Caitlin Moran - Columnist for The Times
“The Oxford Circus Topshop changing rooms are an awe-inspiring and emotional place: they are the front line of British fashion. I would estimate that around 80 per cent of this country’s debut experiences with new “fashion risk” items — harem pants, capes, hologrammic rave leggings, shoulder pads like a linebacker — happen there. It’s the first place that the woo-hoo nuttiness of the catwalk becomes available for under £100 and in up to a size 16. To watch the women of Britain emerge, cautiously, from their cubicles and check the results in the Big Mirror of Truth by the entrance is to watch the Quotidian Fashion Jury deliver its verdict on spring 2009. When it goes well — with the “tea dresses rage” of 2007-09, say — it is wholly delightful to behold. Women turning this way and that in the mirror, imagining themselves in heels by going up on tiptoes and back down again, zazzing their hair, smoothing pintucks over their breasts and sighing “Yes!” .They feel thin and they will have sex that night. Everything will be wonderful.
When it goes wrong, however, it is a little like watching the brightest and the best of your generation being mown down by the power of their own reflections. Wet-look leggings, for instance, have caused unquantifiable damage to our girls — in seconds, they can cause destruction that will last a lifetime. If Diana, Princess of Wales, were alive today, she would be campaigning against them, not landmines. Women emerge, black and shiny from hip to ankle, look into the Mirror of Truth and gradually become mesmerised with the awfulness of their own legs. They stare themselves into a traumatised catatonia. “Oh my God! My legs! They are made of black pudding! They look like a roll of stair carpet in a binbag! I can’t. Stop. Looking!”
Often, these women can move away only after a friend pulls their head on to their shoulder, so they can’t see their reflection any more. Like when you put a towel over the cage of a distressed budgie.”
her articles are soooo gd!
