The 80/20 #9 Should We Do Celebrity?

Why, yes, when it’s Clemence Poesy!

What’s so great about the way Ms Poesy dresses is its deceptive impossiblity. We all have black skinny jeans. We have some kind of grey top. I have a white jacket and a mushroom-y coloured scarf. Maybe you do too. Even the car she’s posing in front of is hardly a Jag. But can we look like that in them?

OK, so:

Have you ever tried copying the stars? Did it work?

 For more about the 80/20 project look here.

 

The 80/20 Project #8 Gymwear

Henry David Thoreau complained about the mania for buying new clothes for every activity. "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes."

Like many people, I have a nagging feeling there’s something intrinsically wrong about buying special exercise clothes. Beyond owning a good sports bra and running shoes, shiny sportswear smacks of hubris. While trying to become a new person, attention to appearance can seem trivial as well as a direct invitation to failure.

I bought this Zucca top last year. I loved it for the kimono cut of its sleeves and the lightness of its syntheic fabric. For something that’s essentially a sweatshirt, it was killingly expensive. It also immediately developed serious bobbles and snags and is now yoga-wear.

Funny thing is, I don’t mind too much. As exercise-clothes go it’s better than the Marmite giveaway t-shirt I used to wear. The cut remains fantastic and, besides, there’s something virtuous about wearing something old to practice yoga. I love it when my exercise-wear develops a fray. Each hole spells effort, each rip, sweated experience. Sportswear is the Dorian Gray of the wardrobe: as it deteriorates, the wearer emerges shining by contrast.

Thoreau advised, "If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes." That’s a sound principle when it comes to yoga. But I’m not enough of a Thoreau fan to believe that he wasn’t just a little too proud of his rips and tears, and that the desire for old clothes can be just another kind of vanity-trap.

A new wearer in old clothes? Why not a new wearer in new clothes? After all, I’ve earned them, as they said in the Fame opening credits, ‘in sweat’…

Do you wear cast-offs to exercise, or does only shiny new lycra do get you up and running?

For more about the 80/20 project look here.

The 80/20 project #7 – I Give Up

Sometimes, especially on a Sunday, it’s better to wear old favourites. Garments with holes are best.

Feels like pyjamas but isn’t: isn’t even jeans, which I used to wear not only for weekends but all the time during the week. Until recently I didn’t own a pair of trousers, just jeans and more jeans: smart jeans and relaxed jeans; faded jeans and raw indigo; shredded and pristine. Now I’ve kind of given up on them. Skinny has been aroud for too long. Despite experimenting with other cuts, nothing else feels right yet. So I find myself wearing trousers. Who’da thought it?

So what happened to jeans? Are you wearing them today, on jeansday Sunday?

For more about the 80/20 project look here.

The 80/20 Project #6 Boyfriend

’cause I have to dress down at the weekend even though I don’t have to dress up during the week…

Do you have hand-me-downs which have a second (or third or fourth) life with you?

For more about the 80/20 project look here.

The 80/20 Project #5

This is what I’ll be wearing tonight. A little timid, perhaps. All black. But very, very safe when you want to go incognito. For me, high heels are strictly for business, not for pleasure. As for the rest, it’s designed so I’ll fade into the black velvet banquettes…

What do you wear to look ‘professional’?

For more about the 80/20 project look here.

80/20 #4 Surprise!

Crocuses, Snowdrops, my legs. It must be Spring…

Is your wardrobe showing signs of Spring?

For more about the 80/20 project look here.

80/20 #3 Magic Tricks

This is really cheating a little. I’m drawing what I wore last Friday to go to the Fivedials Bookslam at Wilton’s Music Hall, London. It was a fine event at which everyday London hipsters were transformed into the modern version of an audience of Victorian ne’er-do-wells with the magic of some vintage feathers and rhinestones and a little moustache polish ("You’re sailors" – Craig Taylor indicates one third of the room -  "…and you over there," – he gestures to the rest of us – "You’re prostitutes.").

For what it’s worth, I was wearing a very tiny Vanessa Bruno mini skirt I recently bought from the Outnet, and an APC ‘mariniere’. I clearly fall into the sailor category. To keep true to the 80/20 project, I’m wearing the same today…

For more about the 80/20 project look here.

80/20 # 2 – Just add leather…

I’m at the tail end of exploring I can do with this dress (There’s a surprising amount).I bought these leggings with leather patches exactly a year ago from the designer Joanna Dauphin. At the time, it felt like ‘pants roulette’. I was only just getting my head round the idea of wearing leggings as trousers instead of as tights, and the leather thing was still unusual enough to earn me a few strange looks as well as comments ranging from references to ‘Pretty Woman’ to "Did you get those from the fetish catalogue? I know the one. I didn’t know you were into that too. Maybe one day we could…"

Weirdly they’ve turned out to be one of the most useful pieces of clothing I own, mainly because a) they’re shiny, b) they’re warm and c) they go under things.

For more about the 80/20 project look here.

The 80/20 Project #1

I bought a sweater dress in the sale. It was warm. It was stylish. It felt like being permenantly embraced by the sort of man who wears tweed. I wore it every day in February. I mean it. Every single day (apart from just a few – I’m not that stinky). I love that dress but – am I getting into a rut here?

I love mulifuctional fashion – the idea that one item can be worn many ways and work for all occasions but, as Nancy Mitford once said, ‘I feel ill if I can’t have new clothes.’. There’s something of coup de foudre about any new purchase and my relationship with each item tends towards serial mongamy: intense passion followed by a cooling-off period. Then they’re sent to live in my wardrobe where they have a great retirement: coffee mornings, European cruises, carpet bowls. I don’t actually know what they do because, although I love to see them there hanging there in their art-installation rows, like most people I’m guilty of only wearing 20% of the clothes I own. Some of that is due to the weather or other circumstances like a bathing suit not being suitable for supermarket shopping but a lot of it is down to indolence.

OK here’s the deal.

I don’t buy anything new.  I don’t even think about it. I wear all of my clothes – both the 20% and the remaining 80%. And, for a month, I post a sketch every day.

Narcissistic? Hell Yes, but it’s also an experiment in creativity: the sort of everyday creativity we all exercise, every time we put on a pair of socks.

Please send in your  reactions: sketches, comments, photographs. I’ll post anything that’s not downright indecent. There will be prizes.

Let’s start with the dress I’ve been wearing all of last month.

Book it!

Write it in your diaries. See you there!

(This ad will appear in the March edition of the Paris Magazine).