Hippy dippy: Paris Hilton sports 'ethnic' clobber in Los Angeles

Greetings, fash fans. I apologise for being the one to break this, but we must now endure two full weeks without a Monday off. How in the blazes are we expected to function after the recent lotus-eating? I put it to you, dear readers, that we must harness the resentment that this inspires and direct it wardrobe-wards.

Style-wise, our hatreds are as informing - and, indeed, enabling - as our pashes. Knowing what one will not under any circumstances be swayed by is as critical as knowing to what one will succumb. For the stylish, rather than the passingly fashionable, the list of nots should equal the list of musts.
Think of these, if you will, as an inversion of the three-word fashion formulae we discussed in January; one's penchants should be as reducible to such a scheme as one's loathings. By way of example, where my positive trio runs: retro, witty, (campily) feminine, so my horror inventory might encompass: ethnic, functional, androgynous.
Androgynous I lack the physique for. Functional I am learning to live with via my love for Great British country clothing. Ethnic I can handle, should one mean Scottish cashmere, or an exquisite kimono from Kyoto.
What I cannot stomach is what fashion mavens will refer to as "hippy-luxe": straggly "ethnic" clobber of the sort that yooves bring back from their Gap Yah, only costing 200 times the price thanks to the designer label. One feels for the Third World factory workers supplying designer middlemen with elaborate tat to beguile gullible Notting Hillbillies.
Moreover, to my mind, this brand of boho-luxe non-chic is as ugly aesthetically as it is ideologically. The developing world is taking its revenge on us for our gunboats and sweatshops, kitting us out as bedraggled, faux-peasant lemmings.
There's a good deal of this mendacious "craft chic" about this summer: natural fibre this, fringed that, "spiritual" jewellery created by socialites who once attended a party in Kerala. Most resolutely loathsome is a dung-brown Pucci bag of the sort that one could have picked up from an Oxfam shop back in 1976 for 25p: yours, today, for £1,245.
The emerging tendency is to argue that the best of such enterprises represent attempts at ethical sourcing. Yves Saint Laurent's Muse II is constructed from recycled plastic bags and woven cotton by artisans in Burkina Faso. I inquired what proportion of the handbag's £1,505 price tag ends up with said artisans, but answer came there none. I bow to no one in my love of (almost) all things YSL; but I'd rather have a Muse I and make a donation to Oxfam.
Other Violet Elizabeth Betts style phobias include: jeans, sportswear as leezure-wear, leather clothing, khaki, gladiator sandals, hooker/stripper shoes and parkas. And yet - for there is always an "and yet" - the modish mind must remain open
Alas, the way this tends to work for many of us is that, come the final failings of a trend we once despised, we find ourselves coming round to it, familiarity having bred first contempt, then acquiescence. "Hmm," one finds oneself musing, "that thing with the fluoro, high-heeled trainer/knee-sock combo: at first it seemed demented; but now, this is how I roll."
I had long refused to have any truck with wedges, considering them at once unnecessary (a heel should be a heel, sisters) and ungainly. However, for the past few seasons, I found myself ripping the odd pair of unfeasibly expensive gold ones out of the spring glossies. I acquired a friend who makes the wedge resemble the world's most sophisticated workplace-stalking equipment. And somehow my mouse kept nibbling on Yves Saint Laurent's jaunty navy Deauvilles (£565, www.net-a-porter.com ).
The thin end of the, er, wedge was the concealed platform. Mine came care of Ms Dorothy Perkins and Boden, but check out House of Harlow's ravishing lavender beauties (£192, www.my-wardrobe.com ). Until, finally, this spring yielded a Damascene fashion moment: My First Wedges, aka Ted Baker's spanking gold Peeas (£95, www.asos.com ).
I am yet to sport them outside my boudoir and have already lost a stiletto-stickler comrade over them. However, the fillip of overcoming a long-standing aversion has been profound. One is forced to reconsider such vital matters as proportion. Moreover, thinking outside the box - even if merely a shoebox - means one feels all thrustingly fashion-fabulous.
To this end, may I recommend Chanel's Mimosa (£17.50, 020 7493 3836)? The majority of us strive not to boast yellow toenails, yet this is such a peppy shade. If the big C says Mimosa is the colour of summer, then colour of summer Mimosa, assuredly, is. ( TELEGRAPH UK)