The shabby-chic look is cruel and manipulative

Charities angry as hobo chic inspires stylistas | Fashion | News.com.au

THE next big fashion trend to hit the streets of Sydney is hobo.

Inspired by the homeless and destitute, designer hobo collections feature faded, ripped and threadbare pieces many charity shops would consider un-sellable - but fashion victims are paying thousands for them.

The shabby-chic look has been embraced by the likes of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Taylor Momsen and Sienna Miller, who wore a $25,000 dress with holes and an unfinished hemline to the premiere of her Broadway play After Miss Julie.

But the fad has been slammed by charity groups, including the Exodus Foundation's Reverend Bill Crews.

"It's cruel, manipulative and breathtaking in its cynicism," Reverend Crews said.

"It's like designers aren't looking at what it feels like to be homeless at all. I wonder how much of the money they make they give to homeless charities."

Designers are unapologetic.

Halloween in White House

President Barack Obama - Yahoo! News Photos

I love to view this pic..Obama handing out some sweets to the kids

confession

Andre Agassi: My mullet lost me the French Open | World News | News.com.au

FORMER Wimbledon champion Andre Agassi - famous as a young tennis star for his wild locks - has revealed wearing a lion-mane-style mullet wig during the 1990s to hide his baldness.

In his new book, the tennis legend admitted to taking crystal meth periodically for "a year or so" during his career, and also reveals that he wore a hairpiece that nearly fell off at the 1990 French Open - and he duly lost to Ecuador's Andres Gomez.

The tennis star's brother was sent running around Paris to find bobby pins to keep Agassi's disintegrating spiked-mullet weave from coming off his head before the 1990 match.

"Of course I could play without my hairpiece. But after months of derision, criticism, mockery, I'm too self-conscious," he wrote.

"Image is everything. What would they say if they knew? Win or lose, they wouldn't talk about my game. They'd only talk about my hair. I can close my eyes and almost hear it. And I know I can't take it."
Related Coverage

Agassi talks about his struggle with baldness.

"Every morning I would get up and find another piece of my identity on the pillow, in the wash basin, down the plughole," he said. "I asked myself, 'You want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court?' I answered myself, 'What else could I do?"'

In the French Open in 1990 he reached the final, his first in a Grand Slam tournament.

"Then a fiasco happened," he said."The evening before the match I stood under the shower and felt my wig suddenly fall apart. Probably I used the wrong hair rinse. I panicked and called my brother Philly into the room.

"'It's a total disaster!' I said to him. He looked at it and said he could clamp it with hair clips.

"It took 20 clips. 'Do you think it will hold?' I asked. 'Just don't move so much,' he said.

"Of course I could have played without my hairpiece, but what would all the journalists have written if they knew that all the time I was really wearing a wig?

"During the warming-up training before play I prayed. Not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off.

"With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand. I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi's hair has fallen from his head."

He only reveals the story of his wig folly in his autobiography, published in Germany this week.

It was actress Brooke Shields, who he married, who suggested he ditch the rug.

"She said I should shave my head," he said.

"It was like suggesting I should have all my teeth out.

"Nevertheless, I thought for a few days about it, about the agonies it caused me, the hypocrisy and lies."

It took him 11 minutes to become a chrome dome.

"A stranger stood before me in the mirror and smiled," he said. "My wig was like a chain and the ridiculously long strands in three colours like an iron ball which hung on it.'

The book reveals how Shields put a photo of Steffi Graf - now married to Agassi - on the fridge for motivation to get in better shape before their wedding.

"It's a photo of the perfect woman, she says," Agassi wrote.

"The perfect woman with the perfect legs: the legs Brooke wants."

Budget flights to the UK spend extra 20 hours flying and waiting | Travel News | News.com.au

SHOESTRING travellers are opting for budget-priced flights at the expense of spending 20 extra hours in the air and waiting at airports.

With airfares between Australia and Europe at historic lows, Aussie travellers are taking advantage of deals to destinations such as London from under $1000 return.

But the bargain priced flights come at a cost.

The Sunday Telegraph was quoted $1114 for a flight from Melbourne to London via Kuala Lumpur on Malaysian-based airline Air Asia X.

The flight included 22 hours of stopovers in Kuala Lumpur, and departure and arrival times of 1.25am and 12.10am. Both legs of the trip totalled an eye-watering 70 hours.

The same trip on Qantas would cost $1921 and totalled 46 hours return, with brief Asian stopovers.


Asiana Airlines quoted $1558 for the same flight, with a 16-hour overnight stopover in South Korea.

The flights have been made possible through budget airlines adding the "kangaroo route" to their schedules to compete with other airlines, including Qantas.

Air Asia X's long-haul budget flights are available only from the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Perth, but the airline is seeking permission to fly from Sydney beginning next year.

Qatar Airways will begin flying from Melbourne to Doha in early December, with connections to dozens of destinations throughout Europe. Flights from Sydney are set to follow in early 2010.

Garuda Indonesia will resume flights to Europe from June 2010, with flights from Sydney to Amsterdam via Dubai initially, with plans to expand to other cities.

Garuda has not flown to Europe since 2004, and Indonesian airlines were banned from flying to Europe in 2007 due to safety concerns.

Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation representative Dr Derek Sadubin said the increase in competition on the Australia-Europe route would continue to create downward pressure on fares.

"Garuda is following in the footsteps of Etihad from Abu Dhabi and Qatar Airways," Dr Sadubin said.

"They're joining the Middle East carriers, as well as new airline models based on low-cost, long-haul operations.

"Air Asia X has low fares from Kuala Lumpur to London. They average about $400 or $500 from KL, but I have seen them as low as $200 or $300.

"Air Asia X will be adding Paris and other places in Europe to their network sometime in 2010. We're going to see one-way fares around the $500 mark - all inclusive."

He said return fares could go as low as $1000 and, coupled with a strong Aussie dollar, made long-haul travel compelling again.

Mark Boyle impresses me

I live without cash – and I manage just fine | Mark Boyle | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Mark Boyle outside his off-grid caravan. Photograph: Mark Boyle

In six years of studying economics, not once did I hear the word "ecology". So if it hadn't have been for the chance purchase of a video called Gandhi in the final term of my degree, I'd probably have ended up earning a fine living in a very respectable job persuading Indian farmers to go GM, or something useful like that. The little chap in the loincloth taught me one huge lesson – to be the change I wanted to see in the world. Trouble was, I had no idea back then what that change was.

After managing a couple of organic food companies made me realise that even "ethical business" would never be quite enough, an afternoon's philosophising with a mate changed everything. We were looking at the world's issues – environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources – and wondering which of them we should dedicate our lives to. But I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.

One of the critical causes of those symptoms is the fact we no longer have to see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that we're completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the stuff we buy. The tool that has enabled this separation is money.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn't waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn't throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn't contaminate it.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid. Cooking would now be outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove; mobile and laptop would be run off solar; I'd use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode, and a compost loo for humanure.

Food was the next essential. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering, and using waste grub, of which there is loads. On my first day, I fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food. Most of the year, though, I ate my own crops.

To get around, I had a bike and trailer, and the 34-mile commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription. For loo roll I'd relieve the local newsagents of its papers (I once wiped my arse with a story about myself); it's not double-quilted, but I quickly got used to it. For toothpaste I used washed-up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.

What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don't own a plasma screen TV, people think you're an extremist.

People often ask me what I miss about my old world of lucre and business. Stress. Traffic jams. Bank statements. Utility bills.

Well, there was the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.

• Mark Boyle is the founder of The Freeconomy Community