigns" of superheroine costumes @ The Daily Dot.

Supergirl may be a woman of steel, but is a red, blue, and gold cheerleader uniform really the most practical outfit for fighting crime? While many superhero costumes can be a little beyond the pale (Ben Affleck’s red pleather catsuit in Daredevil comes to mind), their female counterparts are almost always worse.

Image by Mike Lunsford/ze-tarts.

Superheroine costumes can be a major point of contention for comics fans. Wonder Woman’s red bustier and star-spangled short-shorts are iconic, but do all female superheroes need to wear a swimsuit and heels when battling the forces of darkness? NBC’s failed Wonder Woman pilot tried to redesign her suit with pants rather than a skirt or shorts, but the end result was something that looked more like a Halloween costume. [READ MORE]