Scent To Try Us?

It seems celebrity is merely the means to an end. Forget the talent -or distinct lack thereof -  that first propelled you to fame, it’s all about becoming a money-spinning überbrand and milking it like cash cow Katie Price who is unleashing yet another perfume aimed at Poundland princesses. Now, I totally get why a bloke might fancy firing into someone who smells of Hilary Duff, Kate Moss or J-Lo, hotties with pongs to peddle, but the Pricey don’t seem righty! Anyhow, from October 25th, you too can douse yourself in Precious Love - ‘a tribute to eternal love’, something she’d know all about as Peter Andre - who, stealing a march, launches Mysterious Girl For Women (huh?) tomorrow - will tell you. The latest Jordan juice comes in ‘a bottle that represents her life’ (cheap? plastic? see-through?) ‘with a frosted centre’ (you don’t say!) and ‘topped with her signature diamond cr**’..or was that ‘cap’? Victoria; Paris; Coleen; Chanelle Hayes: what next? L by Maureen from Driving School? Night Gusset by Amy Wino? Chip and Chavvi di Katona? `Seriously wrongpong.

Fashioniseateries

Fashionistas rejoice! Buoyed by the success of a Vogue Café, GQ Bar and Tatler Club in Moscow - a dump formerly so starved of fashion outlets, its grateful bling-crazy citizens' sartorial choices make Katie Price look like Grace Kelly by comparison -  publishers, Condé Nast, are reportedly looking at a global roll out for their licensed concept. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there once a Vogue Cafe where now stands Itsu, in the same Hanover Square building as the publisher’s London HQ?  No matter, fashion exists on a diet of regurgitated trends, so bring it on again, boys!. To the marketing wallahs at Condé N, it seems restaurants are ‘a natural way to extend our brand’: this, despite my supposition that the spaghetti-thin noodles featured in their titles' pages exist on a diet of Evian, Marlboro Lights and gossip and that US Vogue’s pencil-like bobbed boss, Anna Wintour, would surely never resort to anything as common as eating out in public. Over a decade after New York and London’s Fashion Cafés sank like soufflés, despite the best efforts of Naomi, Claudia and Elle, the world has become one vast style-obsessed global village. The label-loving diners of Luton, Lanark and Llanelli are surely clamouring to shell out on fashionable suppers of three steamed edamame beans and half an egg-white omelette. As for those GQ bars, ‘honey, crème de menthe? With your complexion?’ Divine! Let’s hope the profits amount to more than a big fat size zero.  

Hollywood(en) Remakes

Most Americans never venture abroad. In fact, very few even have passports. After all, didn't they move the Eiffel Tower and  the pyramids of E-Jipt to Vegas? Could such insularity explain Yankee antipathy towards non-English language films, manna to studios that repackage world cinema for Mikey and Miley Mall-Rat’s consumption? But why do so many slightly more mondaine Brits ('yeh we've been to Benidorm, innit?') also lap up Hollywood(en) retreads? The ensuing car crash when Tim Story hijacked Jean-Luc Besson’s Taxi; Richard Gere’s vague turn as nouvelle vague icon Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless; the leaden Vanilla Sky: remakes rarely shine. Will David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo really improve on the enthralling (subtitled) original? I admit, Brits occasionally play their part in cooking up a Stateside turkey. Mercifully, Lina Wertmüller as imagined by Guy Ritchie (and ‘star’ Madge) was deservedly Swept Away at the box office. The latest such Hollywood horror in cinemas is Francis Veber’s appetising French comedy, Le Dîner de Cons, regurgitated as Dinner For Schmucks. If you’re schmuck enough to fork out on indigestible tripe, go armed with Rennies - that's Pepto Bismol, or near enough, to my American friends.

FaFoBas

To fill their pages, gossip mags have created a monster: the FaFoBa. That’s those Famous For B***** all, basically (see also ‘nonebrities’). Cretinous reality show losers; witless Wags; famous parents' in-ya-face offspring with zilch talent (you know who you are P, P & K)| and myriad desperate red carpet cockroaches that would attend the opening of bowels: such is the Z list fodder whose only press mention would otherwise be a three line appearance in their local rag’s death notices. Quoted recently in Grazia, voici dress-up dolly Kim (pictured), of US reality-TV Über-FaFoBas, The Kardashian sisters whose 4.7 million followers on Twitter, if rounded up and culled, would not be missed.  ‘Our family has baggage, but like Louis Vuitton baggage you always want it.’ She has a point. It seems Britain has grown an insatiable appetite for the minutiae of the planet’s most pointless baggages’ lives. Inevitably, the bit we relish most is when, their fifteen minutes up, Kim and her like are dumped in the lost celebrity office along with their LV trunks. Call it FaFobafreude.

Slick Photography?

On the pristine sands of The Hamptons, St Tropez and Sardinia this summer, debate has raged among the fashionable beau peeps (rhymes with…) about photographer Steven Meisel’s recent work for Italian Vogue. Is his Water and Oil shoot art as political commentary or just sensationalism in very poor taste? Basically, the snapper’s idea was to use a beautiful model juxtaposed against an approximation of the ravaged American shoreline - a metaphor for environmental rape, perhaps? If endless imagery of stricken avian life struggling hopelessly for survival didn’t resonate with Voguettes, the sight of Kirsten Macmenamy, clad in ludicrously expensive couture smeared in nasty gunk that even the best dry cleaner would not shift, surely would? I’m not saying all fashionistas are shallower than the polluted waters lapping the Gulf of Mexico’s shores, but when one of their feather-brained number tells me - without a hint of irony - that ‘this season’s palette of oil and tar and petrol blue is to die for,’ you have to wonder which bird is the most tragic.   

Can't (cake) stand 'em!

I can't believe people still insist on offering me a vulgar, upstart import that is way past its sell-by date. It's as if I should be somehow grateful and wowed. Now we all know that what America pigs out on today, Britain troughs tomorrow: Krispy Kreme donuts (bleech!), Oreos (I mean why would you, FFS, and do you actually know anyone who'd go there?) but, even people of hitherto irreproachable bon gout, it seems, can't resist the dubious charms of the ubiquitous cupcake. Vile! No catered event or humble tea room is complete without these icky fatty buns; which is how your tramp stamp ass will end up if you keep gobbling ‘em like a gavage-crazy goose with a death wish on a Dordogne foie gras farm, muffin top! A ubiquitous TV presence (Come Dine With Me, Four Weddings, countless sleb chefs and Lord Icing-Sugar’s Junior Apprentices have all pimped them). Had Mary Queen Of Shops insisted the old bat who ran that half-baked Raynes Park bakery that turned into a right nightMary for the retail guru in Ms Portas's last series sell nothing but cupcakes, the place would be raking in hundreds and thousands. But that's suburban taste for ya. A dozen jumped-up fairy cakes gussied up in pearls and feathers with my name in puce piping as a birthday present? Because I’m called Princess and I’m four today? Gimme the Marks and Sparks socks every time! When Metro's resident foodie, Marina O’Loughlin, states ‘I want my tastebuds back for something entirely more sensible... like cheese’, trust me, a trend is over.

Must-Have Gadgets

Can’t wait to get your hands on the new iPad? Not me. Now, I am a big Mac fan - the computers, not the burgers - but isn’t there such a thing as too much technology? Still struggling to get my noggin around the latest ‘how-did-we-ever-live-without-that?’ piece of ‘essential’ hardware I’ve been suckered into buying, up pops another gizmo, without which, excommunication from the modern world is surely imminent. Geeks will snigger at such naiveté, but what exactly does Apple’s latest ‘must-have’ do that a phone/ laptop/ iPod/ paper and pen can’t? Wash the car? Iron shirts? My cupboards are crammed with ‘the next big thing’:  Betamax player, Sony Watchman, Psion organiser, a robot vacuum cleaner and the combination calculator/ cigarette lighter (yes, really!) that seemed somehow indispensable after a sake-soaked lunch in Tokyo. iPad? iPass.

World Cup Songs

More contemptible than any cynical Argie tackle, isn’t it time World Cup songs were shown the red card? Mercifully, England - presumably distracted by Embrace’s World At Your Feet and before that, woeful tripe from Ant & Dec and The Spice Girls - have no ditty this year, the players advised to focus on their game - and, boy, do they need to, Fabio! Thierry Henry may have done us all a favour, albeit inadvertently; with Ireland dumped out, there can be no reprise of 1990’s Give It A Lash Jack, while fellow failures, Scotland, are denied the chance to bludgeon us with the caber toss that was Ally’s Tartan Army. Official anthems fare no better; witness well-know er, South African Shakira’s 2010 effort.  With lame lyrics such as ‘When you fall, get up, oh oh. And if you fall, get up. oh oh..’ it’s entitled Waka Waka. Nuff said!

Your Big Gay Day

For fash-pash lesbians about to enter a civil partnership, the question is what frock (or not) to rock on your big gay day? With such ceremonies still a fairly new trend, no ground rules exist. On her fashioneditoratlarge blog, it’s a dilemma currently exercising Grazia’s Mel Rickey, soon to make an honest woman, so to speak, of the similarly stylish Mary (Queen of Shops) Portas. The butch/ femme cliché of trouser suit and tulle meringue - as favoured, respectively, by Ellen Degeneres and Portia di Rossi -  cuts no ice with Mel and, despite heavy rotation on the Spring catwalks, I’m guessing matching denim dungarees mightn’t look so hot when the Rickey-Portas’s revisit their wedding album circa 2020. For gay guys, it’s an equally difficult call: are bare torsos, leather chaps and matching tattoos ever what to wear when being whisked up the aisle?

Propagreenda

Hot on the heels of product placement, now deemed suitable for British TV viewers’ consumption, a new subliminal soft sell from America is set to appear on our screens. Plot points such as a character in Law and Order who switches to energy-saving light-bulbs are being increasingly worked into the narrative as networks attempt to attract advertisers out to court the eco-aware buck. It’s a phenomenon that goes by the distinctly Orwellain sounding title of ‘behaviour placement’ although I prefer ‘propagreenda’. Cynical marketing ploy or nay, anything that helps preserve the planet can’t be all bad. How will it translate here? Could The Bill, recently axed, be recycled with bobbies in hand-me-down vintage uniforms riding tandems rather than tearing around in gas guzzler cars? They could rebrand it as Dixon of Dock ahem, Green.