Trend Report: Motorcycle Jeans

Set to be the only way to wear your denim in 2010 is the Motorcycle jean. A new take on the skinny jean, these have panelling and added piping detail on the knees to give that "biker chic" look which has been around for a while. Already shown by Balmain in S/S 2009 and the favourite of celebrities including Rihanna, Victoria Beckham, Nikki Hilton, Katie Holmes and Cameron Diaz (all pictured) they are both flattering and edgy.

Dress them up with a biker jacket and some heavy boots like Nikki Hilton, or down like Katie Holmes with a simple jumper and flats. If the £868 price tage on the Balmain pair (and that's reduced from £1,240, eek!) is a bit out of your budget, Miss Selfridge and Topshop have some more affordable pairs for £38 and £48.

Vogue’s Best Dressed 2009: Alexa Chung

Vogue’s Best Dressed 2009 list has been published and Alexa Chung won the top spot, beating off fierce competition from Cheryl Cole, Emma Watson, Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga.

She has apparently won over the Americans since she set sail for the USA earlier this year (despite her TV show being cancelled after its second series) who like her “Brit-girl-abroad quirky sense of style.”

Alexa’s style typically includes a vintage tom-boy feel which is still feminine, pairing vintage items with high street and designer alike. For example, at the 2009 Emmy’s she wore a Topshop leopard print coat and dress (top center), whilst she is often seen in Chanel shoes and wearing her name sake bag by Mulberry (bottom right).

Although she often opts to reveal her legs, large jackets and blazers compliment her style whether she’s dressing up or down. Pairing a bold Jason Wu red dress with black flats at the Vogue Fashion Fund Awards (bottom left) is a refreshing take on red carpet style, steering clear of sky scraper heels which perfectly suits her signature look.

Whilst Alexa has been criticized for topping the Best Dressed list despite her skinny frame, I think she is giving a positive message about body image. The prevailing message should be that no matter what you size, large or slim, you can create still your own style and be comfortable it in, which I believe Alexa Chung personifies.

Images taken from It’s On Alexa

Stiletto Stoners

In this month’s edition of Marie Claire magazine in America, they discuss the trend for professional young women to smoke marijuana after work, a trend they’ve termed “Stiletto Stoners”. According to a study by The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 8 million women admitted to smoking pot in the last year, one of five of which have a household income of more that $75,000 a year with professional jobs including lawyers, editors, TV producers and financial executives.

The young woman profiled in the piece lists off a reel of advantages, helping her relax, it’s cheaper than getting drunk on expensive, sugary cocktails, it helps her relax after a stressful day at work, it doesn’t make her fat, it doesn’t has the nasty consequences of a hangover, or the groggy feeling anti-anxiety pills can leave you with, she finds it easier to lose her inhibitions when high. So it’s win- win surely?

The article seems to be challenging the stereotypes that go with smoking pot, no longer for young hippies, or teenagers who don’t have a job and have nothing better to do but get high everyday. Almost a re-branding of the drug and the sorts of people associated with it. Pointing out that you’re not necessarily a bad mother, unreliable or a waste of space if you have the occasional joint, and for the most part feedback about the piece seems to agree.

Photocredit: NebulaskiN

Glamour leading the way with real women

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In the September issue of Glamour magazine this photo caused a bit of a stir amongst its readers. The image of Lizzie Miller, sitting completely relaxed and unfazed by a little bit of belly hit a nerve with readers, who wrote in their thousands to congratulate Glamour on the image.

Glamour have followed up the warm welcome of that image with this image of the seven of the leading plus sized models, getting it all out to make a statement about what real women really are.

Hopefully this image and the positive attention it has received will lead the way for the rest of the fashion industry to finally take note that women are bored of looking at images of stick thin, air brushed and seemingly perfect women, and a more natural and real approach needs to be taken.

Congratulations to Glamour for leading the way, and I hope the rest of the fashion industry follows suit.

Four Kisses You, yes YOU! must Master, or else he'll leave you.

So for a while now I’ve been signed up to the Cosmopolitan.com ‘Sex and Relationships’ feed, and for the most part it’s been complete drivel. What His Cuddling Body Language Reveals, 10 Things Men Don’t Want to Hear in Bed, The Body Language of Liars etc. But this morning an article entitled ‘Four Kisses You Must Master’ landed into my inbox and caught my attention. “Four kisses I must master? But I don’t know any!? There are four different types!? Since when!? Is this why I don’t have a boyfriend???”

So I eagerly clicked the link, desperate to learn these four different types of kisses which will mean that I will never again be left wondering what I was doing wrong, and will be able to keep the attention of men for longer than 30 seconds.

But thankfully as I was reading the rational part of my brain which had been absent for the previous 30 second made a welcome return and I realised, this is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.

“Expert” Shelley Hess tells us that kissing is crucial, and in her book, Pucker Power: Great Kissers Make Great Lovers, you’ll find out the best secrets to make any man powerless to resist you once you’ve planted one on his lips. What??

And here I was thinking a kiss was a kiss, fairly straight forward, no complicated tongue, lip, or mouth maneuvering, just simple kissing. Apparently not.

And it doesn’t stop there, oh no, then there’s the handy link directing me to “30 New Blow-His Mind Sex Moves” (oh Lord) where I’m expected to eat peanut butter off his chest to keep him coming back for more. Or fiddle with his back door to “double his pleasure.” Really??

It seems like an unfair amount of pressure to be putting on Cosmo readers. To think that you have to do all these weird and wonderful things to keep a man from cheating seems ridiculous. And if you’re not willing to do them, another woman who is willing is just waiting to pounce on your man and whisk him off into the sunset, where he can enjoy as much teasing, blindfolding, spanking or light bondage as he wishes.

And the wording, “Four kisses you must master.” It just seems a bit exploitative of the impressionable girls and women who might be reading.

To quote the words of the wonderful John Devore over at The Frisky,

“And here I was, thinking there was only one, 100% guaranteed way to drive me wild, and that was to touch my penis.”

Photocredit: Pedrosimoes7

Mark Fast to design a Topshop Range

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Whether Mark Fast’s decision to use Plus Sized models on the catwalk at London Fashion Week was a stunt or not, it’s done him no end of favours. Now Topshop have recruited the designer to produce a range for them.

With his collection going down a storm, with help from added press coverage due to the whole Plus Sized issue, he’s landed himself a job designing for one of the biggest names in female fashion on the high street.

His ethos of designing clothes to flatter a female figure has done him a world of good and his combination of feminine and edgy clothing seems perfect for Topshop. I’ll be intrigued to see what he comes up with when his range hits stores in February of next year.

Plus Sized Models Cause Walk Out at London Fashion Week

[caption id="attachment_89" align="aligncenter" width="168" caption="Plus Sized Models on Catwalk at LFW"][/caption]

This week is London fashion week, and imagine the surprise that plus sized models have been spied gracing the catwalk showing Mark Fast’s collection.

Apparently the girls were friends of the designer, and had inspired the collection so were put on the runway. Even if it may only be by connection, nonetheless models who weren’t a size 4 or 6 or less were on the catwalk during London fashion week, with the world’s eyes upon them, and that can only be a good thing in my eyes!

However, Fast’s decision to use plus sized models didn’t go down well with everyone. According to the Daily Mail after “creative differences” arouse over the use of the fuller figured models, the stylist and creative director of the collection walked out just three days before the event, leaving Fast in an awkward position.

Fortunately, two freelancers came in to save the day and made sure the show went on without a hitch. I’ve got to say I respect Fast’s decision to stick to his guns and keep the curvier models in his show. Putting them there demonstrated that his clothes aren’t just for the slimmer models but can be worn by bigger women as well, which would have done him a world of favours, as opposed to buckling under the pressure to only use exclusively slimmer models.

[caption id="attachment_90" align="aligncenter" width="168" caption="Plus sized model on catwalk at LFW"][/caption]

So is this a sign of what’s to come? Fast has been working with Caryn Franklin, (presenter of The Clothes Show back in the nineties) on a project which intends to encourage designers to produce clothes and styles which suit different sized women, as opposed to the straight up straight down girls you universally see on the runway.

With support from designers such as Hannah Marshal, David Koma and Cooperative Designs, hopefully this initiative will bring about a flurry of plus sized models, and I hesitate to say plus because they mustn’t be any bigger than a size 14. But never the less, anything more normal and realistic than the current clothes horses will be an improvement.

Although designers argue that clothes hang better off skinnier models than they do on more curvaceous ones, this cannot be true for all clothes. And in half of the cases the opposite will be true. Some dresses need curves to cling to; others don’t, and if the people who will eventually be buying these gowns aren’t all the same size as the models, why not cater to the majority of women out there who are a little larger?

Nick Jonas Diabetes Conference

[caption id="attachment_81" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Nick Jonas speaking at the National Press Club in Washington DC"][/caption]

Browsing through youtube earlier today I stumbled on some videos of Nick Jonas of Jonas Brothers (or Jo-Bro) fame speaking at a Diabetes Press conference in Washington D.C. from Monday morning to raise awareness about childhood diabetes. Turns out that Nick was diagnosed with diabetes in 2005 and has been doing lots of charity work to raise awareness of the disease, and give support to other young people diagnosed with the condition.

Talking as a diabetic diagnosed when I was 8, way back in 1998, I think he’s giving out a very positive message. In the press conference he talks a lot about how he struggles with the disease on a day to day basis, having to check his blood sugar levels 12 times a day, and how he wanted to use his position in the media to turn something which is really quite negative, into something positive by giving support to other young people who are struggling with the disease.

Whilst I would consider myself to be have good management of my diabetes on a daily basis and a flexible regime which doesn’t affect my life too much, I admit that I am guilty of not giving it the attention it deserve sometimes, possibly because of lots of the misconceptions there are about the disease.

I’ll often avoid telling people about my diabetes, with lots of my oldest friends not knowing and slyly slipping out to take my injection. The reasons for my reluctancy to talk about it are because of the misconceptions about the disease. I assumed that if I told people, rather than being able to help me if it were to be go wrong, they’d assume that I got the disease because I was over weight or had an unhealthy lifestyle. (It was actually more genetic from my Grandfather)

Hopefully Nick Jonas will be able to use his fame and presence in the media to be able to educate people about some of these misconceptions, and give other kids with the condition the confidence to be more open about it, not to be embarrassed or let it hold them back in any way.

Part of his work for this cause is the “Nick’s Simple Wins” web site, where young diabetics are invited to send in a 30 second video showing how their diabetes hasn’t hindered their ability to be creative or slowed them down in any way. As well as donating lots of money to the cause and selling a dog tag he designed with half of the money going to the Change for Children Foundation.

To my knowledge he’s the only person in the media who openly talks about his condition, and when I was younger, if there were someone like him giving a positive message about the disease I think it couldn’t helped. He also comes across incredibly well, talking to thousands of people and journalists at the press conference extremely well, given that he is only 16 years of age.