“Big can be beautiful, but fat should not be in fashion.” So begins an editorial by Damien Woolnough, fashion editor at The Australian, who’s stirred up controversy this week by criticising department store Myer’s plus-sized runway show, which featured models including Robyn Lawley, pictured here in Vogue Italia.
“ Most of the models looked healthy but some looked obese,” writes Woolnough. “While most fashion festivals ban models for being too skinny, why is it OK to see fat women on the runway?”
[TFP note: if you want to judge for yourself whether the models looked "obsese", there are some photos from the show here.]
Woolnough goes on to argue that models who are “too fat” send just as unhealthy a message as models who are too thin, and the fashion world is in danger of creating a dangerous double standard by “celebrating people being overweight”.
As contentious as it may be to say it, we think there is a double-standard evident in the way some people talk about weight. It’s become almost fashionable – no pun intended – to bash the “skinny” and celebrate the “curvy”: if you need proof, you need only to look at all of the “she needs to eat a sandwich” comments posted here on TFP, take a look at magazine headlines lauding “women with curves” or listen to the endless talk about “real” women and how “men don’t like skinny women”. For many people, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to criticise thin people for their weight, but still taboo to make the same kind of comments about fat ones (in fact, we’re not even sure we’re allowed to use the word “fat” without causing offence: it has to be “curvy” or the detestable “real” instead, although it’s still OK to call someone “skinny” or refer to them as a “stick insect”).
This really shouldn’t have to be said, but apparently it does, so allow us to be the ones to say it: pets are not fashion accessories. They’re just not. They do not need to be dressed in human clothes, have ribbons tied in their hair, or HAVE THEIR FUR DYED PINK.
This is apparently the latest thing, though. The dogs shown above have all been “fur-jazzled” by a company called Cute Cuts Grooming of Essex, England, who say it’s the canine equivalent of vajazzling. Because the world was just crying out for a canine equivalent of vajazzling, obviously: how we have lived without it so long, we will never know.
We should stress that no animals are harmed during the process of fur-jazzling, which can include dying the fur, attaching “fairy wings”, or adding a bit of “bling” to the animal’s nether regions:
Ever wondered what the worst thing you could wear to the office might be? The biggest crime of workwear fashion? The one item of clothing that could instantly lose you both the respect of your colleages, and possibly your job?
Luckily, you don’t need to wonder, for fashion website Stylecompare has commissioned a survey in order to answer these very questions, and the results show that the top ten crimes of office fashion are…
1. Cleavage.
2. Frayed clothing.
3. Ugg boots.
4. Jeans.
5. Piercings.
6. Visible underwear.
7. Fake tan.
8. Stilettos/pointed shoes.
9. Bling jewellery.
10. Wedge heels.
Now, most of these we could all probably have worked out for ourselves, couldn’t we? For instance, most office workers probably don’t need to take a quick poll in order to work out that this:
probably wouldn’t go down well in a professional business setting. (Although, we guess it might depend on the business…)
We’d broadly agree with the majority of these, however, minus a few little quibbles. Jeans, for instance, may not be acceptable in a very conservative office setting, but could be perfectly normal in a more creative type of office: it all depends on the office. And the jeans.
Stilettos/pointy shoes, though? Wedge heels? Since when did all forms of stilettos or wedges become a fashion faux pas in the office? Sure, something like this:
is probably going to be pushing it a little (or a lot), unless you happen to work in fashion, or some other industry in which bold style statements are considered a plus rather than a minus. Many offices will consider sandal-type shoes, which expose the toes or most of the rest of the foot to be against their dress code, too.
There are plenty of pairs of perfectly respectable, stiletto heeled pumps out there, though – even pointed-toe ones – which shouldn’t cause a stir in the office. Take these, for instance:
This particular shoe is by Christian Louboutin, but the black heeled pump has been an office staple for a long time, and we can’t really think of a good reason why these would cause conniptions at work, can you?
As for wedges, meanwhile: well, again, it really depends on the shoe. These, for example, are likely to get the thumbs-down from the boss (unless the boss IS actually Jeffrey Campbell, in which case you can disregard everything we’ve just said. Everything we’ve EVER said, actually.) if you work in a conservative type of office:
These are surely dull enough for almost any office, surely?
So, what do you think, Fashion Police jurors? Are all stilettos and wedges really inappropriate for the office, or does it depend on what kind of stilettos or wedges they are?
Can you spot the difference between these two dresses?
Other than the fact that one is £69.99, and the other is £150, we mean?
That’s right, there isn’t one.
And we wish we could say this was an isolated incident, but the fact is: it’s not. There are dozens of these dresses on eBay, being bid up to extraordinarily high prices considering the fact that:
a) They’re from Zara
b) YOU CAN STILL BUY SOME OF THEM IN STORE FOR £69.99.
Not all of them, granted. Some of these Zara tulip dresses have, in fact, sold out in the store, such as this floral print number, which is no longer available:
In this case, there is another explanation for the high eBay price of the dress. We call it the “Olivia Palermo effect”:
[Image: PRPhotos.com] Olivia isn’t the only celebrity to show a preference for Zara and its dresses in recent months. Both Kate Middleton and sister Pippa have been spotted in Zara this year, as have a string of other celebs, and this has, if the media is to be believed, sparked a buying frenzy which means that although the dress below, as seen on Pippa Middleton, was last seen on the Zara sale rack, priced at £19.99, certain eBay sellers are offering it for considerably more than that (a little optimistically, it would seem: this dress isn’t quite reaching the giddy heights of the tulip dresses. Sorry, Pippa.).
What is this madness, we want to know? Where does it come from? And don’t get us wrong: we love Zara. We like all of the dresses pictured on this page. But, bearing in mind that the purple dress pictured at the top of the page is still available in all sizes on the Zara website (or was at the time of writing), we just can’t understand why people would pay more than twice the price for it. We realise Zara doesn’t ship to all countries, and that if you don’t have easy access to a store, eBay may be your only option, but even so: we’re perplexed.
Now, we were going to ask why eBay sellers are charging £150 for a dress that is available in-store for £69.00, but the answer to that one is pretty obvious: they’re doing it because they can. Because consumers really are willing to pay that much extra. Which brings us to our next set of questions:
Is the media hype so effective that people will spend almost £100 than the retail price of a garment just because it’s been deemed the next “must have” item? Are we all so desperate to dress like celebrities that we’re willing to buy their clothes at any price? Are these dresses selling for so much A) because certain celebrities have been seen wearing them, B) because the media has hyped the fact that certain celebrities have been seen wearing them, or C) because the people who buy them just really, really like the designs?
When we wrote about repeating outfits last week, quite a few of you commented about issues of wearing the same thing for two days in a row, or how outfit choices can sometimes be restricted by what happens to be clean at the time, and this got us thinking about how often people wash their clothes.
We, for instance, know some people who wash ALL their clothes, EVERY time they wear them. Every single thing. Skirts, tops, even sweaters which are worn on top of other sweaters: they all go straight into the laundry basket as soon as they’re taken off.
Now, this strikes us as crazy. For one, who has the time for THAT amount of laundry? And for two, well, as far as we’re concerned, most clothes don’t actually NEED to be washed every single time they’re worn. Constant washing is bad for clothes, and it’s bad for the environment, and while we’re not advocating for a second that people walk around unwashed (personal hygiene: it’s a good thing!), we tend to split clothes into two distinct groups when it comes to laundry, and we don’t mean “whites” and “colours”. (Although that too, obviously. Or you’ll end up with a machine full of baby pink clothing, like the Chief of Police did on that day last month when a bright red gardening glove found itself going through a spin cycle with a load of whites.)
1. Clothes that have direct contact with skin – i.e.underwear, hosiery, tops with arms which come into close contact with the underarm area, etc. These get washed after every wear, no exceptions. Also, workout clothes: there’s no way they’re being worn again once they’ve been sweated on.
2. Clothes that don’t. Things like skirts, jeans, jackets, and anything else that’s usually worn over another item of clothing, and which therefore doesn’t come into contact with the skin. For example, a skirt worn in winter, over tights and with a shirt tucked into it will only really need to be washed after one wear if you’ve dropped something on it, or been sitting in a smoke-filled room for hours. Items in this category get washed on an “as needed” basis.
Obviously, the second category is a lot harder to define than the first, and really depends on what you’re doing in the clothes in question. If something gets stained, or dirty, then obviously it’s getting washed, regardless of how long its been worn for. If you live in, or are visiting, a hot climate, you’ll probably need to wash things more often. And if you spend a lot of time outdoors, or work with animals or on the land, or something, then your clothes will get a lot dirtier a lot faster than someone who drives to work in a climate-controlled office every day and doesn’t get any closer to dirt than looking at it through the window will.
As for ironing: well, that’s a whole other discussion, which we had back in this post, if you want to take a look!)
So, those are our rough guildelines for clothes washing (and we must stress, they are very rough!), but we want to know about yours. Tell us: how often do you wash your clothes?
Before we start this post, let’s just make one thing crystal clear: we don’t really believe in fashion “rules”. We don’t believe that you should never mix navy and black, for instance, or that red and green should never be seen. (If we believed in that last one, our red-haired, green-dress-wearing Chief of Police would be permanently incarcerated in the Fashion Police jail. Which would be pretty ironic, no?)
For the most part, we believe that people should wear whatever they want to, as long as it’s within the bounds of common decency. But at the same time, we all have our personal taste, don’t we? We all have those little things that we just can’t imagine ever wearing even although we wouldn’t necessarily bat an eyelid if we saw someone else doing it.
This list, then, contains five things that fall into that category FOR US. We’re not for a second suggesting that these things are crimes of fashion, or that no one else should ever do them: they’re just the silly, pointless “rules” that we impose upon ourselves for no particular reason. They’re our own little fashion foibles, in other words, and we bet you have one or two of your own, although probably not the same ones as us, which include…
1. Thick tights or knee high boots in the height of summer
This is particularly stupid of us, because the Fashion Police HQ is in the frozen North. It’s cold 99.8% of the time. But no matter how unseasonably cold it is in August, we just can’t bring ourselves to break out the opaques and boots. Don’t get us wrong: it’s not that we’re walking around in shorts when it’s pouring with rain and freezing cold. We’ll happily wear leggings, or trousers, and we have no issue with breaking out the knitwear and other so-called” wintery” clothes, but we reserve the woolly tights and the knee high boots for the actual winter, not the pretend one we sometimes get in summer.
Along the same lines as the above. Fashion magazines seem to constantly be telling is how to make sundresses winter-appropriate, usually by layering them over something else, or layering them under piles of knitwear. But we don’t want to. We prefer to keep the lightweight fabrics for summer and the heavier ones for winter. Don’t ask us why, we just do.
Vero Moda sundress. No, we don’t want to wear a long-sleeved t-shirt under it.
3. High heels with frilly ankle socks. Or any ankle socks.
Some people can pull this off and look just great. Not us. We’d look – and feel – like little kids playing dress-up with mummy’s shoes. A look best left to the young ‘uns, we suspect…
4. Anything with a drop crotch
You knew we were going to say this, of course. But we will never, ever wear anything that looks even vaugely like this:
Your butt just doesn’t ever need to have a face, does it?
5. Pyjamas in public
You know, if we were really ill, and we absolutely HAD to leave the house for something, them OK, we guess we can imagine throwing a coat over the PJs and hurrying back before too many people were exposed to our dishevelled night attire. But we honestly can’t imagine wearing nightwear in public deliberately, or habitually. If that makes up uptight then fair enough, we will wear that badge with pride, but we will never wear our PJs in public.
If you read fashion blogs at all, you’ll know that “remixing” is a thing now: “remixing” being the practice of taking a particular item of clothing and, you know, wearing it in more than one particular way. So, say you have a pair of jeans. One day you’ll wear them with a blue top, for instance, then another time you might wear them with a green top, or a yellow top. And you might also wear a different pair of shoes with them sometimes, too, if you want to get really wild. Voila! You are a “remixer”, you crazy fashion person, you!
Now, the idea of remixing has been around for a long time now, but not so long that we don’t remember when it used to go by a different name. Yes, way back in the day, when The Fashion Police were young whipper-snappers and this Internet thing was all just fields, “remixing” used to simply be known as “getting dressed”. It wasn’t a FASHUN thing, either: it was just what normal people did, every day. Because, let’s face it, not many people would buy that pair of jeans and think to themselves, “Now that I have this pair of jeans, I’m going to always wear them with this one blue top, and NOTHING ELSE, EVER.” Do they? Do people do that? We suppose some people do, but then again, some people wear pyjamas to collect their kids from school. Moving on…
What we’re trying to say here, is that we sometimes think “remixing” gets made out to be a little more complex than it actually is. But then again, the opposite of remixing – outfit repeating – is also sometimes made out to be much more of an issue than it really is. You’ve probably all seen those news articles in which such-and-such a celebrity is seen wearing the thing more than once, and the word is deemed to have ended. Or read a fashion blog in which the blogger feels they have to apologise for commiting the huge sartorial “crime” of repeating an outfit. We know we have, and we normally think, “What’s the big deal? Isn’t this what everyone does?”
Actually, we think it’s quite refreshing to see someone in the public eye wear something more than once. As with the remixing, that’s what real people do. We buy things and we wear them… and then we wear them again. And again. And, if you’re The Fashion Police, probably againandagainandagain. The alternative, you see, would be buying a completely new outfit every single day in life, and who can afford to do that? (And who has the closet space, come to think of it?)
So repeating items of clothing is just fine by us. And remixing is just what normal people do when they’re getting dressed in the morning. What about repeating the exact same outfit, though? As in, same skirt with the same top and the same shoes, say. Do you think that’s a crime of fashion, readers? Because we’ll be honest: we’ve done it. And we’ll probably do it again. Well, if you’ve happened to put together an outfit you absolutely love, it would be a shame to have to say to yourself, “You know, I really love this outfit of mine, so it’s a shame I’ll never be able to wear it again, because I wouldn’t want people to think I was repeating an outfit!” Wouldn’t it?
Here’s our guilty fashion confession, then: we don’t just repeat individual items of clothing, we sometimes repeat entire outfits. Not constantly, of course. We wouldn’t turn up to work in the same outfit day after day, for instance. And if we’re going out with friends, we’ll probably make a mental note of what we wore so we don’t wear the exact same thing the next time we go out to the same place, with the same friends. But we won’t obsess over it, or feel the need to never be seen in the same thing twice.
What about you? Do you repeat outfits? And if so, how often do you feel it’s appropriate to repeat them? Do you have rough guidelines (No more than once per week, or three times per month, or whatever?) or do you just wear whatever you feel like wearing when you wake up in the morning, regardless of whether or not you’ve worn it before?
Looks like Tesco isn’t the only place where pyjamas-as-daywear is frowned upon: this week, the headteacher of a school in England sent out letters to parents, asking them if it would be too much trouble to actually get dressed before dropping off or collecting their children from school. Apparently some of the parents were even attending school events in their PJs, and turning up mid-afternoon, still in their nightwear, according to BBC News.
What does everyone think about this?
We’re absolutely astounded by it. Obviously we knew people were wearing their pyjamas in public – that’s been going on for a long time now, much to our dismay. But to wear them to collect your kids from school? Have these people no shame? Do they not remember what it was like to be at school? Because the thing is, kids are cruel. They’re particularly cruel at primary school age, when absolutely anything can become the object of ridicule. You remember how embarrassing your parents could be at that age, don’t you? Can you even imagine how embarrassed you’d have been if they’d rocked up at the school gate clad only in a pair of PJs and a dressing gown? Because we can.
Now, we’re in now way advocating that parents should completely change their style and/or their personality in order to make sure their kids don’t get teased. Quite apart from being unfair on the parents, it probably wouldn’t even have the desired effect. Is it too much to ask that people at least put on some clothes before leaving the house, though? Apparently it is. And we have no idea why. If the people who are so determined to wear pyjamas put even half the energy into pulling on some clothes that they put into defending their right to wear pyjamas in the street, there would be no issue. And they’d preserve some small amount of dignity, too. It must be hard to be taken seriously by your child’s teacher when you’re wearing the same clothes you slept, in, after all.
What’s more, many of the pyjama brigade ARE actually going to a lot of effort in their bid to wear pyjamas. In this story, we hear from a mother who wears leggings over her pyjamas, in a bid to appease the school. Leggings over pyjamas? How is that even comfortable? And how is it easier than just wearing leggings in the first place?
“Hello, I’m here to pick up my little boy…”
We don’t know. Perhaps our own horror over the idea of being out in public in our PJs is clouding our vision over this issue. We don’t know about you, but when we get out of bed in the morning, we look and feel a bit… icky. We’re creased, dishevelled, untidy… we need a shower and a coffee to start to feel human, and the idea of having that shower and then jumping right back into the same dishevelled nightclothes we just got out of, in order to go out in public is the stuff of nightmares. (Literally. We’ve actually had nightmares about being out in our PJs.) Isn’t it just as easy to put on clothes as it is to put on pyjamas?
Does it all depend on the pyjamas? Do you think pyjamas are a totally acceptable form of dress? Tell us!
“Big can be beautiful, but fat should not be in fashion.” So begins an editorial by Damien Woolnough, fashion editor at The Australian, who’s stirred up controversy this week by criticising department store Myer’s plus-sized runway show, which featured models including Robyn Lawley, pictured here in Vogue Italia. 
