Canadian fashion magazine

Fashion bashin': Vice magazine's take-no prisoners fashion guide is universally offensive and very funny

Dos & Don'ts * Gavin McInnes * Vice/Time Warner * $17.95

Is your outfit gay? Not gay as in "homosexual," mind you, but gay as in "stupid." It's the preferred definition among countless middle school students, after all. And if you and your beloved are wearing matching T-shins or you've chosen the wrong ugly sweater or perhaps a leather-studded jacket complemented by bug-eye sunglasses, then you sartorial choices, according to the young hip creators of underground culture bellwether Vice magazine, are officially "gay." Now, if that particular usage offends you, then you're not going to like Dos & Don'ts, the latest book from Vice, in which even toddlers are taken to task for daring to be seen in public in elastic-waist purple pants. If, however, you're a fan of the gleefully obnoxious glossy's posteverything take on matters of race, gender, and sexuality, one in which words like "faggot" are meant, if not necessarily affectionately, then at least as simple descriptive monikers stripped of malice, you're going to laugh until the milk squirts from your nose.

Dos & Don'ts, with its often clandestine street-level snapshots and meaner-than-mean critiques that make Mr. Blackwell come off like Mr. Rogers, offers a crash course on how to win the messy low rent style sweepstakes as well as paper cut-sharp eviscerations of everyday folks in bad clothes, Renaissance Faire-attendees, velvetswathed goths, the elderly, neo-Nazis, house pets, and deceased tattooed bikers. The Vice guillotine falls on everyone and anyone, the just and the tinjust, and miraculously makes fashion-bashing something more than comedy or a middlebrow one-liner in Us Weekly. In their cruelly funny hands, talking about clothing becomes talking about life, art, sex, politics, everything. Sounds gay, I know.

Bitter, party of three

Samples of Vice's priceless commentaries that skewer the fashion-challenged: The woman in the for is dubbed the "mind-blowingly hot" mistress of a dead Italian, while the young man is presumed a French Canadian whose "huge women's earrings" are a faux pas surpassed only by his mom's "biker shorts,"

White writes on film for E! Online.