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There’s been weird stuff going on between The Times fashion pages and The JC fashion pages… cue X Files music.
Last Saturday, September 24, the Times carried a fashion story about impossibly high shoes, and how the fashion pack refused to give them up. Under the headline “The fashion pack is really not over heels” new fashion editor Laura Craik wrote about “taxi shoes”, how the fashion editors and top fashion bloggers were clinging on to their impossibly high heels and how this was fine if you had a car waiting to transport you between runway shows, but not so great if you were a real person having to occasionally walk or run…
Observant readers (and I am not talking religiously observant here) may have spotted that the most recent edition of the JC, September 30, which came out on Wednesday – two days early because of Rosh Hashanah – also contained a story about shoes, how the fashion pack were wearing “taxi shoes” with impossibly high heels, and how this worked if you “had a limo purring” at the kerb, but not so much if you were a real woman who needed to walk, etc.
To the casual observer it might have appeared that the JC had borrowed liberally from The Times story, except that the JC fashion pages containing the shoe story were completed on Thursday September 22, two days before the Times piece.
In today’s edition of the Times, Laura Craik is writing about the Crombie (or, in JC parlance, the boyfriend) coat, about the choices of coats out there, and about the versatility of one particular style of coat.
Your next edition of the JC, on October 7, will contain a spread on choosing your winter coat, the huge choice, the importance of choosing a coat that is versatile. Because of Rosh Hashanah, those pages were completed last Tuesday, on September 27 – four days ahead of the Times piece.
Just to be clear, I am not for a nano-second suggesting that the Times might copy the JC, and I know I’m not copying the Times, and I also know that fashion pages cover the same ground, write about the same trends, etc. But Laura Craik and I both seem, almost uncannily, to be tuned into extremely similar, if not identical fashion vibes, making similar observations and coming to similar conclusions about readers and their purchases. As I said earlier, cue X Files music…