Sunday 31 July 2011

Beige is all the rage - if you can summon up enough energy to get even slightly exercised by this tedious garment

Ladies wearing this will be bored into catatonia so rigid, workmen will be able to carry them under their arms like planks.

It's light brown, it's mid-length, it's poylester, an..........<zzzzzzzzzz>  Oh, sorry, drifted off there for a few moments.

Yes, River Island, we will gladly pay thirty quid to squander our remaining existence in a fog of tedium.

Well, I'll just let this do all the talking

You'll probably stop laughing when you learn the price of this abomination.  £20, River Island.

Thursday 28 July 2011

Your own personal oil slick

Don't go near any stranded wildfowl in this, or a well-meaning environmentalist will try to hose you down.  £40 at River Island.


Wednesday 27 July 2011

Oh look, the new Everton away kit!

...and while you're at it, put your mittens on a string and thread them through the arms of your anorak.

Twenty-eight quid from Ripoff River Island.

Tuesday 26 July 2011

It's 100% polyester and it's washable!

....should not be the best you can say about a garment.  However:




What is this trying to be?  Length + colour = dowdy  BUT long splits up the sides?  Which moral code are you trying to satisfy?  Stop doing this, Topshop, and above all stop doing it for fifty-five quid.

Librarians: not necessarily in love with cardigans

...and certainly not with this one.  It's the sort of thing which will attract fag ash and a lingering aroma of Fray Bentos.  On the other hand, perhaps I'll slip this little number on and find myself drawn, tractor-beam-like, to Emmerdale with 20 Woodbines and an orange-bottomed poodle.  On the other other hand, for £38, I probably won't.

River Island, in case you hadn't guessed.

Monday 25 July 2011

I sunbathed next to the park railings and this happened

Garment widens towards bottom hem.  Stripes widen towards bottom hem also.  Who is this flattering?  Oh look, no-one.  £22-worth of pain at Topshop.

The peasants are revolting

This was a terribly mannered and contrived style even in the seventies, the period from which this dress is unwholesomely resurrected.  The dull floral print was intended to recall cosy winter afternoons making scones, or coyly drifting about meadows in summer (before the vicar's son knocked you up). All it did for me was cast a pall of Sunday-afternoon pissing-down ennui from which the Lord's Day has never quite recovered.  This is how people in 1973 imagined the Brontes, who invented the word 'drear' for precisely this sort of garment.

The price of this gossamer symphony in brown?  A hard-nosed £140.  I'm looking at you, Asos.

Sunday 24 July 2011



Christ!

Fun: now compulsory

Vintage:  find a hilarious sweater from the eighties, and wear it with a sense of irony and enjoyment.  And all for a few p from a car boot sale or charity shop.

Bold-faced cheek retails this for thirty-five quid before you can say 'shamelessness'.

Wear your own tent

ASOS, £45 in the sale (was £85)

Forty-five quid for an exercise in self-loathing?  This is badly-cut, it drapes badly, the colour is melancholy rendered into Pantone, and is designed to flatter no-one.  I think shoving a pole up the middle and shivering on a draughty hillside at some Godforsaken festival is the only possible use for this thing.

Some day my prints will come - two clashing ones arriving on the same dress

Topshop, £50


Goodness, there's a leopard on the duvet. 

Children who are just learning to dress themselves might put themselves in clashing prints, but a guiding parental hand might suggest a different outfit today, darling.  

Saturday 23 July 2011

The playsuit phenomenon

Oh yes, this thing, the playsuit.  I'd feel overdressed in this right down to the bum, and then horribly exposed from there on.  Short legs and long arms on a garment are clearly the work of an overstretched designer, and adding this saccharine floral pattern will plunge seventies kids into some terrible flashback of being hugged to the bosom of an elderly aunt.  And why is there the facility to button this up right to the chin?  Feeling a little chilled in this draughty back garden?  The price for this is £295 at Matches.

Ugly stuff - on sale now!

God, there's some ugly stuff being touted in the shops right now.  I'm starting this blog as an extension of the Facebook posts I make from time to time, exposing to ridicule some of the more startling garments available for purchase.  

I like Facebook, as it's easy to post links and comment on them:  however, blogging gives scope for other avenues of distaste, so let's see where this takes us.  If we all hate it I can always go back to FB.

For the record, I actually like some of the things River Island sells - it's just that the website makes it easy to post  individual items for almost instant mockery.

 Grazia recommends you turn up to the pub in this.  Yes, I can see this going completely unremarked in the Old England on a Saturday night, especially when you tell dazed punters that it cost you a trifling £418.  The submerged fairy on the front merely adds to the sense of unease.  For some reason, the milk's just curdled.