Zee French do it Better…. now buy our goods!

On this happy Good Friday, hours of eBay browsing ensued, turning up many an interesting auction that hopefully if I’m successfuly at 50% of them, I’ll basically have my wardrobe for the next three months sorted… however, the subject of this post is the seller icecoolvintage who is based in L’Honor de Cos, Midi-Pyr√©n√©es in France and their quite hilarious way of selling in their auctions.

Now, I’m not really into worshipping French fashion/style in the way that a lot of people do.  Or not just about fashion, but regarding other things too.  When people declare fashion/dance music/food to be a whole lot better in France in that sort of repugnant Francophilic way ‘Oh wait till you get to France, you’ll see REAL fashion/eat REAL food/hear REAL electro there’, I really roll my eyes.  It’s not a patriotic thing.  It’s not about one country being better than the other.  Sweeping generalisations are just really irritating.  I don’t idolise French style the way some people do because I believe in diversity and individuality more than anything else so tacking on the label ‘French’ isn’t going to entice me anymore than if you tacked on German, Korean or Argentinian until I have seen the item for myself and believe in the item’s integrity, regardless of its origins. 

So icecoolvintage’s approach to selling is a funny and interesting one.  Whilst all the listings are in English and they talk about UK sizes and shipping to the UK and so they are blatantly targeting UK buyers, they are clear to point out that the goods that they sell are superior because they are French.  For example, they talk about having a large stock of French 60s’ – 70s’ ‘funky’ clothing and because the concept of throwaway fashion which is was all the rage in the UK was alien to the French, their garments are better made than their UK counterparts… 

That may well be true – who knows?  They also sell a lot of the ‘classic’ French designers, mainly 80s’ blouses…

The seller also takes great care in making sure you know that these pieces are coming from French ‘pret-a-porter’ lines of designers that a lot of us may not have heard of but hey… it’s French, or in the case of Lolilta Lempicka, it was HOT in France!

In some cases, they can even be a touch arrogant in their listings to try and educate us poor Brits on all things French and wonderful . When talking about the label ‘Kamosho’, they say ”Kamosho’ never really happened in the UK – maybe British taste is just a tad conservative for something so completely off the wall.’  Hmm….

They also sell a lot of vintage issues of French photography/general magazines… on Photo, they have this to say: ‘French ‘Photo’ is much more cutting edge than anything published in the UK’…

I am quite attracted by these covers of Zoom magazine (a ‘magazine of image’) and some Paris Match covers with a lot of Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. 

Don’t take this as a complaint as a lot of these listings are on my Watch List as I am sold on a lot of the prints going on in  the clothes as well as some of the issues of magazines.  Furthermore, the upside of this though is that whilst icecoolvintage may have quite strong views on items with a French provenance, their prices are very reasonable so all in all, you can only conclude that this seller is targeting the Francophiles in this country, the same people who like to lecture me about the superiority of French cheeses/wine, grumble about the lack of A.P.C. stock in London and complain about the crap croissants in this country.