Tag: fashion

Continental Clothing

Please forgive me while I get a little bit over-excited for a minute.

Way back in the mists of time, I ran a t-shirt printing company. We used the best quality t-shirts we could afford to buy at the time, but I wanted more. I wanted organic cotton. Sustainable production. Ethical business practices. And all of these things were sadly rather hard to find. I did buy some organic cotton t-shirts, and some Fair Trade ones, but most of the inventory I bought all those years ago is still sitting in my Shed. The fit wasn’t right, the colours weren’t right, and they were so much more expensive than ordinary t-shirts that nobody was willing to pay for them.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I was looking again for wholesale suppliers of organic t-shirts that I could use in my dyeing experiments. Imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon Continental Clothing. All of their garments are either organic, fairly traded, sustainably produced or a combination of all three. They have exemplary business practices, and even more exciting, the clothes they produce are so much more than just plain t-shirts!

I have grand plans for the racerback tunic shown above, for example, worn with a contrasting vest or t-shirt underneath. Think how pretty it would look in a patchy natural dye, with hand embroidery all around the neck and armholes…

Even better, and the thing that I’m extremely over-excited about, is the fact that they offer bespoke manufacturing! Okay, so a minimum order of 150 garments per size is out of my reach at the moment, but think of the possibilities! The tunic above would be fantastic as a dress, for example. Continental could make it for me, and I’d add the embellishments myself. It would work out significantly cheaper in the long run than me buying organic jersey at retail prices, making the clothing myself, and then embellishing it.

I’ve applied for an account with them, so I can start by buying a few sample garments for myself. I can then do lots of dye tests, and see how the different styles and fabrics fit, wash and wear. I can already imagine how several of the tops would go with many of the skirts I’ve made.

So, watch this space for hand-dyed t-shirts with added embroidery, lots of pockets and other pretty things!

Doctor Who meets Helena Bonham Carter.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this was one of my Christmas presents this year. A box set of all eleven Doctor Who figures. They were held into their TARDIS-shaped box (it had doors! with velcro!) with forty-four little twisty ties, which gave me plenty of time to contemplate the little Doctors as I was wrestling them out of the plastic.

As a general principle, I think bow ties are cool. We were watching some Sylvester McCoy episodes yesterday, and I genuinely contemplated knitting a fair-isle tank top with a punctuation motif. I like long scarves and big coats and funny hats.

And then I thought of someone else who likes long scarves and big coats and funny hats. And wearing things in lots of layers, and generally looking a little bit crumpled.

My fashion inspiration for 2012?

Doctor Who meets Helena Bonham Carter.

With the somewhat eclectic contents of my wardrobe, that should be pretty easy. Watch this space for pictures, if I manage to make it work…

On Short Hair

Written c. 1998 by Joan Juliet Buck, the editor-in-chief of French Vogue from 1994-2001:

Hair is time.

Women with short hair always look as if they have somewhere else to go. Women with long hair tend to look as if they belong where they are, especially in California. Short hair takes a short time. Long hair takes a long time. Long hair moves faster than short hair. Long hair tells men that you are all woman, or a real woman, or at the very least a girl. Short hair always makes them wonder. Short hair makes children ask each other –usually at the school-yard gate, when parents are late– “Are you a boy or girl?” Men married to women with short hair should not have affairs with women who have long hair kept up with many little pins and combs. Once you have cut your hair you have to remember to wear lipstick, but you can put away the brush, elastics, and the black barrettes in the form of shiny leaves with rhinestone hearts. When you cut your hair you lose a nose and gain a neck. A neck is generally better than a nose. It does not need to be powdered, except on extreme occasions. It does, however, need to be washed more often.

With short hair you suddenly dislike the month of March, when the wind blows down the back of your neck. With short hair you begin to crave pearl necklaces, long earrings, and a variety of sunglasses. And you brush your teeth more often. Short hair removes obvious femininity and replaces it with style. When it starts growing out a little and losing its style, you have to wear sunglasses until you can get it to the hairdresser. That’s why you need a variety. Short hair makes you aware of subtraction as style. You can no longer wear puffed sleeves or ruffles; the neat is suddenly preferable to the fussy. You eye the tweezers instead of the blusher. What else can you take away? You can’t hide behind short hair. Your nape is exposed. Men put their hands around your neck instead of stroking your long locks. You can only pray they have friendly intentions. The backs of your ears show, your jaw line is clear to anyone watching, and you realize –perhaps for the first time– how wide the expanse of skin is between cheekbone and ear.

You may look a little androgynous, a little unfinished, a little bare. You will look elegant, as short hair requires you to keep your weight slightly below acceptable levels. However, the first time you wear a bathing suit with short hair, you will feel exceptionally naked. People who used to look straight at you will love you in profile. Short hair makes others think you have good bones, determination, and an agenda. The shape of your skull is commented on, so are its contents. They can pick you out in a crowd, and you can be recognized from behind, which can be good or bad. But your face is no longer a flat screen surrounded by a curtain: the world sees you in three dimensions.

Chase to the cut.

I’m slightly concerned about the references to washing your neck and brushing your teeth – I hope I do those things often enough already! I also have absolutely no intention of keeping my weight “slightly below acceptable levels”, whatever that means. But I am absolutely loving having very short hair.

I’ve had short-ish hair for quite a while now. Like many women I grew it a little longer for my wedding in 2009, but almost exactly a year later I bought myself a set of clippers and simply shaved it all off. Not as short as Agyness Deyn’s hair in the photo above – I cropped it down to a grade 8, which is about an inch long. Now I’m in the process of growing myself a sort of a mohawk – keeping the sides at about a grade 3, and leaving the crown to grow until I find myself bored of it.

The most frequent comments from other people have been “you’re so brave” and “you have a lovely-shaped head”, which is a bit of a weird one – I mean it’s not as though I had anything to do with the shape of my own skull! I have been surprised by the level of maintenance that’s required by having hair so short. It really needs to be washed every single day, whereas slightly longer hair often looks better on a day when it hasn’t been. I also find myself shaving the sides every couple of weeks, simply to keep it from looking as though I couldn’t be bothered. I don’t wear earrings or make-up any more often than I would have done before I shaved my head, and I’m not really fussed if passers-by can’t tell whether I’m male or female. Why do they need to know?

Also, Joan? I’ll damn well wear ruffles if I want to, short hair or not.

50 Years of Everyday Fashion

This weekend we were idly looking at the magazines in the local shop, when Paul said, “I can’t believe you haven’t picked up this!”

“This” turned out to be a magazine by Yours (the best-selling lifestyle magazine for the fifty-plus woman, apparently), called, “50 Years of Everyday Fashion: How the Women of Britain Created Glamour and Style on a Shoestring”.

It has a glorious picture of Audrey Hepburn on the cover, it costs £4.99, and I heartily recommend it! It covers the period 1948 to 1997, and also has sections on men’s clothes, Royalty, and weddings.

The thing which particularly interests me about this magazine is its “everyday fashion” approach. So many fashion magazines and books, whatever period they’re discussing, tend to only talk about the prominent designers of that time. Of course this is important, but it often bears very little relation to what was being sold on the high street, what women were making for themselves, and what kinds of clothes people were wearing to go about their everyday lives.

There’s a whole chapter on making your own clothes, and it’s full of photographs of people wearing the most beautiful outfits. Some of the clothing made during wartime and post-war rationing is particularly noteworthy, because people had to be imaginative in the ways that they used fabrics and re-used old clothes. The magazine suggests that the rise of designer labels during the 1980s was one cause of home dressmaking going into decline, but cites the recent resurgence in the popularity of knitting as a hopeful sign that people might also regain enthusiasm in making their own clothes.

I think that enthusiasm is already here – although I’m naturally somewhat biased on the subject!

The TV show Project Runway, for example, has inspired a range of Simplicity sewing patterns. Books such as Rip It and Generation T are a drop in the ocean of books telling you how to make new clothes out of old ones, and there are dozens of online communities devoted to showing off clothes that you’ve made yourself.

If I was going to recommend one book to anybody who wanted to learn how to make their own clothes, it would be the Reader’s Digest New Complete Guide to Sewing. I have the original 1978 edition, and it’s an absolute goldmine. Anything you could possibly want to know about making your own clothes, you’ll find it in there.

If you’re more interested in reading about clothes than in making them yourself, then you might enjoy The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping. It’s little snippets from literature which give an insight into the ways that people used to shop, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

Four vintage patterns…

Look at what my Mum found, when she was clearing out some things from my Grandma’s house!

None of the envelopes have dates on them, but the style of the illustrations and the style of the clothes suggests late 1950s/early 1960s.

Even better – they’re in a size which I can modify to actually fit me! They’re sizes 18 and 20, which translates roughly to a modern size 14 and 16.

Four vintage patterns

IMG_4120 IMG_4121 IMG_4122 IMG_4123

The dress that I’m most likely to make and wear is (surprise!) the Maudella a-line shift dress. I might leave out the hanging fabric for daily wear, but I do love the contrasting circles.

In fact, I might even take that envelope with me the next time I go to the hairdresser. I love everything about that outfit.

Oh dear, I am now fighting a terrible urge to make this dress from camouflage fabric, with elephants peeping through the holes! I’ve almost certainly got enough fabric left over from the elephant dress to do that…

The Way We Wore.

I’m reading the most fantastic book at the moment – The Way We Wore, by Robert Elms. It’s about one man, and the importance of his clothes as he grows up. It’s a social history, and a sartorial autobiography.

Robert Elms is half a generation older than me, so some of the earlier parts of the book are quite difficult to understand, although I can still picture a lot of the clothes very precisely, thanks to seeing the few old photos of my Dad as a teenager, and having been pretty obsessed with the 1960s when I was a teenager myself. The 1970s seem to have been just as confusing for Elms as they were for me, although I was far too young to be thinking about clothes at that time.

It was the 1980s that really did it for me. I was eight years old in 1981, the year that Philip Oakey of the Human League appeared on Top of the Pops with eyeliner, earrings and a pierced nipple. I’m absolutely certain that I noticed none of these things at the time, and was quite shocked when I saw that footage again recently and worked out how young I must have been when I saw it first. The 1980s were for New Romantics and Soft Cell and Nick Rhodes – always Nick Rhodes – never Simon Le Bon or Roger Taylor. Nick Rhodes, always Nick Rhodes, because he was the one with the feathered hair and the eyeliner. No wonder I ended up as a goth. I’d been looking for men in make-up since I was eight years old.

Of course I was far too young to be a goth or a New Romantic at the age of eight, or even really to know what those things meant. I do remember having a Madonna phase, all leggings and hair bows, although it was never as pronounced as my sister’s, who had the lacy gloves and everything. I had braces and a too-big trilby with a turquoise band, purchased from Top Man. I can’t remember now what I attached the braces to. It can’t have been leggings, although my wardrobe was full of those, and I never had a pair of jeans so tight that they had to have a zip at the ankle or you couldn’t get your feet through. My friend Kerry broke her wrist getting into a pair.

I remember the braces and the trilby, and the elasticated belts like a nurse, with a butterfly for the buckle. I remember a neon yellow skirt, worn with the most atrocious haircut on my fourteenth birthday. I remember going all the way to Tammy Girl in Hanley, and longing for the day when my skinny frame would be old enough to fit into grown-up Etam clothes instead. I remember my beloved Falmer Kittens. Jeans with a brand name, instead of from the catalogue! Jeans in a size nine! Jeans with tiny little dots woven directly into the fabric. I loved those jeans, and I wore them until they fell apart, and because ripped denim had become fashionable by then I wore them for a bit longer. I wore them with my favourite shirt, which did come from the catalogue, and it was plain white stiff heavy cotton, with black embroidery down the placket front. Perhaps I also wore the braces, and probably an old waistcoat from a charity shop, covered in badges. I’ve never owned a shirt of such good quality since. I wore it to parties and when it got older I wore it to college. I wore it with skirts and braces and hats. (Probably not all at once, but then it was the 1980s. It’s hard to be sure.)

And shoes. Let’s not even get started on the subject of shoes. Confined to orthopaedic lace-ups during the early years, I remember very clearly being allowed my first pair of tan sandals for the summer, aged about nine. I went outside to play in them, and promptly ruined them by getting covered in tar. That summer was so hot that the road had melted, and my brand new sandals were spoiled.

This was written as a stream of consciousness this morning. (Hence the over-long sentences and too many commas.) I’m sure it’s hugely out of order chronologically, but I was just writing down odd things as they occurred to me. I didn’t even mention the giant black and blue stripy jumper, or the lace-up tan stiletto heels, or the grey pixie boots, or the haircut that made me look like a boy, or my first pair of Doc Martens, which made my Mum laugh because they looked so much like the orthopaedic shoes I’d spent so long rebelling against. I’m sure you’ll get to hear about that some other time…

Rest In Peace, Isabella Blow.

Isabella Blow died on May 8th 2007, from ovarian cancer. She was only 48.
It is rumoured that she took her own life.

She was Philip Treacy’s muse and mentor, and is credited with beginning and supporting the careers of Sophie Dahl and Alexander McQueen.

Blow dressed in a way which suggested that she was never afraid of what anybody might think of her, and she always looked absolutely stunning. One of the joys of reading Vogue, and flicking through magazines like OK and Hello, was looking to see what she had been wearing to the latest parties and events.

Isabella Blow was one of my role models, and I am very sad that she’s gone.