I think the British are very stylish. We lead the USA in fashions and fashion designers like McQueen are only pipe dreams for those Yanks. On a Metro train to JFK from Washington DC this December I was sitting next a Fashion Designer from LA who told me that he thought that he thought that the USA was lagging behind all of Europe in terms of style, being behind the times in terms of style as well as geographically.
As a native Londoner i see the latest fashions (and pay very little attention to them) as well as crazy, open-minded yoof wearing whatever the fuck they like (my kinda style) every single day and I think it's the openess of us Brits that sets us apart from our conservative American counterparts, who fear peer-pressure so much that they sacrifice self-expression at the altar of conformity, which at the moment means that all the kids wear crap baggy trousers and wide, sk8er boi shirts and look like right pricks.
So on the way back I was expecting to be hit by the wave of fresh air that is British "I-don't-give-a-fuck" fashions and was hoping to be overwhelmed by colours and designs again that would leave me wondering "where the hell (and why!?!) did you buy that!?" as often happens when I walk around London. And when I look in the mirror.
But instead of the Visual panacea or Eden of the senses I so lusted after I walked into fashion hell.
It seems that the Brits just have no clothes for this sort of weather whatsoever. Even though we are percieved abroad as a cold and foggy island it seems that the Brits just haven't got the wardrobe to cope with extreme cold. The classic stiff upper lip we British are renowned for means that, rather than admit that it is cold we go around wearing our summer gear sometimes adding a light coat when it "gets a bit nippy" right into the middle of winter until it gets REALLY unbearable.
At that point when our stiff upper lip gets just TOO stiff, we abandon our sense of fashion and dig out that really fuckin awful coat that we keep in the attic as a last resort - The Emergency Coat. By this point it really is TOO fuckin cold and we assume that everyone else has also discarded all taste and/or has died from pneumonia, so we step out in our very worst threads, clothes that wouldn't look out of place in Salvation Army soup queues.
I got on the bus the other day, a place that usually teems with colour and hippies and punks with glittering jewellery and pink and green hair and equally colourful clothing, to be greeted with a sea of black hoodies and macs. It was a fashhion disaster! Don't they know that black is SO ten years ago!
Of course I was in grey, with a Stetson hat on and wearing hiking boots (Berghaus are the new Prada you know) and a pair of Army Combats (REAL army combats not those crappy Gap ones although I must admit to having felt a little 1998 at the time. Perhaps this was a bad fashion choice...) and looking around felt like I had stumbled into a mortuary for people whose sense of style had died.
So London, buck up your act and buy a winter wardrobe, this is just disgraceful! Woolen knitted jumpers are so in as are colourful stripes and fur (fake of course) but Wellies, black hoodies and combat trousers are out. Sorry for setting such a bad example.
I'm going to go lock myself up and lash myself 100 times with a whip for my crimes against fashion and I suggest you all do the same.
