An Illustrated Fashion Blog by Angie Réhe

That’s not a statement, that’s a name.  Although actually, it’s also a statement.

We go back, and we cross continents.  I believe in any true friendship there’s always a defining moment when you realise it’s the shiznit, and for Ms Rock and I that was the time in London when I was stood up again by the sexy pole, and called her in a fug.  She could have rightly said I told you so, but instead she said meet me in 30 minutes at Medicine Bar, where we made short work of a bottle of red before I wobbled back to the tube and she proceeded to her date.  Her date. Yes, even though she had a hot date she still made time to share not a glass but a bottle and listen to me whine.  And boy did I whine.

So meet Ms Rocks, brand new photography graduate, already with a catalogue shoot for Rich under her belt.  And check out the shoes, handmade by our friends Joanna and Peter at Preston Zly.  They’re made from Stingray, and I’m pretty sure if you tapped them together 3 times you’d be transported somewhere fabulous.

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Sitting this morning sipping my Sunday morning coffee, I flicked through the paper and cast my mind back over last night: BBQ – Good?  Check, no spillages, no faux pas rating higher than a 6:  Drink at the pub on the way home – Good?  Check, aargh – memory flash, leaning in to make chit chat with the handsome barman when finally I got my chance, elbow narrowly misses edge of bar, causing me to face plough glass of wine.  Not cool, and remembering this is not a good start to the day.

Never defeated, I turned the day around with a spot of vintage shopping at the Thread Den vintage market in North Melbourne.  A decade of shopping for work has turned me into a lazy scanner, but fortunately I had Peta my personal spotter with me, who eyeballed these undeniably smokin’ shoes which went so beautifully with the snakeskin clutch I’d already nabbed, and which freakishly fitted my duck feet.  Fate.  As I was moved to remark – if these shoes don’t get me a husband then nothing will.

Look at them!  I’m practically engaged.

And notice please the perfection orange dress which Peta previously bought but was too small.  Ah, sob.  Note to all:  Only ever shop with friends who have different taste to you or are a different size.

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Of all the things I could justifiably seek therapy for, and there is a list, my disproportionate love for Paris over any other city would have to be near the top.  Long before I ever landed at Charles De Gaulle or had my first rude treatment from a french waiter, I was obsessed with the place.

So blind was my love that even when I dated a frenchman (once – and cut the date short using an aerobics class as the reason for my hasty departure – no really, if he said one more time Onjheeee!  Oh but yer eeyezh are se bleeeuuuuuh! I may have killed us both), my perfect vision of Paris remained untarnished.  In fact for 10 whole years, I put up with some spectacularly annoying jobs just because they took me to Paris at least twice per year.

But why?  The extreme beauty of the place?  The wine?  The cheese?  The guy in the g-string I photographed sunbaking by the Seine?  The french waiter who caused me to almost miss my flight to New York?  Or is it more that when I put on my brand new red Dior lipstick and went for a walk I got so much attention I thought I’d forgot to put a skirt on?  No actually, it’s the soft European lighting that blurs my lines, doesn’t make me squint quite so hard, and makes colours look more beautiful when offset by the old grey buildings.  I just look better in Paris.

Ok ok, if you insist – this is the guy in the g-string:

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For those of us in Melbourne today, it’s stinking out there.  What is it – a hundred degrees??  I can tell you that the only thing separating me from the tonic in my fridge and the gin on my shelf until now has been the fact I needed to draw something to go with these short words, and it’s the lament of my life that I can’t drink and draw.

But back to the heat… So after 3 hours of life drawing during which even the model almost melted – and she was naked – I headed off to the paper sale at Neil’s.  Driving through the streets of Fitzroy and wondering why the hell I was in such a good mood when actually my fingers were fusing to the red-hot steering wheel, I suddenly realised that as far as the eye could see there were naked male torsos.  So thank you Budda/Allah/God/Muccia Prada or whoever it is that brings us the kind of hot weather that compels Australian men to take off their tops, thank you very much.

Now if only it was acceptable for us laydees to take off our tops in the heat too.  Oh hang on, that would be like those dreams I have over and over again where I’m walking down the street and suddenly realise I forgot to put a top on. (Feel free to interpret this dream for me – it’s clearly trying to tell me something.)

Our melting model:

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It’s day 4 of this cold and frankly it’s shitting me.  I am on my fourth box of tissues, and my nose looks like something off Amy Winehouse’s face.  Actually my whole face does.

Despite this, I still attended the Lloyd Cole show at Thornbury Theatre tonight, having bought the tickets about 3 years ago, and gagging to relive some of my late-80s idealism (insert jaded cynical gafaw) .  Jazzed on codral “day”, I found the show a little slow – Bill Callahan is pretty much the only person I don’t find boring when solo with guitar – which leaves me in the awkward position of being home at 11.30pm and ready to rock.  Hence this post.

And here I find a sketch from the other day, and look, I’m even wiping my nose, except this one isn’t throbbing red like something off Santa’s sled.

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So there I was tapping away last week writing the Patsyfox newsletter and wondering what the hell was that great about this week anyway, when I receive an e-mail from Yasuko Kurono, the Japanese artist behind the TOYS (Take Off Your Skin) performance art which I so lovingly documented in pencil & paper recently… The wonders of Google had led her to Patsyfox and she was so enamored with my illustration that she put it on her blog.  Aaah, there’s a lotta love in the blogasphere…

If you didn’t already check it out through the newsletter: Check out her blog…

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When I do something I like to think that I do it well.  So when it came to the recent advice given to me to work a bit less, be a bit less disciplined, and have a lot more fun, this was no exception – I threw myself into it wholeheartedly.  Consequently, work and discipline didn’t get a look in last weekend, but fun certainly did.  Perhaps a little too much, because the champagne and bloody marys seem to have rolled seamlessly into codral and vicks.

Suffice to say, instead of frocking up somewhere trackside like the rest of my fellow Melbournians today (it’s Melbourne Cup day for the out-of-towners), and wearing a fabulous dress like this Stella McCartney one above, I was inhaling vicks over a bowl and sneezing green stuff onto my beloved Mac (in fact you’ve probably caught my cold just reading this).  Nothing like knowing all your friends are together and having fun in the sun, while you are on your own and not.

Fortunately for me, Patsy doesn’t like crowds and finds me pretty much the most interesting thing in her life.  My shadow – Patsy.

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Put it down to thick calves (according to a survey in Dolly magazine in 1981 my calves were 10cm outside the “normal” parameters), but I always said I didn’t understand people who had a shoe obsession.  That is, right up until the day I was hit in the head by a (boot) shoe box which didn’t stay put when I hurled it Knicks-style towards the top of the pile on my wardrobe, thereby being knocked backwards off the chair/phone books I was standing on.  Being summarily buried in the proceeding shoe box avalanche was my moment of realisation – jesus I have a lot of shoes! And they hurt.

Having it pointed out that I have little illustrations on the end of each box only cemented the fact that there was a little bit of Imelda in me.

So happy was I to wander in to Craft Victoria this week and find a teeny little exhibition of shoes called “Shoe Show”.  Featuring the work of some of Melbourne’s leading emerging shoemakers, it gives us a look into the art and inspiration of their bespoke practices.  I was particularly taken with the ‘shoe pants’ – yes, shoes connected to the pants – worth wearing just for when you go to a Japanese restaurant where you have to take your shoes off.  The conjoined shoes were a leetle bit too close to the dreams I have where I’m trying to run but can’t move.  But ooh, the white boots with embroidered gaitors…

Got me in the shoe-collecting mood so I took a look at net-a-porter…OOOOOhhhhhh, look at them……

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If I needed any more evidence that I’ve gone a little off the sane track of late, then the fact that I’m sitting here in the pm-turned-am drawing and writing a blog post, after 2 days on the brainiac chain-gang trying to pull a Masters proposal out of my arse, would be it.

Yes, readers in Melbourne will know just how beautiful the weather was here on Saturday, and most probably spent the day re-introducing their skin to the concept of a tan.  I, on the other hand, spent the day in the bowels of RMIT ensuring I stay the colour of a melting moment (that’s an albino yo-yo for those who don’t know the difference), downloading to my brain all I need to know about putting the letters MA after the ones I already have.  I then backed it up with 24 solid hours intellectualising and translating my ideas about drawing and design into words.  I think the strain is clear because that sentence doesn’t even make sense.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that spending so much time with my specs on and using many multi-syllable words has made me feel like quite the academic.  Does my brain look big in these?

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