art & creative direction SHINI PARK
assistant photographer SIMON SCHMIDT created for Calvin Klein Swimwear

Unmoored by the particulars of who and what might be watching you on a deserted beach at sunset, in Calvin Klein‘s one must dance, if not make sand angels on a particularly powdery part of the beach. This is my swimwear edit: a tinge of Baywatch (for mouth-to-mouth is always the objective), and multi-purpose swim garbs, as per. Crop tops and high-rises, might as well be John McClane. Also – just in time for sale season. Yipee-ki-yay, kids.

If you too, for a large part of 2007 and maybe even a slice of 2008, spent most of your waking hours lusting after a canvas tote bag, then come in for a cuddle. We did it, comrade, we started the efficiency revolution! A canvas tote bag wasn’t just a canvas tote bag – it was a political statement (I had one that said ‘Puppies not Politics’), an inflatable magic pocket, a bottomless Mary Poppins/Hermione’s handbag that had undergone an Undetectable Extension Charm. There were months when I exclusively carried a tote bag, keys and coins jangling under various half-eaten Pret sandwiches, amongst acrylic paint tubes I picked up at the Uni shop. As a ‘flaneur’, it was a must-have item, because the point of it was that it collected evidence of an entire day’s worth of curiosity (knick-knacks).

Fast forward a decade, bag trends have come and gone, all the shapes and sizes. I now mysteriously have enough canvas tote bags to make soup from, but it still stands that none of my bags have proved as practical. I mean, have you tried shoving an aubergine into an Olympia Le Tan book clutch? (Actually, don’t say that on a date.) Enter Smythson, whose pale blue featherweight notebooks I have time and time again poured my heart, ideas and indecipherable scribbles onto, with the new Kingly Tote. The new butter-soft leather bag is an embodiment of their delicate yet resilient stationery, which comes in black or the legendary Nile Blue of the brand’s shopping bags. Stop, drop and roll it up, stick a loaf of bread in there next to your gym clothes (microwave pizza for me), whip it out when the airline nags your about excess luggage weight. Viva la revolucion!

Top – Jaeha. Skirt – Celine

Coat – Joseph. Shoes – Yuul Yie

Coat – Emma Charles. Shoes – Yuul Yie

Dress – Exhibit. Trousers – Joseph. Tote – Smythson Kingly. Heels – Celine.

Top – Finery. Leather trousers – YearOne- (Similar)

Market smarts

Layer a bunch of anemones on top of a freshly baked bread loaf from Pavilion, and finish with a light sprinkling of change. Bacon butty optional.

Right: André Ledoux 1948 ad for anouraks. Left: unknown source.

Right: Winter 1963, Vogue.

Above: Spread with Jacques Heim 1938 Winter Sportwear

Top & Bottom – Rejina Pyo. Phone case – OtterBox. Necklace – Louis Vuitton.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away – far enough from a Starbucks (one equipped with a toilet) that warrants this rant a fairy-tale/hipster beginning – lived a girl whose name was Butter Fingers. She had the face of any ordinary girl, but possessed an extremely rare useless magical power, one that allowed her to drop everything – little or high in value – to the floor. Her fairy godmother had concluded that Darling, earth’s gravity must be a little stronger around you and had slid a card to a botox clinic before *poof*-ing off. The people in the village however, had banished her with pitchforks and selfie-sticks, to a leafy-yet-ironically-well-connected borough, after an incident at Oxford Circus station that sealed the fate, and name, of Butter Fingers.

It had been the height of rush hour, exactly five hours past the hour of noon at which the sun is at its highest – villagers retiring from a day’s work poured into the under-passage of Oxford Circus Station, all four entrances choked up to the brim. Butter Fingers had been on an excursion, one of her busier days – ending with an appointment making BLARRHGHER cupcakes and that of similar unimportance. She had shuffled along into the station with the throng, sharing in agitation with the day’s exhaustion, and joined the bottle-neck queue up to the ticket barriers. Just as she reached the double-gates and pulled out her magical oyster that grants entry, out spilled the entire contents of her bag. Keys, phones, wooden ladles, anti-bacterial gels… even the DIY cupcakes tumbled onto roadkill. Domestic/foreign coins rolled towards the escalators, and she’d lost in the Schrodinger’s cat query: Is the phone screen cracked, or intact? The station ground to a halt, and then, an uproar.

It was since that day, the villagers dubbed her Butter Fingers. Or Lube Collective, for those who remember the incident. Marinating in self-shame, she’d since thrown out all flap-less bags and stocked up on OtterBox Drop+ Protection cases, and lured a man to carry all peripherals, who she eventually married. She resorted to a life online, dedicated the rest of her life to a blog (the laptop nailed down to the desk), and lived happily ever after.

FIN.

Top – Rejina Pyo Trousers – COS.

creative direction SHINI PARK editorial assistance SIMON SCHMIDT in collaboration with OTTERBOX

Gone are those days when my hooves – tad tall for the day’s purposes – made odd Christmas-tree shaped marks in the pavement on a hot summer day. Banished, are the thoughts that fleeted into my post-adolescent, under-cooked brain, teasing with a very useless idea of purchasing stripper heels with a 3-inch perspex platform and a goldfish residing under each foot (or dollar-note tips, whichever). You know, kids and their insecurities, one of mine were: short, Asian legs. My early twenties was in fact, punctuated with poor choice in footwear: cheap ‘leather’ glued with ‘wood’, and heels generally too high for my/my immediate surroundings’ own good. And to think of all the things I could’ve done had I been a little closer to earth – all the buses I could’ve caught, the nights I could’ve slept indoors had I not given up on walking home on the bloody stumps I called feet…

Perhaps it’s life’s Yin & Yang, but now I own a UberXL-load of sneakers in varying shapes and sizes, a hefty bunch Nike’s – naturally. All made for a ‘track’ or another (the Cortez originally a running shoe), but worn beating down London pavements and chasing buses (and catching them for once). Insecurities are re-allocated (cellulite, taxes), but I’m glad to say that for the past few years I’ve been sleeping indoors every night, thanks to this obsession for trainers. The Nike ‘Cortez‘, returning since its original debut in 1972 and then 1994 in Forrest Gump, is new to the family. No plans yet to run cross-country in them but here’s three ways you can at least get to the next meeting without hailing down a black cab.