For Anyone Who Wanted To Know

What a newsboy cap looked like (i.e. boys- I can't blame either of you for a lack of knowledge) here's the picture of something that resembles the object I spoke of yesterday, before The Great Internet Block (now lifted thanks to loads of angry students howling about it and not shutting up- to anyone who doesn't know me in real life, I must explain: I attend a course of higher education that requires all its adherents to live on campus, thus turning what would have been a minor pain in the bum if we were a day college, into a flaming row between the students and the administration). A checked shirt is probably as wrong to wear with the cap as loose hair, but it was a bit of a warm day and I didn't have anything by way of a hair tie on me.

Mayday!

Even though it's April and all, this is still highly distressing to me...my precious university has installed itself a new filtering system which means that I can't access my blogroll, or view this blog despite the fact that I can see comments in my gmail inbox. I'm sorry to be putting the same content up on both my blogs, but I think some part of the world outside needs to know what's being done here. And even the gmail, I don't know how much longer it'll work if the filters aren't removed- the girl sitting on the computer next to mine has just found that she can't open her inbox because the "weighted phrase limit exceeded" bit says "banned phrase found" instead. And among the blocked sites are not only my friends' blogs and all my fashion blogs, but also assorted wikipedia articles on Internet censorship, assorted UN sites, images of any artwork featuring nudity- that includes Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, by the way, and certain search strings in Google have been blocked altogether.
Here's one of the messages I got:

___________________________________
Access to the page:

http://stylebubble.typepad.com

... has been denied for the following reason:

Weighted phrase limit exceeded.



You are seeing this error because what you attempted to access appears to contain, or is labeled as containing, material that has been deemed inappropriate.

If you have any queries contact your ICT Co-ordinator or Network Manager.



Powered by DansGuardian
_____________________________________________________________

Replace that url with any of the ones in the links list, you'll have what's been happening over the last few hours. And the bolded bits are by me.
I've just discovered I can respond to comments, at least for now, if I take the long route through the Blogger dashboard. I've also just discovered that I can, from the dashboard, view every individual post that has ever been put on this blog- comments and all. SO WHY ON EARTH CAN'T I SEE MY BLOG- ALL OF IT, I MEAN? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WARPED BUNCH OF IDIOTS WHO DID THIS TO US?

God Save The Cap..

The latest on-campus example of style heinousness (I wish I could put up pictures, but these people don't deserve to have that done to them) needs to be bitched about, because I actually have nowhere else to do it:

Ingredient #1: dark-wash blue jeans (not skinny, just regular straight or boot-cut ones)
Ingredient #2: black, slightly loose t-shirt tucked into aforementioned jeans
Ingredient #3: velvet-trimmed flip-flops
Ingredient#4: (and note, because this is where the outfit starts on its way to fashion victimhood) a brown corduroy newsboy cap. Worn with (and this is what sent the entire look straight down the road to hell)
Ingredient #5: a lot of rather long brown hair, loose under the cap. IN SUMMER. IN INDIA. WITH POWER CUTS AND THIRTY-SOMETHING-DEGREE CENTIGRADE TEMPERATURES IN ABUNDANCE. I admit, I'm not exactly fond of the girl in question, but I can usually divorce my opinion of a person's dress sense from my opinion of the person- and she's usually decent-looking, if a little matchy-matchy at times. And I know the description above actually sounds fairly ok, but it was just so try-hard I didn't know whether to feel sorry for her or just be my monstrously mean self and keep laughing at it (actually, I did know what to do- the mental equivalent of point and laugh. I wasn't the only one doing it, either). And the worst part was that the hat was actually, as an independent entity, pretty decent-looking. It deserved better from a wearer than this-and headgear isn't that difficult to pull off, I can think of at least two people in my class who do it with far more panache than this specimen.
Trend victims, bleargh......

They Don't Make 'Em Quite Like This Anymore..

My roommate returned from New York a few days ago with, among other things, a pack of 50 postcards from the Museum of Modern Art featuring old movie posters. Which got me thinking, most movie posters these days don't look all that great, I wouldn't want them decorating my walls . And they rarely, if ever, feature clothes I think are cool (Uma Thurman's yellow Game of Death tracksuit from Kill Bill will be covering the damp patches over our mirror as soon as the poster gets flattened out, and the wedding dress from Volume 2 looks amazing - maybe that's because of the katana in the frame, but they're the exceptions rather than the rule). I honestly can't think of anything recent that, fashion-wise, is a memorable poster image. Unlike the two below:

I know it's two posters for the same movie, but I swear, Audrey Hepburn wouldn't look out of place in 2007 despite the fact that it was made over forty years ago. Unfussy shapes, coloured and otherwise printed tights, and the sunglasses in the bottom picture..what's not to love? Especially the tights..and now I WANT the posters. Along with her tights, of course.

No, No, No Please

I refuse to put a picture up here, and I suppose I should be surprised they didn't get here sooner, given that they've been around the runways for almost three years now...but there are girls on campus wearing leggings. UGH. There are certain items of clothing my brain and whatever scraps of fashion sense I have just say a big no to- not many, but there nonetheless. They happen to include Stetson hats and, you guess, go ahead...leggings. Never mind the issue of how legs look, I honestly don't think the best way to deal with a temperature in the thirties (that's Centigrade, by the way) is by wearing a lot of black material that, even if it leaves a large chunk of your leg below the knee bare and ready to breathe, adheres to the rest of it without leaving so much as a millimeter of space between itself and your skin. Oh, and especially not if what you happen to have on top is made of some weird shiny fabric that is very definitely not Indian-summer-friendly at all.

EDIT: on request, I've put up a picture by Style Scout- the young lady in it actually wears her leggings pretty well, but then she didn't forget that there's supposed to be something more on your bottom half than just a t-shirt.

On Niceness.. And Not

Happy Easter, everyone! I'm sorry the blog is such a lazy space but posting takes time, not to mention energy..who'd have thought sitting on your ass for an hour can actually be that exhausting?
My question for the day is: why are some people nasty? To nice fashion bloggers, I mean (that came out sounding a bit whiny and immature, but it'll have to do). When I first started reading other people's fashion blogs, it was all a bit desultory. If I liked it, I bookmarked the page, if I didn't then I didn't come back. I didn't see anyone else leaving negative feedback either. So the first time I saw meanness on a commentspace, it was a bit of a shock because the blogger in question, Susie Bubble, is one of the nicest people on my links list and the comment (it was anonymous- no email, no homepage) was no more and no less than a direct personal attack against her, and a really nasty insult to boot. The flip side was that it was gratifying (for me, at least, since I wasn't into typepad commenting back then) to see other bloggers closing ranks around one of their own and proceeding to call the anonymous commenter a few choice names. She put up another post, that discussion closed, the matter ended there...finit, we'd have thought. As it turned out, it hadn't. On another post came another insult. People, again, disagreed with it. And then, up pipes someone asking her to fix her writing style (he/she got cyber-shouted down again), and on yet another post turns up someone claiming to work at Vogue and dissing the blog...these comments turned up on just a few posts out of maybe a thousand, but what I found odd was the fact that they seemed to show up only on Style Bubble, or about Susie. Maybe I'm missing something and horrible comments are in fact being sent by email to the keepers of the other sites I visit, or comments are being left and I don't see them, but it bothers me that people seem to taking potshots only at the girl they see as least likely to take their heads off for it. And I don't mean everyone should get rude comments (no one should, where are our manners?), or that everyone who reads a blog should agree with what it says, but there's a world of difference between plain old disagreement and the kind of pettiness I see in these cowards (that's what they are. I've yet to see any of them leave an email address or url with their comments). But this utter rubbish doesn't have to be put up with, by Susie or anyone else who keeps a blog about anything at all. If someone feels threatened by the fact that we have the inclination to speak our minds and people seem to listen or respond to what we have to say, that's their problem- not ours.

More Bangs For My Buck, I Say

(pictures from Kingdom of Style)

I'm not a massive fan of most models . I wasn't fond of the glamazons (Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista et al- stunning women, but I probably extrapolated my dislike of the clothes of their time into a distaste for the women who wore them) and the Young Aliens (Gemma Ward, Jessica Stam, Lily Cole and co.) of today are beautiful, but so many pairs of wide-open blue eyes made the average fashion magazine circa 2004 start to look a bit like Children of the Corn. But every once in a while, like maybe about once a year, I discover that I really like the way some girl wears the clothes . And for the last year and a bit, the young lady in the pictures above and below is someone whose work I have actually loved looking at. Kate Moss might not have done anything nearly as groundbreaking as what she pulled in the years of her collaboration with Corinne Day, but picking Irina Lazareanu as the model for the editorials in her first post-coke scandal stint as guest editor of Paris Vogue was nothing short of genius. Aside from the slightly kooky appearance (not so much anymore since every post-pubescent female with even the slightest pretensions to a liking of fashion started cogging her hair by cutting in the fringes they'd previously begged their mummies to let them outgrow, but that doesn't mean they have automatic entry to the Good Fringe club*), she's too bloody skinny (someone get a look at her modelling that v. pretty white dress on the Kate Moss for Topshop site, she looks practically childlike there), and she isn't even conventionally pretty, but despite scouring a year's worth of pictures of her in adverts and editorials, the only conclusion I could come to was that she has je ne sais quoi in spades. The quality in question is supposed to be beyond definition, but I wonder if being slightly older than normal (in a field of work where the average age on getting your first break seems to be about fifteen) has something to do with it. Or the fact that, in the only interview of hers that I've ever read, she actually sounds intelligent. I hate to be stereotypical about models, but given that most of them start as young as fourteen (some even younger) and never finish school, they don't often seem like the brightest bulbs in the box. It's no fault of theirs, but having a brain and not hiding it doesn't have to be a bad thing. Oh, and it doesn't hurt that she has hellishly sharp personal style- possibly influenced by Le Moss, but well-dressed girls in my immediate surroundings, no matter what my friend Girlface has to say, are so rare that I'm grateful for the sight of one anywhere. Even if that somewhere happens to be a computer screen. She's still pretty fascinating, though. And any female who manages making an 80s perm (not pictured here) look something other than ridiculous deserves my respect.
So what if I have a soft spot for a well-cut, or more importantly well-worn, jacket? Sue me, I say. And the days of sharp might just be numbered, since Hedi Slimane** quit Dior Homme and a new chap who likes baggies is now captain of the ship.

* previous members of the Good Fringe club-i.e. those who wear/wore it with panache- include Louise Brooks, Amélie Poulain (yes, I know she's fictional and it's actually Audrey Tautou, but still), Jane Birkin, Audrey Hepburn, Marianne Faithfull, Penelope Tree, and Jean Shrimpton. Oh, and Ms L above.
**he of the trousers so skinny, Karl Lagerfeld went on a baby food diet so he could fit into them. Also He Whose Style Icon Was Pete Doherty And Whose Suits Were Worn By Franz Ferdinand and who inspired the style of most halfway-sharp looking boys in the world, musical and real (even if they didn't know it), between 2004 and now.