Category Archives: Fashion industry

Career Change

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I’m disappointed.  I entered my latest novel (The Boundary Fence, unpublished) in a literary competition – a minor one, not the Booker – and didn’t make the longlist.  Not even the longlist!  So I’m beginning to think I’m not cut out to be a novelist.  Therefore I’ve enrolled in an online 12-week scriptwriting course at La Trobe University, starting in July.

That doesn’t displace my ambition to become an influencer.  I’ve been waiting for the big spenders to beat a path to my door, eager to access my phalanx of followers, but they’re a bit slow off the mark.  So I’m given them a nudge by plugging products that I’ve actually bought and think worth recommending.  So stand by to be influenced to buy… drum-roll… Australian bamboo underpants and Ukrainian/Polish jigsaw puzzles.

This is not actually me.

The underpants are made by an Australian company called Boody.  They’re expensive (by mail-order about US$15 a pair including postage-and-packing, but they’re very comfortable and allegedly eco-friendly.  That price includes a few dollars’ premium for a rather roomier cut – for the man who has everything.

The jigsaw puzzles are made by Energia Plus (email energyplus@svitonline.com) but printed in Poland by TREFL S.A.  I can recommend these companies because Mrs SG and I have just finished one of their puzzles (pictured here) and the quality is a lot better than an expensive one we bought a few years ago in the Tate Modern shop.  Each piece is a unique shape and when you slide it into place there’s an inaudible click that reassures you of its rightness.

There’s a story behind that puzzle.  About ten years ago I was working in Ukraine, accompanied by Mrs SG.  We decided to take a week off and tour Crimea.  That was before Putin made a grab for it.  In the city of Feodosia we came across the Aivazovsky National Art Gallery and went it.  Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900) was a gifted artist of Armenian ancestry who specialised in seascapes.  One such painting, a huge one with a wall to itself, caught our eye and we stared at it in awe for a long time.  Its title translates as ‘Among the Waves’. Aivazovsky painted it when he was 81.

When we went to recover our coats we found that the cloakroom attendant was selling jigsaw puzzles – and pride of place was taken by a reproduction of the one we’d so admired!  So we bought it. 

Bottoms

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Twelve years ago I had a spell in hospital. They were feeding me through a tube and I lost a lot of weight. During a nightshirted shuffle around the ward, accompanied by my drip-feed, the nurses at their station asked me how I was feeling. I expressed concern that my bum seemed to have disappeared. They laughingly professed envy and asked my secret.

At that time, and for many decades prior, it was fashionable for women to want smaller bottoms than the ones nature had endowed them with. It was even a meme before memes became fashionable: “Does my bum look big in this?”

It was not always so, of course. In the mid-Victorian era artificial bottoms in the form of bustles were all the rage.

Now the wheel has come full circle and big bottoms are very definitely in. By way of evidence I present (top right of this post) the cover of an Australian Sunday supplement. But who or what caused this seismic shift? Was it Pippa Middleton’s doing, when her behind stole the show at her sister’s wedding to Prince William? Or was it engineered by the Kardashian clan for some dark purpose?

Can anyone enlighten me? Who decides these things? How is the signal sent to all the women in the world? By what alchemy are people’s self-perceptions turned upside-down overnight?

Hair

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Who is the most reviled man in the world at the moment? There are quite a few candidates, but I think a global vote would put Kim Jong Un at the top of the list: he of the unbecoming and widely derided hairstyle. (No, not that hairstyle, you’re thinking of Donald Trump.)

But what do I see as I walk the streets and the airport transit lounges, when I glance through the windows of barbers’ shops, when I see news clips on TV? Every male human under the age of 30 seems to want to emulate this hated man! Even little boys, for whom the choice of hairstyle is presumably made by their mothers, have shaved sides and bushy tops!

I’m old, I know, and out-of-touch. I’ve given up hoping that I’ll ever really understand the human race. But can anyone explain this bizarre phenomenon to me?

Hijab and Pants

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I just read an article about an Iranian model called Elham Arab, who was hauled up before the Revolutionary Court for posting pictures of herself in which her hair was visible – and dyed blonde.  This is how she looked in court:

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The article included this interesting snippet: “In Islam, hijab can refer both to the headscarf women wear to cover their hair and the principle of modesty that underlies the practice.”

I wondered whether there were parallels in our own culture, and I think I found one: “to be caught with one’s pants down.” In our culture to be without pants is as immodest and shameful as it is for a woman to be without a headscarf in Iran.

Can you think of any more?

Male Fashion

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I know, I know.  Male fashion is an oxymoron.  But there are people who are trying to persuade men to jump onto the merry-go-round of waste and vanity that women have been riding for centuries.

Most of the time I can ignore this sad fact, thereby avoiding the onset of stroppiness.  But here in Armenia I have cable television and one of my 41 channels is FTV.  That stands for Fashion Television and it broadcasts wall-to-wall fashion parades.  Worse, some of those parades are for male models wearing… well, I suppose I have to call them clothes but they bear no resemblance to what real men really wear in the real world.

Have you ever seen a male fashion parade?  The poor blokes look as if they’re on drugs to dull the emotional pain of being made to look like twerps.  Is this a global feminist conspiracy to make men ridiculous?  Somebody out there must know something.  It’s time to blow the whistle!