Let’s Face It, There’s Always Something Else To Shop For, And It’s Target Time

I don’t know about you, but I have a had to institute a moratorium on spending on spring clothing and accessories.  I have no reasonable excuse for buying anything else.  So, trying to steer clear of my favorite websites, I thought it was time to check out the Shops at Target.  Without question, my favorite is the Privet House shop (I’m not a dog owner, and after my dear friend was awoken on Mother’s Day by a poop covered dog who had been sick in his crate the night before and let out by a mischievous five year old, I have no interest in becoming one — so I have an aversion to the Polka Dog Bakery shop without even checking it out so it could be just lovely but I wouldn’t know).  The Webster shop is a little preppy for my taste, but there is some nice merchandise if you go for that kind of thing.

Not surprisingly, many of the Privet House items have sold out, but there are still some cute pieces left.  The dishes, napkins and glasses are very pretty.  Admittedly, at this point nice melamine dishes are a dime a dozen, except that they aren’t remotely a dime a dozen so the Target prices for these dishes makes them pretty hard to resist.  $15.99 for a set of four dinner plates isn’t half bad given that comparable French Bull melamine dishes, while beautiful, retail for  $11.00 each.  The bad news is out of four styles of printed melamine dinner plates, only one is still available online.  Truth be told, it’s my favorite of the four.

Privet House at Target Brown Toile Dinner Plates

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

An Assortment Of Mints Because Everyone Loves Style From The Stars

Stylemint.  Shoemint.  Jewelmint.  And now Homemint.  Enough already.

T-shirts designed by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

Pocket Sized Art For All

For several years we received, as Christmas gifts from my in-laws, post card sized images by various artists.  They bought the postcards each year at RCA Secret, an exhibition and sale put on by the Royal College of Art in London.  ”Secret” refers to the fact that in the exhibition the postcards are displayed anonymously.  The name of the artist who drew the image on each card is written on the verso, so that it remains unknown until the card has been purchased.  It’s a little bit like The Voice  for the art world, although in this case many of the artists participating are already recognized and established figures.  Still, it can be a lot of fun to view the exhibition, and even more to buy a postcard or two, for a very reasonable price, purely because you respond to the image, and only later to attach a name to that image.  (You can see the postcards from the November 2011 edition of the RCA show here – they’re really fun!)

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

It’s On Your Face Folks, So Make Sure It’s The Look You Want

So today I finally had to break down and buy a new phone.  I had an iPhone 3S.  I have no idea when I got it.  Years ago.  But lately it has decided that it’s not terribly interested in connecting anymore.  Anything that doesn’t require an internet connection — great!  Making calls — no so great.  Texting — good luck.  Since the new phone, a 4S, is a different shape from my old phone, buying a new phone meant suddenly needing to buy a new case as well.  (In fact, buying a new phone seems to cost at least $100 in hidden fees in top of the $199 it claims it’s going to cost you if you renew your contract, but that’s another conversation altogether.)  And buying a new case got me to thinking about how significant a choice that has become.  The phone, after all, spends an enormous amount of time hanging out next to your face, so selection of a case represents an important opportunity to make an aesthetic statement about your identity.

We have AT&T — which may have great service in other parts of the country but is really an inexplicably stupid choice in this corner of the northeast since the coverage and service on Verizon are infinitely better, and yet, it’s what we have — so my experience of looking at cases while purchasing the phone itself is specific to the AT&T store.  I have no idea what they do or don’t offer, for example, in the Verizon store.  But in the AT&T store, any sales person doing the job right will try to sell you a case when you’re buying the phone.  The thought of walking out of the AT&T store and dropping that brand new iPhone without a case onto the ground and shattering it before getting around to purchasing Apple Care gives me an anxiety attack.  The offerings in the store, however, seem to be very pretty but simple cases in various colors that start at $35, a clear plastic protective sticker for the front and back of the phone for $30 (yeah, $30), or a screen protector for $20.  Which, in this day and age, is all just silliness.

There are a lot of truly great covers out there if you want your phone to have some personality, but if you’re less choosy, it really only needs to cost a few dollars on Amazon.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

This Spring Give Your Kitchen A White Out

Say what you will about her, but I tell you, my girl Martha always comes through.  Whatever else you may think, there’s no denying the girl knows how to do things right (or how to get someone else to do things for you … but still right).  My new obsession in kitchen style is whiteware.  It seems to me that one major advantage of adorning your kitchen with serving pieces, bowls, vases, out of porcelain, glass, white glass and crystal (or any subset thereof) is that in addition to looking clean, sleek and classy, chances are pretty good that whatever the decor in your kitchen right now, the new items will work with it, so you don’t have to go throwing away and replacing everything right away.  You can replace your possessions slowly over time, and if the trend changes before you finish replacing everything, chances are your whiteware or glassware will still work pretty well with whatever the new fad is.  After all, style is important, but versatility can be helpful.

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

Think Of What You’ll Do With All Of The Money You Save

Some hopeful signs out there seem to be suggesting that plastic surgery – at least the highly invasive kind – might be falling out of favor.  I know, that may be a fabrication on my part, but I’m going to cling to the fantasy for a bit and see if it sticks, so please don’t burst my bubble just yet.  People’s desire to perfect their physical appearances is not remotely  waning.  My evidence to support the general trend away from plastic surgery, therefore, is the development of new and significantly less invasive techniques for improving your appearance.

Right now, I have to say that it looks like Japan has cornered the market.  One popular item is the Hana Twin Nose.  Check it out.  Absolutely no surgery, and you only have to wear this thing for 20 minutes a day in order for it to work.  Slip the clip into your nostrils so that the supports on either side can push up the bones resulting in a straighter, less round nose.

Hana Tsun Nose Straightener

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

All The Cool Kids Report For Art Class

Generally I find the aesthetics of a product almost more important than the product itself.  So you’ve got to appreciate a clever and visually engaging concept regardless of whether the product is a hit or a miss.  The Seoul, Korea, based beauty label Too Cool For School is one of the cutest concepts I’ve seen in a while.

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

Art For Sale On The Interweb … Something For Everyone

The following is a list of five art objects currently available online that you should buy if they are within your budget — do what you want, but I would certainly buy them were they within my budget.

Artspace has got to be one of my absolute favorite places on the internet.  Whenever I am left thinking that maybe the interweb was not such a good idea after all, I remember Artspace, it takes me to my happy place, and all is right with the world.  All five of the following images are available to purchase on Artspace at a wide variety of price points.

1.

This goes without saying … at risk of sounding repetitive, I love this man.  That fact that it is possible to go online and purchase a numbered Murakami print for a large but not genuinely preposterous sum never ceases to amaze me.

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

Your Feet Have Never Had It So Good

Of no interest to more philosophical types, but of the utmost importance to shoe addicts, there are a lot of exciting developments on the shoe front.  The trends in shoes seem to be particularly fun for this spring anyway (I know I’m sounding like a bit of a fluff here, but I’m telling you, if you’re obsessed with shoes, this is nirvana) with even brighter colors, and more floral prints and patent leather than usual.  So it is perfect timing for some new players to enter the shoe market.

In case you forgot, the Aldo Rise for Preen, Libertine, Mark Fast and J.W. Anderson collections arrive in Aldo stores and online tomorrow.  All of the styles are precariously high, but a pair of the Preen Giffee just arrived on my doorstep yesterday and the shoes are surprisingly comfortable.

Preen for ALDO Rise

Read the rest of this entry »

share this

This Spring Put Your Best Foot Forward

This is going to sound like bitching.  And it’s not meant to be – honestly – because it doesn’t really matter in the end.  As addicted as I may be to shopping, I desperately need outside controls, so when something gets in the way of my throwing away money, it’s just as well.  As seriously as I might take fashion, I know that the world doesn’t rise and fall over one pair of shoes.  What aggravates the hell out of me is when large scale businesses can’t figure out how to operate in an organized manner.  Certain issues just shouldn’t be that hard.

I have been looking forward to the new Aldo Rise shoe collections arriving at ASOS.com for some time now (see my January 24 post on Affordable Designer Capsule Collections).  It has been available through Selfridges, but they don’t ship to the US.  The Aldo Rise website states quite clearly that the shoes will be available on ASOS (which does ship to the United States) on February 15.  They weren’t.  The shoes appeared slowly but surely on the site throughout the course of the day on February 16.  In the morning (US time, so later than that in London) four styles were showing up on the site.  By afternoon there were more, but if you did a normal search for them, you were likely to find most of them.  I found that if I googled “Aldo Rise ASOS Libertine” I could get to the page with the shoes I was looking for but could in no discernible way access from within the ASOS site.  Finally, by Thursday night they were all there.  As I say, no big deal, but why not just say that some of the shoes will start to be available on ASOS around February 15 — or something — or else actually have all of the shoes up on February 15?  This plan has been in the works for some time.  It’s not like the two companies couldn’t see it coming.  Is it really that hard to get the information right?  It cracked me up that as of last night, as February 15 drew to a close, every site affiliated with Aldo Rise still stated that the shoes would be available on ASOS.com February 15.  There’s no one in the office there that checks on and corrects these things?

The other really big miss — and this is the one that’s getting in the way of my buying the shoes — is the pricing.  The Aldo Rise website lists pricing for all of the shoes in both pounds and dollars — they are priced at either $175/£135 or $155/£125.  When I initially saw the dollar pricing a month ago I was surprised, since it is below what has been the exchange rate.  As of the 16th, £135 would be roughly $213 and £125 would be $197.  But, ha, fooled ya, on ASOS.com the dollar pricing to order these shoes from the United States is $241.72 and $223.81 respectively.  So my questions are a) why put the wrong price on the Aldo Rise website (is this going to be the price when the shoes arrive in Aldo stores on March?  was it the price given the exchange rate at the time that someone typed up the web page?  if either of the aforementioned, could they really not have been clearer about it?)? and b) why is the dollar price on ASOS.com notably higher than that dictated by the exchange rate?  Is it to compensate for shipping costs since ASOS provides free shipping to the US?  I understand why they would handle it that way, but it seems pretty slimy to me.  The inconsistencies are of very little consequence, but why be sloppy?

I was so excited for the shoes in large part as consolation for the fact that I was sure I wasn’t going to succeed in getting the Mary Katrantzou pieces I wanted.  And shoes are kind of a nice source of solace anyway when you find yourself in the midst of oh-my-god-it’s-february-and-I’m-still-overeating-from-the-holidays-will-I-ever-fit-into-anything-cute-again.  The good news is that the trend for this spring seems to be in really fun and brightly colored shoes, so cute shoes are pretty easy to find.  If you can’t afford to go designer, here are some fun alternatives.  This is one instance in which I would say, get three really fun pairs of shoes rather than the designer ones — it will cost you less money anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

share this