It's OK for intellectual feminists to like fashion

April 19th 2013

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23 Rules which have inspired my style

Stripes: Neutral colours.
Men’s shirt: Only comes from the menswear department.
Tweed jacket over jeans, smoking jacket over a printed t-shirt, leather jacket over everything else.
Skirts: Never below the knee. Never mid-calf.
Trousers: Ankle-length is the perfect length.
White dresses: Always with colour pop shoes, never black or white ones.
Tights: Unless you’re a grandmother or a Duchess, never wear skin-colour ones (Ines de la Fressange).
Cleavage and legs are mutually exclusive, even if you have very little of both.
Only wear heels you can walk in.
Never buy something you struggle to put on in the store changing room (my mum).
To lengthen the leg, straps must always be under the malleolus (my sister).
Loose top, skinny bottom.
“When accessorising always take off the last thing you put on” (Coco Chanel).
The high-street/high-end mix only works if you can afford high end.
If something looks amazing on Olivia Palermo/Diane Kruger/mocktress of the moment, it doesn’t mean it will look good on you.
If something looks bad on Olivia Palermo/Diane Kruger/mocktress of the moment, it means it will look bad on you.
Navy blue is more refined than black (my sister).
Don’t wear it if you’re scared to stain it/crease it/tear it.
Being cold isn’t elegant.
If it seems like a good idea in store because you don’t own anything similar, it means it isn’t.
Stick to a few trusted brands. It makes throwing outfits together that much easier.
There is no such thing as too much underwear.
Scarves dress an entire outfit up or down.

All pictures by Tommy Ton, sourced from a variety of sites.

Posted at 8:13pm and tagged with: list, first person,.

November 27th 2012

First Person: A Wardrobe Full of Unwearable Clothes

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I bought a t-shirt last summer for a lot more money than it was worth. I’ve worn it twice, and it has since been gathering dust, though hopefully not moths, at the bottom of my white t-shirt pile. The official reason is that I ordered it at the end of the summer, and by the time I received it, it was too cold for t-shirts. You could wear it under a jacket, you say? I hear ya.

Truth is, I can’t face wearing this t-shirt, a reminder of a less than sound financial decision. I went through a similar phase when I bought my Yves Saint Laurent Muse, leaving it in its dust bag for weeks. To this day, it spends more time in than out, although I do carry it from time to time for weeks on end.

Of course, logic dictates that having bought an expensive accessory or item of clothing, I should use it as much as possible, to get my money’s worth. I am however concerned by the quality of the t-shirt, having had a few appalling experiences of button losses with the brand I bought it from. I am not sure how many washes it will withstand before the motif starts fading. As I said, not my most sound purchase.

When I bought this t-shirt, I full-well intended to wear it. I had even started assembling outfits in my minds. As such, it should be differentiated from another category littering my wardrobe but hardly ever worn: the concept clothes.

Concept clothes are bought, generally in the sales, because I either think I look hot in them, have been lusting after them all season long or think they would be perfect for a cocktail party or a date, never mind I never go to either.

Maje is the biggest culprit. There’s the life ambition dress (which I bought, eventually, after annoying the whole family over it), a blue draped dress, which I’ve worn once in over a year of owning, mostly to justify buying it and never giving it to the charity shop, a raspberry pink dress with shoulders as big as its V-neck is low, a skirt made of so many layers of fabric I don’t even know how to get into it and my personal favourite, a corseted white lace dress I can’t get in or out of because the process is just too darn complicated.

The concept dress is beautiful but unpractical. Think silk, significant décolletage, easily creased cloth, dry clean a minimum, specialist clean preferred. It’s only useful if your life is all about sitting pretty and being chauffeured from one fabulous party to another. Think Daphne Guinness.

The concept dress isn’t for me. It isn’t even the promise of a life, or the feeling of how much better my life would be if I had places to wear this type of garment to. The concept dress is bought purely for theoretical value. It is about my obsession with building the perfect wardrobe. If you asked me what I am most proud of, my wardrobe would feature in the top five. I have something for every occasion. Except really waterproof rainwear. Which is just fine, since I’m not living in a country where it rains too often.

Posted at 5:20am and tagged with: first person, dream shopping, yves saint laurent,.

November 17th 2012

First Person: My General Petraeus Education

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If you studied International Relations in the mid to late noughties, or had any interest in contemporary warfare during that same period, I would challenge you not to have heard of General David Petraeus. I name-checked the man and his counterinsurgency doctrine in more than onr essay. Petraeus is widely thought, if not as the instigators of counterinsurgency, at least as one of its foremost proponents. The “let’s build nations rather than bomb the shit out of them” approach might seem a bit of a “duh, common sense” idea, but until Petraeus’ Iraq and Afghanistan leadership, this phase, on a large scale, was mostly synonymous with post, rather than during-war behaviour. It was something (and I overly simplify here) occupying forces would consider as a way to settle down. Think post WW2 Germany.

The first time I heard about Petraeus was in 2007, when he became commander of the Iraq Multi-National Force. What struck me was neither his leadership, nor his strategy but rather his name, which seemed straight out of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars. Having spent many teenage hours translating Roman war strategy texts, I could just picture Petraeus consorting with Hannibal over the best way to trap the Romans at Lake Trasimene. The name was the hook but as I researched the leader, I found his mastership of modern media fascinating. He wasn’t just running counterinsurgency abroad, he was running a parallel campaign at home, becoming a pin-up general and gathering popular and political support.

As you can imagine, for the past week, I have been glued to my computer, questioning in the process this slightly unhealthy interest. In sex scandals, I am generally the first in a conversation to ask “who cares” (as long as it was agreed between all parties, I’m looking at you DSK) but in this instance, I care very much. Part of me is disappointed by the sheer banality of it. How can Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, by all accounts two smart individuals with such careers and promises, fall on the stupidest of swords? An affair, when you’ve worked in counter-terrorism and ran a couple of wars, isn’t it a bit… mundane? Shouldn’t history have taught them better? Part of me likes the almost Greek aspect of the story, this crime of hubris of thinking your intellect and intelligence experience will allow you to outsmart everybody.

Scandal after scandal, we are reminded that as human beings, we want irreproachable leaders we equally admire and envy for their rise and success, their drive and ambition. This envy is at the heart of their downfalls since we like to think they are, in fact, no better than us. It makes becoming them seem more possible. For that very reason, I doubt we’ve seen the last of Petraeus. He’s shown he was a leader, and he’s shown he was human. Unless malpractices are discovered in the process, if he plays it right he could come out of the scandal stronger.

If nothing else, we’ll likely see him impersonated on the big screen in the next few years. The scenario is just writing itself. As a reminder: General Petraeus stepped down from the CIA after his affair with biographer Broadwell was discovered following emails she wrote to army social liaison Jill Kelley warning her off her lover. Kelley asked the FBI to look into the threatening correspondence, which resulted in an FBI agent sending her shirtless pictures of himself and in the Bureau stumbling upon pages of “flirty” emails she’d been exchanging with General John R. Allen, who replaced Petraeus in Afghanistan. You just can’t make this kind of intertwined plot up.

I’m calling for Daniel Craig and Angelina Jolie in the title roles, not because they look like Petraeus or Broadwell but because a movie with the two of them has been overdue since Tomb Raider. As for the scenario, I’d give it, another personal indulgence, to Aaron Sorkin, who can write leadership and sexual tension like no one else when he really pours his heart and brain into it. Not to mention his penmanship would play quite well with the sexist and double standard undertones the affair narrative has been riddled with.

Posted at 12:16pm and tagged with: first person,.

October 15th 2012

First Person: How I Discovered The Online Fashion Community

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It was the summer I bought my first (and so far only, gathering dust in the cupboard) Vanessa Bruno cabas bag because ELLE had been telling me for years it was the bag to own to be cool and fashionable. It was purple, because in 2006, purple was totally my colour, as proved by no photo of me at all. It was purple because it was the only decent colour left in the shop and I was determined to buy a cabas.

Fashion Carrousel (to make this narration easier and because it’s her name, we’ll call her Camille) and I had just spent the first of what would become our annual Paris summer reunion shopping and visiting the French capital and generally feeling cool because ELLE had been telling us for years that all the cool shops and people were in Paris. We started doubting it when we walked into Colette and thought the store silly and overrated. That was my first lesson in fashion magazine disappointment.

In addition to the cabas bag, I had purchased some Antoine & Lili, Repetto and Des Petits Hauts, brands cooler than me which I had only been vaguely aware of thanks to adverts, photoshoots and articles (some would say advertorials) in ELLE.

So imagine me, obsessed ELLE reader yet unaware of the online fashion community, new owner of cool clothes, me before I discovered the RSS function, a discovery* I regret every morning when my Google Reader shows 1000+ unread posts.

Not that I was a total digital moron. I was on Facebook (back then, Facebook was a cool, elitist concept only available to good universities) and had run a quickly defunct Blogger blog about the Royal Family (the reason I came to London, remember?).

Camille was about to start engineering school in the South of France, and I was about to start my second year at the LSE: we therefore decided to run mirroring, password-protected blogs to update each other. Hers would become funny and complainy, mine serious and complainy but at the time, I thought up this brilliant idea: why wouldn’t I post pictures of myself wearing my new cool clothes and document in the process my search for the perfect wardrobe, something every French woman is obsessed with. As with everything, I blame ELLE.

I immediately Googled the idea (see, not a digital moron) to check if anyone had had it. It was 2006 so yes, of course people had had it, although not as many people as have had it by now. Our Internet connection at home was dial-up, please feel my pain loading up the picture-based blogs which painfully slowly killed my brilliant idea. My not-so-quick search showed me there were people out there doing it, and pretty well. There and then, I decided to end my not-even-started personal style blog. As a consequence, my first blog posts to Camille were: a story of my mum, my dad and I going swimming, a recipe for a chocolate cake, one about William and Kate (let’s keep the Windsors close and the chocolate cake closer) and one about how happy I was it was my last day working as a hospital cleaner (you would have been too).

In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t set up a personal style blog because I’m terrible at staging myself and I wouldn’t have fared well amongst my peers (~~or maybe I would have become a blogging sensation of the Style Bubble or Bryan Boy quality~~). The “journey to the perfect wardrobe” had a more interesting, if a bit self-aggrandising angle yet it took me four more years to set up my own fashion blog. I needed the time to get used to putting my ideas out on the world wide web (under password at first, I was brave), to get to know the online fashion community and to come up with a blog concept that hadn’t been overused yet could be of interest to people. The result was Fashion Abecedaire, the whooping 3 000 monthly hits I get a clear proof I have found my niche.

* I blame my friend and sometimes mentor Stacy-Marie for introducing me to RSS feeds a day I was complaining about my difficulty to keep track of blogs. However, this shouldn’t stop you from subscribing to her really good Galavant Time newsletter. It’s so good it hasn’t been ~~ruined~~ mentioned by ELLE. No one paid me to run this footnote and I received no free sample.

Posted at 5:40am and tagged with: blogosphere, blogger adventure, ELLE, first person,.

September 2nd 2012

First Person: How I Moved to London

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Friday 31 August marked the ninth anniversary of my move to London. I was 17 and realising my dream by spending my last year of high school in a foreign land, living amongst people whose language and customs represented a struggle. Some people say it was brave, I think it was foolhardy. I had no idea what to expect, let alone that nine years on, I’d still be living in London.

I moved to England on 31 August, which in my personal mythology is quite significant. Even though I had started learning English a couple years before, I only realised in earnest England existed when princess Diana died. A British couple was staying at our house, and I couldn’t understand why the event made them laugh whereas the telly broadcast interview after interview of their crying compatriots, analysis of why the country was losing its legendary phlegm and questions over the survival of the monarchy. Great-Britain was a monarchy! As a 12 year-old French pupil, my idea of the monarchy was Loire Castles and François I, Henri IV’s chicken for all and Louis XIV building Versailles. Not a constitutionally-defined institution, and certainly not one which would have survived in the 20th century.

So to understand, I started reading books on the Royal Family, then and now, in a voracious, non-discerning manner. Trust me, that’s a lot of crap writing. Around the same time, I discovered Harry Potter. The common point between books on the Windsors and JK Rowling’s is that they were published in English before being translated, giving me no choice but to learn the language quickly. It was a matter of understanding, which for me has always been synonymous with survival.

Fast forward to 2002. I was still obsessed with England, had taken a few short trips to the country and Jersey and more importantly was bored in my local high-school. Which is when I read an interview with Jodie Foster (likely in ELLE) about how she’d gone to a French Lycée in New York. Some random Internet search taught me there was one in London, that it was one of the best French schools across the world (France included) and that it ran a program of scholarships for teenagers living in France but wanting to study in a different country. Oh and the deadline to apply was a week from that day.

I got in, and that’s how I moved to London.

Posted at 1:25pm and tagged with: first person, london, Royal Family, Harry Potter,.

August 29th 2012

First Person: Inner Dialogue Around The Perfect Coat

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Temptation: This fits you perfectly, it’s so snug

Reason: A bit too snug maybe? You could probably go one size up, you’ll never fit a jumper underneath.

Temptation: Cashmere and wool with rabbit fur, you’d never need to wear anything underneath anyway

Reason: But you’re cold, all the time, cold for you isn’t a temperature, it’s a state of mind, practiced 24/7.

Temptation: You can just throw it on over an evening dress, it will be perfect to go out.

Reason: When was the last time you went out?

The Voice: Point taken. It would be perfect for a date.

Reason: Don’t you think it’s a bit intimidating?

Temptation: Maybe so but you’ve wanted it since you saw it on that amazing PR lady at the show last September.

Reason: True but she’s much taller and thinner than you. You’re not thinking of buying it to be more like her, are you? In any case, it makes you look corpse-like. I can really see the dark circles under your eyes right now.

Temptation: That’s because this coat is making you feel elated, feverish and a little bit sick.

Reason: That’s a sign you can’t justify it. This would be your fourth coat this week, and you already have so many you’ll soon need to annex the balcony. You know the guilt you’ll feel will equal your current desire for it. Not that I’m remotely feeling sorry for you.

Temptation: It’s a good price though, or at least not cheap enough to make the decision easier.

The Sales Assistant: Actually it’s £Twice-the-price-on-the-label

Reason: That decides it then

Temptations: You never know, it might still be there tomorrow.

Reason: Let’s sleep on it.

Posted at 8:48pm and tagged with: retail, shopping, dream shopping, first person,.

August 25th 2012

Retail: Don’t forget the small people

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“Let me look for the cropped version”. I was standing in the Sandro changing rooms, in a pair of trousers needing a good 5cm of shortening. The sales assistant came back 5 minutes later, empty handed: “I think you might already be wearing the cropped version”. I was. In fact, these trousers were never produced in anything but a cropped version, yet they were still too long for me.

I’m not particularly small, yet “(Oh My God) you’re so small” is one of the most recurrent comments I hear from my co-workers, taken aback by the 15cm I loose when I take off my heels. At 1,54m, I would be considered tall in India, Bahrain, Bangladesh and a dozen other countries*, or in Europe in the 18th century. Not that I have any intention to move to any of these regions, nor do any of the small people I know.

When commentators criticise fashion for being a sizeist industry, they mean girth, not height. A crusade championing plus size women, and the lack of clothes at their disposal, is more populist and headline-grabbing, at least in Western countries, than wishing for shorter trousers, skirts and dresses. It’s also easier: the first requires added width of sizes (and possible design adaptation), the second demands producing the same size in different, length-based versions. It would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention eating up on margins since produced volume in each size would be lower.

Yet as fashion brands conquer more and more markets with a significant percentage of small people (The average Chinese height is about 10 cm below the average British height, although this largely depends on the survey you refer to*), clothing companies might not have a choice. Just like brands started introducing sizes and designs tailored to the need of a bigger audience when they realised overweight Americans were a great, untapped market, they could create sizes for smaller people. Acknowledging the “sizing challenge” in Asia, companies such as Kiwi sportswear have already started producing lines based on this height difference.

Would such items be sold in Europe? Considering the percentage of sales to Asians and Middle-Easterners in European stores, as well as my purely self-centred motives, I like to think so. The small market is just getting too big to be ignored.

* Based on the Average height around the world Wikipedia table, consulted 25 August 2012

Pictures: Photo from Elle Muliarchyk Dressing Room self portrait series

Posted at 6:15pm and tagged with: shopping, retail, first person,.

July 29th 2012

First Person: The Life Ambition Dress

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Yesterday, some time between skinny jeans and Tunisian t-shirts at Berenice and a bright pink jacket from Des Petits Hauts, I fell in love with a dress. It was midnight blue, straight cut, above the knees with an integrated cape. Fashion Carrousel immediately dubbed it the Batman dress, comparing it to a mixture of Jackie O (good) and our paternal grandmother (bad). I thought it was the perfect balance of Jil Sander clean minimalism and Phoebe Philo Celine fashion intellectualisation.

I had started styling it, with a large black studded belt, the second I took it off the rack. Yet when it came to buying it (once in the brand’s own store and once at its corner in Galleries Lafayette), I just couldn’t bring myself to doing it. It wasn’t the price of the dress, nor the fact I couldn’t see myself getting enough wears out of it in my current life.

The dress was about my future and about what I could see myself as in 20 years. I could see myself wearing it in a boardroom and I imagined the dress commanding authority and self-confidence. I freaked out at the till point, twice, because I was too scared it would stay in my closet, month after month, year after year, not being worn, staring back at me accusingly every time I opened my wardrobe, reminding me I just wasn’t getting there. In the space of on afternoon, this cape dress went from beautiful item of clothing to life ambition challenge and buying it became part of a wider self-questioning over what I want my life to be.

Photo: Richard Nicoll cape dress by Carolina Engman at Fashion Squad

Posted at 9:46am and tagged with: first person, womenswear, dream shopping,.

May 21st 2012

How to use Pinterest if your blog isn’t picture-based

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Pinterest is a picture-based social network. And despite all the traffic-generating promises it held, my blog is so not picture-based I couldn’t see how to use it. But I signed up because, eh, better make sure I owned my name on it. And once I had signed up, I started using it because, eh, better not waste a traffic opportunity.

My first instinct was to pin my “Which” posts. Built with nothing but photos around an elected theme, they make for rather nice, unified boards, as well as being identified by my Google Analytics as my most traffic-generating entries. But they’re limited. Pinning these posts taught me that a successful board is one which can be expanded with time rather than relying on the few pictures previously selected for a post. In the future, I could see these boards being useful to pin all the fashion editorials and movie stills I find while researching, but end up casting aside due to sheer volume.

In an attempt to build traffic, I’ve also started monthly boards pinning all articles I write, but Pinterest doesn’t really work that way for me: over the past 30 days, the social network has only brought me five visitors. None spent more than 1:30 minutes on the blog, with a bounce rate of 60%. People seem to consume visuals on Pinterest itself, rather than clicking through links.

My second move was to use Pinterest as a way of displaying the Fashion Abecedaire world, going to the reader rather than bringing the reader to me. Social networks are all about bragging and showing off to people how much greener life is your side of the fence. In that spirit, my Twitter feed could be summarised as “look how cool and extensive my readings are”. So I started a board “In praise of stripes”, because I love showing off about how many stripes I own, another one on my readings as a way to take over my (mostly defunct) book review category, because I love showing off how much I read, and another one on stationery, because I love the idea that I send a lot of letters. In terms of Liking and Repinning, these are my most successful boards.

My third usage of Pinterest is for research. I used it that way for the first time when writing about the sad demise of Beatrix Ong. I found it a great tool to gather all interesting links in one point and to get an easy overview of her work and marketing strategy in one place. At the moment, I have two posts in the work, one on new French ballerina shoes brand Avant-Minuit and one on the role of fashion in The Bell Jar, and the boards to prove it.

My fourth discovery was that Pinterest was a great way to penetrate other bloggers and fashion cognoscenti’s creative and visual world as well as giving an overview of how brands want to be perceived. It also allows for a glimpse of what people are interested in on any given day, is good for trend forecasting and could be useful in coming up with blog post ideas on one of those inspiration block days.

You can follow me on Pinterest at Lucie M (fashionabcdr) - Fashion Abecedaire was too long…

Posted at 5:45am and tagged with: Pinterest, blog, technology, first person,.

February 5th 2012

Open letter: Dear ELLE, let’s take a break

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Dear ELLE,

I take to my keypad with a heavy heart to record the end of our decade-old story. Receiving you in the post, unwrapping you has long stopped stirring any feeling in me. Page after page, all I felt was boredom, sometimes replaced by annoyance. The small defaults I used to find endearing, the inadvertent spelling mistake, the press release impersonating a feature have become an absolute pain. I’m no relationship expert but, according to the tips I’ve gathered from your pages over the past decade, it’s time to call it a day.

It had started well though. For years you were my favourite magazine, a glossy I would never imagine starting the week without (yes, you’re weekly in France). When I moved to London, you became a monthly must, a reassuring routine in a foreign land. No matter where I went, which country I visited, Great-Britain, Italy or Germany, you were here and I could count on you for a dose of feminism, current affairs and fashion.

You shaped many of my views of the world. To this day, I thank you for imparting in me, from a very young age, that the pill and abortion are not givens, that, as a woman, I’d always be treated according to double standards at work and that fashion doesn’t make sense considered as a stand-alone. I owe you partially responsible for deciding to pursue a career in fashion, and definitely responsible for all my journalistic ambitions.

Yet, for the first time in over a decade, every woman in my family has cancelled her subscription. My sister was the first to take this radical step. I can’t pinpoint when exactly I decided to cancel mine. There’s been a couple of issues so uninteresting I barely went further than a flick through, debate articles which left me feeling less knowledgeable than when I started, not to mention the never renewed tendency for sugar styling.

This might be a temporary break. I’ve loved you so much and for so long I don’t expect this to be an easy break. In fact, I still have a peak at both your French and British editions at work while weaning myself off. I’ll keep trying your ELLE Collection, which has an art direction and writing in a class of its own. For the past two years, this bi-yearly has been the only thing which kept me coming back, which maintained my hope and trust in the magazine.

I don’t wish you any harm, and I selfishly hope you’ll keep being printed for many decades. I already know you’ll be top of my present list when the next generation of women in my family comes of age. You’ll be my goddaughter’s birthday present, the day she turns 12. Even though you’ve disappointed me lately, I remember fondly how you were a great support to parental education at that age, how many embarrassing mother-daughter discussions you spared me. It’s better we split while the good memories still outweigh the bad ones.

It’ been emotional,

Lucie

Picture: ELLEmagazine, Flickr user Howtedious

Posted at 12:08pm and tagged with: ELLE, magazine, first person, open letter,.