Scene on the Street - Fur, Faces and Duffel Coated Bears

Silvana wears a coat from M&S, a top from Phase 8, a homemade skirt and vintage bag and shoes

All hail a new year and a whole noisy, colourful, raggle-taggle band of Cambridge street fashion. This week starting Silvana, Charlotte and a well-known bear from Darkest Peru.

Silvana is wearing an excellent fake-fur coat. I'm all for real fur, but if its fake and it looks good then I'm wild about that too (its an aesthetics-based morality). She said that it was originally a long coat that she had cut herself into a jacket length. This is the same story that someone else recently told me about their real fur coat which they had inherited from their grandmother and it trailed all the way down to the floor and was a completely impractical-back-of-her-wardrobe-oddity, until she thought of trimming it. Short fur coats people. Have you seen how cold it is outside? Did you know that even though Christmas has passed - and in my head that should always be the peak of winter but apparently it isn't - it is going to get COLDER before it gets hotter? Short fur coats are the way to go. They're selling them in charity. They're selling them in the market. They are really, really warm. What are you waiting for?

'So many people have come up me since I started wearing it' Silvana said with a laugh, and of course they have because that is what fur does. Skinned or synthetic, fur is a statement item that grabs your attention. This makes it perfect both for extroverts who want all eyes on them, but also for introverts who can use it as a glamorous shield, creating an air of intrigue instead of shyness.
 
I also adore her tiny checkered skirt, which she made herself (blessed are those whose talents are these). Its the perfect thing to wear with a large fur, firstly because it slims down her outline below the coat, while showing off her legs and secondly because its classic, Chanel-esque pattern makes the fur and in fact the whole outfit look more expensive. It is for this exact reason that I have kept hold of a very similar skirt which I bought from H+M when I was fourteen and it still looks just as quietly elegant. 

Charlotte wears a top from Ben Sherman, jeans from Topshop and shoes from New Look

 

Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick in the Ciao! Manhatten film poster

 I'm not always a fan of big prints on tops and particularly faces. When it doesn't work it swamps the person whose wearing it, so that the t-shirt seems to have more of a personality than they do. But when they do work they're great. Charlotte has balanced hers with a whole monochrome outfit, which is then just subtly picked up by her gold necklace. There's also something very pleasing about the wide, loose neckline, which feels much more generous than the normal, simple circle.

I don't know who the face on the top is, but she reminds me of Edie Sedgwick in the Ciao! Manhatten film poster, with those wonderful black shadows above her eyes. If you have never seen the truly awful film Factory Girl, about Sedgwick being torn between Warhol and Bob Dylan, then I recommend getting very drunk with a few friends some time and watching, because it is both very pretty and so bad that its almost brilliant.

Jane wears a coat and scarf from Ark Vintage and is holding a Padding Bear, also from Ark

Daria Werbowy for YSL Winter 2010/11 Ad Campaign

And finally, we have a bear, who would like to be looked after (and you can go find him right now in Ark). Not only is Paddington Bear an eternal fashion symbol and the patron saint of duffel coats, but he is clearly the inspiration behind YSL's big, floppy, eye-covering hat in their winter 2010-11 collection.

Although I was never obsessively into Paddington - my heart belonged to Pooh and there's only room for one truly committed relationship to a bear in a young girl's life - I am indebted to him for my first ever foray into serious footwear. We were staying at my grandparents when I first learnt to properly walk and my parents were terribly excited and wanted to take me up the road and back, but realised I had no shoes other than the little cloth ones you put on babies. And then they remembered the Paddington Bear sitting upstairs and - having politely asked his permission - they borrowed his red wellingtons, which fit me per-fick-cally and off we went. I don't remember this of course, but its what I'm told. I'm sure this explains the boots obsession that I've had to this day...

Coming up next, fifties carnival-esque in the ADC's Taming of the Shrew. See you soon.