Union Jack- Who do you think you are?

Oooh, it's such an exciting time to be British aint it. Oooh the olympics. Oooh the Jubilee. Street parties, days off work, cheese and pineapple on a stick, bunting and booze. Don't it just make you all warm inside? Well no actually, but that's just me.

I'm worried about tube delays and rising prices. Gormless tourists and crowbarring the idea of patriotism into every piece of useless ephemera; but don't mind me, I'm just a Londoner; we're sour it's what we do. I'm sure the rest of the country is thrilled at the prospect.

However, when it comes to vacuous stuff like fashion, and design on a broader sense, I find all this British hoo hah actually quite fun. The main thing I like about the queen is when she gets her glad rags on. I like the aesthetic of a British souvenir (aside from an I love London jumper; which all clearly need to be burnt) The sparkle, the pomp and ceremony; appeals to the magpie in me. Its bizarre and lol and British.

 But I do feel like people are taking one thing too far. And that's the union jack.

One good thing about all the BRITISH things happening this year is that I do feel normal, decent British people have been able to reclaim our flag from the racists. The pesky BNP did a bit of re-branding to a flag that is pretty good in the iconic stakes. Racists are pretty good at that; just look at the swastika. For ages those stripes represented the bitter aftertaste of the British fish and chips; not the fried delights of the main meal. But perhaps with Kate and Will as our new representatives and all these dates in the diary, being British means something better (at least for now) and red white and blue is back in favour. Actually to say it's 'in favour' is a massive understatement; it is bloody everywhere.

If your buying your lunch in M&S and the content of your sarny is slightly British (ie. contains cucumber) it's emblazoned with it. Not to mention if you fancy some strawberries. If you open a newspaper, look at an advertisement, turn on your television, oh yes; it's there. Its there, but it's not there. Its meaning is getting watered down. It's become twee; executed in muted pastels, printed on crafty cushions and hung from bunting. Without trying to sound like the racists that squirrelled the flag away to their dingy dwellings  in the first place; that's not the way I see our flag.

For me, the last time I saw this piece of design used successfully and appropriately to personify the country it represents was stretched across Geri Halliwell's boobs at the 1997 Brit awards. Now that depicted a britain I recognised. She literally may as well have been on a seaside postcard. That union jack summed up  page 3, sugary tea and chips from the paper. The pervieness, the gaudiness, the tack. As much as we try to represent a Britain that's got it's shit together and is prepared for the world to bowl into it's capital for sports day, really we're all just in it for the piss up. Whether you're from the royal borough or moss side; if your British, you're more likely than not brassy, pompous or batshit cray or all of the above, and we've got a suitable flag to prove it.

It's nice that waving around a conglomeration of colours and lines doesn't mean you hate immigrants as much as it did, but I vote we save the flag for things that really represent this crackpot of a nation. Leave the bunting up, but find another way to advertise clotted cream.

Archive: The reality Star's Guide to Beauty

With 'Made in Chelsea' returning for it's third series on Monday, I present the reality star's guide to beauty. Taken from an article written for ‘The Muse.tv’ on 13th May 2011

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling my weird love/hate relationship with my television taking on more of the ‘hate’ at the moment. ‘The only way is Essex’ has been followed by ‘Made in Chelsea’, which is soon to be followed by what I can only describe as an embarrassment to our fair isle; ‘Geordie shore’. Oh dear. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am guilty in indulging once in a while in the kind of American vacuous ‘scripted reality’ that have spawned these region based British counterparts; first there was ‘Laguna Beach- the real orange county’ (inspired by the hugely successful fictional drama ‘the OC’), then there was ‘The Hills’ (following the young life of Lauren 

Conrad; a woman that started as a girl on Laguna Beach), then there was ‘The City’ (another spin-off featuring Whitney Port; the one that was slightly more edgy) Then there were a million others, and my IQ was halved. 

Laguna beach started in 2004, and I became aware of it via MTV, probably around 2005, so that gives me a solid dose of 6 years of rubbish swilling around my head, and although I wasn’t ever the biggest fan, I found it a funny kind of escapism, middle ground between a sitcom and a documentary but now that’s all changed. Why is it that this type of TV only now is starting to really bother me? I think the answer is pretty clear. All these programmes have been up until now very far removed. 

I I don’t live in LA or on a Californian beach, nor do I conduct my life around long lunches with girlfriends to gossip/snipe/catfight about the night before and then storm off to my waiting white BMW/Range rover. Its not real life, its just something to laugh at and turn your brain off to and I’m very happy with that. But Essex isn’t LA, neither is 

Chelsea, or for that matter Newcastle. Their all within a short travelling distance, they’re not far-removed and they’re all part of the social make-up of Britain. But these people don’t seem to be removing themselves from hollywood, living in a dream world of boob jobs, scandal and fakery that I don’t associate with the Britain I love, but I think others don’t see it that way.

With this weeks episode of The Muse.TV surrounding beauty, I thought I’d take a minute to examine the ‘Scripted reality’ star’s ‘guide to beauty’ (if you will). When I was filming the latest episode, within the beauty industry, I found professionals who were dedicated to artistry, care of the skin, and not drastically changing what you have, but 

highlighting it. The make-up artists were really pushing the idea of a base for your skin, a primer to allow less actual layers of make-up, and care for the skin underneath. But when was the last time you heard of this kind of regime on TV? no. No no no no no. If I was a make-up artist I’d be throwing my eyelash curlers at the screen in frustration.

To achieve the beauty standards of the scripted reality star, one must start not with a rejuvenating primer, or a good moisturiser but it seems invasive surgical procedures. In ‘The Hills’ these procedures were actually totally ignored by producers, and the viewer was just supposed to assume the way its stars filled their bikinis was genuine. But British reality stars have never been known for their subtlety; ‘The Only Way Is Essex’ could probably be defined by the identicat faces of its female characters, and makes no qualms about openly glamorising surgery and other forms of extreme beauty treatments. There is talk of botox parties, boob jobs, and even mention of the tanning injections

‘melanotan’, which has links to cancer, and causes chronic nausea; but as the buxom and bronzed Amy Childs says “you look good all the time!” 

Amy Childs is I would say the UK ambassador of this guide. She jokes about needing boob holes in the massage table of her beauty salon to cater for all the boob jobs in Essex, and when looking for an assistant wants a clone of herself- into fake tan, boob jobs and cheek fillers. She’s recently been photographed outside of the parameters of the programme dressed in a replica outfit to one worn by Katie Price, so this gives an idea of the genre of ‘beauty’ she puts herself in. I’m not for a minute suggesting that Amy Childs and the rest of the cast of ‘The only way is Essex’ are solely to blame for what I see as portraying harmful and invasive procedures as commonplace, but with 1.55 million viewers of the itv2 programme surely its something to question? 

In the end I wouldn’t class my scripted reality star’s guide to beauty as ‘beauty’. The people in the industry I’ve met aren’t promoting a necessity to cut, jab, and inflate to look your best, it should be something fun and experimental, and as much as these programmes promote surgery and other extreme procedures as this, this is obviously not the case. Each to one’s own, and surgery does work for some people, but it is not the same as putting on eyeliner, or using a highlighter product to enhance your assets, no matter how accessible and acceptable it becomes. 

To conclude, I’d like to turn to a woman who has long fascinated me, and is perhaps who I regard as the first glaringly obvious tragedy of scripted reality programmes. If Amy Childs is the princess, she is the queen, and if we can learn anything the portrayal of beauty in these programmes, its from reality veteran Heidi Montag. After starring in MTV’s ‘The Hills’ from 2006-2010, Montag became completely unrecognisable from the fresh faced girl whose naivety and girl next door looks had defined the programme. At the peak of her surgery she underwent ten procedures in one day including brow-lifts, ear-pinnings, a chin reduction, as well as a second rhinoplasty and second breast augmentation. Her surgery wasn’t mentioned on the show until well into its development, but her face and body were changed dramatically for the viewing public, explicitly talked about or not. Montag is just a year older than me (now 24, but 22 when the main bulk of her surgery was carried out) and has been described as being thrown head first into a Barbie factory. 

In 2010 Heidi spoke of her regret of the procedures she underwent. “Parts of my body definitely look worse than they did pre-surgery. This is not what I signed up for.” She adds, “I definitely think I should have been way more informed. I think that doctors should really walk you through all aspects of it, not just the glamorous side of it. Doctors, it’s like they’re selling you cookies or something.I would love to not be ‘plastic girl’ or whatever they call me. Surgery ruined my career and my personal life and just brought a lot of negativity into my world. I wish I could jump into a time machine and take it all back. Instead, I’m always going to feel like Edward Scissorhands”

Maybe its time to turn off.

Archive: Fashion Freaks form an orderly que...

Originally featured in ‘The real Runway’ August 21st 2011

If you're new to TTR and don't know how we roll, let us tell you one thing: we can sniff out a publicity stunt at ten paces. Quite frankly we've seen it all, and it takes the fashion world quite a lot to shock us. 

Case in point, fashion's latest specimen in the viewing gallery: Rick Genest, aka. Rico the Zombie. The Canadian model tattooed top-to-toe in intricate anatomical artwork. Dude is clearly interesting to look at, but once you've seen the tatts where do you go from there? Sure, Gaga writhed on him in Born This Way, but a week later it was some other piece of meat. Formichetti's obsessed with him?...erm..cool? 

Same with Andre Pejic. He's a boy, but he looks like a girl. A beautiful one, granted, but there are lots of beautiful girls. He's been in FHM's sexiest list as a man and a woman. Call us all kindsa skeptical, but the 19 year old is another media pawn to spark a bit of questionably homophobic controversy. Stories like these in fashion are like cheap firecrackers: there's a big bang when they explode but the spark's diminished within seconds. Who's next in line to the fashion freak show? We're pretty much immune to it all so this better be good.

It seems Brazilian label Auslander beg to differ, however. Plucking these two fashion mould-breakers from the blogs and column inches in which they currently swirl and plonking them into their Spring 2012 campaign. In doing so, telling us we should be shocked by what these two stand for, especially paired together. Hi-jacking and exploiting their brand of crazy is done with such brazen column-inch hungriness you'd think the collection itself would be equally as, ahem, 'controversial'. Shock horror, another firecracker goes out. 

Yes, Pejic's gender fuckery (mixing men's and womenswear with such poised ease) does retain your attention that little bit longer, but that's Pejic's deal... not down to Auslander's slogan tees and Peter Pan necklines. Genest's poses are bold and engaging and the colours in his carcass-art compliment the navy's of some of the pieces. But for all their zaniness we can't help but feel, well... underwhelmed. Auslander's clothing (unlike its choice of models) brings zero new to the table. Nice, but a million miles from controvershe'. 

The campaign bonus is that it puts these two anti-classical images of beauty into a mainstream context - you don't have to be lipsing Gaga or prancing about in an arty video to own looking different. But in the same breath, people like Genest and Pejic keep being the catalysts for getting gratuitious column inches. In a lot of instances the people who reap the benefits ain't wholly deserving.