RULES ARE FOR FOOLS: A Laura Jane Fashion Challenge

As far as I'm concerned, the only rules worth following are broken ones. When it comes to the obstruction of Fashion Commandments, I got more records than the KGB. Still, before I embarked upon my RULES ARE FOR FOOLS Challenge, I never consciously set out to antagonize the Fashion Police. It just sort of happens as a side effect of being an ardent non-Normie, a sartorial rapscallion who strives towards the avant-wack and hella-conceptual. I love what I wear: it says everything about how I feel (or, at worst, how I wish I felt) and who I am (but never who I wish I was).

The number-one guaranteed way to ensure pedestrian and impersonal personal style is to use fashion as a means for validating one's attractiveness to oneself. It breaks my heart to see how many gorgeous women looking like total blah because they think they have no choice; this is a by-product of stupid Normie fashion magazines that ram boring, meaningless axioms like "Avoid colour!" and "Leopard-print is for sluts!" down the throats of women who lack the confidence to say DAMN THE MAN and wear whatever the Hell they feel like.

This past week, I said DAMN THE MAN every day, and damn- was it ever satisfying! I have sinned, but I don't need no forgiveness. For seven days straight, I broke every fashion rule in the book, and looked Damned Cool doing it. Bear in mind I am The Ultimate Fashion Champion, so take my word as gold here, folks. They say sing while you slave, but I just get bored- I ain't gonna work for Anna Wintour no more.

BROKEN RULE #1: THOU SHALT NOT MIX PLAID AND STRIPES
HOW TO PULL IT OFF: BE BORING
LJ'S WAY: Black-and-white striped cardigan; muted lilac workshirt; plaid fine-wale corduroy walking shorts; grey nylons; black ankle boots

The main argument posed against donning plaid and stripes at once is that it makes you look like a wackjob. This is understandable. The combination of plaid and stripes is traditionally associated with red-faced, middle-aged golfers sporting a tam and too-tight trousers on the putting green, or perhaps a clown, or perhaps "Just a Girl"-era Gwen Stefani. Oddly enough, I felt ten trillion times boring-er than usual while breaking this rule. Because it was my first day of RAFF, I had no concept of how the rest of the Challenge would unfold. I took it way too seriously, and put an enormous amount of pressure on myself to create something practical and instructional, something that "you" could "learn from". I looked overly business-cazsh for my liking, but at least figured out how to construct a sane-ish plaid/stripes look: play that shit so safe that nobody can even tell! Stick to classic, klassy shapes; keep your prints subtle; don't add jewelry; be tame. Go to work at Ernst & Young; hang out by the water cooler; alphabetize your database of accrued capital gains taxes. This one is strictly for 9-to-5ers. NEVER AGAIN!

BROKEN RULE #2: THOU SHALT NOT SPORT LINGERIE AS OUTERWEAR
HOW TO PULL IT OFF: BE A SWEETHEART, NOT A SKANK
LJ'S WAY: Long camel cardigan; grey sleeveless tee; simple gold chain; pale pink lingerie camisole; flouncy blue button-up mini; grey textured stockings; tan lace-up stacked-heel ankle boots

This outfit was state-of-the-art AWESOME. It helped me reach an incredibly important conclusion about my own life, which is that my Spring 09 fashion concept is will be based around sweetheart-ism, smelling like strawberries, and going out of my way to sport lingerie as daywear as frequently as possible.

Anyone with half a brain would agree that the juxtaposition between my sweetie-pants lil' camisole and tuff grey sleeveless T is pretty genius, in that fashion-specific non-genius way often hit by acknowledged fashion weirdos like Chloe Sevigny and the late, great Isabella Blow (RIP). Another reason why this look played out so swimmingly is that I referenced a fair bit of Mary-Kate Olsen hobo-chic chic: uncool as shouting out MKO may be, her style is the opposite of slutty, and I needed a hit of that. All in all, If you are a dyed-in-the-wool tomboy in the mood to look nominally girlier than usual, go to any thriftstore in the world and fork over $1.99 for one of these ubiquitous lingerie camis. Throw it on over your regular jeans/t-shirt combo, and, as you can surely see, you will look as undeniably adorable as a red velvet cupcake.

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Thirteen (RIP UFC)

In the grand tradition of 9 out of 12 UFC collages, my final UFC collage background is ripped from John Hopper's ever-amazing Textile Blog. It is Cosmic Fog by Robert Oerley. Cosmic Fog! How appropriate. The UFC itself has been one hell of a Cosmic Fog, to say the least.

PS: For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE

PPS: Stay tuned for LJ'S UFC "LESSONS LEARNED" WRAP-UP, to be posted sometime this coming week.

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Ten

(this week's background image is by Astrid Sampe. It has something to do with IBM, which is similar to UFC in that they are both three-letter acronyms. How novel! It is taken from John Hopper's ever-amazing Textile Blog).

PS: For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE.

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Nine

(this week's background image is by Helen Littmann of English Eccentrics, from 1984, when I was negative one years old. It is taken from John Hopper's ever-amazing Textile Blog).

PS: For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE.

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Eight

To keep myself from either getting deadly bored or going completely insane (whichever may happen to come first), this week I employed the creative talents of Kat Asharya, Meggy Wang, Laura Jane Faulds, Emily Richmond, the Oxford English Dictionary, Elizabeth Barker, and John Delk to act as Guest Conceptualizers. Each one of these people (or reference books) was assigned the task of coming up with a snappy idea for me to sartorially articulate. I wish there was a synonym for "sartorial" that wasn't "fashion-wise" or something equally lame. The Ultimate Fashion Challenge has forced me to overuse it. The Ultimate Fashion Challenge has forced me to do a lot of things. The Ultimate Fashion Challenge is my life. My life is the Ultimate Fashion Challenge. When it ends, do I die then? I hope not.

PS: For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE.

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Seven- the DEADLIEST Week

For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE

(the image is one-third of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights)

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Six

(background image taken from The Textile Blog).

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Five

For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE

(background image taken from The Textile Blog).

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Four

For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE.

(background image taken from The Textile Blog).

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Three

For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE.

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week Two

For those unfamiliar with the Ultimate Fashion Challenge: formal UFC rules, guidelines and regulations can be accessed HERE.

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Laura Jane's Ultimate Fashion Challenge: Week One

If you had told me five years ago that in a half-decade's time, my claim-to-fame would be engaging in weird fashion challenges and posting them to the Internet, I probably would have found that strange, and remarked that I might possibly be wasting my full potential. But what can I say? Some people get wiser with age; some people throw it all to hell and decide that there is nothing cooler or more relevant for them to do than turn the often humdrum ritual of getting dressed in the morning into a never-ending conceptual art project. I fall into the second category of people.

My compulsion to monomaniacally document every single aspect of my life down to the nittiest-grittiest detail remains a mysterious and often frustrating enigma to me more than anyone (I'm assuming; I doubt anyone else really thinks that hard about me besides my good old egoist self), but I'm hoping that forcing myself to complete the Ultimate Fashion Challenge will perhaps lead me towards figuring it out.

So: what the Helen Keller is your Ultimate Fashion Challenge, Laura Jane?

Well, the most basal rule of the Ultimate Fashion Challenge is as follows:

EVERY SINGLE THING I OWN MUST BE WORN ONCE, BUT ONLY ONCE.

The Ultimate Fashion Challenge is designed to counteract two opposing forces in my life: 1) The urge to constantly waste money on avant-wack thrift scores and/or low-end children's sale rack items, and 2) The fact that despite my obsession with buying clothes constantly, I only ever wear the same five t-shirts, three cardigans, and two pairs of shorts every single day of my life. This makes up about 2.3% of my entire wardrobe. The Ultimate Fashion Challenge will be in effect for as long as it takes me to wear every single item of clothing I own, even (especially!) the ugliest, worst and most embarrassing crap of all. The Ultimate Fashion Challenge is highly strategic and highly stressful, but after one week of participation, I'm also finding it oddly freeing.

The knee-jerk reaction that most "smart people" (or, "people who fancy themselves to be smart") so cleverly fall back on when the subject of fashion comes up is that it is shallow, trite, snobby, superficial, et al. But anything can be shallow and trite if it is approached from a shallow and trite perspective. There are countless aspects of fashion and the fashion industry that I would literally rather shoot myself in the lower leg than condone or be affiliated with in any way (luxury branding; brand as identity; "size zero or kill yourself" mentality) but at once, fashion- particularly the act of dressing oneself- is psychological, political, creative, and a valid and massively important method of self-representation. In short: we all get dressed in the morning- what the hell does that mean?

I'm hoping that throwing myself outside of my comfort zone and introducing restrictions and limitations into an inescapable ritual that I suppose I do take for granted, will force me to think about things I never stop thinking about in ways I never would have considered without having those constraints pressed upon me. And if not, whatever, maybe I'll just come up with some cool outfits.

Tune in to nogoodforme.com every single Sunday for the next ten billion years for my weekly UFC re-cap; to bring you further up-to-date, here are some ground rules:

1. All jewelry and accessories count except my "Laura" necklace (because I never take it off), and shoes/bags/sunglasses (because I don't have enough).

2b) Complicated situations such as the aforementioned shorts dilemma or "I have to go somewhere fancy and only have scrapola tore-up junk left" will be addressed on a case-by-case basis.

NOTE: Do not abuse these policies, Laura! They are meant to be used as sparingly as possible; in case of emergency ONLY

3a) Absolutely NO buying of new clothes!

6) If for some reason I have to change outfits over the course of a day, I have to suck it up and cut my losses: it all counts.

I hope you all enjoy watching me wear progressively crappier and weirder outfits over the course of the next god-knows-how-many weeks. Months. Years. Click behind the jump for Week One's day-by-day recap.

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Usually Just A T-shirt

I like t-shirts. I also like dresses. So when I found the stripey dream babe of a t-shirt dress (pictured at left) on sale for a scant ten buckaroos at my favorite store in the world, Uniqlo (I think everybody should be allowed to genuinely adore one cheapie-crappy High Street store of their choice. I think H&M and Zara are kind of stupid; therefore, I love Uniqlo). I wore it for the first time on Wednesday and, uh, WOW. I was on Cloud Nine to the power of nine: not only did I look hella cute, chill and scrappy, but I had also attained a level of comfort unrivaled by any other outfit I've worn over the past sixteen years.

Basically, wearing a t-shirt dress feels exactly like how you used to feel when you were six years old, playing outside at around 8 PM as the sun began to set, knowing that you'd be doomed to go to crappy bed in twenty minutes (which sucked), but it made you relish and appreciate your final moments of day. I don't know about you, but all the times I ever lived moments like those, I was necessarily clad in one of those flimsy t-shirt nightgowns decorated with a cartoon of Bugs Bunny or something similar. I do recall wanting to rock Bugs Bunny t-shirt nightgowns as daywear at that age, but that was way back when my mother still called the shots, and so I was relegated to continue wearing ever-restrictive shorts and t-shirts. Ew!

Anyway, now that I am grown, I have decided that my new look for summer is going to be: t-shirts, and only t-shirts. No shorts. Well, sometimes shorts, but hopefully as infrequently as possible. In short:

Usually just a t-shirt.

That first revelatory day I wore my Uniqlo t-shirt dress, I decided that I'd just buy some XL men's t-shirts and see what happened. Today, I did so. And the photograph at right illustrates what ended up happening. I cut off the sleeves of the t-shirt, and then tied some strips of leather around the shoulders. And in doing so, I made it official: I am the coolest person of all time. (take that, James Dean!)

Okay, I know that DIY t-shirt projects are kind of a dime a dozen in this clogged toilet of a fashion landscape we all live in. There's even that stupid book entitled 800 Billion Trillion Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good T-shirt (maybe that's not what it's called, but whatevs), which I am not going to link to, because I hate it. I hate books that fall into the genre of "books that teach you how to be creative"; if you're not freaking creative, why don't you just shut up and wear a normal t-shirt like everybody else in the world??

Anyway, I think this mod/Grecian/punk rock masterpiece is one of the best items in my wardrobe. I am beyond stoked to wear it out; I really like to have fun in my life, and the fact that wearing either of these two rad t-shirt dresses makes me feel like I'm six years old again seems to pretty much guarantee an upward swing in general fun levels.

The nogoodforme Guerrilla: LJ'S ULTIMATE FASHION CHALLENGE 4000!

The latest installment in our groundbreaking nogoodforme.tv series is perhaps the grandest Fashion Guerrilla challenge ever to be recorded to tape, and I'm barely even exaggerating. I'm not even exaggerating at all, actually. Not even one tiny little bit.

It's hilarious to me that after twenty-two years spent soul-searching and trying to figure out "what I want to do with my life," I've learned that my greatest skill is actually just putting together weird outfits at crappy stores. What can I say? Avant-wack fashion odysseys are my livelihood.

This week, I'm sure you will find yourself wholly enraptured by my epic sartorial journey through mountains, valleys, deserts, polar icecaps, Winners, Old Navy, and a pile of garbage outside Le Chainon.

Hope you enjoy the caperific antics that ensue, and as always, feedback is beyond appreciated.

Bon Appetit!

(Hosted by Laura Jane Faulds, directed by Emily Richmond)

The nogoodforme Guerrilla: Laura Jane takes Wal-Mart

If there is one thing I love in this world, it's a good caper- and I'm not talking about the edible berry of the perennial spiny shrub of the Capparis Spinosa, most commonly utilized in traditional Sicilian cooking. I'm talking about running knock-kneed around the world with no regard for rules or regulations, wreaking havoc for havoc's sake, eating stolen candy out of a shopping cart, breaking into the Museum of Natural History and sleeping inside a sarcophagus, so on, and so forth.

My general approach to dressing myself often errs toward the caper-ific in my insatiable appetite for awkward print-mixing and an unnecessary reliance on conceptualism, so I figured I might as well take my devil-may-care sartorial ethos a step further and tweak it into full-blown Fashion Guerrilla-dom.

I did so. Most of my greatest ideas are borne from being bored out of my skull at my parents' house in Suburbia, Ontario, and the Great Wal-Mart Wardrobe Challenge was no exception- in my case, creativity seriously stems from constraint, or desperation at least. In lieu of subjecting myself to one more mind-numbing day of daytime TV, gas station runs and excessive Diet Coke consumption, I decided to take the world's most nauseating corporation up on a claim it had sold to me in a particularly unbelievable advertisement the previous evening.

The plot of the ad was as follows: a sunburnt, tousle-haired blonde woman has been marooned on a desert island for five-odd years (this premise was obviously designed to cash in on Lost-related desert-island fascinations). She is rescued, and asks the helicopter pilot what year it is. 2008, he replies.

Oh My God! the woman exclaims (Actually, she probably says "Gosh". These are conservative times, you know), I have to go buy a whole new wardrobe!

Cut to idyllic imagery of the woman romping through the harshly-lit aisles of her local Wal-Mart superstore. Trying on charming earth-toned suit jackets, boot-cut jeans, plaid canvas Vans approximations, gobs of turquoise jewelry, and etc.

Of course this ridiculous commercial prompted me to spew caustic anti-Wal-Mart-isms to my poor Father for the next twenty-five minutes, then again every time the commercial replayed, which happened often, duh. I mean, come on. As if any girl who gives half a card about seasonal dressing would choose to buy her whole new wardrobe at Wal-Mart. That is such an obvious point that I feel stupid even writing it. Like, God, Desert Island girl, I realize you are probably short on cash considering your long spell of unemployment, but PLEASE: go to H&M for Chrissakes. Go to Old Navy for all I care. Just don't go to Wal-Mart. They sell guns and use slave labor and probably do something unethical to puppies I'm sure.

But in the name of great capering I decided to temporarily forgive Wal-Mart for murdering puppies (or at least forget). Fine, Wal-Mart. Prove me wrong, Wal-Mart. Prove yourself right. If you say I can buy myself a sweet and satisfying new wardrobe at your gross mega-hell, I mean store, I guess I'll take your word for it. Apparently you're pretty wise. Wise enough to take over the whole world with your blank, banal, mindless approach to lifestyle branding. Show me who's boss, Wal-Mart. Is it me? Is it you?

It's you.

I grabbed my good friend Eric and we made the expedition over to the dark side of mass-market retail. We spent about two hours shopping until we dropped. Oh, and by "dropped" I mean "Got kicked out of Wal-Mart for taking photographs and generally behaving inappropriately, if not antagonistically." This pissed me off especially because I ended up deciding that Wal-Mart is a perfectly awesome place to construct an entire new wardrobe. I thought it was really reactionary of Wal-Mart to kick us out without bothering to take the time to realize that I was totally loving the shit out of their sweatshop merch and sick accessories department. I guess we were just a little too conspicuous for our own good- Eric is almost seven feet tall (no joke! He was totally the Thurston Moore of Cawthra Park Secondary School in his day), and I am one of those obnoxious people completely inequipped to deal with being anything but the center of attention of all center of attentions. I'm a loudmouth, and look weird.

Truth be told, Wal-Mart is really cool. This article is positive, on the whole. I constructed four killer looks that I would actually wear walking down the street without feeling like a total loser. I had at least two more full looks in our shopping cart that I'm sure would have ruled equally, but our cagey little jig got upped and we were thrown out to the wolves by grouchypants floor managers.

1. Strawberry Shortcake at the Kennedy Compound

I saw these classic white high-waisted Bermuda shorts and knew they had the potential to throw me into serious nouveau-Gatsby territory. The great thing about Wal-Mart is that 90% of their pants/shorts/skirts are high-waisted, so you can capitalize on the high-waisted trend without having to spend excessive amounts of cash on Opening Ceremony shit or at least all the garbage that's trickled down to Urban Outfitters by this point. I paired them with a plain white wifebeater. If I hadn't been having an anxiety attack about getting thrown out the entire time I was there, I probably would have worn a black bra underneath the beater, which I always find to be a weirdly classy way for non-slutty women to incorporate skankiness into their everyday wardrobes.

I accessorized with a white scarf tied around my head, mostly because I really hate my hair these days and always have a scarf tied around my head anyway. These $14.92 gold flats were really cute; I would have bought them if I didn't have 20 billion beat-up pairs of metallic flats hanging around my life already. The cutesy-pie pink plastic heart necklace was the perfect way to bring a little touch of humor to an otherwise kinda trad look: I spent my early teens buying way too eagerly into candy-raverdom, and as such will always have a soft spot for jewelry that looks like it is made out of corn syrup and Synthetic Dye #00000564.

2. Android Gwyneth Paltrow

I can't even explain how hard I fell for this silver raincoat. I walked around the store wearing it for the majority of the Caper, which I suppose must have abetted in calling massive amounts of attention to our madness. I would have bought it, but it was sixty dollars, which seemed a little ridiculous considering it probably cost a ha'penny to make. I bought these jeans instead, because they were a mere twenty bucks, and happened to fit me better than pretty much any other pair of jeans I've ever worn, especially Sevens, which look really bad on me. I ripped giant holes into the knees because, you know, they were twenty dollars, so I didn't feel too bad about defiling them.

This ladies' work-out top was oddly reminiscent of Christopher Kane's first collection, and, excepting the plastic tag which connected the two shoes and forced me to waddle around somewhat constrictedly, these green loafers were actually pretty swank.

And for the record, in my opinion, the most important principle of any stellar wardrobe is:

Everything looks better with the collar popped.

3. Second Date at Six Flags

I have mused about my severe t-shirt addiction before on this blog, and I'm sure I will again, bearing in mind the accelerated pace with which I am always more than willing to drop any amount of money on a sweet tee. So, I was particularly stoked to check out the Wal-Mart little boys' department, where I knew I could at least find some sort of plain polo or thermal that would scratch the itch. Instead, I was lucky enough to find a series of black t-shirts featuring unflattering and sort of terrifying caricatures of NBA All-Stars. I opted for Kobe Bryant, mostly because they were all outta Yao Mings in my size.

I paired the t-shirt with cute lil' plaid shorts, which, like the gold flats, I would have bought in a heartbeat if I didn't have 50 billion pairs of cute lil' plaid shorts to begin with, which I do. I found a cool transparent plastic belt. It is even cooler than you think- it has a Carnaby Street-esque giant green plastic buckle that I had to hide around back since a bunch of security devices were attached to it, which looked stupid. The espadrille flats are chill, and the beach bag is kind of lame, but you know, it gets the job done as well as any other blah tote bag.

So yeah: if I were going to drink a blue razzberry Icee, play that stupid game where you fish for goldfish with a magnetic rod that I always lose at, and make out with a hot stoner boy on the Wonder Wheel on a sweaty July evening, I would totally rock this.

4. What Mary Quant wore when she volunteered at a nursing home

Believe it or not, this kimono-sleeved minidress was actually not designed by Emilio Pucci. It is the top half of a pair of really fly nurse's scrubs. I initially put together this look using a bubblegum pink scrub shirt, but it was indecently short, so I asked Eric to grab me an XL in the same color. He found this paisley pastel number instead, proving that he is the Grace Coddington of Mississauga, Ontario's Square One Shopping Centre indeed. I belted the "dress" with this silver-and-black Op-Art thing, and thanked the sweet Lord above that somebody else had removed these burgundy cable-knit stockings from their packaging.

Okay- and can you believe these shoes? When I found them, I texted Mary-Kate Olsen on my iPhone to keep her in the know, and she bought ten pairs that exact instant. You probably saw her wearing them at Givenchy Fall/Winter 08. These patent platforms are another case of "I would have bought them if..." which this time around happens to be, "I would have bought them if I was capable of wearing a pair of shoes with any heel higher than 1/2-inch without inflicting major harm upon myself."

Because I think this outfit would probably have been ruined by bloody knees, a fat lip, and tear-stained cheeks. Or maybe not, actually. I am rather fond of scrappiness.