My Fabulous Fe-males (Part 2)

As I’d looked back at half the amazing ladies featured in my posts last month, I figured it only seemed fair to look back at the rest of them this month – these ladies are just as amazing.

Maxine Peake

“I develop more respect for this lady every time I see her on telly or read about something she’s done”

Aside from continuing to be generally brilliant, Maxine Peake recently wrote and starred in another radio drama, My Dad Keith. It’s the story of a woman who loves drumming and sets out, with her Grandad’s help, to find out who her father is. The play aired on Radio 4 on November 28th and gave Mike Joyce, the drummer from The Smiths, his first acting role.

Perhaps even more brilliantly, however, she was recently quoted by the London Evening Standard as saying the following when asked about her continual casting in gritty dramas: “I thought maybe I would like to do something darker for a change and I got caught in that world. I want to do something ridiculously silly next year.”* Hurrah for silliness, I say!

Bridget Jones

“She was the first character I saw who taught me that it’s ok to be me, neuroses and all”

Ok, I’m going to take this opportunity to briefly say something about the actress who played Bridget in the movies, Renee Zellweger. For anybody who hasn’t seen the recent fuss in the press, Ms Zellweger went to an event a couple of months ago looking a little different. This resulted in a media frenzy picking apart what work she may or may not have had done to her face, with just about every practicing plastic surgeon in the western world chipping in with their professional opinion.

This made me very sad, Fe-liners. Renee Zellweger has brought many beloved characters to life, Bridget included, and she has done so with wonderful care, attention, and warmth. So the fact that the press are gleefully picking over her every feature as though she were a faded waxwork without any other value seems very wrong to me. The way I see it, it really doesn’t matter if she looks different (regardless of the reason) because it doesn’t change who she is or how much talent she has.

Renee’s comment on it all: “Perhaps I look different. Who doesn’t as they get older? My friends say that I look peaceful. I am healthy. For a long time I wasn’t doing such a good job with that.”** If she feels healthy, peaceful, and comfortable in her skin; then surely that’s all that matters?

Anita Roddick

I do not have enough space in this post to list all the amazing projects, campaigns, and charitable works that Anita Roddick undertook during her lifetime.

Anita Roddick’s best known legacy, The Body Shop, is firmly on my list of Christmas shopping destinations. This years’ Christmas range includes Frosted Cranberry, Glazed Apple, and Vanilla Brulee. I was in my local branch this weekend and had a cheeky sniff; whether anybody I buy these products for this Christmas actually ends up with them or whether they accidently get put in my bathroom cabinet remains to be seen! On a more serious note, the reason I love giving people Body Shop products is that, while they do carry a higher price tag than other high street brands, everybody knows that they have been made ethically with everybody along the way being paid properly. I love that whoever I give them to will know that nothing and nobody has suffered as a result of their post-bath pamper – in my book, that’s a good feeling to give.

Nina Conti

“I had absolutely no idea how totally, utterly, and brilliantly hilarious she was. Not funny in a very-talented-ventriloquist-and-also-quite-amusing kinda way, but in an I’m-laughing-so-hard-I-can’t-breath kinda way”

Nina Conti enjoyed much success with her sell-out Edinburgh “work in progress” show (which she has actually just brought to London, for three dates only – the final date being this Saturday, 14th), Nina Conti is Messing Around. She has also just released a DVD Dolly Mixtures – the trailer made me giggle a lot so I thought I’d share it:

Phoebe Buffay

“Her carefree attitude to being herself regardless of what others may think is something I’m sure we’d all like to have”

As this year marks 20 years since the first episode of Friends and ten since the series finished, all anybody seems to be talking about at the moment is the possibility of a Friends reunion. Lisa Kudrow and the rest of the girls have dinner and this must be because they’re planning a reunion, couldn’t possibly just be because they worked together for ten years. Her co-star, Jennifer Aniston, flippantly remarks “I say we really wait until we’re really much older and be, just, Golden Friends. Because then we won’t have the comparison” while on The Graham Norton Show and The Independent reports “Will it happen, won’t it happen? Well, if Jennifer Aniston has anything to do with it then yes, a Friends reunion might just be on the cards.”***
Personally, I’m not sure I want to see a Friends reunion. I think the series ended well, they’d all gone their separate ways and their lives had moved on; trying to recapture the magic however many years later as though Phoebe and the rest of the gang have been sitting in Central Perk ever since we left them doesn’t quite feel right. What do you think, Fe-liners?

Kate Bush

“What is always so striking about Kate Bush, and almost certainly why she has attained the success she has, is how very different her music and performance style is to everybody else’s”

Kate Bush received The Editor’s Award at the 60th London Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her recent concerts, Before The Dawn. The more I read about these concerts, the more amazing they sound and the more gutted I am that I wasn’t one of the lucky 100,000 people who managed to get tickets in the 15 minute window before they sold out. I’ve got my fingers crossed that a DVD’s planned at some point, but for now here’s a BBC Breakfast round up following the opening night:

 

I’m looking forward to talking about more inspirational women in 2015, but until then, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas and sparkly New Year.

 

 

 

 

* The London Evening Standard
** The Telegraph
*** The Independent

Photo Credits: www.theguardian.com; Miramax Films; Photo by Rex Features (1350527r) Anita Roddick of the Body Shop; Image taken by Debs at BST in Hyde Park, 10-Jul-14; FanPop; www.theguardian.com

 

Amy’s African Adventure

While chilling at my brother’s house in Harare, Zimbabwe, at the end of one of my life’s lucky solo journeys, I had the time and space to ruminate about my past three and a half months adventure. I felt the desire to share some of its light and shade, albeit mostly light! Having followed Fe-line and being an Oxfordshire born and bred lass, I have been inspired to share my thoughts and experiences with you all … I’ve been deliberating over how to organise my monthly blogs, and I don’t really know where to start to be honest. My recent trip included visiting ten countries in East and Southern Africa. So I thought I would work backwards, dedicating each month to one of those countries – with a ‘I climbed Kilimanjaro’ special! Therefore today, I suppose I’m simply ‘setting the scene’.

I’ve been home three weeks after an experience of a lifetime. Like many people in this world (and I am a lot more fortunate than most); just when I thought my life was going swimmingly in one direction, it was turned on its head. A combination of my general personality and the cliche ‘life’s too short’ being made even more apparent to me, I thought; ‘enough is enough, I’ve got to do something’. This is a sign, an opportunity to embrace change. (NB; I am someone who has always struggled with change. I told my family I didn’t want them to mention I was leaving to go to university, until the week before I left.) I felt I had to make something of this unexpected and unwanted change. Partly my stubbornness, I’m sure, but I couldn’t let it beat me. Here was an opportunity, for something, I didn’t know what yet, but never-the-less an opportunity that I wouldn’t have had if circumstances hadn’t have gone the way they had. I’m aware I sound like a walking cliche but I thought; one has to grab life by the balls … horns… whichever, before it grabs and tramples on you. And at this point I was already somewhat ‘trampled’ upon. So personal survival instinct kicked in and I realised I had to propel my life in a new direction. Call it running away if you like, but I decided to go back to Africa. (I’d just like to mention here, and it’s a whole other story, but I fell in love with Africa after spending three months in Zimbabwe at the end of last year volunteering for a charity; working at an orphanage, village school, old people’s home, AIDS garden projects and walking lions.)

My new plan was to climb Kilimanjaro for the Kenyan charity S.A.F.E and tour a part of Africa on a large yellow overland truck for 83 days. But as I’ve decided to write backwards in time, I will share how I’m feeling now. I’ve had a difficult couple of weeks struggling, to my surprise, with reverse culture shock, or ‘re-entry’ as my wonderful coach calls it. A feeling of displacement: not belonging, either here nor there. Wanting to be back in another world where I can truly be myself and feel free. So I’m currently in a kind of ‘floating above myself’ state. And upon digestion of all that’s happened to me, I’m now on what seems (and indeed is) a very far away continent. During my trip I experienced the freedom of spontaneity and I felt genuinely at peace for the first time in my life. My new lifestyle enabled me to be regularly mindful and live in the moment. I thought and perhaps still do, that the peace I found was Africa. But perhaps I found it, not Africa. The challenge now, is maintaing that peace within me, in our very challenging – for all sorts of different reasons – society and lifestyle.

While I was away, (quite rightly), life went on without me and now I’m back nothing has changed. But I have. So how does this ‘new’ Amy fit in? I’m still playing with the answers. Unexpectedly, or perhaps naively, I feel I can’t pick up from where I left off. There’s a part of me that is glad of the changes within myself, but I also feel I’m mourning my old self in some way. Is that possible? And why do I feel I can’t be me here? Or why do I feel the challenge of being true to myself is greater here? Perhaps it’s only a transitory feeling. I hope so. There’s a novel ‘silent wonder’ for life now, inside my soul, and I desperately don’t want that light to fade, or at worse disappear.

I’m a sucker for a good quote and I came across this two days ago which I thought was very apt for beginning my journey of blogging with you…

Life is no straight and easy corridor along
which we travel free and unhampered,
but a maze of passages,
through which we must seek our way,
lost and confused, now and again
checked in a blind alley.

But always, if we have faith,
a door will open for us,
not perhaps one that we ourselves would have ever thought of,
but one that will ultimately
prove good for us.

Never under-estimate the positivity that can come out of a challenging, down right rubbish time!

More cliches I’m sure you’ve heard a trillion times before and I promise to ease off them in the rest of my blogs, but – things always happen for a reason (my survival philosophy), even if you don’t know what that reason is at the time! I have warming, grounding feeling that despite everything, I am incredibly blessed to have been on my African Adventure.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hong Kong – A Cautionary Tale

At the beginning of November I was fortunate enough to be able to go to Hong Kong with my husband on a business trip. The last time I had been to Hong Kong was in 2002 on my gap year, and to be honest the focus then was on finding cheap drinks and going to the Rugby Sevens in Happy Valley.

This time round, with 12 years between visits, Hong Kong and I had changed a lot. Hong Kong has always been a world hub for commerce and I imagine it being quite the playground for expats in the 80s. However, despite the rising number of millionaires in the city, the number of people below the poverty line is almost 20% of the population. This is a huge challenge for the Governor of the city and is a central concern for protesters demonstrating currently.

There are over 114,000 millionaires in Hong Kong with Asia’s four richest men among residents too, with a total net worth between the four of them of $90 billion. This extreme income inequality not only creates huge amounts of hardship, but also disharmony and instability for the whole population and potentially could lead to fragile markets which would have a knock on effect the world over.

On my visit I met up with an old school friend who was born and bred in Hong Kong. She now has had to move from her home on Hong Kong Island due to rocketing prices and because much of the Hong Kongese population have relocated to Kowloon on the mainland. She now lives in a small apartment with her husband, two daughters and her retired mother. Both her and her husband have good jobs but this is just how people live in this over populated city.

The focus in the city is completely around work and money. You work hard to buy whatever the latest designer accessory or gadget is the must have item. Walk down any street and you’re smacked in the face with signs, lights and adverts vying for your attention, ‘buy me, buy me!’ The Harbour City mega mall on Kowloon had a gross revenue of HK$8,471 million last year alone. Hong Kong is a millionaires play ground or a dystopian vision of the future depending on your point of view. It’s an uncertain-able pace of consumerist culture.

There is a thin veneer of gloss on many aspects of life in Hong Kong. The products you can buy at the markets are a good example of this. Knock off handbags, wallets and purses may look great on the outside but peek inside and the interior is made of cheap PU and badly constructed. Standards of production in China are falling as people chase the capitalist dream. There are less regulations on products that are made in China, if they are sold in China, and are not under the scrutiny of international trade regulations. The brand becomes more important than the quality of the product. Wealthy factory owners need to realise that copying endless amounts of products for cheap and not-so-cheerful end results is not the answer and we as consumers need to get out of the Primark mind set of buying lots of stuff because it’s cheap. This only perpetuates the wealth gap.

As a consumer and retailer passionate about traceable goods, I felt that our trip underlined the importance of this. I’m not saying boycott Chinese goods entirely, for one thing that would be near on impossible. But when you’re buying Christmas presents this year, have a think about where that item has come from. Let’s strengthen our economy and support small businesses and designers in the UK that produce products that are quirky, unusual and fun as well as being ethically produced, and in turn enrich our lives as a result.
If you need some ideas for where to shop, here is a list of some great Oxford Independents:

• The Old Fire Station
• Kinship of Oxford
• Indigo 
• Gilt & Grain
• Amy Surman
• Objects of Use
• Alice’s Shop
• Illyria Pottery

 

Indie love,

 

 

 

 

 

When is a Frock Swap not just a Frock Swap?

It is with great excitement that we can say that The Fe-line Frock Swap is back a week tomorrow (12th December) at The Old Museum. This is set to be a Frock Swap like no other, firstly we are swapping on a Friday evening (5-9) not a Saturday and it will be so close to Christmas that the room is set to be filled with festive cheer!

Other than clothes swapping there is loads going on, you can buy gorgeous Christmas gifts from our lovely stalls, Kinship of Oxford, ,  and Monkey and Bo. We thought you lot had probably been working really hard recently, so we have got lovely Leyla from Neal’s Yard and exquisite Ettaline from Shiatsu Oxford to come along and pamper you. Oh and we thought on a Friday after work you might be hungry and thirsty, so The Wandering Kitchen will be on hand with a festive buffet, tea, coffee, cake and plenty of fizzy wine.

What we have our eye on

Here are just a couple of gift ideas that will be on offer at the Frock Swap.

It’s common knowledge around Fe-line HQ that Jo has a little bit of a love for a bit of faux fur, so she has been going a little crazy for the Mink Faux Fur Huff from Kinship of Oxford. At only £24.00 this would make a gorgeous gift for a special lady in your life or Jo, she would love you forever

Got some little ones to buy for this year? What about these organic trousers from Monkey and Bo? How cute are they?

Our friend Liz aka makes very beautiful things out of silver and we love her animal cut out necklaces. We know that we would be pretty ecstatic to unwrap one of these on Christmas day.

So there you have it, swapping, shopping, pampering food and booze. If you want to know more about how the swap works, check out the event page and if you have friends that you think would love this event, please send them the flyer below or invite them to the .

Love and clothes swapping,

 

 

 

“I’m just trying to change the world, one sequin at a time.”

If Lady Gaga can change the world with sequins and pearls, why can’t you change your wardrobe in the exact same way? Since Christmas is just around the corner I couldn’t resist doing a post on the one trend that bursts onto the scene every December. Sequins. I’m going to be honest and say that I was never particularly keen on sequinned pieces as I always found it frustrating when they ended up catching onto every thread that was within arms length of me. Sequins used to be only found on the hems of Halloween costumes or as an embellishment on a handbag, whereas nowadays anything that is considered clothing can be found covered in sequins. Who knew that little metal discs that never existed outside the Mediterranean and Middle East for centuries, would be transformed into plastic discs that could change a plain piece of fabric into a wearable disco ball. Whether you want to go brave with statement full-length embellished gown, or whether you want to go subtle with a hint of glitz, there has to be at least one sequinned sensation out there that’s perfect for you. Every time the month of December comes around girls have a habit of starting to panic because they have no clue what to wear for their Christmas party, so I decided I’d do a post on the one trend that’s always incredibly perfect for your Christmas Party ensemble.

• Cosy Christmas

Since the Christmas season is upon us I can’t help but push the idea of an embellished jumper for the upcoming chilly month ahead. Now I have to admit and say that I’ve never, in my nineteen years of living, had a Christmas jumper hanging in my wardrobe, but this year I’m highly tempted to break the tradition and chance purchasing one. However since I’m an insanely fashion conscious girl (you would’ve never guessed right?) I don’t want to go out and buy a cringe-worthy, itchy knitted one that has flashing lights, or musical shoulders or something tacky, I want to still look somewhat stylish. So when I began my search I couldn’t help but fall in love with the ones that were decorated with sequins and sparkles, and they’re the kind-of ones that every girl seems to look good in. Whether you want to go for a subtle glitter covered jumper, one trimmed in tinsel, or one with a sequin penguin on your stomach, there’s a cosy light-catching jumper out there for every single one of you beautiful women. And no you won’t end up looking like Mark Darcy,  if that’s what you’re worried about!

 

• Silly Skirts

Every time I’m on a night out or look on street style websites, I can’t help but envy the girls that pull off sequin skirts. I’d love to invest in one but for some reason I can’t help but think it’ll be one of those purchases that my hanger will wear more than me. However when I see them on other women I always think they look amazing. Whether you’re small or tall, skinny or curvy, brunette or blonde, a sequin skirt will look incredible on you because of the various styles that exist on the high street at the moment. I have to say that my favourite style is the elasticated pencil-skirt version, but you can go from bodycon mini skirts to skater skirts, and from fully embellished maxi skirts to mid-thigh length skirts, and look effortlessly gorgeous in every single one. I know you’re probably thinking “How can I pull off a sequin skirt for everyday wear?” but you’d be surprised how simple it is if you wear a simple tee, shirt or even jumper, a pair of chunky tights (or nude nylon tights) and a pair of coordinating converse, vans or a kick ass pair of heels, and you’re ready to go. It might sound like a brave outfit choice, but you’d be amazed at how easy they are to pull off with a little bit of confidence.

• Perfectly Party

When I have a night out or party coming up I can’t help but want to whip out one of my favourite party dresses, and this Christmas is certainly no different. There are so many types of party dresses that are hanging on the rails of our high street shops today, but for some reason no girl is able to resist the one that’s covered in sparkles and sequins. So with this glamorous glitzy trend being huge every Christmas, sequin dresses are everywhere right now. I love wearing statement party dresses because then all you have to do is get simple block coloured accessories, and you’re ready to go. Whether you want to go for a lightly embellished dress, a full glitterazzi “gown” or a 50/50 sequin and fabric choice, one that’s flirty and fun, you’ll look party perfect in no time.

• Dorothy or Cinderella?

Ever since we were all little girls (don’t even try to deny it) we  all wanted to have a pair of Princess shoes. Whether you wanted a pair of red glittter mary-janes to follow the yellow brick road, or whether you wanted to be given a sequinned glass slipper by your Prince, we all couldn’t help but crave a pair of sparkly heels so why not follow that childhood dream and invest in a pair this Christmas? Whether you’re a regular in Primark (like myself) a lover of River Island or favourite H&M, I can guarantee that you’ve come across more than one pair of light-reflecting heels this season. In all fairness they’d probably end up being the best pair of heels you’d ever buy because they’d give you the chance to change a simple outfit consisting of skinny jeans and a statement t-shirt into an outfit perfect for sipping on cocktails and breaking moves on the dance floor. Okay, so they might not result in being the comfiest pair of heels, but when it comes to fashion sometimes you have to put style over comfort, and sequins over sensibility.

I hope that you found this post useful, that you have an effortlessly stylish and ever-so-glamorous Christmas, and that I’ll see all you fashionable fe-liners in the New Year…

Stylishly yours,