Gemma Cartwright writes...
There is a running joke in our offices that - despite my originally joining the company to run the fashion side of things - I am Shiny's biggest geek. I don't really think it's true. You wouldn't catch me dressing up as Hunter S. Thompson or swooning over Bill Gates, for one thing. Still, there is no denying that without technology, I'd be nothing...
There was a time when I survived with only the basics; an ancient PC with a dial-up modem, a Nokia 5110 and a portable CD player. I know there was a time before email and text messages, when we actually made plans and stuck to them (and I had to call my parents from payphones) I've just chosen to forget.
I carry so much unnecessary kit around with me nowadays that any mugger would be set for life if he ever managed to prise my beloved Marc Jacobs handbag from my shoulder (good luck, mate). Mobile phone, laptop, internet tablet, DS lite (it's all about Animal Crossing), iPod, camera, flash drive, SD cards, bluetooth headphones...it's like I'm lugging Dixons around with me every day.
And it doesn't even end with work gadgets and entertainment. The world of beauty has been taken over by technology too. Do you remember when we used to just wash and dry our hair 'normally'? Now we have ceramic straighteners, tourmaline straighteners, ionic hairdryers, hairdryers with built-in straighteners, hairdryers that reduce electromagnetic field energy (?!) and quite possibly hairdryers that'll make you a cup of tea and ask you where you're going on you holiday while they dry your locks. You can buy scary looking gadgets and gizmos for just about any purpose, from touching up your roots to zapping your spots. Once upon a time I used to use a disposable bic razor to shave my legs. Now you're not doing a good job unless you have at least three carefully positioned blades, special protective strips and something mint green coloured with aloe vera in. Or worse, an epilator, a device so excrutiatingly painful it was obviously created by a man who has never needed to tidy up his bikini line in a hurry.
Fashion, too, is slowly getting there. While many fashionistas have still not grasped what a blog is, they are now shopping online. At fashion shows you'll see as many people taking photos on their mobile phones as you will frantically sketching what they see. Designers are creating iPod holders, camera bags and laptop sleeves to cash in on our gadget obsession. And lest we forget, one of the biggest fashion schools in the world is called The Fashion Institute of Technology. So maybe we're not that far removed from the world of tech as we like to think.
So what am I getting at with all this? Well, maybe I'm not a geek after all. Perhaps we're all geeks, but only some of us are prepared to admit it!