Frugal: So hot right now

In case you didn’t already know it, being frugal is so hot right now. Oh yes.

You know you’ve noticed it, girlfriends announcing camping trips instead of the usual annual pilgrimage to the Greek Islands (with only a trace of crazy/fright around the eyes); eschewing the normal expensive nights out in favour of hitting your best friend’s couch with a bottle of wine and some James McAvoy eye-candy DVDs; and if you haven’t already discovered the frugal fun of swap-meet parties, I have two words for you: DO IT.

Need more proof? By page 6 of the Sunday Times’ Style magazine this weekend, two unlikely ideas had permeated the usual ridiculously over-priced materialistic orgy that usually reigns supreme: eating in versus eating out, and (hold onto your hat, dear reader), ‘make do and mend’.  Make do and mend.

Not the Sunday Times Style magazine!!? I hear you cry. The very same. This is the same magazine that regularly tells me that if I don’t own a pair of £660 Sergio Rossi grey suede boots I may as well not get out of bed in the morning. And if I don’t have a £1,460 Fendi merino-wool coat hanging in my closet I should think twice about showing my face in public. And, what?  No £1,338 green sequined Miu Miu shorts? How do I live???

Of course, they have put an über-trendy spin on the idea of spending less during tough economic times. Eating in is now called ‘CREAM-ing’ (WTF?!), that is, ‘Cancel the Reservation Everyone At Mine’. And as for ‘make do and mend’,

Homespun fashion doesn’t normally equal cool, but times they are a-changing. Welcome to the new world of “crashion” (economic-crash fashion) where anything goes, from “investment buying” (spending all of your salary on one piece), heirloom hunting (filching your granny’s keepsafes) to making your own. Even the great dame Vivienne Westwood has been endorsing the new thrift – at her recent Paris show, she urged assembled fashionistas to make “necklaces out of safety pins” and shawls from “blankets, tablecloths, curtains or towels”.

[Except, methinks Vivienne Westwood may have suggested these ideas because, you know, she’s crazy, rather than as a money-saving technique per se].

I do admire them for embracing the credit crunch and all that, but more than anything I wish that I could have been there during that crisis meeting at Style magazine when they realised this stuff could no longer be ignored. Just for the laughs. I imagine a flurry of fashionistas in a panic, screaming at each other to come up with new buzzwords like CREAM-ing and crashion, pulling their hair out as they imagine the semi-glossy pages of Style covered in clothes from stores where poor people shop, like (retch) Oasis, rather than Balenciaga; and their little Nicholas Kirkwood boots clicking towards the bathroom where they hide in the stalls and ward off anxiety attacks, consoling themselves with visions of Kate Moss wearing Vivienne Westwood terry-towelling shawls.

It almost makes the credit crunch worth it, doesn’t it?

And by the way, I don’t jest about the green sequined Miu Miu shorts. Either I’m getting old or they are some fugly sounding shorts. Page 28. Check it for yourself.