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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.
First, know your budget and stick to it – don’t just decide how much you have to spend on clothing, because it’s easy to blow the whole amount on one cashmere sweater or a fashionable jacket. Instead, divide your budget between different forms of clothing: basic T-shirts are pretty cheap, but leather jackets are not, so allocate a percentage to every form of clothing you need to buy.
Aim for quality not quantity. Beware of very cheap clothing that simply gets worn out before you’ve worn it a few times – flimsy shirts that begin to bag and stain after a couple of wearings are not a bargain. A good quality cotton or poly-cotton shirt will last several years and can take hard washing and still look good – it’s a much better bargain than a cheap top that falls apart. Equally, try to stay way from knock-off imitations because (a) they tend to look cheaper as they generally copy a design and maybe its logo but not the quality and (b) who are you fooling? Anybody who knows you has a pretty good idea if you can really afford Armani suits or not.
Avoid posh shops and boutiques when purchasing, but use them when deciding what to buy – look at the brand name fashions in store and then go home and shop online, spotting the same trends for a fraction of the price. Also, check out the clearance offers when shopping online, discontinued items can be up 50-75% lower than the original price.
Mix and match. You can team T-shirts with blazers and shirts with cardigans to extend your wardrobe by giving your clothes a new look. You can use accessories to ring the changes too – invest in some cheap belts and gloves and hats that you can use to make your base outfit look completely different.
The coldest winter in recent history is all but behind us, and an uncertain spring looms ahead, so how can you dress to be smart, warm and comfortable?
Begin by replacing heavy sweaters and the kind of scarf that you mum knitted for you with something a little more stylish – both give you a rotund appearance that is less than flattering and don’t really allow for layering. Instead, invest in some long-sleeved T-shirts that can be worn with slim-line jackets and the new lightweight scarves that add warmth without bulk – because they are so much lighter, these scarves are still comfortable to wear in spring, especially with a sleeveless fleece. Go for hats, scarves and gloves that tone with each other, rather than a matching set, which is a little old fashioned – a pale blue hat with navy gloves and a blue and grey scarf gives the right impression without over co-ordination.
Vests are great items to layer, and can be worn over or under long sleeved T-shirts or short sleeved ones to add warmth without making you look fat. As the summer approaches, reduce your layers to a polo-shirt under a fleece or if the weather is so cold as to need long sleeves, try a sweatshirt with a knotted scarf around your neck.
Trousers for the year ahead are likely to be straight cut and often worn, by women, tucked into boots well into the spring. If you’re wearing a layered top look, stick to smart black trousers that don’t distract the eye from the complexity of the garments on your upper body.
Classic sweatshirts and polo-shirts combine to make versatile casual clothing options if your want to look good on a small income.
Worn alone a classic plain sweatshirt looks neutral and is good for almost all occasions, but you can team it with a bright T-shirt or a polo-shirt layered over the top for colder weather or to offer a contrasting appearance that is more casual.
Both polo shirts and sweatshirts can be worn with casual jackets which gives a sporty appearance or with jeans or shorts to offer a more relaxed impression. A sweatshirt is also a great accessory to tie around your shoulders or waist if you feel the weather might change and you don’t want to carry a jacket.
For men, it’s easy to choose two colours around which to base your wardrobe, such as blue and beige or black and white meaning that you can combine a white zipped hoodie with black trousers, jeans, shorts and chinos to give a range of clothing choices from semi-formal to totally casual. For women, more choice of colour is better, but picking a base colour such as navy blue around which to coordinate your clothing allows you to be sure that all your T-shirts, vests and camisoles work with all the clothing that you wear on your lower body. Smaller items, usually called clothing accessories, such as vests, belts and hats can be purchased in contrasting colours to offer variety.
Christmas now means taking more care with your appearance – your favourite T-shirt might be something you can get away with wearing as you unwrap presents in the morning, but by lunchtime you need to be dressing smart-casual, especially if you’re entertaining guests. Aim for a polo-shirt with your new Christmas scarf over the top if you’re male, or for women, a long sleeved T-shirt with a shrug over the top.
The basic rule is to make a bit more effort that you usually would but not to get carried away unless there is actually a formal event (lunch with people from outside the family, drinks party etc) planned.
For trips to the pub, or out to make snowmen, choose a sleeveless fleece that allows you to move easily without losing temperature. Because winter is a grey time, choose bright colours for outdoor wear: red, bright blue or pink are ideal, but stay away from yellow if you’re a bit hungover as alcohol can make the skin yellower and the whites of the eyes somewhat tea coloured and yellow clothing simply emphasises this. A hat and scarf help to keep you warm and can add a colour contrast to your jacket or fleece so that you don’t lose your fashion cachet when you move into outdoor wear.
There was a time when it was unfashionable to wear hats. Through the 1970s and 1980s, for some reason, men thought hats were unmasculine. Fortunately this weird behaviour has now changed and men wear both summer and winter hats. A hat that keeps your head warm in winter is important to your health and there is a wide range to choose from, the baseball cap, the hood of a hoodie, a pull-on beanie etc. Any of them will help insulate you from the winter weather.
Gloves are important if you’re going to be outdoors because they help reduce heat loss from the body but also because chilled hands do not function well. Canadian police estimate that a third of winter accidents while driving happen because the driver has cold hands and thus loses control of the wheel or over or underestimates their actions. Fleece gloves keep the hands extra warm in winter and come in a range of colours.
Scarves are not just a way of keeping your neck and chest warm, they make a fashion statement too. A winter scarf can be the easiest way to perk up a tired looking winter coat and having several in different colours allows you to match your mood to your outer clothing without having to invest in several coats or jackets.
This winter the weather has been weird: floods and gales, thunderstorms and torrential rain, and to look good in such extreme weather conditions can be difficult. The most common problems are twofold – the amount of clothing you need to wear to keep warm makes you look like a tubby, even if you’re not, and the outer clothing that keeps you dry can look like a plastic sack. Here’s how to dress for the weather and still look stylish.
1. Begin by choosing good socks and underwear – if you have warm clothing on your feet and backside, you can cut out at least one outer layer, this keeps your silhouette slimmer.
2. Sticking to the rule, light for height and low below means that you wear dark colours below the waist and lighter ones above – this suits both men and women as it makes you look slimmer from the waist down than from the waist up, which is the effect we all want to achieve! Do this by ensuring your trousers are a couple of shades darker than your jacket or hoodie. Bright white is a great colour for a jacket, sweatshirt or hoodie, especially when teamed with a contrasting scarf in something like green, grey or yellow to focus attention on the vertical line it creates against the pale background.
3. Always choose a fleece jacket or a sleeveless fleece if you want to be warm without adding bulk to your appearance – core body temperature determines if you feel toasty or shivery, so having something that keeps the chest and back insulated means you’ll feel warm without looking chunky.
4. Wear a hat – the 10% of body heat we lose through our heads can make us feel very cold, so a hat can mean you don’t need an extra layer on your upper body.
As the old advertising slogan has it, hats help. And especially in winter a hat helps you look better and actually feel better.
The old myth that most body heat is lost through the head is actually untrue – it dates back to research carried out by the US military in the 1950s when volunteers were dressed in Arctic survival suits and exposed to bitterly cold conditions. Because it was the only part of their bodies left uncovered, most of the heat did leave the head, but if they’d been dressed in shorts, only around 10% of the heat would have left the body through the head because the large area of exposed skin across the rest of the body would have caused higher heat loss.
However we do lose between 7 – 55% of body heat through our heads and a hat can prevent virtually all of that loss. It also stops some of the other effects of winter, such as cold ears which can lead to earache and hats with brims or bills can reduce the way that cold makes the eyes water, which makes us both look and feel miserable.
So it’s true is that a hat allows us to feel better in cold weather. It also protects the brain from getting chilled, which can make us feel sluggish, which is why sometimes after going out in cold weather we feel extremely drowsy and stupid, and hats can even cut down on the incidence of sinus headaches caused by inhaling cold air as hats with a brim create a micro-climate that means the warm air we breathe out doesn’t disperse so quickly so it mixes with the colder air and thus stops the sinuses starting to ache through frigid air entering them.
One of the commonest and saddest sights of summer is the older person, male or female, who seems to have lost the plot, clothing-wise. They come in two main forms:
The giver-up – this is a person who’s lost track of clothing nuances and just gone for comfort. From the sandals (worn with thick white socks) through to the jogging pants and the saggy, baggy cotton top, they look as if they dressed in the dark, from a charity shop reject bag.
The trendy is the opposite – they’ve bought the most fashionable clothes they can find, suitable or not, and they appear in back to front baseball caps, brand trainers, low-slung jeans and a high-end label T-shirt, often bearing a message they don’t understand and wouldn’t appreciate if they did!
So how can an older person dress both comfortably and attractively in summer casual clothing?
First – pick a style. If you’re going for casual, make sure that everything you’re wearing is clean and neat and roughly colour co-ordinating: that means you don’t wear blue, purple, pink and green with a red baseball cap because it all ‘looks cheerful’ – take a hint from fashion magazines and TV adverts: there are colours that are in and those that are out, try to stick to the ones that are in.
Second – make sure your clothing fits. Our shape changes as we age and men with belts around their chests and women with boobs that hang to their waists just look awful. Good undergarments help keep everything in place, but double-check, before you leave home, that your waistline is roughly round your waist – low-slung trousers and midriff exposing tops are definitely best left to the teens and twenties.
Third – keep it simple. T-shirts and polo-shirts are classic in style and shape and never look either horribly old-fashioned or ridiculously up to date.
Stick to these simple rules and you’ll always look smart, attractive and intelligently dressed, even if you’re wearing casual clothing.
Whether you’re headed Woodstock, Big Green, Glasto or Wychwood, doing Leeds, Bath or Cornbury or even heading for Savannah, here’s what you need to do to look right, and feel right, in tentland.
Dress from the top down or the ground up
When aiming to look good at a festival think top to bottom or bottom to top;. There are three things you can wear on your feet: trainers, Wellington boots or flip flops and three things you can wear on your head: a baseball cap, a beanie hat or a sunhat. Anything else, at either extreme, will look very dodgy. If you’re wearing trainers, any of the hats is acceptable. If you’re wearing flip-flops you can wear the baseball cap or the sunhat, if you’re wearing Wellies, you can only wear the beanie. In between is easy once you sort the head and foot rule out. Jeans and polo-shirts can be worn with any footwear, T-shirts can be worn with trainers and flip flops and hoodies and woolly jumpers can only be worn with Wellingtons. See? Easy.
Festival High Fashion
If you want people to applaud you as a festival belle, then you’ve got to lok better than right, you’ve got to look great: for women, this year, it means form fitting T-shirts tucked into fitted shorts, with or without thick opaque tights, depending on the weather conditions. Nothing floppy works, style-wise, this year.
Born to Fest?
Jes Cartner Morley, writing in the Guardian says ‘Neither tents nor wellies should have flowers on them’ but actually I think she’s wrong. Her point is that to fit in, you should look as if you grew up going to Glasto and honed your teenage rebellions on the Rock Ness grass, but I reckon that today’s festivalgoers aren’t that insecure – they don’t care if your Mum and Dad used to hang with The Kinks or not, they just want to have a good time, so if flowers are what you want to sport, sport ‘em!
One thing that shouldn’t be overdone is the grunge look – despite what people say, you can wear white (but only on the first day you arrive, when a white hoodie with a front pocket looks great and helps you file all your tent pegs and other bits and bobs while you get settled in) and the mud looks just as good (or bad) on white clothing as any other colour, but torn T-shirts and jeans and grimy cut-off denims are just not good festival wear. A smart pair of cargo shorts looks much better and it just as handy for carrying things like toilet paper around!
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