Mademoiselle

Looking around the office the other day I realised we wouldn’t be able to run this well oiled fashion ship without our interns.  That sounds like an obvious statement to make given most magazines are run on a skeletal staff (no pun intended), but with four weeks of fashion shows around the corner and the big summer issues to be shot, it really is a moment of all hands on deck.   Most of our interns have recently graduated and have probably amassed a fair amount of debt during their four years at fashion college.  The standard magazine internship salary may only cover rent and travel so I’m in awe at how well dressed our fashion helpers are.  Day in day out, they turn up wearing vintage finds from markets and jumble sales or things borrowed from backs of wardrobes of grannies and mums.  Rebecca, who assists the accessories editor, dyed her hair bright red and had it cut into a page boy style last week and I almost fell off my Marant ankle boots when she walked past me in the corridor head to toe in cheetah print making like a Punk Marylyn Monroe.  I pass the Celine section in Selfridges on a daily basis and although I appreciate well cut tailoring, good quality fabrics and directional design (I long for one of Phoebe’s handbags), I reckon I would have to re-mortgage my house to buy more than one piece.  With four weeks of immaculate dressing ahead of me (the shows),  I’m taking a leaf out of the interns book, the key to my key look this season is going to be my imagination.  

Subscribers will have already devoured the March issue of ELLE but for the rest of you, it’s on the news stand today! Hurray!  How hot does Liv Tyler look on the cover and especially on page 273 in the shoot.  This has obviously got me thinking, can I do brown?  I’m talking hair, not clothes here.  There’s something so sexy about a tousled brunette wearing lashing’s of black eye liner.   Those legs should be illegal they’re so long.  I’m going to talk to my hairdresser who is going to tell me to talk to the hand because a colour change from blonde to brown is very difficult to pull off without going green after one wash.  In the meantime, I’m off to Selfridges to check out the wigs, a temporary but safe solution.  

I’ve  just returned from a stroll down Oxford Street (thanks to the new flat shoe trend) and for a minute I thought I was on Bond or Sloane given the Zara window is practically an homage to the entire Chloe collection!  There was a khaki cape worn with flat sandals and over the knee boots worn over suede trousers all in dusty pinks and browns with a splash of military green thrown in.  This Chloe extravaganza drew me into store obviously, I mean hello?  The entire Chloe collection for under £200?  Inside the store was a flurry of fashion crazed women stocking up on the latest designer knock offs, clearly these women knew when Zara restocked and may have been camping outside all night.   There were so many things I recognised from the SS10 collections, the shows I had spent hours watching in London, Milan and Paris last September, the designs the designers had laboured hours over.  There was a trench with gathered shoulders, nude mannish tailoring, tough leather boots to wear with crisp white shirts, you read ELLE so you know the trends.   I left empty handed, it felt like wearing a fake Chanel bag, I couldn’t do it, even though I had bought some ‘they think they’re Marant’ boots last season, this felt like a step too far.  The Top Shop SS10 look book arrived on my desk the other day and yet again they have tapped into the fashion zeitgeist without plagiarising the designers.  Top Shop create their own trends based around their customers, they know who their girl is and their girl likes to be original, a sentiment shared by us, the ELLE fashion team.