Yesterday afternoon, Officer Emily filed a report which forced us to instantly declare a Fashion Police State of Emergency. Here is the suspect in question:
You’re possibly wondering what the problem is. Is it because it looks a bit like nightwear? Because, OK, that’s not good, but LOTS of dresses look like nightwear without meriting so much as a Fashion Police Caution. So what is it?
Perhaps THIS will make things clearer:
To quote Rolf Harris: Can yer see what it is yet?
As Emily put it: this dress looks like something else.
If you can see what the “something else” is, great: at least we know it’s not just us and our filthy minds.
If you CAN’T see what the “something else” is, well, good for you. Your eyeballs are safe.
This is by Suzie Wong, is £125 at ASOS, and it’s well worth looking at the product page to view the video: people, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen this dress in action. There’s something in the way it moves…
P.S. While we’re on this particular subject, let us just take the opportunity to show you THIS again:
The Fashion Police’s undercover officers are infiltrating fashion retailers around the country in order to bring you honest, unbiased reviews of the clothing and footwear they find there. Today, they visit New Look to investigate a pair of sparkly ankle boots…
Quality: Not bad, actually, considering the price. At first glance I’d assumed they were covered in glitter, which would doubtless fall off, leaving a trail of glittery footsteps everywhere you went, but the upper is actually a kind of high-shine snake print, which creates the sparkly effect without the usual glitter or sequins.
Officer’s comments: PR people keep writing to tell me that Christmas is “just around the corner” (as if I could possibly forget!) and that I better get ready to douse myself in glitter, so I thought I’d review something sparkly for this edition of Secret Police. Now, glitter and sequins are really Not My Thing, so I was surprised by how much I liked these: in fact, I had to spend a good bit of time talking myself out of buying them, so smitten was I by their high-shine upper, which lights up like a disco ball when it catches the light. Part of the appeal here was the sleek shape, which makes them ideal for wearing with tights or skinnies, and I also like the fact that they’re not covered in glitter, and therefore look less like a child’s art project than some shoes I could mention.
The heel is pretty high, at 12.5cm, but I had no problems walking in them on my circuit of the store, and I think they’d be pretty easy to wear: surprisingly so, given my allergy to anything with the world “glitter” in it!
Verdict: Surprised myself by really liking these: an easy (and cheap) way to add a bit of Christmas sparkle without going down the glitter route.
Do you want to join the Secret Police? We’re looking for honest reviews of clothing, shoes and accessories to feature here on TFP. If you’d like to take part, simply email your photo and review to report@thefashionpolice.net. You’re free to remain anonymous if you wish: if you have a blog you’d like us to link to, however, please remember to tell us in your email!
Aqua are becoming serial offenders in the real of Strange Skirts: and Strange Other Items, too, to be perfectly honest. We think they’ve outdone themselves with this Half Maxi/Half Mini, though. Come on, Aqua, make your minds up! Surely no one is THIS indecisive? Look, even the model is starting to get all huffy:
Not content with a skirt that will leave one leg out in the cold, however, Aqua continued the strangeness with this Shirt-With-a-Tail:
They call it a “dress”. We call it “what a Fashion Criminal Superhero would wear, if there actually were Fashion Criminal Superheroes. Which there isn’t: there are only villains in the world of Fashion Criminals.”
And just to prove that we’re not totally biased against dresses with weird long bits attached to them, we don’t hate this one:
Oh, who are we kidding? We DO hate it. Just not as much as the other two. Because once you’ve looked at those, even this starts to look not-so-bad, don’t you think?
We seem to be spending a lot of time worrying about whether things are offensive or not lately, but the Advertising Standards Agency will keep banning fashion adverts, so here’s the latest conundrum for our readers to answer:
Is this model glamorizing anorexia?
The ASA thinks she is: they’ve banned adverts featuring her from appearing on Drop Dead Clothing’s website on the grounds that they’re socially irresponsible as the model is “too thin”.
Their statement:
“We considered that in combination with the stretched out pose and heavy eye make-up, the model looked underweight in the pictures. We noted that Drop Dead’s target market was young people.We considered that using a noticeably skinny model with visible hip, rib, collar and thigh bones, who wore heavy make-up and was posed in ways that made her body appear thinner, was likely to impress upon that audience that the images were representative of the people who might wear Drop Dead’s clothing, and as being something to aspire to. Therefore, while we considered the bikini and denim short images might not cause widespread or serious offence, we concluded they were socially irresponsible.”
Our first thoughts upon reading this:
1. Can open, worms EVERYWHERE.
2. We feel sorry for the model: it can’t be nice to cause adverts to be banned simply because YOUR body is deemed unacceptable.
3. As with yesterday’s Marc Jacobs/Dakota Fanning issue, these bans simply serve to draw even more attention to the supposedly “offensive” images. Case in point: we’d never heard of Drop Dead Clothing until this advert was banned…
4. The comments on this post will make for depressing reading, because, for reasons which we’ve never been able to fathom, many people seem to feel they are able to diagnose health conditions by looking at photographs on the internet. This is almost always unfair to the people being “diagnosed”: just because you think someone LOOKS unhealthy, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they ARE unhealthy.
As for Drop Dead Clothing, they have, of course, refuted the claims. They say that while they acknowledge the photographs make the model look thinner, she is a UK size 8, which is not an abnormal size. In fact, they think it’s offensive to call a size 8 model offensive. So, in short, everyone’s offended.
Who’s right here? Are you offended by this model’s size, or you offended by people who are offended by this model’s size? Perhaps you’re offended by people who are offended by people who are offended by this model’s size? The main thing to note is that, in today’s society, it’s important that you be offended by SOMETHING. So pick your side now…
(The Fashion Police are going to take a shot every time someone uses the phrase “she needs to eat a sandwich” or a derivative thereof in the comments on this. We predict we’ll be roaring drunk by lunchtime…)
The Fashion Police’s undercover officers are infiltrating fashion retailers around the country in order to bring you honest, unbiased reviews of the clothing and footwear they find there. Here’s their first report:
Sizing: Ths is my usual “H&M dress size”, which is one size larger than I wear in other high street stores due to H&M’s habit of sizing everything down. It was still pretty snug – I’d have tried the next size up again, but this was the only one they had! The main issue for me, however, was the length: this dress is WAY shorter than I’d be comfortable wearing with bare legs (unless I was on holiday somewhere hot, and headed to the beach!) so it would definitely need thick tights or leggings if I was going to wear it.
Quality: Pretty good for the price: this is a stretchy, t-shirt type material, but it’s fairly thick, isn’t see-through, and felt nice to wear.
Officer’s Comments: H&M’s sizing is different from most other UK stores: for instance, in most stores, a UK 6 will correspond to a European 34, but in H&M it corresponds to a 32, and so on. So if you’re usually a size 8, you’ll probably be an H&M 10, if you’re usually a 10, you’ll be an H&M 12, etc. (I say “probably”: the sizing in this store can be random, and I normally only have to size up in dresses and trousers – tops are generally true to size for me.)
(Aside: The strange sizing at H&M has always been a bit of a puzzle to me: I honestly don’t care what the label inside my clothes says as long as they fit properly, but for most stores, “vanity sizing” means making the clothes LARGER than the label suggests, so shoppers can feel smug about going down a size: at H&M the opposite rule applies!)
Sizing issues aside, I loved the shape of this dress and I also liked the stripes, which are a favourite of mine. The length was the deal-breaker, however: a real shame, because it’s a great dress for £12.99, and if it was a few inches longer, it would definitely have found its way back to Fashion Police HQ!
Click here if you want to buy this, or take a look at the gallery below to see the other colours available.
Do you want to join the Secret Police? We’re looking for honest reviews of clothing, shoes and accessories to feature here on TFP. If you’d like to take part, simply email your photo and review to report@thefashionpolice.net. You’re free to remain anonymous if you wish: if you have a blog you’d like us to link to, however, please remember to tell us in your email!
Yes, readers, it’s another one of those “Are you offended?” moments. So let’s cut right to the chase, shall we?
Are you offended by this advert for Marc Jacobs’ ‘Oh, Lola!’ fragrance, featuring Dakota Fanning? Because some people are. Four, to be exact. And because of that, the advert has now been banned in the UK. Given that it was first revealed back in June, we’re going to bet Marc Jacobs is absolutely delighted by this turn of events, because let’s face it: if you want an advert to get widespread coverage, the quickest way to do that is to get it banned. There is no better way to ensure that lots of people get to see your advert than by taking steps to try to make sure that no one gets to see it. It’s a funny old world, eh?
Here’s a quick cheat sheet to bring you up to speed with some of the facts of this:
Dakota Fanning is 17
Marc Jacobs has said that Oh, Lola! was inspired by the Vladimir Nabokov novel ‘Lolita’, and that he chose Dakota for the advert because he felt she could be “a young Lolita”.
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) received four complaints about the advert.
In their ruling, they said that although Dakota is 17, she looks younger, and that this, combined with the provocative positioning of the perfume bottle, makes the advert unacceptable.
The ASA’s statement: “We noted that the model was holding up the perfume bottle which rested in her lap between her legs and we considered that its position was sexually provocative. We understood the model was 17 years old but we considered she looked under the age of 16. We considered that the length of her dress, her leg and position of the perfume bottle drew attention to her sexuality. Because of that, along with her appearance, we considered the ad could be seen to sexualise a child. We therefore concluded that the ad was irresponsible and was likely to cause serious offence.”
What do you think? Is it offensive? Should it have been banned? Tell us!
So, Tibi’s leather-trimmed satin-twill tuxedo jacket is kinda nice, no? Great with black skinnies, pencil dresses, jeans… an easy way to dress-up an outfit, just by throwing on a jacket. Awesome!
“But Fashion Police,” we hear you cry, “It’s $495! How can we be expected to pay $495 for a jacket? We will have to starve, or make ourselves homeless because we spent our rent money on a designer blazer, woe is us!”
Don’t worry, though, help is at hand! You SHALL have a white tuxedo blazer, Cinders! You shall have one from…
Ah, the humble pencil skirt! It’s a true fashion classic, and we’re very glad about that, because the pencil skirt is a Fashion Police favourite, which adds a touch of sophistication to just about any outfit. We’re particularly glad to see so many of them around this winter: it would be wrong to call the current range of pencil skirts a “trend”, because it’s a look that never really gets old, but if it’s a look that you love, you’ve no doubt been finding it a whole lot easier to create it recently, thanks to the many pencil skirts, in every conceivable colour and print, which have been flooding the high street.
(Special credit here to Topshop and River Island for their excellent work in bringing the pencil skirt to the masses this winter: we appreciate it.)
For this roundup, we’ve imposed a “£100-or-less” rule (OK, there’s one skirt which is £101, but we’re not going to quibble over that extra £1), in order to show you some things you might actually buy, rather than drifting off into Fantasy Shop territory.
Tell us: what do you think of pencil skirts? Do you own any? What do you wear with them?
