wtffashionshark

Hallo readers,

It is almost September and the leaves are starting to turn russet. Summer is drawing to a close.  The football season has started (North Americans – read, soccer). WTF is still shattered by the news that former Arsenal captain and Dutch superstar Robin Van Persie (the Dutch play in orange) has gone to Manchester United. Only yesterday, she threw the sports section to the floor and jumped up and down on a picture of RVP whilst shouting imprecations. It may be time to see the doctor. But I digress. This weekend is the last Bank Holiday of the year and the forecast is set fair for summer Bank Holiday weather, i.e. it will be pissing down with rain with possible flooding. Tradition has it that Brits set off in their cars, sitting for hours in stationary motorway queues watching fed-up punters in other cars whilst the rain hammers against the windscreen. For at least some part of the journey, traffic is always reduced to a single lane because of miles of orange cones. Eventually, you drive past a wheelbarrow and an abandoned JCB digger with no bugger in sight, then there are another few miles of cones with no on-going work to be detected, not even of any kind, and then the traffic starts to speed up again. When you get to wherever you are going to, the inclement conditions dictate that you are forced to picnic in your car with the contents of your sandwich disappearing between the front seat and the handbrake and the windows steaming up. At which point someone annoys the shit out of everyone else by uttering the inevitable cry of “It’s brightening up!”, whereupon it starts to rain even harder. Then you drive home again past the cones and the wheelbarrow and the abandoned JCB digger whilst the food that fell out of your sandwich and is now wedged inaccessibly between the car seat and the hand brake begins to whiff a bit. A bad time is had by all. When you get home pissed off and exhausted after 8 solid hours in the car, you then have to scramble under the seats with a carving knife in one hand and your mobile used as a torch in the other trying to extract the by-now pungent foodstuffs whilst your legs get wet hanging out the doors. Roll on September.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The nation has been much cheered by the pictures of Prince Harry, he of the ginger hair and naughty expression, caught in Las Vegas stark bollock naked and snuggling up to a female with whom he had been playing strip billiards. WTF loves Prince Harry, and not just because he’s an Arsenal supporter. I mean, it isn’t as if he were running around the parade ground flashing his dick, or getting it out for Trooping the Colour or during the Diamanté Jubilee celebrations. That would clearly be inappropriate. BUT HE’S ON HOLIDAY!!!!!  The Daily Mail  and fuddy-duddies various worked themselves into a right state.. “He’s let the Queen down, he’s let the Country down, he’s let the Army down” etc, etc.  Happily, the public reaction is less censorious.  After all, there are only two reasons why young men go to Las Vegas. One is to get their wallet out and the other is to get their dick out.   The Sun has published the pictures on the grounds that there was a “security issue”. Yeah, one of the bimbos could have suffocated him with her inflatable breasts. Maybe that is where they concealed the camera without HRH and the Royal Protection Officers noticing. WTF does wonder what the Officers doing whilst HRH was getting his kit off? Do they just watch? Do they join in? Are they outside the suite with one of them peering through the keyhole and another with a glass up against the wall? WTF is intrigued…..

To business. And be warned. This week is bad. Very bad. Indeed.

For the Z Listers of the week (once more, we have two for the price of one) we have best friends Billi Mucklow and Cara Kilbey off The Only Way is Essex. Although in this case, Essex has come to Leicester Square for the premiere of a crap British “comedy” entitled Keith Lemon – The Film.  WTF would rather be tortured with hot implements than have to sit through even five minutes of Keith Lemon, who would have to improve by a million per cent just to be unfunny. However, a premiere of this sort is the natural habitat of Z listers like Billi and Cara who turned up dressed like this.

These two could not be any more orange if they were oranges. Cara is even wearing orange lippy. Billi and Cara are inseparable, which is presumably why they are wearing the same YSL shoes. Billi co-owns a beauty and tanning salon called Belles and Beaus  (I know there should be an “x“, but this is Essex). Frankly, looking at her dodgy tan and absurd eyebrows, she should sue herself. Cara used to work in the City.  Incredibly, Cara’s dress is by Lanvin but it looks like it came from Primark. Billi’s dress is by Terry Paris. WTF set about trawling the internet with an assiduity bordering on the obsessional in search  but could not find more information about this power-shouldered, Fred-Flintstone-purple-tied, pink-collared, über-shiny monstrosity. Together, the girls look like a pair of walking ads for the Jaffa Marketing Board.

Here is Rod Stewart.

WTF is not averse to colourpop but this is more grandpop. These are Slacks! Orange Slacks which match his face! He should have been posing in Leicester Square with Billi and Cara.  Rod has teamed his slacks with a blue and white gingham shirt, blue and white matching plimsolls and a yellow belt. The poor love resembles a Florida pensioner waiting for his earlybird supper ($10 – all you can eat). Note to Rod – no. Just no.

Let us pass on to Heidi Klum at the launch of her new kiddies’ fashion range, Truly Scrumptious, in a really horrible Michael Kors dress.

An explosion of leopard print. Baggy. Saggy. One shouldered. One sleeved. A flounced hem last seen in 1978. If the rest of Michael Kors’ Fall Range looks like this, he should call it Truly Emetic.

And so we come to another edition of Designers Who Need to See A Doctor, in which the men and women who create lovely clothes for other people go around looking like they have got dressed from the contents of a skip. Here is Dame Vivienne Westwood.

There are several aspects of Dame Viv’s appearance which are a given, like the orange hair and the weird accessories. But, sad to report, this is worse than usual.  WTF is reeling from the visible pants which look as if they were last worn by Dame Viv’s granddad round about the time of the relief of Mafeking, not to mention the visible grey tights just below the visible pants and the flesh overhang just above the visible pants. And then there is the dirty, torn dress. In fact, it looks as if Dame Viv climbed out of the skip like something out of a Samuel Beckett play.  

It doesn’t get better. Say hallo to former childstar, actor and Dancing With The Stars artiste, Corey Feldman.

WTF is an equal opportunities critic. Sheer, brocaded, nipple-baring shirts are not good on either males or females. Yes, Corey has had a difficult life but that does not excuse the shirt. In fact, I can’t think of anything which could excuse the shirt, or, for that matter the trousers, the shoes and the hair with that rat’s tail falling over his face. As for the bimbos, they both look as if they are desperate for the loo. Standing like that, they will soon be desperate for an osteopath.

And so to this week’s edition of The Emperor’s New Clothes and to two ridiculous examples of overpriced Designer excess. First Jessica Biel, soon to be Mrs Justin Timberlake, wearing Giambattista Valli at the premiere of her new film Total Recall.

There is a lot going on here, but WTF is puzzled by the dead swan round the waist. Why are dead swans suddenly de rigeur? Apparently, this dress was so tight that it split right under the arm. This is probably just as well or the poor girl might have joined the swan down the morgue.

But Jessica looks fab as compared to Kim Kardashian in her boots and silly leather skirt, both by Givenchy. Kanye West also looks silly, but we will get to him later.

Apparently the boots cost $1,695 and the skirt $1,395. That is $3,100 not-worth of stupendous silliness. The boots look like a couple of umbrella stands and the leather skirt seems more Tonya Harding than haute couture. (You remember Tonya – she was the rough-as-a-bear’s-arse skater whose then-husband conspired with her bodyguard and some other bloke to attack her closest rival, golden-girl-next-door Nancy Kerrigan, with a collapsible police truncheon.) Last week it was Djibril Cissé in his Givenchy sweater and kilt combo, and now this. Hubert de Givenchy must be turning in his grave. This is the House that dressed Audrey Hepburn, and gave us the ultimate iconic movie image.

One other thing. Kim and Kanye were on holiday in Hawaii, where the average August temperature is 84F (metric users – read, 29C). Now WTF is not suggesting that Kim and Kanye should have to dress like Magnum P.I, but going about in Hawaii in August dressed from head to foot in funereal black with lashings of leather screams “fashion victims” and “photo opportunity” in equal measure. No wonder they are tucking into the frozen yogurt. They must be bloody hot in all that leather.