Fashion Etiquette.

How to avoid embarrassing yourself and offending others.

SALE: EVERYTHING MUST GO!

After waiting months for this day to finally arrive, you and the fellow contenders begin limbering up outside. Squatting, lunging, stretching, just waiting for the … doors to open?

This is no marathon. This is the first day of the January sales.

That black sequinned shrug you had your beady eye on in is half price. There is 20% off those high-waisted flowery shorts. They’ve even knocked a fiver off that red duffle coat.

You don’t want these things. You need them. And boy, will you go to great lengths to get them.

The doors open. You shove the fifteen-stone security guard out of the way with Hulk-esque strength. Hey mate, no one is getting in my way. I need that shrug!

You search the rails like Kerry Katona searching for a career. Elbows start flying at you from all directions. A poke in the back, a jab to the rib, a dig in the knee. Green steam begins to seep out of your ears. 

Lunging towards an assistant, who is cowering in the corner under a pile of cut-price hosiery, you yell for more sizes/different colours/some sanity.  

“Sorry madam that coat sold out in December. We’ve only got the shrug left in olive-green now. The shorts only come in a size four,” she squeaks back at you as Santa embroidered socks fly overhead.

You grab the olive-green shrug. It’s pretty much the same as the black one and I mean olive-green goes with everything right?

Size four is probably the size you should be buying anyway because your New Year’s resolution was to join the gym and never make eye contact with a bakewell tart ever again. Ahem.

You eye a pastel-blue duffel coat the other side of the store. It’s not in the sale but you’ve got your student discount which is pretty much the same as sale really when you think about it and pastel-blue will be so rad in spring, yeah?

You pay. You leave.

A month down the line the olive-green shrug is never worn, your ten-year-old niece is parading around like Lady Gaga in the high-waisted shorts and you’re snowed inside your house sitting on the sofa in your pastel-blue coat munching on a bakewell tart.

Until the summer sales ... Happy New Year. 

   

Written by Sarah Barns.