When I’m not writing or editing a column for Address online or working on the next issue, my time is spent thinking about fashion criticism as part of my research degree at London College of Fashion. Criticism is very difficult to define and most of my research is drawn from discussions and definitions from other disciplines such as graphic design, product design, music, theatre and film, where the subject is more evolved. Against these, fashion is starving for, not just criticism, but also discussions …read more
For a while now, I have suffered from an acute boredom when it comes to fashion magazines. I used to buy every single magazine I could get my hands on, but now only a few will come home with me from the newsagents. As a diagnosis for this, I can only offer one explanation: I have become more of a reader rather than a viewer. Fashion magazines have always been more about imagery than writing, but it seems to me that this is even more so now …read more
I went shopping to find out. The Westfield centre in Stratford in East London, to me, is a kind of hell. Every shop pumping music from dodgy speakers, too many people lacking spatial awareness, and it’s hotter than the Mediterranean in June. Not great for puffa jacket wearers in doors, especially if also wearing thermal undies. However, I thought it a good location to meet people wading the last dregs of the January sales and incoming fresher stock. To have a look at what is new in fashion …read more
My mother had a button tin– an old sweet tin that was once given as a Christmas present. It had been full of butterscotch – my Grandma’s favourite – and that taste just explodes in my mouth… On the tin were some indentations. I had not really looked at them too closely before, but now, as an adult, looking, feeling, I realised that it was a footprint. A small, rounded, solid dent from a child’s shoe …read more
At least, not as nice as I thought… When I began researching fashion at street level back in 2005, interviewing for the FashionMap at Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the Future Laboratory, I became immediately aware of my assumptions of other people before I approached them to interview about their clothes. It shocked me as I’d mostly considered myself a good person, equal, but there I was, in Nottingham city centre with sweeping statements flying out of my mouth about people …read more
