Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Sydney, I’m Yours
a) Wide leg chiffon pants are not a good look on me;
b) Silk Herringbone blouses (from the sneakily hidden outlet store in Surry Hills) are;
c) Ruth Park street sign spotting fills me with excitement;
d) Iku lunches restore the soul;
e) Tear up one rainbow on Oxford St and a thousand others will grow in its place;
f) Anna Thomas designs the most beautiful women's wear imaginable;
g) Ibises’ beaks have evolved superior garbage-rifling, pond-scum-diving, and Peggy-frightening skillz;
h) Sydney heat is bad hair heat;
i) A coconut water and watching not one, but two, hideous weddings in the park at dusk makes point F OK;
j) The Hyde Park bubble man’s bubbles burst the exact moment I get my phone out to instagram them;
k) All day parking in the middle of Sydney is cheaper than all day parking in the middle of Canberra (believe);
l) Traffic jams and navigating Sydney streets are absolutely fine so long as I’ve got Zsuzannah Verona (Scotty to my Kirk);
m) It’s possible to eat rice pudding while driving if you really put your mind to it.
To paraphrase The Decemberists on Los Angeles:
Sydney, I’m yours.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Packing
Those of you who know me well know, in my heart of hearts, I’m a chronic homebody. My little nest of an apartment pulls me in, and, like a homing pigeon, my sights are set on home, always.
And, yet, I love new places, new people, and the chance to know your travel buddies better. All of these things give scope to the imagination (to borrow a phrase from my favourite redhead, Anne of Green Gables).
Recently, it’s been my privilege to go on some brief sojourns, for business and for pleasure. This has got me to thinking about packing, and, more specifically, how not to do it. Sadly, I excel at the latter.
Question: how many scarves does one young lady need for a trip to Scotland? Answer: 17 (BELIEVE). My housemates at the time were capable of tough love, forcibly removing my suitcase and reducing the number of scarves to single digits. I'm forever in their debit.
A more recent example of my packing ineptitude is this week’s business trip to regional NSW. My colleague and I were going on a four day trip to one of the few places colder than Canberra (hard to imagine, but it exists, and is lovely, in spite of the cold). Logically, I packed three cardigans. So far, so good.
But, here’s where it gets messy: I packed ONLY ONE DECENT GOING OUT CARDIGAN.
YES. I KNOW.
The rest of the cardigan contingent consisted of my boudoir cardigan (inappropriate for non bedroom wear) and an old cardigan of MamaK’s that I wore ONCE with a VERY SPECIFIC outfit and only VAGUELY LIKED in that PARTICULAR CONTEXT.
What was this last cardigan in my suitcase? I have absolutely no idea. But, as there are no packing pixies in my apartment, I must have packed it for a reason. I just can’t recall what that reason was.
Being daft when it comes to packing does have its advantages. I’ve yet to go away on a trip without purchasing something amazing at a bargain price, often facilitated by my deficient packing skillz.
Had I not found myself rapidly running out of warm clothes this week, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so willing to try a slightly unorthodox but now-new-favourite jumper from the sale rack in Myer. A similar thing happened in Melbourne last month with my sparkly Camberwell markets sweater.
Perhaps it’s fair to trust that nature, abhorring a vacuum, will fill any voids in your capsule travel wardrobe with exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. And that, my friends, is just the ticket when it comes to successful packing: let go, trust the universe, and remember your credit card.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Breast Dressed
N.B: this blog is somewhat of a companion to my ‘Panty Problems: Just Say No’ post from about a year ago. If talk of lovely lady lumps and the like offends, please tune out. Now. Love, Peg.
Travel is a real eye opener. New sights, new sounds, new discoveries (square sausage, black pudding and haggis FOR THE WIN).
And, of course, new shops, trends, and dress norms to explore.
Discovery #1: Uggs cost 60 POUNDS in Scotland and thus are highly coveted sartorial status symbols.
Discovery #2: Scottish women are impervious to cold and will attend a February wedding (read: 2 degrees celcius, fog and light mist) in a summer cocktail frock.
Discovery #3: the boobs of the UK are the Best Dressed Breasts the world over.
Why, might you ask?
Well, there’s just so much CHOICE in terms of bras. Walking into a lingerie shop, or a lingerie department in a major department store, is like walking into a candy store of lace, silk, and general delectability. Everything – and I mean everything – is lovely – and, more importantly, available in all sizes. What could be more heavenly, I ask you?
It’s as if British manufacturers have taken a good look out the window, around the office, and at the nearest girl’s night out and stumbled upon a powerful truth that I wish they’d exported to the antipodes along with convicts, rabbits, noxious weeds like thistles.
That truth being that boobs come in all sizes and shapes, and so should bras.
Historically, my relationship with bras, and my breasts, has been long and somewhat tortured. I developed early – I can’t really remember what life was like B.B. (Before Boobs). My first bras, which MamaK sensibly insisted were fitted by a trained professional, were rather plain and boring, with no fancy embellishments or anything vaguely resembling prettiness. At the time, this made bra-wearing anything but fun (although I am actually thankful that I could save the discovery of sexy lingerie until I was old enough to appreciate it in its proper context – i.e. sixteen, and doing everything that girls of that age are supposed to…). Coupled with change room teasing through primary and high school – contrary to popular mythology, girls who develop well and early are not always placed on a lofty pedestal of developing womanliness by their young peers – this potent combination of ugly bras + ugly people meant that I drew the only conclusion I could at the time: breasts, specifically mine, were ugly.
I spent most of my teenage years wishing my breasts away, desperately envious of girls who could get away with nothing under their tee-shirts whilst I needed industrial strength scaffolding to stay afloat. I think, in the chronology of my relationship with my breasts, these were The Wilderness Years.
Then, something wonderful happened: I went to college. In the ACT system, college is where students go in years 11 and 12 – so you’re a YOUNG ADULT at a school with other YOUNG ADULTS where you’re treated like a YOUNG ADULT and you can talk about YOUNG ADULT stuff like SEX and DRUGS and ROCK AND ROLL. Or, more like, your aspirations towards those three lofty goals of YOUNG ADULThood. It was there, in that heady, sweaty mix of all of us working out who we were and who we wanted to be, that I realised two things: that boys like boobs, and that boys like boobs FULL STOP. No matter how big, how little, how round or high or wide, boys LIKE THEM, quite possibly more than they like anything else on God’s green earth.
Being perfectly honest, and at risk of being a Bad Feminist, this meant that I could finally begin to entertain the possibility that maybe I might like my breasts too, if I gave them half a chance. Giving my breasts half a chance meant setting them free from their functional scaffolding, and looking for other options that supported not only my breasts but my fledgling and fragile self esteem.
I can still remember the thrill of purchasing my first Really Sexy Bra and Knickers. As mentioned above, I was sixteen, and doing all those things that sixteen year olds do. As I’ve said many times before on this blog, we don’t always dress in a way that reflects who we are in the present moment, but who we are becoming, and who we want to be. And although I was confused and had a lot of growing up to do at that point, I wanted something that would make me feel strong, sexy, and powerful – and nothing was more a reflection of who I wanted to be than a chocolate brown French lace balconette bra and knickers set from Elle Macpherson Intimates. It cost me a weeks’ pay, but the boosts it gave were worth it.
Over the years, I’d estimate that my spending on lingerie would have been enough to have placed a down payment on a small apartment, but, no matter how poor I was, I always felt as though good – in both the practical and the aesthetic sense – lingerie was never a waste of money. Which is just as well because in Australia, you’d be hard pressed to find lingerie that fits both of those categories – practical and pleasing to the eye – without relaxing the purse strings considerably. This was something I was always happy to do, even if it meant having only one or two bras, and repairing them until it really was time to pension them off to the back paddock. This was fine whilst my breasts were in the ‘normal’ cup size range – from A to D – but, in my Honours year, whilst the rest of me stayed the same, my boobs jumped two cup sizes, into an E. Overnight. Literally. I went to bed with D’s and woke up with E’s.
Sometimes the universe burdens us in the strangest of ways.
Having breasts that were suddenly outside of Australian clothing’s ‘normal’ range meant that I was in for a rude shock. Whereas previously the lingerie world was my oyster, I was thrust into the barren wasteland of Full Figure Lingerie. My first ever foray into a specialist stockist of Full Figure Lingerie (a euphemism I grew to hate – why not call a spade a spade and just say Bras for Big Boobs?) involved tears in the change room. The sales girl did her best, but when I asked her for something sexy, all she could produce was a hackneyed red and black number so massive that it encroached into my décolletage and flattened my breasts into two squarish blobs. I bought the bra, in the two colour ways available, because it was the best of a bad lot. There were other, prettier bras available in E cups – but they were out of stock, on backorder with a two month wait list, and completely beyond my financial means.
The second period of Wilderness commenced. This was only slightly better than the last Wilderness, as I at least knew in my heart of hearts that my breasts were indeed lovely, but this knowledge made shopping for bras more frustrating – I felt as though all of my breast’s loveliness was literally being squished out of them. Some days I even went bra-less, because it was simply too depressing to contemplate putting on some of the horrors that now comprised my lingerie wardrobe. After much thought, I decided that the problem with the Full Figure Lingerie industry was that their Ideal Breast, for which they designed all their bras, was a completely different shape to mine, with completely different needs. My problem was that my breasts, due to my large bone structure and impressive set of pectoral muscles (if I do say so myself – it’s carrying all those textbooks under my arm, I tell you) were actually firmer and higher than the Ideal Full Figure Breast, meaning that the bras available in Australia in an E+ cup were far far too supportive and rigid, with way more scaffolding than was necessary for someone with my frame and muscle structure. Whilst a very supportive, ridged bra, with a wide central panel and full cup coverage, would be ideal on a woman with a small rib cage, little muscle tissue and lots of boob, it was absolutely hopeless for me, and, what’s more, made my breasts look dreadful and made me feel dreadful.
There was an end, however, in sight. Mama-K, on a trip to Mother England midway through my honours year, came back with stories of an oasis of beautiful lingerie – in all shapes, sizes and colours – at Marks and Spencers. Being unsure of my exact size, and understandably feeling a bit awkward about shopping for sexy lingerie for her daughter, she bought me home just two Marks and Spencer’s bras to try. Although E cups, they looked…just like a lovely, ordinary lacy bra, complete with a low front profile, delicate straps, and transparent lace. I wore those two bras until they were grey with over washing, desperately hoping that one day I would make it to the promised land of Marks and Spencers, to rejoice in the loveliness of sexy bras in 14 E-F.
One Day finally came a few weeks ago, in Scotland, and it was better than I ever imagined.
The greatest thing about M&S was that there was no specialist section for Fuller Figure Bras – rather, most of their ranges just ran up to a G cup as a matter of course. This means no scarily wide centre panels, no full coverage cups, and no scary thick straps. No opportunity for manufacturers to charge through the nose because they’ve cornered the Full Figure Lingerie market – because all boobs are already catered for as a matter of course. M&S, as the locals call it, even stocks a range of post-mastectomy bras – something which, in Australia, you would have to hunt around specialty stores to find. You can even get scary huge squashy bras if that’s what floats your boat – everyone’s a winner. Here’s the bottom line: to buy a nice, lacy bra and pants in Australia, the outlay would be close to $150 at RRP, and your choices would be black and porny, pink/red and porny, or cream and virginal – just try and tell me that the Madonna/Whore paradox is dead! In the UK, shopping at M&S, the MAXIMUM you’d be looking at would be 50 pounds RRP – that’s about $100 in our money – and you can choose from dozens of lovely bras, with many levels of subtle graduation between vampish seductress and daisy fresh innocent. I won’t tell you how many sets of lingerie accompanied me home – but, to give you a ballpark figure, it’ll be at least a week before The Dreamboat has seen the full gamut of my UK purchases.
And the best thing of all? You can shop M&S online, and stand alongside me in my boycott of ugly, expensive Full Figure Lingerie that is all that’s available in Australia, or just ugly, expensive lingerie in whatever size you wear, because all breasts are beautiful and deserve to be dressed accordingly. Let’s not settle for lingerie that only uplifts our busts – rather, let’s strive for lingerie that uplifts our sometimes flagging and fragile egos, and elevates us to a higher plane of bodily acceptance and love. At least, I know that’s now where my personal bra bar is set, and I think you’re all, dear readers, worth a similarly high standard of support.
Travel is a real eye opener. New sights, new sounds, new discoveries (square sausage, black pudding and haggis FOR THE WIN).
And, of course, new shops, trends, and dress norms to explore.
Discovery #1: Uggs cost 60 POUNDS in Scotland and thus are highly coveted sartorial status symbols.
Discovery #2: Scottish women are impervious to cold and will attend a February wedding (read: 2 degrees celcius, fog and light mist) in a summer cocktail frock.
Discovery #3: the boobs of the UK are the Best Dressed Breasts the world over.
Why, might you ask?
Well, there’s just so much CHOICE in terms of bras. Walking into a lingerie shop, or a lingerie department in a major department store, is like walking into a candy store of lace, silk, and general delectability. Everything – and I mean everything – is lovely – and, more importantly, available in all sizes. What could be more heavenly, I ask you?
It’s as if British manufacturers have taken a good look out the window, around the office, and at the nearest girl’s night out and stumbled upon a powerful truth that I wish they’d exported to the antipodes along with convicts, rabbits, noxious weeds like thistles.
That truth being that boobs come in all sizes and shapes, and so should bras.
Historically, my relationship with bras, and my breasts, has been long and somewhat tortured. I developed early – I can’t really remember what life was like B.B. (Before Boobs). My first bras, which MamaK sensibly insisted were fitted by a trained professional, were rather plain and boring, with no fancy embellishments or anything vaguely resembling prettiness. At the time, this made bra-wearing anything but fun (although I am actually thankful that I could save the discovery of sexy lingerie until I was old enough to appreciate it in its proper context – i.e. sixteen, and doing everything that girls of that age are supposed to…). Coupled with change room teasing through primary and high school – contrary to popular mythology, girls who develop well and early are not always placed on a lofty pedestal of developing womanliness by their young peers – this potent combination of ugly bras + ugly people meant that I drew the only conclusion I could at the time: breasts, specifically mine, were ugly.
I spent most of my teenage years wishing my breasts away, desperately envious of girls who could get away with nothing under their tee-shirts whilst I needed industrial strength scaffolding to stay afloat. I think, in the chronology of my relationship with my breasts, these were The Wilderness Years.
Then, something wonderful happened: I went to college. In the ACT system, college is where students go in years 11 and 12 – so you’re a YOUNG ADULT at a school with other YOUNG ADULTS where you’re treated like a YOUNG ADULT and you can talk about YOUNG ADULT stuff like SEX and DRUGS and ROCK AND ROLL. Or, more like, your aspirations towards those three lofty goals of YOUNG ADULThood. It was there, in that heady, sweaty mix of all of us working out who we were and who we wanted to be, that I realised two things: that boys like boobs, and that boys like boobs FULL STOP. No matter how big, how little, how round or high or wide, boys LIKE THEM, quite possibly more than they like anything else on God’s green earth.
Being perfectly honest, and at risk of being a Bad Feminist, this meant that I could finally begin to entertain the possibility that maybe I might like my breasts too, if I gave them half a chance. Giving my breasts half a chance meant setting them free from their functional scaffolding, and looking for other options that supported not only my breasts but my fledgling and fragile self esteem.
I can still remember the thrill of purchasing my first Really Sexy Bra and Knickers. As mentioned above, I was sixteen, and doing all those things that sixteen year olds do. As I’ve said many times before on this blog, we don’t always dress in a way that reflects who we are in the present moment, but who we are becoming, and who we want to be. And although I was confused and had a lot of growing up to do at that point, I wanted something that would make me feel strong, sexy, and powerful – and nothing was more a reflection of who I wanted to be than a chocolate brown French lace balconette bra and knickers set from Elle Macpherson Intimates. It cost me a weeks’ pay, but the boosts it gave were worth it.
Over the years, I’d estimate that my spending on lingerie would have been enough to have placed a down payment on a small apartment, but, no matter how poor I was, I always felt as though good – in both the practical and the aesthetic sense – lingerie was never a waste of money. Which is just as well because in Australia, you’d be hard pressed to find lingerie that fits both of those categories – practical and pleasing to the eye – without relaxing the purse strings considerably. This was something I was always happy to do, even if it meant having only one or two bras, and repairing them until it really was time to pension them off to the back paddock. This was fine whilst my breasts were in the ‘normal’ cup size range – from A to D – but, in my Honours year, whilst the rest of me stayed the same, my boobs jumped two cup sizes, into an E. Overnight. Literally. I went to bed with D’s and woke up with E’s.
Sometimes the universe burdens us in the strangest of ways.
Having breasts that were suddenly outside of Australian clothing’s ‘normal’ range meant that I was in for a rude shock. Whereas previously the lingerie world was my oyster, I was thrust into the barren wasteland of Full Figure Lingerie. My first ever foray into a specialist stockist of Full Figure Lingerie (a euphemism I grew to hate – why not call a spade a spade and just say Bras for Big Boobs?) involved tears in the change room. The sales girl did her best, but when I asked her for something sexy, all she could produce was a hackneyed red and black number so massive that it encroached into my décolletage and flattened my breasts into two squarish blobs. I bought the bra, in the two colour ways available, because it was the best of a bad lot. There were other, prettier bras available in E cups – but they were out of stock, on backorder with a two month wait list, and completely beyond my financial means.
The second period of Wilderness commenced. This was only slightly better than the last Wilderness, as I at least knew in my heart of hearts that my breasts were indeed lovely, but this knowledge made shopping for bras more frustrating – I felt as though all of my breast’s loveliness was literally being squished out of them. Some days I even went bra-less, because it was simply too depressing to contemplate putting on some of the horrors that now comprised my lingerie wardrobe. After much thought, I decided that the problem with the Full Figure Lingerie industry was that their Ideal Breast, for which they designed all their bras, was a completely different shape to mine, with completely different needs. My problem was that my breasts, due to my large bone structure and impressive set of pectoral muscles (if I do say so myself – it’s carrying all those textbooks under my arm, I tell you) were actually firmer and higher than the Ideal Full Figure Breast, meaning that the bras available in Australia in an E+ cup were far far too supportive and rigid, with way more scaffolding than was necessary for someone with my frame and muscle structure. Whilst a very supportive, ridged bra, with a wide central panel and full cup coverage, would be ideal on a woman with a small rib cage, little muscle tissue and lots of boob, it was absolutely hopeless for me, and, what’s more, made my breasts look dreadful and made me feel dreadful.
There was an end, however, in sight. Mama-K, on a trip to Mother England midway through my honours year, came back with stories of an oasis of beautiful lingerie – in all shapes, sizes and colours – at Marks and Spencers. Being unsure of my exact size, and understandably feeling a bit awkward about shopping for sexy lingerie for her daughter, she bought me home just two Marks and Spencer’s bras to try. Although E cups, they looked…just like a lovely, ordinary lacy bra, complete with a low front profile, delicate straps, and transparent lace. I wore those two bras until they were grey with over washing, desperately hoping that one day I would make it to the promised land of Marks and Spencers, to rejoice in the loveliness of sexy bras in 14 E-F.
One Day finally came a few weeks ago, in Scotland, and it was better than I ever imagined.
The greatest thing about M&S was that there was no specialist section for Fuller Figure Bras – rather, most of their ranges just ran up to a G cup as a matter of course. This means no scarily wide centre panels, no full coverage cups, and no scary thick straps. No opportunity for manufacturers to charge through the nose because they’ve cornered the Full Figure Lingerie market – because all boobs are already catered for as a matter of course. M&S, as the locals call it, even stocks a range of post-mastectomy bras – something which, in Australia, you would have to hunt around specialty stores to find. You can even get scary huge squashy bras if that’s what floats your boat – everyone’s a winner. Here’s the bottom line: to buy a nice, lacy bra and pants in Australia, the outlay would be close to $150 at RRP, and your choices would be black and porny, pink/red and porny, or cream and virginal – just try and tell me that the Madonna/Whore paradox is dead! In the UK, shopping at M&S, the MAXIMUM you’d be looking at would be 50 pounds RRP – that’s about $100 in our money – and you can choose from dozens of lovely bras, with many levels of subtle graduation between vampish seductress and daisy fresh innocent. I won’t tell you how many sets of lingerie accompanied me home – but, to give you a ballpark figure, it’ll be at least a week before The Dreamboat has seen the full gamut of my UK purchases.
And the best thing of all? You can shop M&S online, and stand alongside me in my boycott of ugly, expensive Full Figure Lingerie that is all that’s available in Australia, or just ugly, expensive lingerie in whatever size you wear, because all breasts are beautiful and deserve to be dressed accordingly. Let’s not settle for lingerie that only uplifts our busts – rather, let’s strive for lingerie that uplifts our sometimes flagging and fragile egos, and elevates us to a higher plane of bodily acceptance and love. At least, I know that’s now where my personal bra bar is set, and I think you’re all, dear readers, worth a similarly high standard of support.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
A Tale of Two Cities and A Capital Idea
From St Kilda to Kings Cross is thirteen hours on a bus
I pressed my face against the glass and watched the white lines rushing past
And all around me felt like all inside me
And my body left me and my soul went running
Have you ever seen Kings Cross when the rain is falling soft?
I came in on the evening bus, form Oxford Street i cut across
And if the rain dont fall too hard everything shines
Just like a postcard
Everything goes on just the same
Fair-weather friends are the hungriest friends
I keep my mouth well shut, i cross their open hands
I want to see the sun go down from St Kilda esplanade
Where the beach needs reconstruction, where the palm trees have it hard
I'd give you all of Sydney harbour (all that land, all that water)
For that one sweet promenade – Paul Kelly, ‘From St Kilda to King’s Cross’.
Take a Canberra girl. Add a little money; a few couches to surf on; cheap air and bus fares to Melbourne and Sydney respectively; and a couple of free weekends.
Canberrans, newly minted and old guard, will be familiar with what happens next: the Canberra girl returns home star struck by the proverbial temptations – sartorial, culinary, cultural – that Australia’s two biggest smokes have to offer, like the little girl enamoured by the grown ups’ closet.
Being too cool for school – a character flaw I have to deal with it as best I can – I thought I’d afforded myself complete and un-breachable immunity from seduction by the splendour of the cities. Having rejected, mid way through my degree, the notion that Melburnians are cooler and Sydneysiders more fun than dull, cold Canberran’s, I held a rather smug certainty that anything the two cosmopolitan powers of Australian style could whip out, I could unearth some hidden Canberra gems that would be harder, better, stronger, faster – stylistically speaking – and all the more chick for being unexpected.
I guess I hadn’t heard the saying pride comes before a fall.
As this blog will demonstrate, I’ve come home with a rather bad case of the star-strucks.
Marvellous Melbourne
Having only been to Melbourne once in my life – for a day when I was eleven, with the parentals and the siblings, tres uncool – I was constantly met with blank stares at parties when this fact came out. My dirty little secret scandalised many – how can one possibly write about style in Australia without having visited its birthplace? Of course, this got my ire up, and I furiously resisted the notion that Melbourne had much more to offer in the style stakes than any other metropolis in the southern hemisphere. I think I deliberately developed a minor aversion to the place on account of SOME – not all - people from Melbourne endlessly disparaging the goods of our nations’ capital – our coffee, our food, our style.
It was only the kind offer of a place to rest our weary heads from the dear Miss Bennett, and the enthusiasm of my main squeeze, J-Man, that prompted me to hop onto ‘what if’ and book some flights for a winter getaway. Packing was a challenge – having heard tell of the uber cool Melbourne fashion pack, I was quaking, under my coat of bravado, in my black leather knee length boots. I decided to take as many options as my classic pre-rebranding country road overnighter could hold. This involved several vintage dresses, a lot of black, and plenty of stretch jersey for its magical crease resistant properties. I was terrified – for, as anyone who has had to move to a new environment knows, big fish from little ponds tend to get eaten alive when they hop on into the roaring stream of life.
Instead, Melbourne and I took one look at each other and fell hopelessly in love. Or at least, we decided we simply had to jump each other then and there. Melbourne is a city after my own heart – it wears its style on its sleave, its lapel, in the seam of a stocking or the heel of a boot. Because of this, Melbourne, or at least the areas of St Kilda, Fitzroy and Carleton that I came to know, is quite relaxed. It knows who it is and as such, has nothing to prove to you. If you take that same attitude to clothing and to life, as I do, you are one of the fold and welcomed to style’s bosom with no further vetting required.
Being someone who feels that a conversation isn’t complete if there hasn’t been something said about clothes or accessories, the casual way that Melburnians have of talking about clothes made me feel right at home. Shocked and delighted was this Canberran to lean that Melburnians actually…
Stop.
You.
On.
The.
Street.
…to talk to you about what you’re wearing, who designed it, how fabulous it was. Needless to say, when a grand dame of the Melbourne style set, wearing the most incredible fuchsia fascinator, stopped me to compliment me on the skirt that I’d made and was wearing during a mid morning wander, I felt like I’d arrived - and that I was, oh, only about ten foot tall.
The thing with Melbourne, as I surmised from my sojourn to the City Museum with J-Man and friends, was that Melbourne was the planned pregnancy after the bastard child that is/was Sydney. No offence to Sydney peeps – I’m coming to valorising your fair city in a few paragraphs – Sydney has always been a shambles. Never really thought about other than a quick and dirty route to eliminate Britannia’s refuse, it grew up never knowing who it was – without order, in anarchistic clusters around the jagged coastline and gash of a river. No-one wanted Sydney, and, consequentially, it grew up with a desperate need to be wanted. Melbourne, on the other hand, was the much loved and wanted child – its conception was carefully planned at a time when there was enough money and know-how to make this one work out well, after the mistakes of last time became evident. Thought was given to the future of the colony’s second legitimate child – streets and suburbs planned in advance, on a grid designed to maximise the fledgling city’s sociability and prosperity decades, centuries, into the future. Just as its shambolic origins influence the Sydney we know and love or loathe today, the planned, considered nature of Melbourne’s origin is evident in the relaxed self assurance with which the city carries itself. Melbourne has nothing to prove, because it has always known its worth.
And it shows in its style. Not to repeat the cliché that weary Canberrans hear all the time, but people in Melbourne dress in a way that’s all their own. Whilst there are trends – in particular, the skinny jeans/rocker hair/bomber jacket look for the lads – there’s a sense that anything you wear is fabulous so long as you look like you in it. Of particular note was the way that Melbourne women are unafraid to embrace both neutrals and colours – see earlier post – as well as vintage and modern pieces – again, see earlier posts. Prints also featured heavily, along with chunky hand knits – a necessity in a city whose mercury drops almost as low as Canberra’s. There also seems to be an aversion to dressing entirely in mass market labels – hence the proliferation of markets, one-off shops that sell local and imported designs, and vintage stores.
Another element of Melbourne style that I feel deserves note here, and became all the more apparent after my adventures in Sydney, is that Melbourne women and men seem much more comfortable with their bodies. People of all shapes and sizes were dressed beautifully, and with an eye to clothes that flatter, flaunt and fit. Perhaps this stems from the preference for one-off shops rather than the chain stores, whose sizing provision leaves much to be desired. The Melbourne gal seems to be much happier in her body – whether it be curvy, tall, short, or straight up and down. Not to say that there aren’t people in Melbourne who battle with body image – I’m sure there are – but they just seemed to be better equipped to dress the body in a way that is sexy and stylish, which, I have no doubt, provides an instant boost of much needed confidence. As a curvy women, I have never felt more comfortable with my figure as I did in Melbourne, because everybody else was embracing and working with what they had too.
The Melbourne experience is not all roses, however. I was concerned at several points that it appears to be the fashion for young Melburnian women to wear one side of their hair almost completely shaved, and the other side quite long. This, I feel, is taking the individual approach to style a little too far. Expressing yourself is a grand thing, but you’re also wearing your hair in such an ugly way that it hurts my eyes and causes me to vom a little in my mouth. No offense but it’s true. And as for those coffees I’d heard so much about…well, they were good, but I still think the Gods are better…
Splendid Sydney
The weekend after my Melbourne sojourn, my dear friend Clementine Kemp and I hopped on a Murray’s coach at the unglamorous hour of 8am on a Saturday in order to spend the weekend with our friend Kitty Gillfeather. Kitty’s older sister’s apartment in Neutral Bay was free for the weekend, and, given that bus fares were super cheap with it being a recession and all, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I must confess here that my relationship to Sydney is a rather complex one. I spent my childhood there – we moved to Canberra when I started high school – and, like anywhere that you spent your childhood, pleasure and pain indelibly colour your perception of the place. Coupled with this was the fact that the part of Sydney my family and I lived in – St Clair, a part of larger Penrith – has a tenuous relationship to the rest of Sydney. Some Sydney purists say that anything further inland then Parramatta can’t be truly described as Sydney – and they are entitled to their opinion. However, the people I grew up with, myself included, always felt ourselves to be a part of the city, even though the tip of the Nepean river we inhabited was an hour away in light traffic from the iconic harbour. I think my test for whether you are, or have been, a true citizen of Sydney is a simple one. Go to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, find Brett Whitely’s ‘The Balcony 2’, and look at it, really carefully, for five minutes. If you have tears in the inner corner of your eyes, or a lump in your throat like a stuck chunk of panne di casa, you’re Sydney through and through. I’m one such person, and Sydney will always have a very special place in my heart.
However, as I mentioned above, Sydney does have some issues of insecurity which I just can’t bring myself to ignore, despite my love for the place. It’s louder, brasher, and sexier than Melbourne, its younger sibling, and I think that this stems from a desperate desire to be seen, heard and acknowledged, rather than from a place of confidence. Somewhat paradoxically, there’s also the tendency to try and fit in as much as possible – hence the proliferation of chain stores and the sad absence of the little one-off shops I love so much. Walking along the busy streets of Sydney, I recalled the Groove Armada lyrics that were the anthem of my high school years: if everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other. Everybody looked the same, and I got tired of looking.
That’s not to say that there weren’t some wonderfully stylish people in Sydney – mostly the lovely Kitty’s gorgeous sisters - and wonderfully stylish places to shop – Paddington markets get a most honourable mention here. What stood out conspicuously for me, though, and was epitomised by our night out at the town, was the tendency of the ladies of Sydney to be (how can I say this without sounding prudish?) a little underdressed. Not in terms of formality, in terms of quantity of fabric! Fifteen centimetres does not a skirt make, ladies. Clementine, Kitty and I weren’t hitting the Cross – indeed, our watering holes of choice were amongst the most well regarded and popular in the city – but some other women didn’t quite get that memo as they were well and truly dressed for a hard night’s work. If you get my drift.
I’m a huge proponent of celebrating the body that you have, whatever its size or shape, and in not hiding away bodies or body parts that are not considered attractive or sexual at this particular point in history. But what is celebratory about squeezing Rubens-esque thighs into a skirt three sizes too small? Or wearing a bra that converts an ample bosom into four bizarre mounds of misshapen fat? One such young patron of a fashionable nightspot was dressed thus. She had the potential to be a very attractive woman, the sort who would have been an artists model two hundred years ago. It seemed, though, that the prevailing norms of Sydney style – ie show as much as you can while you can (and even then for ten years afterwards) – had got the better of her. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened had we transplanted her to Melbourne, and steeped her in the celebratory, individualistic style ethic that was evident in every fibre of that city. Perhaps she would have found herself felling more comfortable straying from the high street chain store look – and they tyranny of high street chain store sizing – and embracing her beautiful curves in a way that made her look as fabulous as she was, rather than like a doughier, spilling out-over-the-edges version of the Sydney cookie cutter girl.
Homeward Bound
As I journeyed home with many thoughts in my head – top of the list being how I had managed to drink that much without repurcussions – I got to thinking about Canberra’s style. If Sydney is the bastard child with an insecurity complex, and Melbourne’s lead the charmed life that gives it the licence to be whoever it wants to be, what could I say about our fair capital? The youngest sibling, by far, and not yet past the stage of pulling at the skirts of her two older sisters, as my shameful degree of star-struckness illustrates. Canberra is developing a look that is its own – one that I think is informed by a conflation of the student chick of the universities and the crisp, slick quality that the best of the public service provides. However, it’s still a long way from making its debut and coming out on the public with a definitive statement of who she is. And it occurred to me, some time as we were driving parallel to Lake George with the wind turbines white against the purple storm clouds, that that’s ok. We’re a new city, without the sense of history that informs Melbourne or Sydney’s styles, which gives us a playfulness, a naivety, and an innocence, which we shouldn’t try to grow out of too quickly. We can borrow our older sisters’ heels and lippy, for it’s fun to play dress ups, but not be too quick to be either one of them, and wait for our own time to come. A capital idea even if I do say so myself.
I pressed my face against the glass and watched the white lines rushing past
And all around me felt like all inside me
And my body left me and my soul went running
Have you ever seen Kings Cross when the rain is falling soft?
I came in on the evening bus, form Oxford Street i cut across
And if the rain dont fall too hard everything shines
Just like a postcard
Everything goes on just the same
Fair-weather friends are the hungriest friends
I keep my mouth well shut, i cross their open hands
I want to see the sun go down from St Kilda esplanade
Where the beach needs reconstruction, where the palm trees have it hard
I'd give you all of Sydney harbour (all that land, all that water)
For that one sweet promenade – Paul Kelly, ‘From St Kilda to King’s Cross’.
Take a Canberra girl. Add a little money; a few couches to surf on; cheap air and bus fares to Melbourne and Sydney respectively; and a couple of free weekends.
Canberrans, newly minted and old guard, will be familiar with what happens next: the Canberra girl returns home star struck by the proverbial temptations – sartorial, culinary, cultural – that Australia’s two biggest smokes have to offer, like the little girl enamoured by the grown ups’ closet.
Being too cool for school – a character flaw I have to deal with it as best I can – I thought I’d afforded myself complete and un-breachable immunity from seduction by the splendour of the cities. Having rejected, mid way through my degree, the notion that Melburnians are cooler and Sydneysiders more fun than dull, cold Canberran’s, I held a rather smug certainty that anything the two cosmopolitan powers of Australian style could whip out, I could unearth some hidden Canberra gems that would be harder, better, stronger, faster – stylistically speaking – and all the more chick for being unexpected.
I guess I hadn’t heard the saying pride comes before a fall.
As this blog will demonstrate, I’ve come home with a rather bad case of the star-strucks.
Marvellous Melbourne
Having only been to Melbourne once in my life – for a day when I was eleven, with the parentals and the siblings, tres uncool – I was constantly met with blank stares at parties when this fact came out. My dirty little secret scandalised many – how can one possibly write about style in Australia without having visited its birthplace? Of course, this got my ire up, and I furiously resisted the notion that Melbourne had much more to offer in the style stakes than any other metropolis in the southern hemisphere. I think I deliberately developed a minor aversion to the place on account of SOME – not all - people from Melbourne endlessly disparaging the goods of our nations’ capital – our coffee, our food, our style.
It was only the kind offer of a place to rest our weary heads from the dear Miss Bennett, and the enthusiasm of my main squeeze, J-Man, that prompted me to hop onto ‘what if’ and book some flights for a winter getaway. Packing was a challenge – having heard tell of the uber cool Melbourne fashion pack, I was quaking, under my coat of bravado, in my black leather knee length boots. I decided to take as many options as my classic pre-rebranding country road overnighter could hold. This involved several vintage dresses, a lot of black, and plenty of stretch jersey for its magical crease resistant properties. I was terrified – for, as anyone who has had to move to a new environment knows, big fish from little ponds tend to get eaten alive when they hop on into the roaring stream of life.
Instead, Melbourne and I took one look at each other and fell hopelessly in love. Or at least, we decided we simply had to jump each other then and there. Melbourne is a city after my own heart – it wears its style on its sleave, its lapel, in the seam of a stocking or the heel of a boot. Because of this, Melbourne, or at least the areas of St Kilda, Fitzroy and Carleton that I came to know, is quite relaxed. It knows who it is and as such, has nothing to prove to you. If you take that same attitude to clothing and to life, as I do, you are one of the fold and welcomed to style’s bosom with no further vetting required.
Being someone who feels that a conversation isn’t complete if there hasn’t been something said about clothes or accessories, the casual way that Melburnians have of talking about clothes made me feel right at home. Shocked and delighted was this Canberran to lean that Melburnians actually…
Stop.
You.
On.
The.
Street.
…to talk to you about what you’re wearing, who designed it, how fabulous it was. Needless to say, when a grand dame of the Melbourne style set, wearing the most incredible fuchsia fascinator, stopped me to compliment me on the skirt that I’d made and was wearing during a mid morning wander, I felt like I’d arrived - and that I was, oh, only about ten foot tall.
The thing with Melbourne, as I surmised from my sojourn to the City Museum with J-Man and friends, was that Melbourne was the planned pregnancy after the bastard child that is/was Sydney. No offence to Sydney peeps – I’m coming to valorising your fair city in a few paragraphs – Sydney has always been a shambles. Never really thought about other than a quick and dirty route to eliminate Britannia’s refuse, it grew up never knowing who it was – without order, in anarchistic clusters around the jagged coastline and gash of a river. No-one wanted Sydney, and, consequentially, it grew up with a desperate need to be wanted. Melbourne, on the other hand, was the much loved and wanted child – its conception was carefully planned at a time when there was enough money and know-how to make this one work out well, after the mistakes of last time became evident. Thought was given to the future of the colony’s second legitimate child – streets and suburbs planned in advance, on a grid designed to maximise the fledgling city’s sociability and prosperity decades, centuries, into the future. Just as its shambolic origins influence the Sydney we know and love or loathe today, the planned, considered nature of Melbourne’s origin is evident in the relaxed self assurance with which the city carries itself. Melbourne has nothing to prove, because it has always known its worth.
And it shows in its style. Not to repeat the cliché that weary Canberrans hear all the time, but people in Melbourne dress in a way that’s all their own. Whilst there are trends – in particular, the skinny jeans/rocker hair/bomber jacket look for the lads – there’s a sense that anything you wear is fabulous so long as you look like you in it. Of particular note was the way that Melbourne women are unafraid to embrace both neutrals and colours – see earlier post – as well as vintage and modern pieces – again, see earlier posts. Prints also featured heavily, along with chunky hand knits – a necessity in a city whose mercury drops almost as low as Canberra’s. There also seems to be an aversion to dressing entirely in mass market labels – hence the proliferation of markets, one-off shops that sell local and imported designs, and vintage stores.
Another element of Melbourne style that I feel deserves note here, and became all the more apparent after my adventures in Sydney, is that Melbourne women and men seem much more comfortable with their bodies. People of all shapes and sizes were dressed beautifully, and with an eye to clothes that flatter, flaunt and fit. Perhaps this stems from the preference for one-off shops rather than the chain stores, whose sizing provision leaves much to be desired. The Melbourne gal seems to be much happier in her body – whether it be curvy, tall, short, or straight up and down. Not to say that there aren’t people in Melbourne who battle with body image – I’m sure there are – but they just seemed to be better equipped to dress the body in a way that is sexy and stylish, which, I have no doubt, provides an instant boost of much needed confidence. As a curvy women, I have never felt more comfortable with my figure as I did in Melbourne, because everybody else was embracing and working with what they had too.
The Melbourne experience is not all roses, however. I was concerned at several points that it appears to be the fashion for young Melburnian women to wear one side of their hair almost completely shaved, and the other side quite long. This, I feel, is taking the individual approach to style a little too far. Expressing yourself is a grand thing, but you’re also wearing your hair in such an ugly way that it hurts my eyes and causes me to vom a little in my mouth. No offense but it’s true. And as for those coffees I’d heard so much about…well, they were good, but I still think the Gods are better…
Splendid Sydney
The weekend after my Melbourne sojourn, my dear friend Clementine Kemp and I hopped on a Murray’s coach at the unglamorous hour of 8am on a Saturday in order to spend the weekend with our friend Kitty Gillfeather. Kitty’s older sister’s apartment in Neutral Bay was free for the weekend, and, given that bus fares were super cheap with it being a recession and all, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
I must confess here that my relationship to Sydney is a rather complex one. I spent my childhood there – we moved to Canberra when I started high school – and, like anywhere that you spent your childhood, pleasure and pain indelibly colour your perception of the place. Coupled with this was the fact that the part of Sydney my family and I lived in – St Clair, a part of larger Penrith – has a tenuous relationship to the rest of Sydney. Some Sydney purists say that anything further inland then Parramatta can’t be truly described as Sydney – and they are entitled to their opinion. However, the people I grew up with, myself included, always felt ourselves to be a part of the city, even though the tip of the Nepean river we inhabited was an hour away in light traffic from the iconic harbour. I think my test for whether you are, or have been, a true citizen of Sydney is a simple one. Go to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, find Brett Whitely’s ‘The Balcony 2’, and look at it, really carefully, for five minutes. If you have tears in the inner corner of your eyes, or a lump in your throat like a stuck chunk of panne di casa, you’re Sydney through and through. I’m one such person, and Sydney will always have a very special place in my heart.
However, as I mentioned above, Sydney does have some issues of insecurity which I just can’t bring myself to ignore, despite my love for the place. It’s louder, brasher, and sexier than Melbourne, its younger sibling, and I think that this stems from a desperate desire to be seen, heard and acknowledged, rather than from a place of confidence. Somewhat paradoxically, there’s also the tendency to try and fit in as much as possible – hence the proliferation of chain stores and the sad absence of the little one-off shops I love so much. Walking along the busy streets of Sydney, I recalled the Groove Armada lyrics that were the anthem of my high school years: if everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other. Everybody looked the same, and I got tired of looking.
That’s not to say that there weren’t some wonderfully stylish people in Sydney – mostly the lovely Kitty’s gorgeous sisters - and wonderfully stylish places to shop – Paddington markets get a most honourable mention here. What stood out conspicuously for me, though, and was epitomised by our night out at the town, was the tendency of the ladies of Sydney to be (how can I say this without sounding prudish?) a little underdressed. Not in terms of formality, in terms of quantity of fabric! Fifteen centimetres does not a skirt make, ladies. Clementine, Kitty and I weren’t hitting the Cross – indeed, our watering holes of choice were amongst the most well regarded and popular in the city – but some other women didn’t quite get that memo as they were well and truly dressed for a hard night’s work. If you get my drift.
I’m a huge proponent of celebrating the body that you have, whatever its size or shape, and in not hiding away bodies or body parts that are not considered attractive or sexual at this particular point in history. But what is celebratory about squeezing Rubens-esque thighs into a skirt three sizes too small? Or wearing a bra that converts an ample bosom into four bizarre mounds of misshapen fat? One such young patron of a fashionable nightspot was dressed thus. She had the potential to be a very attractive woman, the sort who would have been an artists model two hundred years ago. It seemed, though, that the prevailing norms of Sydney style – ie show as much as you can while you can (and even then for ten years afterwards) – had got the better of her. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened had we transplanted her to Melbourne, and steeped her in the celebratory, individualistic style ethic that was evident in every fibre of that city. Perhaps she would have found herself felling more comfortable straying from the high street chain store look – and they tyranny of high street chain store sizing – and embracing her beautiful curves in a way that made her look as fabulous as she was, rather than like a doughier, spilling out-over-the-edges version of the Sydney cookie cutter girl.
Homeward Bound
As I journeyed home with many thoughts in my head – top of the list being how I had managed to drink that much without repurcussions – I got to thinking about Canberra’s style. If Sydney is the bastard child with an insecurity complex, and Melbourne’s lead the charmed life that gives it the licence to be whoever it wants to be, what could I say about our fair capital? The youngest sibling, by far, and not yet past the stage of pulling at the skirts of her two older sisters, as my shameful degree of star-struckness illustrates. Canberra is developing a look that is its own – one that I think is informed by a conflation of the student chick of the universities and the crisp, slick quality that the best of the public service provides. However, it’s still a long way from making its debut and coming out on the public with a definitive statement of who she is. And it occurred to me, some time as we were driving parallel to Lake George with the wind turbines white against the purple storm clouds, that that’s ok. We’re a new city, without the sense of history that informs Melbourne or Sydney’s styles, which gives us a playfulness, a naivety, and an innocence, which we shouldn’t try to grow out of too quickly. We can borrow our older sisters’ heels and lippy, for it’s fun to play dress ups, but not be too quick to be either one of them, and wait for our own time to come. A capital idea even if I do say so myself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
