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.