The Wardrobe Whisperer

Illustration by Lulu, for Australian In Style magazine, Jan 2005 I just love these articles on whipping your wardrobe into shape that fashion magazines regularly publish. It’s particularly fascinating when they deconstruct a real person’s closet (as opposed to a celebrity with a stylist and a limitless budget). Here are a couple of oldies from Australian In Style magazine, from 2005 and 2006, but they are full of practical tips that are still relevant today.

It’s jewellery storage that gives me the biggest headache – I have a huge collection. I particularly adore those old wooden coin sorters (on the fourth page), and have been looking for some for years, but they are very hard to come by. The best I’ve been able to do is ceramic egg trays – they are really cute. The only problem with these open trays is that they do collect dust. Last weekend I found an odd vintage wooden tray that is divided into compartments exactly the size of bangles. The tray has a handle too. My entire collection just manages to fit!

So scroll down for a read and get motivated (click images for larger versions). And please excuse me – I’ll be whispering to that giant basket of ironing I just made today. 

Summer in Zanzibar

After this appalling heatwave Melbourne dished us in the last week, and continuing the African theme, I thought I’d soothe the soul and refresh your eyes with these beautiful images of summer in Zanzibar. The pictures were taken by Friedmann Hauss for Australian marie-claire – possibly in the early 90s, judging by the slip dresses (and the fact that a FAX number is given in the travel details rather than a website!).

Except for the touches of turquoise blue, I don’t actually like the garments in the photoshoot. They look merely passé and bear no patina of retro charm (not yet anyway). But the photos are sublime, depicting a far gentler summer than this furnace Melburnians lived through in the past week: searing heat and hot, drying winds are not pleasant.

Zanzibar! The name itself is exotic, the whisper of it conjuring up images foreign to my eyes, strange sounds in my ears – the lap of water against a wooden boat, the rustle of the breeze in trees for which I have no name, African voices chattering inexplicably – the sounds to lull one to sleep on the white sand.

Zanzibar is actually an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Tanzania, composed of numerous small islands and two larger ones – the main island Unguja is commonly referred to as Zanzibar. It sounds like a place I should visit one day, but meanwhile I can daydream. 

Click on images for larger versions.

Object Worship

Feast your eyes on this lovely collection of shoes photographed for a noughties edition of US Harper’s Bazaar, by Gilles Bensimon. So many divine pairs in this editorial! I love how those Prada shoes in the very first photo look like a flock of butterflies. I think the grey suede Balenciaga booties are my favourite, followed by the saucy laceback boots by Alexander McQueen. The hacked heel on the Gucci crocodile pumps is freaking me out though – how did the fashion editor get away with that?

Click on images for larger versions.

The Ugly Fashion Editorial‏

The smock! The colours! The hair! The horror!I spotted this fashion story in the August 1975 issue of Australian Vogue a couple years ago, and while I found it very amusing, I seemed it unworthy of SNAP’s pages. That is, until today, in this week of celebrating dowdiness.

It hits every note on my list of Seven Ugly Sins, and yet Vogue is touting it as an elegant look: ‘One of the simplest, most becoming dresses you can wear is the one with full smock … Proportion has much to do with its charm, the length of the skirt above a pretty shoe, your head wrapped small.’  

It would be easy to protest, ‘Oh it wouldn’t be too bad if only it was belted,’ but Vogue is expressly advocating loose and voluminous smocks.

‘One of the simplest, most becoming dresses you can wear is the one with full smock …’

Even the shoes they call pretty are very dowdy, and the open-toed sandals are worn with beige pantyhose, a look that has quite rightly been banished from fashion horizon for decades. The overall apricot and terra cotta colour palette is repellent too. And the hair! Those fluffy curls are overwhelming, and as a friend observed, we are more used to seeing headscarves worn like that by cancer sufferers, so it just seems strange. 

Though a coverline declares Spring/Summer 1975 the best fashion season for years, I can’t find a single redeeming feature – except perhaps that this dress shape would be a comfortable style for a heavily pregnant lady at the height of a stinking hot summer. While I like the atmospheric grainy black and white photographs by Dieter Muller, I cannot imagine these garments featuring in a current issue. We’ve seen plenty of challenging volume in recent years certainly, but styled in quite a different and more appealing way. 

I wonder what Anna Wintour would say? 

Click images for larger versions.

Here’s an extra spread from a different shoot in the same magazine as a bonus. Still on the billowing theme but with added extras: some hideous patterns, brighter colours, tacky accessories and the OTT 70s makeup we all know and love: baby blue eyeshadow and frosty lips. 

Vintage Cheek

Continuing with the theme of pinups: here is a very cheeky fashion editorial from the February 2013 issue of French Grazia that I stumbled across yesterday on the blog Vintage Vandalizm. It’s both super-cute and naughty, and is gorgeously styled by Stéphanie Brissay with lots of nice lingerie (I just love that white spotted tulle bra by Eres in the aeroplane pic).

The clever and witty art direction, the sumptuous photography by Marc Philbert – both save those visual puns from becoming tacky. Saucy!

Click images for larger versions.