Glad you asked, everyone! People tend to think this is not something they need put much thought into. Just that dress from French Connection two years ago and some lip gloss, right? That’ll do!
In fact, dressing for the office Christmas party is probably the trickiest fashion quandary you’ll face all year. All outfits send a message. Some say: “Yes, I might be a middle-aged man, but have you seen my skinny black jeans? These have never seen the inside of a B&Q, I can tell you, mate! I’m all about the clubbing!” Others say: “Hello, I like to hibernate from November to March. Yes, I am in my pyjamas at 1pm on a Wednesday, what’s your point?” (See question below.)
With an office party, you need your outfit to make so many conflicting statements that we can only start to grasp what is needed by laying them all out. Here is what you need your outfit to say: “Hi! I’m actually surprisingly attractive, aren’t I? And you always thought I was just a mousey office person. But I’m not attractive in a now-you-want-to-sleep-with-me way, because that would be really awkward in the office. No, it’s more of a fun and funny but definitely-out-of-your-league way, so that you’re now nicer to me at work and maybe feel a little wistful when you think of me, but you know you could never, ever try it on with me. I’m like your mate’s really hot partner, right? Think of me like that. Also, I’m a lot more interesting than you thought, aren’t I? This outfit shows someone with secret depths of creativity, someone who is a little more woke, a little more on it than you thought. It’s the kind of outfit worn by someone who gets invited to secret midnight gigs, which is totally how I spend my evenings after you see me leave the office, not just sitting on my sofa wishing Bake Off was on. No, never. You respect me more now, don’t you?”
For men, this means a suit that actually fits; for women, this means a dress that isn’t two years old and from French Connection. That’s the other thing about office parties: the message is tricky, but the bar is pretty low.
Look, for the record, I really did try, OK? Because I, along with everyone else, got the memo sent to every columnist in Britain that the topic this season was something called “hygge” and that it was absolutely essential we treat it as an actual thing, under pain of losing our lofty status as opinion churners for hire. Sure, a couple of other things were happening this year that we could have written about – something in the political world, I think? – but hygge was the big one, the issue on which we absolutely must express opinions. To the laptop!
Yet two months have passed since the hygge klaxon went out and still, from me, nothing. I know! It makes no sense. I once wrote 4,000 words for a fashion magazine about how a store moved its shoe rack from one end of the store to the other. Surely I, of all people, could conjure up some kind of excitement/outrage/bigger meaning about hygge? No, I could not.
I get that hygge is a real thing in Denmark. I also get that clever, good writers are writing books about it. But, try as I genuinely do, I cannot see hygge as anything other than Danish for “choosing to be cosy instead of miserable and uncomfortable”. You know what? I think I’ve got that down pat already. Perhaps my fellow columnists have heretofore been living in the kind of photogenic but clearly horrible modern houses you see in fashion magazines’ homes spreads, all chrome and corners and bare, slate-grey floors on which they click about with their pointy-toed stilettos. The sort of homes with sofas as hard as boards and cupboards you can’t open because door handles are verboten. I, on the other hand, am au fait with the concept of getting into one’s pyjamas, ideally by 3pm in the winter, lighting a fire, inviting friends over and settling down with a giant pot of macaroni cheese. My friends are so used to seeing me in my pyjamas that, when one of them saw me in a dress recently, he was genuinely concerned that someone had died.
So, trying to be excited/outraged about hygge feels like attempting to stir an emotion about air, water or anything else that is just “the stuff of life” to me. I mean, thanks for validating my lifestyle choice of staying home, eating chocolate and wearing socks – I raise my hot water bottle in appreciation. But, seriously, does anyone live differently? This smacks of a trend that exists purely to sell to people things they already have. But that’s absurd – fashion would never do that.
So, I’m sorry. I appreciate that this will result in my invitation to the columnists’ Christmas party being revoked. I might even have my name removed from the Columnists’ Golden Charter, meaning – Oh, cruel world! – I’ll never appear on Have I Got News for You or Question Time. But I must live my truth. As Tony Blair said, albeit possibly not about hygge, I am the insurgent now.
YOU KNOW A nun when you see one. The uniform, known as a habit, is a dead giveaway. But the outfit you’re picturing in your head might look very different from the one worn by the sisters at your local convent. And yet, each ensemble’s meaning is immediately clear. That’s because nuns abide by a sartorial system that is at once endlessly adaptable and instantly recognizable.
That’s an impressive feat for any visual system. In the case of nuns’ habits, that system relies on a standardized combination of symbolic elements. “It’s really a kit of parts,” says Lucienne Roberts, cofounder of GraphicDesign&, a British publishing house devoted to design’s more esoteric subjects. For their latest book, Looking Good: A Visual Guide to the Nun’s Habit, Roberts and cofounder Rebecca Wright worked with illustrator Ryan Todd and theologian Veronica Bennett to dissect the dress of nuns from some 40 Catholic orders. The result is a fascinating work of reference on a subject to which you’ve almost certainly never paid much mind.
The book begins by cataloguing the various components that typically comprise a nun’s habit. These include things like veils, rosaries, tunics, medals, coifs (the cap worn under the veil), and sandals. It’s a collection from which each religious order draws some, but not all, of its sartorial elements. This section provides the reader with a visual framework with which to understand Todd’s minimalist illustrations, which rely on simple cues to distinguish between religious families.
For instance, many orders of nuns wear some form of girdle, be it a belt, a cord, or a cincture. Each type and subtype of garment carries specific connotations. Franciscan nuns, for instance, favor a cord over a leather belt, to reflect their order’s devotion to poverty. Its four knots, plainly visible in Todd’s illustration of the Franciscan garb, represent the order’s vows of chastity, poverty, obedience, and enclosure.
These are the kinds of minutiae encoded in the book’s pages, which the authors color code to differentiate between the various orders. Even the nuns’ orientation on the page is significant; some face towards the reader, while others face away. This is to distinguish between sisterhoods that are active in their communities from ones that live cloistered lives, respectively. The book itself, like the habits it analyzes, is a form of information design.
Presenting that information meant distilling complex social and historical subjects into simple visual patterns. “We had to make sure we weren’t editing it down too much,” Roberts says. GraphicDesign&’s approach draws heavily on the work of Otto Neurath, a curator and designer credited as the forefather of pictograms. Neurath is known for developing Isotype (International System of TYpographic Picture Education), a method of conveying complex social and historical information in pictorial form. Looking Good achieves something similar. While each order is accompanied by a few lines of explanatory text, the book was designed so that readers could grasp the differences simply by looking at the illustrations.
As Wright and Roberts explain in the foreword, religious institutions have long relied on colors and symbols to communicate their history, identity, and differences of belief. The nun’s habit encapsulates this observation perfectly. That makes it one of history’s most enduring, and adaptable, visual identities—and Looking Good an unexpectedly interesting graphic standards manual.
After ghosting, mooning and breadcrumbing, modern dating has taken a new twist: unghosting.
It is a term used to describe a person who has been ghosted - where a person ignores all contact to discourteously cut someone off – only to be hit up again by the culprit in hope of rekindling the flame.
The phrase was used by writer Gabrille Pedriani in a piece for Thrillist, and has also gained traction on social media.
She described the moment someone she had met up with once four months earlier texted her out of the blue.
He asked her “On a scale from 1-10” what the “rejection level” would be if he tried to say “what’s up.”
When she asked why he had texted her again, he simply responded: “Older = fewer options = more thoughts of the past.”
Pedriani went on to argue that ghosting has been normalised in dating, and “unghosting” is following suit. As people get older and the fear of “dying alone” kicks in, they may regret opting to explore the seemingly “limitless options” of dating rather than giving it a shot with one person that they experienced some feelings towards.
Twitter users have also adopted the term to describe their confusing when dating.
The phrase has emerged following a 2012 study which identified seven break-up methods. It found that ghosting - identified as withdrawal and avoidance - is the least ideal way to end a relationship.
Writing for The Independent, Relate counsellor Clare Prendergast suggested those who have been ghosted can cope by deleting the person’s number and by avoiding internalising negative emotions.
“Being dumped unceremoniously with no explanation taps into our deepest fears of abandonment," she wrote. "That’s why it’s so hard to come to terms with.
However there’s a compensation to being ghosted - when someone has suddenly gone from your life it is easier to get over them because you don’t see them and can’t be constantly reminded they still exist.”
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