I want to believe

Very belated post, I do apologise. It seems like the second I sit down to do this stuff I get some ridiculously large commission that I can't refuse. However, I finished the main one this morning, and maybe once the other one's done I can think about putting the M.o.E website up.

Meanwhile, my on/off relationship with Oasis is back on, after I discovered an excellent "army style" shirt dress in there this week. I think shirt dresses are one of the best ideas of recent times, making people like me with slightly boyish sense of casualwear, who nevertheless need to find a way of cooling their legs in the summer without resorting to pirate shorts, feel less like they're "wearing a dress" and more like they've been cast in the lead role of a cross-gender wartime production of A Christmas Carol. (Something that has always been a dream of mine, and I can't be the only one)...More girly girls might strike lucky in Gap, who have a great sale on summer dresses at the moment, in fact so much has been knocked off the price that they have started to cost almost what I'm prepared to pay for them. There's a very pretty, simple dress in there at the moment with a lined skirt making for that irresistably annoying 50's rock 'n roll swoosh. Despite the Hoxton hipsterness of 50s styling, I'm pretty much a postwar housewife these days and if I can dress the part without resorting to polkadots, I'll be as happy as a Sandra D.

Of course like all the most responsible columnists, I'm nothing but topical, and suppose I must mention the appalling events of last Thursday. How better to address it, I thought, than via an assessment of Scully's outfits through the first five series of the X Files. I hope it doesn't come across too negatively, I do like to think of Scully's style as a vital slice of the 90s, a constantly surprising visual time capsule, and a warning to us all about tapered trousers.

Scully had some serious problems with her hair style right until late in series 5. Here we see Gillian Anderson pretending to do something to an alien, in Series 1. I really have thought about this a lot, but the more I think about the more sure I am that her hairstyles were never quite in fashion. I was a teenager in 1994 and I had a symmetrical bob, but Scully's bob was never quite symmetrical, always kind of kicking out on one side and rolled under on the other, sometimes massive, sometimes less so, always slightly too long for her face. In this picture you can see the brief attempt at a fringe that only lasted for a few episodes, and that it seems she never quite got over losing, always spraying her hair into alarming shapes around the crown to try and compensate for the short-lived forehead bangs - something you get a sense of in this series 3 episode:

Hair aside, however, Scully's outfits underwent some much more subtle transformations over the years the show aired. The top photo I've put on this page clearly shows the "layering" she favoured during her "heavier" early days. Scully just wore too many clothes. It's no secret that shortish, broadish people don't need shoulderpads...but boy did no one tell her stylist. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that at some point in the early/mid nineties it was actually fashionable to wear clothes that were too big for you. In his ill-fitting suit season one days, even Mulder's surprisingly high arse couldn't save him.

My iBook's a bit broken at the moment, keeps saying "My mind is going, I can feel it, Dave" etc, and I don't want to tax it with screengrabs, so you'll have to trust me that Scully's worst clothing moment involved a gigantic green blazer with gold buttons. Finally, in the interests of objectivity and balance I must say that I've just stumbled across this ridiculous page which contradicts pretty much everything I've just said. Includes the line, "Hey, you know this is going to be an interesting Scullywear ep when she starts off with a tangerine blouse under the usual black skirt and jacket!"
Fish in a barrel, seriously.
Oh look, I found a picture of Scully's "Alan Partridge" moment...