Free Advice for the Chaps

Guys, men, boys, whatever, this is the time when you need to take a bit of advice from Aunty Jane.  I know the weather is warming up and those pale hairy little pins of yours need an airing, but I implore you, DO NOT GO DOWN THE CHINO SHORT ROUTE.

Yes in theory they have a great preppy vibe and hit the right smart casual yet comfortable notes.  But what they will not do is flatter, no matter what your shape.  For example see above, a fine strapping young man, a model no less, does he look a bit Oh *disappointed face*?  You betcha he does.

The reason why my fine fellows is proportion.  They cut off mid thigh and cling with that weird turn uppy thing.  The result is the perception of short legged chubbiness.  Us ladies have had years of experience with proportion disasters, we can overcome most of these with heels, you can't.  Well you can, but you'd look like Prince and we'd laugh.  If you are going for shorts which end mid thigh, they need a tidgy bit of width at the hem, same if they end just above the knee.  We won't discuss 3/4 length because you shouldn't, under ANY circumstances.  If you are clinging onto your desire to wear a pair of chino shorts then size up for God's sake, and avoid beige unless you have a darker shade of skin.

Right that's you lot told, feel free to share and tell your mates.

Disgusted

After buying Vogue and the other glossies religiously since the mid eighties I've now totally given up on them.  Why?  Well because I am getting rather fed up of spending money for the sole purpose of being flogged a load of overpriced goods which I don't want.  Page after page of glossy ads for the big fashion houses, minimal interesting and innovative articles (if any) and more selling in the editorials, well at least they are pretty.

There have been countless articles about the decline of the printed word, books (sad), newspapers (a bit sad) and magazines (haha).  Blogs and the internet are getting blamed for this decline.  Well in the case of magazines, they are dinosaurs and internet is their extinction event.

Yesterday I bought two magazines, one Oh Comely which I will come to in a bit and  AnOther which is edited by Jefferson Hack.  For the grand price of £6.95 I had to flick through 57 pages of adverts before I got to the first article.  OK I thought, they've got them all out of the way to make way for lots of great articles.  Nope, every other page is yet another ad.  In balance it does contain some beautiful pictures in the fashion editorials, of which there is a lot.  Then I looked closer, each outfit was for a designer, not a styling mishmash using these amazing clothes to show the unique creative vision of the stylist.  More selling.  There is a bit of text accompanying each fashion story, which was such pretentious twaddle I had to laugh out loud.  Once again, for balance, there was one great piece on Edward James who was a fascinating character and an OK interview with Ai Weiwei.  This was however, not worth £6.95 and it left me feeling empty and just a little bit depressed.

Back to the aforementioned Oh Comely, this magazine is a total delight.  With minimum adverts it gets stuck right in.  Interesting articles and examples of new writing as well as some fresh fashion, it is exactly what I want to spend my money on.  Priced at £4 it is published every two months.  This magazine is a real item of beauty, fabulous photography, great paper and even an item on how to make cheese, something I never thought I'd want to read about, let alone enjoy.  I finished reading this magazine and felt uplifted and looking forward to the next issue in two long months time.

I think I'll email Jefferson Hack and suggest he changes the name of his publication to Disgusted.

Wellingtons

Above you will see a pair of bog standard wellies, these my lovely readers are the only chic way to wear the practical yet noble Wellington Boot.

There are two ways in which un-chic welly wearers get it wrong.  The first is the expensive branded wellies.  Why on Gods green earth would you want to pay for Hunters, or God forbid Le Chameau.  If you have that much more money than sense, you really need to start stopping for chuggers and talking to them.  Basic fact, they are a functional item ONLY.

The second erroneous way is the cute patterned welly.  Ask yourself two questions.  Am I older than 12? Or yes you knew this was coming, a CBeebies presenter?  No? I thought not.

If you just want to look normal and quite smart then I beg you, your only other options are tacky as hell or Carly Rae Jepson?

I Don't Care What The Fashion Press Says... About Peplums and Pairs

Peplums, beloved of the cast of Dynasty and Dallas and alongside huge shoulders and hair is one of the things we have been quite happy to leave in the 1980's, until now.  Yes you guessed it, the fashion houses have decided that they are now to be part of our future fashion faux pas. I'm sure the average woman on the street really wants her hips emphasizing. If you are still interested in looking a bit daft you can pick up this Jil Sander peplum for Net-a-porter for a paltry £320.

The other thing which is driving me crazy at the moment is the insistance by the fashion press of describing clothing items in the singular, as in a shoe, or a tight or a trouser. I do hope dear reader hat they are only doing this to make themselves sound more knowledgeable that us civilians and that actually it is a load of pretentious nonsense.  If I hear any of you dropping the 's' off the ends of these items I shall afix you with a steely glare or in tradionally Scouse fashion, point and say 'eeeeeeeee, kip of you'.  You have been warned.

Desperate

Desperate Scousewives?  Well it is a desperate idea anyway.

Elephant Feet

This was on Garance Dore's blog today and I really think we need to get the message out across Liverpool, there is a vaccine ladies, all is not lost.

Why Mary Portas is Wrong

A few weeks ago to great fanfare on the blogosphere and in the Sunday Supplements, Mary Portas, of Mary Queen of Shops fame launched her own fashion line.  Marketed as the only available alternative for the middle aged woman, it produced various garish tunics to keep us feeling relevant.  This flummoxes me.  There are plenty of places where a middle aged woman with varying stages of middle aged spread can shop and look good, Whistles, Toast, Jigsaw (sometimes), Reiss, Jaeger among many.  What all these labels and Mary Portas' range have in common is the price range, they are all prestige high street prices.  The gap in this market is for decent styling, fabrics and sizing at the lower end of the price bracket.  Yes you can shop in M&S or Next but frankly they are very dull and are not going to make anyone feel like they are on the cutting edge of anything except utter mundanity.  Gap is good for all ages but only for basics, and Zara is so random in it's sizing I for one mainly can't be bothered.  I also have a problem with the quality in Zara, in that it is not very good.  


I do wonder about the motivation for this line, is Mary Portas really so out of touch with the prices the majority of women can afford?  And why is she trying to kid us all that she is saving our sartorial lives?  I for one am off down to Whistles.


Pictured is the no-brainer dress priced at £135, please forgive my sniggering.

I Don't Care What the Fashion Press Says...

About...

Smoking Slippers
 

Whose bright idea were these then?  I'm all for flat shoes, heels should be for those random occasions when you don't need to use your feet.  But slippers?  All that outrage with people going to the shops in their PJs and now because Charlotte Olympia is doing a pair for nigh on £500 it's OK? I think not fashion press!  I have absolutely no desire to look like an old man looking for his pipe and paper thank you very much.  Let us not be fooled by the hype and the faux heritage name (there is no such thing as a smoking slipper, unless it's on fire), these shoes are ugly and for all their pretense at being practical, they are velvet, not a fabric which mixes well with our rather damp British weather.  One for the fashion bin I think.

             
Fur

This has never been acceptable in my book  and never will be.  Let us not forget that this is a fabric born out of death and cruelty.  It is not a by product of the food industry and wearing it is inexcusable.  What about vintage fur I hear you cry.  Well I'm in two minds over this, yes we live in an age where we should recycle and reuse.  For an animal to give up it's life it seems only decent that it pelt is used till it quite simply falls apart in order to justify its dying.  However, I do feel that the whole vintage fur trend has inadvertantly helped muddy the waters on wearing fur.  Where once any sign of a real pelt in the street ran the risk of a pot of red paint being flung at it, today that would never happen just in case it was someone trying to save the planet.  Why not just ban the use of real fur in any further garment production and then all that is left is vintage which can be worn to the hearts content.

Maxi Skirts

Oh the maxi skirt, my all time bete noire.  Want to look fat and frumpy?  Wear a maxi skirt.  Want to sit all day with a sodden muddy hem?  Wear a maxi skirt.  Want to walk in a really strange way as you have three yards of fabric bunching up between your legs?  Wear a maxi skirt.  Unless you are tall and willowy a maxi skirt will not suit you, it will hide your lumps and bumps but only because it's affect is akin to a tent and with all the style that implies.  If you want coverage, go for the mid calf length.  It is showing enough leg to give you shape but will skim across areas you want to hide.




Skinny Models

What actually gets my goat about this more than anything is the utter hypocrisy of the fashion press.  Approximately once a year one of them will run an editorial with larger size models and there will be a holier than thou debate about how it needs to change and a more natural sized model should be used in future.  They then go straight back to using anorexic children.  It is very easy fashion press, use women with proper bodies in future instead of prattling on about it and making those larger sized models almost freak like, you forget, they are the normal ones.




It Bags

I've never understood this phenomenon at all.  I like a nice bag, who doesn't? but to spend hundred of pounds on one, NEVER!  For example one of the most touted at the moment, the Mulberry Alexa bag costs around £785.  For that money I could get my roof repaired or take myself and my daughter for a weekend in Rome.  I am certainly not too proud to pack my phone purse and camera into a M&S bag for life.





The Fetish Look

I rest my case.

A Feminist/Fashion Rant

I firmly believe the women use fashion to impress other women, women who have their own style dress to please themselves, and women who follow what I will loosely term the WAG look dress to please men.  Nothing wrong in this, having a liberal take on the world, we should all be able to do and dress how we please.  However, I can't help feeling a tad disappointed in the WAG option, for me personally this is a sign of weakness, partially at the women who are wearing this, but mainly at the forces which make it such a desirable option.  I shall explain.


The primary image of Liverpool women in the media is the WAG, derided for being vacuous, false and designer obsessed gold diggers.  This is not my experience of the Scouse Sisterhood at all.  Yes there are women (and men) with those qualities in our fair city, but by and large Liverpool women are strong and outspoken and are generally up for a bit of a laugh.  Men are treated with an eye roll while we push up out sleeves and crack on with it.  Men?  they are just there for decoration.  I jest of course.  I am not anti men, I like men, I enjoy their company and there are many who I admire for their achievements.  I don't hold them individually to blame for the sexist society in which we still live but the patriarchal hegemony which has been in place for centuries and which thankfully is gradually being eroded.


I am pointing an accusing finger at the advertising companies and especially the lower brow media.  They are constantly offering up ideals of woman, be it size, looks or what they should be wearing which I feel is detrimental to women, they just won't let us be.  Even when I open Vogue, a magazine which is dear to my heart, I get annoyed at being bombarded with images, sex as the cliche goes, sells, and boy does it.  I have no objection to sex, quite like in fact but I do get frustrated that this is, by a long chalk, the main way in which things are sold.  Have we not yet moved away from this rather unsophisticated concept.  Why is the mainstream reluctant to harness the immense creativity at it's disposal and evolve.  Naive and vulnerable girls are why.  Is it moral to use this to sell more stuff?  Women especially younger women and girls buy into this hook line and sinker, it is so pervasive, feeding off the lack of confidence and self esteem which it produces in these women, that they will never match up.  As a consequence they may never feel the absolute joy that is dressing to please yourself only, to sticking two fingers up at what anyone thinks.  An extreme example of this is when I finally relented and allowed my very young daughter to have a Barbie doll, when she peeled off the clinging glittery pink dress, Barbie, god bless her plastic soul was wearing a gold thong, WTF?  Is this really the model I want her to use in order for her to grow up into a strong, independent creative being, a big nope.


I know that ranting about this in a blog is not going to change anything, but Ladies I implore you, please your own heart first when it comes to dressing at least.  Nothing is more attractive than a woman who knows her own mind and isn't scared of expressing it.  And my message to the media, open your eyes, there is a lot more to us Scouse women than your tiny minds can cope with.


The photo is from some dreadful footie site and saddens my little heart.

Cheryl gets it Wrong

This is the first and last time you will see a picture of someone like Cheryl Cole on this blog, but I had to comment because this outfit has left me stunned.   She normally looks good in a glossy over stylised way which is very popular with her audience, but this, well lets do a bit of analysis:

The trousers do not fit and are shapeless, the top is over fussy and the colours do not work at all.  I will say nothing about this woman's insistance on over grooming which sucks out any indication of personality. 

On the plus side, well done Cheryl your fashion faux pas has returned faith that you are not a Stepford  racist thug Wife after all.

Fancy Dress

Driving home from work this evening, I was amused to see my Other Halve's jaw drop open in shock.  As he doesn't tend to notice anything that occurs outside Goodison Park, I glanced over to see what had kicked him out of his reverie.  Out of a shop clopped a young girl, dressed to kill.  Unfortunately she had made the classic mistake I see time and time again amongst young Scouse girls. Instead of using a trend for inspiration they use it too literally.  Hearing that the Seventies are back in fashion, she had donned her clogs, floaty brown sprigged maxi dress and had a headband across her forehead.  This did not look chic stylish or any other adjective usually desired when dressing, it looked like she was in Fancy Dress.


It may seem obvious to some of us but what struts down the catwalks or graces the pages of the glossies is purely there for inspiration.  It is not meant for wholesale recreation on the street.  If the Seventies are back, wear a pair of wide legged jeans but pair it with a modern blouse or t shirt that keeps it looking fresh, less is more to coin a cliche.  

Photograph by the Sartorialist