missing gary

If you may prefer to entertain yourself with an old track by Les Georges Leningrad “Missing Gary”, go ahead. Yet here I tell you a short story about something else that went missing.
Prologue.
Yesterday I held a wonderful piece of clothing, hardly believing that it is from a high-street brand COS - the cropped acid yellow jacket from the spring/summer collection. The texture of the fabric is very unusual, synthetic, rigid and transparent. The cropped cut with narrow long sleeves is incredibly graceful even when this piece is futuristic and sporty. The main focus of the shape is on the shoulders – the extended shoulderpads are applied to the outside of the garment held by huge metal clips, breaking all rules of proportion and dressmaker’s modesty. I was in love with it – just how gorgeous it looked against blue background on that blond model (from the yesterday’s shoot).
Chapter I
This morning among the mess that the Brussels store becomes time to time I discovered a newly matched rail of black and acid yellow garments. It didn’t really fit into the space…well, at least it got my attention. I grabbed the yellow jacket and switched some garments around, and only after a while I realised that my hands are holding an object of the familiar texture…hesitation…frown…more hesitation…
In my hands I was holding a jacket. It was acid yellow, synthetic, rigid, transparent. Yet it had an awkward boxy body and flat shapeless shoulders …frown… it did not have any shoulderpads – the plain, boring, ugly blob of disturbing colour it was!
Epilogue
We are often living in the world of editorials – admiring the perfect styles on the pages of glossy magazines, yet never trying to live those styles, knowing that most of the garments are meant for the editorials only and will never go in production. I can bet you’ll never see a girl walking around with the Alexander McQueen spring-summer 2010 shoes on, jumping over pools of water and doing her groceries shopping…but that’s OK.
What’s not OK, is when a high-street brand makes sample pieces that will be used in editorials in all sorts of girly magazines, and then those girlies will go fishing for the particular shoes, dress or jacket just because it appeared in a mag on the ‘Weekly Fashion Fixes’ page – just imagine her surprised expression when she finds that the real garment that she can actually purchase is only a crippled sister of the image in the glossy. I understand that sample pieces can be slightly different form the production, but SO different is a no go. When the reason for the existence of that jacket is the shoulderpads, then ‘cost conscious’ production piece (genre ‘Let’s get rid of those shoulderpads – we use less fabric and simplify the production process by 3 steps) doesn’t really deserve to exist.
I believe design has to be honest.

Well, here you had it – the long rand without any images. I’ll upload the shoot I styled yesterday in a couple of weeks, and then you are all welcome to discover the infamous yellow jacket in any COS store. Untill then, don't forget to listen to 'Missing Gary'