Fur Coat, No Knickers

The kindly folk at Thames & Hudson sent me a copy of the new Facehunter book today, which presumably means that the embarrassing letter I sent them five years ago begging for a job on the basis that I was a senior bookseller at Waterstones and really, really liked books, never made it onto their weirdo blacklist. Phew!

Facehunter (Yvan Rodic) is a bit like Stylebubble in that it’s been a permanent presence in my bookmarks folder since it started all those moons ago. Other blogs come and go, my tastes change, but Facehunter remains a constant for me. I guess that’s largely because, like Susie’s blog, it’s more about straight up personal reportage than following trends. And yes, I do still rely on a bookmarks folder not a reader. I could reveal a whole bunch of your favourite internet superstars who do too ‘cos I’ve asked them. OMG!

It’s easy to draw comparisons between Facehunter and The Sartorialist, seeing as how they’re both successful street style photographers, but I think there’s a lot of differences. Sart is obviously an incredible photographer and I have a lot of love for him too but his pictures are kind of as much about as him as they are the subject. It’s his view of someone and the photos are judged as much on the fact that the nice blue sky works with the yellow hat or the fact that the subject is old/homeless/smoking as they are on the clothes. With Yvan, maybe the photographs aren’t as pristine but that just means you focus more on the outfit, which is pretty much the point… right?

Yvan says in the book that often street style photographers are obsessed with asking their subjects what they’re wearing. He says, ‘who cares! I’m not writing a shopping guide.’ He’s right. Although sometimes it’s nice to find out where an outfit is from if there’s something you want, does it really matter? I’d rather just look at a good outfit and enjoy it. I absolutely love the fact that in this book each image is just captioned with the city and date. No names, no job titles, no pithy description of their personal style mantra. Just a good picture of a great outfit. It’s nice in this era of information overload to just be given the bare minimum and do the rest in your head. Why is he wearing that? What made her think that dress was a good choice? You get to use your noggin, how’s about that? There are a few choice paragraphs from Yvan about his process and some bits about his favourite shots, but for the most part it’s just about the pictures. As it should be! At one point he does say, ’sorry guys — I don’t know much about fashion’ and that warms my cockles heartily.

Needless to say, the pictures are great. Apologies for the quality of these ones, they’re in no way indicative of the book. As I was fannying around trying to take these shots of my favourite looks (some of which are saved in folders on my laptop from when I first saw them on Facehunter years ago!), my boyfriend pointed out that I could have just copied the pictures off the blog, seeing as how they’re all dated and referenced in the book. That’s why he has a proper job and I don’t.

Anyway, the book is a lovely hardbacked hunk of beauty — the perfect addition to my new coffee table which is arriving on Saturday after being purchased in December and locked in my mum’s garage in Sheffield ever since, awaiting the kindness of someone with a car.

Facehunter by Yvan Rodic, £14.95 goes on sale 15th March 2010, published by Thames & Hudson. If you’re in London town, get down to Foyles on Charing Cross Road at 5pm on 12th March 2010, where Yvan himself will be signing copies of the book!

Thanks to Lauren at Thames & Hudson for the love!

I’m so excited that my colleagues on Women’s Fitness are calling these bags in from ASOS for our next shoot together! I heard a while ago that Head had rereleased these retro bad boys but I don’t have much use for them in our magazines… The lovely WF girls sit just a chair’s trundle away so I will most definitely be sneaking a peek at these when they arrive. I can’t imagine the Head 1989 will be any different from the originals, but we shall see. Pretty sure they weren’t called the St Tropez and the Monte Carlo in the old days either! Without wanting to attract too many weirdos, these bags just remind me of being in junior school when the girls got to get changed for PE in the cloakrooms rather than in the classroom with the boys because we had reached an age when it wasn’t OK to run around in your pants and vest together. I had the lilac bag and it was my pride and joy, even though I only had a lunchbox to take to school and probably a reading book or something. Happy times! I’m pretty sure I got it from a jumble sale too, can’t imagine my mamma paying out for an overpriced holdall when I had so little use for it. My favourite ASOS model wears it so well, maybe I should buy one??

On a related tip, check out the colour of my nails today. This new colour from Models Own is called Beth’s Blue but it’s actually the colour of that lilac Head bag.

Thanks to the always amazing FabSugar for linking to my Las Vegas wardrobe musings! Unfortunately, there’s more to come. I don’t know how Alice by Temperley passed me by. Probably because I’ve never been interested in Alice Temperley? Dunno, but the diffusion line is reeeal nice. Kinda want all of it for Vegas fun times. Great colours, nice tiger prints and a very fetching putty coloured leather gilet which is still not a patch on mine. You can buy Alice at Net-A-Porter, with prices from a very reasonable £59.

I think it’s fair to say that I’m as excited as everyone else about the launch of The Gentlewoman, the female counterpart to the excellent Fantastic Man.  I don’t know if I’m alone in thinking this (I am a magazine square to the max), but when I first heard the name I thought to myself, ooh, that’s a bit like The Lady. Not because the name is similar (although… it is), but because when The Lady launched all those moons ago (1885, fact fans), its tagline was, ‘the magazine for gentlewomen’. Wonder if that’s intentional? Just something that’s currently circulating my brain.

I studied the changing face of feminism in women’s magazines for my MA dissertation and that FASCINATING document (no really it was, I have spare copies if you want one) covered everything from The Lady to Spare Rib via Minx and Sassy, so I guess maybe my useless knowledge bank is full of more women’s mag facts than it needs to be. I think it’s a generally accepted fact that The Lady is a bit of an outdated institution now (and it’s edited by Boris Johnson’s sister which earns it a big red cross) but they recently revamped their website and I’m happy to admit that after I heard that I went on to spend an afternoon nosying around the blogs. I think if you go into it knowing what to expect (adverts for nannies and features about an alien land where people still have country parties), you can enjoy it, even if you’re not of that world. I’ll be interested to see where the print edition ends up. I keep reading features about them trying to shake off their staid image, but that’s kind of the point of the magazine isn’t it? I don’t think anyone buys it expecting features about babies with two heads or Cheryl Cole’s divorce. Sure the etiquette guidelines and pieces about how to find a good under gardener are passé to the maximus but I think there’s still a place for it, especially now that cupcakes [shudder], knitting and Women’s Institutes are all back in action. Publisher Ben Budworth, great-grandson of the magazine’s founder said last year in an interview with the Independent;

Where we were once seen as irrelevant and eccentric, we want to be seen as charming and amusing.

I dunno, might be pushing it, but those credentials aren’t exactly a million miles from what the Gentlewoman is aiming for are they? Lovely Gert Jonkers, the brains behind Fantastic Man and Gentlewoman describes the new launch as,

…a magazine about and for amazing woman. It will be inspiring, it’ll have great journalism, I hope it’ll be super good fun too.

Super good fun? I think The Lady would approve.

ETA: Great interview with Penny Martin, editor of The Gentlewoman on Ponystep now!

[Great vintage cover from The Lady's Facebook page -- wonder how much that front cover advertorial would have cost??]

Want to get ahead on the flying jacket trend?

Still can’t get enough of studs?

Considering getting back into flared jeans?

All of the above and more? Well I make that four good reasons to watch the excellent BBC4 documentary, Heavy Metal Britannia. It showed last Friday and I totally forgot, but for once the BBC got something right and it’s still on the iPlayer and On Demand. Watch it here and watch a great collection of metal bands at the Beeb here! Both available until this Friday and both really well done with some great talking heads (what no Gambaccini?).

With the Vegas trip looming ever closer, thoughts have turned solely to wardrobing the occasion. So far the only outfit set in stone revolves around this pair of vintage Betty Barclay trousers [I know!] that I accidentally bought because I thought they were a maxi skirt. They’re really high waisted and so wide you would think they were a skirt (it’s where I went wrong) and feature a rather fetching anchor motif. Them, my New Look boater and a nice denim bralet, all good.

Anyway, today I got an email about this Topshop dress and it has been added to the list. Something about a vintage fruity print and one armed bandits just seems to work nicely together. There’s nothing I like more than dressing to a theme. There’s also a really nice t-shirt with the same motif, except the pineapple is embroidered. I was considering buying that last week, but I think the dress is better. So, next step, work out an outfit around this. Two days down.

[I don't like making love at midnight, I'm usually asleep by then]

I cannot believe I forgot to add my pal Natalie to my links on this new site. Here is a link to her blog, Canned Fashion! Natalie isn’t just getting a post to herself though, no sir. The point of this post, other than apologising for my bad manners, is to share these sunglasses that she recently posted about. They’re too good not to mention, so they get a bonus post here as well as on Natalie’s site. I think we (by which I mean, everyone on the internet) all want Alexander Wang’s sunglasses this season, but they’re definitely a little pricey (not to mention selling like the proverbial). These are the best lookalikes I’ve seen and what with them being vintage deadstock you don’t have to feel too much like a bastard for buying fakes. God bless eBay. God bless InTouchWithStyle and their Hot Bad Ass ways. Apparently Luxirare started the trend, so thanks for the eagle eyes!

Love the suggestion from Rackk and Ruin to add tin foil to the corners of these… might even try that, it’s not too dissimilar to my usual gold nail varnish painting of everything I ever buy on eBay (makes brassy gold look like goldy gold, true fact!).

Buy ‘em here!

Not sure what reminded me of this, but over the weekend I started thinking about The Best Dress Ever. It hasn’t crossed my mind for about 6 months now and while I feel certain I probably have written about it in the past, I can’t find anything. Anyway, it’s here burning a hole in my brain so here goes nothing.

Back in the old days of my Masters, the marvellous Amy De La Haye gave us a presentation on an exhibition she’d just curated; The Messels: Six Generations of Dress. The fascinating show (wow, maybe you could even call it a social experiment?) featured the extensive wardrobes of the Messel family over the decades. Anne, Countess of Rosse (4th generation Messel) realised that her family’s clothes might be interesting one day in the future and preserved them like a stylish, tissue-packed time capsule because she recognised that, ‘they have that meaning of being worn.’  Deep! Anyway, Anne gave the Brighton Museum heaps of her family’s clothes, all packed away and preserved, annotated with notes about where they’d been worn and the reaction they got. One dress (a long green evening dress with a beaded neckline, according to the museum) has a note that (intriguingly!) reads, ‘Had a wonderful time in this dress am ashamed to say. 1941!!’ Hah! Wonder what the minxes got up to?

The collection comprises over 500 items dating from 1870 to 2005, which were worn by six generations of Messel women. You can read about the intriguing family here, but suffice to say their wardrobes largely comprised of couture gowns from exclusive London dressmakers and top fashion houses. The exhibition also featured loads of letters and photographs of the outfits in action. All amazingly fascinating, but maybe irrelevant seeing as the exhibition was in 2006…

Anyway, amongst the wonderful outfits was aforementioned Best Dress Ever. The Snow White Day Dress was created for Anne by Charles James in around about 1937, just after the film came out. I’m by no means a Disney fan (we only had Fantasia on video as a kid, and I think that was a present… still, it was creepy) but this dress is a real thing of beauty. When the exhibition came to Sheffield I spent about 4 hours wandering around drawing everything in anal, fashion student detail. I’d hazard that the bulk of that time was spent in front of this number. What I like most about it is how modern and creepy the print is, kind of like Giles Deacon’s 2008 Who Killed Bambi-ish collection. Without being crass, I remember thinking that the open-mouthed Snow White which makes up the bulk of the print looks just like a sex doll. Not sure whether the honourable Charles James would have intended that, but who knows?? Eleanor Thompson, Curator of Costume at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (where the exhibition opened) is quoted as saying;

The Snow White dress is amazing – by Charles James, after the film comes out. It’s a fantastic and unusual example of a merchandising twist, I guess. And the cut – you see at the front the faces have all been cut up and juxtaposed with each other. If you look, the faces are interesting – very odd! You think of Snow White as quite childlike but when you look at the actual faces it’s quite strange.

Such an unusual item and such a stand out piece. I remember when Amy was giving her presentation a slide of this dress was shown and all my pals correctly assumed that I would love it. I do, I do, I do! I wish this exhibition (or just this dress) would go on tour again so I could get another good look. Alas I have no photos or a scanner to show you my shit sketches… the only two pics I can find are teeny, but you get the jist.

The exhibition catalogue is available here. Look beyond the awful 90s Textile GCSE cover, it’s good!

A couple of weeks ago I was at my local station when I happened across a young lady in Burberry (‘Burberry’ is probably more accurate) check bootcut trousers. Obviously my initial reaction was to tweet about it to my fashion pals and I was kind of surprised by the all out negative response. The gal in question was a Goldsmiths student as far as I could tell and she was hanging with a bunch of equally stylish folk. She was wearing said trousers with a massive black fur coat and killer shoes and fierce hair and, ironic as she may have meant it, she looked incredible.

The problem my pals had wasn’t, evidently, the Burberry check. I think the check has now come full circle and us now totally acceptable, even if it is in an ‘ironic’ way. Like how it’s ok to wear a comedy 80s faux Chanel sweater or to lust after a Galvin Klein tshirt, as I am right now after Charleen at work told me about her brother’s unfortunate 90s buy. The check is fine. The problem is bootcut. How weird is that?

The whole reason bootcut became popular in the first place is because it’s wearable and flattering. It’s such an immense rarity in fashion that something cool is flattering to your average size 16 woman in Sheffield. Bootcut looks nice and everyone can carry it off. Deal! When I was tweeting and getting a negative reaction, my pals just grossed out at the bootcut, nuthin else. Believe me I get it. Amongst my friends, ‘bootcut’ is short hand for ‘bad’. If you’re talking about a girl in your office that’s alright but that you’d never go on holiday with, you could just be like, ’she wears bootcut trousers from Morgan’ and all would be understood. Don’t quite know the point I’m aiming for but maybe… don’t hate on bootcut. The night I saw this chick, NY Fashion Week was just winding up and we’d seen loads of softly flared pants, skimming gently over a nice pair of ankle boots. Right now Paris is winding up and I’ve already seen bootcut cargo pants so… by the looks of things, anything could happen.

I wish I had a picture of this girl. I wish there was a point to this post! I guess if there is one, it’s give bootcut a chance. Maybe? I can’t see me wearing it but I’ll try not to judge. Here’s a nice pic of Gemma Ward rocking Burberry and a dog, I guess that’ll do.

Aw here goes! This week’s Spotify playlist to make the last few hours of the day go by just a little bit faster.

Ta-da!