REVIEWED: Vivienne Westwood x The Cambridge Satchel Company

When Teen Vogue and Vanity Fair both recommend a collab, then it’s the collab for me.

I've admired Dame Vivienne Westwood since her retrospective back in Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia, when I was a teen. And I've admired The Cambridge Satchel Company since I spotted it on the BagaholicBoy blog.

I ended up with the Vivienne Westwood x The Cambridge Satchel Company tiny satchel in navy and orange.

 

Quality – beautiful. The outside is stunning. The inside is unlined and a bit easy to mark.

Leather smell – intoxicating

Print – tiger-like, if you were viewing the tiger through an imaginative haze. It’s Westwood's pirate print, an ‘80s print, so it announces itself a LOT. The exception is the black-on-green colourway – that one merely whispers. And on the red version, which is exclusive to Vivienne Westwood stores, the print seems vaguely vaginal (I’m sorry, I deal with letters pertaining to the vagina very often, don’t ask why).

Englishness – it’s very English-y. Westwood’s an iconic Brit; the Cambridge Satchel Company’s name alone speaks of punting down the river Cam. It so happens I have done this – the man wielding the big punting stick (does it have a better name than this? Perhaps it does. Tell me, if so, in the comments) happened to look like the love interest in Eat, Pray, Love (by the way, haven’t seen that; have read about it).

Size – terribly adorable

Practicality – far less ideal than I’d like to admit. The aforementioned adorable size means it looks like a satchel stolen from a small child. Though I measured it out onto paper before I ordered it, when I held it in my hands it was TINY. When I tried to put my modest daily essentials in it, it didn’t quite work (it could only accommodate two out of three of the keys/wallet/phone combo at any one time). A bit more enthusiasm meant I was ultimately able to slot everything in, even my special pass to get into work. But practical it is not. I would also not quite consider it an evening bag. But if you’re wanting to walk around looking like a stylish street-style person (NOT me – stylish street-style people do not combine the carrying of a tiny bag with the lugging of a big tote), clearly this bag’s a winner.

Five questions for Gabrielle Tozer on The Intern

Christian Louboutin, purveyor of fine, improbable footwear with red-splashed soles that grace every red carpet, makes shoes called 'Intern flats'. I found them in David Jones - they were red suede and nodded to punk with their studding and to military influences with their insignia and yes, to a certain glamorous yet hardworking lifestyle with their lack of a heel.

But 'Intern' flats? Really? Come now. Are we supposed to believe that our unpaid workforce - our wannabes, our foot-in-the-door starry-eyed guys and girls - is tripping about town in $1100 footwear while carrying coffee to overlords and overladies ?

Maybe they are. Interning can be privileged - especially in, say, New York where it can be done by only those moneyed enough to go for long stretches of time sans cheque, devoting hours and unpaid weeks, months and days to grunt work, to pleb work, to bottom of the ladder stuff that they're told they're so, so fortunate to get to do.

Interns grab headlines - overseas, with lawsuits around whether they ought to have been paid, whether they were treated improperly. You can even pay to perform free labour - how perverse! - and this is something only the dreamiest fashion houses could get away with, and do.

So - interning, with its ostensibly high-glamour atmosphere and lowly tasks, its silver-screen dramatisations and big money legal problems, would seem to be a goldmine for fiction.

Enter Gabrielle Tozer, University of Canberra alumna and seasoned glossy mags journo, whose debut YA novel is called, you guessed it, The Intern. Already drawing comparisons to The Devil Wears Prada and sparking frenzied searches through book stores for the rare red jacketed version, Tozer's book was launched to fanfare in Sydney. She graciously took five questions for this blog. 


Was there a part of The Intern that was a difficult birth, that is, that struggled to emerge and took a lot of rewrites, cups of tea, and stiff liquors, to come to life?

The most difficult stage, especially for a newbie author, was the rewriting and editing process. It was gruelling – and that’s putting it nicely. There were countless writer meltdowns as I learnt how to wrangle 80,000 words into a neat and tidy manuscript… quite a change from a 2000-word magazine article! Thankfully my editors at HarperCollins are incredible and I’ve learnt so much from them over the past few years (and I’m trying to put all their lessons to good use on the first draft of my sequel).

How much did your own real-life magazine experiences feed into The Intern, and did you manage the right balance of cool glamour and sweaty work ethic when capturing the world of mags?

The magazine experiences described in The Intern are fictional. Sure, there are few bits and bobs that cross over – I’ve met celebrities, attended beauty sales and organised photo shoots – but when it comes to the major plot points, my imagination is working overtime. It’s one of the reasons I love creative writing… I don’t have to worry about fact-checking or research! My little sister did dress me for my first big magazine job interview at DOLLY magazine, though, which is the same as Josie in the book; she still teases me about it to this day.

Your story of being headhunted – of being actually asked if you had manuscripts in drawer, and then being invited to pitch ideas, is really wonderful. It’s a pretty cool origin story and completely different from the ‘broke-my-way-out-of-the-slush-pile-after-20-rejections’ tale that seems to be common to even JK Rowling. You evidently have the talent to back up this good fortune, but what is it about you and your writing that caught a publisher’s eye?

I’ve been in a daze ever since HarperCollins contacted me so I’ve never dared to ask them ‘Why me?’ (I didn’t want to accidentally talk them out of taking a chance on me). My ‘big break’ came when I caught the eye of non-fiction publisher Helen Littleton at a publishing course who was impressed with my passion, ideas and online portfolio, and she kindly passed on my website to a YA publisher – all without me knowing. Even though I’d felt like a total douche when I registered my first domain name back in 2009, I’ve always maintained that having a strong, professional presence online is essential for building a profile as a writer and, somehow, that theory turned out to be true.

What do you think of the real-life intern experience at magazines in Australia? To those outside the media industry, an unpaid internship can look exploitative. Is it?

There are a few types of internships across all industries, not just media, in Australia, so I don’t like to generalise. There are paid internships which are fantastic, obviously, as you gain experience while being valued monetarily – I’ve done one of these and it was wonderful. Just like a job, but with less responsibility… winner!

Next up, there are unpaid internships with restrictions (say one day a week from 9-5pm), where you gain experience, build contacts and get one step closer to getting a job (and sometimes you do score the job, as I’ve seen so many interns do!). You mightn’t get paid, but you might nab freebies here and there – I’ve done this type too and definitely don’t regret it. I ‘did my time’ and it eventually turned into paid work.

Finally, there are the exploitative internships that are unpaid, but on a part-time or full-time level. This has never happened at any magazine I’ve heard of – magazines in Australia have incredibly strict rules surrounding work experience students and interns these days – but I have been horrified to see internships in other industries advertised with fulltime requirements. Seriously – a fulltime unpaid internship! Horrifying. That is exploitative and should be illegal.

For now, it seems unpaid internships are a stepping stone into many industries in Australia, so it would be good for regulations to be put in place so everyone is treated fairly. 

What’s the best reaction you’ve had so far to your debut novel?

I’ve had people contact me with daily updates on their favourite parts of the novel, others who are beside themselves over the romance angle, others who can’t get enough of the sillier parts. Every text, tweet, Facebook comment, email and Goodreads review counts as a great reaction to me – I love hearing that people are enjoying The Intern because it makes all the hard work worth it.

In praise of Meadham Kirchhoff x Topshop

Fictional girl band The Cherrys wear Meadham Kirchhoff for Topshop. Photography: Topshop

The stoles are shaggy and eye-wateringly colourful, like the pelts of skinned Muppets.

The whole thing recalls candy-pop dreams and ravers. Dr Seuss. Vintage shops dishing up a mash-up of 70s/80s/90s. The sorts of thing you wish you'd find in a musty shop, but all you find is smelly taffeta. Pentagrams for those who remember The Craft when it was first cool. The attention-grabbing, eye-assaulting style favoured by street style bloggers. PVC like fetish wear and big lacy hearts like shojo girly mangas. Something genre-defying so as to be a brilliant spectacle. Show me something new, high street. Yes, this will do nicely.

If I were a manga schoolgirl, my reaction to the 89-piece range would be a shower of sparkles coming out of my head. Big love hearts and stars in my eyes. This is something I didn't foresee - it was a given that I'd lose my senses for Lanvin x H&M and Mulberry for Target, but I didn't know anything about Meadham Kirchhoff. I just know the first glimpses of the range I had on Grazia UK made my heart swell with delight that someone had thought to make a furry bag in sherbet pastels, and glitter cherry hair ties, and rainbow Mongolian stoles. Someone knew we all had inner freaks and geeks - and inner girl-band rockers. Someone thought a collection so exquisitely eccentric would take off, and it did. Within 24 hours of going live, so much had sold out on the website that I had to bolt down to Sydney's  Topshop to make friends with a magical pastel dream skirt and glitter-lacquered cherry bag.

Then there's the cleverness of the narrative. I can't name another high-street collab that involved the designers dreaming up not one but four fictional women, and clothing them.

The designers in an interview have said that any of the pieces would do for 'one of those days when you want to tell the world to leave you alone'. I can't imagine why. If I saw you or anymore else in this garb, I'd want to know all about you.

La Vie En Roach

Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Roaches make people cry.

It is a terrible thing to never be quite at ease inside one’s own home, to be hyper-vigilant, alert but not alarmed. To constantly scan the walls and the crevices, to anticipate and expect an unwanted guest or ten. Anything could be one of THEM: a clump of hair, a chip of paint, a soft, scuttling feeling against the back of my hand. They are cockroaches. Always cockroaches.

Sydney has as many cockroaches as it has tourists sighing over the Opera House. The climate is ideal – moist, warm, never punishingly cold enough to stop them proliferating, spreading, and affluent enough that there will always be food in our bins and our houses.

How I hate their ancient armor, crazed, erratic movements, constant perseverance and resistance against bottled poisons. How I fear we are building up their immunity against roach-spray – we might be raising an army of super-bugs who cannot be killed. Nothing could surprise me – I imagine I will one day walk into my loungeroom to see a roach the size of Kafka’s nightmares, all tickly legs and drooling mouth. How it will laugh at the slipper in my hand.

One time I thought there was a near-ideal solution. In a move worthy of Jonathan Swift, we would eat the cockroaches. We would stuff ourselves full of them like champion cockroach-eater Edward Archbold. Then if we spotted them inside our homes we would pick them off the wall and down them as if there were no more than gummi bears. The thing about Archbold, though, is that he died after his epic roach-eating feat during which he downed dozens of them, gigantic ones to boot. An autopsy found this wasn’t from a kind of anaphylactic shock. No, insect parts had managed to suffocate him. Cripes. Even if you do your best to defeat them, even if you manage to masticate unfeasibly great numbers of them, in the end, the roaches always win.

Saying no to selfies

The original poser: Narcissus by Caravaggio

Instagram is a mindless pocket-based entertainment source - as you wish you can pull up a feed that reveals, in pictures, the carefully curated and aspirational lives of people you follow. Sure, you can find the odd feed that is brutally, hilariously honest, but usually (and I include my own feed - username theclairelow8 - in this) there's a lot of gorgeous food porn and sunsets and manicures. You know, la vie en rose where the rose is the beautifying filter.

A beloved friend of mine posts shot after shot of himself: his brooding face, his many outfits, his hand holding his phone because he can't seem to resist firing off another shot at his own reflection in lifts, and there are the flashback photos of him with different coloured hair, and at the beach in dark glasses, and on and on it goes. I wanted to do some data analysis and figure out what percentage of images he had posted were selfies; I got worn out by 35 or so. It's a bit wearying and I say this as someone who genuinely enjoys his brand of outsized ego. 

This kind of endless self-promotion is a bit more acceptable if you're a bona fide celebrity - Miranda Kerr, Jessica Gomes and their ilk spring to mind, you know, people who make a living on their looks who really do have legions of fans who will lap up each and every image they post of their beauteous face.

But if you're a narcissist without a fanbase, what is the point of all your selfies? If a selfie floats on the interwebs and nobody hits 'like', does it really exist?

Then there's the over-edited selfie - the suspiciously airbrushed kind, the kind that sparks ire from the friends whose newsfeeds they appear in. Filters are well and good but no filter will obliterate all of your pores and turn you into a perplexingly faux-looking person worthy of The Sims.

I am over selfies. I have been guilty of plenty of them in my time - as overwrought and self-consciously posed and over-filtered as you care. I am as big a narcissist as anyone. Maybe other people find my own photo selection - fingernails and food, trinkets and cats, handbags and jewels - makes them as violently ill as a bucketload of selfies makes me.

Selfies have reached saturation point; they say 'Nothing is more interesting to me than ME.' Time has an article on how the wealthy like to selfie and how narcissists know they are obnoxious but love themselves anyway. Can we please take a break? I think we can't, we can't tear ourselves away from this habit anymore than Narcissus can keep himself from dying as he stares at himself reflected in water.

Vale Cory Monteith / Finn Hudson (I never learned the difference until now)

When I was a little kid without much of an idea of what an actor was, I assumed they and the characters they portrayed were one and the same. This is why it did my head in when I watched Dean Cain talk about Clark Kent.

Fast-forward to now and I'm not sure I really learned the difference between an actor and his character. This is why I was shocked to the core about the recent death of Glee actor Cory Monteith. When I first read reports: alone, hotel room, no suspicious circumstances, I assumed a suicide rather than an overdose. Apparently, Monteith's struggles with drugs were well-documented. I must have missed those reports in spite of being a rabid Gleek. Maybe I didn't want to know. The idea of Monteith battling these kinds of demons is so profoundly at odds with Finn Hudson, his character, the handsome, popular, all-American teenager on the squeaky clean Fox show. Death by drug overdose makes sense for the Kurt Cobains of the world, but the idea that the man who tenderly serenaded Rachel Berry in Mr Schue's choir room could die this way did my head in just like my revelation about Dean Cain.

Because I didn't know the difference between Cory Monteith and Finn Hudson. A talented performer on the show, a talented performer in real life. In love with a gifted singing ingenue on the show, in love with a gifted singing ingenue in real life (Lea Michele / Rachel Berry, who I can imagine being like her character too: bossy, with vocal gifts oozing out of every pore).

The meaning of the Finn Hudson character and the reason why he was a gift to us Gleeks has already been explored at length, and more articulately by Ben Pobjie. And as for me I'll just try to forget that Cory wasn't Finn and Finn wasn't Cory. I could imagine him cold and alone in his hotel room, or have him in my mind in that other way: forever young, forever in love, forever dancing around Mr Schue's choir room with Rachel / Lea on his awkward, teenage feet.

Forever Young - the rise of the haute kidult

It has been said I have the taste of a nine-year-old. This isn't an insult, it's a fairly good summary of me. The good thing is in my new life in a senior role at a magazine for tweenage girls, I am free at last to unabashedly love the cute stuff - to decorate my desk with Hello Kitty without restraint, to add Blythe dolls and Littlest Pet Shop without shame.

It's also carte blanche to reverse age - to choose childlike things which I've always liked best.

That's not to say it's time to plaster myself with cheap diamantes from Diva (not saying I have anything against Diva, or diamantes, or plastering myself with things). It's more about the somewhat slicker stuff, and I'm not the only one.

There must be huge numbers of people like me - haute kidults, that is, solvent adults with a taste for high-end kiddy kitsch complete with price tag to set it out of reach of bona fide kids except Suri Cruise. How else to explain the popularity of Mawi x Disney Couture, the existence of implausible diamond Hello Kitty jewellery, and the fact the Tokidoki x Karl Lagerfeld figurine (plastic!) costs nearly AU$200? Lagerfeld himself must be young on the inside - he gave his cat, Choupette, an iPad, which sounds like something a child would do.

I am 27 years old. When faced with a big, square and sensible Mulberry Bayswater in thick black leather, I inevitably reached for a raspberry mini Alexa, a handbag so weeny it cannot fit my diary. It occurred to me the Bays was the better investment - the sort of bag that could see me through to age 90 and then some. It also occurred to me that something so practical could make me feel like I was age 90. No, far better to go for a bubblegum-pink shrunken It Bag, one that I lovingly pet as if it were a teacup Yorkie. This is after vetoing a mint green Mulberry with flower clasp - that I feel really IS like a child's bag, that looks like something out of Forever New on a good day. It is so little I have grave fears more than an iPhone could be tucked inside and its discount price tag was still the princely sum of more than AU$400.

Fun fashion is ageless, I think. I never believed in those 'How to dress for your age' articles anyway. Let me wear my cartoon cats and fluffy ears beanies (no matter how much Guardian writer Hadley Freeman decries them). Let me be a haute kidult - I found the fountain of youth and it looks at once cheerful and eye-wateringly expensive.