Hi yaaaall :) I'm staying at The Hoxton Hotel in East London with my Husband for the next few days and we're off to the flower market on Columbia Road shortly to have a late Sunday morning mooch. I wanted to leave you with something to think about today though. Something that's really been niggling way on my mind for months now, the high street, and it's lack of fashion options for a gal like me.
Let me explain.
Window shopping used to be such fun; Topshop, French Connection, Reiss, Warehouse, Miss Selfridge, Monsoon - yup, even a sneaky bit of M&S occasionally thrown in {don't tell the fashionistas!}.
But window shopping is no longer fun and I'm beginning to despair.
All I see when I go window shopping is dress after dress with a hemline that would have had my dear Grandma raising her eye brows with disapproval. Teeny, tiny, teeny-bopping dresses and skirts, the skinniest of skinny jeans {if you've got the legs - I haven't}, and a whole bunch of crazy tiny space age fluffy stuff that makes no connection with me as a potential buyer. At all.
Trust me, these dresses would not look good on me...
Image Source: Topshop
Topshop, I want to love them. I used to adore their edgy, carefree style casual and day-ware. But I rarely even bother going in to their store these days. It would seem that I have slipped off their target market and no longer belong to their key demographic. It would seem that Topshop no longer care.
I'm disappointed.
I get that the majority of Topshop buyers are a bunch of trendy teens and cool hipster twenty somethings, but is there no longer a place for a woman like me in the hearts of the hippest high street designers? I don't want to dress like a dowdy old thing. I don't want to invest in dresses where the hemline stops mid-thigh. Am I to feel like I'm over the hill and past it at 37? Is my wardrobe doomed from here on?
Having two children has changed my body shape forever and I'm not keen on showcasing 3/4 of my lets these days when I get dressed. I want to feel chic, elegant and a little bit sexy when I don a frock for the weekend. And I aint no prude, far from it, but I'd like to keep my dodgy knees and thighs to myself thanks.
Honestly, I don't mean this to sound like an all-sweeping statement. I know there's some really pretty stuff out there right now, it's just difficult to find. And I feel the marketing people don't really care about trying to connect with me.
One of the best things that happened to the high street in the past two years was Pearl Lowe, when she was commissioned to design for Peacocks. Pearl designed dresses that made you feel feminine, a little bit sexy. They were inspired by the silhouettes of the 40s and 50s when looking demure championed women's wardrobe choices. Beauty {the cosmetics brands kicked off big time around this period} and striving to be beautiful was a fun and serious pastime for many women post-world war 2, and following a long period when women had been de-feminised and spent months, years living in utility clothing whilst they served their country...
Image Credit: Pearl Lowe, for Peacocks
But alas, Peacocks is no more and whilst I hear rumours via Pearl's Twitter feed of her returning to clothes design, the high street is sadly bereft of her touch of elegance right now.
Meanwhile I continue to feel disillusioned with the high street and the efforts the marketing guys behind high street brands make to connect with women like me.
I shall continue to plunder the vintage stores and try to find other choices online, but I'll be giving the high street shopping trip a miss for a while now.
I'd love to know what my readers think; what are your experiences of high street shopping? Which brands/shops are your favourite and why? And, is it just me, or is Topshop just a mecca for teenyboppers
Please discuss.....
And please, please bring back Pearl Lowe.
