This week’s prettiest press outing was to a pop-up shop for Pink City Prints, purveyors of gorgeous, lightweight, hand-printed dresses. While I was there, I got chatting to the brand’s PR, who understandably pooh-poohed the idea – put forward by John Lewis’s fashion director, Queralt Ferrer - that the floral midi dress is officially over.
‘It’s a trend that has been around for too long’ Queralt told the Guardian in a recent interview. ‘We’ve got to move on’.
The idea that we must simply ditch ‘over-popular’ items altogether is particularly troubling for someone like me, who buys far too many clothes and therefore has a lot of skin in the game when it comes to culling a whole species from my closet (I would hazard a guess that I have at least 25 floral midis gasping for air in my wardrobe).
Then there’s a fact that it takes so much more thought to get dressed when confronted with a new lewk. I think that’s why I stayed wedded to my skinny jeans way past the point where fashion editors had declared them over and Gen Z were clawing their eyes out at the sight of me. In my mind, a flattering outfit consisted of a) skinny jeans, b) ankle boots and c) an oversized top to balance out the bottom half. EASY. Then suddenly all the rules changed and I was confronted with rails and rails of jeans that reminded me of the bootcut styles I wore from Tammy Girl aged nine, or the enormous ‘mosher’ jeans with which I soaked up litres of rain in my early teens.
After many laborious try-ons and returned purchases, I finally discovered that high-waisted mom or flared jeans suited my figure and was able to move on with my life. It was a massive bloody hassle though.
But this week I read, while silently screaming at my phone, that WHITE TRAINERS are out. And it comes from one of my favourite fashion writers, Harriet Walker, so I suppose it must be true. ‘White trainers are over’ she said in The Times. ‘Stop wearing them; they will age you faster than a pair of Crimplene slacks or a blue rinse’.
What should I wear instead? Apparently ‘the most stylish mums’ Harriet knows are wearing hiking trainers, with chunky soles and technical details, and crucially: not white. She must know some much cooler mums than me, because literally every mum in South-West London is currently wearing white Veja trainers, and I sneakily thought I was the cool one for choosing white trainers from a different brand (Nike Internationalist are my present favourite, but don’t copy me because they are clearly deeply tragic).
On reflection, I don’t think I can accept this. I may have moved on from the skinny jeans and I think I can probably exist without a floral midi, if push really comes to shove. But white trainers are officially the fashion hill I will die on, even if – according to The Times article – I will on that hill with the likes of Nadine Dorries and Liz Truss.
I’m sure I was cool once.
It’s also what goes with the said fashion item. For example you then need to rethink all the tops that went with skinny jeans to see if they go with the new cut. Absolute bloody faff! Don’t even get me started on maternity clothes and post baby clothes…. Minefield