>> Everyone is walking around with an eerie smudged vaseline look, from the white matte glow of snow reflecting on to their faces. For somebody who is anti-shine (bronzers, moonshines and sparkly liquids for the face be gone…) and would prefer going through life with the complexion of chalky matteness, this weather is heavenly. The jibber jabber of constant transport updates from the media may be making the snowfall louder than it should be but being holed up for a day or so at home watching your surroundings blur into a white blanket is pretty awesome. As I type right now, I'm speeding (albeit slower than normal) down to Paris on the Eurostar and looking outside on the horizon which meets the sky in one indistinguishable haze.
Apologies if I'm going overboard on the poetics here. What else to type to accompany what is in effect, an impractical but ever so dramatic snow-grazing outfit . It's partly a mini shout of huzzah over John Galliano's semi-return to fashion, into the unexpected welcoming folds of Oscar de la Renta's atelier for a three week residency. I received this John Galliano jacket as a gift from Marianne, my Comme-mad fashion heroine, who happens to be my agent (not the awful, eyes-on-the-prize, grabby grabby type of agent but someone who reminds me that I need to be less of an unambitious lemon). Every time we meet up (she lives in Dublin), she always has a tale to tell about her fashionable exploits in the eighties slash nineties when she was a fashion buyer. She picked up this jacket in a now defunct Coco boutique in Dublin shortly after Browns snapped up Galliano's infamous graduate Les Incroyables collection in 1984. I can't date it precisely but it's most probably from the subsequent A/W 85-6 The Ludic Game or S/S 86 The Fallen Angels collections, with both displaying traits of the deconstructed historically-charged tailoring that bought Galliano to prominence. It's my one and only piece of John Galliano, and treasured precisely for its early origins before Galliano developed a more excessive design vernacular as well as other excesses in his private life. You know where I stand on the whole debacle and whilst this isn't a "I wear you therefore all is forgiven" gesture, I think we can all agree that his mark on the fashion world shouldn't be buried and erased.
Along the lines of the style of the Incroyables and Merveilleuses, is a pair of impossibly voluminous silk gazar navy trousers with fold upon fold of fabric hidden in its trail. They're Louis Vuitton (even harder to discern the originating collection to be honest…) and were a bargain find in New York secondhand designer store Tokio 7. I've dubbed them my samurai trousers and should I want to take revenge against those that have dishonoured my family, I shall be unsuccessfully welding a sword in Crouching Blogger, Hidden Talent mode.
Worn with Emma Cook shirt and a pair of Prada espadrille brogues, also donated to me from the magical wardrobe of Marianne. She claims she can't walk in them. I say she didn't try hard enough but then again, I do have the advantage of my ankles being fully adjusted to the dizzying flatform heights of creeper shoes.
