When Anna Stalked the Earth

I cannot wait to see The September Issue. That is all.

How to Fake a Balmain Outfit

Ugh. I may have to take it all back about the current issue of Vogue Paris (see ranty post below). I'm getting ideas from it, and I can't very well be ripping out pages at the same time as I'm ripping the editorial content for lack of inspiration. So . . . pardonnez moi, les redactrices!

Anyway, here's something I found that I quite liked. No, not the damn acid-bleached, shredded jeans, Christophe Decarnin, I could whip up my own pair with a bottle of bleach, some sharp scissors, and a pair of ultracheap jeans from the thrift store. Nor the shoes that make the arches stretch tight as a legionnaire's bow.


But I do rather fancy the look of that transparent striped top under the jacket. Sexy, but not so extreme as to scare the kids during reading hour at kindergarten. And since I am in no way capable of shelling out the sort of euros it would take to acquire such a lovely garment new, I turn, as ever, to eBay, which will source me something rather similar, and leave me enough change left over for a flight to New York, where I could fool fashion fiends into thinking it was actually Balmain. Or maybe I'll forget to bid (this happens a lot), so you can get it instead. Bonne chance!

(top photo: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for Vogue)

Strike a Pose

Just been through the latest issue of French Vogue and tossed it away, bored. Apart from a couple arty black-and-whites by David Sims, editorial was bereft of nourishment . . . the same old same old, models in ultrashort skirts (or none at all), sky-high heels, starkly lit and angularly posed.

The edict, surely, on the part of editorial director and step-in stylist Carine Roitfeld, was "fierce". But thanks to the critiques of the teenagers on America's Next Top Model, hasn't fierce already become self-parodying, a commodity as cheap-jolt predictable as a Taco Bell spicy chicken wrap?

I'm just so tired of seeing professionally beautiful women wearing thousands of dollars worth of merchandise styled like hookers and clowns in the name of cool. It's an insult to both, who aspire to a finer, more beautiful world. Come on fashion, you can too.