you look lovely today, just today?

horrible week in more ways than one. don't really have many details to go into, other than the fact that it has just been horrible. next week will be better.


Diane Kruger



If i could be any girl in the world I think i'd want to be Diane Kruger. Ah, i caught you there didn't i? You think i would say Alexa Chung with her british accent and her rockstar boyfriend. But look at her. Alexa Chung couldn't rock a velvet assymetrical jumpsuit? Diane looks like she was born to wear Chloe, and wear it she does.This outfit is immaculate, i cannot fault it, and this coming from the girl who hates jumpsuits with every fibre of my being (believing that they are, above all else, the ugliest piece of clothing in a woman's wardrobe today). But seeing Diane makes me want to search one. A velvet one no less. And to cinch it in at the waist with a carpet tassel. Such class, such sophistication. I have a feeling she's our generations Grace Kelly. And hey, Prince Harry is on the market again. Who knows. :)


Kate Bosworth


Oh Kate. Where have you been? i've missed you shiny hair and your two-tone eyes. No-one wears clothes quite like you do, as if they just sprung into being on your body. No-one accesorises like you do, with mis-matched metallic shoes and box clutch. No -one can wear a simple white sheath, knotted experimentally at the waist, with the same oomph and pizazz as you do. It takes a class act to wear something so simply so well. She may not be a great actress (but hey, i'll let her happily prove me wrong on that account) but boy the girl can dress.


Leighton Meester


I'm excited at the idea that Leighton might have a Vogue US cover. I much prefer her to the goddess-like Blake any day, her more decadent, more sinful brand of beauty is more to my tastes than Blake's bright-eyed Californian effervescence. She also has a really surprising avant-garde taste. Take this dress for instance, a simple shift made interesting by the huge floral ruffle at the collar, a little Carrie Bradshaw-esque, no? The print is darling, and the shoes are just the perfect counterpoint, picking up the belt and recalling the ruffle with the circular detail on the strap. She's canny about fashion, she has wild and crazy taste, and she knows how to accessorise. Not much more a girl can ask for!



Thandie Newton



I'm not sure if this is actually that recent, but it was posted recently on tFS, and i needed something a little casual to break up all this glorious red carpet stuff. This outfit is perfect. Thandie is a beautiful girl, so she can get away with things mere mortals can't (hello, leather leggings). But aside from that i love the principle of this outfit - mixing silhouettes, textures, colours and shapes to form an interesting, yet casual outfit. I love the way that the sheen of the leather contrasts with the hard cotton of her striped shirt and dull shine of the satin tuxedo jacket. I like the sleeves pushed up over the shirt, and the hem of the jacket hanging longer than the shirt, yet the leggings taking pride of place. And i looooove her 2.55 of course.

TGIF!
X

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love, loss and what i wore - flower power

I love wearing clothes with history. Not just vintage clothes, i mean clothes that actually have sentimental value for me, or for someone out there. Part of my halloween costume (i ended up going as marie antoinette, actually, but it was rather nice all the same) was the skirt of a wedding dress, dumped unceremoniously in vinnies (charity store) for me to find, alter a little, and form into a marie antoinette costume. I asked the guy at the counter, with a little trepidation, whether the couple had split up, or something like that. I would be horrible if they had. But he said no, she just didn't have any room for it, and she wasn't particularly sentimental about it. I wasn't quite sure whether to take that as a good thing or a bad thing, but i bought the dress anyway.

Likewise one of my favourite pieces of clothing, one that has never let me down and that i will wear until i die, is a vintage lanvin flower shirt of my mother's. She was given it by her best friend in the whole entire world (who has the best taste, and looks like sofia coppola, dammit), and like me, used to wear it everywhere. It's funny, we're not that similar now, mum and I, and I'm half chinese and she's not, but we look remarkably similar. We talk the same way, we smile the same way, and we share all these mannerisms. People say when I wear the flower shirt and chatter away, gesticulating wildly, I remind them so much of my mum when she was my age. And though I roll my eyes, actually I feel quite proud.

Because despite all appearances now, my mum was actually so cool in the 80s! Like my fabulous aunt, she has inherently good taste as well as an appreciation for beautiful things. Although unlike my aunt she didn't really galivant around for the whole of the 80s and 90s through Europe and New York. My mum has all these amazing stories to tell that i love hearing about uni life, about being a young doctor, about travel, about boyfriends, about weird guys who used to stalk her (and make her watermelon baskets, like a basket carved out of a watermelon with individual fruits carved out of the watermelon flesh! WTF! hahaahahah), and i drink them in. She has so much life experience and spirit of adventure, and you can tell that about her now. Just like my Aunt, people really love my mum. She's funny and vivacious and she engages you, no matter who you are.

The flower shirt used to be as much a part of her wardrobe as it is mine. It's a beautiful shirt, Jeanne Lanvin really knew how to cut a garment. It's semi-sheer with this gorgeous multicoloured floral print that goes with every colour in the known spectrum no joke. It's bracelet length, which in my opinion is the most beautiful length - exposing your wrists can be a really lovely thing in clothing - and it's suitably baggy, so when tucked into a skirt it just sort of puffs up over the top of a belt. Perfect. I cannot fault this garment. It has never let me down in 4 years of wearing it, it has always fit well, looked beautiful and made me feel happy when everything else was letting me down.

The real reason I love this shirt, though, was because my mum wore it to my christening. Cue the awww.. But there is just something so special about it now for me. I wear a lot of my mum's clothes, she has great basics and some unexpected lovely finds in her wardrobe despite the fact she dresses quite simply now, but none of them means that much to me in terms of sentimental value. This shirt has history. She's told me she's worn it to bizarre uni parties where one guy ended up so drunk he boarded a one way flight to fiji wearing nothing but a hessian sack and a moneybag filled with oranges. She's worn it when she met her then boyfriend's parents, a lord and lady in england (who referred to her as the 'australian gel'). She's worn it when she's flown halfway around the world to rescue her sister from a broken heart, and when she's driven all around Sydney searching for her brother who got lost at a school excursion. And she wore it to my christening. I was born on Christmas Eve, so they christened me on Christmas day, when I was only 1 day old. My mum's there, beaming with happiness, my dad's there, so proud, all my family are there and my mum's best friend, all smiling wildly. Mum gave me the shirt when i turned 14 and told me all these stories about it, and I love it all the more for it.

I was recently looking at some photos and pasting them into a scrapbook. I had pasted a photo of me in, wearing the flower shirt and head cocked onto the side, grinning, into the first page. I was sifting through some photos at the bottom of a box when I found one of my mum, age similar to my own, wearing the flower shirt and holding up a champagne saucer to the camera. We look so alike it's stunning. When I was a bit younger I used to hate it when people said that to me, you know when you're a surly teenager and the last thing you want is to look like your mum?

Well i'm so glad I do. Because hopefully it means I might have half as many adventures as she did.

X

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