Diamond queaser

Matthew Williamson wants you to wrap up tight this winter, so why not slip into a knit of the kind of transcendent ugliness that makes even the jet stream swerve north?
Heartless bastards wear this kind of thing on a country walk and make deer plunge into the path of oncoming traffic.

£380, Urban Outfitters.  If you've just won three hundred and eighty quid on an accumulator at Betfred, please go and blow it all on booze and unsuitable boyfriends instead.

Things that go clump in the night

The kind of visual disturbance vouchsafed only to the fevered, this dress is a warning that you have become dehydrated and need a Lemsip.  Opening the cupboard to find this collapsing unpleasantly onto the carpet, rather than the usual rattly, disarticulated skeleton, is a super way to celebrate Hallowe'en, and is just the thing to wear while you are summoning the legions of the dead.

And those boots will make your mum think the ghosts of  the entire Household Cavalry are in the house.

This is from House of Holland, and costs £225, which is more than the entire budget of all four Paranormal Activity films.  That should have you leaping out of your seat and grabbing the arm of the stranger sitting next to you.

Dive! Dive! Dive!

Neoprene Oversized Boyfriend Coat, Topshop, £115

Quite apart from the obvious gag about oversized boyfriends, there are a number of things wrong with this coat.  Of course there are, missy, otherwise it wouldn't be making an appearance in the Hall of Shame, now, would it?

Anyway, the neoprene thing:  wetsuits work by trapping a layer of water 'twixt skin and suit, which warms up and thus allows you to swim underwater without turning blue.  Furthermore, neoprene absorbs water and becomes enormously heavy.  In a downpour you will be rather discommoded by this coat, a fact cheerfully disregarded by the designer at Topshop, who doesn't mind in the slightest that you'll look like The Thing From The Deep getting on the number 14 bus, trailing seaweed and noisome marine detritus.  Still , it should shut up the singing bus chav for a bit.

Drudge, grudge and sludge

This dress is described on Topshop's website as 'Hidden Bird Maxi Dress', which is apt as you will indeed be quite well obscured by it.  Unless you are a man.  Then it would be called the Hidden Bloke Maxi Dress.

My Nanna would have worn a floral housecoat when doing the housework, back in the mid-20th century when everything was apparently dirtier.  Clearly, then, it is just the thing for Topshop's demographic, which seems to have veered from the usual twenty-somethings, to 1950s northern housewives, irritated that their newly-scrubbed bath is about to be sullied by coal again.

Topshop, £95.  Eee, there'll be trouble at t'mill.

Take your coat off or you won't feel the benefit

....is a phrase often repeated by aunties but never adequately explained.  I doubt whether you'll get any sense out of them at all if you confront them with this.

 This is an interesting development in cutesie bits-missing couture. You know, I think I'd want the elbows intact, as a sort of minimum standard in a winter coat, to prevent unwelcome gusts.  But then that's just my rigidly conservative attitude to clothing:  Topshop, I'm sure, feel a little more confident in their menu of winter attire, because they've priced this merry little amuse-bouche at a hundred bloody quid.

I once had my car vandalised by a mindless thug, and even that bastard didn't leave an invoice under the wiper blade.  Tsk.

RTA

Help!  I've been run over by a tractor!  And then I've been run over again!

Exhibit A, River Island, £18.

Oh Fail Rail, how I've missed you

Balloon zip trousers, £45, Topshop

Do you see these trousers?  The front view suggests that you have not completely changed into your clown outfit for your weekly circus skills workshop, and are content to wander the streets with the lower half of a shoplifter replete with 'bargains' from Marks and Spencers.

And now, do you see them from the back?

That elasticated waistband! That drooping arse!  A super choice for those who like to wear all their clothes at once and want to top them off with their Dad's waders.  I imagine when you take them off, a stray bream will fall out, together with a fishing reel and tub of mealworms your mate Ted hid for a jape.

I suppose one end sucks in seawater, and the other end blows it out

The webpage 'Sea Cucumber Facts' states that 'all sea cucumbers have some form of chemical defence that makes them disgusting to their predators and sometimes dangerous as well'.


Well, that's us warned off then.


Morphed Tribal Shorts, Topshop, £35.  A percentage of the price is refunded to any purchaser who can render the description even faintly explicable.

Sitting atop the cistern, disguising the spare loo roll within

Crocheted shorts, £36 Topshop.

People in the sixties and seventies were unaccountably coy about having toilet rolls on display.  They got around this by buying a tiny dolly and crocheting a very long voluminous dress for it.  The legs of the dolly (usually the chubby sort which came affixed to a card from the newsagents*) were then inserted into the cardboard tube, the skirt charmingly draped around the roll, and hey presto, no-one could possibly guess you had something so vulgar (good God!) as a lavatory in the house.

Here is a garment which perfectly captures that bewildering combination of shame, half-assed pretension to refinement and home knits so reminiscent of the seventies.

I also detect a hint of ungulate tarsal in the gusset.



*No, I don't know why toys like this were on sale in the newsagents - they certainly looked unappetising to my eight-year-old self, and I don't recall anyone buying them, apart from old ladies with bathroom requisites to conceal.

Oh look, we're being stared at again

Many kinds of ugly have converged unhappily on this dress.  It's a bit like a conference for dysfunctional patterns, where the delegates get to teambuild in tight migraine formation before going home to slide themselves back into their wallpaper pattern book collection.

This partial black ladder and diamond pattern laid atop a desperately perky chintz is a particular success at this year's symposium of horror (keynote speaker:  Linda Barker). That diamond pattern at least allows the chest of the wearer to stare right back at that unpleasant sweaty bloke from Accounts.

And of couse there's a peplum.  There's always a peplum.

River Island, £45.

Angry kimono is angry

I do dislike clothing with inadvertent facial expressions, and this kimono thing is clearly furious.  At whom or what is not clear, but I'd stand well away if I were you.  Mind you, how outraged would you be were your face enblazoned all over a pillowcase from Brentford Nylons?

£25, River Island.

What is that terrible clanging sound?

Is it an old bike being flung into a skip?  A brick being turned in a cement mixer to remove the dried-on clag?  Oh, I see:  the dreadful cacophony wrought upon your ears is the sound of the patterns on these shorts being forced together like adjoining tectonic plates.  You know, geological catastrophe just doesn't look so worrying now this abomination has given us such a helpful perspective on the apocalypse.

Topshop, £30.

Interference

If I bang this on the side, will the picture come into focus?

River Island, £20.



*Thanks to my colleague, Debs, who suggested this particular set needed retuning if we were to watch anything but Welsh television.

Colour Me Horrible

Well, this is a riot of colour, isn't it?  Marker-pen doodling and ugly dip-dye fringing:  if this were an insect I'd assume the colours were Nature's way of signalling distress, moderate gastric discomfort, or "I'm extravagantly poisonous and you'll find me at page 384 of The Traveller's Guide to Australia's Most Toxic Things Under a Centimetre Long".  At least wearing this you'll scare predators.

River Island, £32.

Herd like a gaucho

Those of you of a certain vintage and a Catholic upbringing will remember the nice old ladies of the parish who used to knit squares to be made up into blankets for Mother Teresa's orphans.  Since the sainted nun's demise (we know she's gone to Heaven because her face keeps appearing in currant buns), we are awash with variously-patterned irregularly-shaped knitted squares, and we must turn to Kookai, who have hastily stitched them up into woollen strangeness.

Asos, £74.50.  If our tiny Albanian wrinkly were alive today, she'd be turning in her grave.

Saucy little Amish number

Have we wandered on to the set of A Handmaid's Tale or something?

Topshop, £85.

Yes, I wondered what a gall bladder looked like, too

A lime tie-dye print - super! On a bodycon dress - couldn't be better!  A clingy frock with smears of bile against a nu-rave crocodile hide is just the thing to ensure instant social success at any high-toned palais de dance, I'm sure.  And it's a snip at £29!

Now I've calmed down slightly, I note that Topshop, whence this terror emanates, has a number of horse-frighteners like this.  River Island also has a number of new-season pieces in lime, which it is teaming with black and white striped jackets and shorts.  I've written that last sentence because I know you, dear reader, will have your head full of gambolling bunnies in meadows, fairies gathering snowdrops, and delightful low-key spring garments in pretty colours, and it's time you got with the programme.  I mean, jeez.