But is it as crease-resistant as crimplene?

From which sedimentary layer of eighties tat has this been extracted, pray?  Double-breasted, collarless, bouclé, plaid, gold-rimmed buttons:  yes, there is not a single item missing from this remarkably-preserved specimen of hellishly conservative tailoring.

This kind of jacket is worn by ladies who do a bit of genteel fundraising for those endless hospital scanner appeals.  Coffee mornings and tabletop sales are run with steely efficiency, but after a couple of sizeable gins in the Top Club on a Friday night the jacket's off and they're raffling their tits for Blesma.

Topshop, £70.  You could get something marginally less distressing from Marks and Spencer, and they do a lovely quiche, too.

Wonders of the deep

Well, who knows what this is?  I'd like to think it's one of those mysterious bottom-dwellers briefly glimpsed from a bathyscaphe hovering above the floor of the Mariana Trench.  I imagine fishermen haul something like this up by mistake, only for the damned thing to collapse, slip between the decks, and land unpleasantly in a hammock.

I suspect that wearing this item will prove alarmingly temporary, so one's foundation garments had better be pretty sturdy.  Having your outfit suddenly depart for the spawning grounds must be quite disheartening.

Miss Selfridge, £50.  Or just let it migrate.

I seem to have stumbled onto the Betterware website

Ah yes, the slanket, beloved of people who have stopped being merely careful with the heating bills, and are now positively miserly.

This loose, baggy monster would do very well as a bus shelter, especially on Clifton Street, where, as night follows day, one must wait for the Number 9 bus driver to take a grateful drag on a Silk Cut, pour out a cup of tea from a flask, balance it carefully on the dash, shake out the Daily Star, check a few household details over the phone with the missus, and FINALLY allow you to board the bus.  He'll save the gratuitous rant at a hapless old lady for later.

This is a Warehouse item, by which I mean it's used to house pallets.  It's also 100% acrylic:  you may as well break out in hives now and save yourself some time.

Warehouse, via Asos, £48.

Another triumph of knitted WTFery over at Asos

I assume this lady is really a lycanthrope, and her luxuriant pelt has been pulled through the gaps in the cardigan so she can have the ends highlighted at the hairdresser's.  Another possibility is that a hamster has been wrapped in a dishcloth.


A cardigan this suggestive of the creatures in M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village is quite likely to make people hide in cellars.

Asos, £65.

God, I had nothing to wear this morning, so I slipped into my laptop carry case

This dress is made of neoprene.  It hangs as if permanently inflated, and to complete the computing theme it is graced with a repeating pattern of silicon chips.  This, I suspect, is couture imagined by Bender.

The unlucky wearer will feel as if they have been loosely encased in a wetsuit made for a basking shark.

Asos, £75 (includes insupportable degree of self-consciousness and an immediate urge to slip into something more comfortable, like a coma).

Sorry love, but I'm blinded by the glint off your knickers

Lurex panel knicker shorts, £18, River Island.

These are exactly the same shape as the terrible PE shorts required of girls at my old school. While I must admit personal trauma has coloured my judgement about sport-luxe attire, I do feel that running lurex thread through the front and back panels glamourises an otherwise terrible garment in all of the following ways:

1 None.


If these shorts qualify as outerwear, then the height of the waist is regrettable. If they are foundation garments, adding a bit of sparkle to something this big and all-enveloping is surely in vain.  Perhaps only the 118 guys could carry them off - preferably to some location where thirty-seven feet of God's good earth will form a satisfactorily compacted and durable sedimentary layer.

Lace frills not seen since the Victorians put little skirts around table legs

I've seen this before somewhere.  But I hurried on as if nothing had happened.

This is described on the website as  'cream stained tiered lace', which is not, River Island, sufficient inducement to buy the thing.  I can imagine its appeal is confined to fairies off the top of the Christmas tree when they go bad, just before they're relegated to disguising the spare toilet roll in the cloakroom.

£35 for cheap frills.