Tiny lifeless mammal now available at your favourite online store

I don't usually write posts about accessories:  most designers reserve their rashness for garments, I find.  However, this small item deserves attention:  it's described by Asos as a raccoon tail, which is a charitable description, given that it looks like something the cat has laid on the back doorstep in a gesture of affection to the householder.  The cat presumably expects you to wear the pelts of its enemies as a symbol of your undying loyalty.

Further consideration suggests that this is a charm which can be clipped to a belt or bag, although Christ knows exactly what it's supposed to be warding off.  The bad luck's already arrived, I'm afraid.

£5 in the sale.

Happy New - Gah!

Generally, most garments can be safely categorised as a dress, shirt,  blouse, tarpaulin, etc.  This item, however, will defy taxonomy, and even the most advanced mathematician will be hard pressed to provide an adequate Venn diagram of fashion to incorporate this startling offering from Asos.

I suppose there is something brave about the entire lack of symmetry, the mystifying school-shirt collar and cape-style sleeve, but it's the kind of bravery fuelled by fly agaric mushrooms and big swords.  Fashion magazines will probably describe this as 'adventurous', but the fluorescence will already have warned us off, thanks.

Asos, £70.

Caution: vehicle reversing

Is it any wonder this lady looks tired?  There she is, working hard in a windswept multistorey carpark, her high-vis shirt the only thing between her and being firmly pinned to the security barrier by a distracted shopper.
If anything will serve as a fluorescent warning to fashion-lovers, this ought to:  that curious long flap thing will be tugged at by small children who wish to draw your attention to the fact that Mum has got her hand stuck up the ticket machine.

The overdone cap sleeves and looseness about the shoulders should also serve as further exhortation to avoid flaccid tailoring.

£30 at Asos. Hot diggity.

Just the thing for straining a festive sprout

This diaphanous garment is described as a tennis dress:  wearing it will perk up racquet sports no end, and the umpire will probably lose track of the score.  However, the players will have no trouble washing out grass stains, as the care label has been so glaringly left in the seam.  A lovely touch there, Topshop, seeing as you're charging £90 for what amounts to three square inches of fabric and a great deal of fresh air.

In case you need reining in

This is frankly the most bizarre object to appear in this blog.  Most of the other things I post are merely ugly or strangely-patterned, but this defeats explanation.

It's described as a harness, so it'll be jolly handy if you're in the 4.30 at Haydock, or have been recently executed, your remains displayed in a gibbet at the crossroads as a deterrent to cattle-rustlers.  Worn backwards over the head it doubles as a scold's bridle.

And so handy for Wichita linemen, too!

£40.  There are specialist shops for this sort of thing, you know, Topshop.

Frowned at by your own coat. Even your wardrobe is turning against you

This coat is described as a 'throw-on' - I suspect because it's the first thing you'll grab on your way out of the door to some event at which you really must express your disapproval, for example at a proposed bypass or the latest filth to flicker across our TV screens.  Older readers, do you remember Mary Whitehouse, guardian of the nation's viewing habits, whose rigid hair, unbending attitude and even tighter sphincter bespoke stubborn, inflexible rectitude?  Yeah, that.

Nothing says 'no' quite like this does: those scowling pockets are tight-lipped and clearly find you morally reprehensible.  The sloping shoulders and dreary pattern are likewise an essay in reproach.  £100 for no fun at all.

Topshop, for God's sake, cheer up.

Unexpected item in bagging area

Anything which makes one look this triangular is deeply unfair on the pear-shaped.   And if your mum's migraines are phototropic, she can be felled by the merest flash of this blouse from under your coat.

Presumably designed by Isosceles O'Humbug for River Island.  £28.

Ah yes, the venerable tartan of the Battenbergs

I think this is a plaid more suited to the coats of little Scottie dogs to make them look jolly and a little less like the ravening mad bastards they are.  And indeed this lady looks quite prepared to take a nip at the postman's backside now that she's wearing this thing.

This damned knit will enrage even the most mild-mannered librarian, and certainly it's making me want to leave teethmarks in the designer's ankles and shelve all the large print Mills and Boon in Home Carpentry.

Asos, £31.50.  It's in the sale, which comes as a terrible surprise.

So you've come as a trapezium?

Well, I'm going to work as a stellated icosahedron tomorrow.  If we must duel, my weapon of choice is a Platonic solid.

This model is looking petulant because she has just been told off for wearing Daddy's shirt.  How is she to know it costs THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE POUNDS AT WHISTLES?  I wrote that in big letters because only upper case is sufficient to express the enormity of offering for sale this insult to a lady's silhouette.

Pretending to be a person many times your size comes in a bit expensive these days.

Target practice

This lady does not deserve to be shot in the back, but if she will insist on appearing at the battlements dressed in this, she is very likely to have some sort of unpleasant missile flung at her by a trebuchet.

I think what worries me about these low-slung t-shirts is that they're so difficult to match with anything.  Your coat must be at least below the length of the shirt, because otherwise you'll look as if you're trailing something.  And a dramatic inset pattern like this must be on show, so a cardigan is out of the question.  What an awkward, awkward garment.

Unless, of course, you're a knight?  Why not wear this as a surcoat over your shiny armour as you prepare to breach a castle or joust the afternoon away?  Gauntlets optional.

Urban Outfitters, £60.

Go home and show Mummy. Wait...maybe don't show Mummy

It's that time of year when small children decorate calendars with gold-painted pasta shapes and get over-excited with Pritt Stick and shiny paper.  How charming, then, to find a, a, whatever this is, inspired by a childlike love of arts 'n' crafts, where bits of tin foil are stuck liberally to the first object to hand.  Well done, Lucy, but do give back the glitter to Mrs Trumbull before Asos arrive and ruin the Lovely Afternoon We're Having!

Eighty barefaced, shameless, flagrant pounds.

And now, two minutes' silence for style, which died today

This lady looks remarkably unconcerned that there is a trilobite crawling over her shoulder.

I do feel that the ruffle is rather going to get in the way of things, although it will be a very good place to save the canapés for later.  On further reflection, however, marine arthropods are perfectly capable of securing their own snacks from the buffet, although the pickle fork may present some difficulty to a prehistoric creature unused to modern manners.

River Island, £60.  They'll throw the rest of the dress in for free.

How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Frock, No 173

Perhaps this looked like a good pattern at 3 o'clock in the morning to the hard-pressed designer, fag in  hand, colouring pencils at the ready.  There is something arch and oh-so-knowing in that jarring scalloped band of black and polka-dot arrangement at the hem, but it is of course the dark stain of sin slowly engulfing the floral loveliness above.

The Island of Doctor Moreau has things less freakishly conjoined than this dress.

Miss Selfridge, £45.

The model tried to smile but somehow couldn't bring herself to

Sci-fi shows in the seventies often had people dressed in outlandish spacewear, but I always took comfort from the creaking scenery and plotlines that the bleak dystopian vision therein would never materialise.  How perturbing, then, to find a survivor from the costume department of yesteryear blazoned across the webpages of Asos.  Flying cars and nuclear fusion must be just around the corner.

Asos is calling this a lantern dress:  perhaps a few fairy lights and a confused moth under the peplum would make it look less silly.

£150.

Rattling the bars

How a nice day looks through a prison window.

Topshop, £45.

Drifty and draughty

Asos' predilection for oversized, shapeless idiocy may just have reached its nadir.  Is it any wonder, ladies and gentlemen, that this lady looks a little distrait?  Falling into the duvet cover and struggling wildly to emerge, she is still draped in a sizeable portion thereof.

The snugness of those fitted sleeves contrasts so delightfully with the parachute-sized top that one is reminded of the potato animals one used to make with matchsticks and a humorously-shaped tuber.

Twenty-five quid for possibly the least practical garment ever seen in this blog.  Warmth, style, pulling power, an ability to match anything in your wardrobe - all must be found in other garments, I am afraid.

The bitemarks are still visible

There is a shark, somewhere in the murky depths of the Atlantic, reaching for the Gaviscon.

Topshop, £38.

Git out there and clank!

This skirt may just look odd, given that the mannequin is probably not well-proportioned.  But there's no escaping the fact that it resembles a lead coffin whose lid is about to be prized off by one of those hirsute chappies on archaeological digs, whose breezy attitude to mangled cadavers makes one suspect a similar disregard for personal hygiene, haircuts, age-appropriate trousers, etc.

This metallic brocade fabric is so fabulous it deserves better than being styled into a section of sewer pipe.  And the length on the leg is frankly depraved:  one's thighs will look like a couple of hams smuggled out of the butcher's.

Topshop, £90.

Hell - now with added stretch

Well, here is another of those knitted skirts which do so much to render the wearer just a little more conscious of her hips than she need be.

It's also decorated with wombs.

River Island, £22.

Not to be worn in a maze

Designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the invention of Pacman, Vero Moda are offering this dress via Asos for £45. For an extra fiver you get 16K of RAM and a bonus score.

I'm a lumberjack and I'm..about to have a brief but comprehensive nervous breakdown

My Dad's pyjamas have gone missing from the drawer:  they were here only yesterday, and....Christ!  What the hell have you done, Fred Perry?

Dad's continual astonishment at the price of things is probably something which comes with age (and he certainly won't be pleased that some reckless designer has hacked his jimjams about); but even hipsters may have some trouble stomaching the £100 price tag on a playsuit whose wide shorts have made the model's legs look like two breadsticks.

I also note Fred Perry has preserved the top pocket wherein old gentlemen store their hearing aids, undoubtedly a vital styling detail all teens will love!

An item right at home at Asos.

When barmaids attack

Perhaps the most unforgiving dress in the history of stretch-knit fibres.  Being mauled to death by the leopard whose skin this loosely mimics is a fate much to be preferred to having every single tiny excrescence or convexity brutally exhibited.

And what can that black lace panel possibly add to the dress?  Presumably the designer put it there to separate two colours desperately fighting each other like bull elephant seals, but this is a problem better solved by having the combatants on separate ice-floes.  One at each pole.

Topshop, £30.

Two ugly things welded together

This top can be worn to prevent your identification after you've robbed a bank.  From one side, you'll be the girl in the dull black and white t-shirt; from the other, you'll be the daft ha'porth who fell into Black's collection of tart fabrics and wrenched herself free, taking this piece of lamé with her.  However baffled the forces of law will be, they will not be as confused and adrift as this damned t-shirt thing.

This is the sort of garment which should have been exposed on a hillside at birth.

River Island, £45.

People will think your legs are attention whores

River Island, £40.  Per square metre.  Includes fitting and underlay.

Just in time for Guy Fawkes' Night

Clothes ought to make one stand up straight, walk with a degree of confidence, and stride up to any bar to demand the landlord's finest ales and a packet of pork scratchings, my good man.  A smart coat instils a degree of sharpness even on a rainy Thursday night when you have to get on a filthy bus and sit next to Old Mother Rancid. Furthermore, a coat needs to finish off an outfit.  This item, however, will do none of these things for you:  a slouchy, grouchy and pouchy offering whose utter lack of charm and elegance will make you drag your knuckles on the floor and forget all the polysyllabic words you ever knew.

This is described as a cocoon coat, an admirable description in the circumstances:  clearly the gaudy, frivolous occupant has long since departed, and left this colourless husk behind.

Dropping the shoulders on this coat and fitting sleeves and collar in fake leather probably sounded like an ace idea in the first two weeks of fashion school term.  And that single button fastening is only a step away from tying the coat in the middle with a piece of string and carrying all your belongings in three Morrison's bags.

£69, Miss Selfridge.

A couple of stick-on boogly eyes would cheer this right up

Is this going to pop out of a bin, shout something cynical to the other denizens of Sesame Street, and then scuttle back under the lid?

This jacket is made of ostrich feathers.  Trimming garments with feathers is undoubtedly a nice touch, but using them all over a jacket makes the thing look like a particularly hacked-off heron standing disconsolately by a frozen pond.

I doubt it will do very much for a lady's silhouette, either - in the dark you'll look like a roided-out bodybuilder about to launch into the door staff.  Albeit one in heels.

Miss Selfridge, £125.

This damned pattern again

Wallpaper ombre shirt, £45.

Topshop are flogging this design to death.  If you're a regular FailRailer - and I do hope you are, sirrah - you'll recall a shirtwaist dress whose charming combination of overdone floral and colour-block yellow invited sinners to everlasting damnation.  I see Topshop have attempted to soften the pattern with a blue border detail, but all this does is suggest to onlookers the queasy sensation of clinging desperately to the wreckage of a torpedoed warship, the horizon lurid with the flames.

One would have hoped Topshop were a little more frivolous, somehow.

Cossack dancing not obligatory

Now, if you were to put your Dad's trousers on, and you wanted to stop them trailing on the floor, you'd hitch them up somewhere around the knee.  You'd get some tremendous bunching and unsightliness in the hip area, but still, your Dad would never guess you'd had his kecks on.  I expect you'll be very glad, then, to find that in order to avoid any awkward explanations over the tea table, Miss Sixty have replicated this experience in denim.  I know I am!

Farmers will enjoy these trousers, as they permit trouble-free insertion of the leg into a wellington boot while simultaneously allowing the smooth transfer of three hundred pounds of potatoes from field to grading station.

Harem jeans, Miss Sixty.  £114.40.


 

Move around too quickly and all the balloons at the party will stick to you

Well, I don't know quite why there is a skull-like lizard thing emerging from the maelstrom of mismatched colour on this frock, but there is something distinctly extraterrestrial about the pattern, which is another very good reason not to wear something which looks as if it were hastily snatched off a Victorian dining-table before little Master Archibald had another of his bilious attacks.

Still, that fringing though, eh?  No?  Oh, OK.

£69 for hot, scratchy, polyester:  Topshop, you know how to spoil a girl.

Dralon pants! Moult the cat all in one go and save hours of hoovering

These trousers are in an irritable mood.  They have fallen out with the model's feet and are swiftly retreating up the legs as fast as static will allow.

£90 at Topshop.

Solve all your unsightly vanity table problems!

I often go into River Island to touch up the garments, which makes me feel a bit dirty.

Stranger motivations aside, I want to confirm that the material of a garment is really as nasty as it looks on the web page.  For the record, many of the clothes are actually of good quality. The styles are hair-raising, but at least the fabric's good.

I fear this may not be the case with Ms Polly Ester over here. Anyone wearing this will look like a four-year-old dressing up in Mum's underskirt pretending to be a princess, and the crackle from the synthetic textile will startle the cat.  

Forty quid for something which looks like a survivor from Brentford Nylons.

That's lovely, dear. And you've been so creative with the laundry bag!

You may remember this lady from an earlier Urban Outfitters post.  She was dressed in something similarly flimsy and structureless, and it was making her very unhappy indeed.  Well, now she is utterly wretched because UO have just dressed her in this sheer chiffon thing, which comes with distracting bacterial print and optional pussy-bow.  I suspect that the combination of awkward length and clumpy black shoes will prove the final straw and she will be off to Edinburgh Woollen Mill for something less ugly.

£100.

Excitingly, this can be grown from moistened pieces of bread kept in a humid environment

Look, I've told you a million times not to leave the white sliced out of the bread bin, because Asos will come along and construct a strange, overpriced garment therefrom, and we'll never hear the last of it, will we?

£65.  I think this looked better on the alpaca, on the whole.

You're welcome

More usually to be found in the bathrooms of stern aunts, this loofah-based top can also be used as an effective and durable doormat, and probably something for the cat to sharpen its claws on, too.  Asos, you've thought of everything.  Apart from comfort, style and colour.  Never mind.  Still, better luck next time, eh?

Asos, £77.  The brand is called 'Cheap Monday', and only one of these things is true right now.

Winner of Most Absorbent Garment Category

Quite apart from the peculiar texture of the skirt, the full and unforgiving gather at the waist, and the strange length, the fabric is that dirty grey colour dishcloths go in disreputable cafes when they've been used to wipe the counter down rather too often, and thus the main suspect in an E. coli outbreak.

Close up, the design is an all-over check, which hints at an alternative genesis as a horse blanket.

Either way, it's fifty quid for a garment replete with pathogens.  Thanks, Asos.

Careful, or you'll snag on a pylon

This lady hurled herself from a plane at 10,000 feet, and with the aid of her voluminous jumpsuit, drifted gently down to the ground, light as dandelion fluff.  And who needs a flattering colour when you're being dropped behind enemy lines?

If anyone turns up to the house in this, I wouldn't let them in:  the pants in this are capacious enough for the wearer to pocket the spoons.

Asos, £85.

I'm sure I brought some oranges home in this

These are usually supplied on the end of a thin garden cane, and are used to scoop sticklebacks and frogspawn out of ponds.

This item is £140.  It will not keep you warm.  It will probably itch.  And the roll neck will permit only the upper part of your face to be visible, which is great if you're hiding something unsightly.  Although the sweater itself is probably more unsightly than the vilest boil, furuncle, or pustule, and should be immediately hidden from view, for example in the nearest skip.

Available from Topshop, which has clearly taken leave of its senses.

Yes, I nearly blew a gasket, too

Nope, the general air of boiler suit is not relieved by the autumnal floral print.  In fact, getting WD40 on it, or those mysterious bits of crap which fall off the underside of the bonnet, will probably make you feel a bit rugged and authentic, rather than done up in cheap wrapping paper from Poundstretchers.

The positioning of the belt is rather odd:  it it's meant to indicate the area of the waist, then the inescapable conclusion is that one's chest will be hovering immediately above one's crotch, which is a fate befalling only the very elderly and unlucky.

Forty-five quid from River Island, for an item which suggests you're a contortionist mechanic on the quiet.

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.

Two sullen tubes of malevolence

Some more skinny pants in a charmless print:  oh, how my cup runneth over.

What's particularly galling about this offering from Topshop is the unpleasant admixture of brown and black, which makes me think of sheds, for some reason; and this tiresome dogtooth print was better left in the fifties, where it was last seen adorning the second-best coat of a minor Foreign Office official.

Goodness, the cut!  That unforgiving structure will emphasise even the briefest patch of cellulite, and make your knees look like a giraffe's.

£45:  all you'll get is some tight cords and six months of unrelenting gloom.

Venetian blinds

There is clearly some drapery-themed fashion going on at the moment:  first we had pelmet skirts, and now this, a skirt which mercifully comes without a pull-cord to roll up the slats.  I'll still be wearing my big knickers, however, if it's all the same to you.

That misaligned frill thing will be making OCD sufferers everywhere wince, and immediately straighten their pencil collections.

£30, River Island.

Oh look, an escaped squid

Usually, edible cephalopods are sliced into rings, covered in breadcrumbs and then deep-fried.  This dress would be immeasurably improved by the same process, and what's more we wouldn't have damned cuttlefish roaming up and down the aisles of River Island.

£30.  Which is a bit rich, given that it's missing a few tentacles.

I'd have worn it, but then I scraped the barrel and found a thin smear of self-respect

Prisoners sew these, but the finished product usually has the legend 'Royal Mail' printed thereon.

Perhaps the designers have loosened the bottom hem and added sleeves so that we will have something cheerless and vapid to wear when we put the bins out, or indicate to the neighbours that we require immediate and sympathetic medical attention.

£80, River Island.  God, you have to spend a lot of money these days to look dirt-poor.

Anyone know a good opthalmologist?

Staring at this dress produces retina burn so hideous and complex, you'll be seeing it three days later.

The pattern is clearly an artistic representation of Hades, the primrose path   along the shoulder and hem leading the damned to the seventh circle of hell somewhere amidships.

At all events God's judgement should be visited upon the designer.  And the sooner the better, before they perpetrate another monstrous act of villainy upon the poor shopper.

Topshop, £80 for a formless polyester frump-a-thon.  It's even got a pussy-bow at the neck, just in case it wasn't dowdy enough.