11.7.04
I went to buy a new skirt for work. I could have gone in sensible, unnoticable clothes. Instead, I wore the grungiest outfit I owned. There was a hole in the canvas on the left side of my right sneaker, my blue-jeans were nearly white-jeans. I was wearing a shirt I bought from a second-hand shirt shop for a pound and looked as if the seventies had thrown up on it, and underneath I had a Meatloaf T-Shirt that had more holes than swiss cheese.
I might have passed through BHS, or Marks & Spencer's, or one of the other big department stores without feeling too self-conscious. But none of them had ankle length skirts. They had short skirts and trousers, and ankle length skirts that hugged your thighs and made you look like some kind of bad eighties hooker, or possibly a landlubbing mermaid. But a simple, elasticated long skirt? Nope, not for the girl in the Meatloaf T-Shirt.
So I ended up in Principles, a would-be up-market purveyor of fine, fashionable clothes to young ladies. That means it's small, and wants to cultivate some sort of boutique image, but can't because, well, it's a chain. That means all the shop assistants wear big tramp earrings and pull their hair back into improbable hair-knots that you're usually hard-pressed to find before two in the morning when the clubs let out, but they spend all day serving forty-five year old women with mid-life fashion crises.
Bitter? Never. Not I.
I just hate shopping, and next time, I really promise I'm not going dressed like something out of Tank Girl, and then have to go to all my favourite geeky haunts with a big showy cardboard shopping bag from the trendiest of the trendy girly frilly shops. Dressed like something out of Tank Girl Versus Pygmalion...
And that's what happened to me yesterday.
I might have passed through BHS, or Marks & Spencer's, or one of the other big department stores without feeling too self-conscious. But none of them had ankle length skirts. They had short skirts and trousers, and ankle length skirts that hugged your thighs and made you look like some kind of bad eighties hooker, or possibly a landlubbing mermaid. But a simple, elasticated long skirt? Nope, not for the girl in the Meatloaf T-Shirt.
So I ended up in Principles, a would-be up-market purveyor of fine, fashionable clothes to young ladies. That means it's small, and wants to cultivate some sort of boutique image, but can't because, well, it's a chain. That means all the shop assistants wear big tramp earrings and pull their hair back into improbable hair-knots that you're usually hard-pressed to find before two in the morning when the clubs let out, but they spend all day serving forty-five year old women with mid-life fashion crises.
Bitter? Never. Not I.
I just hate shopping, and next time, I really promise I'm not going dressed like something out of Tank Girl, and then have to go to all my favourite geeky haunts with a big showy cardboard shopping bag from the trendiest of the trendy girly frilly shops. Dressed like something out of Tank Girl Versus Pygmalion...
And that's what happened to me yesterday.
