wants to give one to Justin Bieber.Should he be man enough to wear it  mother of the bride dresses 2016 , I'd love to hear your excuse.Whether this is a bona fide trend, a belated ringing in of equality or a bold money-making move on the part of recession-weary jewellers, I don't care enough to say.These rings only interest me insomuch as women actually use them to propose.I am 26; I have something that resembles a career; I'm independent and adamantly feminist.I have spent the last few years of my live-in relationship proving that I would make, at best, a disappointing wife.Were I to marry, I'd be way more Mrs.Rochester than Jane Eyre; I would burn that house down.And yet I still know, still maybe even sometimes think about, what I'd want my dress, my shoes, my ring to look like.I can see that marriage is a fundamentally flawed institution, on levels biological and societal, too; that it was always destined to fail.But, like Madeline Hanna in the new-ish but funnily old-fashioned Jeffrey Eugenides book The Wedding Plot, I can't so easily give up on wedding-day dreams.I don't particularly love this about myself.My straight, single, under-30 friends are, to a woman, smart and ambitious and work-first and modern.I did not think I'd have to ask 29 of them before I found one who said she'd truly rather propose than be proposed to this holiday, say, or any other time of the year.as long it's gluten-free.My friend Katherine has the man, the baby and the two-storey house, but no certificate, which is all rather more because she's practical than 'cause she's much bothered about marriage as the site of patriarchal reproduction.But she did say she'd pop the question  mother of the bride dresses , and why?Men deserve to be swept away, too.Engagement rings lately come in all colours: There are the monarchical sapphires, the emeralds of Wallis Simpson lore and Joan Didion novels, the pink diamonds worn by unembarrassed rich girls Mariah Carey and Anna Kournikova and their ilk.They're shaded, too, by various sentiments.They're not always about love.They're not always, in the end, about marriage.But they are always, for better and for worse, about desire.Cultural Lessons of 2011: How Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty made the case that Twitter is fashion-forwardAs a new calendar year approaches, our writers reflect on what they learned from pop culture over the past 12 months.Today, Nathalie Atkinson on the fashionable world of Twitter.If you tweet it, they will come.And they did, in droves, to the Costume Institute's posthumous Alexander McQueen exhibition.Bloggers extolled, newspapers raved and the Met harnessed their Klout with a few hundred thousand Twitter followers who hashtag-gushed #savagebeauty.visitors at final count, nearly 100,000 more than the Costume Institute's last record-breaker (the Superheroes: Fashion Fantasy exhibit of 2008) and the eighth most popular show at the Met, fashion or otherwise.RelatedIt's impossible being green: From Hornet to Lantern, heroes of this hue lost the battle in 2011The museum opened on Mondays.It stayed open until midnight.And by the time the exhibition closed in August after a scant three months on view, the accompanying Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty catalogue distributed by Yale University Press had sold more than 100,000 copies.The hefty hardcover, with a lenticular cover that morphs McQueen's face into a macabre human skull (his frequent signature motif) is lavishly photographed  bridesmaid dresses for wedings , but cannot capture the eerie grandeur and solemn beauty of standing in front of the museum s scuffed mannequins modelling McQueen masterpieces.The Costume Institute's next exhibition is a pairing of Elsa Schiaparelli with Miuccia Prada and was only decided in September.explained Harold Koda when we sat down last month before his talk inaugurating the Founders Lecture series at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.It s very much about Zeitgeist.and I are constantly batting around.Koda has been the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2000, and if there is any event of comparison, he explained, it's Gianni Versace; the Costume Institute mounted the Versace show in December 1997, just months after the designer was murdered.which is, the concern of a curator is that there is going to be somehow a dispersal, or a shut-down of access to the archive.Because that has happened in the past.It also didn t hurt that McQueen s head designer Sarah Burton was revealed as the designer of Kate Middleton's wedding dress on the eve of the exhibition's opening.it s expensive to have a company archive and maintain and staff it.the theoretical layperson who might wander into the gallery.The Costume Institute is part of an important historical art museum and not, after all, the specifically focused, more academic Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.Koda disagreed with my suggestion, however, that luring visitors was about the exhibition as entertainment.he added by way of example.It s a different thing.what we re trying to do is create enough curiosity about something that people know nothing about, and still want to come.sometimes it s expanding it, skewing it younger or skewing it to more men for a change or skewing it to people who are interested in contemporary art, or people who are much more historically minded.Every exhibition has its nuance.But we always think about, Who is the potential audience?as we re formulating these ideas.it s that we ital like unital to break our own records.It becomes about how you can convey your ideas to the most people.you didn t have to read a label.Even a person who knows nothing about fashion thought they were in the presence of something that was exceptional.Newt Gingrich s gay half-sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, backing Barack ObamaThe gay half-sister of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich slammed his position on gay rights on Wednesday and said she will support President Barack Obama, a Democrat, in the 2012 election.but disagree on gay rights.Gingrich-Jon.