January 2008 Archives

THE new spring campaign from Next is just hitting the shops and I was expecting something really amazing having been told they had overhauled their marketing images this year.

But has anyone noticed a dramatic difference in their look?

If you catch your other half rifling your underwear drawer in the next couple of weeks don't be alarmed.

Harvey Nichols' manager Kevin Breese is encouraging blokes planning to buy lingerie for Valentine's Day to do their homework.

Instead of heading for the shops and cupping their man boobs in front of a flustered assistant in the hope they will be able to guess your bra size.

While visiting a favoured high-street retailer for cosmetics I noticed a few women huddled around one of those ghastly height/weight machines lamenting about how their actual bodies compared to the guidance on the machine.

One of the women told a friend in a what I could only describe as an extreme moment of clarity: "Love, if you only weighed that much, all that would be left is boobs and hair."

IF there is one thing more tedious than buying clothes for your boyfriend, it has to be helping a friend buy clothes for hers.

How many Paul Smith shirts do I have to look at and try to picture her boyfriend wearing?

And why does my opinion actually matter?

I'm a slave to convenience.

This fact was confirmed to me when I emerged from my last shop at ASDA with fruit and veg, a large bin, an £8 sparkly top and a pair of shoes.

With my mouth I bemoan the expansion of globalisation and the fact that the big shops are crippling the little shops.

But my shopping basket says something completely different....

I came back from a holiday abroad proudly displaying my goodies - which included a very expensive designer leather bag which is to take pride of place in the wardrobe.

But you can't please everyone. On its first public showing, my mother dismissed it with the following words...

"I can't believe that someone who comes from Walsall would buy a leather bag from anywhere else. Don't you know that Walsall is the home of the leather trade? If you wanted a bag you should have gone to the Leather Museum in Walsall and bought one from there."

That is the last time that bag is seeing the light of day.

THE other day I saw something I thought was as likely as spotting Britney Spears at a mother's meeting - a shopper leaving Birmingham's posh Louis Vuitton store clutching two bags of designer gear.

I thought the swanky store was so exclusive its customers arrived and left under cover of darkness.

Twenty minutes later I bumped into the same girl queuing up to buy clothes in my natural home, Primark.

It seems some shoppers in Birmingham are taking the trend for mixing and matching designer labels with budget bargains to extremes.

Thank goodness all those racks of tatty old sales clothes are finally being removed from the shops.

I never understand that mad rush to buy things which have been on a rail for months just because there is suddenly "one-third off".

The very reason they have been left at the end of the season is because they were so awful no-one wanted to buy them the first time round. But hey, offer a bit of cash off something which was over-priced in the first place, and it suddenly becomes something we can't live without.

Personally I never sale shop. I can't be bothered with the crowds, with trying to find something my size or with then having to check them from top to bottom for lipstick smudges, pulled threads and missing buttons.