Carbon emissions! All for a dress. Yikes!
Before you start reading, just know that this is not meant to be an interesting post. It just illustrates how two little words, black tie, can make me extremely anxious.
I make that pact with myself, and Neil calls me a week later from work to ask if I want to go to the company Christmas party. In Reading. It’s black tie.
I’m no WAG wannabe, but as I said before, I’m not buying any new clothes. I spent all last night searching for second hand stuff on eBay, but I could only find very boring designs. If I was going to buy something new for this black-tie affair, I would go for something like this Lip Service dress (Neil’s response without even seeing the dress, but having heard my description: “Well, they’ll remember you.”), but alas, I have no spare patent veggie leather lying around, and I’m not that good at sewing anyway, so a call was made to my mummy in Singapore.
(Not a verbatim transcript, but reasonably close.)
“Mum, could you go through my clothes in the spare bedroom and see if I’ve kept any of my old dresses?”
“Hold on…”
(A few minutes pass. I really must persuade Mum to buy a cordless phone when her phones cark it.)
“Okay, I’m back. You’ve got a knee-length blue one, a knee-length black one, a long, asymmetric blue one, a slightly shorter asymmetric black one, and a knee-length red one.”
“Oh, the one in a snakeskin print?”
Ah. The dresses I’ve been wearing to weddings since the late Nineties. Seriously. I still wear loads of stuff that I bought while I was at Uni. People talk about buying a new black coat ‘this season’, I might consider it ‘this decade’, but only if the coat has started to fall apart* (it hasn’t. It’ll go for another decade, I reckon). I buy so few dresses I can remember them all**.
- Knee-length blue one — Australia. Strange surf-y / girly shop in Fremantle. 1998.
- Knee-length black one — Singapore. I suspect it’s a slip I bought at M&S to go under another blue one I bought in… Garden City mall in Booragoon (Australia). 1998.
- Long, asymmetric blue one — Australia again. I think it was also at that shop in Fremantle. 1998.
- Shorter asymmetric black one — Singapore. The newest one, purchased for Mark and Kristen’s wedding in 2003. From Chaos.
- Knee-length red one — from Toronto when we went to my cousin’s wedding in 2000. Last worn in… gosh, 2003 to my friend’s wedding.
My mum promised to send three of them over to me, and offered to send me high heels, too. HA***! So I’ll be racking up carbon emissions by having clothes (and a bag) sent to me via airmail, but I won’t be buying something new that I don’t need. Oh the conflict.
* That said, I have a lot of coats. I’m referring to Old Reliable, my black wool coat purchased in Australia many moons ago.
** Yes. This is sad. I am so anally retentive.
*** No point.
It’ll make me self-conscious as well. All the wives and girlfriends will be glammed up to the nines, and I will be… me. With a dress on.
People will buy anything, won’t they?
Women went nutso in London this morning, queueing up to get their mitts on Kate Moss’ range of clothing at Topshop. According to the BBC, she didn’t even design the fucking things. She ‘worked with merchandisers’ — exactly the same clothes sold everywhere else, just priced higher and with a different label.
WTF. If these women really want something special and fashion-forward, here’s a tip. Buy something basic and reconstruct it to suit you. It’ll be entirely one of a kind and you’ll have got it for very little money and some of your time, something to be proud of.
This just drives home what sheep people are when it comes to buying stuff, or as Neil says, People will buy ANYTHING, won’t they?
(The other thing that really brought it home was, at the party last weekend, at least a third of the women in attendance were wearing Pucci-esque print tops or dresses. Fashion zombies.)
Glasgow Fashion Week
Glasgow’s going to get its own Fashion Week! Apparently, “Glasgow is consistently described as being at the cutting edge for all things fashionable and chic.”
I dunno, loads of the things I’ve seen look like Xiamen specials. Plus I’d prefer to see local designers instead of Topshop and Miss Selfridge. Glasgow Fashion Week will be good for tourism, they say. In March? Unless the tourists are from even further north… it’ll be freezing!!
Anyway. I like fashion and new clothes, I’m just not fashionable and really cheapskate when it comes to shopping. But looking at new clothes and making snarky remarks? I’m up for that!
I love my radish legs
I forget who Neil was talking to, but he mentioned something about people of Chinese ethnicity tending to possess ‘big calves’.
“Like me,” I interrupted.
“Yeah,” he responded, without missing a beat.
I remember whoever it was he was talking to was a little surprised that I didn’t react in some way that involved beating Neil repeatedly over the head with a stool, and the conversation continued.
According to this article, Endoscope-assisted calf reduction in Orientals,
In general, Oriental women have shorter legs and thicker calves than Caucasian women… However, liposuction does not solve the problem of muscularly prominent calves, because the shape and size of the calves are determined mainly by gastrocnemius muscle rather than by subcutaneous fat. The authors have devised a method of contouring the calf by partially shaving the calf muscle.
It scares me that women seriously consider doing something so drastic to their bodies. I’m a skinny person (and sufficiently flat-chested to prove it — it’s great for exercise, no discomfort in the boobital area) and I have muscular calves. I see that as a plus. I LOVE my calf muscles, the way they make my legs look balanced when they’re relaxed, and how they bulge when they’re flexed.
Maybe I’m a freak. I don’t understand when people aspire to have legs as skinny as runway models, because they look more like people who are wasting away. You can’t really help the genes you’re born with — you may not like the hand you’ve been dealt, but I strongly believe that if you mess with your body in some major way, it will react*.
Not that I’m full of self-confidence about the way I look. If Nature could bestow straighter teeth (I’ve already done the braces), give me a better-proportioned torso, and make me a few inches taller, I’d be ecstatic (and then find something else I’d wish was different). I believe, in the end, that if you want to look good, you need to eat well (this is the main area in need of improvement for me) and exercise, exercise, exercise. Your body will settle into your ideal weight and size. I think most people are too obsessed with attaining a certain weight and dress size, and not paying attention to their fitness level, which is so important to help prevent diabetes, cardiac problems, osteoporosis… loads of conditions I hope I never have to endure.
(The term ‘radish legs’ comes from the article, Some Korean Women Are Taking Great Strides to Show a Little Leg. I run to maintain my link to root vegetables.)
* But hey, if it makes you happy, it makes you happy. Whatever.
Little plaid skirts
There’s a great editorial in the Glasgow Herald today, blasting people who feel morally offended by schoolgirls who wear short skirts:
It seems, rather tragically, that we are so scared of young people that we have to take away their freedoms, rather than educate them better into how to use them. The history of fashion is the story of female emancipation: women have spent centuries liberating themselves from the prison of tight bodices, long skirts, bound feet, constricted limbs.
There is, in this respect, something wonderful about the insouciance of modern teenage clothing. Baggy, tight, explicit, baby-doll, extreme: they do it. Because they can.
If you think schoolgirls who wear short skirts are dirty, it’s probably because you’re dirty. Don’t project the blame on to girls because of your guilty fantasies - that’s the gist of the piece.
I went to a convent school - we wore white blouses under our blue pinafores. They weren’t exactly sexy outfits, but we tried our best by puffing up the pinafores above the belts so the skirts would end well above our knees. These days, it’s trendy to wear the belt so loosely that the girls look like newly-pregnant teenagers trying out maternity dresses. I know for a fact that the teachers and principal despair - why do the girls, year after year, wear the uniform the unsanctioned way?
Because we can. Because it makes (made, in my case) us feel individual, different, trendy, rebellious.
Teenagers will always try to rebel, to see how far they can push the rules. They’re in between being adults and children. They’re learning about themselves. The more you try to set rules to regulate behaviour, the more they will break them. Better to teach teenagers self-confidence and promote a sense of self-worth than try to impose rules that mean nothing.
I doubt that if those wanting school uniform regulations to be more strictly enforced were to go quiet, all hell would break loose. If an adult is keen on teenagers / is a paedophile, nothing except their own efforts will stop them from indulging.
Between five and seven children are abducted and murdered a year, a figure unchanged for 30 years. A moral panic over short skirts is as effective as banning men from admiring girls’ legs.
(I’m as bad. I own skirts that play on schoolgirl fetishes because I think they’re great.)