Scene in Cambridge is All-Grown-Up

Scene in Cambridge got all grown-up... It even has a new name.

Scene in Cambridge started off as a very little blog that used to run around, falling over in its mother's high heels and getting lipstick smudged across its face. But the time went by and slowly it learnt how to walk in tall shoes, how to accessorize and when not to wear white. In fact, it got so big and grown-up that one day it decided it was time to leave home and go out into the big, wide world to seek its fortune and buy lipstick and shoes of its very own.

So - having plucked its eyebrows on the way - Scene in Cambridge moved and transformed itself into This Caught My Eye. You can pay it a visit at http://www.thiscaughtmyeye.co.uk - a website address all of its very own. Although it still hasn't worked out how to use a tumble dryer, it has now got all sorts of things going on - film trailers, fashion, music videos, great articles, other cool websites and fascinating events.

It still has original photography, including Chuck Bass look-a-likes in Cambridge and the (real) Lily Cole in student plays.

It hopes you like its grown-up self as much as you enjoyed watched its first baby steps. It looks forward to seeing you.

Kiss me Kate. Or, if you're not in the mood, you could just give me your boots.

Dancing all the way from the ADC stage onto the pages of this blog, ETG's Taming of the Shrew is here in Cambridge and you should all go see it now. I'm going tonight and I hope to see lots of you there - we can stand on the balcony and watch the actors doing their post-performance thing of lavishly praising each cast member as they appear and then bitching about them as soon as they disappear to buy a drink. But before we get caught up in thesp social dramas and wooing of a certain shrew, let's lavishly praise the clothes. Then the clothes can bitch about us while we go for drinks.

Waistcoats are making a comeback. How do I know this? Did I read it in the pages of Vogue, did I see it on the streets? No, I came across this website and after you have seen the simply irrefutable proof laid out here, you will almost certainly agree. Google labs! Why didn't Anna Wintour think of that? Why even bother to have fashion shoots, when you could just show people a sexy line graph and prove what's going to be in this season. Waistcoats Direct, you are on to a winner.

But even if they aren't, this doesn't mean that they don't deserve to be right. Waistcoats are great. They lengthen the body, give an elegant silhouette and they come in gorgeous plain or checked or paisley prints. Let's bring back the waistcoat and make WD's year.

You know what else is great? Dressing gowns. Long silk or cotton dressing gowns (the towel variety - while it looks snuggly and teddy-bearish - is sadly not ever going to be stylish). Amrou's is a stunning combination of red and gold. The print has an Eastern, slightly regal feel to it, as if it belonged to a young Mahārāja. I'll confess that I prefer gowns that are full-length instead of cropped, as the short cut can sometimes look sleazy in a way that the long ones never do. Think Noel Coward rather than Guy from Green Wing (go to 07.27 for the full horror)

Everything about this outfit is right, including the way that Joey is wearing it - louche, laid-back, leaning like a gangster against a lamp-post. The long coat is fabulous. In fact it is almost impossible for fitted long coats to look bad, on men and women alike. The huge white, turned up cuffs are delightfully dandyish and all the colours are perfectly matched, with the waistcoat the exact same shade as the shoes. Nice touch. Such style almost puts him in the running against Rufus Sewell's shrew-tamer, who is in fact terribly dressed in that scene, but so sexy that it Just Doesn't Matter.

Sophie, our Shrew, wasn't running around on the stage with all the other well-dressed actors, so she got her very own fashion shoot as the female star of the show. Here she demonstrates the lasting appeal of the 'We Can Do It' pose, particularly apt when one is wearing thirties-length short sleeves and long boots with trousers (more on the boots shortly).

The poster was used as part of the American war effort and is often associated with the idea of Rosie the Riveter, a fictional cultural icon who represented the women working in factories during World War Two. She's considered a feminist icon and she also knows how to pull off the headscarf look. It's a difficult art, but rewarding if achieved. Also red and white spotted anything rocks  - and even better when done in flowers, as below.

 I want that key. So much. I don't really need to elaborate on this point do I? You can all see that this would be the best necklace ever. If I find out where Anna, the costume designer, got it from, I will get back to you posthaste.

Taming of the Shrew at the ADC
Costume Designer: Anna Reid

And finally, the boots. The long, endless, oh-me-oh-my boots that go all the way down to floor. With laces top to bottom. The only better pair of lace-boots that I have ever seen were slightly shorter, and black, but more overtly sexy in a Victorian hussy sort of way. They belong to my mother. And no, she's not my size so I can't even try and steal them. And yes, I find this situation difficult. But we've worked through it. It took a while. The thing about lace-up boots is that they are not made for walking. They made to be adored.

Coming up next, singing and looking stylish in the rain. See you on the ADC balcony.

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.

Today, we're going to use ALL the colours in the paintbox...

Checked shirt - Olymp, Jumper - Montego

He stares moodily into the distance, his high angular cheekbones drawing your attention up to his dark, piercing eyes... wait. CLOTHES. We're meant to be focusing on the CLOTHES. All your attention was on the way one side of his collar was cheekily breaking up the neckline of his jumper. Right?

Checked Shirt - Yves Saint Laurent, Scarf - Boden, Trousers - Selected: Homme, Belt Vintage, Shoes - Strellson

Colour. Big, bright, grabs-you-by-the-arm-and-whirls-you-around-whirling-dervish colour. That's what this Spring is all about. Vogue is singing the praises of colour blocking all the way up to chiffon-hemmed skirts of the angels in the sky. Only I wish they would use a better word that 'blocking' to describe it. Blocking has all the wrong connotations, it sounds clumsy and faintly aggressive.

Let's just call it 'Colouring'. Like when you were in primary school and there was nothing more exciting than grabbing the red and the green and the yellow crayons and pressing down really hard so you got that very intense colour that made the crayon crumble as you drew. And every colour-flooded picture was a work of genius to be stuck up on the kitchen fridge. If that was the kind of kitchen fridge you had - my parents didn't like the ruin the minimalist aesthetic of the room.

Don't you just love the shirt - the soft blending of so many different shades and the way that it looks pinky-blue at a distance but then more red and green up close? And of course the scarf offsets the whole thing perfectly. Slightly patterned scarfs are brilliant - if this one were plain then he couldn't wear it with the trousers as well, not matter how big colour blocking colouring is this season.

But the circles and stripes break it up beautifully. I'm particularly fond of the way his shoes are so well camouflaged with the completely-normal-and-seasonal-huge-pile-of-leaves that he seems to be growing out the ground, like bed of delphiniums.

Trousers - Selected: Homme, Shoes - Strellson

Talking of shoes - when not taking root - let's admire the brogues. Brogues are just unstoppable aren't they? They used to be the preserve of the ultra-cool - amongst girls anyway - the kind of people who had tracked down an original gentleman's pair from sixties in a vintage fair, in a size small enough for their delicate feet, but now they're everywhere. Go look in the window of Office if you don't believe me. Black and brown, flat or high-heeled, women have made the brogue their own. Just like we steal all the other fun things that boys wear. We definitely get the better deal here. Transvestites are only - reasonably enough - trying to level the playing field. 

You noticed the turn-ups right? Check-out those turns ups. They're just glorious. They just run-up-and-down-and-up-and-down and light up both trouser and shoe to perfection.

Shirt - H+M, Scarf - Paul Smith

Noisy, in-your-face, floral prints might be more 2009 than 2011, but classic, subtle touches like this defy the fickle winds of passing trends. They have an aristocratic class and will flourish in whatever season they damn well please. Rather like the imperious behaviour of the inhabitants of Downton Abbey. I'm a little late to this bandwagon so am only half-through but god it's good. And the clothes! The dresses! The silk, sky-blue harem pants that the youngest Miss Crawley daringly wears as a sign that she believes in a future where women have the vote and there is equality for all... which will inevitably mean no more servants and thus the need to invent the genre of 'servant-porn' as the new wave of period dramas has - a little uncharitably - been christened. I don't want someone to dress me. I just want the dresses.

Colouring In With Lukas

Model: Lukas Schmitz

If an emblem were needed to capture the spirit of this new Colouring season, then it would probably be the juggling ball, with it's classic primary colours and that irresistible way it has of silently persuading you to try spontaneously juggling with with it, even when - as in my case - you really, really can't.

Term is about to start and Christmas is just a distant memory so we should all be throwing as much colour up into the air as possible, to cheer up these grey days while waiting for Spring to come and do some colouring in of her own. I leave you with one the best advocates of simple, stunning, block colouring that I know. She flies through the sky on my wall and her name is Supergirl.

Glastonbury: The Opera - starring Lady Gaga as Titania

Ok, actually it's A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Opera by Benjamin Britten BUT the idea was that this Dream is set in Glastonbury, or whatever festival you prefer because Glastonbury has become like, so totally over-hyped and over-crowded and full of we're-still-cool-middle-class-thirty-five-year-olds and where do we learn this? Why in the newspapers, in pieces written by yeah-I'm-still-cool-middle-class-thirty-five-year-olds who resent all their peer group crowding round them and unhelpfully reminding them that they are not, you know, eighteen anymore and why in god's name would they want to be, get a life, but - I DIGRESS.

So this Dream is set in a Festival and the fairies are Gaga-inspired performers, hence white (see above and below) is the new black, à la the iconic masked claw dancing in Bad Romance. (I've been doing my dissertation: works by an author must be italicized. Although perhaps a song is the equivalent of a poem and only albums should be italicized... Academic procedures are undoubtedly rotting my brain and infecting innocent, supposedly-regulation-free parts of my life...)

But just imagine if Lady Gaga DID decide to play Titania in her next video/project/plan to further take over the world. How AMAZING would that be? Although I've tried to think of someone worthy of playing her Oberon, and frankly I just don't think he's out there. Actually we could ignore the age gap and the fact that he is her cultural father rather than lover/contemporary and cast Bowie.

Eight degrees of separation between everyone on the planet? Get talking people, rave about this idea to everyone you meet and by a process of social osmosis (considering I spent every science lesson reading books under the lab table I think I should be congratulated for knowing this word) WE CAN get this dream of a Dream made one day...

What you have to really appreciate is the amount of thought that went into this; to the extent that the happy lovers (above) are supposed to be the chavvier festival goers and the unhappy lovers (below) are the Rah couple (does any - who hasn't been involved in a production of the play - ever remember which names belong to which lovers? The four of them have always been a blur of Lysandhermiaelna to me...)

So gold goes to the chavvy girl which rocks for her as it looks great - anyone seen Kate Moss in the Just Cavalli Spring 2010 gold dress? Unfortunately the high street seems to work on the logic that only in winter do we want to look go to parties and look sexy, so try finding a gold dress now and all you will see is a mountain of stripey tops and little cotton summer dresses but there are always charity/vintage shops and NEXT WINTER'S shopping (that's how fashion works darling, you look A HEAD. Which is why they are currently selling you the above mentioned floaty cotton dresses when I am still walking around in wool tights...)

I have to say that I didn't really get the whole Rah couple thing at first, because I thought that Ed was channeling the T-Birds from Grease, which, frankly, is much cooler than Rah-chic so I might stick with my original interpretation. But spot on with the ubiquitous elasticated gold tiara that Topshop was practically handing away free last season (ok, it's possible I'm just jealous because when I try to wear those things my hair poufs up at the back and looks silly and... sigh)

Very New Romantic. Very Total Eclipse of the Heart (even if you have seen this before, watch it again, it is so much worse/better than you can have remembered. What, oh WHAT were they thinking?? Quote from Jim Kitchen "This is the video I was born to make - and someone has already made it")

That, by the way, is the way to fairy wings

I realise that the blue hair (above and below) is created by the light, but how GLORIOUS would it be to really have your hair that colour. Not possible unless your hair was electrified (?) to give off a ethereal ligt blue/white light, but a nice thing to dream about.

Is it just me who looks at sweet little innocent choir boys dressed in white and thinks of this?

BEST. HAT. EVER. Even better two down when lit by blue light. Also like how the shadow is creating a Dali-like moustache...

This is when Titania - aka Lady G - starts to sing about the fact that her love affair with Bottom may have been something of a bad romance. But the hat inspiration she could have taken from the relationship would have consoled her.

Somehow capturing the spirit of white Grace Jones - who is clearly Gaga's cultural mother. Bowie and Jones, it's quite some parentage...

Back to the lovers - Red Wellingtons. If you are festival going this summer (and it will rain) have fun, make a statement (did anyone see the red high-heeled wellies they were recently selling in Office? So wrong and yet kind of wonderful). However, while making a statement with your wellies is great fun and will cheer you up when you wading through the mud, there is no excuse for being one of those girls who miraculously emerges from their tent with perfectly groomed hair and make-up every single day when the rest of haven't even changed our clothes cos we couldn't be fagged. Those girls only exist to ruin things for the rest of us. They probably don't even stay in tents, they probably stay in hotels and get day passes. Get into the I-don't-care-how-rough-I-look-this-music-is-great-vibe.

Attack of the killer fairies. Because Lady Gaga's fairies would be able to kill a man by sheer intimidation alone... On the topic of men and Gaga, why do so many of you get confused about what she looks like? So many boys have said this to me. Yes, she dresses up a lot. But it's not still not that confusing...

Bambi Eyes. Not really a fashion choice unless you're planning to go under the knife, but pretty stunning if you have them.

Rah-chic proves it's worth with the tasteful creases of the oil-skinned Barbour (also the blindfold is to show he's under the love spell. Perhaps a similar fashion accessory could be devised to indicated when someone is wearing beer goggles...)

What a wonderful green waistcoat. Waistcoats aren't worn enough anymore. Which is a shame as boys get little enough variety when it comes to formal wear. However, anything from a coat, a hat to a pet dog in that shade of green would surely be a welcome addition to anyone's life.

I realise that he's wearing that because he is 'representing wall' and that it's made a little uncomfortable by the poles that are keeping his arms straight, but they don't need to be there, you could just have ribbons that attach at the wrists (in an unusual burst of needle-and-thread creativity I once made a Halloween cloak this way). And just think what an AMAZING cloak this would be. Even Gaga would be proud. And you could whirl on the dance floor and look like a spinning wall... tell me you are getting as excited about this idea as I am.

A beautiful illustration of how not to wear floral. But probably the best Thisbe anyone who was there has ever been lucky enough to see.

Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream
Costume Designers: Sophia Parkinson, Rupert Bickersteth and Felicity McDermott

For an performance which had no set, particular kudos must go to a design team who created the entire atmosphere of the play out of lighting and costume. Also to the fairies, because they were hardly wearing anything and it was cold in that church (but so worth it).

Going back to Total Eclipse of the Heart, which I assume you, like me, have been listening to on loop since clicking on the link (which is significantly more time on my part as I'm having to think up this fascinating commentary) The Wikipedia's answer to WHAT were they thinking is that:

'The video was story-boarded by Jim Steinman - who also composed the song - and drew inspiration from the 1976 film Futureworld. The Gothic themed video features Bonnie Tyler clad in white, apparently having a dream or fantasy about her students in a boys' boarding school. Young men are seen dancing and participating in various school activities such as swim team, karate, fencing, football, and singing in a choir. The video was shot at Holloway Sanatorium.'

For the sake of championing equality between the sexes I suppose we should cheer this celebration of lust for young boys by older women (then again they are half alien. There is no legislation against sleeping with aliens). Perhaps Sam Taylor Wood could have the song played at her wedding...

Finally, how much do you love the Honourable LG's response to the hermaphrodite rumours in her new video?