Launches & Releases: Amusing New Blog J.Cruel Abuses, Secretly Loves Catalogs

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Enigmatic new fashion blog J.Cruel appeared in our inbox recently and promptly blew our minds. The About section read "Anemic. Emotionally unavailable. J.Cruel." and the mission statement seemed to be a clip from Waiting for Guffman in which Parker Posey announces, "We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs."

The site is basically a parody of a catalog, or a fashion magazine, or a Lucky-like hybrid of the two. It's borderline impossible to navigate, but the individual entries are fairly genius—genius enough, in fact, that we assumed it was written by fashion industry people as a secret way to blow off steam. When we inquired, however, it turned out the authors were both getting graduate degrees in fiction, which also makes sense.

Here's an excerpt, attached to the photo with all the greenery, above left, and nicely calibrated to mock the whole Zooey-Deschenel-Built-By-Wendy-wistful-gamine thing that's so hard to pull off if you consume carbs:

That day’s work at the Children’s Library was particularly stressful. Two mothers asked the location of the restroom, and an eleven-year hold was caught snorting Adderall in the Under the Sea Storytime Castle. Dinner was a cigarette and an asparagus. As per her evening habit, she plucked up The Arcades Project before quickly setting it down again. This was how she avoided muscle atrophy. There were so many things she wanted desperately from life: the curve of a highball to cool her moist forehead, a goat cheese pizza the size of a hubcap, a bra.

OK, so there's a definite Fug Girls influence here, but it's hard to do fashion parody right, and there's certainly nothing wrong with having mentors. We hope they keep it up.
· J.Cruel [Official Site]
· Daydream in Ivy [J.Cruel]