The other day, I tried to explain to my Mother the singular pain of longing to own Acne’s classic Pistol boot, and finding oneself without any money; this wasn’t a plea for the money to buy said shoes, you understand, as she doesn’t have it either, but more the result of a desperate need to share such a terrible burden. A woman can only take so much on her own.
“You could always try Clarks?”
Evidently, I made some sort of faint noise of displeasure on the other end of the phone.
“I don’t know why you have such a problem with Clarks, Philippa. It’s all well and good being fashionable, but what about your feet?”
The last part was said with a quiet desperation, as though any moment my arches might collapse and all of my toes dissolve, leaving me wobbling around on small, flat and featureless stumps, like one of those elderly pigeons that’s shat its own feet off, and so in the spirit of goodwill, I agreed to spend a few minutes perusing the startlingly mumsy Clarks website; the woman gave birth to me, after all, in what I hear was a particularly painful and protracted labour, so a cursory glance at some matronly shooties (urgh) seems a small price to pay in comparison.
There should never be a category of boot entitled “Wide-legged”. That this should happen is a grave and inutterable wrong, and I am happy to stick firmly to this pronouncement until death. That said, I found myself quite liking these, which I am worried qualifies me both for a small slice of humble pie, and for the beginning of a sad and terrible passage into the world of Mothers’ footwear:
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But you can bet they’d be as soothing as fuck on the ol’ soon-to-be-toeless-stumps.
I realise that this tweet is supposed to be a reference to Ugly Betty – believe me, I do – but robbed of the context of the previous missive about PR interns, it does sort of make you look as though you just hate hispanic people.
(Is ‘hispanic’ racist? I don’t know why I’m asking, because with 800 spam comments lined up, I’ll never get your reply.)
I’m not going to lie to you – today, I Googled my name. It was partly because I’d noticed that people had been finding me on Facebook and Twitter after reading this drivel, which I assume was done via Google, and partly out of curiosity. To clear a few things up, I’d just like to go on record as saying this:
Not once, to my knowledge, have I ever taken gloomy photographs of a goth for their modelling portfolio. I apologise for making this known here, “India Rose”, but there it is.
If you’d like to see a mediocre photo that I’ve taken, however, there’s still hope – it is indeed me who was class of ’10 at Camberwell College of Arts, and I have absolutely no viable excuse for that. I’m sorry for that, too.
I know that I tend to write a lot about weight and body shape, and it should be fairly obvious by now that I am batshit insane when it comes to this particular facet of being alive, and should not be trusted (in real life, I have actually hovered around a size eight, or a US size four, more or less forever, falling to a six at my thinnest, and occasionally requiring a ten at my largest. Like almost all women I know, I am an idiot, and believe that expanding into double figures makes me something akin to Jabba The Hutt, but I am not entirely sure what to do about it. My mother always told me that life’s greatest dream is to spend as much of your time as possible doing what you are good at; I am terrible at exercising, but conversely, I am excellent at drinking cider). When I read this extract from comedienne Tina Fey’s memoirs in the Guardian this morning, however, I had to put it here, because it is far truer, far funnier, and far more succinct than anything I have ever said here on the matter. It’s also worth noting that elsewhere in this extract, she answers an accusation that she “doesn’t have a funny bone in her body” with the words “You know who does have a funny bone in her body? Your mom, every night, for a dollar”, which isn’t relevant, but which is amusing to me:
“Remembrances of Being Very Very Skinny
For a brief time at the turn of the century, I was very skinny. This is what I remember about that period.
• I was cold all the time.
• I had a pair of size-four corduroy short shorts. That I wore. To work. In the middle of Manhattan.
• I loved it when people told me I was getting too thin.
• I once took a bag of sliced red peppers to the beach as a snack.
• I regularly ate health food cookies so disgusting that when I enthusiastically gave one to Rachel Dratch she drew a picture of a rabbit and broke the cookie into a trail of tiny pieces coming out of the rabbit’s butt.
• Men I had met before suddenly paid attention to me . . . and I hated them for it.
• Sometimes I had to sleep with a pillow between my legs because my bony knees clanking together kept me awake.
• I had a lot of time on my hands because I wasn’t constantly eating.
• I ran three miles a day on a treadmill six days a week.
• I felt wonderfully superior to everyone.
• I didn’t have a kid yet.
We should leave people alone about their weight. Being skinny for a while (provided you actually eat food and don’t take pills or smoke to get there) is a perfectly fine pastime. Everyone should try it once, like a super-short haircut or dating a white guy.
Remembrances of Being a Little Bit Fat
For a brief time at the end of that last century I was overweight. This is what I remember about that period.
• My boobs were bigger.
• I once left a restaurant in the middle of dessert to get to Krispy Kreme before it closed.
• Even though I only liked McDonald’s fries, I believed it was more nutritious to make a meal of it and have two cheeseburgers as well.
• If I was really ambitious, I would get a Whopper Jr at Burger King and then walk to McDonald’s to get the fries. The shake could be from anywhere.
• I could not run a mile.
• I wore oversize men’s overalls that I loved.
• Guys who were friends did not want to date me . . . and I hated them for it.
• On at least three occasions, I vomited on Christmas Eve from mixing chocolate, peel-and-eat shrimp, summer sausage and cheese. No alcohol was involved.
• As a size 12, I took pride that I was “real woman”-sized. “Size 12 is the national average,” I would boast, “no matter what magazines try to tell you.”
• Once, while ironing in my underwear, I grazed my protruding belly with the hot iron.
We should leave people alone about their weight. Being chubby for a while (provided you don’t give yourself diabetes) is a natural phase of life and nothing to be ashamed of. Like puberty or slowly turning into a Republican.”
Speaking of Gaga, actually, here’s a staggeringly egocentric quote from the Lady regarding the suicide of Lee McQueen, which appears in an upcoming issue of Harper’s Bazaar:
“I think he planned the whole thing: Right after he died, I wrote ‘Born This Way.’ I think he’s up in heaven with fashion strings in his hands, marionetting away, planning this whole thing.” Supporting Gaga’s claim was the decision by the label–not Gaga herself–to move up the release date for “Born This Way,” ultimately to the exact day of the one-year anniversary of McQueen’s death. “When I heard that, I knew he planned the whole damn thing.”
Which I have no words for, really. To paraphrase Patti Smith – who I also mentioned in my last post, pertinently enough – McQueen may have died so that somebody could listen to Lady Gaga’s pedestrian re-tread of ‘Express Yourself”, but not me.I’ll also add this: in case you’d imagined that the late, great designer’s suicide note had somehow managed, by some cosmic coincidence, to foretell his involvement in Gaga’s Magnum Opus, here’s what it actually said.
I’m sorry to have to bring this to your attention, assuming that you haven’t already seen it, but what the sweet everlasting sod is this?
For those of you who haven’t already been subjected to this Porcelain Black character, know this; she’s “The New Lady Gaga”, a simulacrum of a simulacrum of Madonna, and is the protegee of Lil Wayne. She looks more or less as good as I do in suspenders and a pair of pants, which is to say that she looks a little bit soft and unformed, with the same kind of ectoplasmic pallor that tends to look good on camera, but cadaverous in person, like a corpse dredged up from a lake (I can be this rude, remember, because I’m really talking about myself, which offers me some kind of moral loophole). She’s also, apparently, “What Rock And Roll Looks Like” now, which is particularly distressing, especially as I’m fairly sure that rock and roll always used to look more like Patti Smith, who was still a little on the pale and cadaverous side, but who always managed to dress in a way that enhanced her otherworldliness, instead of using it to force her way onto the cover of Front Magazine (Front Magazine, incidentally, is another of those very modern inventions which confuses me, partly because I’m unsure whether the men who buy cheapo wank mags are discerning enough about the women whose “Grade A Knockers” they crack one out over to care one way or the other about Lovely Rebecca From Colchester’s interest in Funeral For A Friend, or what age she was when her parents allowed her to pierce her septum).
I don’t know – maybe I’m just getting old. I mean, I really quite like her hair. Is that anything?
At the Sass and Bide show this season, I wore a pair of skintight jeans, some cuban-heeled, masculine boots, and a leopard coat, with my long, usually-shaggy black hair and eye-grazing fringe ironed straight. As I was leaving the venue (Il Bottaccio, incidentally, which I had never been inside before), I met eyes with Alison Mosshart, who was doing a video interview – possibly for Grazia – and was wearing skintight jeans, some cuban-heeled, masculine boots, and a leopard coat, with her long, usually shaggy-black hair and eye-grazing fringe ironed straight. Momentarily, we exchanged a smile and a tiny nod of acknowledgement, as if to say ‘Nice outfit, brah”, and then I buggered off grumpily back into the fray.
Oh God, I know, I’m a terrible person, and I’ve been in absentia for a long time. In case you were wondering what vital shit I’ve been up to since I last posted here, I’ve mostly been obsessing about earrings (actually, that’s a lie, because what I’ve mostly been doing is looking for work, slogging away full-time for free and gratis, freelancing in my spare time, emptying the pockets of all my leather jackets in search of loose change, and doing all the other stuff that dole scum tend to do, but nobody comes to a fashion-based blog in order to read about other people’s misery). The first obsession – and the one that’s most attainable – is these, by Danielle Scutt:
Which I think would go at least some way to satisfying my desire for blonde hair. I’d rather they were human hair than synthetic, of course, but at £35, one can’t really complain, and I’d rather we didn’t all go pillaging corpses in search of a “mayj look” anyway. I am dangerously close to buying these, even though I am as broke as a mouse that lives in some kind of remote Church of the occult, because although nothing – quite literally nothing- can be described as ‘within my budget” at this juncture, they at least come closer than these:
Which are by Pamela Love, and which I would imagine will retail at around $400. I am only half-joking when I say that I would prostitute myself for these, and that they make me want to cry sad, salty, pauper tears when I look at them. I’m not saying that I’d give up my cat for them, because we know that I am an insane cat woman, and God knows I love that hirsute little cockblocker, but my half-demon firstborn would be A-OK.
The other day, I tried to explain to my Mother the singular pain of longing to own Acne’s classic Pistol boot, and finding oneself without any money; this wasn’t a plea for the money to buy said shoes, you understand, as she doesn’t have it either, but more the result of a desperate need to share such a terrible burden. A woman can only take so much on her own.
