Truly I don't give a fuck

=

And that's all I have to say about that.

storms

I just stumbled across the photos of E.O. Hoppe and gee whiz aren't they beautiful:

That's Margot Fonteyn in the gold lamé tunic. Too much!

too many bitches

Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock has been the inspiration for many a fashion shoot, but it's usually the faffy Pre-Raphaelite stuff that's focused on:

Yes yes, very pretty, Miranda is a Botticelli engelle, etc.

But I for one am pretty psyched to see that Mrs Appleyard is getting some recognition in Numéro:

Werk!

She loves it.

Oooh Jonfen!

Hello Jonathan Saunders:

Winter's looking bright.

cheap cheap

I'm pretty tempted to buy this dress but I think the spandex pushes it over the taste border into whoresville:

Awesome straps but.

I can feel my life, you know?

Soon after I returned home from my holiday in Europe I watched Australian Story's episode on Maggie MacKellar, author of the book When It Rains. I had in fact previously heard MacKellar giving a talk on the book, but once again found myself very moved by the account she gave of her recent past.

After her husband's death (following a period of his own severe mental illness), as well as the loss of her mother to cancer, MacKellar and her children moved from inner city Sydney to a farm near Orange. The blurb of her book describes how the farm became 'a redemptive, healing place for Maggie and her children'.

When I met MacKellar at the talk she was wearing a skirt from Karla Spetic's Spring/Summer 2011 collection. It was one of these two (I very annoyingly can't remember which):

I approached Maggie and told her how much I loved the skirt. She seemed pleased, saying that she had bought it that same day as a treat. I think she was also a little surprised - my comment must have seemed a tad vacuous given the weighty nature of her talk. What I meant and should have added is how perfectly fitting I thought it was that Maggie wore something from this particular Karla Spetic collection for her talk.

For me Spetic's screen print images create a sense of nostalgia for rural Australia, the likes of which I've never seen in the work of a local designer. And the fact that she did this in the context of a very cool and wearable garment is testament to the designer's talent.

Working along similar lines, Rodarte took inspiration from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and the Great Plains of America for their recent Fall 2011 collection:

I adore the Mulleavy sisters but I find Spetic's effort far more evocative. Though, I suppose if things are as they should be, an American would feel just the opposite.

I wanna be eurotrash

I (sort of) just got back from my first trip to Europe and the three weeks spent in Barcelona and Paris were an absolute dream. The jump-shot became our signature pose:

And then of course there was the shopping. Until the last days of the holiday my purchases had been fairly sensible, with the possible exception of this leather Zara dress (which, incidentally, retailed for far less in Spain, where I bought it, than France):

Then I went to Galeries Lafayette in Paris and suffice it to say, shit got a wee bit crazy. I ended up going home with these babies:

They're originally from a confection of a collection, Balenciaga's 2011 resort:

Oooh how I love them. They haven't been worn out yet but I'm currently in the process of building small shrine for them in my room.

got the blues real bad

Well I'm off to Gay Paris for a month and I don't want to leave on a fugly note, so here's a blissful 2005 Hermes campaign starring Gemma Ward.

At the time it came out I was madly obsessed with blue and white - I suppose I still am a bit. I think it's because the best dream I ever had included a house made entirely out of blue and white porcelain. It even had a porcelain pond with goldfish swimming just above the surface of the water. Best dream.

Edit:

Holy shit, who knew?!: 

What an utterly frivolous subject for a book! I must have it.

Her?

There's a scene in Arrested Development that always makes me laugh when I think about it:

George, Sr.: Now, listen, we can’t just go in there and plead “not guilty,” we have to have someone big behind us, our own private Matlock. So I made some calls and I got him.

Michael: Got who?

George, Sr.: Andy Griffith. What, you never saw Matlock?

Michael: Not a real attorney, Dad.

George, Sr.: Now, for ten grand, he’ll actually sit behind us in court and read the paper. For $15,000, he’ll actually sit at the defense table. For $20,000, he’ll twice lean forward (Whispers.) and whisper something in your ear. Oh. White suit, that’s extra.

Michael: Boy, that’s an awful lot of money for the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.

This bit of dialogue came back to me when I saw these Casadei heels and their price tag:

They'll cost you a cool AUD$9022.97. 

And that's an awful lot of money for the fugliest shoes I've ever seen.

foux da fa fa

So finally Natalie Portman's Miss Dior Cherie ad has come out:

Let me be the first to say 'Ho hum'.

Natalie is still the prettiest woman in the word but this ad is crazy dull and borders on tacky. Especially disappointing given the previous campaign for this perfume was so delightful:

so fly

Here is an image from Bottega Veneta's Spring Summer 2011 campaign, starring Karolina Kurkova and shot by Alex Prager:

I like the low angle and I'm a Kurkova fan, but...

... I think Louis Vuitton's tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was more subtle and attractive.

Definitely no girl problems here.

I will never not be obsessed with this video of Beyonce doing the wobble dance at a block party in Jay Z's mum's neighbourhood.

Luna Chicks

You know what I'm really into right now? Crescent moons. Here's Julia Stegner rocking a crescent headdress in Muse's winter 2010 issue:

And here's the trend-starter Diana, goddess of hunting and (you guessed it) the moon, in Roman mythology:

Detail from Titian, 'Diana and Actaeon', 1556-59

I got the rings, you bring the cocktails

I sort of loath myself for having recently bought one of those hammered-metal knuckle rings on sale at Sportsgirl. The ring's moment is so over but I momentarily got the red tag-crazies.

Here are some amazing statement rings which I should have bought instead. All pretty cheap on Etsy:

Two blobs hugging

Cornflower bouquet

Molten treasure chest

Jade pixels

Happy new year!

russian rhythms

Gotta admit, I shrieked with excitement when I saw Alina Kabaeva had landed the cover of Russian Vogue. I don't know why everyone's getting so uppity about it. Yeah, it's tacky, but isn't Russia kind of tacky? And her hair looks fucking fabulous. 

In fact Kabaeva and fellow Russian rhythmic gymnast Irina Tchachina have appeared in Russian Vogue before: 

Not wonderful, I think you'll agree.

P.S. There are a lot of rumours flying around regarding Kabaeva's alleged love child with Vladimir Putin. FYI the good members of the RSG rhythmic gymnastics forums remain skeptical about whether Kabaeva has even had a child. 

RG 4evs!

But I know, you wouldn't mind.

ha ha ha remember Queens of Noize's one and only single, 'Indie Boys Don't Deserve It'?

Well it's still very silly but I'm feeling renewed waves of adoration for Mairead Nash.

Along with having inspired the garage rock revival's sweetest song ('Golden Touch' by Razorlight), she currently manages Florence and the Machine.

But who am I kidding, I like her for the same reason Miss Ryan was my favourite teacher in year 2 - she's so pretty.

Sing To Me

The folk at 2threads and Altec Lansing want to know about the musicians who influence our style. As it happens, it's a topic for which I like to get out my lyrical wax...

Dedicated Leaders of Fashion

Staring from the cover of her seminal album Horses, Patti Smith is clad in suspenders, an un-ironed man’s shirt and jacket (complete with a lapel pin) casually thrown over one shoulder. P-A-T-T-I! She looks as chic as any supermodel to ever grace the cover of Vogue.

Fast forward thirty years and this writer is frantically searching for some super-chunky trainers to team with a 1950s prom dress, after seeing Lilly Allen rocking the look, while singing the worst swear words as sweetly as you might coo a nursery rhyme. Though on me this particular outfit was not the roaring success hoped for, I was not the first, nor would I be the last person to look to the music industry for sartorial inspiration.

Musicians, and particularly indie ones, often seem to have the edge on fashion. Take as an example the skinny-legged jean, a defining garment of the 1980s (currently enjoying a revival), which was in fact being worn from the mid-seventies, sperm-count threateningly tight, by members of punk groups like The Clash and The Ramones

Similarly in the mid nineties Courtney Love and her band Hole, helped bring the Babydoll/ Grunge style to prominence, their torn and mussied-up floral dresses giving the wearer the appearance of a dolly that has ended up at the dumpster. It was a look that would filter up onto the catwalks and indeed cluey fashion designers often use musos as their muses.

Hedi Slimane, Dior Homme’s former creative designer, was able to see past the scum, sweat and syringes otherwise obscuring Pete Doherty’s enormously marketable sense of style, and named him as a key inspiration (don’t scoff. Own a trilby or fedora hat? Well chum, ya bought into it.)

The concert stage offers musicians a forum for creative fashionable expression combined with a sense of theatre that is unlikely to be found elsewhere. From Kylie with her ten or more showgirl costume changes in one concert, to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, whose onstage duds are works of art in their own right, musicians can bring the same kind of fantasy to fashion that the Paris Haute Couture shows do - and without the overwhelming sense of wankiness.

Indeed, in some instances a musician will have sufficient sartorial panache to distract from lacklustre musical talents - Patience, I’m talking to you. The Grates should consider themselves lucky you rock a tutu like Anna Pavlova.

Here are some musicians whose style I crave:

Patti Smith (der)

Janelle Monae

Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife

Adam Ant

suffering from centuries of tanning

I've never heard of Tangent magazine before, but this shoot from their latest edition is so good it makes me want to strangle a mountain ox.