The joy of Fluevog

I’m a shoe freak. I also keep my favourites till well after they have collapsed and died (unless Neil talks me into throwing them out). I bought a pair of Supervogs back in 2000, and excepting the soles that I had to replace, they are still on the go. So John Fluevog makes me happy.

And so this trip to Canada will have to include a visit to the local Fluevog store, because I want these shoes. They’re a bit fetish but perfectly normal at the same time. I like the double-duty.

Ileana

And these ones. They’re smarted-up motorcycle boots. Grrrrowwwllll!

Bondgirl

Let’s see if I have to make yet more space again for yet another couple more pairs of shoes. Plus they’re not exactly cheap. You get what you pay for, right?

Buying books via text — a most bizarre idea

I didn’t realise hearing about or deciding you want a book is such an unbearable feeling that one must buy it immediately — via text. Amazon Lets Readers Shop via Text Message:

Once a customer has set up their Amazon account to accept TextBuyIt purchases, the process is relatively quick and easy. And for customers who aren’t near a computer when they want to purchase a book, but do have their cell phones handy, TextBuyIt offers a convenient way to shop.

Erm, you could also wait till you are near a computer, or, shock horror whoda thunk, go to a bookstore. Amazon continues to cultivate the population’s slavish addiction to immediate gratification.

(Which, I reckon, doesn’t work so well with books.)

One of the more amusing sales pitches I’ve heard

“… Oh, the hood on that winter coat isn’t meant to be worn, that’s why it doesn’t fit (unless you have no neck). It’s purely decorative.”

(In the Xiangyang market, Shanghai. The coat wasn’t even a pirated designer brand.)

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.

Lip Service skin tight buckle dressI 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.

Busy busy busy

Yeah, I am. Oddly enough, a publisher publishes books all year round and I’ve got to work on them all-year round. How inconsiderate.

My mum, who was just here, tells me she prefers to window shop now, not shop shop. I like to look at stuff too, but since I have less stuff than her, I don’t mind buying now and again.

Spend, spend, spend. It’s no way to happiness:

Greed and consumption addict people and they spend weekends trawling shopping centres chasing the next hit.

Spend money so you can save money — yes…

Retailmenot coupon codes for UK retailers. More something for me to check once in a while in case there is something I want to buy.

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.)