About Furlough Fashion

Furlough Fashion started as a simple joke on my Facebook page at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. I posted a throwaway visual joke of my head superimposed on the image of a model wearing an OTT haute couture dress with the caption "Well at least working from home from now on I can wear what I feel most comfortable in all the time". It got a great response from my friends so, eager to get another dopamine hit for my ego, I did it again the following day and got another great response. Friends started joining in with the joke and saying I should do more. I duly obliged and turned out sixteen images in March and April before being furloughed and Working from Home morphed into Furlough Fashion.

It was never my intention to win a Nobel prize or find a cure for anything, but a set of silly Photoshopped images coupled with silly shop names and saucy puns made people laugh. At a time when we're all struggling with varying degrees of anxiety, grief and cracks in our mental wellbeing humour seemed a precious commodity. If my friends were logging on and looking forward to my fashion crimes then who was I to disappoint them. 

THE CRITERIA: the vague ground rules of Furlough Fashion:

• No pictures of my head were taken to fit to the images
• I only use photographs of me that were already on my computer (mainly found using the legacy software Picasa and its 'People' function). This forces me to be inventive and I think it's funnier to re-use the same head again and again
• I make very changes to the background image so the fun is matching my head to the colour and quality of the background image 
• I stockpile JPG images as and when I found them and keep, on average, 10-20 Photoshop files in various stages of completion
• I only write the accompanying text on the day of the Facebook post to make sure it stays fresh and matches my mood that day
• There are plenty of Easter Eggs in the puns and use/misuse of language and I put a lot of research into the shop names, types of fashion etc. plus translation and obscure references that sync with the subject matter. They're there if you can be arsed to re-read and Google some of the terms 

THE IMAGES:

Occassionally I would search for specific things, but mostly the images come from the weird and wonderful pop-culture vomit that is Tumblr.

Disclaimer: It is not my intention to demean the fashion world or upset the owners, or subjects, of the original images. It was just a way to make people laugh at a difficult time. I hope people realise that the joke is aimed squarely at me (and my long-suffering partner Kate, on Wednesdays) and the pictures were just the serendipitous inspiration.