Clothes in a Cold Climate

I suppose you all enjoyed the Chanel show. But many of you- including the journalists who I'm fielding now whilst telepathically writing this entry and transferring my thoughts to Enrnest in Ohio who'll write these down and post them on the blog- many of you are wondering why I did this collection.

I travelled to Antarctica last year, and the North Pole a few months before that. Anna quite enjoys clubbing all the animals there- not to mention the people who looked like animals. But nevermind that. The main thing that struck me was how demode everyone was dressing. It was impossible. And in the North Pole there's a man who calls himself "Santa Claus"- he wears red and is very overweight and has a beard. Frankly, he strikes me as some sort of pervert or homeless man. He lives there in his sleigh because the bank kicked him out because he couldn't pay his mortgage- poor guy. Beside him lives an executive from the 80s who carries around one of those giant mobile telephone devices- he lives in his Mercedes. These places exist out of time and space somewhat. But that's no excuse for demode dressing, hm? You must understand- I don't mean the normal sort of demode dressing- the kind one finds and Walmart and such. It's a special sort of demode.

The people in the picture above are a typical example of the bad dressing that goes on in these places. Just because one is in a very cold climate doesn't mean that one should dress like the Antartic equivilent of ex-Woodstock now-henchmen-for-a-bad-James-Bond-villian.

So, quite simply I thought something must be done. I consider it a favor to these poor people. The Chanel show was an instruction manual for dressing in a cold climate. It's not often I'm this charitable, but you know, I quite like the penguins- I get along well with them- and if I'm going to visit them again I'd hate for the humans to be dressed as in the picture above. It's unpleasant. People wonder why more people don't go on holiday to places like Antarctica. Yet when the inhabitants are dressing like that, who would want to visit Antarctica! Every day I get emails from people like Slim John Popeye and Dr. Faustus Pound- head of the Antarctica Tourism Board, asking why magazines I work with aren't shooting in Antarctica. And I always reply with "Because your people are dressed abhorrently. It is impossible."

Now- onto the next thing. A few of you commenters need to "step up your A-game" and start writing essays in my comments section longer than the posts themselves. Ideally you'll have names like "A.Cat.Lady" and "FDR De La Truffle". I am going to be conducting a search for these commenters, because it is not good enough simply to leave a comment like "LOVE YOUR BLOG! XO" and then link to your blog. Please email me your CVs at fakekarl@gmail.com.

Ideally, you'll either be an aging British aristocrat a or costume designer, an old lady who likes to garden and wears floral dresses, or something like that. I will revise your CVs and the qualified ones will make it into "Karl's Gang" (TM).

Interview

Whilst I've been elsewhere lately, I have done one interview over at Bonnie and Clyde. You can read it here.

We Will Return Shortly

D is for Dresses

The dress is like a woman's chambermaid- it is the closet confidante a woman can have, aside from herself. A dress knows all the secrets- you cannot hide anything from a dress; it sees all your flaws in technicolour. More importantly, it feels all your flaws. Yet a good dress does not reveal secrets. When selecting a dress, one should keep this in mind. How trustworthy is this dress? Of course, one cannot submit this dress to a lie-detector test- dresses cannot talk, they can only show. So I find in cases like these that it is best to hire an old fashioned private investigator to investigate the dress. You can do this by going to a private investigator's door, knocking on it and hiring him with cash handed in a manilla enevelope. In extreme cases, I'd suggest getting the police involved- but really, if you're getting the police involved the dress probably isn't very trustworth in the first place! The private eye will do some background work on the dress first- even an old Chanel dress may not be totally trustworthy, about one in a thousand tends to go rogue. Like the FBI or CIA or RIAA or something, no? Anyway- the background work, then if it passes that the P.I will start investigating the dress in person. He'll walk into the room, feel the dress, talk to the dress, feel it again- frankly, some of these private eyes are perverts. But they do their job, and it's absoultuly paramount that your dress is trustworthy.

I'm reminded of a case where a woman did not have her dress properly investigated before she went and purchased it. As you can imagine, the consequences were quite disastorous. She wore the dress to a rather "important" social function and her photo ended up in all the social pages the next day. Several magazines, I know, took pictures of her in the dress because it was so unflattering. This was before these internet memes- those internet-pictures that go around everywhere. People had to make their own memes, back then. So this stupid woman became a meme in the world of fashion- people would look at the picture of her in the dress, laugh, and take it as a warning. The woman in question- I won't name her, but you probably know her name; she's very well know. Well, that woman in question's social life was destoryed, and she now mopes about her house by herself.

A Dior dress is very untrustworthy. I don't think anyone should buy a dress made by a man with a finiticky moustache anyway. Dior dresses tend to tell the other dresses about their owner, so when the wearer of the dress is in a room with other people wearing other dresses, she looks very demode indeed. Be very wary of the couture. Whilst it may look like a lady, it does not behave like a lady!
Lanvin dresses are generally good. Alber, you know, the designer of Lanvin- he has a heart of gold. Real gold. Melting gold. Pure, melting gold. It must get very hot in there sometimes. They can be quite haughty, so treat them with respect.
I'm fond of Rodarte dresses. The Rodarte sisters are sweet, in the genuine way that one imagines Sylvia Plath to be when she wasn't being depressed. The dresses themselves are sweet. Sweet in an organic way- very natural.
I suppose I'd better include the Japanese in here. Dresses by Rei Kawakubo- Comme des Garcons, tend to be incredibly mysterious. Other dresses are a bit scared of them. It really depends if you intend on socializing at a party or not. I don't, so if I was a woman I'd wear Comme des Garcons all the time. I used to wear a lot of Yohji Yamamoto in the 90s- it scared away a lot of people. Alas, I cannot wear Yohji these days. It is not in "the now." Dresses by Yohji are wonderful- elegant, but spinsters or never married. Mostly the latter.

Attention: Perez Hilton

Sorry Karl, must interrupt this alphabet business of yours for a moment.

Dear readers, I apologize for uttering the demode name of Per- Perez-

GET ME A WASTEBASKET, I FEEL NAUSEOUS

Hilton. But he has slighted our darling little Tavi.

Mr. Hilton -

One more word and you'll find yourself in Bulgaria blogging about new hallway carpeting trends. If I'm that nice.

I AM ANNA AND I HAVE SPOKEN.

All right, Karl - you may continue. I believe the next letter is H? H is for Hermès. Which reminds me...

ORDER MORE SCARVES.

Ciao lovelies,

Anna

G is for Gadgets

In today’s modern times, gadgets seem to take the role of mother, daughter, father and son. I have colleagues- ex-colleagues, anyway, who are secretly engaged to their Blackberry or iphone. They refer to their fax machine as their “mistress” and their laptop (a Mac, no doubt) as their “lover”. Gadget people are most definitely not monogamous- except for me- I think I must be the only monogamous gadget user in the world. The only gadget I use is the ipod. I have hundreds of them- thousands. I’ve actually designed a special ipod wheelbarrow to wheel them around in. I go out into the garden and I wheel them around, pretending I’m doing some sort of garden-type work. Sometimes I even wear a safari hat, which is the most chic sort of gardening hat in the world. Of course, I don’t actually garden. It’s true that I draw flowers and they come to life, just as some sort of fairy tale. Yet those flowers need to be watered, as do the rest of the plants I have in my garden. They’re not going to survive on their own! But being drawn flowers, they require drawn rain, drawn suns, and so on. It’s all a lot of work if you think about it, which I don’t imagine you have. So I simply have Dries van Noten do the gardening. He’s much better at that sort of thing, you know. That’s why he has so many floral prints. (I think floral prints are for middle aged ladies with weight problems, but that’s another matter.)

Anyway, gadgets are fine, if one acknowledges that they are a gadget rather than a person. I’ve been at funerals- actually, recently I was at the funeral of a Very Famous and Fabulously Wealthy Person, and people answer phonecalls on their Blackberry or Boysenberry or somesuch during the funeral.

“And we will remember..”

Gadget obsessed man: “Hello? Yeah, I’m in a funeral right now. Yeah, it’s a really good one. They have cupcakes and everything..”

“Was a good man, and was loved..”

G.O.M: “Oh really? Did she really? Yeah, I haven’t had sex with her in- oh god- I don’t know, a week. Jesus. I know.”

“..By all that knew him. He was born on..”

G.O.M: “Oh god, there’s this guy in front of me who just can’t stop talking. God. Jesus. Buddha. So rude!”

And on it goes- people get annoyed with the G.O.M, the G.O.M gets annoyed with them and ends up twittering about how he is annoyed in one hundred and forty characters or less. This is not chic.

New Things

A couple of months ago, a website called "ASOS" wrote to the producers of the t-shirts you see to your right (I feel like a tourist guide), expressing interest in selling said t-shirts on their website, along with t-shirts designed by other collaborators in the Borders and Frontiers "blogger" collaboration (of course, I don't consider myself a blogger per se, just a dressmaker). Anyway, I was feeling generous at the time and decided to spread fashion to the masses, etc etc- a la H&M. One may purchase them here. I recommend buying all 8, because there's sometimes 8 days a week. (As that chic covers band, The Beatles knows. They also do children's parties.)