Okay, maybe I can only summon three to mind whilst writing this [will add more if I can think of them] but still…they do seem to be ageing rather well, don’t they? Recent concert photos of Mr Martin Kemp got me thinking about how dishy he and Mr Nigel Taylor still are – and then I remembered that Mick Karn isn’t doing too badly either. I’m more of a Sylvian kinda girl, but Karn comes a close second with interesting hair and make-up….
An amazing cream satin Forties dress, and Anna has now been quoted as saying that she’s ‘as happy as a pig in s**t in a vintage store‘. A girl after my own heart, with very enviable hair as well. I really do love the fact that she’s dressing up for the paps outside the theatre. That’s definitely what I’d do.
I can’t stand ‘celebs’ who look pseudo-pissed-off for waiting photographers, whilst wearing some pseudo-stained t-shirt as a dress over some pseudo-ripped tights or somesuch. Stop moaning and break out the dressing-up box!
Anna Friel is someone who looks amazing in pretty much whatever she wears, and I’m usually very taken with her style choices. Something of a modern style icon in the making, I predict. There have been a few strange ones this week (now she’s appearing as Holly Golightly in London she’s being photographed post-performance each night), but she’s definitely back on form with this outfit.
I have no idea if any of it is vintage, but I love the dress, jacket, hair and make-up wholeheartedly… I don’t often flirt with the forties look, but it might be time to try again.
Please don’t all cry out ‘who???’. Noosha is a little gem of an icon of mine from the mid-late Seventies. Born Susan Traynor, and originally from Australia, she changed her name to Noosha Fox and the glam band ‘Fox’ were formed around her. Her look was very heavily influenced by the starlets of the Twenties and Thirties. She wore floaty chiffon dresses, swishy capes, fringed shawls and flowers in that ringletted bob. Her make-up was a glorious mix of blue eyeshadow-ed Seventies-ness and that flapper girl cupid’s bow pout. And oh! that adorably squeaky, Helen Kane-inspired voice. She’s like a silent movie star taken out of her time and plonked on the set of Top of the Pops.
It’s fairly safe to say that Ms. Alison Goldfrapp has taken rather a healthy dose of inspiration from little Noosha. I love how unique and seemingly unspoilt her performances are. Someone who would never be a star nowadays, due to her slightly awkward dancing and facial expressions. But I adore her. She’s just so cute, and her clothes are delicious (being both very Seventies and also very antique-looking), and, and…..the songs are amazing. I have no idea what you look like now, or even what you’re up to, but Noosha – I salute you!!
It’s been tough to find enough images of this icon to fill the space, so I would highly recommend your looking at some footage of Fox on YouTube.
(I’ve been meaning to publish this in response to the dénouement of Style on Trial for a while now, so here it is….)
The Seventies won out in the end. I thought it was a lost cause, quite frankly, because people are so biased against a decade they associate with polyester and bad taste. Irritatingly and blatantly ignoring the fact that man made fibres in various forms have been in steady use in clothing since the 1930s. And bad taste is always with us. As much in the Fifties and Sixties as it was in the Seventies and Eighties, our specs have just got rosier with time passing.
Wayne Hemingway’s impassioned plea for glam, punk, northern soul and disco was certainly appealing to me, but I could also see why Celia Birtwell would question whether any of those clothes look remotely appealing on older ladies. My response to that would have been that I know many women who still wear their Ossie dresses well into their forties and fifties and still look incredible. Everything permitting, I hope I’ll be one of those ladies myself. She commented that forties styles were far more wearable for people of all ages, possibly forgetting that the Seventies (and specifically the likes of her ex-hubby) incorporated a lot of forties silhouettes and styles, updating them and making them sexier and more modern. All of which look gorgeous on older women as well.
So, perhaps the Forties should have won? I certainly enjoyed Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen’s case for the decade, and was convinced that they would all vote for his era of choice. But in terms of the most rounded decade for fashion, I actually think the Seventies had it all.
Affordable clothing for those who wanted it, in the days before it was all farmed out to children in a sweatshop in Sri Lanka. Vivid, fun, sexy clothes for teenagers and twenty-somethings. Glamorous eveningwear and wearable separates for older, working women. Polyester has its place, and revolutionised the lot of the housewife, but you could just as easily get delicious crepes, jerseys and wool.
Platforms were infinitely superior to spindly little stiletto heels, and they didn’t have to be 6 inches high (unless you were a member of Slade or a very brave woman). Different styles and cultural groups or identities were plentiful. You could wear the general style of the era, or you could choose who you wanted to be.
Hair was fairly low maintenance if you so wished. And there was a style for all hair types. Every other decade (and trend within that decade) seems to have beaten everyone’s hair into submission to one overarching style. Likewise with make-up, there was a general look but fewer rules than before. The preferred female silhouette was natural. Curved but never to excess. Softness prevailed. No corsetted waists, but no severe straightness either.
Men actually cared about clothes. Not about labels in the way they do now. Clothes. They cared about fabric, colour, silhouette. They didn’t give a rat’s behind about looking overly feminine, and to my eye actually look more appealing and masculine in all their satin and tat.
Okay, perhaps not in the case of The Sweet….but I still adore them!
Ultimately it was the best attitude to style we’ve seen for a long time. Trying everything. Experimenting, being brave, making your own choices and not necessarily the same choice as anyone else. There was a good reason the New Romantics were harking back to Glam Rock and, to a lesser extent, disco. There was always a general ‘look’, but no one slavishly followed rules (unlike the mods, rockers, teddy boys and so on). You were expressing yourself.
While I don’t think any era can really be truly hailed as the greatest, and certainly style is a very subjective concept (the word stylish, in fact, makes me think of the word timeless….and thus, a bit dull and safe), I think the Seventies was a very brave but very well rounded choice to make.
I have decided that Yasmin Le Bon is Beatle-wife-gold-standard. Of course it helps that she’s impossibly beautiful and wealthy, but she seems really sweet in the interviews I’ve seen. Strong but feminine, and goofy enough that you don’t hate her for being impossibly beautiful and the wife of a Duran. She still looks incredible, and I love the colour of her dress here at the British Fashion Awards.
(She’s also wearing FAUX fur, FAUX fur – yes I’m glaring at a photo of Mrs John Taylor, Gela Nash, in a huge REAL fur jacket at the launch of the latest Juicy Tat Couture launch. Naughty Duran wife, naughty!!)
I’m sure it’s a modern take on a Thirties-style evening gown, but this is proper glamour. Some of the other people on the red carpet that night would do well to take heed. Black tights and smock mini dresses are adorable, but they’re not red carpet. They’ll also be dated within a year. In fact, I thought they already were? Anyway, this is how you work it…..
At some point, I intend to make Alison Goldfrapp one of my website style icons and I will wax lyrical about her fabulousness in greater detail. In the meantime, may I just say that the photoshoot for Goldfrapp’s latest album, Seventh Tree, is officially my new favourite photoshoot in recent years. I knew I was going to love the new look after the distinctly Bill Gibb style tunic she wore in the A&E video, [and whoever created the dancing leaf people was a genius], but I had no idea just how much. I really hope there are even more shots from this, but for the time being I’ll just post the divine images I’ve seen so far. Yeah, yeah, it’s not exactly wearable but who cares?
I feel a sudden need to be hugged by a giant owl whilst wearing a clown tunic. Who wouldn’t?
Now where can I find me a Harlequin suit, hat and a big empty space to run around wearing it?If you haven’t already seen the fabulous There’s a Girl in My Soup, please do so immediately! Quite apart from its general Swinging Sixties fabulousness (Goldie Hawn, Peter Sellers and a very groovy soundtrack), Ms. Hawn’s entire wardrobe was designed by Ossie Clark AND Alice Pollock. Quite how a poor American girl living in a basement with her sleazy boyfriend could afford Alice and Ossie to start with, I’ll never know – but I guess that’s why we watch films.
We first meet her in a very sassy little yellow ruffled crop top, navy blue calf-length crepe skirt and an astonishing blue and yellow high collared cloak.
On their jaunt to France, she gets sozzled in a see-through green chiffon mini dress with plunging ruffled neckline, buttoned back and matching green knickers (quite clearly visible even before she disgraces herself and gets carried around on his shoulder).
Next she dons a gorgeous cream chiffon blouse (the ruffles do the concealment work of a bra, apparently), flippy cream maxi skirt and a trailing chiffon trimmed straw hat.
We briefly see what looks like an incredible pink crepe maxi overdress and a floppy pink felt hat which is trimmed with a distinctive Celia print chiffon.
Then she happens to run across a Boutique in which she finds the most incredibly vibrant Celia-print halter neck maxi (if only t’were that easy these days) in which she dances the night away with a garland of flowers around her neck.
Finally, her new found confidence and savvy is reflected in a super sharp black skirt suit with a cream silk sharp collared blouse (and some serious hair!).
I queued patiently to buy some of the Celia magic, I tried to zone out the people standing around muttering “No idea who this woman is, but I know this stuff will sell on ebay”, I narrowly avoided being ripped to shreds as the rails were pushed out and all hell broke loose. I bought the pieces which had some manufacturing integrity (did anyone actually ever wear that botticelli print silk monstrosity?? so badly made I wanted to weep….) and put my years of hardened vintage shopping to good use as I walked around clutching the dress everyone was wetting themselves over and ignoring the black market-level dirty looks and whispers of ‘are you buying that?’
It was fun as a one-off. Something to tell the grandkids about, since I don’t have a Biba experience like that to share.
I didn’t bother second time around, the second collection was a poor relation and I don’t need the hassle. I’d rather spend my time and money getting an original.But at least she designed the prints and had some claim to the copied shapes of Ossie’s. The woman has talent.
Kate Moss in the original (left) and the Topshop copy (right)
Kate Moss at Topshop is a travesty. Normally such a non-event would barely register in the world of Ms. Peelpants. I couldn’t care less about Madonna at H&M, Lily Allen at New Look or even some of the least talented designers in the world getting deals with the same shops (naming no names, but I’ve heard some very interesting first-hand things about one of them lately and am suitably smug that I guessed they had no talent years ago). But Kate Moss at Topshop has affected me on a very personal level, and opened eyes to the true extent of the shallow money-grabbing at the heart of the fashion world these days.
I remember noting with amusement that Kate Moss had a vintage Bus Stop dress I also have. Much like the Ossie jacket she once wore, it’s always a nice little nod to the vintage community that vintage is still cool and it can do wonders for the image of what are, to most people’s minds, just someone’s old cast-offs. We know they’re not, but sometimes the challenge is to change other people’s perceptions. Kate Moss did the vintage community a lot of good in the past, but now she’s cheated on us.
For she has now ‘allowed’ (inverted commas to note that it is not her place to allow such a thing) Topshop to copy the aforementioned dress for her ‘collection’. A travesty so awful, on so many levels it’s taken me about a week to calm down enough to write this. They’ve copied the dress exactly, even down to getting the print copied and the detailing around the neck and on the sleeves. To add insult to injury, the dress in her closet had been hacked with what looks like nail scissors and is now a bum-skimming mini dress. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see how badly out of proportion even the remake is. They’ve remade a ruined dress.
Lee Bender should sue Topshop. Her work has been copied stitch for stitch. It’s one thing to be inspired, Bender herself would have to admit that the dress was heavily inspired by dresses of the Forties, but there’s no room for the word inspiration here. This is duplication and it’s disgusting.
On a more personal level, one of my absolute favourite dresses has been ruined for me. This year everyone will think I’m wearing bleeding Kate Moss at Topshop. Next year, everyone will think I’m wearing two seasons old bleeding Kate Moss at Topshop. Two years time, perhaps the fashion world with its attention span of a gnat might have forgotten all about Kate Moss at Topshop (or perhaps Kate Moss herself, we can but hope).But my dress will still be tainted by the association and I resent the fact that I will always have to think carefully about whether to wear it or not. To sell it now would be to cash in. To sell next year, well no one will want the same problems I would have. But really, I don’t want to sell it. I bought it for me, and it fits me like it was stitched to my body.
Yours truly in the original dress
Liz Eggleston 
