Brand New With Tags

You know something has suddenly become ultra-trendy when the eBay search bar knows what you’re looking for.

There are those consistently recognised, of course: you only have to type in ‘mar’ before it is suggested that you might be, and most probably you are, looking for something by Marc Jacob. Or Marks & Spencer, one of the two. Type in ‘jim’, and you’re immediately offered eight variations of Jimmy Choo, and the singular alternative of Jimi Hendrix. Some high street stores are equally as reliable, with a quickly recognised search for Topshop automatically generating links for the likes of Zara, Warehouse and River Island.

Fashion-forward celebrities can be equally as obliging when it comes to hunting on eBay. A search for ‘alexa’, for example, presents a plethora of high-waisted skirts, satchel-style bags, cream-coloured dresses and brown brogues akin to those frequently adorned by the lovely Alexa Chung. Her name also suggests links to the equally as stylish Peaches Geldof, Kate Moss and, again, Topshop, which, in terms of fashion, seems to work as an umbrella search term for all three.

Of course there are certain items where second-hand just doesn’t cut it and authenticity is everything, but when it’s not, eBay can be a great way to find stylish and unusual items at a reasonable price.  The latter, I feel, should be applied to matters of hosiery. Although I’m not keen on buying pre-worn undergarments, I’m equally unenthused at the prospect of spending a fortune on tights. Luckily, anything marked ‘BNWT’ (Brand New With Tags) offers a compromise of the two.

Tights, you see, are what I was after. Vertically striped tights, to be precise. I’d seen them once on the catwalk; opaque white and nude stripes for Jean Paul Gaultier. But mostly I’d seen them on trendy arts students, in the ‘street style’ pages of free magazines, or in the occasional Facebook profile photo. Chunky black opaque stripes alternating with stripes of about 20 denier(ish) and teamed with chunky knitwear, little dresses, mini-skirts, or more or less any thigh-skimming item which benefited from these leg-lengthening wonders.

Unfortunately, the trend seems yet to have hit celeb-ville; perhaps because their legs are all far too long already. I scoured the high street to no avail, and so set about my online quest. ‘Stripey tights’ I typed into the eBay search bar, only to be presented with an array of hideous horizontally-striped, rainbow-coloured creations. Alice in Wonderland may have had a certain resurgence of late, but it wasn’t quite the look I was hoping for. ‘Striped tights’ was scarcely any better.

In one last attempt, I tried the awkwardly precise search of ‘vertical stripe tights’ – and voila. By the time I’d hit ‘s’ eBay had filled in the rest of my enquiry and sent me and my PayPal account clicking in the right direction. A fleeting trend it might be, but mark my words: they’ll be everywhere until the bare–legged summer season. EBay has spoken.

In defence of cupcakes.

It has come to my attention that the poor unassuming cupcake has been getting rather a lot of stick of late. When exactly did these innocent, if not a little flamboyant, sweet treats stop being flavour of the week? Not so long ago the smooth swirls of pastel-coloured butter-cream screamed retro and were being snapped up by sweet-toothed hipsters and indie kids everywhere. Bohemian wannabes teamed them with champagne at picnics and super-trendy DJs ‘Twee as Fuck’ gave them away at their club nights in the name of being, well, twee.

But ‘twee’ has been tainted of late, and our affection for these diabetes-inducing delights has unquestionably faded. As cafes devoted almost entirely to cupcake consumption appeared upon every other middle-class high street in the UK, the grumblings of a revolt began to reverberate around the culinary cool-kids. The cupcake has become the Daily Mail of the confectionary world – smugly renounced by anyone with vaguely liberal leaning – and last week Sophie Heawood claimed on Twitter that cupcakes “even look like Tories”. Websites such as http://www.cupcakesareshit.tumblr.com have only added fuel to an already raging sugar-frosted fire and, I imagine, prompted prejudicial slurs along the lines of “she’s just one of those cupcake-eating types, y’know?”

But are these paper-cased indulgences really as bad as all that? The simply unnecessary levels of extravagance employed by cupcake bakers is too often regarded with negative sentiment. Cupcakes are not Nazis, folks. In fact, such pointless precision can be seen to allude to a valuable ideal. It suggests a civilisation where nothing is more important than the aesthetic arrangement of glazed rose petals, or the symmetry of piped icing. This is a world where squeals of girlish ecstasy cost approx. 47p each; where glitter is edible, and calories don’t count as long as they’re pretty. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not a world to be sneered at.