Fashion advice for the piste - part 1 March 9, 2010 @ 9:54 am
Compared with the average French woman, I’m a fashion disaster. I do not, at least, get out on the street in twenty-year-old clothes that are faded and out-dated. Nor do I get on the piste in ski gear from the eighties, but plenty of others do. I know, I know: ski clothing is expensive, and if you go once a year, you can’t justify buying new gear every year. But maybe even every ten years would do. I’ve snapped lots of bad outfits, but I’ve chosen these three as examples (unfortunately similar in colours, but different in other ways) of how not to style yourself on the piste.
One-Piece Number 1
This couple still use skis from the late eighties/early nineties. At least they match the outfits. The outfits don’t look like any others around them, but they haven’t seemed to notice. What really gives them away, apart from the colour distribution, is the big pocket in the front of her outfit and the giant triangle pointing down on his. Advances in both ski technology and waterproof material (Gore-tex, anyone?) mean that this couple are doing themselves a bit of a disservice: shaped skis that have been around since about 1999 really are much easier to use, and well-worn twenty-year-old fabric is never going to have the warmth or protection of today’s material. And if anyone wants to defend their choice of ski by saying it’s ‘real skiing’, then they should probably be on old wooden skis with telemark bindings. Ski technology moved on with fashion.
If you must wear a one-piece please pull the trouser legs down over your boots. This will keep your buckles and boots dry and protected, stopping the buckles from icing up on cold days (they’re difficult to adjust like that), and saving your feet from getting wet from that ice melting and seeping through the shell.

One-Piece Number 2
Here are more unprotected boots, but this time at least the one-piece wearer has tried to pull the trouser legs over the boots. Many older one-pieces (like this faded one) suffer from this problem and I really don’t know why. The leg tightness unfortunately extends to other parts of the outfit, and the owner, a lady would you believe (head cut off to be kind), has done that common eighties thing of attaching a bum bag to store whatever it is she needs to take with her for the day. Bum bags were indeed all the rage in the eighties! I had two: a pastel purple one, and one made of black leather. When they went out of fashion, I took them to the charity shop. What makes an every-day fashion accessory that lost popularity by the nineties timeless if worn with a ski outfit? NOTHING. I’d like to ask this woman if she wears it down the street, perhaps in summer when she has no pockets available (much like the result of this figure-hugging one-piece), and if not, why not. What’s the difference?

One-Piece Number 3
This one is actually a man (heads again cut off on purpose, and thanks to my friend Tom for the photo) who isn’t even on the piste. In fact, he’s in St Jean de Sixt, which really is a village down the road from Le Grand Bornand and La Clusaz ski resorts. So why is he wearing a rather scary one-piece? Maybe he went skiing earlier, but what I don’t understand is that if he’s bothered to leave the resort and change his shoes, why not change out of his one piece at the same time, especially when he’s considering eating in a restaurant. I’ve seen this often recently: people will be shopping in La Clusaz in their ski outfit and with a dog on a lead, but no sign of ski equipment. Maybe they’re worried they’ll fall?
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been all these people: I still have my 193cm straight skis in my shed, and I owned an O’Neil one-piece back in the nineties because I’d heard that one-pieces keep you extra warm, and, given Australia’s often wet snow conditions, I saw the value in that. Mine was a fluorescent mix of colours. I wore it once. It was badly designed (it didn’t keep me warm because the zip down the front wasn’t protected, leaving me with a wet line down my front); going to the toilet was very awkward; I was mistaken as a man by my own boyfriend at the time, and when I looked around even back then, I noticed that nobody else was wearing anything remotely similar. I’m not saying I want to conform, but at the same time, I don’t get around in Elizabethan dresses or Cindy Lauper hairstyles.
So, my advice, if you believe an Australian for fashion advice, is to throw away the one-piece and either buy a new one-piece if you must, or better still, settle on a jacket and pants. And if you’re still using your old straight skis, I dare you to hire some shaped skis just for a day and not love them.
Still to come: kid fashion, over-blinging it, and possibly something about novelty hats.

So why am I still surprised to see this sign? Pictured here is a sign for a shop in Annecy called “Espace Déco” (a home decorations shop). The sign then reads:
The Winter Olympic Games (les Jeux Olympiques in French) are in full swing, and I’ve been following the sports on French television. The French athletes have been a bit unlucky so far, and at first the commentators blamed it on badly-made courses. I think they’ve given up on that angle now but they certainly haven’t stopped saying: “Ooh la la”, nor the variation: “Ooh la la la la”, nor the variation of the variation: “Ooh la la la la la la”. Seriously, the commentators are la la laing so many times that I’m losing count. As the Men’s Cross-country Relay went on (and on and on) last night, the commentators became more and more worried, using more “Ooh la la”s, when the Norwegian approached from fourth place, and eventually made it to second place, ousting the French team to fourth place. Vincent Vittoz from La Clusaz was in that team, and it was pretty much his last chance of winning an Olympic medal after many years of trying, so the commentators were hoping for him as much as I was that he would get at least a bronze. There’s still a chance he might get one because the French team have complained about Sweden (or is it Norway?) bringing two pairs of skis instead of one. If their complaint is successful, Vincent and the French team will move up to win bronze. And the commentators are sure to la la la themselves into oblivion if that happens.
I can see into the cemetery from my house, and after each funeral, the attendees walk slowly through the cemetery before leaving the church grounds and waiting in their cars of other funeral-goers to move theirs out of the way, but the body never seems to get buried there. In fact, the cemetery seems pretty full — and a bit sad for its occupants during winter, for although the path is kept cleared by a lawn-mower-sounding snow clearer, the snow on the graves remains, and fresh flowers are a rare sight (where can anyone put them?). On the upside, they get a great view of the mountain. I took this photo from the cemetery, with the lovely view of the l’Etale peak of La Clusaz, when I walked through it the other day for signs of fresh flowers. There were none, nor any funeral goers, nor any signs of the bell-ringer, but I’m going to check that out with the local tourist office. And if he does exist, does that mean he never gets a sleep-in?
French imagery in
Well well well, January is over. Where did it go? To match the speed of the month, I’m speed writing this entry as I have lots of observations to tell you about. So, first up, the Christmas tree. Not only did I kill it as I mentioned a few days ago, but then the snow dumped overnight (see photo) just to add insult to injury. It’s as if the mountains are laughing at it, rejecting it from the outside after I rejected it from indoors. I still feel a bit guilty.

