The Fashion Thread

[sil]

I don't want to invade the "things you wanted to say" thread with clothes talking so here it is this wonderful thread...

Did you see or buy any cute clothes?




I looove this tshirt



They have Surkana shops in Madrid... I have to find it!

(Oops maybe I'm sounding like a fashion victim... I'm not)

[precinct14]

They have Surkana shops in Madrid... I have to find it!

Can I find her in Madrid?

[sil]

Hehehe you can try...

[felix]

An example of the first fashion I noticed:



The Teddy Boy style. Drape jacket, bootlace tie, drainpipe trousers, Tony Curtis haircut.

Here's the Teddy Girl look (for the Judies* in the audience):



*apparently, that's how Teddy Boys' ladies were known )

[eddie]

The Royal Wedding has added a new word to my vocabulary.

A "Fascinator" is (apparently) a thing toff totty wear sideways on the cranium. Like so:

[LaRue]

I have to wear a fascinator to Foundation Day

[Old Mack]

I just bought some new black t-shirts w/ a pocket ! There all I wear until it gets warm out !

[Dick Fitzwell]

Everything I'm wearing right now was purchased at Walmart. They actually have pretty good clothes there and they are cheap as hell. I found a really cool Who shirt there for $7, and bought another one when it was on clearance for $3.

[Old Mack]

And when it gets warm out? Do you use the ones without the pocket then?

Black attacks the suns rays so I switch to blue t-shirts w/ a pocket ! (wonder how many people notice Jerry Garcia like almost always wore a black t-shirt)

We've had our heat on for three days now...we already had our AC on twice...this weather were having is crazy...not fashionable at all !

[felix]

I just bought some new black t-shirts w/ a pocket ! There all I wear until it gets warm out !

Folks around your way are pretty tolerant, Mack? They don't mind you strolling around trouserless?

[sil]

Sometimes I see dresses so short I mistake them for shirts
Maybe Old Mack too...
edit: I just realized this doesn't make sense (it would be the opposite)

[precinct14]

I think it's now safe to conclude that we owe it to Princess Beatrice's Royal Wedding Turkey Twizzler Titfer for the super-slick, fashion co-ordinated elimination of bin Laden:

[Guest]

I only wear black in the winter or cooler days.

[precinct14]

I only wear black in the winter or cooler days.

[Guest]

I only wear black in the winter or cooler days.

I am not ready to meet an undertaker yet.

[Old Mack]

Folks around your way are pretty tolerant, Mack? They don't mind you strolling around trouserless?

How embrassing...my secret is out !!!

[eddie]

To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? By Lucy Siegle — review

The journalist's look at the fashion industry is a chilling exposé

Hephzibah Anderson The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011


Bangladeshi garment workers dry jeans on the roof of a small factory in Dhaka. Photograph: Rafiqur Rahman/Reuters

By now, most casually informed shoppers know that cheap fashion is something none of us can afford. We're aware that the nimble needlework of children has been found in high street shops, that seas have died satisfy our cotton addiction and that sweatshops are far from being a thing of the past. But according to Lucy Siegle's new book, this is just the thin end of an unsightly wedge. "Big Fashion" has become unsustainable and if you hoped you were doing your bit by avoiding Primark, you need to think again.


To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? by Lucy Siegle

As well as being this paper's ethical living columnist, Siegle is a reformed fashionista. Her wardrobe, dubbed "fashionably overweight" by one expert, offers a bulging index of high street fashion fads from the past two decades. The story of its greening comprises the latter third of this book, but first, she leads us off on a tour of the industry's seamy side, totting up the real cost of trends such as It bags and "cheapskating".

There are conversations with Cambodian garment workers, visits to factories in Bangladesh and west Africa and tales of forced teen labour in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan. Human misery seems endemic at every point in the production line, from the alarming suicide rates among Indian farmers to young seamstresses forced to take contraceptive pills.

Social injustice is just one of the skeletons lurking in fashion's closet. There's also the industry's devastating environmental toll to consider – rivers flowing denim blue, the uncertain legacy of "Frankenpants" cut from GM cloth.

Animals don't fare much better. You'll have to trust me when I say that nobody of vegan sensibilities will want to hear about the sorry end met by silkworms – 1,500 of the little critters for every metre of fabric.

I'm ashamed to say I picked up this book feeling just a little bit, well, smug about my wardrobe. I'm a frugal shopper, waiting for the sales to buy pieces whose cuts and fabrics suggest they'll last more than a season or two. With a bit of rummaging, I can even produce an LBD that I still wear occasionally, almost 20 years since it was bought for my teen self in a Laura Ashley sale.

I was feeling downcast by the time I reached the end. Not much of the cotton I own is organic or fair trade, and what use is a "made in Italy" label if it's attached to a pair of heels which have been made by migrant labour with leather whose creation is helping to destroy the Amazon rainforest?

The unspoken purpose of the "quick fashion hit" is to race out of fashion or else fall obligingly to bits, sending its buyer back to the store for more. But our bulimic passion for fashion is symptomatic of a broader malaise. Disposability, instant gratification, the idea that impulses are there be indulged, regardless of impact – these sentiments permeate our lives.

Siegle doesn't really pause to consider this. It's anger that keeps her marching on through the dense data she has amassed. On the final page, however, she allows herself some love for a garment. Dropping off a bag of her old clothes with the designers at Junky Styling in London's Brick Lane in the East End, she returns a couple of days later to reclaim a made-to-measure cocktail dress.

Sustainable fashion has a hair shirt image, but while I'm less convinced about the matching cummerbund and bolero, I believe Siegle when she says that her dress is sophisticated. Only she knows that it is made of the first suit she ever bought. This ex-suit, she says, offers a chance "to recreate the joy I first found in clothes".

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

[eddie]

SlutWalk London challenges the 'asking for it' mindset

Jun 13, 2011


Thousands of women have taken to the streets of London to participate in what is commonly referred to as the SlutWalk, which began at Trafalgar Square the capital.

The idea for SlutWalk was born in Toronto in April after police officer Michael Sanguinetti told students at Osgoode Hall Law School during a campus safety talk: 'Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.'

The protest soon spread to cities around the world in an attempt to challenge the mindset that victims of sexual assault should bear a degree of responsibility on the grounds that they were 'asking for it'.

The London march kicked off behind a banner reading 'SlutWalk London: because we've had enough'.

Others carried placards reading 'It's a dress, not a yes', 'Women against rape', 'No means no' and 'Hijabs, hoodies, hotpants, our bodies, our choices'.

Former International Monetary Fund chief and rape accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn may have even spared a grimace at one sign which read 'We are all chambermaids'.



Strauss-Kahn recently pleaded not guilty to seven counts of sex crimes, including attempted rape, against his 32-year-old female cleaner.

Student Sofia Capel, 25, said: 'It's not the victim's fault if they're raped. Some men think they own the right to women's bodies.'

Event organiser Caitlin Hayward-Tapp said: 'We are using the word slut because that is the word the officer used.... and by using it so often we feel we have taken some of the power out of it... it can't hurt us anymore.'

AOL

[eddie]

The Saturday interview: Vivienne Westwood

Vivienne Westwood virtually invented punk and picked up her OBE from the Queen wearing no knickers. Now 70, she has no intention of slowing down

Stuart Jeffries

The Guardian, Saturday 3 December 2011


'I'm not comfortable defending my clothes": Vivienne Westwood. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

When Vivienne Westwood was four or five, she had an epiphany. "When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like – full of cruelty and hypocrisy." At the time she was living in the Pennine village of Tintwistle, where her father worked in the Wall's sausage factory and her mother was an assistant at the local greengrocer's. "I thought they'd been lying to me by telling me only about the baby Jesus, rather than what happened to him."

We're sitting at a table teeming with glue, scissors and drawings in her fourth-floor office at the Westwood empire HQ in Battersea. She's wearing a beautifully cut pin-striped suit, as well as dangly earrings and more makeup than usual for the benefit, she says, of the photographer. "I'll tell you what I was like as a child," says Westwood. "I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader. What I remember as a child is that other kids didn't care about suffering. I always did."

Sixty-five years on, and Britain's most feted fashion designer is many things – mother, multimillionaire businesswoman, jauntily knickerless recipient of an OBE from the Queen, dame, happily married to a man 25 years her junior – but one thing has remained constant: her sense of her difference from the bulk of other people. "I do feel I'm fighting against conformity," she says.

As if to prove the point, she announces: "I will say something that sounds terrible. We're all going into the gas chamber, and what I'm saying is that it's not a bathroom. We're going to be killed. The human race faces mass extinction."

Westwood came to this dystopian conclusion a few years ago when she started to read the books of James Lovelock, the environmentalist most famous for proposing the Gaia hypothesis – the idea that the Earth functions as a living super-organism.

Lovelock argued that humanity's vast output of carbon dioxide over the past two centuries has prompted the deserts to spread towards the poles at an alarming rate. "I always thought we had an environmental problem," says Westwood, "but I hadn't realised how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left." That's six billion dead by the end of the century. "He calls it the cull. I consider him to be a great, great, great genius, the equivalent to Darwin or Einstein, but more incredible."

She contends – on the basis of her reading of Lovelock – that once average global temperature levels rise beyond a certain point, they will spiral uncontrollably: "If they rise by two degrees they will go on to five and so on in a domino effect. Eventually, if you draw a line at the level of Paris, below that it would be uninhabitable," warns Westwood. "There'll be no more going to Florence."

We're meeting because 70-year-old Westwood has just announced she's going to give £1m to rainforest charity Cool Earth, which aims to stop such an intolerable future being realised. It's the culmination of three years' involvement with a charity established in 2007 by Labour MP Frank Field. Last year, she produced 20 tablecloth designs for the charity, selling at £1,000 each. Could posh tablecloths help save the planet?

Of all the world's good causes, why Cool Earth? I ask. "I'm going to start by talking about how I see the world," she says. "The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What's happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It's going to make the situation worse. We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great." It could be: the vision little Vivienne beheld of human hypocrisy, cruelty and delusion 60-odd years ago need not be our destiny.

But isn't today's imperative to nail the bankers; maybe later we can save the rainforest? "It's presented as though the financial crisis and climate change are two different things, but they're connected," Westwood replies. "We're letting businessmen do what they want. People get paralysed by the enormity of wrong things in the world. There's only so much that one person can do. What I decided to do was to focus on the rainforest." In September she launched her spring/summer 2012 Red Label collection with a call to support her £7m fundraising campaign. "We must begin today – tomorrow is too late," she said then. "Governments have been talking about saving the rainforest for 40 years. Now only half of it is left."

The campaign is called No Fun Being Extinct (it surely cries out for the subtitle: "Just ask a dodo. Oh yeah – you can't.") If you go to the campaign's website (nofunbeingextinct.org) you can commit to saving three trees for £3. The campaign aims at embarrassing the World Bank for dedicating $600m (£390m) to tackle deforestation in 2008 and sitting on 90% of that money. So far, according to Cool Earth, just $15m (£10m) has been spent, all of it on administration and advisers.

Her support for Cool Earth is only one example of Westwood's rise as a political activist. She's long supported Liberty and CND, but in recent years she seems determined to support every good cause going. Her most recent blog posts detail her multifarious radical interests: she backs a fundraising campaign for the Refugee Council, pledges her support for Greener upon Thames, an organisation campaigning to make next year's London Olympics plastic-bag free, and reprints a thank-you letter from the headmaster of Uaso Nyiro primary school in Kenya for the books she sent, adding: "The school was started in 1992 but they've never had a library. Now they have and they've named it the Vivienne Westwood Library – amazing!"

But isn't there a contradiction between fighting to save the planet and charging huge sums for (admittedly very beautiful) consumer goods? "With Andreas [Kronthaler, her fashion-designer husband whom she married in 1992] we're trying to make the product quality rather than quantity," she replies. When she launched a collection in September last year, she said we should not buy new clothes for six months, which must have left her sales people wringing their hands. Or maybe not: "My message is: choose well and buy less," she said then – as if to suggest you should buy one Westwood dress rather than filling Primark trolleys regularly.

"I don't feel comfortable defending my clothes. For 15 years I hated fashion." Why? "It's not very intellectual, and I wanted to read, not make fashion. It was something I was good at; it wasn't all of me." She's never recaptured the thrill of the first fashion show she did with Malcolm McLaren at London's Olympia in 1979. It was then they launched the Pirates collection that became the template for the New Romantic look. "I watched it and I was so captivated. I had done something." But she has fallen in love with fashion design again: "I'm happy doing my work at the moment because everything is coming together." Even in her eighth decade, she cannot contemplate retiring. "I really want to carry on." She hints her husband may not, though: "Andreas is considering his position – he's a perfectionist, and that can be very stressful."

Last month she lent her support to the Occupy demonstrators outside St Paul's. When she was there she told anyone who would listen that they should go to London's art galleries to become freedom fighters against capitalism, consumerism and philistinism. Why? "It's to do with consumption – if you go to an art gallery you're putting in, not just sucking up. Propaganda can be resisted by loving art."

All this chimes with the delightfully loopy 22-page manifesto she wrote four years ago, aimed at rescuing mankind from mediocrity, called Active Resistance. In it she cited Aldous Huxley, who said the world suffers from three evils – nationalistic idolatry, non-stop distraction and organised lying. Once she thought that non-stop distraction (she doesn't watch telly) was the worst evil. Now she wants to revise that opinion. "Actually, organised lying can be the worst. It is the frame of reference that people have – that they must consume, or that politicians are speaking sense."

But why should Occupy protesters join the queues to see Leonardo at the National Gallery? "When you look at art, it's perhaps an unconscious criticism of the world we're living in, comparing a world that doesn't exist with ours. Great art is always about asking yourself if things could be better."

Her belief in the revolutionary impact of art comes, she says, from two things – her provincial upbringing and her relationship with McLaren, who died of cancer last year at 64. "It was culturally quite provincial where I came from. I didn't know about classical music or art galleries. My parents and I moved to London when I was 17, and I tried to understand the world a bit more, thinking I was stupid." She went to art college for a term to study fashion and silversmithing. Why not to university, to indulge her passion for intellectual life? "I wanted to have fun with men, and all the geeks went to college."

After art school, Vivienne Swire married Derek Westwood, a factory apprentice. They had a son, Ben, in 1963. The marriage lasted from 1962 to 1965, ending when she met the situationist student radical and future Sex Pistols manager, McLaren. At the time she was working as a primary school teacher, and making jewellery and selling it on a Portobello market stall. What was McLaren's appeal? "He was from a cosmopolitan Portuguese-Jewish family, and very attractive because he seemed to know what was going on. I had no idea." In 1967, they had a son, Joe.

When McLaren and Westwood opened their iconic King's Road boutique, the couple revolutionised style with safety pins, rips and zips and bondage trousers. They were inspired by bikers, prostitutes, fetishists. "When we did punk, his ideas weren't mine. I really wanted to help. I was interested in human rights. I started to be anti the royal family because I saw that the queen was a symbol of hypocrisy."

Today Westwood is more forgiving of the woman who ennobled her. "What do you do if your government is doing terrible things, like supporting rendition flights? You can't necessarily blame her. Maybe she's not the symbol of hypocrisy. I'm not patriotic in terms of nationalism, but I like what the royal family has done – they've given people in England an identity. I'm not saying she's terribly cultivated. Maybe she is – I don't know."

She sees Prince Charles as a kindred spirit: "He has done an amazing amount in this world. He does set standards. He brokered a rainforest deal between Guyana and Norway. He understands what makes us human is that we are able to express ourselves through culture."

Just before Westwood introduces me to a new experience (a parting kiss on the lips from a dame), she offers some advice for Guardian readers: "Try to use your time not worrying. Try to get involved. Try to get involved in seeing art then you'll be a freedom fighter, you'll be working for a better world." Is that how you see yourself? "What do I know about anything?" she smiles. "I'm only a fashion designer."

[eddie]

Saturday interview: Vivienne Westwood

'Don't call me eccentric'

She has been an icon of British style for four decades, but Vivienne Westwood breaks off from work on her new gold bodysuit to reveal she never wanted to make clothes

Emine Saner

The Guardian, Saturday 15 November 2008


Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

'Please don't write that I'm eccentric," says Vivienne Westwood, who is dressed in a holey black dress with what looks like bits of flesh-coloured tights woven in and out of it, a pair of scruffy old trainers and a knitted hat pulled over her hair, which is the colour of clementines. She has drawn her eyebrows on in red pencil. "It's always, 'aah, this eccentric woman'. I've heard that story so many times." She pauses and looks out of the window of her office. "I suppose I don't mind, I have to take it as a compliment in an age of conformity."

Westwood's office, in a building in Battersea, south London, which seems to have hundreds of young people busying themselves in corners, is crammed with papers, ideas and sketches pinned on walls, and rails crammed with clothes. She shows me a gold bodysuit she is working on for a ballet performance next week by dancers from the Royal Ballet, alongside a fashion show of her autumn/winter collection, in aid of the NSPCC. "It will have a dragon snaking its way around it," she says. It looks worryingly unfinished, given that it needs to be ready in four days, but Westwood doesn't look concerned.

The idea for the dance, she says, came from a book about alchemy, and what follows is a 10-minute monologue about the subject, delivered in an accent so soft and Alan Bennett-esque that it makes you think of tea and crumpets. "I won't go into any more details," she says, finally, then: "Yes I will actually, because it's really great. I won't be a minute. So, the dance. I took one of these metaphors from an alchemical book. The male is horrible - he is absolutely beautiful, a sensation, but he's totally cold and he doesn't care about anything. The female is incredibly ugly but she's attracted to him. Eventually, they lock together and they can't separate and it's a sort of strange love affair. They become one substance. Anyway, that's the end of it. It's incredible how it works, I love the choreography."

Another speech follows - and I'm not sure how we got on to this - about how she doesn't think science is the answer to everything because it doesn't take account of human nature and what makes us happy. She says: "Sorry if I take rather a long time to explain things," then: "Hang on a minute," when I interrupt. She steamrollers over me, talking slightly faster and louder, sometimes putting her head in her hands, as if nothing will stop her getting her point out. She has a lot to say. On the destruction of the planet: "We have to save the rainforest or else we've got no chance. Can you imagine the war lords, and the rape and pillage, and the mass migrations and the hunger? The human race has looked never before on the apocalypse and I do believe that is what we're facing."

On politics: "I'm [Brown's] worst enemy. I hate that man. I hate his cowardice, the fact that he just acquiesced in everything the horrible, disgusting Blair wanted to do. Cameron doesn't seem to have much to say, and the Liberal Democrats are following the government ideas. They are all old-fashioned thinkers."

You could probably choose any subject and Westwood, a voracious reader, would have something to say on it. But because we have a strict time limit, it's a bit of a battle because Westwood wants to talk about art and ideas and, boringly for her, I'd rather talk about the punk years and why she didn't wear knickers when she went to collect her OBE (if she's wearing a dress, she never does, apparently).

"I'm not interested in talking about little anecdotes about things that have happened to me," she says, not unkindly. I suppose her past has been gone over so much that it is threadbare. Westwood grew up in the Pennine village of Tintwistle, where her father worked in the Wall's sausage factory and her mother was an assistant at the local greengrocers. After art college, Vivienne Swire married Derek Westwood, a factory apprentice, and their son Ben was born. The marriage didn't last, and when Westwood met Malcolm McLaren, she fell pregnant with her second son, Joe, almost immediately.

They opened a shop together on Kings Road and in the four decades she has been designing fashion, Westwood had a phenomenal influence on the way we dress. As well as the safety pins and rips and zips and bondage trousers of the punk look, her 1979 collection, Pirates, became the template for the New Romantic movement. For years she and her clothes were ridiculed, but she has arrived at national treasure status.

I recently interviewed her oldest son, Ben, who is a pornographer. He has recently been campaigning against the government's plan to criminalise the possession of extreme pornography. What does she make of his career choice? "It's such a cliche, that pin-up styling," she says. "I think it's boring because of that. Otherwise, I think it's fine. But I think he should make the women look more glamorous, more interesting. But then it probably wouldn't be porn if the women looked too strong."

Maybe it offends her feminist principles, I suggest. "Oh no, I'm anti-feminist," she says. "They don't see the wood for the trees and everything has to be viewed from this feminist point of view. I know women have suffered and I think it's great that people stand up for women's rights but the problem with feminists is that they somehow consider women to be superior beings. And in the end, they just want to be men anyway. They want to do men's work." I try to ask her what she means by "men's work" but she steamrollers on. "[Feminists] certainly underestimate the power women [have had] in influencing their children, or men."

I was hoping to see Westwood's third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, but he isn't in the studio. Westwood met him when she was teaching a class in Vienna and he was one of her students and they married in 1992. "It's amazing, it's incredible," she says of their relationship. "I feel so sure about it. He's so supportive and we're just so interested in each other. He's an amazing person."

Does he mind being in her shadow? "No, not at all. He's not in my shadow anyway. He's a very bossy person actually. He prefers to let me do the public things. He has an original point of view, he's extremely interesting. What is good about him is that he likes to go out. He goes to the pub across the road and he just loves to look at people. So when he goes down the club, or is watching TV, I can get on with my reading."

Kronthaler is 25 years her junior and she has often spoken of how he goes off on holiday without her ("I hate to travel"). It is perhaps mean to even suggest it, but does she ever worry he will leave her? "No, I don't. But it's difficult to say that and one doesn't want to sound complacent. I know he's committed to me. We support each other, intellectually and in all kinds of ways."

Is it important for her to be in love? "No, it wasn't. One of the greatest periods of my life was when I was without a man, sexually or any real way, for about 10 years. Except that wasn't really true because I was very close to my friend Gary Ness, who is dead. He was a homosexual but I was very attracted to him. I was not looking for a man at all, and if you want to find a man, maybe don't look for one and you might get one."

Last year, Westwood launched her 22-page manifesto to rescue mankind from mediocrity, called Active Resistance. It has a cast of 20 characters who pop up throughout it, including Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio. It is, you gather, quite bonkers, but marvellously so, didactic, snobbish and thoroughly subjective. She hates modern art, for instance. What does her friend Tracey Emin think about this? She gives a little laugh. "I feel very guilty because it's very one-sided. She loves my clothes and I ..." she pauses. "Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin - I couldn't give tuppence for it. She says, 'Have you changed your mind about modern art yet?' and I say, no. But we're very good friends."

The main enemy, she says, is non-stop distraction, by which she means television, the cinema, the internet, adverts, the press and fashion magazines. "If people are not thinking then we really don't have any future," she says. "We live in this terrible, terrible danger because everyone is not thinking." We remedy this, as far as I can tell, from reading lots of books and appreciating art and culture. "My manifesto is saying, essentially, every time you learn something, you see something you understand, you are helping to change the world and you are a freedom fighter. Even if it just means looking a word up in the dictionary you didn't know before."

One of the messages of her last collection was "don't buy clothes" and she rails against consumerism, strange for a fashion designer who produces several collections a year, for an industry that is nothing if not about consumers. "You might think that's really disingenuous of me, but I'm serious," she says. "I'm not here to defend [being a fashion designer], it's something I do.

"I didn't want to do it in the first place, I wanted to read books, but I knew I was good at it. But don't consume crap, make a choice."

[Guest]

I want this coat. I tried it on in a shop the other day and loved it.

[eddie]

A models displays the golden cape, made from the silk of more than a million female Golden Orb Weaver spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian.

[Nah Ville Sky Chick]

I want this coat. I tried it on in a shop the other day and loved it.

I want that coat as well !! Is it very expensive, it looks it?

[Guest]

It was my Christmas present
200 euros
Desigual

[Nah Ville Sky Chick]

It was my Christmas present
200 euros
Desigual

Excellent, I see she has a bag to match. You will need that too.

[Sponsored content]