Zara Adelaide

Last Thursday I was lucky enough to be invited to the media tour/opening of Zara at Burnside Village. On arrival we were gifted with a lovely leather tote bag and a usb with photos of Zara's latest lookbook.

The tour started at 8am, and we were taken in groups around the store and given detailed introductions to each collection by different staff members. Zara's concept is to keep each collection in its own section of the store, like a mini boutique where you can pair and mix individual items and access the coordinating shoes and bags.

Surprisingly, Zara's prices are not unreasonable. Shoes retail for around $60-90, a large selection of jeans for $60, coloured knits for $30 as well as some higher price points for limited edition items and finer materials. Not only was I impressed by the range of colour, cut and style for women, but the men's collection is very well thought out with plenty of pieces to mix and match. (If I'm lucky, I'll drag Pete along to buy him some slim fit shirts!) There's also a very cute and age appropriate kids collection and TRF, a collection aimed at fashion-forward youth.


Adelaide's Zara store is the largest in Australia, housed over two levels and occupying 2,300sq m and is modeled on the Fifth Avenue, New York design. It's a lovely store, very open, clean and relaxing. I think Zara will do very well at Burnside, as the style of the store and merchandise is in line with the mix of middle range and high end retailers in the shopping centre. 

My lookbook usb

Leather tote!

*Note: Sadly, at the start of the tour I realised my camera battery was completely dead (though it appeared full the night before). I have no photos of my own from the tour, but can show you pics from the Zara lookbook.

Friday I'm in Love

Thought I'd take advantage of the amazing weather and spare time due to my car being serviced to take some photos! Seriously, this weather is so perfect, it puts a smile on my dial all day.

First up, I'm showing off my new dress that I bought from K Mart for $29. K Mart have some really great stuff at the moment and I had to suppress a squeal when I saw this dress because I've always wanted one like it. It's floaty, feminine, soft green, a little bit boho and looks great with boots. It ticks all the boxes!

Below is today's outfit, teamed with the ultimate handbag - ultimate because the colours are awesome, the size is perfect and I paid a measly $1.99 for it at Salvos!!! Cha-ching!

Spike

Just though I'd update y'all on the newest sandals to appear in our Betts S/S range. Behold:

This is Spike, it retails for $89.99 and I'm pretty sure was made for me. While I'm at it, I really should buy the Anaconda heel from Zu while it's on sale.

What do you think? Love or hate?

Evil Twin Summer Lookbook

Aussie label Evil Twin (the twisted sister of Mink Pink) have released the lookbook for their first Summer collection, Black Magic Woman, and it is an absolute winner. According to the Evil Twin blog, the release is a bit late and we can expect their second summer range next week! How lucky!

The collection, if you couldn't already tell from the title, is a continuation of the themes we saw in their A/W collections and full of 70s nostalgia with a nod to rock-and-roll and tribal mysticism. While the cuts and silhouettes featured in this first collection are not ground-breaking, they boost the retro trend finally making its way to our shores. The collection is versatile and very wearable, highlighting one of the main reasons this brand continues to be a favourite of mine.

Breakfast of Champions

My apologies for the lack of fashion-related posts. I have been so busy lately visiting other cities and working extra hours, I promise to upload pics of all my wonderful new things soon! But firstly, I finally finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Honestly, I found it to be a tedious read as I never quite got used to the staccato narrative littered with illustrations of the signs, animals and objects Vonnegut was describing. However, his descriptions and commentary on American society and human behaviour are spot on and well worth the read. By describing facets of modern life at a basic level, Vonnegut exposes the absurdity of the world in which we live in and the rules and reasons we create for ourselves and our society.

"Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless the really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to.
So they didn't have to."

p.13, Breakfast of Champions.

I ear marked a few other pearls of wisdom:

""You are pooped and demoralized," read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.""

p.253

"He began the five mile walk down Fairchild Boulevard - toward a tiny amber dot at the other end. The dot was the Midland City Center for the Arts. He would make it grow bigger by walking toward it. When his walking had made it big enough, it would swallow him up. There would be food inside."

p. 284

""Mr. Trout - Kilgore -" I said, "I hold in my hand a symbol of wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.
"Look up, Mr. Trout," I said, and I waited patiently.
"Kilgore-?"
The old man looked up, and he had my father's wasted face when my father was a widower - when my father was an old old man.
He saw that I held an apple in my hand."

p.293

I'm about to start Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five which should be just as interesting and thought-provoking. If you have any other book recommendations, send them my way!