Junction emerges on left

 A lady wearing a road-sign.

Motorways, I find, often contain entertaining traffic advice, the sort that makes you drive into the forecourt of Ikea seventy-six times.  Clearly this is Asos' little homage to a proud British tradition - one of exposing as much flesh as possible to an Arctic January wind outside Walkabout, the fabric providing amusing directions to various avenues of dissipation.


Thank the Lord that little piece of fabric covers a collar-bone.  Otherwise the wearer would look a bit, you know, loose.

Asos, £40.

Not so much a fail as a desperate plea

What all the staff at Topshop are wearing.


£46 - or free if you decide to run, utterly distrait, from the building.

Off the Rictus Scale

So handy to have the seismograph chart from the Poulton earthquake on a dress, don't you think?  A reminder, if any were needed, of how the earth moved for you after all that fracking.  Or didn't, in this case.  And certainly there is no prospect of any tectonic activity if you go out wearing this.

Topshop, £32.

If you see this whizzing over a rooftop, I'm sure the Gazette will appreciate a call

Why, you could paste two of these together, insert sherbet, and have your very own Flying Saucer!  Although it'll be enormous and made of wool, which is a good deal less appetising.

And it's not very appetising right now, is it, unless you're a very, very old lady playing bowls?

£22, River Island, in a rather brusque attempt to elbow Damart aside.

What you wear if you live on an estate. Not that kind of estate.

Comes complete with five or six pungent spaniels and a number of unpleasant political opinions.

Just 95 of your English pounds at Oasis.  How terribly non-U to mention money.

This amount of acrylic will definitely need the Remington Fuzz-Away ®

It's fancy dress week over at Asos - why not come dressed as a harpy?  Swoop low enough in this and you can sweep all the vol-au-vents off the buffet.



Asos, £102, a distinctly unmythical and unromantic price for this amount of knitted glarg.  At least it fastens right up to the neck.

Holy chintz!

Once upon a time skirts like this were usually to be found on the more conservative rails of Marks and Spencer.  They were generally favoured by vicars' wives, who wore them with a toning sweatshirt, the collar of their pink Airtex shirt jauntily folded over the neck.  The comparative youthfulness of the sweatshirt gave them automatic seniority running the youth club, while the skirt reassured the verger that Mrs Vicar was perfectly capable of turning out a good scone, thank you very much.

Quite why there has been some sort of Christian revival at Miss Selfridge is an investigation beyond the purview of this blog.  You can be quite sure I won't be putting £32 in the collection plate, though.

PS  Many vicars' wives saw sense at last (or saw Grease) and ran off, leather-clad, with burly truckers, while the vicar, freed from the shackles of marriage, took up cottaging in earnest.

How the West wasn't won

An infallible guide to good dressing:  walk into a room full of people, and if the place falls pindrop quiet, you're either the sheriff come to clean up this town, or the dress you're wearing has startled the company into a highly discomfited silence. (If you are indeed the sheriff, your attire is most unlikely to intimidate the Clantons, Mr Earp.)


I suspect this frock will precipitate a deathly hush in the most swinging of parties.  This is handy if you have a portentous announcement to make, like 'FIRE!' for example, but otherwise the conversation will awkwardly resume after a moment or two, with a kind lady asking if you're alright and is this the first time you've been out since the breakdown?

River Island, £35.

All the nice girls love a sailor

Captain's hat, £20, River Island.

Another pernicious experiment in the revivification of the seventies.  I remember ladies of a certain age wearing these, complete with heavy mascara, a chiffon scarf, and a fondness for a couple of large gins before lunch, making their way unsteadily to Cleveleys for twenty Silk Cut and seventeen games of bingo at the Orion.

I can see this looking reasonably pert and chipper on the right person, but as the right person emigrated to Paraguay 37 years ago after a fall-out over the sale of a bungalow in Anchorsholme, there's not much of a market for this kind of over-structured and derivative headgear.

Splice the mainbrace, or something.

Matching items available - in a universe which clearly hates you

This, dear reader, is the companion piece to a pair of leggings so bizarrely ghastly that it would have been safe to assume they were unique in the annals of nausea.

But no.  Here is an abomination in the same print.

Put them together, and the electrical discharge caused by the static will set substations alight and plunge industrial estates into darkness.

Topshop, £26.

Writer of blog finally overcome by garment

I surrender.



£22, Topshop.

Freshly-sloughed, snakeskin is *perfect* for a garment made out of tubes

A sleeveless jumpsuit in a polyester snake pattern fabric, complete with pussybow.  Yes, perfectly harmless words by themselves, but jostled together in a sentence like this, they conjure an image vivid enough to cause light retching.


This looks like the snakes' revenge for depicting them wearing little collars and ties in children's books.  I mean, wouldn't they fall off?


£50, River Island.

Oh, it's a herring

Sturdy fishermen haul these ashore at Grimsby, where they are gutted traditionally by weatherbeaten fishwives before being deep-frozen and transported to Topshop.


Faux fur sleeveless thing, £75.

Dead. But refusing to lie down.

This skirt died in 1989 (I have the certificate) but, like some dreadful revenant in a horror movie, the noisome remains of the deceased suddenly appear in your wardrobe to remind you of some past misdeed which must be atoned.

The wearer will be doomed forever to a dowdiness so thorough they may never see the light of Day Birger et Mikkelson again.  Combining a below-knee length skirt with a pair of tedious flats is so utterly joyless even a bunny gambolling through sun-dappled woods fails to animate.  It certainly won't animate this particular corpse.

I notice New Look, whose zombie apocalypse this skirt heralds, have now replaced the sturdy countrywoman shoes in this image with heels.  Which makes it all much better.

£24.99.

I'm trousers! I'm a skirt! I'm trousers! I'm a skirt! I can be anything you want, except stylish!

The Schrodinger's cat of couture, culottes instil a sense of indecision and nervousness, particularly in harried female teachers in the eighties, compelling them to write on the blackboard with a felt tip and do all their marking with chalk 3/10 SEE ME before permitting themselves a few fags and a quick look at the TES jobs page before English with 3C.

These are an odd length:  they cut off the wearer's legs mid-calf - ie at the widest point - so will give even the most svelte of wearers the look of an elderly and recalcitrant Russian peasant.  The colour is difficult to match, but buried in seventeen feet of blizzard in a Muscovite winter, the tightness of your headscarf is all that matters.

32 roubles, River Island.

Dangers of smoking video, figure 1: diseased lung

This is the colour lace curtains turn when the occupants of the house have been smoking for a number of years - let's say 854.  In the Pantone catalogue, this hue is labelled 'emphysema'.

£45, Miss Selfridge.  Comes with a free bout of bronchitis and chest X-ray.

Hmmmm, I need a device to make my legs look as short and stubby as a caterpillar's

Oh, that's handy - I look down at my trousers, and I have a map of Jupiter's atmosphere!

All I need now is a snood containing a small large hadron collider and I'll have Higgs' bosons coming out of my nostrils.


£18, River Island.

Doctor Frankenstein does couture. Badly.

Seventies kids will remember the sensation of trying to peel their legs off the imitation-leather seats of a hot car.  If you came away with your skin intact, you rewarded yourself with an ice pop and a root through the sideboard for that bottle of sherry your nana kept for special occasions.

The upper half of this dress has been lovingly handcrafted from the upholstery of a 1973 Austin Allegro, and the lower half from some old blackout curtains found in the shed when Uncle Bernard died horribly of piles, leaving the house to that floozy he met in the bookies.

The gaps at each side - does anyone want to see the side of one's waist?  It's like daringly revealing an elbow or something.

£45 for a dress which will be impossible to remove in temperatures above 20 degrees celsius.

Miss Selfridge.

Corrugated pants will fit in the tiniest of wardrobes

Twong!..and out they pop from the cupboard, ready expanded for instant wear.  Or straight into a perfectly-positioned binbag for immediate recycling to British Trouser Foundation, a charity founded to help those engulfed by their own pants.

These trousers probably started out as a singularity, and after the Big Bang have gone on expanding infinitely ever since.


£12 in the sale at ASOS.

I ate the contents and now I'm wearing the wrapping

The last time I saw something like this, it was lying, slightly inflated, on a grass verge.



River Island, £18. Glassy stare and the unwanted attention of a persistent crow optional.

Clairvoyants never saw this coming

Can I read your tea leaves, deary?

£35, River Island.

What the nurses put you in if you forget to bring your own pyjamas

This strangely bland and amorphous frock is inspired by the plain, modest attire encouraged in the indigent poor to prepare them for a life of servitude in dank sculleries.   A style more usually to be seen on a peg dolly or something about to be cursed in a voodoo ceremony.

Oasis, sixty quid!  Label fans will be heartened to learn that the dress is made from abaca.  This is a relative of the banana, but presumably one Mr and Mrs Banana never speak to, as abaca is a bit rough.

It's behind you!

Have you seen those pictures of Victorian seances?  Contacting the spirit world was clearly a rather jolly affair, consisting of the production of ectoplasm from the medium, usually a small hapless girl drafted in by Strange Aunt Myrtle, whose tuberculic appearance and readiness to faint were seen as the certain manifestation of The Other.

A  similar visitation from the undead can be had for a mere £45 at Jane Norman.

Put this on, and render yourself catatonic

Even the designer gave up part way through this taupe nightmare, and left the right-hand side unfinished.  They were resuscitated from near-terminal boredom only when shown a floral playsuit, which shocked them into consciousness.


I positively hyperventilated when I discovered this was 100% viscose - whoop, or something.

£15, River Island.

Personally, I'd have set fire to this too

Pass me the Bryant and May - I'm going in.

Consigning this to the flames is the only sacrifice which appeases Cellulitus, the God of Needlessly Accentuated Thighs and Unforgiving Horizontal Stripes.  Humanely euthanased, a dignified end to a life of knitted hell is the kindest thing we could have done.

£25, Miss Selfridge.

Oh, I forgot to take my curlers out

Tsk!  River Island these days!  The store looks as if Penelope Keith shed her entire wardrobe for fashion archaeologists to pick over and reassemble into some hamfisted account of how people wore things in 1975.

Heritage museums, with their frowsy displays of deformed mannequins dressed in clothes of the period, are not more disturbing places than clothes shops of late.  At least in River Island we're not expected to heave coal or scrub the front step.

£16.  At least it's not itchy.  Oh, <looks at label:  angora and wool mix> it is.

Gravity: not your friend

Perhaps this is a merry jape down at Topshop, the equivalent of making an apple-pie bed for that prissy Queen's Guide in some Godforsaken scouting hell-hole up in the fells.  'Oooh, let's sew this top and trousers together to form a slouchy misshapen bifurcated tube held up only by the forces of hope and any number of crossed fingers!'  Yes, hilarious.

£35 at Topshop for Miss Lucy Lastic here.

Unnervingly reminiscent of the Kraken as it heaves its ravening maw over the terrified shipmates

In fact, so many things are clashing I thought I'd stumbled on to the set of Stomp.  That central pattern, which is no doubt an artist's representation of The Abyss, will dizzy and appal the unwary shopper, propelling them into mannequins and distressing artfully-folded trouser displays.

Queasy does it at River Island, £17.

Troubles never come singly

Goodness, you can get two terrible items in the same print!

I'm sure psychics and mediums would feel more comfortable in a velour leisure suit and their second-best slippers, but convention demands they wrong-foot their clients with attire more suited to bead curtains, jangly bracelets and fringed lampshades.  The mingled odours of patchouli and boiled cabbage complete the experience.  Cross your palm with silver?  I think I'll be crossing myself with holy water.

River Island:  kimono £50,  trousers £35.

My God, it's a prosthetic leg!

My niece had a number of Bratz dollies when she was little.  To change the shoes on a doll, you pulled the entire foot off.  This explains the flashbacks, for which a kind doctor is treating me.

These boots are made for walking.  Stiffly, I should think.

£75, River Island.

I don't know what I'm looking at but I'm certain I never want to see it again

There are a number of things wrong with this skirt.  Polyester pleats are unpleasantly reminiscent of the school skirt I had to wear, but there's rather more to complain about than my adolescent discomfort, however much you'd love to hear about the angst of my teenage years - let me tell you all about it next time we meet!

That shot-off look at mid-thigh just ruins the whole idea of a maxi-skirt, which is surely to provide a column effect on the wearer.  It's an ugly visual interruption of the length of the garment.  The designer clearly wanted it both ways: 'Hmmmm, maxi is too frumpy, so I'll make it see-through and put this mini-skirt in - yes, that solves it!'  Marks and Spencers pull off this sort of clumsiness far more effectively.

Topshop - £45.  No, I didn't think cheek could be this barefaced, either.

This looks like an ornate Christmas cracker. But not one you'd want to pull

What a helpful dress!  You can be any way up you like, and remind everyone in the room of a face card.

Topshop, £80.

Because two arms would just look ridiculous

The print might be an artist's impression of a multi-dimensional universe - hence the purple and yellow cubes (always an attractive colour combination), several Higgs bosons (oh, they were on this dress all the time), and the tracks left by protons as they whirl around the Large Hadron Collider.

A tough brief, but well done scientific illustrator!  My retinas will probably reattach themselves shortly.

£22, River Island.  At least this ugliness comes cheap.

...and the beauty of this is you can wear it whichever way round you like!

...because you'll still look like scrambled egg.

This is from New Look, a store which has recently tried to do River Island on the cheap.  Lovers of irony will particularly appreciate this little snippet of fashion excitement.

Thanks to my colleague Debs who so gleefully shared this on Facebook.  Her innate class allows her to detect tat at a hundred paces.

£19.99 for an item whose fabric will produce the same effect as dragging fingernails down a blackboard.

Freshly peeled from the wheel arch

I knew I'd gone over something in the Bentley this morning.  I've never worn stoat before, but nothing ventured, nothing gained!

Twenty quid, River Island.

A night in with just Radio 3 and this blanket the dog's lent me

Now, what else do I need to settle down to a relaxed night in?  Pipe, slippers, gramophone - oh, and I must slip on a false beard and my Dad's specs.  There - a picture of comfort, circa 1953.

£50, Greenwood's, the Flat Cap Centre of the North.  Oh, sorry, Topshop.

When tea-cosies attack

On average, three people a year are hurt in tea-cosy-related accidents.  I think this cape thing is going to make that figure rise quite sharply, as distracted car-drivers mount the pavement, and cyclists ram themselves into lamp-posts.

It seems a most impractical item:  it can't be fastened up, so unexpected chillinesses will result, I fear.  And this bright coral pink colour will make everyone's teeth hurt.  Ten sugars or twelve?

Also available in dark green, presumably for Merry Men.

River Island, £34.

Got that drained, washed-out feeling?

Another of these damned, drippy, shapeless items.  Not terribly cheery, is it?  I've seen livelier colours in the Co-operative chapel of rest.

And what's with the raggy, uneven hem?  It looks like little Tyler aged 3 got hold of Mummy's scissors again.

Even Sally Snakehips would look enormous in this.

£28, Miss Selfridge.

Unsafe socks

Ok, so how are we wearing these?  Let us assume that we wear them under boots so that the fur fabric shows above the top.  So far so Cossack.  If we don't assume this, lumpy knees are not a good look, I feel.  I don't know about this cosy 'we' thing, as neither I nor you will go within a country mile of the kind of itchiness so abundantly promised by hosiery like this.  <scratches popliteal fossa>

£15, River Island.

Whatever it is, it's forty-five quid

I think it might be a lampshade.  Or a danger to shipping.  Only Topshop can tell us, and will we get a sensible account of how this appeared in the store?  I fear we may not.

How old would you like to look?

Game octogenarians will blench at this, so if you're in River Island's demographic, please choose something less frowsty.  Pick anything!  Even anything on this blog!  But not this!  Save yourselves!

Christ! It's a knitted jellyfish!

One single brush with a tentacle is all it will take.  Apparently the pain is excruciating.

Eighteen pounds sterling of acrylic fun at River Island.

The sort of thing you find growing at the back of the pan cupboard

In  the absence of a compass, you determine north by ascertaining on which side of the tree trunk moss grows.  If a small boy scout feels your leg while you're wearing these, it will not be because he fancies you - he just doesn't know how to get out of Stanley Park.

These trousers, for God's sake, have an elasticated waist.  They are tapered, and - in further disregard for a lady's silhouette - have voluminous pockets.  They then dwindle to nothing at the ankle, making your legs look like two carrots.

At least the camouflage will break up your outline next time a leopard eyes you up.

Thirty-five sodding quid from Miss Selfridge.

This won't break down too well in landfill

Is there some religion which supposes the forearms to inflame men's desire to distraction, but they can take or leave a shapely bicep?

I mean, what is this shirt for?

Miss Selfridge, £35, with no discount for unaccountably-omitted arm bits.

Hmm, these will chafe

Made of hosepipe.  And some tulle left over from that ill-advised bad fairy outfit worn last Hallowe'en.

Miss Selfridge, £22.

Rawr! Says the not very frightening wolfie on the front

Reminiscent of those fleece jackets you can buy in town whereon is printed a poor rendition of a winter scene complete with wolves, suggestive of the wearer's natural affinity with Native American culture.  We are not very far away from this sort of thing, are we, Topshop?

Warning - knitted horror ahead

If the car breaks down, you can always position the wearer of this at the rear of the car to warn oncoming traffic.

Careful drivers might regard the poncho as the greater hazard, however, and will cheerfully plough into the back of a Ford Focus rather than risk pranging themselves on something quite so embarrassing.

This acrylic bobble-fest will cost a mere £32 at River Island.

I wish to show off my knees, but only from the front

What a  handy tassell, with which the Queen will unveil some sort of commemorative plaque in a day centre.

Another £38 which would be much better spent on booze, fags or Betterware.