Chez Spud

Oh no. Shall we all take a moment and remember those good old bad old days when our lipstick was too bright, we wore electric blue mascara, we had big hair and even bigger shoulder pads? Well don’t be getting too nostalgic about it because shoulder pads are BACK. And not in a retrotastic, vintagey kind of way…oh no, this is not a trend for the kool kids…they are back in a Power Dressing/Dynasty kind of way.

I know this because I read it in the Financial Times so it must be true. Although I will admit that the FT probably isn’t too well known for having its finger on the pulse of fashion…but read it here ‘Recession spurs the rise of the ‘lipstick entrepreneurs”. It’s a fairly interesting article about the increase in women starting their own businesses, partly due to the rise in redundancies but also a more general shift in the way that we are all choosing to work. Personally I think ‘lipstick entrepreneur’ is a ghastly term, is it me or does it have slightly sneery slightly sexist overtones? But I digress…

Anyway, scroll down right to the bottom of the article and there’s a little nugget about power dressing. I bet Mr Brian Groom (Business and Employment Editor for the FT) never thought he’d see the day when he was writing about power dressing. Apparently those lipstick entrepreneurs  aren’t plonked at their kitchen tables running their global empires in their jammies…they’re dressing up for the occasion and dressing up in 2009 means “power shoulders”.

But, get this, as well as buying jackets with power shoulders already built in and ready to intimidate…those thrifty lipstick entrepreneurs are doing it themselves. To the extent that John Lewis have SOLD OUT of all shoulder pads in all of their stores across the UK, as women have been panic buying to “stack them vertically or horizontally in anything from cashmere sweaters to last year’s jackets”. What madness is this? Has sexual equality made such little progress in the last 20 years that we still feel like we need to bolster our confidence by bolstering our shoulders, whether it be ‘vertically or horizontally’? Sheesh, soon we’ll all be doing our colours again too…

Naturally some old fashioned female rivalry has crept in. Not content with their ‘power shoulders’, some lookatmelookatme types are going for ‘extreme shoulders’….”Extreme shoulders, which some shoppers are opting for, can take up to four shoulder pads each side and build a 2x2in stack for maximum boardroom confidence,” said Jo Hooper, head of womenswear buying [at John Lewis].

It’s hard to know which is more comical: the mental image of “extreme shoulders” or the rather tragic belief that big fat shoulders = “maximum boardroom confidence”, whatever the hell that means. I would imagine that the board will submit to whatever Ms Extreme Shouldered Lipstick Entrepreneur wants for fear of personal injury,”Arggggh….it’s ok….it’s ok….here take whatever it is that you want…just…don’t…shoulder me…OK?”

Either that or they’re too busy pissing themselves laughing.

Some Lipstick Entrepreneurs earlier today

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