Style Bubble

Beach Reminder

It's highly amusing that the day this Urban Collection Summer '09 cover comes up on their homepage is the day that storms are brewing and showers are aplenty here in London and pretty much back to normal dodgy up-and-down summer weather.  Nope, gone are the days when the heatwave managed to convince me that 'frollocking' on a REAL beach was doable...

I therefore look back at these particular pics with great fondness.  I might even shed a tear.  A commentor got a little confused by the cover thinking I had designed something for The Urban Collection.  Indicative of the sort of weird, surreal times we're living in when certain bloggers are doing kerazy things like designing ranges for high street stores.  Nope, I can't be going down that odd route seeing as I have no design bone in my body.  Instead, like Karla and Queen Michelle, I'm just featured on the homepage of Dree's wonderful vintage emporium... along with Westgate on Sea.

A snapshot look at the current offerings of The Urban Collection site already yields a few more goodies and *gasp* ANOTHER interesting bit of denim (the ruffled shirt), and there's a big apparel drop to come next week...

Swide This

>>I will come back and add further words to my thoughts on Dolce & Gabbana-produced and branded website Swide.com because it's an interesting development in that luxury brands are now tentatively branching out into content production that isn't banal and chokingly cheesy. 

For now though because I'm about to shoot off, I'll just bung this up and say that Swide have done a very cute interview with me where they asked me to take 'backstage' shots of my blogging environment... aka my messy apartment... I took the opportunity to give the feather headdress, which I randomly bought at Casa Mexico in Hackney, a visual mention.

You've Got Even Bigger Mail

>> I was going to wait until the weekend to post about the joyous package I received from Daydream Nation that not only has those uplifting HK stamps and postmarks on the package (I get a bit pathetic and teary when I receive parcels from Hong Kong) but more importantly, inside contains this dress that I'm wearing today which plays tribute to the humble postmark.  Look closely at the woven fabric and ye shall find markings that could make a philatelic nut go mental.  I'm almost semi-tempted to purchase a catalogue just to see whether these postmarks are the genuine dealio. 

From the small bit of mail which I received a while back containing their lookbook, I'm of course happy that it has given way to this even bigger bit of mail that carries through that Par Avion theme Daydream Nation have got going on in their A/W 09 collection.  I'll be delving into the other parts of this postmarked mail this weekend.  For now though, the dress has given me a way of wearing these old Zucca open net trews that have been languishing away in a useless manner...

Lulululuella...

I don't feel so guilty in overindulging in what can only be described as Lula-isms(rumours abound that the mag is gone for good?) seeing as I'm probably quite unlikely to pack so much Luella into one singular outfit and it really is for the purpose of photographing my picks from the mega sample sale that was so overflowing with stock, it got extended until Friday.  Thank you to the peeps who reported back with their tales of glee... tis' good when the sample sale fun can be had by many... though hopefully nobody wilted in the queue (saw a woman pass out the other day on the bus...was trying to telepathically send out thoughts of the ice bath over to her to cool her down...).

Like I said in my mini-post, the bag sale was pretty bargainous with bags going for mostly in the £75 region and only the big giant ostrich/croc fests going for £250 max.  I think I chose the oddest bag of the lot just because I'm personally not really into the Giselles or the err...other famous Luella bags that were on offer (you can tell I'm completely out of my comfort zone when I start talking about those errr....bag things...).  Mainly, it was the suede saddle and horse head tag that swayed me... and it's also lined with sheepskin which will make a cosy home for my shivering hand in colder months. 

It sits rather well with two pints...

Clothing wise, I didn't go too crazy with spending unlike other people, who were laden with about twenty items in their arms, excited by the £15 to £100 price range.  I went for a double breasted tail coat with net sleeves that also came in gunmetal grey.  Not exactly sure what season they are but it could well be a piece that never made it into the shows.  Have finally hit the tailcoat mark as the last time I was tempted, at the Veronique Branquinho stock sale in Antwerp, it was slightly too big. 

Oh, and I had to wear the things today in a very LITERAL and matchy matchy way with an old Zara dress and the Luella shoes I got in the sale... promise there won't be so much compacted Luella into one outfit ever again. 

Dirty Digitaria

I've been meaning to check out Digitaria after Buck Style's writeup but haven't had the chance over the past few weeks.  It's been open for a few months and I've had some good words coming back so on the balmy Saturday I had to go take a peek...

It's the oddest kind of treasure trove to be found in London and adds an interesting label roster that can't be equated elsewhere in London.  It also benefits from a cool location at an old tailor's shop hence why it's got the old fixtures, mirrors and wooden panelling.  Digitaria is an Athens-based label that makes the kind of loose and interesting silouettes that would be welcome in most wardrobes.  The menswear is especially interesting with tightly pleated wide legged trousers and double layered shirts.  I might talk about Digtalia, the label elsewhere as here's it's the shop that's the star.  Other than the Digitaria label, the shop has gathered up a number of labels that I've not heard of... and ones that I'm just getting wind of... Tian Wang who I talked up last week was selling here for a bit. 

There's an impermanence about the labels moving in and out, showing a flexibility that means every week, it could be different.  When I visited, it was stocking Euphemia, Stone of Surrey and paper neckpieces by Millie Cockton.  I can't even give links, that's how new most of the pieces are... next up, I'm excited that Katie Eary and Gemma Slack will be coming into the store...

Millie Cockton..

Downstairs is a gallery area that will be rotated regularly...

I loved the mannequins that Lee Benjamin, a close collaborator of Leigh Bowery's has designed for the store...

Loving these pieces by Euphemia... exactly the sort of interesting muted pieces I crave for summer layering...

I came away with a white satin finger painted top by Stone of Surrey...

...and some rather controversial (or maybe not...) printed thigh high socks by Lee Benjamin's label Sanatorium....yup, it's pretty obvious what's printed on them.  I can't really explain why I bought them other than the fact that I love the sort of rubbery texture of them (though they're not rubber...thank god...) and the way the print is on a very neutral colour.  I wore them today as below and they did get a few eyebrows raised but I'd like to think that we're not five anymore and we don't have to go "Uuuummmm!  I'm telling, I'm telling!" over something that's just a print and nothing more. 

Deep into the Heath

>>I know this is very very lazy of me and these are gratuitous personal larking about shots that should go into the personal folder of the blog (think there's one of me snorting an olive and basil breadstick somewhere in this batch...) and I know it's not fashion week or anything so lazy outfit posts are completely inexcusable... but... I was quite impressed with the number of colours Style Salvage Steve and I managed to break out in yesterday despite the fact he was a bit illin'.  I've finally converted him to the therapeutic wonders of wearing something new/colourful, which thus lifts your spirits.  So he had his 50% COS colour block t-shirt and I had my stripy stripy Cooperative Designs dress which I layered over a Twelve by Twelve cheapie purple knitted dress because I'm feeling longer lengths now (it's a defiance act against the confuzzling fact that it's actually incredibly hard to find below knee length skirts/dresses on the high street...).  Random outfit post over...

Let's Pretend it's Hawaii

I can't praise the colour coral enough it seems... five posts on coral (coral 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) this year and now another.  I love typing the word and saying it.  Even if the colour is not QUITE coral, I still like to label it as so.  It's a happy sort of pink that never reaches the depth of red and thank god it doesn't because then I'd start getting the fear.  I've been waiting to break out with this new Tim Ryan fringe scarf (he's now stocked at Browns and is FINALLY gonna get with the times and have a website...). I must have dropped the coral hint pretty heavily because he came up with this amazing arrangement of colours of fringing on the scarf... deep deep coral, a sort of dark dusky pink and a bronzed peach on sewn onto pink lurex.  I'm treading into Nigella Lawson lascivious language here but the fingers can't help it when you're staring at these kind of colours.  Wearing it on the neck has sort of been out of the question as it's been getting up to around 28 degrees celcius in London even for someone like me who oddly doesn't sweat that much.  So, around the waist it went today in a sort of Hawaiian grass skirt formation.  Unlike grass though, this silk stuff was swinging around in a soft 'swoosh swoosh' motion, and has given me the major coral fix for the summer and beyond, boosted by other coral finds (EUR1 lace crop top, underwear, nail polish etc etc you get the idea...).

Burn burn burn!

I could very well blame my inner pyromaniac tendancies for these pictures.  That would be the easy way out.  No, I'll immediately own up to it.  As soon as I saw Karen Langley's styling in these Chadwick Tyler for Dazed images, I knew that I actually genuinely liked the aesthetic of burnt bras.  I could even try and lay it on a previous life where I was perhaps once a 60s' feminist who had many flammable bras to burn.  That would be the other easy way out.  Given that I'm so UN-endowed in the chest area so much so that I rarely wear bras, it would be ridiculous to think that in a previous life, I was bountifully full-chested with a chest full of brassieres, and thus eager to burn those horrid body shackles in a feminist fit.

There is only one explanation and it's a simple one; it's that new-looking and pristine lace is not really my cup of tea.  Why a perfect condition teal lace vintage dress has been languishing somewhere.  Why I tend to hunt out vintage lace garments that preferably have some discolourisation.  Why I don't mind that my cream lace pumps from the 1940s' are battered, weathered and have a few holes in them (even if I do cut my toe on glass sometimes...).  Burning the lace was the next progression that Langley pointed out most fervently in the editorial.  The other part of the explanation is that I've had a fixation with wearing bras on the exterior for an age even if you guys have cussed me aplenty for it.  This summer of course, go to any music festival and lacey bras are hanging out and about everywhere so much so that the likes of Topshop (providers of the burning bra assets in the editorial and below...) have elongated a lot of their bra styles to make them more like crop-tops for the purpose of airing them about in sunlight.

But perhaps the pyromaniac explanation is also a valid one.  It was IMMENSELY and SCARILY satisfying waving the bra over a candle flame and watching the lace shrivel up...  

The Chain Goes On and On and On...

"Near, far, wherever you are....I buh-lieve.... that the CHAIN does go on..."  Did memories of EVERYONE in year 8 playing that fucking song on the piano (myself... *shame* included...) in the classroom come flooding back... ?  It did for me...

Instead of the bleedin' heart though, this chain, specifically Fannie Schiavoni's chain dress/cage slipover will, as I found out, go on and on and on.... It's really too hot to be changing in and out of outfits in my un-airconditioned flat that smells of last night's fish and chips.  Still, I felt compelled to try a variety of different things with it... plain, prints, tight, cartoon-y, dress-y (that goes in order of the pics by the by...).  That's just five words out of a plethora of themes and descriptions that could possibly go with this chain piece.  In other words, there is no limit except perhaps going completely buck naked with this on.  Whilst this equals outfit joy for me, it also means that whenever I'm about to grapple with this piece, it will undoubtedly create a catastrophe of a clothing whirlwind in my bedroom.  Lower the temperature down a few degrees and this post might have gone on and on and on like ol' Dion back in '97 when she just couldn't stop her heart from running a marathon...

(All of the Above grey jersey jacket, American Apparel vest, The Good One bum skirt, Tristan Blair wedges)

(Vintage dress, Blue Chain necklace, Peter Pilotto silk trousers, Marni shoes)

 

(Smack dress, Giia waved neckpiece, YSL shoes)

(Embroidered t-shirt from The Good Shop SF, Vintage straw visor, Richard Nicoll trousers, Customised H&M wedges)

(Giles dress, KaPowWow neck ruff, ASOS nude shoes)

The Print is Mine!

>> Some people are bored with the whole digital print thing.  Me?  I'm a lemming who can't get enough of them... there are some things that I just don't flit away from despite my style schizophrenia syndrome.  I got a bit Twitter happy when this Mary Katrantzou dress arrived.... her ginormous bijoux prints and clever colour combinations have been extolled about here and a million other places but wearing one about is something else altogether.  Weirdness of all weirdness, I've been told a few times before that there has to be an Aries man in my life... this dress happens to be called the Aries Dress and so perhaps those amateur soothsayers got it wrong by saying the Aries in question needed to be in man when in fact, it's an Aries dress that I need.  Every now and again, lengthly articles about the search for THE dress crops up in Vogue and you read them with hardened cynicism thinking "What a load of twonk... I'd die pretty happy without knowing THE dress..." but then again I have thought back to THAT Emilio de Morena dress that I only wore the one time for an event, THAT vintage strapless dress which I overwore and overkilled and now THIS dress which joins the ranks of requiring capital demonstrative pronouns.