Hang on a minute...

Am I the last person on the fashion planet to know who Ann-Sofie Back is and that Ann-Sofie Back, the Ann-Sofie Back, did a 2007 fusion line for Oli? Or is this some kind of blood secret where anyone who reveals the truth is caught and gutted alive and forced to eat their own bloody entrails until they choke to death... (Oh, dear. Far too much watching of the Masters of Horror). 'Nyhoo... back to my musings...

I only ask because I really, really like ASB's stuff. It's got everything: style, cut, edge, spunk. In fact if I had to be reincarnated as an item of clothing, I would like to be one of these:

Back's clothes have front. They snarl at you, challenge you to a fight and kick your damned arse. Love. Her.

If you want to buy some affordable Back, check out the Oli sale. These are a few of my favourites:

Image sources:
First collage images via Ann-Sofie Back
Second collage images via Oli.co.uk

Speaking of the Oli sale, it's got some fab bargains. Here are some of my other sales picks (little add: I would watch out for the kimono dress. Although it has a lovely shape, it's a cunning blend of wool, nylon, acrylic and a teeny bit of cashmere - which, I find, never bodes well):

From top left to right: Fever tie-waist coat, £55; Jasmine Guinness tux, £60; Naughty Kimono dress, £68; Looking Glass nautical dress, £32; Fever knit dress, £40; Thomas Vicary pencil skirt, £40; and cut and sew skirt, £55

Click on all images to enlarge

So fugly! Sam, Charlotte and Miranda go large

More horrors from the set of Sex and the City - the Movie. Not only is Carrie wearing the wedding dress that ate New York, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda are also forced to share the misery.
So here's Charlotte continuing the fugly wedding theme in her Transyvannian transexual meets flamenc-Oh no! dress. Look, it's even got bat wings at the back! All the better to fly, my pretties, fly.


Poor Sam gets the red dress with the frou frou - because she's the hot enchilada, geddit? The point is further rammed home with some fugly ass, white chilly pepper earrings. Miranda, meanwhile, gets the big blue house, sorry, dress because she's Miranda and nobody ever cared what she wore anyway.

Remember when you were a kid and you and your friends wanted to play Charlie's Angels but there was always a huge fight because no one wanted to be Sabrina? Well Miranda is the Sabrina of SITC.

Pictures courtesy Daily Mail

So fugly! Sex and the city -the wedding

storm in a GG cup - SJP in that dress

Let's get one thing straight up front. Sex and the City - the series was the best thing on television, when it was on television. I loved Carrie's quirky style, I had a big crush on Mr Big and I thought that ballsy Samantha was the best thing since vibrating, battery powered, lady toys.

Like a sizeable chunk of women the world over, I am waiting for the movie with baited breath. It reminds me of those Friday nights spent in with the girlfriends, drinking too much wine and cackling like witches at the witty observations on single male-female relationships.

However, the release of the pics from the Carrie's wedding have left me in tears. Of laughter. Because all I can think is, what the fug?! Apparently, Patricia Feild and Sarah Jessica Parker, spent three years looking for the perfect dress and fell in love with this Vivienne Westwood creation. I am wondering if they also spent those three years getting high because... it's fugly. It's an enormous, bad, meringue nightmare, made all the worse because, SJP looks like she was sentenced to death by smothering in a duvet factory.

SJP, let me tell you straight honey. Your wedding dress doesn't fit. At all! The bodice section alone made me cringe because you could see all of SJP's tiny pigeon chest, totally unsupported by the acres of material, which is obviously made for a person with, er, more chest. And when she bends over? Holy mother, she might as well not be wearing anything at all and what we see? Is not pretty.

So my question is: Pat, what look were you going for here? Because whatever it is, it is so not working.Ooh, Aah, lost my... entire upper dress area!

It is a well known fact that Viv designs for the curvy lady, so what anyone was thinking when they put the teeny tiny SJP in this dress, remains one of the world's great unsolved mysteries.

Sadly, this is only the beginning of the nightmare.

Next: Sam, Charlotte and Miranda go large.

Pictures courtesy Daily Mail

Feeling pouffy

I'm really feeling the pouffy shapes that are emerging out of the shops at the moment. Not to be confused with last seasons volume madness this is more of a marriage of contrasts - fit and flare and fit again (or vice versa).

Coat, Full Circle; cocktail dress, Karen Millen; cable knit sweater, Topshop; Fingerless gloves, Gloved Up; skinny rib sweater, Karen Millen

I'm trying to work out what it is about the shape that I find so appealing... I suppose it's the shapely, vaguely sculptural air. These could be items of clothing or they could be works of art. It's something about symmetry. It's something that I majorly dig.

Too much of a good thing?

Long ago (oh, so long ago) when I was a spotty teen, hopped up on hormones, with far too much time and far too little disposable income, I used to be creative. I thought nothing of turning a pair of jeans into a skirt, finding some fascinating and cheap scrap of material and turning it into something even more fascinating and wearable or snaffling my mum's old clothes and reshaping them into something wonderfully short and teen-ish.

That was then. Now I'm too busy, I get paid and there's a shop on every high street corner where I can buy an entire outfit for less than £50. What's the point?

This, my friends, is the beginning of the end of my creativity.

I just don't do that sort of thing anymore. I own a sewing machine but I can't remember the last time I sewed (no, wait. I can. It was 1999. A skirt. It rocked.) Or altered a dress or nipped in a waist.

Fast fashion, disposable income, work and age have stolen the playful experimentation and imagination with which I used to approach fashion and replaced it with the grasping soullessness of a shopaholic. I want all the latest looks and I want them yesterday.

I don't know exactly how I came to this realisation but I don't think I'm alone. Up and down the country there must be women who could just as easily turn a old pair of slacks into this season's shorts who, instead, just go out and buy them for a fiver at Primark.

I'll bet that if we all spent as much time and energy creating the next big look as we did shopping for it, we'd have a lot more fun and probably a lot more money and the feted fashion designers who charge far too much for their exclusivity would be quaking in their It boots as their empires crumbled around them.

Or maybe not. Maybe not everyone is or wants to be creative that way. Maybe it's just easier to pick up a bargain on the high street, wear it once and chuck it to the back of the wardrobe than it is to actually make something. Sewing is, afterall, a pain. It's complicated and time-consuming. Sometimes it doesn't even work. Why go to all the trouble when you could spend a few hours shopping for instant style gratification?

Wouldn't it be great though, if you went out in an outfit of your own making and everyone wanted one just like it? You could tell them "It's one of a kind. I made it." I think that would totally be worth it. Maybe it's time I dusted down that sewing machine.

Antique Singer sewing machine image courtesy of The Smithsonian

Elegantly waisted

I am so in love with the new high-waisted look in the shops right now. Now, let me say right up front, I am not a skinny girl, but the right fit in a high waist can give you a great hour-glass figure, especially if you've got an apple shape like mine. I bought a great pair of high-waisted denim shorts, £24.99, from H&M recently (see image left). Wearing them is just like putting on a corset, sucks you right in.

Come to think of it, H&M are doing some great high-waist styles on everything from skirts to trousers. Also, check out Warehouse, whose high-waist skirt with braces, has been flying from their stores (see image right) .

Preen also have this lovely high-waist skirt for Topshop, £60 (below left).

Best way to wear them is with a nice slim-fit jersey top or tee, or if you're a skinny Minny, try a silk or satin smock top.

Thank heaven for skinny girls

I’ve been following the current hoopla surrounding skinny models with a some degree of cynicism lately. It’s as if everyone has suddenly forgotten what models are. I mean, what else is a model to do if not be skinny. That, I would say, is a considerable part of the modelling job description. It’s not as if they’re supposed to be like ordinary mortals. What would be remotely interesting about that? What’s next? Models to be less tall, have pot bellies, pimples?

Just to put this thing to bed in my mind once and for all I logged on to trusty dictionary.com for guidance. The definition that particularly caught my eye being definition number 2: a representation, generally in miniature [italics mine], to show the construction or appearance of something. Hee! Now if that isn’t the definitive, er, definition, I just don’t know what is.

Models are freaks of nature. They stand out because they have the leg measurements of the average skyscraper or because they manage to have a luscious cleavage and a 22 inch waist. Not everyone is so blessed and it is not something that you can make happen if you weren’t born with it – unless, of course, you are happy to let some quack remove a few ribs (yes, Cher, I am talking about you).

Why blame the models? They’re just being what they are supposed to be – tall, skinny, pretty, pouty, young. Why not blame the designers with their fugly clothes that only ever look good on models and, that they expect us, real women, to buy. The thing is, as long as we have these women who obviously have more money than sense or taste for that matter (read WAGS and bloody, bloody, Victoria Beckham) these designers getting away with it. For now.

Surely it can only be a matter of time before the backlash; before we start looking at ourselves in the mirror and realising that there is no point in trying to look like models because most of us simply will never look that way. What we need is more clothes that are made for real women that help us look good with our God given booty, whatever size that booty might be. Which is why I applaud the lovely M&S with their dresses with the hidden support that keeps us nipped in at the right places and looking our gorgeous best.

And to the designers and their fancy models, I say, you can kiss my big behind buh-bye.

The big clearout

I am currently sitting in the post bomb-blast situation that is my bedroom. Yesterday I decided to have THE BIG CLEAROUT. Apologies for the shouty capitals but in this instance they are all that will do, seeing as I haven’t done a wardrobe cull since the turn of the century.

Being a dedicated shopaholic and consummate hoarder, this poses something of a problem. I currently have a shoe collection somewhere in the region of 500 and, as for the clothes, I simply stopped counting. So this clearout? Big effing deal!

I decided for the first cull to divvy the clothes into piles of : bin, charity, ebay and keep, Out came clothes that hadn’t seen the light of day for years: jeans and trousers whose gussets had worn away through over use, t-shirts, tops and dresses that I’d last worn when I was size 8, clothes that I had been unable to find at that crucial moment when they were all I wanted to wear simply because they were hiding under a tonne of other stuff that I’d got bored of wearing… on and on the list goes.

In the end I got together quite good haul for charity – a huge suitcase and two binbags full to be precise. From the ebay pile I found a few choice pieces that I had bought in a haze of shopping madness at TK maxx. I love TK maxx but for me shopping there is like the equivalent of Superman walking through a maze made entirely out of kryptonite. I go all fuzzy in the head and the next thing I know I’m walking out the shop, laden down with massive shopping bags, my wallet several hundred pounds lighter and my entire being filled with a vague sense of dread.

Anyway, back to the cull. So, in the for the ebay pile, I manage to find, not one, not, two, but three pairs of fashionably high-waisted flares, which unfortunately no longer fit over my size 12 booty but will make someone out there in the shopping ether very happy indeed. Also in the haul is a lovely tomato-red, cotton tunic dress with ties, a pretty flower pattern and bell sleeves. It’s gorgeous. It’s never been worn. I bought it in a grab and run from H&M last year under the erroneous impression that when it said size 12 on the tag, that meant that it would fit my size 12 body. So, here I would like to do a quick shout out to H&M… guy’s, sort out the sizes. Please. The whole sizing Russian roulette thing? Getting really annoying! Thank. You. So. Much.

Other goodies abound. I will be posting up pictures shortly with links to my ebay… go on, grab yourself a bargain.

On to the keep pile and Oh Sweet Jesu, there are still masses of clothes left. This is after I’ve hung up the favourite skirts, blouses, dresses and coats and put the winter woollies on the shelves at the back. The wardrobe is full, the hanging rack on the other side of the room is full, I am still looking at a very healthy pile on my bed and it is now 2.30 in the morning!

In fit of pique brought on by lack of sleep I pull out another large suitcase and throw all of the rest of the clothes in it. They are now just sitting there waiting for me but I can’t even think about doing anything with them right now. All I know is that I did THE BIG CLEAROUT and I still can’t move for clothes.