Confession time.

I have a little secret: a compulsive addiction to fashion blogs. You know the Sartorialist?
I see a new post, I HAVE to click through. Ok, so I think the America Apparel ads are the weirdest clothes I've ever set eyes on (and I read a LOT of Vogue and Bazaar in my teenage years, and wore some incredibly peculiar stuff myself), but the photos that make their way onto this page are just... love. Or WTF bevelled with a little confusion and trying to understand exactly what was so attractive about THAT person at THAT moment in time.

Another sneaky addiction is more like having an ever-updated glossy on my dining table. I look, I explore related galleries, I get all wistful about the days when sewing a couple thousand copper paillettes was no biggie... but then I saw this and I now have to seriously reevaluate my commitment.

Apparently the couple are a couple, although their bony bodies conjure up little more than the idea of painfully colliding exoskeletons, and I can't say a guy who looks like David Bowie during his "Am I male? Am I female? Hell, let's aim at shemale and bleach everything to fairy floss while you're there!" is really working for me.

I haven't read any of the insanely popular Twilight series, but I'm aware there is a certain tension between Bella and Edward - something about vampirism, infection, blah blah, so on. Looking at this couple I can imagine the same kind of thing, except more of the "Oh, I want to make love to you, but the osteoporosis  might kill us both!" or "Sorry, baby, heroin's the only thing I can get it up for. Or get up for."

Actually, someone get me some heroin. Not for me. Let's just put the poor half-starved waifs out of their misery.

In which I complain.

Dear Herald Sun,

You suck.

I realise this isn’t a surprise.

However, you even suck at the things you should be good at. Being a tabloid-y, let’s-gawp-at-celebrities and have-a-lifestyle newspaper, you should at LEAST be good at the lifestyle parts.

Fail.

Massive fail.

Catherine Lambert, you’re not style police. Street smart? Give it a rest. You don’t even reach the bar of looking-moderately-put-together in any way, shape or form. I could have found you fifty people on Friday night in Northcote who looked better (for ANY given value of ‘better’) than Ilesha H. Hell, I could have found fifty people in Frankston who had some kind of ‘look’ pulled together tighter than the ruffly-in-all-the-wrong places red dress on Ms. H.

Stripper shoes might be fun, but not when you match “expensive items with less expensive items” because there is nothing that can be called matching going on here. Sweetheart, your shoes make your (white, fluffy, cropped-sleeve) jacket look like your pimp bought it. A blind pimp with tactile issues and really short arms.

And when you wear your little red dress with your really little white fluffy jacket and your stripper heels with contrasting silver peep-toes AND weird glittery ankle straps (lesson one in elongating legs: ankle straps are FAIL) refrain from bling.

Hang on. Refrain? Oh, that means do it again, right? Wrong. Teaming a clutch hewn out of Priscilla gunmetal-grey sequins with all this is disaster. However, why stop there? When you’ve gone this far, the only sensible option is to load on all the jewellery in your possession. (Possibly so innocent bystanders have time to run and hide.)

I can count (yes, even with one hand awkwardly-on-back-of-hip and partially concealed by the small Samoyed savaging Ms.H’s torso) a watch with a beaded bracelet with another beaded bracelet (big, chunky silver beads) WITH a heart dangling from said beads. Ok. Look, it’s been a confusing season for everyone, but why then mish a gold phoenix necklace to this mash?

If the phoenix was TRULY bringing you “spiritual guidance” it would have set fire to half the contents of your wardrobe (the stripper half) and we’d be left with an attractive brunette. Maybe not SO suitable for publication, since all she’d be wearing was a lovely phoenix necklace, but what a classy necklace.

I think the expert (Sesil Arzadian, of Anton Jewellery) said it best: “Certainly, this look has a lot happening.”

What the expert forgot to say: Catherine Lambert, you’re a knucklehead. Get some new glasses and a subscription to a magazine. Any magazine.

What I did on my Sunday.

Sunday started very early in the morning with a showing of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" in honor of Halloween. Then there was some sleeping. And a cooked breakfast, because bacon, egg and hash brown sandwiches are vital to schlepping about at the races before ballet rehearsal. Great idea. The caramel popcorn the night before? Very important part of my never-ending carb/sugar/edible loading. There are just too many pale and shiny leotards in this world for me to cope. Therefore more eating is in order. Where was I? Oh, about ten a.m. on Sunday morning. OK.

We offed to the races in style; me in a 1920s black lace and silk chiffon dress (shoestring straps, fitted, dropped waist, floaty skirt), black headpiece, red sinner lipstick (Poppy King gets some things very, very right), the boy in charcoal pants, black french-cuffed shirt with tie, & snap-brimmed charcoal hat.
If anyone sends me photos I'll add one to this post.

Right now I'd like to send out a fervent thankyou to jp for the tickets. I'm sure a highlight of the whole 'going to the races' experience is queuing for two hours in the dusty carpark, listening to a segment of the population whining "Loz, crack meopen another can, wuldja, me feet are killen me!"
where:
 -  "Loz" is their peroxided cohort with tatts snaking beneath her visible bra strap (NO country race meet is complete without strapless dresses worn with possibly-maternity-bras and DIY oompa-loompa tan)
 - "can" is premixed Bundaberg rum & coke or UDL, served from the esky in the dust and tossed aside when drained
 - "me feet" are encased in unsuitably strappy shoes, which are cast aside shortly after aerating the turf and causing their owner to fall over. Oh, hang on, that's the cans and shoes in cahoots. My mistake.

The other half of the population, being male, are
(a) ogling the girls trying to simultaneously pull their dresses down over their backside and up over their strapless bras (while I wonder just how many seconds will elapse before someone gets that very delicate balancing act VERY wrong)
(b) oscillating between a vantage point and one of the alcohol outlets while making copious use of the word "f%^k" as a noun, verb, and adjective
(c) being tools while dressed as tossers.

I've never seen so much badly applied fake tan in my life, and I've been to a lot of ballet/calesthenics/aerobics events. Really, it was just indomitable proof that there isn't enough love in the world. Because if you really loved your bestie (you know, last-piece-of-chocolate type of love), you wouldn't have driven the Barina out of the driveway. No.

Instead, you would have said "Sweetheart, your legs have funny orange streaks up them and that REALLY clashes with your red undies, which, by the way, you can see straight through that pillowcase masquerading as a dress. And the kilo of clanging brass bracelets is just going to give you a headache by the time you finish that slab of Cruisers in the esky, so why don't you pop back in and trade the indian-feather-headband for a REAL hat, find a dress that covers your nipples and your girly bits AT THE SAME TIME and... those shoes? If you REALLY want to walk on the balls of your feet all day, those shoes are PERFECT. Here's a nail brush so you can get started on all that nice fluorescent dead skin."

Next time I go to the races I'm going to take a belt sander. You have been warned.

The horror...

No, the hubs' plane did not go down. Although that would be an event of epic magnitude, it wouldn't rock my world in quite the same way as this jawdroppingly awful event.

In Australia, EVERYONE follows a footy team. Not me, uhuh, no way. And every year we host a ceremony to reward the biggest fathead best player. Or something. It may actually be the guy who drank the most beer last weekend/assaulted the most girlfriends/sent the most obscene text messages. (Oh, sorry, that's cricket. Oops.) It's hard to be sure.

But SOMEONE (actually, many someones) makes quite a living exploiting the conniving I was born to marry a footballer lovely innocent girlfriends of these players by putting the ruffliest crap on their body without actually covering anything up and then parading them in front of said fatheads footy's noblest and finest. (Before you scream in outrage, yes, there ARE morons people out there whose life aspiration was/is to marry a footballer. Not a PARTICULAR footballer. A footballer. More than one of these very strange people have I known - you should picture me nodding sagely in a Yoda-like fashion at this point.)

The only way that dress got out of the store was by the 'designer' giving random people $50 (or a slab) to come in and gush "AWMIGAAWD! That's fantasssssstic, you don't look like a slapper at all!" (I'd do it for $20, but I'd know I could blog about it later.)
Look, honestly, I've been accused of leaving little to the imagination (full skirt +spinning on dance floor = drawer full of sensible knickers, and I did mention that jeans collection, which comes in varying degrees of tight) but there's something very wrong about wearing a sheer black bejewelled dipping-to-the-navel kaftan over a sequinned bra top (two cups sizes too small) no matter what size, age, or color you are. Extra demerit points for being oompa loompa orange.

That just made me think of The Chaser. How great would it have been to have Julian handing out Fashion Police tickets. As long as they read
"one free drink"  no-one would notice the
  "and you're a bloody idiot" printed underneath.

I know, I'm so cynical. But it's a game where winning scores are routinely in the hundreds.
Soccer's so difficult sometimes NO-ONE gets a goal. Perhaps it's a uniquely Australian thing; we can't fund our science departments well, schools are losing desperately needed teaching spaces (aka all the portables are playing silly buggers), we don't have national arts operating in the maroon, let alone black, and our leading politicians can barely string two words together. Oh, wait, that would be all the concussions they incurred back at Scotch and Melbourne Grammar playing football.

Anyway, we have this massive misallocation of funds. Football clubs can pay their stars a couple million per season, but local ovals are being closed because drought has made the playing surface dangerously hard. Someone wears a dress covered in diamonds, but the rest of it looks like Nanna's ruffled navy valance tucked and pinned in a few strategic spots. Uuuuuuugly.

I just don't know how to make it better.