16 August - Leopards & Diamonds

Am sure sometimes fashion designers sit there and feel like s hit at their own utter failure to come up with something new. If they don’t, I’d make it compulsory for them to be flogged in the windows of Harvey Nichols or some such. A quick ten mins on the high street have revealed that what I saw in some magazines for Autumn is indeed in the shops. Guess what.. we don’t know what to propose, so why don’t we come up with LEOPARD PRINTS AGAIN. Gee, yeah, great idea. Never seen those before. They look sophisticated on Sophia Loren, but on your average British girl they look like trollop prints a’ la Bette Lynch. Lucky me I’ve kept some from 2 revivals ago and a few months ago was quick to snatch a wonderful D&G jacket a friend was discarding. I grabbed it on account of the fact that yes surely this shit would come round again, I'm more Sophia than Bette and at least if it’s a D&G, it could look ok were I to go to some club infested with Russians. And in fact I may have to go on account of Leela’s sparklers of which more below.
But seriously, I know in music they keep recycling stuff; am sure the same happens in art and books but does it happen with everything? Do folks at IBM suddenly see an ad for a Xerox machine and go ‘But.. that’s the 1987 4761X model, look they’ve just changed the position of the out tray and re-designed the feeding thingy at the top but,. Gosh, it’s our model. Why don’t we re-design their 1988 7654SX best seller and just pass it off as something new??? After all, offices are full of people who were not around in 1987/88.’
I mean???????? Give me a break. The ex boyfriend who’s a trend predictor, seems to have gone into print in 2005 predicting we would be seeing a return of traditional brands like Carnation Milk. Like, er, yes, that really was a supermarket phenomenon last year. NOT! I wish people boycotted animal prints like they didn’t take a blind bit of notice of carnation milk, then the collective fashion industry would learn not to take us for fools.
So Leela….she came back from India where a business deal is going ahead for her and her partner and their associate there paid his share in diamonds. Some £6k worth at source. So she let me open the black velvet purse, and fondle them and examine them with a lens so I could tell which one was the clearest, better quality etc. MAGIC. She went to answer the phone at some point and I thought oohhhh, she won’t notice one missing. But uh, no, they’re there for her to find a buyer. Of course she could take them to Hatton Gardens but that would be too simple. I want her to go to South Ken or Chelski and exchange them for wads of cash in the Wellington Club or something.