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.