At last night’s UK Fashion Awards, Alexa Chung won the British Fashion Award for the second year in a row. This is the only title which is the result of a public vote, so while the appeal of Alexa has always been a bit of a mystery to us, if we’re totally honest, we are presumably in the minority with that one, and Alexa is a true icon of British style. We’ll allow you to be the judge of that. For ourselves, we will simply say that she looks very nice here (wearing a Christopher Kane dress and Charlotte Olympia ‘Kitty’ heels) and leave it at that.
What do you think of Alexa’s style? A deserving winner of the British Style Award?
Now, don’t get us wrong: we love shopping as much as the next fashion-loving officer. But as the Versace for H&M collection “lands” today, as fashion-parlance would have it, we find ourselves not-so-secretly relieved that our local branch of H&M isn’t one of the chosen ones to be stocking this collection. (We know it’s also available online, but the site has been down every time we’ve checked it today, so…)
Here’s why:
1. The queues
If you want to be in with a decent chance of getting your pick of the stock, chances are you’ll have had to queue up for it: possibly overnight. The Fashion Police don’t queue. Or not unless we absolutely HAVE to, anyway. And honestly, as much as love H&M, the idea of sleeping rough just to get into one is still just a little bizarre to us.
2. The rules
This is not shopping as we know and love it: this shopping has RULES. This morning, H&M was allowing only 20 people at a time into the stores carrying the Versace collection. Each group of 20 had just 15 minutes in which to shop, thus turning the event into a Supermarket Sweep-style exercise in acquisition. This is something of a triumph for H&M/Versace, of course, and for the other retailers who’ve managed to turn fashion into a competitive sport (The Missoni for Target line springs to mind), persuading legions of shoppers that it’s a good idea to grab armfuls of clothes and buy them before anyone else can, but we’re just not competitive enough to want to race other women to the checkout in order to have the same clothes as everyone else in the huge line outside the store. Shopping is not a sport: or at least, it shouldn’t be.
3. The hysteria
Let’s face it: we’re really just worried we’d get caught up in the hysteria and end up buying a pair of those palm-print jeans, just for the sake of buying SOMETHING…
That said, we do kind of love this collection (and we rarely say that about a diffusion line), so now that the H&M site is back up, we’ll be having a good old rummage. There’s a certain leather coat that looks a bit special…
What do you think about designer-diffusion lines? Do you get caught up in the excitement that surrounds them, and think it’s great that people are so enthusiastic about fashion, or do you see it as yet more evidence that the fashion world is, well, a bit mad, really?
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…)
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!
Oh, dear. It seems that First Lady Michelle Obama, always elegant, is coming in for some criticism for appearing at the White House Halloween party this Saturday wearing a £40 ASOS dress, which just-so-happens to bear a striking similarity to a $498 dress by Diane Von Furstenberg. And this is bad, of course, because, well, copying people’s designs is bad, and not something that should be supported, least of all by someone as influential as the First Lady. Or so the argument goes, anyway.
BUT.
It’s complicated, this one. We kind of feel like Michelle can’t really win here. If she’d bought the DVF dress, that would’ve been wrong in the eyes of many, because spending $498 on ONE DRESS, especially in the current financial climate, isn’t exactly a great example for the first lady to be setting either, is it?
Then there’s the issue of the dress itself. While the ASOS dress has very obviously been inspired by the designer one, it’s not an exact copy, and it’s not claiming to be DVF: in other words, ASOS are doing what the high street has always done – taking inspiration from designers, and producing their own, much cheaper, versions of the runway styles. This kind of thing goes on all the time: it’s how the fashion world has always worked, and, given the sheer amount of clothing available these days, unless you’re a dedicated runway-watcher, and really know your Prada from your Primark, it can be pretty hard to know whether that dress you love is an original design or simply a COPY of an original design. It can also be hard to care, sometimes, too. We know that’s probably a controversial thing to say, but let’s face it: if you love fashion, but you can’t afford to drop $500 on a dress, you’re probably going to be fairly happy to find something similar for a fraction of the price, no?
Would Michelle Obama even have realised this dress was a “copy”? Possibly, possibly not. Taking into account her known love of bargain-hunting, we think it’s more likely that she saw it, liked it, and wore it, than that she saw the DVF dress and set out to find a copy. We also think that if someone were to go through our own closets, they’d probably be able to find items we’d bought without even realising they were “copies” of something else.
What do you think? Is Michelle Obama committing a crime of fashion here by wearing a dress that’s a reasonably close copy of a designer piece, or is she just doing what most of the rest of us do, by choosing the budget version of a particular style? Does the fact that she would presumably be able to afford the DVF dress (unlike those of us who buy “designer inspired” pieces because we can’t afford the originals) make a difference here, or is that outweighed by her responsibility to be seen to be fiscally responsible?
Iris Apfel, fashion icon, (left) seems to be a big fan of the idea of fashion-policing. Speaking to The Independent this week, the 90 year-old said:
“It seems that the fatter and uglier people are, the fewer clothes they wear. The shorts and flip-flops and tight jeans on butts that go from here to Poughkeepsie. I always say they should put people in jail for wearing clothes like that. Especially stretch jeans over size 10 — they should be outlawed. Ten years ago people were starting to look like slobs in New York, now it’s an epidemic.”
Iris, we’re doing our best to fight the good fight against bad fashion. No stretch jeans for anyone over size 10, though? We doubt our jail is big enough, even if we agreed with you!*
(Does this photo make anyone else fall off their seat laughing, or is it just us? Why is that one model knocking herself on the head? Is the one in red trying to grope her?)
The whole designer capsule collection is something The Fashion Police have never really been able to fake a lot of enthusiasm over. Honestly, we get exhausted just thinking about them: all of that frenzied shopping, the getting up at the crack o’dawn to line up outside H&M, or wherever, just so you can buy exactly the same items as the hundreds of other girls all lined up outside H&M and type the word “SQUEEE!” a few dozen times on Twitter when you finally manage to get your hands on something that is OMGDESIGNER: exhausting. And the fact that the “hero” items (dontchya just hate that term?) sell on eBay for just as much as something from the designer’s main line? Madness. Utter, Fashion Victim madness.
Anyway, all of this is academic in the case of the Giambattista Valli for Macy’s collection, because we don’t have Macy’s here in the UK. This is a shame, because if we DID have easy access to this collection then we, too, would be able to dance on a table in head-to-toe leopard print:
It would allow us to put our hands in the air, like we just don’t care! In, er, MORE leopard print:
But, of course, we can’t do any of this, because we live in the UK, and will only be able to buy these pieces on eBay, for the price of a small car. Thus, our lives will be empty and meaningless from this moment on, while our American officers are the ones who will dance on the tables:
We want to cry at the injustice of it all.
On a serious note, though: what do you think of this collection? Will you be buying any of it?
Remember bootcut jeans? Of course you do. In fact, chances are you still have at least one pair squirrelled away somewhere, and even although the skinny still reigns supreme in the denim world – for now – you’re hoping the day will come when we can all toss those tight jeans aside and get back into bootcut. Maybe that day has already come for you? Maybe you never made the switch to skinny, and have clung onto your trusty bootcuts, regardless of the vagaries of fashion trends telling you it’s time to get into wide legs, flares, or any other cut of denim. Jennifer Aniston is still wearing bootcuts, after all, so why shouldn’t you?
How do we know all this? Well, partly because we’re The Fashion Police, and it’s our job to know these things obviously. But also because we climb inside your closet at night while you’re asleep this week eBay released an infographic showing how jeans sales on the auction site have panned out over the past year. The results are not the least bit surprising: every time we write about the Battle of the Denim, you tell us you HATE skinny jeans, and LOVE bootcut. And the results of eBay’s research definitely reflect that:
Jean Sales on eBay in the Past Year:
1. BOOTCUT: 793,289
2. STRAIGHT LEG: 215,353
3. SKINNY JEANS: 214,405
So more than twice as many pairs of bootcut jeans as skinnies were sold, and skinny jeans didn’t even make it to second place on the list: straight leg jeans did.
Surprised? We’re not. While we personally prefer skinnies (Yes, we know, it’s shocking), we know that our readers have always tended to express a preference for bootcut styles, feeling that they’re more flattering to most figures. So we’re mostly just surprised that retailers and designers haven’t been taking that on board: we’d imagine one of the reasons people are buying so many pairs of bootcut jeans from eBay is because they’re not exactly easy to find in regular stores, with the balance skewed heavily in favour of skinnies, or whatever that seasons flavour of the month is. (This season: flares.)
(Actually, scratch that bit about designers. We’re not surprised AT ALL that designers aren’t making clothes which flatter people’s bodies, and which women actually want to wear. If they were, this site wouldn’t exist.)
So tell us: do you favour bootcut jeans over the other styles available? Why?
