Douglas Blyde is the creator of top food and wine blog - Intoxicating Prose. I'm fond of this site, particularly when I'm craving some respite from my vapid world of fashion - just don't visit on an empty stomach or you'll be drooling. Aesthetically pleasing, (quite a rarity in the food and wine blogosphere) with a dry observational wit and vaguely existential tendencies. Bingo!
I'd cheekily asked Douglas to bear me in mind if ever he came across anything Style Scanner-esque on his travels. Both his writing and photography have mildly surreal leanings, so, while naively imagining that I might get a shot of some fabulous Art Deco hotel foyer - I wasn't altogether shocked when this belter, taken in Lisbon, unexpectedly revealed itself in my mailbox...
Uncanny actually, because I secretly had a little collection of my own half-cut mannequins brewing.
Douglas didn't tell me the back-story to this picture so let's see...spectacles, hat, what the....? Is her breast intentionally exposed? The window of an eatery perhaps? Has she been lent out to its patrons in rotation on a nightly basis over the last few decades? We had this sort of arrangement in The Brownies, each girl, in succession, was allowed to take an unwieldy fiberglass toadstool home for the week.(?) Painted up like a giant fly agaric, It was a touch too 'domed' to remain seated on for a whole episode of Blue Peter but pretty good for a game of leapfrog. No, I still don't think that's it.
In trying to diminish the unsettling quality of this still-life, the most innocent explanation I can hope for is that we're simply looking at a perfunctory 'lost property' repatriation system...
"Santa Maria! I've only gone and left my chastity belt at Cafe Portuguesa again, och, I'll just pop by tomorrow - maybe José stuck it in the window"
An alterations shop in Italy this Summer. It was an eerily quiet lunchtime in the Ligurian city of Imperia...
A promenade down Glasgow's Byres Road one evening a few weeks back unearthed this ghoulish double act...
I checked-up on 'The Hospice Shop' last Sunday...New hairdo, but that dislocated shoulder still needs urgent attention.
There's a famous Glasgow saying to describe someone living beyond their means:"Fur coat - nae knickers"... The no shoes version is entirely new to me.
If you happen to have photographed any outrageously heinous mannequins yourself, please email them over and I'll post the best ones!
And no stranger to the plight of the clothes horse himself, here's Douglas (bottom right) modelling for Oliver Goldsmith.
Mari O'Brien with husband Gavin who himself has quite a provenance in this field, his family run the legendary Edinburgh second hand institution Armstrong's, established in 1840 (that's not a typo). His vintage store Watermelon, just up the street, has been going strong since 2005.
The Glasgow Vintage Co.
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