The Crunch Bunch

An email in my inbox, from a shopping website that will go unnamed [but...uh... if you got it, you know who I'm talking about]:

You don't need us to tell you that this is the time for investment. Forget fast fashion and quick fixes. We're investing in timeless basics that will last year after year and stand out from the crowd.

Don't think me hard-hearted. I know retailers've gotta make a dollar [and no-one benefits from the economy going down the tubes], I know they've got overheads and bottom lines and masses of stock that they need to shift our way. No-one expects them not to. But one thing is being ignored: after you buy this season's timeless classics, there'll be another raft of essential, three-figure long-term buys next season. All of which, of course, will carry us safely through to the good times again.

I know full well that I sound like a mardy cynic, and I truly will try not to rant about any more recession-related idiocy for at least a week. I'm just rather weary with every advertising line now referencing the credit crunch, and with the moronically topical tone they all take.

"There, there. We know you've got no money. [Ha ha! Sucks to be you!!] We know you can't afford to buy your next tin of baked beans, or make rent. Instead of buying that new house, savvy savers will downsize and buy this handy 3-pack of classic alpaca cushion covers. These amazing, dual purpose delights will make your home look up-to-the-minute AND mean you don't need to buy a new house. Take that, credit crunch! The perfect investment to carry you through the recession. 'Er from next door might be sitting on the kerb this morning with the few worldly possessions she has left since the bailiffs battered the door down halfway through Newsnight, claiming their due, but you can feel cosy and cocooned from the financial maelstrom with your timeless soft furnishings. Available now for the inflation-busting price of £159.99."

If I exaggerate, they drove me to it. I'm sick of hearing about it. Give me facts and reportage - the latest bank to crash and burn, our good PM's newest and boldest strategy to dig us out of this apparently apocalpytic mess. But I really don't need credit-crunch themed shopping journalism, ta very much. I've heard of spending your way out of recession, but this bullshit about this being the time for investment, buying something [coincidentally 'on-trend'] to 'take you through' several seasons... It's getting my back right up.

Can we not just be honest about it, and admit that we should be saving, not investing, but that when the spending urge hits you, it's better to buy this product than that product, because "ours is totally... like... BETTER"?

And what's more...

...as an addendum to the other day's post about the fashion press's response to the credit crunch, I really like this month's Bazaar.



How timely to run an issue of icons, of people that never go out of style and clothes that never lose their cache. It's rather comforting to flick through the pages of their '40 classic pieces' article. It could have been dull, but typically for Bazaar, there's enough elegance to the pieces they suggest and enough sense to their arguments for them, to make me return to my own wardrobe and remind myself that I really don't actually need to add to it right now.

Is it just me that isn't at all impressed by Peter Blake these days though? Oh, British institution, fiddlesticks. Sgt Pepper is all well and good, but what's he up to now? 'Designing' the cover of the magazine with Swarovski crystals by sticking them in doltish stars at obvious points on the photo? Yes, very good, well done. Pfft. There was another piece of his in the magazine, I forget where, but if I'm sufficiently annoyed when I get home this evening, perhaps I'll scan it in. Not impressed.

The credit crunch / the recession / the impending depression / the end is nigh

Curious that as the media blare shock-and-awe headlines about the credit crunch, fashion is unapologetically back on the mainstream radar. Compare fashion coverage seven or eight years ago with the frenzy now. [Maybe this has something to do with fast fashion, Topshop, Primark, the accessibility of good design etc]. I remember as a teenager feeling awkward among my peers for liking Fashion with its designers, fashion houses and iconic history, while my friends were more tribal about the clothes they wore.

Now fashion is in fashion again [is that like black being the new black?]. Every day it's all over the free London papers and the TV [Gok, the Fashion Show, the incoming Frock Me with Alexa & HH], and every teen seems to know her Miuccia from her Marc Jacobs [and own some of it, too. Jesus!]

And as governments bail out reckless bankers, on we shop, from Primark bargains upwards. Meanwhile the fashion press contextualise clothes economically, analysing designers' responses to the crunch via their collections, and telling us how to style and save at the same time.

But UK Elle's November issue is the proverbial straw on my imaginary camel's poor overloaded back. I can deal with repetition of a theme, but I can't deal with being sold idiocy under the guise of 'top tips!!'. The running theme is 'beating the credit crunch', bargain shopping, sneaky savings etc; timely and helpful, one might think. Sadly, quite the opposite, to a laughable degree.

They're not encouraging us to stride defiantly into our nearest Tiffanys and and load jewelled diadems on our cards. Nor are there helpful ideas to maintain some style when all your money is going on bills and basics. No 'More Dash Less Cash' here.

Rather, empty & idiotic advice; the hypocrisy of encouraging a fashionista spending habit under the guise of saving money. Plenty of us do this, but I don't need to read journalism to the same effect, without writers even questioning why. Their advice is the equivalent of giving someone a fiver and asking for five pounds change.

If November Elle is a joke, the punchline sees their Mademoiselle columnist venture into Zara [a little-known, backwater boutique the eagle-eyed among you might know] for the first time in years and registers surprise at their stock and prices. These people live on another planet.

Buying a K by Karl Lagerfeld sweater because a diffusion range is cheaper [an actual Elle tip] than the main line is not saving money! Nor is buying £135 men's indoor slippers instead of a pair of shoes, or a new bag because, thrills!!!, you can use it both day and night. I know they have to be seen to sell, but not one shred of their style advice this issue practically encourages the reader to spend less or observes that fashion can be fun without costing much.

Vogue has never made any pretence about affordable fashion - they separated the cheap from the luxe with their occasional Cheap'n'Chic features, and are thoroughly and honestly aspirational - and a good read for it. By contrast, and of all the real glossies, Elle always seemed like the credible, accessible option - couture here, high street there. If they want to encourage people to lavish their way through the current times, fine, but this kind of journalism is insulting.

A double page spread about the psychology of shopping in the high street supplement, based on an Elle survey, notes that despite the crunch, we're shopping as much as ever. The tagline led me to hope it might explore why we all seem so shopping addicted, and ways of replacing it with a less costly kick. Sadly not. Just a handful of statistics and cheerful 'Off you shop!' encouragement.

It can be done, and it can be done well, from individual blogs to mainstream TV. I liked the observations over at Make Do and Mend, on the reality of living on a real budget [as opposed to a diffusion-range-only budget] and how she does it, and Twiggy's Frock Exchange on BBC2 the other night, if a bit WI-esque and sugary, proved a joyful hour of swapping, out-of-town thrifting and reinventing, with not a penny spent by the 100 women that participated.

If Elle let me write an article on saving money, I'd advise:

- sample sales through Fashion Confidential et al
- recon high street missions - as soon as you see the new season's clothes, if you must shop, hit the high street with no cash/cards, just a notepad and camera. Try things on, note who does the best versions of high-end clothes, note prices, and work out what you really need.
- smalltown charity shops [and charity/2nd-hand stores if you happen to be abroad too - almost always cheaper than UK ones]
- identifying what you will never wear again. What you can't sell on eBay/thriftstoreuk etc, alter - especially if you'd have thrown it away anyway. Success = new clothes, failure = nothing lost.
- part-exchanging good quality unwanteds for vintage goodies in shops like Bang Bang
- clothes-swap parties with similarly-shaped friends
- learn to dye your clothes [practice on unwanted bits], choosing and mixing subtle hues to avoid the limited high-street palette
- make clothes if you can, or befriend the dressmakers/tailors in your local dry cleaners. [I did this tonight, potentially to great effect.]

It's not exactly rocket-science, but when Elle's advice amounts to 'spend hopelessly and pretend you didn't', I wonder how much grasp they have on common sense.

The perfect trousers

What are yours?




As well as my fixation with the perfect pair of skinny-fit tuxedo trousers, for years I have hankered after some dream wide trousers. But two things come to mind when I think of wide trousers:

- Katharine Hepburn, striding about in her trews with thunderous defiance, telling her studio bosses to stick it when they request that she clothe herself in ladylike skirts
- 'What Not To Wear' type shows, where middle-aged women are made to don characterless two-legged high street cotton sacking because they're supposedly too fat to show their legs

They can go very right, or very wrong. This is what I do NOT want:



[Image: Industryfolio.com]

Wide trousers are meant to make a woman look statuesque, nonchalant but powerful - the kind of woman that glides through life wreathed in odourless cigarette smoke and cinematic shadow, knocking down her peers and subjects with dry quips and gusts of air from the movement of her eyelashes. They're meant to make your legs look like they go on forever. If they make a catwalk model look like the average woman on the street, they'll do precisely nil for that average woman.

I've got some nice black high-waisted ones, very tight in the waist, but I want some cooler, mannish ones too. When my dress-form arrives, instead of finishing the dresses I have started, I suspect my next sewing project will be a pair of heavy wool pinstripe trousers. Heavy enough that they can be wide and show some movement but not flap stupidly in the wind as cheap trousers do. Wide on the leg, medium-rise on the waist, with just the right amount of insouciant slackness on the legs. I'm not thinking Annie Hall and her kooky granddad dressing, though this admittedly has a separate appeal.

Mainly I'm thinking Madonna in the Vogue video - these trousers have hovered in my imagination for years -



. . . and Irina Lazareanu in the current issue of Tank. The photo's not too clear, sadly, but these Paul Smith trousers are magnificent [pity I can't afford them]:



[Image: Stefano Galuzzi, Tank]

Pinstripe wool, some heavy machine needles and thread, and a couple of days of patience. How hard could it be?

Orient Excess

There's some beautiful photography in the June issue of UK Vogue. Not a particularly engaging issue this time round, but I enjoyed the fashion spreads [the Patrick Demarchelier one is also very much worth a mention - Foto-Decadent has scans here - Jessica Stam looks phenomenal.

However I think they shot themselves in their bejewelled feet in the way they arranged the Orient Excess story.




[Images: Javier Vallhonrat for Vogue UK]

Two enticing double page spreads, then a two page article by Syrian writer Rana Kabbani about the decline of the Ottoman empire, as experienced by her grandmother. The writing is evocative, fierce and deeply saddening, and makes no bones about the author's contempt for the sensationalism of the western view of the harem, and the popular view of women's place in this much romanticised world. She goes to great pains to separate her [and her family's] first-hand experiences of it from the salacious image many people retain, and describes it as a place where women of the time could convene, converse, work, entertain, rest, learn from each other and be themselves, 'relieved of the intrusive presence of their men'.


[Image: Javier Vallhonrat for Vogue UK]

Following this intelligent, thought-provoking article with 6 pages of a semi-orgasmic white model, surrounded by diaphonous silks, her hair clinging sweatily to her face and throat as she arches backwards on piles of cushions, rather suggests that the photo editor, the features editor and the person who put the page order together did not have a conversation. The images are superb in every way but they're let down by the context they're placed in. If Vogue had run these images before the article, letting them stand for themselves in their beauty and then having the article offer a social and historical counterpoint, I think it would have been more successful; as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if the author felt rather insulted.

Nevertheless, it's still a beautiful feature, and one I'll keep and look at again.

I also really love the Tim Walker feature [he of this much-adored photograph]; I want to tear out all the photos and spread them across my walls like one of his scrapbooks. I'll definitely be going to his show at the Design Museum.

Vogue Nippon

I love these images from the May issue of Vogue Nippon. On one level they make me think of Vermeer paintings - the colour and the poise are incredibly painterly, each colour seems to have been painstakingly mixed and crafted, not snapped [and, I guess, photoshopped].




[Images: Yasunari Kikuma for Vogue Nippon, scanned by Linka-Lebedeva in Livejournal/Foto_Decadent]


[Image: Johannes Vermeer]

They also make me think of Nancy Cunard - they have something distinctly late '20s / early '30s about them, and the hair fashioned into a turban-like headdress is something I think she would have wholeheartedly approved of; the photos seem to tap quite strongly into early twentieth century society's well-meant [if rather patronising/insulting - circle as appropriate] fascination with what they deemed the exotic.


[Image: Curtis Moffat]

Two people who never age

[Image: Ellen von Unwerth, US GQ, April 2008]

40 year old Claudia Schiffer evidently made some kind of Dorian Gray pact in her late 20s, and Joseph Gordon Levitt, bless his heart, still looks about sixteen.

They're great photos though. Someone on thefashionspot forums scanned them here [scroll to the end of the page].

Lost+Found

I picked up a copy of new fashion fanzine Lost+Found on Thursday. Their first issue, Brand Archaeology, is sparse but intriguing, with features on famous photographic homages, Ossie Clark shopgirl and Harpers/Vogue fashion editor Vanessa de Lisle, and 14 pages on the inspirations behind Chanel's most iconic trademarks, all printed on black and white newsprint.






[Images: View Creative]

With this and rightly admired music sharpshooter The Stool Pigeon, it's good to see newprint being used creatively and cleverly in magazines. There are worse things in life than inky fingers.

You can view the PDF or order a printed copy at View Creative.