Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 September 2006 17:02:19
A suit of severe and funereal tailoring, sober of colour and restrained of lining (no fuchsia pink, thank you very much), with a skirt, rather than trousers. And not black. Ideally not brown either, because I currently have rather a lot of that in my wardrobe. Charcoal grey would be perfect. And a skirt of sensible and business-like length, neither down round my ankles nor up round my bum.
You'd think it would be easy, wouldn’t you?
You'd be wronger than a wrong thing which is mistaken.
So far, I have trailed round:
BhS - who possibly deserve some sort of Awful Tailoring Award for having me look in a mirror and think “my goodness, I appear to be the size of a house.” Alternatively, they get their mirrors from the rejects bin of a funfair supply company.
Marks & Spencer - lovely jacket, perfect colour, wrong size, no skirts in that range.
Next - fabric set my teeth on edge, colours not quite right. I also seem to remember a jacket with a peculiar lime-green lining, but I might have been suffering from shopping-induced hallucinations by that point.
Dorothy Perkins - hah. Nothing else to say there. Just a resounding “hah!” in tones of deep contempt.
Today, I went into the Principles concession in Debenhams. Found a lovely jacket, and after a very long wait whilst someone rummaged around in the stock room, I managed to try on the matching skirt. Skirt too big, by a country mile. Even longer wait (a wait that is long enough to make me decide that their stock room must be in Dagenham), no size 10* skirt in stock. So the wonderfully helpful member of staff who had been running around for me called their main shop on Regent St. The person on the other end of the phone line was clearly both very new, and very unfamiliar with their stock, because after much, much delay the nice lady in Debenhams finally said "can I speak to the manager, please?" in tones of doom and woe. No size 10 there, either.
Oh, and that’s another thing. Why on earth don’t companies do the same styles in their “petite” and their “normal” ranges? It is deeply irritating, finding something you like, only to discover that it’s so out of proportion that you look like a small girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes, and they don’t do the same style in their petite range.
*Woo, yay, hoopla, I’m a size 10. Huzzah. Sorry, just had to squeeze that in somewhere...