As Requested

Sketchy, highly inadequate explanation of bits and pieces of the last post- namely, the names.

Paul Smith: Brit designer of the old school, has a penchant for making boy-style clothes for women. A little preppy, but I don't think I've liked anyone else's blazers as much.
Margaret Howell: again, Brit designer of the old(ish) school. She specialises in (as far as I can tell) shirts. Especially variations of white shirts. Her clothes are never crazy, loud or unwearable, and neither are they revolutionary, but I still love them.
Central St Martin’s School of Art and Design: Pulp's Common People name-checked this place (specifically, the sculpture programme and possibly because Jarvis Cocker went here) College located in London from which most Brit designers I know of seem to have spent their student years, including the above-mentioned Paul Smith, and a fair few of the names mentioned below (John Galliano, Christopher Kane, Stella McCartney, Hussein Chalayan, Gareth Pugh and Alexander McQueen). Their student shows are usually worth watching (for me, that's via Vogue or YouTube when I can get that) for general student craziness, shock value, and (their alumni list is ample proof), talent too.
Gareth Pugh: last year's boy ingenue from Central St Martin's. Bases his outfits on 80s performance artist Leigh Bowery, as seen below. Looks highly impractical and flat-out unwearable, but I do like the fact that this man has fun with the clothes he makes. And I think he does make the occasional bit of conventional clothing (very well, too, from what I hear)
Christopher Kane: Central St Martin's latest boy ingenue. Has showed only one collection at (London) Fashion Week so far (Spring/Summer 2007, which happened in September/October of last year), which wasn't bad though I wouldn't dare to put it on anyone without the legs of a baby giraffe. More interesting than the tightness and shortness was the fact of his mixing neons with neutrals (see picture in the last post), I thought. I could possibly translate that to screaming yellow shoelaces on my beaten and abused old blue-turned-grey Converses since that's all the courage and experimentalism I have, but I'd still want to try it.
Vivienne Westwood: That's Dame Vivienne Westwood, the lady in the incredibly short cape and red hair above. Was married to Malcolm McLaren (and here comes the music angle), manager of the Sex Pistols, in the 1970s, and ran a boutique with him in London. I think the band actually wore stuff from her boutique, too. Also (and this is why I admire her) one of the few people working in fashion who is openly political, and puts that into her (very beautiful, if somewhat crazy at times) clothes. I actually can't think of anyone else who would launch a line of t-shirts with the slogan I Am Not A Terrorist, Please Don't Arrest Me on them, and make the lot cool. I mean, I hate slogan t-shirts as signs of intellectual retardedness, but I would wear one of hers. And not because it's one of hers.
Stella McCartney: daughter of the Beatle. Somehow I think it wouldn't have made too much of a difference even if she wasn't. Took over one ailing French fashion house fresh out of St Martin's, turned it around,then quit to start her own label before she was 30- made a roaring success out of that too, and I can see very well why. Her clothes are almost consistently lovely, though she does go a little overboard with the layering and deconstruction at times. Not often, though.
John Galliano: Head of design at Christian Dior. Equal parts genius and madcap, and really likes dressing up. Really, google him. The great interpipe can explain him easier than I can.
Alexander McQueen: Former head of design at Givenchy, former enfant terrible too (the younger Brit art and design lot seem to be a succession of those)- caused a bit of a stir with his student collection, I won't go into the details but he did quite a job (from what I've seen in pictures) with the shock value angle of things (the trousers he made for some early-on collection of his were called bumsters). He doesn't do the shock value so much any more, though- and his clothes are among the most exquisite things I have ever seen up close (one jacket. Don't ask how)

Hussein Chalayan: Designer with ethnic origins in Cyprus, easily one of the great innovators of the modern age. Takes inspiration for the clothes he designs from furniture and buildings among other things, but is still capable of making clothes that look exquisitely wearable even if they're not as mind-boggling. Finished off his last show in Paris with a dress (pictured above) that, using some insane contraptions featuring invisible levers and pulleys and other mechanical stuff, collapsed from being this big poofy-skirted old-fashioned dress, to the next thing to a modern shift. The model's hat changed, too- and she didn't move through the whole operation. I have to settle for putting up two pictures here, but the video of the dress transforming was one of the most amazing things I have seen in years and the kind of thing even my sick, cynical soul would give a standing ovation to if I'd been lucky enough to witness it live.
Biba: 60s London superstore that ended up defining the style of the city back then. Possibly the first store anywhere in the Anglophone world to make sure that the words cheap and cool didn't contradict each other. Opened in 1965, people went nuts about it for ten years and then it shut down in 1975- bankruptcy from selling the clothes so cheap, perhaps? Has now been revived (as of the last set of Fashion Weeks) as a premium-price label whose main function seems to be to feed off the old (and cheap) Biba's retro-cool image and people's nostalgia for it.
Barbara Hulanicki: the woman who, with her husband, set up the aforementioned superstore, working on the funda that you didn't need to be rich to look good.

Irina Lazareanu: the girl with that fringe in two pictures below. Is a model with seriously sharp personal style, and (it never hurts) a face and fringe, not to mention extremely skinny figure, that make her look like a live version of Emily Strange. I don't care for most models, but I do find this one's face rather appealing.

Ah, London

I'm a bit of a nut, to be honest. I like work, but I'd be the first to admit that if someone offered me a job scrubbing the floors at a magazine office (provided, of course, that the magazine in question is one along the lines of Vogue UK or i-D, Nylon, Purple, Another, so on), I'd chuck law school down its drain and head straight for the mops. And I would actually love to have an internship- even a law internship- that places my feet firmly on the pavements of London for this particular week of the year, simply because it means that I'll be breathing the air in which Fashion Week is happening. It's an odd thing, London Fashion Week. While New York and Milan, for the most part, put out pretty, easy, highly-wearable clothes that I tend to covet on sight, London, to be honest, is a bit of a hotch-potch. A hotch-potch that I'd throw myself headfirst at, given the chance, but still really crazy. It isn't always instant likeability, but I love the way the shows get balanced between designers like Paul Smith and Margaret Howell (whose work, to be honest, is ninety percent of the reason I'll always feel my prettiest in a boy's shirt), who are all old-school and not into being revolutionary but who still have their design fundas and stick to them, and the madcaps from Central St Martin's who are out showing for the very first time and who can be amazing if I'm not going "Bleargh, fluorescent yellow!" (prime example of the latter: Christopher Kane (above, right). Neon and lace. Together. Who'd have thought?), and mad-as- hatters looking stuff from people like Gareth Pugh (above, left). It's all a little strange sometimes, but in some ways the place is actually prime stomping ground for genius. Genius that almost inevitably tends to move to other, less random, more commercially oriented fashion weeks or shuts shop in a season or two for lack of financial backing, but mark my words, ye few who read them, pure brilliance nonetheless. Some of the best ones of the last twenty years- including Vivienne Westwood (though she goes back a lot more than twenty years, and I swear I will post about her sometime- if I wore hats more often, I would take off mine in deference to this woman), John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Matthew Williamson, Hussein Chalayan and Stella McCartney got their start in London, either as students or because they opened their first shops there. And even though none of them show in London any more, it isn't a tragedy because there is always new talent to watch. And I would dearly love to see some of that, firsthand. Just one of those 'I was there' things, I guess. And I really do want to get a look at Biba's collection for the season. Never mind that it's so grotesquely overpriced now that Barbara Hulanicki all but disowned it, I still liked some of the looks they had for Spring/Summer '07 and I really fancy the outfit down on the right (or could it be that I fancy Irina Lazareanu's fringe and general air of doll-faced, fascinating coolness? My own fringe is a pale wannabe of that, I just end up looking a bit sheepdog-like but it's too much of a pain growing it out- I like to keep my eyebrows hidden)

I just figured out while typing, why I like the idea of the place so much. London Fashion Week is the fashion week of angle. Hardcore fashion angle, no less, and unlike India Fashion Week, where people know jack shit about cutting or fitting clothes and think the best way to get around that is by piling embroidery on the garments and saying it's a homage to the country's textile crafts, the faff is a lot more fun and I'd willingly wear even the crazier clothes, leg shape and hip width be damned. I have a feeling college would have liked them. And I'm watching for the pictures, A/W 07-08 is only a day and a bit in after all and even the trusty old Vogue UK site doesn't have any yet. And that cleaning job? Make it scrubbing the runways.

Because Old Favourites Are Just Fun

Possibly my favourite piece of music of all time. Just a little different from its usual self though.

The William Tell Overture

We're Creepy And We're Kooky

I loved The Addams Family as a kid (the Cartoon Network animated series, that is- and also the movies), so it was quite a nice surprise to see the following picture on Style Bubble. Like Thing found itself a mate on your shoulder :)

Personally, I'm not that fond of the outfit apart from the hands, I'd have liked it if the top was looser or if the hands came attached to something drapey and not so fitted. Or, if you wanted to be Morticia Addams (with Thing on your shoulder), perching the hands on a long flowy black dress would be perfectly in order.

Blah blah blah

Fashion Weeks are now well underway...the one in New York has started, but I'm not reviewing anything mainly because I'm really bad at it. My appreciation of collections often stops at "that's really pretty, but my ass will look huge so no way on earth am I wearing anything like it" or "I want (but can't ever have)!" so attempting to give angle on the subject just won't work. So I'll just go off into what I want to be wearing today instead of what I actually am wearing (black parka-ish jacket, navy blue t-shirt, black mildly flared and still unflattering trousers, black ballet flats with little cartoon birds on them, and orange socks). So today I would like
1) a Powerpuff Girls t-shirt with Buttercup on the front (the pissed-off looking green-eyed one, remember?), over
2) My black, mildly tulip-shaped knee-length skirt which always ends up turning back to front when I spend an hour sitting down in it
3) My beatup black boots
4) A parka. Like a whopping big, fuzzy-inside-the-hood parka whose hood when put up won't make me look like Kenny from South Park.
5) And, since I'm not out of it yet......fishnets. In pink this time, though. Bright, really bright pink.
6) My mum's nude pinkish lipstick. I've worn lip gloss since the age of eleven, and owned it in every conceivable flavour, but lipstick is just something I can't take because it just looks so like, well, makeup. Except for this particular shade of Clinique (or was it Bourjois??) lipstick, which matched the colour of my unmadeup mouth so perfectly, my friends couldn't tell I had it on. Which is, as far as I'm concerned, an excellent quality for any cosmetic to possess.
7) Sparkly blue polish on my fingernails (also toenails. So what if they can't be seen?), and
8) A parasol. One of the ridiculous decorative affairs in the picture below, if possible- I particularly fancy the blue ones and am feeling a wee bit like Mary Poppins today. Or something frilly and pretty would do just as nicely, I want to twirl it.

Guitar Girl

If all guitars looked like this (scrub the name off, though) I'd have run away from school long ago, learned how to play it and then joined a shouty, sparkly-nailed girl band like the fictional Mellowstar in an attempt to emulate Shirley Manson. But I'd skip the Jolly Roger top, wear my old Harmony t-shirt with the poofy new black tutu-type skirt I bought last week, keep drainpipes on underneath since the skirt is just too short to be seen out in public, and green Converses. Like, moss-green ones, not the achy bright green I keep seeing in the shops. Add a tiara, replace the laces on the shoes with a pair in fluoro green or yellow and we're good to go. Less of the fingers-up and more of the tongue-out grinning raspberry to the world, but still good to go.

(Picture pinched off I Hate Generic)

Because I'm Just Such A Blog Junkie...

It's a cruel trick of fate, I swear, that the profession for which my education is preparing me has one of the most boring dress codes in the world- I mean, I have as much fun with black and white as everyone else, and offices don't need you to stick to it, but dress codes are still boring and it isn't even like school where all of us shortened our skirts by a clear three inches each and wore our shirts out when they were supposed to be tucked in and it makes me really itch to wear a pair of fishnets, never mind that I don't own any- I'd be happy wearing them under my trousers just to know that they were there.

So yes, what my schizo dress sense really wants is

a) Fishnets (with smallish mesh, otherwise I'll be tempted to take them off and toss them in the Yamuna)

b) a tutu, or similar crazy poofy skirt

c) a really big chunky green (I like green) scarf

d) Black nail polish, worn with stripes of

e) Silver nail polish

f) Big clunky shoes- heeled or not, I don't care but the clunkier the better

g) My baggiest old black t-shirt

My brain says: fat chance of it ever happening, Miss Trousersuit. But I still really want the fishnets...