Fashion advice for the piste – part 1

One piece faux pasCompared 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 bum bag

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 off-piste

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.

About

I'm a technical author, journalist and writer from Australia who has been living in Europe since 2000 and exploring the world from there. My passions are writing, snow sports and travel.

7 Comments on “Fashion advice for the piste – part 1

  1. For one piece order of laughter it’s 3, 1, 2 for me.

    I am not guilty of any ski or ski clothing crimes because unfortunately I couldn’t afford to try it and by the time I could too many other sports had stuffed up my cartiledge and now I have two total knee replacements!

    Looking forward to some novelty hats, for some reason I’ve always craved a hat like Renee Zellweger wore in Bridget Jones Edge of Reason. Actually believe she may have been wearing a pink all-in-one!

  2. Ha ha! Looking forward to the next installment! For the record, my husband does wear a bum bag when skiing. In his defense, he wears it every single day anyway. I know, that’s no excuse. There are some things from the 80s that he just cannot leave behind (including his ponytail!)

  3. Love this post! I had a hard time giving up a ski suit that I was given that was white (and slowly turned yellow) and had FOSTERS in HUGE writing down the front of the legs. It is seriously retro now but in 1993 I was HOT HOT HOT! All the lifties were nice to me cause they thought I was the Foster’s rep and had access to unlimited supplies of it.

  4. Hi April, I enjoy your writing and find myself looking for it like a letter from a friend. But honestly, I prefer you as the non-judgemental, casual observer of life. Am I now being judgemental? Let me ask you this, at a small party of say 6 or 8 people, would I find you; center of attention, in the mix, or mostly listening? Love your work!

  5. April, back in high school (and this is waaaaaay back!) the only cool way to ski was to do so in jeans. Tight jeans. SUPER tight jeans. We wore those “guêtres” things over them, supposedly to avoid getting snow in our ski boots, but I think it was because they were just, well, cool. We had short jackets to show off our vaccuum-packed behinds and never wore hats. The weird thing is that I don’t ever remember being frozen. The skis had to be Olin Marks! I pestered my parents until they finally caved and got me some, they were pale blue, but I can’t remember their number (Olin Marks seemed to go by numbers). Then, once the jeans phaze died out, we all had Killy outfits. Mine was navy blue and white, and the sleeves zipped off. Gosh, I remember all this soooo clearly! Ooh, and then came the Lothar jackets! Very puffy. Or maybe the Lothar jackets came before the Killy ones. I know I had a pale blue Lothar jacket, extra long. It gave me a nice warm bottom! Another, possibly even weirder thing: I can’t remember the brand of my current ski suit. Probably because it’s been sitting in the cupboard, unused, for two years!

    Fun post!

  6. Francesca, thank you for the correct spelling of what I previously called ‘gators’ and a very entertaining comment! I had two pairs of guêtres, including some very white ones that I wore with my tight jeans when it was the cool thing to do.

    Dana, are you an 80’s one-piece owner? Thanks for the compliment (I think). I certainly wouldn’t worry about a dinner party as it’s very unlikely to happen. Many of my previous posts have been judgemental and I’m not about to change.

    Gaijanhousewife, I remember seeing that outfit many years ago! I too thought the wearer was a Fosters rep. Great way to queue-jump I imagine.

    Penny, if he wears it every day, he has won the fashion battle, in a twisted kind of way. As long as he doesn’t insist you wear one too, I guess…
    Angela, I checked: it is a pink one-piece that Bridget Jones wears — and a matching silly hat!