Fashion Watch

An international shopping inventory

I’m currently sitting on my bedroom floor with the contents of my unpacked bag all around me.

I’ve been back for five days, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to unpack more than what needed to go straight into the washing machine without passing go or collecting $200.

But the truth is that I like to put the unpacking of my overseas purchases off a bit. First, I like to have the chance to lay them out and take stock of what I actually bought, and second, the longer I put off integrating them into my wardrobe, the more I feel like the holiday is still real. Of course, by writing this instead of cleaning out my closet and putting the new stuff in, I am further putting it off.

Anyway, I realised that I haven’t been on a big trip since I started writing here, so I haven’t mentioned how I shop when I’m overseas. First, I shop. It is not a holiday to me unless there is shopping (the one exception being sitting by the pool with cocktails and friends for days at a time, which is why I like Hawaii because I can combine them).

I take my large soft-sided heavy canvas surf bag (upgraded to one with wheels this trip) at least half empty and with my overnight bag packed flat inside it. The overnight bag is one that’s also in heavy canvas, and is exactly the same size as the size limit for carry-on baggage but is sturdy enough to go into the hold if necessary. I’ve also had it for 15 years, so it comes with no fancy extras like wheels or anything, which is why it’s perfect for lying flat in another bag. I pack allowing for shopping.

When I’m overseas I’m looking for two types of things. Things I can’t get at home and things that are much cheaper overseas. And sure, that means I’ve come back with a number of pairs of designer shoes which are always much cheaper overseas than here, but it also means that I can go shopping in the chain stores with glee. Because every mass produced J-Crew sweater and Zara jacket I buy is completely unavailable at home except via e-bay. So I get the fabulous combination of a varied and comparatively inexpensive wardrobe.

I usually also take a rough shopping list with me. The purpose of this list is not to limit me at all, but rather just to remind me to actually look for black pants in between buying cute shoes because I never do and thus am in desperate need of black pants.

This trip’s list was: black pants, bath robe, t-shirts, bras, sweaters, jackets, flat shoes, summer skirts for work. Told you it was rough. I managed to pick up everything on the list except a bathrobe, and that entry had only come from being envious of Claire Danes’s robes in Shop Girl rather than any actual need.

Now, just because shopping is central to any relaxation experience, I really only had four shopping days while I was away. First, I had scheduled Milan at the end of my Italian journey knowing I could shop there and then not have to drag my purchases all over the country, and second there were plenty of sights I wanted to see that did not involve shopping. So I took half a day at the outlet malls outside Florence (well, well worth the effort), a full day shopping in Milan, and two days shopping in London, which was really the whole purpose of stopping there in the first place.

And as a result of those four days, currently sitting on the floor in front of me are:

7 pairs of shoes (1 flat. Hey, I tried, but the only flat shoes I usually cope with are sneakers and flip flops)
7 sweaters/cardigans
1 pair of black pants (not my fault there aren’t the more that I need, there was far too much linen going on in the stores)
4 t-shirts
2 jackets
3 skirts
2 shirts
1 top that is not a sweater, a shirt or a t-shirt
4 bras (I love Gap Body bras and thus stock up whenever I go to the UK or US)
1 pair of knickers
2 cute night dresses
2 handbags
4 lipsticks (all available here but much cheaper duty free in Singapore, so one must stock up on favourite shades)
2 headbands
1 necklace
2 pairs of opaque tights (preparing for the coming return, and also flashing back. The last time I was in the UK was 1999, and I bought many pairs of black opaque tights from Boots chemist, and the fact that they were coming back into fashion again and I could go into Boots and buy them amused me)

Of course most of it is for summer, while here we’re currently in winter, but that’s always the nature of southern hemisphere living and northern hemisphere shopping. Though I did buy a couple of cashmere sweaters at the Prada outlet that can be employed immediately (restraining myself from mentioned “Prada” and “cashmere” in the same sentence as much as possible). And for summer I’m now all prepared.

Besides, the sales are on here at the moment, so chances are I’ll continue the spending spree (the major problem of coming back from overseas spending: I’ve saved from the overseas spending, I haven’t saved for the spending that almost inevitably continues when I get home) on some winter clothes.

And to give you an idea of the spread, the list of brands I came back with were: Prada, L. K. Bennett, TopShop, Balenciaga, Zara, Sisley, Bobbi Brown, Stefanel, YSL Rive Gauche, Carvela, Furla, H&M, Miu Miu, Muji, Gap, SW6, Stila.

And as soon as I pay off the credit card, there’s no doubt I’ll be planning the next shopping trip.

Zara, Prada, Balenciaga...

Zara, Prada, Balenciaga. Just a short summary of my Italian shopping experiences (sure, one’s Spanish and one’s French, but we’ll just ignore that).

7 pairs of shoes.

7 sweaters.

Many other things.

I’m still jet lagged (or at least excessively tired, I’m not sure which), and trying to cope with the return to work, but I will return shortly with shopping tales of Italy and London, and of the strange southern Italian obsession with garish sequined t-shirts and garish embroidered cowboy boots worn with cropped pants.

The Thin End of the Wedge

We all know that when it comes to fashion (and perhaps everything else in life) what goes around, comes around.

And what has come around this season are wedge sandals. Last popular when? The early, pre-Madonna/WHAM/lace and fluro 80s?

When it comes to shoes I am not dictated to by the gods of what is fashionable now. I am a slave only to “cute”.

In fact, if I am taken with a shoe that is particularly in fashion at the time of purchase I am far more likely to buy the cheap knock-off that will fall apart in six months than I am the $600 version from Italy that will last ten years, because chances are that the shoe will be ugly and out of fashion before it has time to fall apart.

Usually in a shoe I’m looking for “timeless”. And by that I don’t mean conservative, I just mean something that is unusual or interesting or colourful, but something that I will be able to wear in two years or five years without someone viewing it as “so summer of 2002”. I don’t really care about cost, though the more expensive the more in love with it I have to be, and the more in love with it I am the more expensive I tend to like it because there’s nothing worse than a timeless pair of shoes that I love but which are cheap as dirt and correspondingly likely to fall apart the second time I wear them.

Which brings me back to the wedge sandal. About three years ago I was on one of my trips to Hawaii, and picked up a great pair of leather wedge sandals with a tapered stacked wooden heal from that generally reasonably conservative and logo-centric producer of shoes, Coach. They were on sale, they were logo-free, they fitted me well, they were cute and nobody was wearing anything like them at the time. They were not in fashion, but they were great shoes, so I bought them and wore them.

I have received many, many compliments about my wedge sandals over the last couple of years.

So now I can’t decide whether to be annoyed that everyone else is wearing similar shoes now, or to be grateful that I already own a pair of “in fashion” shoes that are superior to so many of the pairs on sale at the moment, or to stop wearing them and put them away for a couple of years until they’re unusual again.

The Pro and Cons of the current peasant/hippie skirt proliferation

Pro
As I am currently buying not only my wardrobe for the coming summer, but also with an eye to the light weight packing of next year’s trip to Italy in the Northern Spring, having a myriad of light, cheap, colourful and crushable skirts to choose from is really really useful.

Cons
Having purchased said peasant skirt for travelling purposes, I have no real desire to own any more.

More importantly, now I really need work skirts (because the 50-odd skirts I own are clearly not enough – you might as well call ulishoesandskirts), and while my workplace is relatively casual, hippie skirts just do not say “work wear” to me. And when the only other options seem to be those horrid mircofibre black and brown “suit” skirts that are, frankly, awful and unconvincing concessions to traditional work wear, and equally work inappropriate silky/satiny numbers, it just leaves me depressed. And frustrated. Many of us office workers prefer to be both fashionable and appropriate, thanks.

Too many seem to be substantially overdoing the layering-to-create-volume thing, and starting that layering too close to the hips. Leading to a tangle of underskirts combined with making one look hippy, as well as hippie. Either that, or they’re going to the unconvincing layer-cake look. You know, a random horizontal seam with a bit of gathering every fifteen centimetres. Trying too hard, or not enough, essentially.

Okay, I have a second pro.
They’re more flattering, generally, than the tulip skirts that are inevitably on their way (and already starting to sneak into the more formal displays).

All of this of course draws me to my usual Spring conclusion – it’s much harder to find good work clothes for summer than it is for winter. I reach this conclusion every year and then block it out for several months until I discover that once again I only have two weather-appropriate skirts in the wardrobe (and that only goes up to three if I happen to loose those extra four or five kilos).

Ah, well, I’ll just have to keep shopping, I guess.

The Jeans!

These are my new, and my absolute new favourite jeans.

Great, great fit, lovely feel, claiming to be ultra low rise but neither gynaecological nor bum-crack revealing unless real effort is put into it, and with a band which doesn’t automatically push everything up and give anyone with any type of stomach an extra spare tire or two. Not that I, at my substantial age (ie not being in that divine gap between 17 and 22, the gap between puppy fat and adulthood, the only age at which belly-baring is at all acceptable), will ever be wearing said jeans with anything flimsy enough to reveal whether I have any spare tires caused by the jeans or otherwise.

Stylish and comfortable. They look like this (except I'm pretty sure mine a little darker):

Danger! Danger!

The Spring Summer sale has started at net-a-porter.com: go nuts!

An Open Letter to Wayne Cooper

Dear Wayne,

First, I hope that you are able to overcome your current financial difficulties and trade out of administration.

Second, you do design some very pretty dresses. And they've generally well sized. I'm not a tiny person, though not huge, but it's nice to put on a size 12 dress and have it fit while still allowing me to breathe. Especially when it comes with a designer label.

But, (you knew the 'but' was coming, right?) there's one problem. While your pretty designs fit well, even around my un-toned stomach and not the slimmest of hips, you are apparently completely incapable of designing for someone with actual boobs.

And I'm not talking double-Ds here. My boobs are not small, certainly, but they're only a C-cup, and pretty well in proportion to the rest of me. And I've never before come across a dress or other piece of clothing that fits the rest of me, but not my boobs.

Yet, while on the hunt for another dress to wear to yet another wedding, I have, over the course of the last month or so, tried on no less than four of your completely different designs in an effort to find something to wear. The pink floral dress with the cap sleeves in particular would have been perfect for the tropical island wedding I'm going to be attending. Each dress fit each part of me perfectly, except across my chest. Boobs squashed together and popping out. Tits flattened and sucked down by gravity. And a candidate for ridicule on my own web site I am not prepared to be.

So, Wayne, can I ask that you start expanding the bodices in your dresses in proportion with the rest of them? Please?

Thanks.

Uli

Worst Laid Plans

I’m not usually the masochistic type, but for some reason upon waking up on Saturday morning feeling all PMS-y and generally unattractive, I decided that the best thing to do would be to put on my daggiest outfit that’s capable of being worn out of the house (i.e. I didn’t resort to track pants) and go try on clothes.

But I embarked on this - in a sloppy t-shirt, my most comfortable (and therefore least attractive) jeans, and with a hoodie tied around my waist to emphasise the size of my arse – for the dual purpose of getting some exercise and jump-starting my plateau-d diet (otherwise known as: Easter eggs, gateway drug). I figured that I would try on a couple of cute new winter outfits, not fit into anything in sizes I was prepared to purchase, and bam! I would be renewed in my healthy eating, exercising zeal and could return to the stores in time for the stock-take sales in a couple of months with a slimmer frame and a bulging wallet because I had put off buying anything.

However, me being me, I should have known that that reverse psychology, encouragement of low self-esteem type of approach to anything, especially shopping, was never going to work for long.

In this case about 5 minutes.

It started with a cute sweater. A cute sweater of the kind that will fit even if I loose a size or more, the kind that’s within my week-to-week budget, the kind that I live in from day-to-day at work. The kind that works in any season (fashionable or climatic). The kind with cute little cut-out details and tiny sparkly bits around the neck that make it different but not over-the-top. The kind of cute sweater I might be wearing at this very moment.

That was fine. As I said, flexible and within budget. Perhaps even the perfect item of clothing. Except that much as Easter eggs are apparently a gateway to French fries and garlic bread, so are cute sweaters to shoes, and shoes to boots, and boots to skirts, and skirts to an entire autumn/winter wardrobe because once you’ve bought the boots, how can you possibly stop there?

But what of the huge arse that wasn’t going to fit into any sizes I was willing to buy? you ask. Well, that was an interesting and distressing phenomenon.

Since the last time I bought clothing of any substance in Australia – which might be two years I think, since most of my wardrobe is made up of things bought overseas, but I don’t get an overseas trip this year, thus being allowed to do one big shop at home – many of the brands have apparently re-sized. Re-sized to allow for the growing growing of people around this country and the Western world. So, my currently genuinely size 14 arse (size 12 US, size 16 UK), was either fitting comfortably in, or in one case, swimming in, size 12 skirts and pants. Which means that my size goal is being knocked down to a size 10, a size that my pleasantly curvy figure was never previously designed to fit into even at my gym-four-times-a-week slimmest. Because, you know, I have hips and shoulders and am not short enough to be petite in any sense of the word.

As a general rule I was always a size 12. That’s my optimum size, a size I have always been perfectly happy to be, a fit and healthy normal life size (thus the diet to get back there, because the fact that I’m not there indicates a particularly sedentary and saturated fat lifestyle recently), a size for which I never have trouble buying clothes. So the fact that the mainstream fashion industry seems to have tackled the fattening of society at large (no pun intended) by making a 14 into a 12 concerns me greatly. On a number of levels. Not least the fact that it totally ruins that ‘if I can’t fit into the 12 then I can’t buy it’ rule. Which the weekend’s shopping binge is testament too.

I don’t care about calories or kilos – I own a scale but it lives in the back of the same cupboard that contains the ironing board, so you can imagine how often it gets used – I judge the appropriateness of my weight solely by the fit of my jeans. So if, hypothetically, my size 12 jeans were in fact really a size 14, you can see where this might be going.

I don’t think people should be dieting themselves into oblivion, or more importantly, an unhappy life. I think that the fashion magazines that I buy all the time, not to mention the pop tarts on MTV and the Saturday morning video clip shows and the actresses on the red carpet, do promote horrible body images for young women and young men. But on the flipside of that, obesity and the health problems that come with it is a much larger issue (again, no pun intended), and it seems to me that making smaller sizes into larger clothes doesn’t help that either.

In short, I am a genuine size 14 at the moment. In the interests of my health and general well-being, as well as my sartorial outlook, I want to get back down to a genuine size 12 and stay there. Which means less French fries and more walking. Easy and liveable. Except that now apparently I need to get down to a size 10, which should sound far more daunting than it actually is, and I have to keep reminding myself that just because everything I bought yesterday was a 12 doesn’t mean I can eat all the French fries and Easter eggs I want and lie on the couch doing no exercise whatsoever, and still expect to fit into and look good in my clothes.

Though my new clothes do look pretty damn good. I bought skirts and sweaters – work and casual – I bought boots, shoes, underwear, basic long-sleeved t-shirts to wear under everything. About the only thing I didn’t buy was jeans, because even my really-size-14-momentarily-deluded-into-thinking-it’s-a-12 arse and my healthy self-esteem were not up to going down that path. Lots of stuff that will be pleasantly loose but not unwearable when I get down to my optimum size. Lots of pink and grey and chocolate brown.

And speaking of chocolate brown, needless to say, I also bought Easter eggs…

Perfect, but...

Don't you hate it when you see the perfect funky, bottle green, slightly tweedy, not too expensive blazer hanging on the rack in the store, and you have a 15% off voucher, and then you try it on and it turns out to look all boxy and make you seem twice as wide as you actually are?

Shopping

With Thanksgiving in the US, there seems to be a dearth of celebrity events upon which to comment this week, which is fine because for the first time in a long time this weekend I actually went shopping for clothes.

While I may have turned my mind to issues of my own wardrobe on numerous occasions over the last few months, I haven’t actually purchased an item of clothing (other than underwear), or a pair of shoes, since I was in LA in February.

Which is truly remarkable and clear evidence of what a mortgage will do to you. That being said, I did buy effectively a whole new wardrobe in February, and I have been sufficiently unhappy with my weight since then that trying on clothes wouldn’t have been at the top of my list even if I had the cash lying around. Also, I got a couple of nice pieces from Willow as a gift, so my wardrobe hasn’t been without updating.

But I have a party to go to this weekend and going through the wardrobe last weekend led me rapidly to the conclusion that (a) I really have to get on the diet bike because I have tonnes of great clothes that are currently a size too small for me; and (b) I needed to buy either a paid of black evening pants – which I don’t own in any size, too big, too small or just right – to go with the tops I already have, or a new top to go with the skirts I already have.

And I figured that I could advance a little money out of my fashion budget (otherwise to be gathered and spent some time in the future) to buy one item.

So I headed out around the usual haunts – which no longer felt so usual as I hadn’t really been in a store for months, although I’d been looking in from the outside – and concluded pretty rapidly that there are no decent black evening pants out there, which I probably why I don’t already own a pair or three.

So I moved on to tops. I needed something with sleeves. I’m not happy with my arms at the moment, and the best way to be less unhappy about them (aside for actual exercise) is not to wear anything sleeveless for the time being. Which eliminated literally hundreds of floaty chiffon tops, many of which the me with good arms would have eliminated as well.

Having done that, gone in with an idea, and been disciplined about what I was allowed to buy and how much I was allowed to spend, I bought this cardigan, but in pink:

with a black singlet with a very fine row of sequins around the neck for some sparkle, to go under it.

And then I left the store. I wandered in the other stores, admired some things that I liked and moved on. I even ventured into the shoe department at Myer and lovingly handled the pretty pretty Alessandro Dell’acqua black patent pumps, and then moved on.

I’m both proud of myself and satisfied.

I can shop in small, targeted bursts. I can leave the store with only the item I came for. I can resist the $600.00 shoes. I can. I can.

Of course, whether I will remains to be seen.