The Hills of Zara

About 15 years ago, on holiday in Madrid, I saw a pair of shoes in a shop window and fell in love with them. The brand was Spanish and its name was Zara. I bought the shoes (black patent leather, vertiginous heels, t-bar, round toe, 1940s style, with a slender ankle strap that fastened with a button) and wore them till they fell apart. Zara came to London and, when I was in Hong Kong, opened there. It became just another shop to me, albeit somewhere you could always rely on finding cost-effective copies of vastly more expensive catwalk designs, with flair and style and always a little in advance of anyone else on the high street. The clothes were well made for the price (often in China of course) but would start to look shabby fairly quickly.

Apart, perhaps, from the opening of a self-appointed supercool store like Bathing Ape in Queen's Road, Central (they're probably still queuing outside it now), and give-aways of bags of rice or free mah jong sets where some poor old character out for a freebie would always get trampled underfoot by ravening crowds, I never saw anything in Hong Kong quite like the hubbub outside the new Zara in Pitt Street Mall. It's Zara's first store in Australia; even so, the atmosphere, and lines of women queuing outside, were astonishing. As I passed by this morning, on a rather miserable cold day nearly two full weeks after the place opened, there were four people waiting outside at 8.50am.

I know I am perhaps being reactionary, and needless to say I would never dream of joining that queue, but doesn't the very fact that everyone will now be wearing Zara mean that any other brand would in fact be more attractive? Sadly, the other stores were failing to capitalise on this concept; one nearby had resorted, in what looked horribly like desperation, to featuring supersized letters spelling "SEX" and (in much smaller letters) "& fashion" in their window display (pictured above).

Lest anyone think, however, that I've turned my back on fashion and, by implication, am sneering at its acolytes, never fear: I am still as interested in shoes as the next woman, and here are some rather attractive sandals by Zara to prove it. Looks expensive, looks like, maybe, Chloé, but costs less than $100? It must be democracy in action.

I am curious orange

I've commented before about having a sneaking suspicion that fashion is a massive joke perpetrated on the gullible – or words to that effect – of whom I am clearly sometimes one. It passed me by in January when it first appeared on the catwalk (how "on-trend" am I? Not very), but this Jil Sander plastic bag (or, to give it its full title, "acetate market bag") is surely another cruel facet of the joke. It's a bag, a plastic bag, and it retails at $150 (if you don't believe me, here it is on Net-a-Porter). I looked, but it doesn't have "I Am A Plastic Bag" written on it.

A day to remember

Kirsten Owen 2000, by Corinne Day, 1962-2010

Detailed

Coleman Street, Singapore. A whole "fox" tail, with a texture suspiciously like real fur, dyed in the style pretentiously known as "ombre", attached to a bag by means of a little gold hook, and all for no apparent reason and to slightly disturbing effect.

Charmless garments: 4

Let me introduce this latest contender in the pantheon of Charmless Garments by stating that in my view it should only ever be worn by children under the age of 5 or by people trying to ingratiate themselves with the same (children's TV presenters or paedophiles?). Yes, it's the dungaree. A boundlessly unflattering item, to be sure, proven to give the wearer absolutely no waist, to contain unnecessary accoutrements of straps and buckles and the like, and sad to report, now featuring, in leather and in a wholly unpleasant shade of brown, in a modern style yet still absolutely vile (see for yourself!), in the window of Chloé in the Mandarin Oriental building in Des Voeux Road.

I confess to owning a pair when I was old enough to know better: they were from the legendary What Every Woman Wants, and were pale purple, slightly shiny, and made from brushed cotton with a zip at the back. I must have been 14 and had just started at a new school where everyone was cooler than me. One day I picked up on a strange atmosphere of barely concealed hysteria during a morning lesson. I had no idea what was going on; it just seemed as though suppressed laughter was crackling in the room. It was only some months later that someone kindly enlightened me that the hysteria had been caused by my dungarees: the zip at the back had begun to creep down as soon as I sat in my chair. The person behind me spotted this and alerted everyone else within view; as I sat oblivious and innocent, the zip continued to descend, helped along by a ruler wielded, gently but presumably with much pantomime, by the person behind me. (Oh the cruelty! That this should have been the only person I had ever wanted to impress only added to the retrospective, woeful, mortification.)

But you don't need me to tell you that the dungaree is rotten to the core. Just look at the picture.

Rankle

There are so many things wrong with this, why, I don't even know where to begin. The man (nominally) responsible for this deplorable quarterboot suedette sandal (this is my name for it, but I welcome other attempts to describe it) is Michael Kors. Kors - hang your head in shame! The worst offence is the sheer pointlessness of it: the excess fabric that some poor animal died to provide, uselessly adorning the unlucky wearer's upper ankle, and the insolence of that gold-look buckle, coupled with an entirely petty heel... it's the cankle (a condition whereby your ankles and your calves merge into one) made all too real. This unspeakable item can be yours for US$295. As an ex-colleague of mine from a best-forgotten summer job at Edinburgh University Registry was fond of remarking: "I could scream!"

Dark age

I just stumbled across a really excellent feature in The Guardian called Fashion for All Ages. It's so nice to see women in their fifties and sixties wearing beautiful clothes and looking great. Isn't it extraordinary that this is such an unusual sight?

Hat in the city

On recent visits to Sydney I've noticed a surprising number of people wearing hats. Proper hats: fedoras and panamas, cloches and gatsbys, and even what could possibly have been a homburg. My friend Davey has been photographing people in London wearing stovepipe hats. I am very fond of hats - certainly of the idea of them and, I suppose, of that romantic connection with the era when it was a social requirement to wear a hat.


Sadly, the reality of Hong Kong (not least the heat - August was the hottest on record and it's been at least 32 degrees every day) is that I am more likely to be seen wearing that most awful and unflattering form of headgear, the baseball cap, albeit only in direct connection with watersports and never, repeat never, at any other time. What I would really prefer, of course, is to be nonchalantly sporting an attractive fedora at all times, even in the canoe.


Attractive fedora from La Cerise Sur Le Chapeau at Net-a-Porter.

Completely barking

Net-a-porter is currently selling up leather slippers called NewbarKs. The irritating, pretentious and unnecessary capital K aside, there is something quite nauseating about the tone of the puff that's written about them: "Stay ahead of trend ... Take a style tip from off-duty models and wear these achingly hip alternatives to ballet pumps in between appointments ... Go from lounge to plane in magnificent style ... They go with everything! Diamonds, candlelight, Chloé and delicious cuisine... ". This torrent of aspirational flimflam fails to disguise the fact that, made out of buttersoft Moroccan leather though they might be, these look like old man's slippers. And I am not paying £300 to look like an old man in his baffies.

A truth universally acknowledged

Weddings in Hong Kong are accompanied by incredible fanfare, enormous expense, and fascinating rituals, one of which is the tradition that the wedding photographs are taken months in advance, often in the most ridiculous locations and involving numerous costume changes for the bride-to-be. These photos are then sent out with the wedding invitations to procure as many possible attendees for the wedding banquet. It's purely a numbers game: each guest has to bring a "red packet" full of cash so the happy couple can recoup the enormous costs of staging their wedding feast (and taking the ludicrous photos).

My friend C has someone in her office whose wedding photos were all taken on a trip to the UK with a Brief Encounter-style storyline involving ancient train stations, steam trains, and pensive shots in 1940s headgear. When my IT manager got married, his photos were taken around Hong Kong in locations and scenarios which the bride and groom are, frankly, unlikely ever to find themselves in again; in one shot, he's riding a bicycle across a park while she perches on the back in overblown gown; in another, the one I was lucky enough to be sent, he's crossing a stream, trousers rolled up, in his arms the smiling bride in billowing green chiffon.

It's the day before Hong Kong SAR Establishment Day, a public holiday, and on my way from Admiralty to Lan Kwai Fong for a friend's birthday drinks, I spotted three couples having their photos done. I couldn't resist taking a photo of the last pair: in an absolutely perfect illustration of the aspirational nature of Hong Kong weddings, they were posing outside the Louis Vuitton flagship store in Central.


(I regret that I couldn't take a better photograph and had to use the rotten little camera on my Blackberry. She actually looked rather beautiful and was obviously as happy as Larry; the groom was definitely second string.)

Hamfisted

I'm pretty keen on vodka and can make damn good lychee martinis; I love bacon, especially in a floury roll with razor-thin sliced tomato and tomato sauce. What I can't countenance, I'm afraid, is any attempt to combine the two. As the website states, confirming all my worst fears: "Yes. Bacon vodka." This is a regrettable development. What next? Bacon sweets? Er... Oh.

Cycle of decline

Regular readers of this blog might readily believe that I would go to the ends of the earth for a great pair of shoes; would you swallow, though, that I would cycle for 30 minutes just to find a shop that sells a top with a great name which I saw in a magazine? Unluckily, they were sold out in my size (phoning ahead might have been good planning, but recklessness of thought and deed was my watchword today) and in any case, it was an A$180 top that, though lovely, was in no way necessary.


The 30 minute cycle ride was to Paddington; the shop, Bracewell; the top is pictured here (click on 7 under "Queens of the Speedway"; it's the purple one for preference although there's also a rather unappealing Dijon mustard hue), and the name, HARLOT YES BUT TRAITOR NEVER, allegedly the last words spoken by Mata Hari.

Heel for heel and toe for toe

Shoes from the 1800s (fur-lined for warmth and, presumably, purple velvet for nobility). Sado Island, Japan, April 2009

Prints of darkness

I'm in Tokyo, on a family fortunes trip with my father (two days in, and he has already introduced me to someone as his sister; analyse that!) where, to be sure, there is worse to be seen than this (Charlotte Olympia, Browns, GBP380), but not much worse: there is nothing attractive about this shoe. Its only redeeming feature is that it's a lot less expensive than the risible Chanel cage shoe. Do designers think women have no brains when it comes to buying shoes? (Don't answer that.)

A distorted reality

Sometimes I find that I like the idea of fashion so much more than the reality. Lanvin is a good example of this: the clothes are so touchable, the colours beautiful, satin and grosgrain in jewel colours and my favourite shade of slate grey. But they are particularly expensive and extravagant; dreams, destined to remain unworn, no doubt, and as these pictures from Paris Fashion Week show, wholly unsuited to anyone fatter than a stick (so many folds of material would look ridiculous covering curves; and satin is a very unforgiving fabric).

Looking through photos of the Autumn/Winter 2009-2010 season from the Paris shows on French Vogue (where these photos came from), there are definitely some regrettable things going on: dresses with only one sleeve, for no discernible reason; fur adorning everything, despoiling some otherwise perfect 1940s silhouettes; the aforementioned wayward folds of fabric (beautifully seamed and sewn, often, but peculiar nonetheless); and Alber Elbaz will make his models wear rats' nests in their hair. Once again, what silly Karl Lagerfeld termed "the new modesty" is nowhere in evidence.

On the rocks

Chloé's latest ad campaign, as seen on a huge billboard in Happy Valley which I passed on the bus this morning, shows two waiflike models walking across some rocks in vertiginous heels (heels not included in picture below, but those are some rocks). I'm not necessarily known for my appropriate footwear, and I love wearing heels, for my own, (probably) highly suspect, reasons; but this surely illustrates the utter departure from practicality of current women's footwear. Go into any shoe shop and you'll notice that heels have got dramatically higher (a vacuous video by a "high heels expert" on the Guardian website purports to show you how to walk in heels, but I can save you the burden of watching it: it does nothing of the sort), viz. the six-inch heels by Louboutin that various celebrity no-marks have been sporting. Sometimes it seems as though this is all part of a vast conspiracy; and really it's akin to the binding which Chinese women used to undergo to make their feet look smaller.


I once went on a hike in the fjords of Norway, south of Stavanger (a pretty, and pretty dull, town where I walked disconsolately round the supermarket poking at the whale meat, and where I learned that rural Norwegians shoot feral cats for sport). For once I was sensibly shod, but I remember watching a woman clambering across Pulpit Rock (which was by no means small and was covered in ice) in heels. She was clearly blazing a trail for just this sort of nonsense.

Such great heights

I was searching for some wonderful shoes to justify the title of this email and nearly drew a blank: designers once again seem to have gone slightly bonkers. What happened to what Karl lagerfeld described as "the new modesty" in light of the global economic downturn? (In the same article he also said that he "throws money out of the window and it comes back in the door", and that "for me the bottom line is that there is no bottom line". Let's hope economic reality hits him between the eyes with all due dispatch.) Even normally sensible, even predictable designers like Louboutin have gone all Britney Spears.



Starting gently with some shoes from Gina: usually too frou-frou for me, but I wouldn't be ashamed to wear these: although I am still unsure about the deplorable über-wedge, compared to the first-year art projects masquerading as something wearable, viz. exhibits A, B and C below (which are tiny so I don't desecrate my blog too much) they are downright beautiful.

And then: the Deranged Collection, from Louboutin. Deliberately shrunken photographs so as to avoid offending the senses.





The problem with making red soles his trademark is that he'll never be able to deny that these monstrosities were his idea.

Cleft palate

Admittedly, competition is fierce, but surely these are hot contenders for the most revolting shoe ever designed? Shoe-boots for goblins.

Despot housewives

I nearly bought a pair of Salvatore Ferragamo shoes in the sale at Lane Crawford. One thing stopped me though (apart from the fact that they were still ridiculously over-priced): I have vowed, on principle, never to buy anything by Salvatore Ferragamo (whose assistants at the Mandarin Oriental, by the way, exemplify that terrible Hong Kong trait of following you so closely round the shop that if you look round suddenly, both of you get a fright).

Robert Mugabe's wife, spending millions in designer shops in Paris, told a journalist disdainfully that she had to wear Ferragamo shoes and, indeed, could wear nothing else because her feet are too narrow for normal shoes. This, while her despotic husband presides over the world's fastest shrinking economy, ruthlessly murders his opponents (and their wives), and turns his country upside down.

Grace, and that's her name, is the reason why I couldn't buy anything with that logo on it.

The soft bed of luxury

One of the above dresses costs US$2400. The other, a third of that. Can you guess which? And then the real challenge: can you guess why?

A clue: one of them is by Bottega Veneta which seem to have successfully established itself as a premium luxury brand (it was rated the world's top luxury brand in the 2008 Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) survey from the ludicrously named New York City-based Luxury Institute, which canvassed the idle rich to find out their opinions; apparently "wealthy women are highly discerning, almost to a fault"); partly by virtue, apparently, of superior craftsmanship, and partly, it seems to me, and this is one of the tricks of the luxury trade, by charging shedloads of money for their product. It works in Hong Kong - and if you look at their site, the roll-call of locations is quite illuminating.

Dresses by Bottega Veneta and Lanvin; shoes by Azzedine Alaia and Balenciaga, all from Browns.