All the fun of The (Vintage) Fair...........

Vintage for me is an era of glamour, romance and a reminder of a bye gone days. Of a time when a party dress would be worn season after season and one pair of shoes went with all. These quintessential English images of the past are smattered with visions of sequins, which were the height of glamour and when tea was served in a cup and saucer. With vintage you can’t help but wonder what stories each item could tell. Where has it been? What has it seen? Or how the person wearing it felt. Vintage for me has character, style and a uniqueness that cannot be met by any other style. It exudes a richness and pizzazz that can’t be recreated or repeated and this, at least to me, is something special. To be able to access a part of the past, reinvent it, make it your own and take inspiration from it is something rare in our world of, what can be, mass produced cookie cutter fashion. Vintage couture is a labour of love, from hunting down the perfect item, customising it, lovingly repairing it and finally the sweet reward of being able to actually wear it, safe in the knowledge there will be no awkward moment when someone arrives in the same outfit as you!

This weekend saw my heart sore and credit card flinch as The Vintage Fair was in town! For anyone who has never ventured to one (shame on you!), it is an experience not to be missed. Stalls heaving with bright fabrics waiting to be rummaged through, jewellery glistening in the light, war time songs being played softly in the back ground and the gentle hum of the ever enticing and diet defying tea room. The gentle bustle of people, murmur of chatter and occasional peals of laughter in excitement can be heard from the venues steps outside. Making my escape from the biting cold November air, my heart skipped a beat as I climbed the grand stair case in to vintage heaven.

But for many, vintage isn’t a style they would consider. The perception of something being old and used puts us off, yet we are happy to buy other recycled products on a daily basis. At a time when we, as a nation, are faced with many ecologic crisis, we waste more food as a country than the third world receives, our landfills are over flowing and our seas are polluted with what have thrown away, we have to ask ourselves, where does this stop? Most of us quite happily separate our rubbish, remember each week what colour bin goes out and reuse newspapers but why do we draw the line at clothes and furniture? What stops us picking up even the occasional piece of vintage? Be it furniture, clothing or jewellery that one item won’t have been made in sweat shop, it has already paid its carbon foot print, maybe several times over  and its effectively being recycled by you buying it. At time when it is so easy to be part of the crowd, wearing the mass produced, sweat shop low viscosity rayon and stocking up on flat packs finest we have to question where our ethics lie. If we can accept responsibility for the impact our rubbish and house hold waste has had on the world and make attempts to rectify that by house hold recycling, is it not time take that next step forward and look critically where and how we buy our clothes and furniture.

So next you are shopping, be it for this seasons must have, a one off key piece to update your wardrobe with or just a little pick me up, spare a thought for vintage and how just one piece could add style to you outfit and escape the landfill. A unique scarf, a sparkling pendent or unusual clutch can add a touch of glamour to any outfit,  uniting  the past with the present and helping to preserve  the future. Maybe in the right vintage piece, and a small adjustment to our attitude about vintage we could tackle some of the world’s ecological issues with some style.

All the fun of The (Vinatage) Fair..........

Vintage for me is an era of glamour, romance and a reminder of a bye gone days. Of a time when a party dress would be worn season after season and one pair of shoes went with all. These quintessential English images of the past are smattered with visions of sequins, which were the height of glamour and when tea was served in a cup and saucer. With vintage you can’t help but wonder what stories each item could tell. Where has it been? What has it seen? Or how the person wearing it felt. Vintage for me has character, style and a uniqueness that cannot be met by any other style. It exudes a richness and pizzazz that can’t be recreated or repeated and this, at least to me, is something special. To be able to access a part of the past, reinvent it, make it your own and take inspiration from it is something rare in our world of, what can be, mass produced cookie cutter fashion. Vintage couture is a labour of love, from hunting down the perfect item, customising it, lovingly repairing it and finally the sweet reward of being able to actually wear it, safe in the knowledge there will be no awkward moment when someone arrives in the same outfit as you!

This weekend saw my heart sore and credit card flinch as The Vintage Fair was in town! For anyone who has never ventured to one (shame on you!), it is an experience not to be missed. Stalls heaving with bright fabrics waiting to be rummaged through, jewellery glistening in the light, war time songs being played softly in the back ground and the gentle hum of the ever enticing and diet defying tea room. The gentle bustle of people, murmur of chatter and occasional peals of laughter in excitement can be heard from the venues steps outside. Making my escape from the biting cold November air, my heart skipped a beat as I climbed the grand stair case in to vintage heaven.

But for many, vintage isn’t a style they would consider. The perception of something being old and used puts us off, yet we are happy to buy other recycled products on a daily basis. At a time when we, as a nation, are faced with many ecologic crisis, we waste more food as a country than the third world receives, our landfills are over flowing and our seas are polluted with what have thrown away, we have to ask ourselves, where does this stop? Most of us quite happily separate our rubbish, remember each week what colour bin goes out and reuse newspapers but why do we draw the line at clothes and furniture? What stops us picking up even the occasional piece of vintage? Be it furniture, clothing or jewellery that one item won’t have been made in sweat shop, it has already paid its carbon foot print, maybe several times over  and its effectively being recycled by you buying it. At time when it is so easy to be part of the crowd, wearing the mass produced, sweat shop low viscosity rayon and stocking up on flat packs finest we have to question where our ethics lie. If we can accept responsibility for the impact our rubbish and house hold waste has had on the world and make attempts to rectify that by house hold recycling, is it not time take that next step forward and look critically where and how we buy our clothes and furniture.

So next you are shopping, be it for this seasons must have, a one off key piece to update your wardrobe with or just a little pick me up, spare a thought for vintage and how just one piece could add style to you outfit and escape the landfill. A unique scarf, a sparkling pendent or unusual clutch can add a touch of glamour to any outfit,  uniting  the past with the present and helping to preserve  the future. Maybe in the right vintage piece, and a small adjustment to our attitude about vintage we could tackle some of the world’s ecological issues with some style.

Is it a girls world?: Is it time to (wo)man up....?

Is it a girls world?: Is it time to (wo)man up....?: Slowly but surely its happening, creeping into our lunch time catch ups with friends, taunting us in the supermarket by flaunting us their o...

Is it time to (wo)man up....?

Slowly but surely its happening, creeping into our lunch time catch ups with friends, taunting us in the supermarket by flaunting us their offers and the TV has been prodding and poking at this for months. Yep the run up to Christmas mania is firmly upon us. Shops have already started shouting to us that we need there fabulous offers, small children in our lives have been making lists since August and our bank cards are starting to attempt hibernation. As the ‘I want’ list from family and friends gets longer, our stress levels climb ever higher and time seems to be sprinting away at Olympic standard, is it time to (wo)man up and face the facts that Christmas is already coming?

Like many of us I try and stay in denial for as long as possible. I avoid the Coca Cola adverts on TV, the million Facebook updates that announce it is on there are enough to drive me to the edge (or at least to the vino) and the SKY adverts, scattered on the TV, radio and internet, that promise me a rubbish Christmas if I do not see ‘my favourite’ programmes in high definition, sorry HD. How do they even know I have a favourite programme?!  Anything that features Jonny Depp is good enough for me. I do not need to see his facial pores up close and personal thank you very much. Even DFS jump on the Christmas band wagon, I mean who thinks ‘Christmas’.... Oh! I need a new sofa! Nope, never an association I have made either. Who cares if you can deliver me a sofa in time for the big day, I have presents to buy, food to make and travel plans to arrange. And why would I buy a brand new sofa (even if I had the money) for little ones to wipe Christmas chocolate hands prints all over it or drunken relatives to spill  France’s best red all over it? Now, Mr DFS, is not the time for a spot of sofa shopping.

If you manage to avoid the onslaught of Christmas advertising until at least the 1^st December, the one thing you can’t avoid at this time of year is the Christmas party invites. From September onwards in the invites start to roll in and so the social jigsaw begins. The game of ‘how many parties can I fit into 3 week’, as we all know, is not really that fun to play. It’s a game of snakes and ladders, of what you can physically do verses not wanting to offend anyone. Then there is the dreaded invite to your other half’s work party. The stuffy formal occasion, where you don’t know anyone and will expected to be looking picture perfect in Vivienne Westwood’s finest and towering Louboutin’s , whilst politely laughing at jokes you’re not involved in. It takes a certain amount of elegance and style to master the art of side stepping your partners drunken, leery colleagues whilst heading to the bathroom/bar. So once you have worked out the party line up conundrum, that of which is only equivalent to The Times crossword you may think a well deserved cup of Darjeeling, served with a selection of Primrose Bakery’s best, should be coming your way. But no! It is party dress season and so the battle of the bulge begins (again).

And what a battle against the bulge it becomes! With irresistible mince pies on the shelves before our summer ice cream has melted, Starbucks luring us in the with the red cups and M&S selling those yummy nibbly type things we never need, but want and then accidently end up eating the whole packet before November is out, there is no wonder squeezing ourselves into the little black dress becomes a mission!

The thing is despite the whinging and moaning, like most of us, I do love Christmas, very much. It’s just the build up that starts in August and seems to drag on until the dregs of the January sales are swept back into the stockrooms for next year that I dread. So as operation find the perfect party dress commences, the list making is in full flow and I have RSVP’d for England, I urgently require some thinspiration to enable me to get into the perfect dress (thank you AllSaints!) in time for Santa’s big night out. Luckily for me, the Boy has decided there is a ban on mince pies until we are ‘at least in December’ and for once this is something we are happily in agreement about!

Is #romance dead?.........

Some times in life, through what ever reasons, it is necessary to put certain things in to a box. Some times is shoes, some times it's a way of creating closure and some times it's the safest, securest place for our most precious memories. The beauty of these boxes is that they keep things that are precious to us safe. They keep our Manohlas safe from boyfriends, pets and little sticky hands, they hold things together to help us heal from pain and they neatly keep our past memories in order until we want to reach up to that shelf and take a sneaky peak at our past in pictures and notes. But as we hurtle through the twenty first century, an era of massive technological evolution has the love letter become as extinct as the Do-do?
In years to come will we all have memory boxes filled with old Nokia brick style phones containing text messages from boyfriends past instead of hand written love letters or notes? Will we have memory sticks filled with emails from previous lovers instead of old cinema tickets and face book wall posts instead of flowers dried between pages of a book?
In an age where the height of commitment is defined by your relationship status on face book and we can tweet the object of desire from any where in the world, we have to ask, is romance dead? Has modern technology stomped its way down the information super high way killing romance and all its sweet notions as it went? Do men send real flowers any more or just virtual ones on a Twitter hash tag? How many of us have opened love letters, on real paper, scribbled writing showing the tumbling of emotions the sender  is feeling versus how many of us have skipped a heart beat when we saw a face book notification telling us our beloved has written on ‘our wall’, in cold type text, emotionless and so public. Or even worse, they attach an emoticon, surely no one is that happy or super smiley to be pouring their heart out on face book?! A love letter is a private thing, only ever destined to be between two people, a wall post on face book, however, declares your love to the object of your desire and all of your 400 friends including your mum and your boss. Nice. There is something warming and comforting about feeling the paper in your hand, knowing the person you love and miss has also touched the same piece of paper. It’s hardly the same when your sharing the information super high with a million other people who you have never met.  Is romance gone or are we expecting too much in the fast moving pace of the 21^st century?

Maybe there will be no White knight on a shiny stead, no big white dress or happy ever after with roses around the door, at least not in the traditional sense. Maybe we need to catch up with the technological era and realise we live in a world where those ideals have changed. Did we get sick of waiting for Price Charming to jump upon his noble stead and put the letter in the post? Was it quicker and easier to jump in our own car and simply tweet him? Could it be our true happy ending isn’t with prince charming and his romantic advances, but with ourselves? And maybe an iPhone complete with Twitter and Face book apps to keep in touch. How many of us have chatted to friends about what birthday presents our other halves have bought us only to admit to each other we now have four new tyres we didn’t want, an in car phone charger we didn’t need and an oh so thoughtful year’s subscription to the AA. I think we would all agree to bring back the flowers and chocolates, but then would we just moan they would make us fat?!
 

So whatever is in our boxes, be it letters or old phones we should try to take all our boxes and stack them sky ward. Piling them high towards our future dreams, remembering that it was because of these memories and past experiences we have boxes to stand on to build the future we want.*

*White knights and fairy tales are totally optional...............

Is #romance dead.........?

Some times in life, through what ever reasons, it is nessercery to put certain things in a box. Some times is shoes, some times it's a way of creating closure and some times it's the safest, securest place for our most precious memories. The beauty of these boxes is that they keep things that are precious to us safe. They keep our Manohlas safe from boyfriends, pets and little sticky hands, they hold things together to help us heal from pain and they neatly keep our past memories in order until we want to reach up to that shelf and take a sneaky peak at our past in pictures and notes. But as we hurtle through the twenty first century, an era of massive technological evolution has the love letter become as extinct as the Do-do?
In years to come will we all have memory boxes filled with old Nokia brick style phones containing text messages from boyfriends past instead of hand written love letters or notes?Will we have memory sticks filled with emails from previous lovers instead of old cinema tickets and face book wall posts instead of flowers dried between pages of a book?
In an age where the height of commitment is defined by your relationship status on facebook and we can tweet the object of desire from any where in the world, we have to ask, is romance dead? Has modern technology stomped it's way down the information super high way killing romance and all it's sweet notions as it went? Do men send real flowers any more or just virtual ones on a Twitter hashtag? How many of us have opened love letters versus how many of us have skipped a heart beat when we saw a facebook

notification telling us our beloved has written on ‘our wall’, in cold type text, emotionless and so public. Or even worse, they attach an emoticon, surely no one is that happy or super smiley to be pouring their heart out on face book?! A love letter is a private thing, only ever destined to be between two people, a wall post on face book, however, declares your love to the object of your desire and all of your 400 friends including your mum and your boss. Nice. There is something warming and comforting about feeling the paper in your hand, knowing the person you love and miss has also touched the same piece of paper. It’s hardly the same when your sharing the information super high with a million other people who you have never met.  Is romance gone or are we expecting too much in the fast moving pace of the 21^st century?

Maybe there will be no White knight on a shiny stead, no big white dress or happily ever after with roses around the door, at least not in the traditional sense. Maybe we need to catch up with the technological era and realise we live in a world


Maybe we should take all our boxes and stack then sky ward, towards our future dreams, remembering that it was because of these memories and past experiences we have boxes to stand on to build the future we want.*

*White knights and fairy tales are totally optional...............

Is it a girls world?: Bobbi Brown Lipstick in Hollywood Red........

Is it a girls world?: Bobbi Brown Lipstick in Hollywood Red........: As we journey through life, bearing killer heels, juggling careers and relationships, we are advised to dance like no one is watching, love ...

Bobbi Brown Lipstick in Hollywood Red........

As we journey through life, bearing killer heels, juggling careers and relationships, we are advised to dance like no one is watching, love like you have never been hurt, sing like there is nobody listening and live like its heaven on earth (Thanks William W. Purkey, Purkey by name, perky by nature it seems!). All of this sounds totally wonderful and like most of us, it’s a life I aspire to lead. To wake up and attack each day with positivity, happiness, light, laughter and glamour. To dance in 5 inch killer heels to our favourite songs, throwing our best Beyonce moves without fearing we may be disowned by our nearest and dearest. To sing loudly outside the safe confines of our car and have no fear of smashing mirrors (move over Adele!) and it would be wonderful to be blind to the horrors of the world we live in and live like we are in heaven ,if you even believe in such a place. Mine would be a fat free, calorie free Ben and Jerry’s kinda heaven, maybe with Jamie Oliver, Dermott O’Leary and Simon Hirst, but I digress! But as for loving like you have never been hurt?! Maybe that is the hardest piece of advice to live by. Can we honestly put our emotional baggage down, forget we ever had it and be free? Ask any girl who has been lied to, made to feel insignificant and betrayed by the person she once loved and see what she says. Is it because our hands are full of emotional baggage that we struggle to dance and sing freely? How often are we holding on to these overstuffed bags of memories of what was? Are we clutching these bags so tightly, like a comfort blanket of warm, fuzzy but distant memories, rather than looking inside those bags and seeing things what those memories actually are now. Maybe we don’t because it’s too painful, maybe it’s because we don’t want to face what we know we must and maybe it’s just too hard to sometimes say good bye when all we want to have back what we have lost. When you have poured all your hopes, dreams and trust into that one person who you believed was worth it and they let you down, all that hurt and rejection is neatly piled up in to an already over flowing emotional bag. And as we get a new hair cut, shrink a dress size in the post diet break up, find a new hobby, plan a girly holiday and totter off into a happier sunset, complete in AllSaints finest, how many of us are actually aware we are carrying all that extra baggage? Maybe we just silently drag it along, blissfully unconscious that it quietly holds us back from fully loving ourselves or anyone else.

But what stops us from going to bin, tipping up Mulberry’s Alexa and just moving on? What are we so frightening of loosing when we have often already lost so much? At a point in our lives when we feel all we have is the memories we mourn are these bags full of emotions helping or hindering us? If there was an excessive emotional baggage fee would we be happy to pay? Or would it make us sit up, take notice, action a swift bag clearance and move on to pastures new free, light and happy? What if we waste too much time in the past, peering into over flowing bags instead of putting it down, letting the millions of little pieces fall on the floor before we start to pick them up and build them, and our future dreams, sky ward....?

So maybe it’s time to be brave, to inch on the lipstick, slip on the killer heels and face what’s inside our emotional handbags. Some times its time to clear out the emotional junk mail loitering in the bottom of our emotional handbags, to bin the scrappy receipts of memories and throw away the broken old lipstick of dreams. Maybe it’s time to make room in our bags, life’s and hearts for a new start, a new lipstick and new dreams. As I begin the work on my new dreams, I’m starting by refilling my emotional bag with a new lipstick, thank you Bobbi Brown in Hollywood Red............