Fashion

 Before Paris Hilton and Mean Girls, there were Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield - and there was Sweet Valley High. During my awkward(est) years, my bookshelves were crammed with nigh on a hundred of these dog-eared little beauties, and even now, the mere use of the words ‘sweet' and ‘valley' in the same sentence (does that sound dirty to anyone but me?) can conjure up vivid memories of my favourite fictional Southern California town.

A pastel-hued utopia where it was constantly 1983, Sweet Valley was crammed with impossibly beautiful residents for whom life was a string of beach carnivals, movie dates and cheerleading conventions – in short, a simultaneously tantalising and soul-crushing drug for a knobbly-kneed twelve-year-old girl with freckles, braces and a boy haircut. I worshipped Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. I worshipped them like whoa. I dreamt that one day I, too, would slurp down miraculously fat-free milkshakes with my ruggedly handsome and sensitive quarterback boyfriend, looking uber-glam in my leather pantsuit.

Last week I wrote about one of the great loves of my life, PVC. It was a brief affair - a mere few hundred words - and this fact left me a little worried. If I didn't show this glorious fabric the true depths of my devotion to it, I thought it might skip off into the sunset with some other fashion journalist, nevermore to return to my loving embrace!

But how to express my plasticky adoration without making all of you groovy little readers doubt my sanity? You see, it's not just PVC that I have this strange fixation with. I'm ga-ga for glitter. I'm in love with lamé. Give me a sparkly piece of fabric  and my eyes pop out of my head Wile E. Coyote styles. It's a little disconcerting.

Luckily, I'm not alone in my sea of metallic madness. One of my favourite fashion bloggers, Winona (who runs the stupendously funny Daddy Likey at daddylikey.blogspot.com), shares my fixation with shiny fabrics. And, like me, she feels The Shame.