Could you wear the same dress for a month?

Forgive me for being a little late with this one, but I’ve just stumbled across this article in the Daily Mail, in which Maureen Rice, the editor of Psychologies, challenges herself to wear the same dress every day for a month (with a bit of help from a four-hour dry cleaning salon). Now I usually try and stay away from the stuff the Hate Mail’s ‘Femail’ section churns out – it always seems to be full of stories like ‘I thought I could have a career and a family at once but I realised I was WRONG, EVIL and am DAMAGING MY CHILDREN’, or ‘I was raped, but it was probably my fault because I enjoy drinking alcohol.’ But this thoughtful, intelligent piece really surprised me – I definitely recommend taking five minutes to read this article – she makes some really smart points about our relationship with clothes, how what we wear effects how we see ourselves, and just how much we’ve been brainwashed by the fast fashion cult.

Some of the comments are interesting too. One woman has a story of how her Grandmother, in the 1930s, would wear the same top or dress but with different detachable collars to make them look different. This approach to clothes is something we could really do with adopting a little more in the west.

Gok’s Fashion Fix: Can Gok Wan really save our wardrobes?

I can’t help but find it odd that thousands of British women are desperate for fashion advice from someone who, by definition, finds the female form father hideous. And before anyone points out that most designers are gay men – yes, exactly, which is why they make clothes better suited to androgynous teenage boys than grown women.

But still, he’s friendly and down-to-earth, and I much prefer him to those awful witches Trinny and Susannah, with their insistence on ripping apart the wardrobes and self-esteem of poor ordinary women whilst their eyes glint with smug self-satisfaction. Urgh.

Anyway, Gok has, as he insists on telling us at various intervals throughout Gok’s Fashion Fix, ‘a new mantra – buy less, wear it more.’  He’s here to clean out your closets of junk and strip them down to a 24-piece ‘capsule’ wardrobe, letting you look goktastically fabulous on any occasion.

Now I am absolutely useless at putting together those ‘capsule’ wardrobe thingys. Every time I make the journey from Cardiff to London, even if just for a few weeks, I always seem to just shove as much as I can in the suitcase, without considering how I’ll wear them all together, until it’s almost too heavy for me to lift. Then when I arrive I realise that absolutely nothing goes with anything else, end up having to wear the same outfit every day and return home with half the stuff I brought with me unworn. Oh dear.

So I was hoping that Aunty Gok would be able to give me a few tips on how to slim down my suitcase. But sadly, it seems the first rule about the ‘capsule wardrobe’ is that it will be different for everyone, and the tips Gok gave poor old Dawn from Cornwall did nothing to help me personally. For starters, he made a white button-down shirt and office-friendly trousers two of her staples, but as I haven’t worn a white shirt since I left school and I’m on a magazine journalism course where the mantra scruffier-is-better still rules, I think you can count me out of those.

He also went for pieces that ‘show off her fabulous boobs and tiny waist’, as he said, and hid her ghastly bottom half (well, he didn’t tell her it was ghastly, but with his insistence than anything below her waist be hidden in a kind of bum-hijab he may as well have). Well I don’t have boobs and my bottom half isn’t that shabby at all, so again, Gok was not to my rescue.

So in the end, all I got from this programme was that you need a stylist to come round your house and personally perfect your ‘capsule’ wardrobe if you want to look anything other than a swamp monster. Oh yes, and that you can sew diamante chains and iron fake studs on to your clothes. Which look hideous.

Killer heels and lipstick: What we buy in recession

Last week at the PTC new journalist of the year awards Celia Duncan, associate editor of Vogue, was asked how they planned to cope with the impending recession. Surprisingly, she replied that Vogue tends to do very well in times of economic downturn because it’s seen as an ‘affordable’ luxury. We’ll buy a nice glossy fashion mag as a treat rather than splash out on a new designer coat.

This got me wondering what other products may sell well over the next year or so. Apparently cosmetics sales go up, as women buy a cheap-ish lipstick for a little pick-me-up instead of pricey clothes. Sexist assumptions about women relying on their appearance for their happiness aside, it’s interesting that the article advises readers to invest in cosmetic companies at a time when the FTSE resembles more a rollercoaster than a motorway.

Rising sales of mega-high heels have surprised many commentators, and Christian Louboutin has just launched its first 8-inch spike heel. It’s suggested this is due to the ‘pick me up’ factor many feel when they put of a pair of killer heels. The extra height makes the wearer feel powerful, a sensation many us are lack as we realise how tightly our lives are controlled by the whims of bankers and politicians.

Having said all that, today it was announced that retails sales overall have actually been holding up pretty well. I don’t know what this suggests, though – we’re all in denial, perhaps?

(photo by Porcelaingirl, shared under a creative commons license)