Image Magazine - Runway Diaries

Many thanks to Image magazine for the Runway Diaries write-up in the September issue! x

Style Stoicism

“Know first who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.”  - Epictetus

“You look like Stevie Nicks,” said the Wise Elder.

As I looked at my spread eagle reflection in the mirror, I was inclined to agree.  Pink fringed arms akimbo, I looked as far removed from the edge of 17 as a 38-year old woman could be.

“I was thinking Tina Turner,” I replied, “but I get your gist.

“The last bus to Nut Bush City honey left in 1973,” came a half-whisper.

She was right. And with that I disrobed. I couldn’t help but mentally berate myself again for yet another personal style misdemeanour. Despite the tassel-clad cardigan’s inherent craftsmanship, it just wasn’t ‘me’.

“A quick question,” enquired the voice of reason from the other side of the room. “Just how were you planning on reconciling bohemia with a rockabilly quiff?”

Busted. I had all the cool kid / festival pedigree of a suburban housewife.  I’d never even been to Coachella or The Electric Picnic. And The Burning Man for all I knew could be an STD.

“I guess I just got caught up in the beauty of it all. I keep thinking I can make it work but...”

“I’m really hoping here that your clothes horse mentality is not some sort of allegory for your relationships with men; otherwise, you are royally screwed.”

She was right. My last boyfriend fit as (im)perfectly as a pair of apocryphal size 10 jeans: willing them on, barely able to button them and then struggling to hide the garish muffin top.

“You’re going to have to learn that you can’t always wear you want; sometimes, you’ll just have to learn when to say ‘no’.”

“I guess I’m a bit like Annie Oakley,” I joked.

“Try telling that to your bank balance.”

Make and Don't

A new shade of wrong

I felt sick. Whether it was the bleach fumes or the prospect of looking like a deranged hippie, the gag reflex was imminent. This was not the Proenza Schouler effect I had anticipated and as I glanced at my tie dye t-shirt, I realised I simply could NOT turn this in to be photographed for a  project the following day. Why was I indulging in beatnik batik? More on that later; now, back to the nausea.

I stood pouring Domestos over what looked like a prodigious Smurf turd in the kitchen sink but
was actually a blue t-shirt clad in rubber bands awaiting its sodium hypochlorite scars.  This was attempt number three, the prior two of which left me looking like an undergrad just back from a tour of Thailand. All that was missing was a dolphin tattoo on my
lower back to complete the look.

I couldn’t figure out how and why I wasn’t able to promulgate those Dries Van Noten poppy prints, so popular on the s/s 11 catwalks; or even a Nicki Minaj fringe homage.  As I smeared the cleaning gel onto the turd with oversized Marigolds, whacking it around like a Turkish masseuse, it hit me that maybe my method needing addressing. Not exactly the 'unique technique' of Jasper Pollack, eh?

Said light bulb moment unfortunately coincided with me pouring Toilet Gel atop the Domestos for good measure. As the foam started to spit, sizzle and rise, I hit the cold tap. The poo made a few cavalier jerks before magically disintegrated into a blue fizz; its rubber bands snapping off like constipated shackles.

Wary of the result that lay in the sink, I gingerly shook out the tee with a porridge ladle. As I suspected, the tee looked like it belonged to a girl named Cloud: likes patchouli, drinks organic beer and spends her free time in an incense haze.  How I would pass this off as a stylist’s own customised tee was anyone’s guess.

I wasn’t even crafty enough to come up with an alternative…unless scrawling  ‘MAKE AND DON’T’ in black marker over the offending article was a viable option. Oh my, how artistic!  

I never knew I had it in me…

Conceptual - a definition; a fact

http://www.stefanbruggemann.com/

Conceptual: n. a term used in fashion to illustrate something vague or abstract. Applied frequently when describing photo shoots, haircuts and Swedish ready-to-wear lines.

It couldn’t be helped. I was in a state of near desperation. The summer sales had started a fortnight earlier than anticipated and I had three pages of swimwear to shoot.

As I typed the brief to my team, a blinking cursor mocked the blank space next to ‘theme’.  Dare I put ‘TBC’?  Or perhaps, ‘we’re kind of stuck for options lads, so we’ll see how we fare on the day’. Hardly.

It was time to swallow my pride and key stroke some fashion-ese: ‘c-o-n-c-e-p-t-u-a-l’.  There, that wasn’t too difficult. Oh dear, but what kind of concept am I referring to here? I glanced over at the TV screen where Carrie-Anne Moss was kicking some Matrix butt. ‘F-u-t-u-r-i-s-t-i-c…’ The mocking cursor beckoned still. Currying favour to another dimension is all well and good but fashion folk are mad on detail. 

I recalled a passage from Amanda Brooks’ tome ‘I Love Your Style’ with game-like instructions on how to mix one’s fashion references. The style stratagem operates on the same principle as fashioning one’s porn name. Start with a core theme, add a celebrity and finish with one’s favourite trend. This could work. Shall it be ‘futuristic-Dolly Parton-bohemia’? Nah.   ‘Futuristic-Jackie O-rockabilly?’ Too much hairspray. What about ‘futuristic-Grace Jones-tribal chic’? Eureka!

The genre mash-up evolved like the seven stages of man in my head.  It was a brave new beach where cyber warrior priestesses took swimwear to a new dimension.  I began to type furiously, ‘Futuristic tribal warriors...from outer space’. And with one trigger finger on the send button, I committed myself to the conceptual, the abstract, the vague and if I wasn’t careful...the ridiculous.

“So just what does a ‘futuristic tribal warrior’ look like?” enquired my sister (a.k.a. The Wise Elder) as I siphoned through bags of nearly-there neoprene.

“I’m thinking body armour, bikinis, wet look hair...” 

“Ah yes, because clearly there is alien life form on Dollymount Strand,” she chided.

“I think you’re missing the point. It’s conceptual,” I offered weakly.

“Wait a minute,” urged the Wise Elder. “Are you saying that in the future we all wear bikinis?”

I was beginning to lose patience with my straight-talking sibling and confidence in my seemingly cock-eyed concept.

“Look! A concept has no apparent basis in reality or fact,” I balked. “It’s simply an imaginative construct.”

“Help me understand then,” she urged; despite my best efforts at clarification. “What you’re saying is that a simulacrum is all that’s needed to sell swimwear; no beach, no sea, no sand, no hunky extras.”

Looks like I wasn’t the only one to spill water from the bath this week. “Congratulations, you just had your first fashion moment,” I goaded with a smile.

 “I’m gathering that’s a so-called ‘concept’ too?” retaliated the seer. 

“No, my dear sibling. That’s a fact.”

"Amaze-bags"

Gretchen Weiners - stymied semantically with 'Fetch

“Amaze-bags!”

I dropped a straight flush and my new catchphrase in one go.

“NOOOOOO!” came the collective response of card playing circle.

“But why?” I pressed. “It’s so much nicer than ‘amaze-balls’.”

“Drop it; it’ll never happen,” demanded Andy.

“I think you’ll find, I dropped an Ace, King, Queen and Jack of Hearts,” I boasted wrly.

“I’m talking about that ridiculous word!” 

I felt like Gretchen Weiners facing off against Regina George in her lexical defence of ‘fetch’.

Granted, I’m no E.E. Cummings but swapping a Polly Push Lock for a less salubrious sac shouldn’t have amounted to half the aberration of which I was being accused. 

Clearly this wasn’t my desired audience. In order for ‘amaze-bags’ to go viral, I needed it to be endorsed and spoken into existence; rather than forced into early retirement with ‘fierce’ and ‘funky’.

A week later I attended a cocktail party – a perfect milieu for testing the lexical waters. Fashion folk love bizarre epithets. I was cognizant however that Andy may well have had a point. Victoria Beckham suffered a seismic failure with ‘major’; Rachel Zoe panned with ‘bananas’ and Andre Leon Talley’s ‘dreckitude’ was well...’drek’.

My semantic debut came with a side of hors d’oeuvres. Those tomato and red onion mini quiches evoked a tandem of ‘oohs and aahs’. It was now or never. 

“Amaze-bags!”  I cooed, eliciting a flutter of chuckles.

I regaled my past troubles of positioning said shibboleth in the general patois.

“You need a critical mass,” advised one of the partygoers.

“Or Jedward,” offered another. 

“If my initial market sample was any indication, the viral capacity of ‘amaze-bags’ was not unlike that of a mild cold – unwelcome, irritating and hopefully gone in a week.

Marketing is all about timing and mine was all wrong. It was time to admit defeat and tuck ‘amaze-bags’ back into my rhetorical clutch, assuring myself the time would come to ‘fetch’ it again.

The Holiday Aftermath

The Dangers of Loose Clothing

It wouldn’t even pass over my thighs; not without Body Shop Cocoa Body Butter, some shimmying and a near act of God.  By the time I actually managed to zip the dress, I was sweating like Kim Kardashian fielding questions about arse implants. “Does she sweat though?”  I wondered to myself, suspicious of her rather smooth motionless brow.  But I digress. 

I looked at myself in the full-length mirror. The leather frock that once gently skimmed my curves now choked and squeezed them like some cheap S&M mistress.  I hadn’t just gained weight; I gained a full dress size.  

It appeared my ten-day Andalusian retreat left me with more than just a relaxed mind; my tummy, bum and thighs had followed suit. The fact that I had to loosen my string bikini on day three should have been a dead cert but the tapas, paella and daily beer o’clock by the pool; not to mention wine o’clock, left me with the kind of excess baggage that would require more than a €30 surcharge to shift.

“I was wondering why you kept saying ‘Si’ when the waiter asked if you wanted your tapas ‘ración’,” mused my friend while I wrestled with a zip that stood between me and my blood circulation.

“I thought ‘ración’ was Spanish for ration,” I offered weakly.  

“It didn’t occur to you then that the portions were rather large?” 

I didn’t answer. The broken metal teeth in my hand were a clear sign that I needed my own jaw wired...pronto. 

The misconception that holidays come with their own weight and wine immunity is swiftly brought to rest when one is forced to don something that is neither a cheesecloth sheath nor a shirred swirly muslin cloak of sorts. 

Which reminded me:  I still needed something to wear to the cocktail party the following evening. I cast a glance at the bag of holiday laundry still tucked in the corner of the room. 

“I wonder if I could pass off that full-length kaftan in the Morrison without raising an eyebrow?”

“Are you high?” enquired my friend glibly; clearly concerned as to the state of my mental health.

“No, not high but given I’m standing here half naked with a broken zip in my hand, I’m thinking I’ve reached an all new personal low,” I blurted tearfully.

Silence. 

“Jewellery would be good.”