WHO WORE WHAT WHEN

Good Luck Pea!

My mate Paula is off to Paris as she in the finals of The Milliner of the Year Competition. Her new website, Pea Cooper Millinery has just launched and I am so excited for her! I use her hats frequently when styling shoots, and I own one myself, that I love to bits.

90s vintage? WTF?

After nearly four years of running Pistol Whip Vintage.com and seven years selling vintage on eBay, I am closing the store. My heart isn't in it anymore, what with being bogged down with Uni and Styling work, and also the imminent launch of the magazine. It will be a sad time as I put so much work into it, but I cannot wait to get stuck into my new little venture!

As a self proclaimed Vintage Aficionado, I am always excited when new vintage shops spring up on the internet. Despite running Pistol Whip Vintage, I still shop other stores all the time, as I am constantly on the look out for fab vintage. I heard about Bitching & Junk Food a while ago and immediately forgot all about it, only to be reminded today by Topshop's Inside Out Blog.

My first impression was 'Wow!' finally some UK vintage sellers who are making an effort with their store photography and styling. I think that because I am so used to 'clever' USA based vintage sellers such as Nasty Gal, Bleubird and Urban Collection, it is always such a letdown looking at UK based online vintage stores that utilize tailors dummies as opposed to live models and have next to no photo editing skills or computer know-how.

On closer inspection, I realized that they only sell '80s and 90s vintage'. Whit? 90s vintage? I can understand 80s vintage, but 90s??? Maybe I am getting old, and need to understand that there are obviously a load of new younger, whippersnapper type vintage buyers and sellers who don't remember the horrors of bomber jackets and cheap synthetic shell suits from this era.

Personally I think that for an item to be classed as 'vintage' it needs to be a minimum of 25 years old. The Vintage Fashion Guild agree. The prices are steep, with some 90s dresses selling for £50/£60 and earrings at £18. In stark contrast to this, I was excited to read that they will be having giveaways! More info can be found on their site nearer the time.

The store has some nice pieces. I especially like this fringed leopard scarf and Kiss t-shirt:

and some really awful (90s?) pieces...





The styling was a bit off in some of the pics, a lot of it being a bit 6months ago. After a while, if I had seen a pair of these on the models, I wouldn't have been surprised:


Still, I feel I should applaud the people behind the store for attempting to give those pesky USA based vintage sellers a run for their money! The reason why those sellers are so popular and successful is because they pay close attention to what is on the runway, and are extremely good at forecasting trends and styling the shoots to replicate them as closely as possible. This, unfortunately is where B&JF falls down. But they are new and hopefully will go from strength to strength in the future and wave the flag proudly for British UK sellers!

Desperately Seeking Cheapness...

Got a wedding this weekend and as usual I don't have anything to wear, and as usual, due to my crappie job and student status, I have no money! Hence the trawling of supermarket clothing websites.

I unearthed this little gem from Asda:

It would fab with my big chunky wedged Aldo Boots

and my next hairstyle:



It would help satisfy my still lingering and unsatisfied lust for Matthew Williamson's pixelated tapestry dress from A/W 08. Ebay is offering me nothing, except all the H&M stuff, or the dreaded 'Butterfly' Debenhams range. Gahhhhh!

I felt that I couldn't keep this bargain (£16) to myself, especially when two of my friends and fellow Glasgow Craft Mafia members, We Are The Robots, are sooo obsessed with pixelations, so I facebooked the link to them. What a good soul I am! The dress would look amazing with one of their pixelated necklaces...

Living in La La Land...

When my sister and I were younger, we used to look longingly through my mother's catalogues which included Freemans, Empire, Kays, Brian Mills and Next. My mother never used to actually order anything so it was always a complete mystery as to why the things kept being delivered to the house every season. Anyway, we used to look at each and every page (yes, this activity occupied us for hours), including boring items like lawnmowers and cutlery, and we each had to choose one thing that we would buy from the page.

I still do this sort of thing now. I don't subscribe to catalogues, (in teh age of the internet, do they even still exist?), but only last night I had Topshop.com and Net-a-porter open in my browser, and said to myself 'right, if you could choose any amount of items, at any cost, what would they be?' I then proceeded to go through each category, adding things I liked to the online baskets. One of the rules of this hypothetical, pointless nonsense is that the items 'bought' have to be things that I would definitely buy and wear normally. No room for frivolity. This was serious.

Anyway, after all the items were added, I noticed something rather odd. My lala-land bill for Topshop was almost double than the Net-a-porter one. Scanning the Net-a-porter basket, there were only five items, yet in Topshop, there were 50. I had anticipated, given free reign, I would have went mental in a high-end designer shop, yet I had not. Don't get me wrong, there were loads of things that I loved on the site, but I guess the 'sensible' side of me was subconciously trying to get more bang for my buck!

Needless to say, this was a complete waste of 2 hours that could have been spent studying.

Here is some of my Topshop basket:

I have just realized, that this is probably why Topshop added a wishlist feature to their website. Doh!

Poladroid...

Want to make your digital photos look like technological advances in photography never happened? Go to www.poladroid.net and download the software for free! I just did it and have transformed this pic of me and some mates, and one of Jack from last Christmas from high res digital uber-images to low-tech, vintage Polaroid nonsense.

I am bored.