The grey matter

My piece on the vogue for dyeing hair... grey - from the Indo's Weekend mag last Saturday.

Elizabeth Taylor, hair still blue-black into her 78th year, has not got the memo that grey is in vogue. Stars such as Helen Mirren, Jamie Lee Curtis, Diane Keaton and Emmylou Harris have been noticeably growing old grey-cefully in recent years and earning applause for it.

But the appearance of gunmetal and silver shades is no longer the preserve of the ageing. For some young hipsters, going grey is something to dye for. Pixie Geldof traded in her trademark peroxide crop for grey, saying: "I'd been blonde for three years and fancied a change." Kelly Osbourne looked lovely in mauve earlier this year, and pop star Pink has been tinting her platinum locks silver-grey.

As style fads go it's an interesting one, not least because fashion normally rejects anything that suggests ageing -- and because it doesn't seem to be going away.

The August edition of US 'Vogue' sported a photograph of a model with waist-length silver-grey hair, sleek as a cat in polo neck and pencil skirt, suggesting that grey will be good at least into autumn/winter 2010.

Supermodel Kristen McMenamy has just done a shoot for cutting-edge fashion and culture mag 'Dazed & Confused', long grey locks rolling over her shoulders.

The notoriously fickle world of high fashion has even been showing some consistency on the grey matter. Two years ago, silver-haired models began to appear on the Parisian catwalks for Givenchy. This year, Calvin Klein sent out a model with a slick salt-and-pepper ponytail to showcase its autumn/winter collection. Designers Giles Deacon and Gareth Pugh also turned their models' hair the colour of concrete for their 2010 shows.

As Meryl Streep's Anna Wintour-esque fashion mag editor explains in 'The Devil Wears Prada', trends work on a trickle-down basis. First they appear on the catwalk, then on the back of some wealthy haute-couture client, then get mass exposure from influential celebrities before finally winding their way down to the woman on the street.

The celebrity advocates have surely now reached tipping point. Two huge trendsetters on either side of the Atlantic have been at the toner bottle. In the US, Ashley Olsen reinvented the blue rinse by sporting blue-grey highlights in her tousled hair, while Kate Moss got skunk streaks to launch her collaboration with Longchamps.

As with her skinny-jeans-tucked-into-boots combo, are we next?

Sharon Rice, stylist with cutting-edge hair and beauty salon Brown Sugar in Dublin, says: "Things like that do catch on. It's different from when we've had people in the past who were going grey and coming into us looking to enhance it rather than hide it. Or someone who has short blonde hair, they might add tones of silver.

"We haven't seen younger people coming in yet actively looking to dye their hair grey, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens and we would welcome it because we love doing adventurous stuff."

This slightly rebellious idea of turning one's hair grey when so many in the world spend a fortune on covering their natural greys is key to why the trend has taken off. Pixie Geldof, for example, was not worried that she'd be mistaken for her badger-headed dad Bob, saying of her grey 'do': "It was rad".

When younger people experiment with grey, they wear it with the confidence that it won't make them look prematurely old because they don't have the wrinkles to match. This was especially true of a fashion blogger called Tavi (her surname is Gevinson, but the 'biz' is so in awe of her that she's been given the first-name-only respect).

Tavi is remarkable for many reasons. She's only 13, but she always bags front-row seats at major catwalk shows because her blog is so influential. She also stood out when she turned up at New York Fashion Week sporting a short, grey hairdo. She dyed her hair a soft baby blue a few weeks earlier so that it would have faded to the correct tone of granny-chic grey by the time she appeared front row at the shows.

Sadly, the grey trend doesn't mean that the fashion and beauty industry is suddenly embracing the ageing process. Barack Obama was accused (falsely, of course) in the early days of his US Presidency of adding grey to his hair for extra gravitas. No one would ever accuse a woman of the same. Men get the 'Clooney' and 'distinguished' tags when they start to go silver at the temples; greying women are more likely to face insinuations that they have let themselves go.

Saying that, this wouldn't be the first time grey has had its go on the fashion merry-go-round. Men and women alike went crazy for dove-grey locks in the 1700s, sometimes wearing wigs to get the full halo effect. Otherwise, they powdered their hair white, oiling it to make the powder stick. It was messy, it was smelly and it ruined expensive clothing, but it was de rigueur for the fashionable set.

Marie Antoinette, the trendsetter of her time, loved wig powder to the point of losing her head over it. Her liberal use of the powder was condemned as another sign of her extravagant tastes as the rest of 18th-century France struggled with poverty. There was her country suffering through the Flour War of 1775, and there she was using enough flour in her hair each morning to feed a large family.

By the turn of the century, the English had laid a heavy tax on hair powder and the grey days of Marie Antoinette were over. One hundred years later, in 1907, L'Oréal founder Eugène Schueller had created the first synthetic dye. By this stage, the average life expectancy had increased from around 37 years in 1800 to 47 years in 1900. The appeal of going grey for fashion was considerably lessened by the fact that people were living long enough to see their hair fade naturally.

Now that home hair dye is readily and cheaply available -- it's a €3 billion industry in the EU alone -- perhaps going grey has a chance for a comeback as a fashion statement because it is a choice, not an inevitability. Rod Stanley, editor of 'Dazed & Confused', said it "remained to be seen" if grey was here to stay. "The trend for younger people dying their hair grey is a different thing in many ways but, of course, that could make people more receptive to naturally grey hair in images." Or as Kristen McMenamy puts it herself: "You can get older and still be rock'n'roll."

Here's hoping Pixie Geldof is still rocking a head of granite highlights in her 60s.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/the-grey-matter-2306506.html#ixzz0xRkSD33l

Jeepers creepers, where'd you get those peepers?

By Susan Daly
Saturday Aug 7 2010

Lady Gaga's cartoon-style eyes have sparked a dangerous craze for the doe-eyed anime look, with teens buying large circular lenses on the internet reports Susan Daly

The outrageous Lady Gaga has set quite a few trends in her brief time at the top of the pops, from metal-spiked shoulder pads to precision-cut peroxide bobs.

We didn't see this one coming though: fans have now fallen for her wide-eyed look in her Bad Romance video. In the bathtub scene, Gaga flashes huge peepers in the tradition of doe-eyed Asian anime characters. The look was also channelled in a popular photoshoot the singer did to celebrate the 35th birthday of Hello Kitty.

While computer-generated imagery and liberal use of eyeshadow on closed lids was used to create Gaga's saucer eyes in the video and the photoshoot respectively, devoted female fans have been trying to emulate the look with super-sized contact lenses imported over the internet from South Korea, Japan and China.

Known as 'circle lenses', they are larger than average-sized contacts and extend beyond the iris over the whites of the eyes to make the iris look freakishly big.

The Association of Optometrists in Ireland warns that the lenses can starve the eyeball of oxygen and lead to serious infections, and even blindness.

The look is hugely popular in Asia where it fits in with the 'ulzzang' ideal of beauty. Ulzzang literally means 'best face' in Korean and encompasses a street style in which eyes are the main focus, with girls using circle lenses, eyeliner and lots of fake eyelashes to highlight them. They team the dramatic eyes with fair skin, again just like anime characters.

The female characters in anime and manga cartoons have been drawn with large eyes since they became popular in the 1960s. Japan's best-known anime artist, Osamu Tezuka, felt they better expressed emotion and femininity.

Asian girls associate the wide-eyed look with youthful beauty. That mindset has been compounded by the more recent notion that rounder, Western-shaped eyes are more desirable than their traditional almond shape.

Some have resorted to more desperate measures to get the look. An Irish ex-pat living in Tokyo notes "they are obsessed with having big eyes over here. A lot of the girls glue their eyelids to show more of their eyeball -- they can't even blink properly".

Now, as with karaoke, hi-tech gadgetry and so many other pop-culture trends, the bug-eye craze has transferred back westwards. More than nine million people have viewed US make-up artist Michelle Phan's YouTube demo of how to get the Lady Gaga anime look.

"In the past year, there's been a sharp increase in interest here in the US," Joyce Kim of Asian pop fansite Soompi.com told the New York Times earlier this month. "Once early adopters have adequately posted about it, discussed it and reviewed them, it's now available to everyone."

It is illegal for anyone in the US, as in Ireland, to sell contact lenses of any description without a prescription.

However, there are countless websites based in Canada, Holland, Asian countries and other territories where such restrictions don't apply, and they will ship circle lenses to anywhere in the world for an average of €5 a go.

It's not illegal for Irish consumers to buy these lenses, nor for these sites to sell them to us -- but it does mean that the consumer doesn't ever have to see an eye doctor and this is what worries optometrists.

"They can't be sold in Ireland but it's so easy to get them over the internet," says Lynda McGivney-Nolan, optometric advisor at the Association of Optometrists in Ireland. "They are being bought without prescription, without being fitted properly to the eye. You can't even be sure what materials are being used to make them. Do they contain dyes that are going to leak into the eye?

"Wearing them reduces oxygen to the cornea and that can affect sight," says Linda. "Then because people are not shown how to put them in properly, there is a huge risk of bacterial infections. Some of these infections can be severe enough to cause corneal meltdown. If you're very lucky, you might be able to get a corneal graft. If not, you could go blind."

Looking at a selection of the websites selling these circle lenses, these risks are not immediately evident. A few contain small sections on eye care.

Prominent Korean website e-circlelens.com writes in an email to Weekend that the circle lenses they sell are indeed bigger than regular lenses, but that "this is also true for other major brands' colour lenses as well

"We ask our customers to receive prescriptions from their eye care specialist before placing an order, and advise them to receive proper care advice from them... (btw, our products are all KFDA approved.)"

Even if young women and teenage girls know all the dangers, will that stop them buying into this latest eyewear craze?

A few years ago, as Etsuko points out, coloured lenses to intensify your baby blues were all the rage and they too could be bought, completely unregulated, over the internet.

"I even heard about a fleeting craze for this contact lens that had a chain attached to it with a little diamond on the end," says McGivney-Nolan.

"I can't even begin to imagine why you would stick that in your eye."

Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/beauty/eyes-wide-shut-dangers-of-the-cartoon-beauty-craze-2288143.html#ixzz0wOx9GoX9

Are we all white, there?

The bride wore white and the groom wore a proud grin from ear to ear.

The photograph of Brian O'Driscoll and Amy Huberman in the porch of a church in Leitrim in their finery is shaping up to be the most reproduced wedding pic of the year.

The image of a beloved sportsman and his beautiful bride subscribes to all the fantasies. It's easy to imagine this generation of Irish girls studying the picture of Amy in a princess-skirted dress, and vowing: one day, my prince too shall come.

It's not entirely about pulling Prince Charming: for girls, little and not-so-little, it's mostly about The Dress. We know that the wedding has not gone out of fashion. More than 19,000 couples will tie the knot in Ireland this year. One might assume, however, that the traditional white frock might be going the same way as the dowry.

After all, our society has changed immeasurably in the past 20 years. Many people have cohabited before marriage. Some have bought houses or already have children. Certainly, it's a given that there are not too many virgins walking down the aisle these days, any more than there's a virgin groom waiting for them at the altar. Yet the big white/ivory/cream/any-shade-of-pale dress is still the focus of the big day for the majority of brides.

Even Sarah Jessica Parker has admitted that she regrets wearing a black dress to wed husband Matthew Broderick. "I would white it up," she said in 2008. "I'd wear a beautiful, proper wedding dress, like I should have that day." Ciara Elliott, editor of bridal magazine Confetti, says: "The big, white dress endures as the key element for most Irish brides. You can wear a beautiful dress for any nice occasion, but you only get to put on the white dress once and I think people feel special when they put it on."

It's this transformative effect that relationship counsellor David Kavanagh says is key to why most Irish women live modern, unfussy lives -- but have no problem becoming Princess Di for their wedding day. In his experience in running pre-marriage guidance courses, Kavanagh has noticed that Irish women are still very much influenced by traditional expectations of what 'looking like a bride' will do for them.

"Wearing that white dress conforms to the fantastical notion of beauty we would have had from when we had fairy tales told to us as children by our parents," he says. "When people put these dresses on, they feel a sense of joy because endorphins are released as they tap back into those good memories of being told that this is the happy ending." For some brides, the psychology of wearing the white dress is simple: it's easier to wear,

than not to. "Some people wear alternatives but they are a small percentage," says Ciara. "We are a traditional country and when it comes down to it, people feel pressure to do the traditional thing. I knew a woman who was going to wear a pink dress, but her mum was horrified and she buckled."

It's not just pushy mums who are at it. Celebrity PR agent Joanne Byrne said in an interview last month that when her client Cecelia Ahern had her secret wedding, the media were obsessed with one detail. "The only question I asked the couple was who did Cecelia's dress, as I was being inundated with that question," she said. (Oscar de la Renta, if you're interested.)

The irony is that the white wedding dress might be seen as a tradition -- but it's not as time-honoured as we think. Blue was traditionally associated with purity, but, in fact, the earliest wedding gowns tended to be in plush, luxurious colours, like purple and red. In the Middle Ages, such expensive coloured dyes showed that the bride was coming from a family with money. The value of her purity was second to her value in cash.

Social media agony aunt Amanda Brown wore a strapless, linen two-piece to her civil wedding. "I couldn't wear the traditional white dress," she says. "I find that convention oppressive. You are dressing yourself up as chattel: it's a tradition I could do without being a part of."

There are some changes afoot in the world of bridalwear, however. Some cash-conscious ladies are steering away from the dressing-up box clearly marked 'Bridal'.

"The special dress has retained its value in the same way as the engagement ring has," says Tanya Grimson, stylist and fashion editor at Irish Brides. "But I am being asked a lot by readers: 'Who could make me something bespoke?' Designers who are not bridal designers are being asked to create something because people want to be able to wear it again.

"There will always be the die-hard traditionalist who wants the tiara, the veil, the pearls and the Gina shoes. But the long veil is gone for most brides. The idea of unveiling yourself to your husband, as if there is no sex before marriage ... oh, please."

IT'S NOT ALL WHITE
Meet some brides who chose an alternative to the big, white wedding dress.

BARBARA SCULLY Home-maker, writer and blogger

"I was 34 when I married, so I felt I was quite old -- well, relatively. I also already had a daughter. I didn't go for subtle, though: I wore a Grecian-style traffic-light-red dress. I'm 6ft tall and when I came down the stairs at home that morning, my two brothers said, 'Jesus, you're Mighty Aphrodite'. It must run in the family. My mother got married in a red suit in the 1960s."
PRISCILLA DIAMOND Financial controller

"Being from Galway but getting married in Kildare, I thought it would be nice to bring the Galway colours with me. I didn't try on any all-white dresses, but I did have a few panic attacks as the big day got closer, wondering if people would wonder, 'What was she thinking with that dress?' But I loved it and it was the dress for me."

MICHELLE WYATT Soap-maker

"I didn't go for the traditional white dress because I'm not a 'traditional' person. I got married in a cave (Wookey Hole in Somerset, England), in November. I also think the whole white dress thing is a bit dated. It's meant to symbolise purity, and I think it's quite safe to say that nowadays most brides are not still virgins by their wedding day."

SOOZI HADJ LAZIB Project co-ordinator

"As I married my husband in his family home in Algeria, I wore traditional dress -- but it was a traditional Berber dress, as his family are of Berber [original ethnic group of North Africa] stock. I have definitely loved having more colourful pictures to look back on and show friends."

AISLING McGRANE PRO for Project Arts Theatre

"I love well-tailored clothes and have always loved the '40s look, so I guess it was inevitable I would be drawn to this dress. I saw it in Costume and I also thought that champagne was more flattering on the skin than traditional white. I chose a dress that I was comfortable in and can wear again, if I choose to."

ANNIE WEST Illustrator

"I just wasn't into the thought of a meringue, so, exasperated with trying to find something, I ended up spending a cool 40 quid on a lovely dress from an Indian shop and dressed up a very plain hat. I bought two dresses in Marks and Spencer for the bridesmaids Anna and my daughter Amy [also in the picture and now 19]. They were a bit too new-looking, so I soaked them in tea overnight to get a nice sepia effect."

-Susan Daly

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion/pure-nostalgia-white-weddings-2262743.html
AND HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion/its-not-all-white-2264396.html

Nightwatch: Costume change

My Friday Nightwatch column from the Irish Independent:
Friday July 16 2010

Surely the surprising thing is not that Lindsay Lohan is going to jail on Tuesday -- it's not even that she had 'Fuck U' painted across her fingernails for her probation hearing.

I mean, come on, I've had expletives written on my nails for all my probation hearings, and the judge always finds them hilarious and not at all disrespectful.It's that she changed outfit three times during the hearing.

Had she mistaken her day in court for a presenter gig at the MTV Movie Awards or something? She arrived in the morning in a sombre, all-black trouser suit. At lunch, she decided to accessorise with a blazer and necklace. By the time the judge came to sentence her, she had stuck on a jumpsuit. Which, to be fair, was a good way to acclimatise to what she'll be wearing in prison.

Now, I know it's not the done thing to admire Li-Lo at the moment. She's not really the kind of gal you'd want organising your girls' night out, for example. Not unless you wanted to wake up in an open boxcar on the train to Albuquerque with a blank memory, a raging hangover and the number of some guy called Bubba written on your bra. Or, depending on your definition of what constitutes a good night out, maybe she is.

I do, however, admire her ability to 'pull together' a variety of sartorial options in a moment of crisis.

This is not a simple case of dressing yourself in the morning. I do manage -- most days -- to make it out the door with shoes on both feet and the requisite foundation garments. Sometimes, I even put something on top of those again.

I watch the American version of What Not to Wear, the one with the aggressive Noo Yoicker female presenter and her poor woman's Gok Wan sidekick. I get the basic tenets of dressing appropriately: no belly tops, no stonewashed denim, vertical stripes.

But dressing coherently under pressure? Forget it. This hit home last Thursday evening, the official start of the weekend. (I do wonder if Li-Lo's drinking habits would be considered as dangerous in Ireland as they are in the US.)

It was one of those 12-hour work days caused by doing three hours of graft, and five hours of Facebook and Twitter, the previous day. I was to meet a group of women in a pub to discuss a project we're all working on. I knew some of them by acquaintance; more I didn't know at all. Two words bounced around my brain. No, not Li-Lo's charming fingernail invitation. First. Impressions.

It's a lie to say that women don't dress for men. Clearly, if you're going on a date, you're not going to get out the sackcloth and ashes to make sure it's just your personality he's after. But it's also very true -- much more so, I would argue -- that women dress for other women.

Pathetic as it sounds, there's a lot of judgey-wudgey stuff going on when women are trying to get a handle on each other. A man might look at another man's feet briefly and think: I like/don't like/have no opinion at all on those runners. I look at women who wear heels that are too high for them to walk in and I immediately make a judgment call on what's in their head, as much as what's on their feet. It's not nice, but it's true, and I'm sure it has been done to me many a time.

So I put a small bomb in the base of the wardrobe and stood back to let it do its work. Not really. But the room did look like it had been hit by a few sticks of gelignite after I had spent an hour pulling things off the hangers and upending the laundry basket to see if the perfect outfit might be hiding in there. (Oh admit it -- everyone has sniffed a T-shirt at least once in their life to see if they might get one more wear out of it.)

In desperation, I ended up going out the door -- late, of course -- in purple tights, a denim dress and mustard-coloured wedges. And yes, it did look as odd as it sounds.

And shame on me for my cynicism: none of the women I met batted an eyelid. One actually told me she liked the colour combo of the tights and shoes -- and sounded sincere rather than just kind.

"Oh, these old things?" I said. "I just threw them on before I came out the door."

- Susan Daly

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/columnists/night-watch-its-all-change-for-ongoing-costume-drama-2260998.html

Bag ladies

From Wednesday's Irish Independent (slightly embarrassing title and pic of me but never mind...)

Your house is burning and you can take only one material possession with you. Will it be photographs of loved ones? Granny's recipe book with handwritten notes in the margins? Or will it be, as Jennifer Aniston has just proclaimed, your handbag?

The man who thinks that it is a cold, unsentimental choice -- for what is a bag but a vessel for the detritus of life -- doesn't understand what handbags mean to women. To some women, let's hasten to add. A friend of mine once went out with a girl who enjoyed insisting that she had never owned a handbag. "She was a nightmare," he remembers, "It was forever, 'Would you hold this?'"

Contrary to what that girl thought, a lobotomy isn't a prerequisite for owning a handbag. I admit that I've had the same battered mushroom-beige River Island number for about four years, and it ain't pretty. But its interior fits a notepad and dictaphone comfortably, it has an easily accessible pocket for my mobile and a zipped one for my purse.

My relationship with handbags is not the stuff of Vogue but I know I need one. I also admit that I understand the allure of a real, grown-up bag. The other significant bag in my closet is a black Marc Jacobs limited edition evening bag for Louis Vuitton.

You weren't expecting that, were you? Neither was I -- I won it in a charity raffle some years back and it only comes out to play on special occasions. But on those rare evenings that I tool up with my LV bag, I feel -- well -- more put together.

This is where the line is crossed between owning a bag for functionality -- or for fun. The utilitarian aspect of toting a bag around is accepted. Men have been carrying briefcases for an age (and some, I suspect, only contain the day's paper and a banana sandwich). It's no longer a crime to be seen slinging a rucksack or messenger bag over the shoulder.

As women are no longer confined between the kitchen, nursery and bedroom, we too need a repository for carrying our paraphernalia with us. Debenhams announced in January that women now carry an average of 3.3lbs of 'stuff' around with them in their bags.

Where we lose men is in the statistics surrounding women's handbag-buying. Depending on which survey you read, women can own up to 100 bags in their lifetime, and spend up to €4,000 acquiring them. Debbie Percy, a HR consultant and life coach who runs handbagtherapy.com, says: "Men just don't get it. It's hard to find a comparison for them. Men love their cars, say, but they don't have seven of them."

Perhaps they would if they could afford them. In truth, most women can't afford the bags they most aspire to either -- so-called 'It' bags -- but it doesn't stop the desire for them. After about 15 years of 'It' bags, from the Fendi Baguette in the late '90s to Chloe Paddington and beyond, the downturn was supposed to put a kibosh on waiting lists for the 'must-have' items.

So how to explain that Mulberry -- purveyors of the current object of desire, the Alexa bag -- is experiencing a 100pc pre-order demand? Or that Hermes Birkins, one of the first 'famous' handbags, still has a lengthy waiting list?

In China, where status symbols are the new currency, Birkins are changing hands for more than €100,000 because there are people there willing to pay the giant import duties imposed by the Communist rulers on Western goods.

Clever marketing to women is part of the story. Note how many of these bags have women's names from the Hermes Kelly (after movie star Grace) and Birkin (after singer Jane) up to the current star of Mulberry, named for style icon du jour Alexa Chung. To have the bag is to have, vicariously, a slice of their style.

'Kate Moss's association with Longchamps is doing wonders for them," says Debbie Percy, "and I'm watching Burberry to see if one of their bags breaks through next, because of Emma Watson's campaign for them. But the bags that reach 'It' status tend to have something more than a celebrity association. They are beautiful, edgy and stylish."

If one man understands women and their handbags, it's Edmond Chesneau. The Frenchman has been selling designs to Irish women for 30 years.

"Yes, I think a bag becomes their best friend, and that it shows a little of their personality," says Chesneau, "but, also, if you think about the bestsellers, they are always beautiful."

One of his own bestselling designs -- the Faubourg, retailing at €375 (www.chesneaudesign.com) -- is 15 years old.

In Brown Thomas, repository of 'must-have' bags, an employee tells me they had customers "out the door" last Friday, waiting to get the Tory Burch tote, retailing at €45.

Guys trying to understand the passion for handbags should look at this tote because it draws together everything women want from a bag right now.

It is nicely designed -- a classic leopard-print and dark leather trim, spiced up by a hot-pink lining. It's got the feel-good factor of raising funds for charity (Fashion Targets Breast Cancer), it's got limited-edition cachet, it's endorsed by supermodel Noot Seear -- and it's keenly priced.

We don't ask for much, do we?

Life coach Debbie Percy, who looks at women's handbags as a personality analysis aid (see www.handbagtherapy.com), has found some curious artefacts:

* A full bottle of wine. "I've had that in there for a week," said the lady.
* A very large beach towel, for no apparent reason.
* A flick knife -- in the handbag of an elderly lady.
* Apple cores, half-sucked mints and once -- a half-eaten chicken drumstick. "For some women, their bags are simply a dumping ground for all the family," says Debbie.
* Children's bracelets and hairclips, toys, and hospital identity tags. "Strangely enough, women don't carry around many photographs, if at all. They tend to carry instead objects that have a sentimental attachment for them."
* Personal notebooks. Says Debbie: "You would be surprised how many people seem to be mid-flow of writing a book."

"My bag is my best friend"
Karen Koster presenter, TV3's Xposé: "I have a one-bag-fits-all policy because with this job you could be anywhere at any time.

I carry around two make-up bags and a jewellery pouch, my phone, my diary and I'm a weapon if I'm not fed every three hours, so I'll have rice cakes, an apple, a banana and a bottle of water.

"I feel completely naked without it. If I'm out with my boyfriend and I don't have the big bag, I'll say, 'Here, I'll carry that bag of shopping'.

"I have about 15 bags in all -- some for evenings -- but I really use the same bag every day. It's a black patent one that I bought for $60 from a shop called Kitson when I was in LA covering the Oscars. Bargain! It's completely waterproof, wipe-down, really sturdy. I had a Jimmy Choo floppy tote once and I couldn't find anything in it.

"The most expensive bag I've had was actually a Chanel knock-off that my boyfriend brought me back from Dubai. It was a couple of hundred euro but it was a really well-crafted black bag.

"I think my first bag was a leather satchel from Dunnes. There we were, 14, hanging around, stuffing our bras and stuffing our handbags because we'd nothing to put in either of them."

"My three-year-old just loves her handbag!"
Anne Ryan, mum and entrepreneur: "I love handbags and I should be carrying a different one every day to show off my range (www.handbagheaven.ie) but actually I'm a bit of a one-bag woman.

I carry a lime green silk one, embroidered with butterflies.

"When we were adopting our daughter Rosie from Vietnam, I came across these gorgeous bags that I now sell. We have an ethical code for how they are produced because obviously we don't want to exploit people in the country where our little girl is from.

"In school we used to have a green purse on a string for keeping money in. Rosie is three and a half now and she's really into handbags, but children's ones, with Dora or Fifi on them.

"I am fairly organised. I carry a purse, a lipstick, a handbag hook that allows you to hang the bag from a table or in a bar. And I have a neat little measuring tape so I can go around sneakily measuring other people's bags for inspiration!"

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion-beauty/why-i-just-love-being-a-bag-lady-2108775.html

Size matters

The market is demanding plus-size fashion be taken seriously - but what does high fashion think?
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/young--fat-and-fabulous-2066267.html



By Susan Daly

Wednesday February 17 2010

Real women eat their dinner. Real women are an average dress size 14. And real women are 'infiltrating' high fashion, gracing catwalks that were previously only stalked by impossibly thin models.

Or are they? It's hard to tell over the trumpeting noises that have accompanied new forays by high-end mags and designers into the world of the larger model. Germany's best-selling magazine, Brigitte, has just published its first issue that is totally devoid of 'traditional' models. Brigitte -- with an average readership age of 48 -- is not at the cutting-edge of fashion. However, when its editor-in-chief Andreas Lebert announced his plans with a press release that proclaimed Brigitte's stand against an industry that he says "is anorexic", it was reported in the international press.

British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman fired off a letter to designers last June criticising them for supplying "minuscule" sample garments for photoshoots, forcing Vogue to hire models "with jutting bones and no breasts or hips" to fit into them.

There was also excitement when US Glamour magazine published an unairbrushed photograph of plus-size model Lizzie Miller (she's an Irish size 12-14).

The praise for Glamour's decision to display Miller's small roll of belly flab was disproportionate to the prominence of the picture in the magazine. The pic measured three inches by three inches and was buried back on page 194 of the issue.

Still, the rapturous response does indicate a public appetite for fleshier models.

A scene in the movie The Devil Wears Prada explains how decisions on a hem length or fabric colour made by the powers-that-be in high fashion trickles down to the high street.

Is it possible that the trickle-down effect has reversed? Take the case of designer Karl Lagerfeld, currently being praised for shooting plus-size burlesque star Miss Dirty Martini for high-fashion US glossy V, who scorned the decision by Brigitte to make itself a model-free zone.

The magazine, he claimed, was being unduly influenced by "fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly".

Either Lagerfeld's had an epiphany or he's realised he's out of step with the public. The more democratic world of the internet is producing a growing number of self-styled "fatshionistas". These plus-size, style-obsessed bloggers are publishing blogs like Musings of a Fatshionista and Fat Girls Like Nice Clothes Too.

Twentysomething teacher Gabi Gregg has appeared on US television speaking about her Young, Fat and Fabulous blog.

The content is similar to other personal style sites -- she posts photographs of herself in her favourite outfits.

She also alerts her readers to plus-size clothing lines and other plus-size bloggers. Her mission statement is only quasi-political: "I'm a fun-loving girl who happens to have a flair for fashion. I'm just trying to change the world one fat girl at a time."

The market has started to wake up to this sea change in demand. ASOS.com has launched a 'Curves' section. In Ireland, simplybe.ie has run a Curvy Competition for the past three years to discover new plus-size modelling talent. The king of positive body image acceptance, Gok Wan, crowned last year's winner.

Simplybe.ie's commercial manager Brenda O'Sullivan says there is a demand for "fashionable clothes that weren't just exaggerated sizes but were tailored for the curvier lady". As for whether she believes high fashion has truly embraced the larger woman, O'Sullivan is adamant: "Absolutely not -- yet size 16 is the best-selling size in the market place."

It's a feeling echoed by Jules Fallon, co-owner of Irish model agency 1st Option, which supplies models for high-end designers. The demand for plus-size models has been growing so much that Jules has stepped in front of the camera herself in recent times.

"We are finding the demand is coming from all angles," says Fallon. "I think it's definitely changing."

Nonetheless, Fallon has just had a troubling experience sending some of her girls to model in the London Fashion Week.

"One of the girls had a 35.5-inch hip measurement and the agency refused to put her through, saying the absolute limit was a 35-inch hip," says Fallon. "In Spain, they check the Body Mass Index of the models in Madrid Fashion Week to make sure they are a healthy weight. London is just crazy."

The fashion industry appears to be singing from different hymn books from country to country.

A judge on Australia's Next Top Model says there is no market for plus-size models in Oz.

"We could have a plus-size model win the competition and she would end up doing catalogues for Target (department store)," says Charlotte Dawson.

Kristi Kuudisim, one of Ireland's most in-demand plus-size models, says she never even considered modelling as a career option until she moved here seven years ago.

"In Estonia, they just want skinny models." She claims there still are not very many plus-size models working consistently in Ireland but that she is getting busier by the year.

"I notice even the fashion magazines in the last six months have had bigger models in them. Six years ago, you wouldn't find one," says Kuudisim.

"I don't think it's a novelty -- but there are certain clothes that look better on skinny women. But there should be a market for both because there are some clothes that look better filled out."

Kuudisim rejects the notion that the use of plus-size models is normalising obesity. "A plus-size model is still a model," she insists. "You have to be toned. I don't sit on a couch doing nothing. I don't starve myself but I eat healthily and work out."

So the demand is there -- is it just a case if when, not if, the high-fashion industry gives in wholeheartedly to it?

Kuudisim says the nature of the work she is attracting is changing. "I'm being called to do a lot of editorial work (high-end magazine photoshoots)," she says. "That didn't happen before."

Jules Fallon thinks that magazines like Vogue, Glamour and V are "testing the water". There has been debate over the real value of highly publicised shoots carried by US Glamour and V when the plus-size models used are frequently depicted nude or semi-nude. Is this promoting the larger woman in the context of fashion, or simply fetishising their bodies?

Then there is the argument that what fashion considers plus-size ("anything from a size 10 or 12", says Kuudisim) is not so in the real world. 'Plus-size' model Lara Stone is a size eight, but because her body shape is not androgynous -- she has hips and breasts -- she is lauded as a poster girl for the fuller-figured woman.

"The likes of Vogue are not going to change overnight," says Jules Fallon.

"But I do think the day of heroin chic look is binned and gone. LA celebrities are a good watermark of where the industry is at. The 'lollipop ladies', heads bigger than their bodies, are disappearing. They are starting to change their attitudes that being skinny is not going to necessarily get you a job."

Whether the runway can be as fashion-forward is still up for debate.

WISE UP AND SIZE UP
The fashion and beauty industries' small steps towards accepting plus-size women ...

2004: As part of their 'Campaign for Real Beauty', Dove cosmetics' global survey finds that women "believe in a broader definition of beauty than the narrowly defined ideals most often portrayed in popular culture".

2006: Former celebrity stylist Gok Wan teaches 'real' women to be self-confident about their shape in his hit Channel 4 programme, How To Look Good Naked.

2007: US Glamour announces its 'First Annual Figure Flattery' issue in October and makes America Ferrera, star of Ugly Betty, its cover girl. Website Jezebel noted how trim Ferrera appeared as a cover girl in contrast to a shot of her taken at the Emmy Awards on the week the issue launched. Glamour insisted the cover picture had not been digitally slimmed.

2008: Whitney Thompson becomes the first plus-size contestant to win America's Next Top Model.

2009: German magazine Brigitte announces in November that it is to make its pages a "model-free zone", inviting "real people" to model for fashion pages.

2010: Designer Karl Lagerfeld shoots plus-size burlesque star Miss Dirty Martini for the February 'Size' edition of high-fashion US magazine V.

The 2010 advertising campaign for plus-size high-street store Evans arranges a bevy of plus-size models in an homage shoot to the famous 1990 cover for Vogue which featured supermodels Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz.

Cover girls

I love it when a sub inserts an exclamation mark to spice up a paragraph - not. Anyway, here is my airbrushed piece from today's Irish Independent.

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion-beauty/now-theyre-airbrushing-the-cover-girls-bigger-1775680.html

NOW THEY'RE AIRBRUSHING THE COVER GIRLS BIGGER
Magazines have been notorious for retouching the cover shots of their models so they look thinner. Now a backlash has editors trying to do just the opposite. Susan Daly reports

Wednesday June 17 2009
The worst-kept secret in the beauty and fashion business is that an airbrush is a model or celebrity's best friend. Traditionally, this piece of technological wizardry has been used to slim down limbs and banish blemishes on digital photographs so that they are seen fit to grace the cover of a magazine.
The argument against this retouching of reality has been that it is harmful to impressionable readers, leading to eating disorders, body dysmorphia and issues of low self-esteem as they try to attain the impossible perfection presented in these photographs.
Well, the reality just got grimmer -- and slimmer. Alexandra Shulman, the influential editor of UK Vogue magazine, has written a letter to all the major fashion designers to warn them that she is now having to ask her photographers to make her cover models look bigger!
The sample sizes which many designers provide for photoshoots are so tiny, she says, that she has to hire ever-increasingly skeletal models to fit into them.
These models are so thin that she fears alienating her readers altogether. Her photographers must now use all their trickery not to take these girls down a size -- as was more traditional in the wafer-thin fashion world -- but to beef them up.
Robin Derrick, creative director of Vogue, backed up Shulman's claims. "I spent the first 10 years of my career making girls look thinner," he said, "I've spent the last 10 making them look larger." The size zero debate has gone sub-zero.
It's ironic, really, that a fashion magazine editor is complaining about having to skew reality to make her models acceptable to readers. For years, the same editors would have argued that no-one wants to buy a dress from an overweight model (for overweight, read a size 10 and up).
Flawless, thin, impossibly beautiful and generally white -- that was the type to which cover girls conformed.
Side by side with Shulman's move back to healthy-slim, we are told there is a backlash against the doctoring of magazine cover images altogether. Airbrushing and digital manipulation is out: undoctored beauty is in.
French Elle recently flirted with reality by featuring three celebrities without make-up on their cover of their April edition. The inclusion of bare-faced ladies in a high-fashion mag was internationally applauded, although the "au naturel" celebrities featured -- actresses Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau and supermodel Eva Herzigova -- are genetically blessed with fabulous bone structures to begin with.
Anna Wintour, the formidable editor-in-chief of US Vogue, has also been embracing diversity in her previously rigid cover girl criteria. When the Ethiopian model Liya Kebede posed for the May edition, she followed Beyoncé and Michelle Obama to become the third black woman in a row to appear on the cover.
"About a year ago, we talked about the global conversation about diversity in fashion, and we took it very seriously," said Patrick O'Connell, a spokesman for US Vogue.
US Vogue, lest we forget, was also the magazine that published a cover shot of an almost unrecognisable Oprah Winfrey in 1998. Winfrey spent months shrinking herself to Anna Wintour's acceptable parameters for the style bible.
"If you want to be on the cover of Vogue and Anna Wintour says you have to be down to 150lbs -- that's what you gotta do," said Winfrey, which is a worrying statement from the apparent queen of self-empowerment and self-respect.
That Wintour is doing a U-turn can only be good, right? Yet some see such talk of diversification as merely trend-driven, a stunt to keep readers attracted to an industry that sells fantasy in the form of luxury items.
When Italian Vogue published its "Black Issue" in June of last year, featuring only black models, it sold out within 72 hours -- but was criticised in some quarters for tokenism.
Cover fakery is still widespread. Actress Kate Winslet protested against GQ lengthening and slimming her legs to stick-insect proportions in 2003. Fast-forward to late last year and she denies that Vanity Fair airbrushed her semi-naked body for an Oscars issue, although she admitted to six hours of make-up, hair and light set-ups for the shoot.
Dove cosmetics launched a viral video on the internet last year called Evolution that caused quite a stir. It showed one average-looking woman being transformed through make-up, re-styling, lighting and digital retouching to produce a model-worthy photograph. "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted," read the kicker line on the video.
The Swedish Ministry of Health has launched a similar campaign to show the country's teenagers how model shots can be manipulated.
A separate website controversially published two photographs of country singer Faith Hill last year -- one in which she looks like the naturally attractive 40-something mother that she is; and the other in which she has been freakily Photoshopped to look like a woman in her early 30s for the cover of Redbook magazine.
This is the same magazine that did a Frankenstein job on Julia Roberts for a cover story in 2003, using a picture of her head from a 2002 paparazzi shot on top of a photo of her body from the 1998 Notting Hill premiere.
The photograph was accompanied with a headline that read, with no trace of irony, "The Real Julia".
The tricks of the trade are no secret. Digital photo manipulation can trim fat, even out skin tone, banish blemishes, add shine to hair, even change the colour of an outfit.
New York magazine was accused of "whitewashing" Michelle Obama on their March cover by giving her a Barbie pink lipstick and lightening her skin tone, although they defended it as an "illustration" rather than a photograph.
A good sign that an image has been airbrushed is when the skin is so flawless that it seems plastic and unreal. The sardonic celeb-style website gofugyourself.com regularly takes a poke at hyper-real cover photos -- its archive has a worryingly long list of entries. The model and actress Jenny McCarthy highlighted her own dodgy covershot for last month's US Shape magazine.
The shot, she admitted, had undergone "a crap load of airbrushing ... I have freckles ... and stretchmarks that you do not see here, and they add a little shadowing to make these muscle things happen that don't exist on my body."
Even with the digital paintbrush out of the picture, there are ways to fake a flawless portrait. People magazine made a big fuss of its 100 Most Beautiful list in 2007, which included 10 celebrities looking dewy-faced without -- gasp -- their make-up, or airbrushing. But clever photographers' tricks were used to flatter the women (including Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel and Rachel Bilson who are in their 20s and wrinkle-free anyway).
Several of the pictures were taken with a long exposure, disguising small imperfections. The shots were also overexposed to the point that the brown-skinned Rosario Dawson looked positively white -- all to fade out uneven skin tone, spots and freckles.
Most of the women were shot wearing white clothing, against a white background, to act as a further natural reflector to fill in dark shadows and blemishes. The women also stood in front of wind machines to tease some energy into their tresses.
But should we worry so much about smoothed-out stars giving false example when fantasy has always been the nub of showbiz? Think of those soft-focus, up-lit portraits of the earliest Hollywood stars.
Black and white is so flattering, darling. Some historians believe that even the iconic bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti -- the world's first beauty queen -- may have been touched up.
The artist who created it is thought to have straightened her nose and smoothed creases around her mouth to present her in the most flattering light. With the idealisation of beauty so culturally-entrenched, it may take more than a few celebs sans slap to change it.