(Look at the beautiful clone women from pattern land)
Image source hereMy lord. My LORD. It's just. So beautiful. I can tell that writing about this without sounding like a fawning moron is going to be nearly impossible. I'll do my best whilst avoiding drooling directly onto the keyboard.
I read an interview with Beth Ditto ages ago where she said how sick she was of being shoved into black sacks by stylists before photo shoots. They seemed to be terrified of letting a plus size woman wear colour, lest someone mistake her for a hedge or a taxi. It's rare to see really bold exciting prints on plus size clothes, something which I attribute to how pricey bigger sizes are. If you're spending fifty pounds on a top, you do want it to go with almost everything else you own. It has to be safe, and black is very safe for designers and shoppers. But safety is boring. As is looking like you've fallen out of a Tim Burton movie in the middle of summer.
These pieces are definitely expensive, being described by the designers themselves as 'investment pieces'. This is code for '£75 per dress'. Still though, they promise the dresses will add 'glamour, fun and a touch of luxury' and since that is essentially my life's mission I can't help but want to get on board. I mean just look at these photos.
They just ooze sexiness and glamour and sexiness. I was so swept up the whole thing, I started looking for the gloves the girls are wearing in the pictures so that I can become one of them and lounge around their oddly lit baroque alongside them. Posing. (Incidentally I couldn't find the gloves but found pretty damn similar ones here)
But then I started rooting around the website, as I generally do. And I started to try to pick out the various dresses I would attempt to save up for and 'invest' in. Somehow, without the lighting and the gloves and everything, the dresses started to lose their shiny veneer. I started to notice that some of the pieces I liked the most had weird design flaws. The dresses named after my idol, the 'Joan' dress (named after Joan holloway from madmen, obviously) have a strange seam straight down the middle of the bust. I lack the tech savvy to retrieve the 'zoomable' pictures and put them up here, but you can see what I mean if you follow the links here and here. These just happen to be the two dresses that jumped out at me the most when I started looking, but I wasn't the only person who noticed the strange seam placement.
The red 'Joan' dress has only gotten 2.5 stars in reviews by customers,
Natsw from London started by saying 'looks surprisingly cheap' and goes on to say 'the pleating around the bust just looked lumpy'
Jungle from London again said 'My problem with the dress was that the bust stitching was not very flattering and gave a very flat shape'
The printed 'Joan' dress got similar reviews, only getting a 3.5 rating. So what the hell is going on? In the interview on the website (which you can read here by the way) they say that they 'thought a lot about the four body types' when making the pieces for the collection, but the reviews say differently. I would like to say at this point that I take issue with the four body type marketing strategy that Evans are currently using, but that is a different article altogether. By saying that body shape had been in mind when designing dresses that turn out not to fit the bodies they were made for falls slightly short in my opinion.
In a review for the Purple Pansy Print 'Peggy' Dress, Natsw goes on to say that she bought 5 dresses from the collection and that the Peggy dress is the only one she's keeping. That dress in fairness has gotten rave reviews and you can see it here.
But all in all, there aren't really that many reviews on the website and I think the only way for me to actually make up my mind is to buy the dresses myself and make a judgement that way. It's RESEARCH. Not just frivolous spending on my part. I can't help but be charmed by the collection because, well, it's just so damn charming. And so much of the interview with the designers speaks so true to me. They say
'We feel high fashion has neglected the plus-size market for a very long time. The high street has filled that gap.'
And they go on to say,
'We'd love to see the market on a much higher fashion plane – we want plus-sized clothes on the high fashion radar.'
And who would argue with that? I just can't help but love them and their gorgeous collection. To finish off, here's a delightful little video of the most flamboyant man in the world showing you all the ways to put a scarf on an incredibly bored, beautiful woman.
As an end note, I also found this cartoon floating around youtube, though I have little to no idea what it has to do with the collection itself. Oh who cares, lets just invite all the girls from the photos around, project this in a loop on my wall and get drunk.
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