Lessons from a Friday Night at Tesco

1. If you absolutely must wear leather-look leggings (and I don't condone this at all, but some of you out there seem to find them irrisistable), for the love of God, wear a thong. Or, since you're pretty much baring it all anyway, don't wear underpants at all. But what you mustn't, mustn't do, is wear panties that dig into the blubber on your bum, because everyone else can see it.
   
2. It's unfortunate, but painting your lips a paler colour than the rest of your face doesn't look pretty, or even edgy and cool; it just makes you look like a corpse.
3. There's only one sort of man who will wear a canary-yellow jumper over a collared shirt (with baggy cords, no less, and patent-leather shoes): the man who wants to be seen as more successful than he actually is. The canary colour is his way of being weekend-y and "playful"--his concession to fun whilst still trying to prove that he's too good at his job to ever really go off-duty. He's probably going to play golf tomorrow. In the same jumper. Avoid him.
4. If you're the manager of the store, don't hold an impromptu gathering of staff in front of the doors while students are queueing all the way to the back of the store trying to buy as much Jacob's Creek as they can before closing time. It makes it hard to leave. Or enter. And it kind of makes it look like you don't really care about your customers. Just saying.
   

How to Read Fashion

I think I've finally figured it out. High-fashion (as in, runway models, couture, fickle designers) is like really, über-esoteric art (or, indeed, writing)--you know, like those three-minute videos in galleries set on loop, with a close-up of a woman's belly-button and a fly buzzing around it. Bear with me--I think this one is good.

The way I see it, each is as obscure as the other. Pretty to look at, maybe, sometimes, and kind of interesting, if you're stoned, or feel like entering an upside-down world where nothing makes any sense, but otherwise empty.

Enter the fashion magazine: our guide to the fashion world, a dictionary, if you will, an art-history major for the catwalk. Today, you see, I walked to Tesco (the longest walk, in my current state) to buy soup, drugs, and a Vogue.

My Vogue, as it turned out, came with bonus material: The (Topshop-sponsored) Ultimate Catwalk Report. I was so excited! I eat this stuff up! Pages and pages of high-resolution photographs of Popsicle-sticks-with-lips strutting (or whatever it is they do) down the runway in....you name it. Jumpsuits? Check. Toutous? Check. A snakeskin-print bag "that's part luxe backpack, part roomy tote"? Check. Pyjamas? Check! See-through dresses? Check! (Who says men aren't interested in Vogue?) A swimsuit with belt, heels, and leather trenchcoat? Che-eck. (Yep, you heard it here first: Spring is all about pairing your old bikini with a designer coat to give it new life--that's some sharp credit crunch thinking!)

It's like a freakish combination of pornography, people-watching, and well-timed comedy rolled into one glossy, and very colourful, package: amazing.

In the midst of my elation, I started thinking: how do they do it? How do they look at all these clothes (clothes? can you call them that?), at all these images of models dressed up like the emaciated dolls of our nightmares, and determine that there's a pattern for the upcoming fashion season? Like, wow, this poor model was made to wear a plastic yellow bubble over her head (check it--page 34--if you don't believe me), so that means that flamboyant hats are the thing for Spring!

No: honestly, I think they're making it up. I think if you put a group of editors in one room and another group of editors in another, and didn't let them talk to each other, they'd come up with completely different visions for Spring/Summer '09 (as it's called, apparently). I think they see what they want to see in the designer collections, and interpret it for us. To be honest, it's good of them: that stuff needs translation. They give us the trends with such authority, but frankly, I think they're probably sitting in their offices right with a glass of champagne thinking, whew, fooled 'em again!

And then, there are the pet-trends. The ones that they mention every year, the one they throw repeatedly against the wall of consumerism and pray sticks. Like the Midi-length skirt, which crops up every few seasons and looks like a good idea (but then again, what doesn't on a life-size pencil): it's a long skirt, no, it's a short skirt, no, it's--in between! But then you try one on and you realize that unless your legs are six feet long on their own it's never going to look anything but frumpy, and besides, you can't walk properly.

Or the jumpsuit. "Vogue still loves...jumpsuits," says this month's issue. "Get to grips with the all-in-one. It's here to stay." I'm sure it is: in the pages of magazines. Have you actually ever seen an ordinary woman walking down the street on her way to work, or to the pub, or to go shopping, in a jumpsuit?

Neither have I.

So I salute you, high fashion: for your ingenuity, your artistic endeavors, and, mostly, your balls. And I eagerly await the day when someone realizes that anyone can interpret what's happening on the kalediscope we call runway. In the meantime, I'm off to consult the encyclopedia Vogue in the bath.

In Praise of Holey Jumpers (Or, The Other Holy War*)

Oh, apparently, there are rules about what I’m allowed to be wearing in my own house—unwritten, unenforceable rules. So secret I didn’t know about them until I opened up the Times today at work to discover that, despite the Middle East going to hell in a handbasket and the upcoming inauguration of a certain American president-elect, both of which had made it to the front page of the paper, the centerfold featured a dozen full-colour photographs of a pouty blonde wearing various configurations of jumper-tights-wool socks. The headline was something quasi-clever, like, “The (Staying) In Thing” and the first line of the (article? blurb?) read: (and I paraphrase) “Hibernating is understandable. Doing it old holey jumpers is NOT.”

I’m a big fan of the old holey jumper. I have an entire collection of them, mostly inherited from The Man, who rips tears in the armpits of his jumpers at a rate of about two per week, it seems: oversize, thick, unraveling-at-the-hems. Basically old duvets with armholes. And as they are a staple of my household wardrobe, I was shocked to discover that it’s not understandable that I might wear them whilst, say, washing the dishes, or watching a film on the couch, or writing in the study (which tends to be very, very cold).

I’ve come to the conclusion, after a fairly in-depth study of fashion magazines (well, after reading a lot of them in the bath, anyway) that fashion is utterly arbitrary. Forget what Meryl Streep says in The Devil Wears Prada: cerulean blue was only ever in vogue because, well, it just was—and only fell out of vogue because it did. If I had the right job, I could make fashion decisions for the world, too: give me a column in the front of any glossy Saturday magazine and see if I don’t get everyone to start dressing like me.

But despite all that, there’s a certain fashion magazine tone of voice: if you’re a girl, you probably know the one I mean. It’s authoritative. It’s almost propagandistic, it’s so convincing. It doesn’t once occur to you to question the assertion that peep-toe ankle-boots are in (PEEP-toe ankle-BOOTS, the rational side of your mind screams, but you shut it up at the first glimpse of Kate Moss modeling the trend). What do we humble readers know anyway?

So not only was I surprised to find that I was breaking standard lounging-around-the-house fashion etiquette, but I also quickly came to the conclusion that, in fact, I’ve become unduly sloppy in my hibernation-dressing lately, and, really, there isn’t an excuse for wearing hand-me-down-jumpers with gaping holes in exciting places. It’s probably not what Kate Moss would do, and it’s certainly not what the pouty blonde in The Times does.

But here I am at home, and the only thing I want to be wearing is—what else—a holey jumper. Preferably with holey tights (yes, I do own several pairs) and mismatched socks. And that authoritative fashion voice cannot permeate this inclination! She’s not allowed in my house; at least, she’s not allowed near my old jumpers.

But the best response, the most astute, I think, comes from The Man, who, upon hearing the headline, had only one thing to say:

“Oh, fuck off!”

And then he turned on his heel in a jumper which is beginning to show a little wear in the armpits.

*despite my penchant for bad puns, The Man actually came up with this one...

Whatever Happened to that Other Crisis?

I'm amused (and maybe even a little incensed) by the recent spate of columns, features, and everything in between about how to deal in the current economic crisis. Timely they may be, and maybe even necessary; but they are also, in large part, overwrought and insincere.

Overwrought: "If, for the fashion-forward, instead of Prada and Primark it's now all about feel-good car-boot sales, charity shops, free-cycling and frock exchanges, for the rest of us it is an hour in Tesco fossicking for the two-for-ones and the nearly-past-their-sell-by reductions, putting £20 worth of petrol in the car instead of filling the tank...growing herbs on the windowsill, making lots of shepherd's pies...and saying 'no!' (possibly for the very first time) to the kids when they demand stuff at the checkout...so not only is it exactly how it bloody well ought to be but it is all the better for being without smug self-righteousness or a gleeful need to be somehow au courant with 'recession chic'."

This is Observer columnist Kathryn Flett's version of a now very familiar tune: the "oh-my-gosh-they-tell-me-the-economy-is-failing-so-now-I'm-going-to-panic-and-buy-less-stuff" song. But Flett's own amazement should have tipped her off to something: "as I ambled from Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Circus and down Regent Street," she writes, "I was faintly astonished, given that the financial blight formerly known as The Crunch is now officially The Recession, to find that instead of tumbleweed and stumblebums the Street was heaving with shoppers, laden with bags, wearing the glazed expression of hardened consumers in search of their fix."

Insincere: What exactly is there to be astonished about, I wonder? In the Sunday Times Style magazine, editors suggest a "skinted" (i.e. "affordable" version) of a £7,000+ designer cocktail dress which costs a mere £50 from a popular high street shop. This is an increasingly common phenomenon--"credit crunch friendly" shopping advice--but let me ask you this: is £50 really affordable, if all is going to shit like they say it is? Do we really have any right to express shock at our fellow consumers, who flit in and out of the Oxford Street shops as readily as they did "before" (as if there was a before; as if poverty was not always a vague and distant threat, as if the mentality that Flett describes is not merely the same state of mind that the young and strugglign are in always)? I don't think we do; even if Vogue is handing out suggestions on how to live an affordably fashionable life, instead of merely a fashionable one, it's still Vogue, and we're still human.

We're seduced, you see--as Flett alludes to--by the idea of recession (wartime chic, growing our own onions, snuggled in a sparsely furnished lounge with nothing but our own fires to keep us warm in the darkening winter). The Sunday Times Style magazine, this sunday, features "The Joy of Thrift: India Knight's Brilliant New Book on the Glory of Make Do and Mend" on its cover, with an impossibly beautiful blonde in a 1950s-era outfit, pretending to knit; but is this actually what we want to do? Of course it isn't, as Colin McDowell rather ironically points out in the same magazine: "Clearly the way forward now is austerity," writes McDowell. "Thrift shops and dress agencies immediately come to mind, but it is wise to remember this: one of fashion's golden rules states that all the most God-awful garments in the world are destined eventually to sink to the thrift-shop clothes rail, which is fashion's equivalent of Skid Row. Avoid. Just as definitely, do not go into that murky world called home dressmaking or--even darker-alterations. And under no circumstances start to knit."

We could translate McDowell's paragraph thus: "Clearly the way forward now is austerity--pretend austerity. Thrift shops may come to mind, but it is wise to remember this: there is no real need to be actually austere, so for God's sake stay as far away from the charity shop, the sewing machine, and the knitting needles as possible. A failure to do so will mark you out as unfashionable and, even more horrifically, genuinely strapped for cash; so do your bit and head on down to the affordable high street shops."

With this in mind, Kathryn Flett's concluding paragraph seems suddenly thin. What exactly is wrong, we wonder, with "feel-good boot sales" and charity shops? Why shouldn't we feel good--and how is this worse than frequenting the ethically dubious Tesco and putting--you poor thing--just £20 of petrol in the car? Surely recycling items is not only "recession chic" but actually necessary. In her own panic, Flett seems to have forgotten that we have another crisis on as well; and a less glamerous one at that, for there is no chic precedent for an environmental emergency.

I'm tempted to say we should combine our crises: if we're so concerned about pinching pennies, why not put our money where it really matters and nowhere else? Why not visit Oxfam occasionally, instead of Topshop or New Look? The beauty of fashion, I've always thought, is that it is what we make it, and nothing else--if "recession chic" is in, then let's use it. Why not grow herbs on the windowsill--and potatoes in the garden, and onions and lettuce, and then invite our friends over to sip wine and warm the house? Why feel that we can't spend an extra few pounds on local, fresh foodstuffs, that we have suddenly to be slaves to Tesco and Asda just because the politicans tell us that money is in short supply and Wall Street has fallen?

Don't get me wrong: I'm as shopping--happy as the next Young Thing, and yes, I like my clothes. A few months ago I made a silent challenge to myself: to buy no clothing except underwear and stockings new; and it's working remarkably well. I probably won't cease consuming altogether--I'm too young, perhaps, too insecure--but I'll happily forgo an extra pint at the pub or this seasons' It-Outfit if it actually means something. We simply can't afford empty gestures anymore.

Does This Make Me Look Fat?

I never realized how differently we see matters of fashion until today. I mean, I knew we have different opinions, and I knew that I sometimes need a reality check from someone less taken by the whimsical but utterly impractical styles of Vogue, but I hadn't fully understood that sometimes, where I see one thing, he sees something else entirely.

I was in the bedroom, trying on my mom's cast-away clothing (a slightly juvenile ritual we go through each time I visit her, or vice versa). First she gave me a dress--polka dotted and colorful, nicely cut. I modeled it in the kitchen to the (admittedly tame) approval of the men. So I was feeling good about the next piece: a dark navy wraparound dress with bell sleeves. In front of the mirror, mom and I admired how well it hugged my curves, how lovely the fabric, how all around fabulous it was. Privately, I thought its finest feature was the way it hung on my rear, but I never got a chance to showcase this to my love: as soon as I entered the kitchen, he said one word, with a wrinkled nose:

"No."

"What?" I said. I figured I'd misheard. Maybe he had been talking about something else. Maybe he had been responding to a voice in his head, or maybe he had made a mistake with his eyes, and thought I was wearing a trash bag. But surely he'd come to his senses.

"Oh, no," he said again. I blinked.

"Really?" I said.

"It's the sleeves," he told me. "They look like something a forty-year-old woman would wear."

"Look at this face," I said, gesturing wildly. "Does this look like the face of a forty-year-old-anything?"

"No," he told me. "That's exactly the problem. It's--it's completely incongruous."

Back in the safety of the bedroom, I considered myself in the mirror. My buttocks looked fabulous; my breasts looked rounded, my abdomen looked--astonishingly--flat. But there it was: floppy forty-year-old-woman sleeves. I tried hiking them up, but no. All I could see was a middle-aged body with a twenty-something face.

How can two people see the same thing so differently? And which one of us is right? More importantly, to a girl trying to make her way in the world with some semblance of fashion sense, how on earth am I supposed to know what really looks good and what doesn't? The worst bit is, I can't even write this off to his being a man: he's shockingly good at picking out clothes for women, and some of my all-time favorite pieces were spotted not by me, or a trendy girlfriend, but by my own true love. I trust his judgment; but I also trust mine, and I'm fascinated by how oppositely we can react to something as simple as a little navy blue dress.

The next thing I tried on was a forest green turtleneck jumper, which I liked mostly for its color. It had a seam in the back and the first thing he did when I came into the room was frown and ask if I was wearing it inside out.

"No," I said emphatically, trying not to sound too petulant.

"Oh," he said, his face falling.

But I put it in the "keep" pile anyway, just in case.