Fashion Drama a la Finland

Finland’s hottest (and probably only) fashion related awards show Elle Style Awards was last week. I had already forgotten about it but my friend called today and told me about a HUGE FASHION SCANDAL! A FASHION CRIME! A crime so heinous they should call the Special Victims Unit!

No, not really.

This is what happened…There is this young fashion blogger named Alexandra, the daughter of famous Finnish journalist and TV-personality Baba Lybeck. They arrived to the gala together and naturally, their photo was taken on the red carpet:

Image via iltalehti.fi

They are both insanely good-looking, don’t you think? Anyhoo, this is where the crime happened. Want to know what it is? Well, when asked what she was wearing, Alexandra (according to Iltalehti) replied vintage.

Aaaaaaand Finnish fashion world went bonkers. Someone spotted that the kimono Alexandra was wearing, is a free Yves Rocher-gift from early nineties. HORROR! Or that’s what people collectively cried. People got so offended that they even posted the outfit on the Finnish Facebook-fails site Feissarimokat with a title Project Runway. So. Much. Burning. A friend of mine linked to another conversation where there were following comments:

“Yves Rocher is replacing Oscar de la Renta”

“I have the matching slippers”

“You would have thought that when the invitation says black tie, you’d take the opportunity to dress up.”

Brutal. So brutal. But the thing is, the girl is 16. The kimono is older than her PLUS 20-year old thing is vintage. Not the best of quality but still…NOT ALL VINTAGE ARE! The girl herself wrote on her blog that she bought it for 5 euros last summer and got tons of compliments on it during the night. Word. And not to mention, if you can’t experiment and do fashion fails when you are 16, when will you ever find your own style?!?

But I digress. The best comment on the conversation was this and actually captures some relevant issues Finnish fashion industry has:

“In the 80s, the men in the village built a car on a Volkswagen chassis, with fiberglass and called it a Porsche. If someone bought it as a Porsche, it hardly is the seller’s fault. As a media critical person, I bet that the journalist asked her where she got the dress and when she answered “a vintage store” the dress became vintage in the story. This wouldn’t be a huge surprise in this golden era of ‘investigative journalism’. What is notable though that Yves Rocher’s free gift doesn’t look half bad next to the designer items, even though the one who is wearing it adds on the effect. Somewhere, in the depths of the wild jungle they call subcontracting, is a surprising level of design knowhow. “

-Thrifty Finn-