Laura Craik on Cindy Crawford, Vetements and Oxford University's favourite crisps...

Laura Craik on supermodel home envy, her latest style sleuthing and crispgate
Laura Craik24 August 2017

Every time I get back from holiday — unless I’ve been somewhere especially heinous — I start finding fault with my house. ‘This kitchen is too wooden,’ I say, gesturing at the dark iroko worktops, knackered oak floorboards, original stripped pine shutters and reproduction antique pine door. ‘It’s like living in a sauna, minus the chic Scandi minimalism. Or the warmth.’

To be frank, I could have done without Kate Moss’s palatial Highgate home being splashed all over Architectural Digest this month. If there’s one thing guaranteed to make you feel inadequate, it’s supermodels’ cribs. They’re not like footballers’ cribs, where you can quietly console yourself that yes, your sofa might be wine-stained and in a shade not fashionable since 1998, but at least you’re not living in Xanadu, with purple flock wallpaper, zebra skin rugs and a tiki bar. By contrast, Kate’s wallpaper is de Gournay, her bathroom curtains are embroidered silver saris and she lives in a ‘grisaille-enveloped space’. I too want a grisaille-enveloped space. Right after I’ve googled what it is.

The one stylistic tic that confounds me, though, is the supermodel penchant for plastering the walls with pictures of herself. Kate’s pad is full of them; so too is Cindy Crawford’s, as a video of her Malibu home, shot for American Vogue, recently revealed. Here’s Cindy, butt-naked and draped in a boa constrictor! It’s a little onanistic. Although if I looked like Cindy Crawford, maybe I’d hang naked photos of myself everywhere too, instead of ones in baggy navy jumpers, looking vexed.

Meanwhile, it’s back to looking at kitchen worktops, stair carpets, mid-century floor lamps on 1stdibs.com, and other items that I can’t afford. A new study claims that one in three Londoners admits to constantly redecorating their house. Only one in three? Everyone I know is in a permanent state of dissatisfaction with their home, forever glowering at some loathed objet they bought on eBay half-pissed. We shouldn’t be so harsh on ourselves. Cindy Crawford has a cushion embroidered with the words ‘Love Life’. It doesn’t get much naffer than that.

Kate Moss's Highgate neighbourhood
Alamy Stock Photo

SHONKY TONK WOMAN

If a picture paints a thousand words, then a stylist’s Instagram feed paints a thousand clues about her clients’ forthcoming collections. Judging by the travels of Lotta Volkova, we can expect a lot of deep Midwestern American influences surfacing in Vetements and/or Balenciaga in the coming months. The stylist has been touring down Highway 79, taking in the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, The Beaver Bar and various shonky motels en route to Rapid City, South Dakota. Anyone who remembers Hogs & Heifers, the saloon bar that ruled over New York’s Meatpacking District (before it got pushed out by rent rises), will get the aesthetic gist. Hipsters, you might want to start growing your beards and your sideburns.

Go west: Lotta Volkova

POTATO HEAD

I’m still raging about the Oxford University student whose list of top 30 favourite crisps went viral, thus gazumping a personal project I’ve been finessing for decades. Isn’t it enough that people from Oxford University run the country? Do they have to start asserting their dubious taste in snack foods over us as well? How this elitely educated person can rank so many ready salted crisps in his top five is beyond me, but then, the world is divided into two types of people: those who think ready salted is the devil’s spawn, and those who are wrong. If a crisp doesn’t rip off the roof of your mouth with its piquant sting, it’s not truly a crisp. Walker’s pickled onion till I die. Of stomach acidity.

Laura Craik

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