Le Franco Phoney

Okay, we’re all familiar with the dog in a bag fashion statement, but that’s for the likes of Paris Hilton, right? Wrong. If your image of a dog in a bag is one of a white fluffy thing in a bling bag on an equally bling shoulder, think again.

Yesterday, a friend in my car snapped this photo of a dog in a bag. Yes, that fluffy blur is actually a black poodle, but we couldn’t catch up to the tough guy on the chopper-style motorbike because he was whizzing around so fast. So, here’s the blur instead, and you’ll just have to trust me on this one. Not only is that a dog in his bag, but it’s a bit of a pink bag for a dude in black on a slick motorbike. Could it be his girlfriend’s dog in a bag? Has he been asked to transport said dog from one location to another? And since it comes with it’s own handy carry-case, perhaps he just popped the girly bag over his shoulders and started up his engine. Who knows.

Now, my friend mentioned that she had just seen a twin-dog bag in Leipzig on a goth who was on his way to a goth festival  happening there last weekend. He was all decked out in a ‘romantic’ goth outfit, which apparently consisted of black, plus white ruffles—kind of lucky considering both dogs were white. They matched his outfit. Dog-in-a-bag fashion continues! Apparently, they were well behaved. I’m guessing they know that their owner is a goth and are so scared he might dye their hair black too that they’re as good as gold when he’s around.

Meanwhile, summertime in the Alps signals the start of dog-in-a-bag season. A few years ago at the Fete du Reblochon in La Clusaz, I saw this (sunburnt) lady checking the dog in a backpack  on her partner’s back. Did they perhaps start the non-bling dog-in-a-backpack alternative to the bling dog-in-a-bag fashion? Again, who knows. What I do know is that the dog on the motorbike seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing. His mate in La Clusaz, on the other hand, seemed a bit embarrassed. Black motorbike dog is cool.

Last week, I discussed out-dated one-piece piste fashion. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that even those with the latest gear sometimes screw it up. The colours from the eighties are actually making a come-back, but there’s still a big difference between then and now. That difference is geometry. That’s right, back in the eighties, jackets were all about geometric shapes — a triangle on the centre of the jacket or a diamond on the back, with squares of different colours sewn together to make a patchwork jacket. In 2010, the fashion is more about either one solid colour making up a jacket, or a patterned fabric. For example:

On the left here is someone who has broken up the limeness of his pants with a darker jacket.  In the middle, proof that patterns can look good when coupled with a solid colour. The guy on the right has gone for mismatching colours, and thankfully, just one pattern. That’s all good. These sorts of combos are currently very popular.

Less popular, thankfully, is patterned tops and bottoms. This guy on the right, for example, is actually a really good skier (he’s easy to spot), but I can’t help thinking of pyjamas when I see his outfit. Talk about busy! I like the way he’s got his matching blue jumper tied around his waist, but I wish he’d stick it over his jacket instead. In the sparse five minutes I had yesterday to snap all these photos, I failed to see anyone wearing patterned ski pants with a different patterned jacket, but it’s the worst combo possible, usually involving lots of colours and totally clashing patterns. It’s a great sign that nobody was out and about in mismatching patterns, but it does sometimes happen, and to be frank, twenty-year-old one-pieces are kinder to the eyes.

Of course, all this is just my opinion, and this guy probably considers my chocolate brown jacket and bright blue pants totally boring and “so 2008″. (I feel like lending him my pants actually: they’d go nicely with his jacket and turn the volume down a bit.) Perhaps next year, I’ll be looking back at this blog entry and wondering how I could be so silly to think that anything less than matching jimjams on the piste is a good thing. But for now, I’m resisting. And I think I will next year too.

Following on from my last post about fashion, this one is about kids. I’m not a parent, but I was a kid on the piste, and I remember my parents wanted me to look cute, but more importantly, identifiable from a distance. It’s perhaps for this reason that very few kids are ever dressed in black. I had yellow plastic pants (it was before Gore-tex existed) and a red woolly hat with a massive pompom on top. It matched my red jacket. My mum could identify me as I cried the whole way down the nursery slope, and my dad could pick up my hat from the snow after each and every fall.

Imagine if there were half a dozen kids in yellow pants, a red jacket and a red hat. My dad would have been retrieving hats all over the place, and my mum would have probably been hassling another mum about hugging a kid she thought was me. Confusing! And that’s what it’s been like this year in the French Alps. It seems that loads of parents have opted for a kids’ one-piece in red, orange and white. Although I’ve seen the same outfit in the darker colour scheme of navy blue, I guess most parents have decided that they want to see where their kids are, and so, red is better. Below is a photo I took while eating a crepe the other day. There was actually another kid in the same outfit sitting in the creperie with me, but I couldn’t get him in shot. That’s four kids in the same outfit, and more kept rolling through as I later sipped on a hot chocolate.

So, what fashion advice am I offering? I’m not actually sure. I would say to parents to think twice before buying this particular outfit, but then, it’s not always a bad thing: last week in Avoriaz, I found a crying child wearing this same outfit. I asked him if he was lost in French, but he answered in another language. Luckily, one of my friends speaks Dutch and was able to find out that the kid had been separated from his mum and brother. He took him to the chairlift operator who put the word out. When a woman and another kid in the same outfit walked past a few minutes later, my friend recognised the outfit immediately and sure enough, that was the lost kid’s brother and mum. Family reunited thanks to the ski suit.

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.