Of Band-Wagons and the City

I've been staying away from my favourite shops for the past few weeks, partly because I've been busy doing other things, partly because the hoards of tourists drive me crazy in the summer and partly because I've been trying to save money for my impending trip to New York. But today, I went for a little wander and these are some of the things that caught my attention.

Banana Republic's Mad Men collection. I've known about this for a while but today was the first time I'd seen the clothes in the flesh, as it were. I had assumed that the clothes in this collection probably wouldn't tempt me; much as I love the clothes on Mad Men, most of the colours don't flatter my skintone and most of the cuts don't flatter my shape. This was indeed the case. Some of the clothes come in petite sizes but many of the small sizes had already been taken, making some of the dresses look more shapeless than they perhaps were. It looks like I'll have to give the collection a miss and hope that season five of the show comes back soon!

On the subject of jumping on band-wagons, Links of London appears to be celebrating the International Year of Chemistry, of all things, with its "chemistry of friendship" collection (only marginally better than Clearasil's "science of looking awesome"). I have to write press releases about all areas of science and I've always said that biology's mostly OK, physics is mostly hard and chemistry is mostly boring. I've no idea what the chemical structure they've drawn is supposed to be (and if they've got it right, although J. Crew has already set the precedent for poor chemistry this season) or whether the blue crystals in the jewellery have been grown from the turquoise solution in the flask. Moving on...

Spotted on Carnaby Street, part one. This is my kind of QR code, at least in terms of its colours. I didn't scan the code but I assume it takes you to the website for Carnaby Street (or, apparently, now the 12 streets of Carnaby; I didn't know inflation was that bad).

Spotted on Carnaby Street, part two. The other side of the board had an Oscar Wilde quotation about bigamy and monogamy and how they both involved one wife too many. I do like to see a witty hair salon, although London really can't compete with Stockholm when it comes to this. As I'm not male and I don't like having my hair cut, I'm not really the target audience of this board, but I think it would probably persuade me at least to take a second look.

On my way home, I also paid a visit to Anthropologie, for the first time in weeks but luckily, the only things that tempted me were the gorgeous scented candles (mmm, angel food cake or vanilla fig...) and I decided to wait until NYC even for them.