Novelty sunglasses don’t often come courtesy of an Italian luxury brand. But Prada’s oversized round sunglasses with their curlicue arms have achieved cult status. Mrs Prada is adept at taking something that others might think of as tacky and making it fabulous. That’s why this summer women who might normally prefer a classic aviator have taken these so-called “minimal baroque” frames into their hearts for a look that is part Gaga, part face architecture.
Imogen Fox Photograph: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images
Basil in ice-cream and sorbet form has been quite popular for a while (the provenance went from green tea to Thai basil to regular basil) but it never tasted like a huge surprise because it’s so floral. The current trend is for earthier herbs: St John Hotel in London has a fennel ice-cream that is amazing, and a coriander one also. The extraordinary Sat Bains in Nottingham has a mint ice-cream – common enough, except that instead of accompanying chocolate, it comes with peas. It’s all about defamiliarising the familiar.
Zoe Williams Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian
In summers past bright pants were the wardrobe preserve of grownup public schoolboys. This summer, pink, red and electric blue trousers – colours that are traditionally more palatable on the top half of a look – have appeared on the legs of fashionable men and women alike. J Brand’s pioneering colour-pop red jeans have made a killing and the high street has been in fast pursuit. Worn with an equally bright top the look is Mondrian-esque and nonchalantly shrugs its shoulders at received good taste.
IF Photograph: Neil Mockford/FilmMagic
Describing Tyler the Creator as “off-taste” is a cautious use of language, like calling Rupert Murdoch “quite influential”. Yes, he’s a remarkable pop star – a stage-diving, ski-mask-wearing livewire haunted by his absent father and with a dazzling gift for wordplay. But the lyrics – which balance the self-loathing with graphic imagery of violence and necrophilia – can be as tiresome as they are shocking. Is Tyler off-taste or just plain off, then? The fact we can’t decide makes him all the more compelling.
Tim Jonze Photograph: PR
If you were asked to tap into your prejudices and draw a business woman, maybe one who was big in the 80s, you might draw a lady with bouffant hair, in heels and a pastel skirt suit. Just like Karren Brady. Despite, or perhaps because of, a career spent in male-dominated fields (she used to run Birmingham City FC) her femininity is ramped up to a cartoonish degree. Only someone completely sure of their talent and drive could dress like Business Barbie and command the respect Brady does.
Emine Saner Photograph: Mikael Buck/Rex Features
Can I quote the Daily Mail? It seems apt. This is from the paper’s report of Prince Albert’s honeymoon: “The 53-year-old billionaire and his 33-year-old wife of just over a week have cut short their trip to South Africa so he can take a DNA test to resolve a multimillion pound paternity claim.” I mean, amazing. Monaco’s Grace Kelly glory days of glamour seem a loooong way away, now that runaway brides, confiscated passports and secret love children have turned the principality into a real-time soap.
Jess Cartner-Morley Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
Harriet Harman is truly the MP for the constituency of Off-Taste. This summer she has taken to rocking a giraffe print on the opposition benches. Had she worn a leopard-print jacket, the dial on the off-taste-ometer would barely have flickered as that particular animal print has become so ubiquitous that it has gone from barmaid chic to neutral over the past few seasons. Plus, Theresa May has been there already. But giraffe just seems a bit bigger, bolder, more unexpected. Just more “off”.IF Photograph: PA/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Olives are over. You might as well serve cheese-and-pineapple sticks. The new pre-dinner snack at hip restaurants is popcorn. No longer flavourless polystyrene for teenagers at a multiplex on a Saturday night, it’s white and fluffy at Bob Bob Ricard or chilli-and-salt spiked at Spuntino. The popcorn revival is part of the new vogue for American haute-trash cuisine: see also, sliders and meatballs at Giant Robot, mac-and-cheese everywhere. If you can’t live without olives, they deepfry them at Spuntino. JCM
JCM Photograph: Judith Collins / Alamy/Alamy
When in How to be a Woman, Caitlin Moran wrote that “there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in a proper, furry muff . . . Lying in a hammock, gently finger-combing your Wookiee whilst staring up at the sky is one of the great pleasures of adulthood”, all the reviewers quoted it but no one went “ew”. Powered by humour, Moran’s feminism decrees that women can say anything that men can, enjoy porn and stop crippling themselves with heels – and that the last thing they should be inhibited by is taste.
Alex Needham Photograph: Sophia Evans
Brilliant white-blond hair, Wayfarers, a very next season pencil skirt and a gold pendant. This is the outfit that Debbie Harry chose to wear for a recent Somerset House gig. It was the epitome of cool. And then, as the crowd’s eyes cut through all the stage paraphernalia, they saw something strikingly off-taste Or as one fan announced it: “Debbie’s wearing FitFlops.” Said footwear had the cult thick-soled keep-you-trim-on-the-move vibe, crossed with a pair of sensible house sandals. Totes atomic, non?
Simon Chilvers Photograph: PA/PA
Stripes are tasteful, but dots are firmly off-taste. Even the term “polka-dot” renders the print too jaunty to stay within the parameters of fashion for long. Instead, it dances on the edge of the taste boundary, skipping in and out of style. During the Tour de France, the King of the Mountains polka-dot jersey stands out from the peloton even amid the clashing team colours – both simpler and more OTT at the same time. Next season, Marc Jacobs has ensured that spots, dots, call them what you will, are at the height of fashion.
IF Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex Features
Clacton-on -Sea is wonderful because – yes, you don’t believe this sentence can end well, you Guardian-reading ponce – of its sandy beach, great rail links, cheap accommodation and undercover amusements in case it rains, which it will. Better yet, it is devoid of the likes of you. As it says on the evil Chavtowns website: “The dregs of the north, the midlands and London descend upon this place.” That’s why this summer I’ll be there in my deckchair with a bag of chips and a copy of Owen Jones’s Chavs.
Stuart Jeffries Photograph: Rodger Tamblyn/Alamy
There was a time when Nicola Roberts felt like the “ugly duckling” of Girls Aloud. Next to her bandmates she was distinctive for her stark red hair and white skin. Then Roberts discovered the world of fashion and learned to embrace what made her different. She became a regular on the front row at the shows of Henry Holland. She went solo, kicking her shoes by Sophia Grace Webster in the video. Roberts isn’t just embracing off-taste, she’s flaunting everything about herself that she used to hide.
Rosie Swash Photograph: ben.griffiths@premierpr.com
The appeal of Wendi Deng is a bit special interest: however fast she can slap a man down, she is still married to Rupert Murdoch. It’s a bit desperate for feminism, if we’re looking for role models in the wallets of international tycoons (and if you liked that, you should join the Facebook group Feminist Prison). She appears to be someone who urgently loves this funny-looking man, a passion that adds lightning reactions to her leaping and slapping skills. She would have taken out that whole room, if she’d had to. You can’t not admire it.
ZW Photograph: Ron Sachs/Rex Features
The Buenos Aires-born artist has made a career out of exploring things that are a more than a little bit wrong – he has written about such London “landmarks” as Paternoster Square and the MI6 building. Bronstein’s current show at the ICA sees him remaking the building (a wall was moved) to install a bonkers world in which dancers prance around mutant “antiques”, an elaborate theatre turns out to have nothing in it, and the “real” ICA seems a lot less tangible than his era-mashing dream world.
AN Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
The notion of putting the former Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire, in double-lurex (silver v-neck over a peachy gold high-crew) then photographing him for your autumn/winter ad campaign is off-taste godlike genius. And Mrs Prada is not alone in this lurex love-in. Hello Topman Design (the brand’s posh catwalk collection), which featured sparkly lurex tops under suits or knitwear during its autumn show at the Royal Opera House. Who doesn’t love a menswear curveball? Especially when it sparkles.
SC Photograph: PR company handout
Despite sounding like a brand of tampon, Lillet is in fact a citrus-scented aperitif. It’s a mixture of bordeaux wines, citrus liqueurs and quinine most famously used in a Vesper Martini. In Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, James Bond invents a drink made from “three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet”. He later names it after his love interest, Vesper Lynd. Kina Lillet is now usually known as Lillet Blanc and is, if you can find it, delicious with ice and a slice of orange.
SJ Photograph: www drinksdirect.co.uk
Cult Spanish-based magazine Apartamento features the real homes of people with eccentric, highly personal tastes. It struck gold when it stumbled upon the New York flat of writer Bruce Benderson. He’s a connoisseur of the outre in both life and decor. With an eye-popping Technicolor scheme, the kitchen is chartreuse with yellow cabinets, the bedroom is red, and an adjoining room is purple. “Purple and red, the Pope’s colours,” notes Benderson. “That’s what makes it decadent.”
AN Photograph: Thomas Dozol/Apartamento issue No7
Always one to explore uncharted cultural territories, Björk was doing off-taste a decade ago when she laid an egg on the red carpet at the Oscars. Since then, she has worn “hair sculpture” and a giant red foot designed by Bernard Wilhelm. Her Biophilia look incorporates: a disco gown by Michael Van Der Ham, a thick blue line around her face and an exploding red wig. It was only when people pointed out the resemblance to Rebekah Brooks that the full zeitgeist-surfing genius was revealed. AN Photograph: Carsten Windhorst/www.frpap.co
Almost 1.8 million people went to see Take That on tour this summer. That’s the same number of people who applied for the first round of Olympic tickets. How can a man-band hold as much appeal for the British public as the first Olympic games to be held in the country for 64 years? It’s the so-wrong-it’s-right power of cheesy, nostalgic pop. Full disclosure: I went to see Take That. A stadium full of people drinking rosé in plastic glasses and an actual Mexican wave. That is summer 2011 taste, right there.
JCM Photograph: David Fisher/Rex Features
Had Karl Lagerfeld been watching My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding before designing his latest Chanel haute couture show, which closed with all the models in glow-in-the-dark shoes? They called to mind the mini torches in fancy car keys. In a good way. In one episode of MBFGW, dress designer Thelma put fairy lights in a 14-stone bridal gown. This dress came with a fire extinguisher. Karl’s shoes did not. The fashion desk is taking bets on which celebrity will wear these beauties first. Sheikha Mozah is currently at evens.
SC Photograph: Stephane Cardinale/People Avenue/Corbis
