Diamonds are a girl's best friend

So they're not exactly Swarovski but they'll do for now. I've spent the last few Saturdays wandering around Bang Bang with gift vouchers that have been burning a hole in my purse for months. I'm skint at the moment and wanted to reward myself for getting through a challenging first week in my new job (with no boss!). As much as I love Bang Bang for its Aladdin's cave of vintage designer/high street pieces, the trouble with it, I've discovered (and this applies to both the Goodge Street and Berwick Street branches) is it's very hit or miss. If you set out looking for something, it's almost guaranteed you'll never find it. Yes, I'm still talking about clothes. I've tried on a pink 1950s gingham skirt (too twee), a beige cotton full-length jumpsuit (too 1980s), a (on the slightly brassy side) gold bolero (I don't need another), I even considered a fitted red mini Peaches for PPQ dress (yeugh)... So jewellery it was.

Not finding a single compatible item of clothing in the dressing rooms of the Berwick store gave me plenty to time to stare into space. But I might never have noticed what a pretty space that was.

A New Look

Prada did it for A/W09. John Galliano for Dior followed suit in S/S10. From Land Girls to Film Noir, 1940s style never seems to go out of fashion – which is why you don’t need the excuse of a Blitz Party to set your hair in rollers or paint your lips pillar-box red. Although it doesn’t do any harm… 

Ahead of this weekend’s monthly East End Blitz Party, UKTV threw a Blitz Party to launch their Yesterday channel’s ‘Spirit of 1940’ season. The dresses. The diamonds. The coiffure. The pork pies. It’s not very often that fashion and TV collide, and when you spy an enormous hog roast being carved into a white bun with lashings of stuffing and apple sauce for a long line of hungry journos (with platters of ‘wartime’ doorstop sandwiches and scotch eggs if you’re still hungry) you can kind of see why. Rationing? We’ll leave that to the catwalk.   

In the foyer of the Shoreditch studios there was a dressing box full of pearls and costume jewellery, an assortment of hats, dainty gloves, military jackets, scarves and erm, novelty moustaches.

The crowd was a real mixture of people who had turned up kitted out and those who created an outfit on arrival... Lucy (top left) fished her five-year-old Primark skirt out of the bin for the occasion, having recently chucked it. You'd never believe Sarah (above right) was wearing jeans and a t-shirt minutes before this picture was taken. Or maybe you would.

I gambled on wearing my navy dress, t-bars and fur coat that could easily pass for 1940s but picking up the first hat I could find when I got there. As more than one person observed through the evening, ‘but you’re just wearing what you always do!’

But that was before I realised that UKTV had employed The Powderpuff Girls for the evening, at which I hastily threw off the hat, as hastily as I had put it on...

Et voila. 

The End.