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The old rule about ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’ definitely applies in tough economic times, but many people are being caught out by counterfeit goods, especially clothing.
Until recently, counterfeiting wasn’t as prevalent in casual clothing as in high-end designer and fashion garments, but the global recession means that almost every brand and clothing line is being targeted by unscrupulous cheats, many of whom chose to sell their knock-off clothing online.
You can protect yourself against fake clothing vendors by following a few simple rules:
1. Buying clothing online can be a fantastic way to save money – but make sure you buy through a reputable online retailer. Counterfeiters choose to sell this way because it allows them to stay anonymous and the set-up costs of business online are low, so look for a company with a long history in retail and a good range of the kind of clothing you want to buy. While some retailers specialise in a single brand – especially of more expensive garments such as high quality jackets, shoes and trainers – and are perfectly genuine, an online store selling only one brand can also be a sign that a counterfeiter is using that website to offload fake goods, so be doubly careful.
2. Look at the details – detailing can often separate real goods from fake ones. On brand T-shirts, for example, look at what the company in question describes as its ‘signature’ or ‘classic’ styling, such as where brand labels are located, stitching styles and cut. Often, even online, you can see where a picture of the goods doesn’t match up to the company’s signature style, such as a garment looking skinny when the cut is supposed to relaxed or roomy, or a label being slightly different in colour, size or shape. Counterfeiters can produce garments that are almost identical to the real thing, but most are just trying to sell similar looking garments as quickly as possible and don’t pay as much attention to detail so you can catch them out by examining photographs carefully.
3. Ask for references – all good online shops have references and testimonials, but counterfeiters have become good at faking those too! Try googling the company and seeing what comes up: disappointed buyers often vent their fury on consumer sites or in online forums, while satisfied customers of online shops will also tend to enthuse about the good quality of their clothing, the excellence of the service and the speedy delivery. Use these online clues to help you decide where it’s safe to buy.
It turns out that employers and Human Resources departments are googling candidates for employment or promotion and checking out their Facebook pages to see what they say about themselves.
Uploaded photos are considered to be a good indicator of a person’s view of themselves, because that’s what they’ve chosen to show the world – so those dodgy pictures of you (male) in a mankini or (female) taking part in a wet T-shirt contest, might be doing you real harm in the career stakes.
On the other hand, smart casual clothing, a big smile and photographs in which you’re just one figure in a big group can all enhance your employment prospects because the right clothing, a happy face and a big circle of friends all tend to convince the viewer that you’re adaptable, popular and intelligent.
So what should you wear in your Facebook profile picture to get a job? A fresh polo-shirt and chinos is the favoured look for the under forty male, while the under forty female should choose a dress or skirt (the skirt should cover her knees and the sleeves of her top should cover her shoulders, but it appears any amount of cleavage doesn’t influence an employer).
It’s even more important for the over forties – men shouldn’t wear a tie because it looks ‘old and sad’ and should have their shirtsleeves, if long, rolled up a few inches to suggest they are active and practical, not stuffy and hierarchical – soft shirts are preferable to stiff starched ones. Women should ensure they don’t show bingo arms or appear in ‘mother of the bride’ type dresses – jeans are good for slim older women, and the more casual the clothing they can get away with, the better, so a contemporary T-shirt with well-fitting jeans would be ideal.
For all ages, it’s important to look fit and healthy, so pictures taken out doors in sports clothing, are a good idea, as long as they aren’t your profile picture – even a blurry picture of the back of your jacket as you walk the dog on a rainy day is enough to give a potential employer the impression that you’re dedicated to doing your duty.
Recent psychological research suggests that to impress a new prospective partner, you should not go all out with special clothing on your first date.
Instead, you should focus on where you met and what you were both wearing, and then upgrade that clothing just one level. So if you met in a library and you were wearing a polo-shirt and jeans, your upgrade might be to a comfortable shirt and jeans and the ideal date location might be a museum or gallery.
If, on the other hand, you met playing football in the park, in shorts and a vest, you might want to upgrade that sports clothing to a pair of casual trousers and a fun printed T-shirt and arrange a date to watch a sporting event.
The idea is that people agree to go out with other people for the first time when they feel comfortable with them, so if you escalate your clothing out of their comfort zone of your new mate, you cause what psychologists cause a ‘disconnect’ between the two versions of you that they are exposed to.
Women are particularly prone to this, and turn up for first dates in sparkly dresses and high heels when they were previously wearing jeans and a feminine hoodie, causing their poor date to think somebody else has turned up in their place! This means that the activities that would have seemed natural if you’d been in more relaxed clothing now become impossible in the mind of your potential partner, and so he or she suggests doing something that neither of you will enjoy so much, but that seems in keeping with your more formal clothing and so neither of you have a good time and one date is as far as you get.
If you’ve had to buy new school uniform items this year, you may be dreading the arrival of the spring and the demanded for new PE kit becuase it’s getting to be an expensive business!
Uniform is good for children’s sense of community and for ensuring equality between those who have a lot of disposable income and fashion sense, and those who lack one or the other, or both. But it’s not a cheap option, whether you’re buying in a high street store, via the school’s own shop, or even shopping online. And if you have a child who is already in adult sizes, as many thirteen year olds and up are, these days, you also end up paying VAT on their ‘children’s’ clothing.
There are some ways to save money if you’re canny:
1. Ask the school to consider wholesalers who can produce small orders (say under fifty items) of essential uniform clothing in larger sizes – this might be embroidered polo shirts or logo-printed sweatshirts, which can then be sold to parents whose children are classed as ‘outsize’ by other suppliers.
2. Consider swap shops for outgrown clothing – often a PTA committee can be organised to set up exchanges of informal jackets worn for school events held in public or specialist clothing like cricket togs, which are swiftly outgrown and yet still wearable by a smaller student, perhaps in a lower year.
3. Request that essential items such as white T-shirts worn for PE and sporting activities be non-branded – this means you can buy the cheapest available, or even persuade the school shop to bulk buy them for you. The school logo could be kept for items like kitbags that are not going to be outgrown, and still give a sense of uniform when children are taking part in outdoor events.
Apparently we’re all getting bigger – men’s shoe sizes have increased over the past three decades, so the average size, which used to be nine, is now 11 and the ‘average’ woman is now a size 12-14, whereas twenty years ago she was a 10-12. And it’s not just being fatter – we’re also an average of two inches taller than our parents and three inches taller than our grandparents.
So, how does the bigger person dress to look at their best – is it automatically necessary to wear tent-like clothing and clumsy shoes or can you look slim and stylish?
For men, the situation has improved a lot recently – the rise of sports clothing, or sport casual as it’s called in the USA, means that you can look fantastic without having to shop around too much.
There are a lot of old rules about dressing to look slim that no longer apply – for example, all the ‘larger size’ specialists used to tell men to buy shirts with vertical stripes because it was slimming – but nowadays, any fitted shirt that’s striped implies that you’re hiding your gut, so it’s better to buy an end-on-end weave or plain shirt with a good pleat in the back and let the tails hang out to conceal any tummy you might wish to conceal. Alternatively, buy a loose fit polo-shirt that fits perfectly on the shoulders and wear it with a pair of dark coloured tailored trousers. This fools the eye into believing the shirt is tailored too, and that you’re actually slim-fit!
Mens sweatshirts are often recommended to the larger guy, because they tend to be comfortable clothing that comes in XXXL sizing, but if you want to give the illusion of slimness, you’re better to invest in some pastel hoodies with a front zip, and wear them over a dark T-shirt. The V-shape that a half-zipped hoody makes, when worn over a darker undergarment, has a naturally slimming effect, especially when worn with dark trousers and black trainers which lead the eye to see you as narrowing from the shoulders to the feet.
Once again, lots of catwalks featured nautical style clothing – for women in particular this took the form of white trousers. When you’ve got your trousers, and they can be wide-leg, chino or skinny fit, team them with a striped T-shirt, Breton style, in navy and or black and white. For men, this look is turning up as striped long-sleeved tops combined with distressed jeans and boat shoes.
Also, for women, the safari look is still strong – Paul Smith had leopard print clothing worn with brown and black striped accessories and Marc Jacobs went for a more Native American theme, complete with face-paint like Adam Ant. To make this look work, it’s best to pick a colour and then combine prints and stripes in that shade, so tiger stripes work well with black trousers and a lightweight jacket in orange or yellow.
Orange and yellow turned up strongly in menswear: Dolce & Gabbana were offering dayglo orange hoodies and Louis Vuitton took egg yolk yellow and put it in everything from polo-shirts to socks. Summer shorts were much in evidence, and they were much more tailored than in previous years – worn with citrus coloured polo-shirts and crumpled blazers and those deck shoes again.
High fashion that it will be hard work to pull off this summer includes the harem trousers on offer for both men and women – while it’s a bit tempting to think that these loose waist, low crutch garments will hide a multitude of sins, what they actually do is suggest you have something (a big belly, a low-slung bum) to conceal, without actually hiding it. Wear them with care, and make sure they are darker than the top you choose, so that they offer something of a slimming effect.
The 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver have revealed a new, sporty but coordinated, sassy yet streamlined, sense of winter fashion. Whether it’s the sportswear disguised as denim worn by Shaun White or the kooky headband of Chemmy Alcott, winter fashion is big!
It’s also cost-effective, because while the USA Olympic team has been dressed by Ralph Lauren, you can create the same vibe at home for a fraction of the price, by shopping around for casual clothing and a few key sporty items to make the outfit work for you.
To get the look for yourself …
1. Go for primary colours – red, white, blue and green are favourites. Nothing should be pale or faded, apart from denims. Bright winter jackets in yellow and green are likely to be big sellers in the next couple of weeks, as are skinny fit ringer T-shirts with contrast trims.
2. Polo shirts need to fit perfectly – too tight looks silly and too loose looks like a hockey player who’s forgotten his pads.
3. Hats are big – but their size is small – tiny beanie hats and close-fitting billed caps should be worn with winter jackets to get the look right.
4. Tight T-shirts are likely to be spring’s big hit for women: wear a skin-tight red or pink round-necked T-shirt under a white or yellow jacket to get the look that’s been turning up on the Olympic medal podiums all week.
While Simon Callow might still be tucking in his shirt, and even his T-shirt, there are new ‘rules’ in 2010 for shirt-wearing.
Until this year it’s been stylish for men to wear their shirts with the tails out – not just casual shirts like polos or Hawaiian-style shirts either, but formal shirts have also been hung out in the office.
However, it’s all changing – while women are still wearing tapered shirts with the tails out, men aren’t. Men’s shirts are being worn inside the trousers for the first time in nearly a decade – and classic styled brown or black leather belts were much in evidence on this year’s spring season catwalks. Men’s shirts are not often seen as a barometer of the economy but tails-out shirt-wear is associated with the 60s and 80s, times of economic vibrancy, so it’s not surprising that in this time of economic stringency, shirt-tails are going back in.
On the other hand, women are wearing their shirt tails out, with large costume belts cinching their waists, over extremely short shirts worn with textured tights. This fashion is also associated with leggings and loose trousers like jogging trousers or harem pants and it sends a confusing message, because while short skirts suggest economic buoyancy, loose trousers are more associated with times of economic depression – so men and women’s clothing is carrying different messages about the financial future – let’s hope the women are right!
If you have any kind of team: sales team at work, football team that plays for fun, pub quiz team, you can use promotional clothing like printed T-shirts or embroidered sweatshirts to increase motivation.
The most successful teams all have the same behaviours – they are groups where each member of the team knows their own strengths and how their strengths support the general team to achieve its aims, whether they are to hit a sales target or to score more goals.
Knowing each person’s roles and special skills can be developed by showing their specialist abilities on their team clothing, so a quiz team might all wear the same embroidered sweatshirts with a cartoon mascot on them, but also have nicknames printed on the back, or a sales team might be rewarded by having a special ‘golden’ vest that is worn on dress down Friday by the person who has made the most sales in that week.
Alternatively you can encourage skills development and team thinking by dividing an already existing team in two, like the girls and boys in the popular TV series Glee, and forcing them to compete with each other as well as competing against other teams. Do this by putting one team in one colour clothing, say red polo shirts, and the other team in green. Their incentive could be that the team that scores most goals in practice gets to leave the pitch without helping tidy up, or in business the team that makes most cold calls might be rewarded with doughnuts and coffee the following Monday morning.
Make sure you mix up the mini-teams on a regular basis, so that everybody gets to know the strengths and abilities of all team members – this creates respect and understanding.
Most people have a limited budget for clothing these days, and it helps if you know how to be a smart shopper, whether you are buying in a shop or online.
A good way to start is to browse some magazines or watch some of the TV programmes that feature fashion. This gives you an idea what’s currently stylish. Then you can visit the websites of the clothing stores you can also see in the high street, or browse the pages of online retailers to check out what sale items they have on offer. Online clothing retailers often provide real bargains this way and if you’ve got a good idea what clothing you’re looking for, you can save a fortune.
Buying online, for a novice, is often easier when choosing casual clothing as it requires less attention to fit. It’s easy to buy a classic sweatshirt online than to choose the right fitted jacket, for example.
Be sure you know your clothing size and how different manufacturers ‘scale’ their clothing because each company has a slightly different cut and style so you might find that a Hanes ‘Beefy’ T-shirt in medium fits you the same as a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt in large … trying clothes on in shops before you buy online can save you disappointment and the need to return garments to get them in a different size.
One area where online retailers really score highly for bargain buying is that they tend to have really good offers on purchases of multiple items, so if you find a work shirt you like, and need to six or a dozen to get you through a week or two of work, you’ll often find you get a discount for a bulk buy, which saves you money.
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