What I loved at the Dover Street Market AW09 press day




Comme’s surrealist military coats (above)

Junya Watanabe’s polished pointed girls’ Oxfords

Lanvin’s mens wool poloshirts with grosgrain collar

Sacai’s girls’ underwear and mens utilitarian nylon and knitwear combos

Undercover’s punk graphic tees

Lanvin’s Little Black Velvet Dress – long sleeved with a wee train – heavenly!

Joe Casely Hayford’s silk scarves

H by Harris’ quilted suede laptop case

Dashing Tweeds’ reflective capes

I didn’t dare take pictures having been told off for using a pen to write notes. “Sorry you can’t take notes,” “But I’m press,” “Ok, but you can’t use a pen, you’ll have to use a pencil,” “Why?” “For health and safety reasons.” Jeez!

[Comme pic via Bish-Shops’ retail blog]

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Miss Selfridge introduces the three-way collab




Another day, another seen-it-before high street collaboration, or so I thought. But when I rocked up to the Hed Kandi for Miss Selfridge launch I got a pleasant surprise. There in front of me was a new idea! I kid you not, Miss Selfridge has embraced an original take on the collab theme – hooking up two brands that genuinely have the same audience via an illustrator rather than yet another celebrity-in-inverted-commas. The three-way hook-up, it’s the future I tell you!

Do I sound jaded? I guess I’m just a little bit over the bandwagon-jumping of the ‘Fearne Cotton/Peaches Geldof/insert any other name here designs exclusive collection’ ilk, complete with predictable interview quote of ‘I couldn’t find anything I wanted to wear so I designed my own’. Snore. Instead, we have the creator of Hed Kandi’s iconic club babes (you know the ones, their almond eyes and lithe figures are all over the London Underground) designing a collection with the Miss Selfridge team inspired by the girls on the record CD covers. 

Not only are the ten dresses suitably sexy and body-con – perfect for the target Ibiza-loving audience – but the prints are all inspired by the graphics on various Hed Kandi compilations so everything ties very nicely together. The Hed Kandi girls are almost a story in themselves. Illustrator Jason Brooks has been sketching these long-limbed lovelies since 1999 and over the years has managed to keep up with fashion yet transcend it at the same time – no mean feat. Apart from anything else, I’m a massive fan of fashion illustration but beyond that, I love a clever marketing concept and this one is genius. Pats on backs all round…

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In: New Look, out: Borders



Bloody hell! There I was popping in to Borders on Oxford Street to ‘use the facilities’ and I was greeted by the world’s biggest queue for the tills, coiling every which way around the ground floor. There must be a new Harry Potter book out, I thought, but no, it’s much more sinister than that. New Look has bought five Borders stores and the Oxford Street branch is one of the unlucky ones. Almost everything is half price (but not the magazines, natch) hence the frenzy.

The photography section looked tantalising on first inspection but when I returned for a proper recce two hours later, everything was on the floor.


What a sorry state of affairs. What on earth is going to happen to the rest of our bookshops if this is happening to Borders now? What can we do? I don’t have anything against New Look but there is already a flagship store in Marble Arch (unless they are downsizing and swapping sites), is our appetite for jazzy leggings so great that we need two branches of the same store in the same street at the expense of a bookshop? It’s all too sad!


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