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Sunday, August 18, 2013
shoping.fashion.beaty.fashion style
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Weekender: Annabel Spooner, performer, 27
I've found pregnancy awesome. I?haven't had sickness or anything. I'm only just getting my head round the fact there's a person living in me rent-free, eating everything I eat. I'm fascinated by it. People can't wait to share horror stories, but I'm enjoying it.
We're not telling anyone the name before he's born. The last time I said a name I liked someone took it. My husband, Meschach, and I want to keep something back, so there's a bit of?surprise and mystery.
I'm obsessed with bright rainbow colours. A friend got this necklace for me in Cape Town, but you can find good African accessories in Brixton and Portobello markets in London.
We're looking to conquer classic meat dishes and turn them vegetarian. We've been taking Delia's recipes and mixing them up with my mum's West African recipes, then our own ideas. One of my favourite meals is peanut butter soup. It's traditionally made with vegetable oil, but I use olive oil to thicken it. You serve it with fufu – a big dumpling you eat with your hands.
The plan is to go travelling with our son. Meschach was raised in Wales, but as a child he travelled through Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana. I think it's essential to go away every year, so you don't forget what the rest of the world looks like.
‧ Are you a Weekender? Email a photo and a brief description of how you spend your weekends to weekender@guardian.co.uk
The best facial foam cleansers
Worked into a froth: gentle cleansers to perfect the art of the clean up. Photograph: ObserverBy the end of the day I am tired and dirty. I want to feel better without effort. One way to do this is a foam cleanser – so much quicker than grimly pawing at your face with lotions and sodden cotton-wool balls squandering precious sofa minutes. In my greasy 20s I?liked a cleanser that made my stripped face tighten. Now that age has removed the oil for me, the way forward is rich washes that gently remove make-up. The first time I spent more than ￡60 on froth and water was for a foam party at Amnesia, Ibiza, in 1998. Now I save that cash for Sisley Creamy Mousse Cleanser (￡65, johnlewis.com). My?glowing face thanks me for it. Or try Ren Rosa Centifolia Foaming Cleanser (￡13, marksandspencer.com) – the scent of rose across your knackered cheeks gives you an extra lift and lingers pleasingly. You can still smell it as you make tea during the first ad break of Lewis. You feel better without effort.
Nip + Fab Glycolic Foaming Cleanser ￡7.99, boots.com Benefit Foamingly Clean Cleanser ￡19, benefitcosmetics.co.uk Rituals Sensational Soft Cleanser ￡11.50, rituals.com Darphin Cleansing Foam Gel With Water Lily ￡19, darphin.co.uk Omorovicza Cleansing Foam ￡44, omorovicza.co.uk
Because Ghana is ahead of the curve
Cut to fit: women wearing traditional dresses in Ghana. Photograph: David Levene for the GuardianFind high street shops hard work. I can't wear skinny jeans – the appearance of the drain pipe does not work with the calf muscles. Pants that fit my legs gape alive, or have what looks like the right-size life, in a sort of hypothetical so since I can't get them past my knees.
My body shape is not unusual – small waist, hips, legs strong. I'm proud of it, actually. I learned that shops to avoid, and where it is possible to find things that fit. When everything goes pear-shaped, pardon the pun, get a customized version of an expression of Hubert de Givenchy that boosts my morale. "Clothes should be done to adapt our bodies, our bodies are not made to measure for clothes".
The ability to design an entire wardrobe tailored is one of the major attractions of life in Ghana. Here there are no tailors on Savile Row or strut around the Pizzetti fashion weeks. They are unassuming men and women who sit in shipping containers-cum-workshop on almost every street in every city, leaned over sewing machines, making clothes that fit perfectly. I feel better dressed just at the sight of one of them, measuring tape their necks. They offer the promise of heavenly my private collection, such as design, and what are the best and only the template.
Friends who visit me in Ghana from the United Kingdom have taken to bring the precious fruit of their trawlers high-street – the few clothes that fit and flatter them perfectly – and getting them copied here multiple times in different colors and different prints.
Much loved purchases that do not fit well enough, or that they planned to slim but failed, can be picked up, taken, carried out, or whatever else is needed to make them look perfect. It is not only women – I had no idea that so many people found it difficult to buy pants that fit at the waist and not cut their blood circulation to the legs. Container-makers themselves are capable of doing surprisingly good clothes.
Say this is cheaper than haute couture or a stylist is a huge understatement. Is much less you could justify a plane ticket to Ghana. It is also significantly less annoying than watching Gok Wan or filling out questionnaires "fruit garden that my body looks like" in magazines. Is the ultimate anti-Abercrombie Fitch & experience.
I am the image of the female body believe problems are with their clothes. Women in Europe and America might think it would look better if they were more subtle, but that is just an abbreviation for thinking if they were thinner, look better in their clothes. I think this with revelations of women starving themselves to achieve the zero size, fainting on a regular basis and have a hospital bed for a second home when a drop becomes the indispensable accessory of the diet.
But if these issues are intrinsically originate from clothes – then can they be exported with them, too? European clothes are all the rage in West Africa now, that it's almost like a worst-case scenario of UK high street. Never mind the fact that people in developed countries that they are donating clothes to charity and not to some enterprising reseller in Ghana and Nigeria that is flogging them on the roadside. But for women who buy them – as a cheaper alternative to get your clothes made – are buying on cuts and sizes are designed for completely different body shapes to them, that are used, and where there is only one dimension to choose from.
The results are already showing. The curves – and the women of Ghana are indeed curvy – that look so attractive in custom-made costumes and Africans, quickly become a sea of flat belly, muffin tops and spilling over into those breasts. I started noticing girls caressing their bellies ruefully as the edges appear through the maxi-sticky clothes. Are just one, small step from self loathing feeling. Tailors, the country needs!
Eva Wiseman is via
Oprah faced not just fashion retail racism, but size bias too | Heidi Moore
Oprah Winfrey: thyroid problems make weight fluctuations inevitable for the billionaire TV personality. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/ReutersOprah Winfrey is a successful billionaire with an empire worth $3bn, a woman whose public reputation has been built on self-empowerment. She has been frank about the stresses in her life – racism and sexism figure often – and about her struggles with her weight.
It is this last aspect that may be the hardest to deal with. Oprah's thyroid condition makes her weight problems unavoidable. She has to deal with the rebellion of her body. She may find sympathetic tailors and fabulous shoes, and accessorize brilliantly, but she likely knows what all women know: shop assistants won't be kind to women over a size 10, and that is especially true of woman of color.
To find something nice for Tina Turner's wedding, Oprah walked alone into Trois Pommes in Zurich last month, an upscale shop that carries clothes from the usual runway names – Celine, Jil Sander, Lanvin – and has locations in wealthy ski towns that attract billionaires: St Moritz, Gstaad, Basel.
A shop assistant refused to show Oprah a $42,000 crocodile handbag. Here is the incident in Oprah's words, via the International Business Times:
I was in Zurich the other day, in a store whose name I will not mention. I didn't have my eyelashes on, but I was in full Oprah Winfrey gear. I had my little Donna Karan skirt and my little sandals. But obviously, the Oprah Winfrey Show is not shown in Zurich. I go into a store and I say to the woman, 'Excuse me, may I see the bag right above your head?' and she says to me, 'No. It's too expensive.'
Oprah later mused to Larry King that she considered following the script of Pretty Woman and deploying her fortune by buying everything in the store, but decided not to give the saleswoman the satisfaction of a larger commission. The head of the luxury chain, Trudie Goetz, later said that the saleswoman didn't recognize Winfrey and that by rejecting Oprah's request she tried to be "too kind".
No doubt, the details of the incident will be pored over. It has already been attributed to racism, and rightfully so: Oprah's incident tripped a wire that worries many women of color: to be judged negatively and immediately by their race, to be treated as second-class citizens, to be pointed to the things that are not the best, but considered merely "good enough" for you. The best and most expensive, the implication goes, is saved for those with the obvious status markers: well-groomed, accompanied by a wealthy-looking man, and usually, not coincidentally, very thin.
This is what Oprah, and most other women, rarely talk about: the struggle for respect faced by women of color is shared, at times, with another group: women of size, another category to which Oprah belongs. The scale is not the same – racism can be as ugly as anything humans are capable of – yet, on a day-to-day basis, they have parallels. There is the same sense of diminishment, the same high-handed assumption by others, the same struggle for control of your own image.
Race is tied with socioeconomic status struggles; so is weight. There have been some studies of a link between a woman's size and her socioeconomic status, showing that women with low incomes tend to be of higher weight. There are many theories on this – because of unsocial working hours, lower availability of healthy food in poor neighborhoods, and other factors that may affect food choice and metabolism.
On the other side of the scale, anorexia and other eating disorders tend to be more common in people of higher socioeconomic status. You don't need science to tell you this: in the cold calculation of high-end fashion or jewellery or luxury bags, a woman's dress size is often assumed to be a marker of her status, as much as race is. Both indicate a certain institutional bigotry, an assumption based on outdated – and just plain wrong – cliches about what a person's bank balance looks like based on what their body looks like.
This is what most women know: when a woman walks into an upscale store, she has already been evaluated as to the size of her bank account or credit line (or whether she looks like she can attract a man with both of them). High-end shop assistants, like everyone who works on bonus, commission or by their wits – Wall Street traders and pool hustlers, for instance – are taught to size up a mark at a thousand paces. They read grooming, body language, clothing, and accessories as a sign of how likely someone may be to spend – or lose – money.
This is what that Zurich shop assistant was doing. Lacking the crucial information that Oprah was a celebrity, she relied on shallow markers: her size, her race. Even a Donna Karan dress is not enough to overcome those biases.
Oprah was looking to buy a handbag, which has no size measurements, but the product is not the point: in an upscale boutique, all buyers are judged, in part, by their weight. Many shops want the people in them to look "thin and cool", in the words of Abercrombie & Fitch's CEO. They may grudgingly sell larger sizes, but only online.
The key thing for people of any size is to remain hidden from areas where status is important. The rather unintelligent thinking seems to be that fat is infectious, or that thin people won't want products that have been merely glanced at by anyone over a size 10.
As a result, there is a kind of social segregation based on weight as well as on race. To test this, walk into any other fashionable shop in Zurich, or Gstaad, or London, or Paris, or Los Angeles, or New York: you may see women in flip-flops, women with messy ponytails, women in ripped jeans. Those are all perfectly acceptable – as long as she is also carrying an expensive handbag or accompanied by a man who looks like he has means. But you will rarely, if ever, see even a perfectly groomed, immaculately dressed woman above a size 10.
Shop assistants in upscale boutiques in fashionable areas of major cities have become practiced at hovering around ample women in a hurry to remind them:
Oh, I'm sorry: we don't have anything in your size.
And this size bias trickles down the economic scale: clothing retailers at all levels perpetuate the idea that carrying an extra 30lb is anti-fashion. Identifying low body weight with low status seems to infect clothing retailers from Lululemon to Abercrombie & Fitch. Last week, Lululemon said that clothes above a size 12 "are not part of its business strategy", and Abercrombie's cheerleaders-only aesthetic has become the stuff of legend. "A lot of people don't belong (in our clothes), and they can't belong," says Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries.
This is, of course, ridiculous. There are many reasons for a woman's weight to vary, including everything from medication to thyroid issues to stress to lifestyle. Fat-shaming, as the fashion retail industry often indulges in, is also a form of fat-blaming: it assumes that a woman's weight tells you all you need to know about her. This is irrational and, most importantly, completely false.
The common bias of tying socioeconomic status with weight is just bad business. The saleswoman who made that assumption about Oprah was wrong – and her shop not only lost a high-value customer, but is also paying a steep price in the very public wrath of a billionaire scorned. Whatever the social formula those shop assistants are using may be, it often fails to truly judge a customer's ability to spend. It was, to quote Pretty Woman, "a huge mistake".
There are women who would like to have access to upscale fashion and have the means to indulge – if only shops would recognize that high income and good credit comes in all shapes and sizes. Maybe clothing retailers should, similarly, learn that a woman's cultural, economic and social power is not solely discernible at a glance – either by her skin color or by her weight.
It might help their bottom line if they stopped judging those of others.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Why we're watching: Camilla and Marc
Camilla and Marc. Sounds a bit royal. If you hail from Australia, they sort of are. They're extremely chic, sibling fashion designers whose sophisticated clothes dress the best in their native country.
Siblings, eh? No rivalry? Not a bit, apparently. "We have a unique bond that is built on trust, honesty and immense respect," Camilla assures us.
I've heard lots about Australian fashion recently. Yeah, it is a bit of a thing. There's Dion Lee, Jordan Askill, Willow… Camilla says the Aussie lifestyle's good for design. "People say we're easy going, and that's reflected in our clothes. They're polished and pulled together yet comfortable and fluid."
Sounds interesting. What's the label's look? Masculine tailoring with feminine silhouettes. Tailored trousers, snappy blazers.
Right up my street. Then you should invest. The label celebrates 10 years as the height of Australian chic this year, but now it's really taking off on the international market.
They say: "Our design is about modern elegance translated through the use of luxurious fabrics, bold prints and effortless yet cool silhouettes."
We say: Could we have one of the blazers, please?
Camilla and Marc is now available at Matches (matchesfashion.com)
Dry and scaly legs: what is the solution?
How do we get our legs in good enough condition to wear shorts. Photograph: Don Arnold/Getty ImagesObviously, tights in this heat are ridiculous but no matter how much body moisturiser I put on, my legs are disgustingly dry and flaky. Any solutions other than "wear long skirts"?
Ella, by email
If there is a woman out there who doesn't have dry skin on their legs, I don't trust her. (I refuse to employ the common beauty writer phraseology of "suffers from dry skin" – people suffer from leprosy, they suffer from poverty, they suffer from horrific savage attacks from rabid dogs. They do not "suffer from" dry legs.) I generally resist scratching mosquito bites on my legs in public because any said scratching results in what looks like a gale-force blizzard blowing out of my calves with dried bits of flaked skin falling all over the pavement. Yes, it's disgusting but you know what? Being disgusting is just part of the human condition and the sooner we all accept that, the better. Deal with it, people.
Like you, Ella, I relied on creams for years and, like you, I found them next to useless. Kiehl's Creme de Corps came the closest to being any kind of cop but, in hot weather, it just sits on top of the skin and looks gloopy and attracts dirt. To be honest, I find that most beauty companies don't really get dry skin and by "dry skin" I mean skin that makes a salamander look juicy with moisture. Beauty companies seem to think dry skin is skin that just feels a little tight when it spends too long in central heating. But you know and I know, Ella, that dry skin is skin that has actual crevices in it – like gashes in the sand of the desert, where water once flowed but no more – and a surface that has more in common with crepe paper than flesh. Seriously, I only need to stroke my leg some days for what looks like half my knee to come off in my hand. Like I said, deal with it, people.
Seeing as so many women have dry legs, I've often wondered about why cosmetics brands are so bad at catering to it, leaving such matters to more medical brands, or simply ignoring it all together. The only reason I can fathom is that a lot of cosmetics brands, like most people, don't like to think about how disgusting the human race is and the reason we're disgusting is because we're humans and not airbrushed models in adverts. Too often I find that some beauty companies cater only to some kind of fantasy vision of femininity, with moisturisers that appear to be made for those with the skin of 12-year-olds and lipstick that feathers garishly on anyone whose lips are anything less than Angelina-esque. No, this is not true of all beauty companies, but it is of many and it is the cosmetics company equivalent of fashion labels that refuse to make clothes in sizes larger than 14.
I don't know if it's that such brands simply can't bear to think about people who look different from supermodels, but they certainly don't want to be associated with them and therefore refuse to cater for them. Which is clearly ridiculous, not least on a financial level. So fine, let those companies kid themselves by making products for the five women out there who look like supermodels and the rest of us can take our lucrative(ish) custom out there, walking firmly away upon our size-16 flaky-skinned legs.
So as for what can be done about dry legs, in my scaly-limbed experience this requires a very specific three-step process. First, body-brush your legs before getting into the shower to get rid of all top-lying flakes. I've recommended the Elemis body brush before, because it's hand held (body brushes with long handles are just too cumbersome for leg brushing) and has a convenient strap, but cheaper ones are good, too. Then – also before getting wet – rub in a good body scrub. These, too, are harder to find than you'd think, as too many of them focus more on fragrance than oils and moisturisation, especially if they've been launched to promote some fashion label's new perfume. The best one I've come across is Ren's Moroccan Rose Otto Sugar Body Polish which is both scrubby and oily, a too rare combination, and smells of the most delicious roses ever. Then, after you've showered and dried, don't bother with creams and head straight for the oils. Oil is a dry-skinned lady's friend (which is also why the dry-skinned lady should take fish oil supplements every day, oiling herself inside and out.) This Works Skin Deep Dry Leg Oil is my preferred one (although I don't know why they specify it as being "leg oil" when obviously it works on scabby elbows and upper arms, too) and your skin will soak it up so ladle it on.
I'll be honest: most days I don't bother with doing any of the above because, you know what? I don't really care. Yes, world, these are my cracked and flaky legs sticking out of a pair of shorts: gaze upon them in awe. But when I do bother, it's like when I go to yoga class: I just feel better, and I vow to myself I'll now do it every day (and then not do it again for about two weeks.) This works, yes, but we're also all disgusting human beings and that's fine, too. Smelling like roses is fun but so is making your legs snow. So, really, winning all round.
Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@guardian.co.uk