choies.com review

For anyone who has seen choies.com pop up recently and was curious about it, here is a comprehensive review, and why I would absolutely, undoubtedly NOT purchase a single thing from this online store.
Choies.com, similar to ASOS, is a online clothing store catering to the online fashion crowd, and is based out of China. They don't sell anything brand-name, nor do they, for the most part, even list what the materials and fabrics are. When listed, the materials used do not appear to be of great quality and are usually heavily synthetic and man-made.  A lot of their descriptions on the website itself are miss labelled, misspelled, or just plain nonsensical.
While a lot of their designs are quite trendy, the quality appears to be extremely poor for what the prices are.   Many of their designs are knock-offs of much better quality designer goods and products.

My personal experiences with Choies.com has ranged from mildly awful to absolutely horrendous. I ordered a pair of tall black boots after signing up to their website (the website claimed they were made from leather, however, judging from the pictures provided and the materials of the other products offered in the store, I have my sincere doubts regarding the truth in this). I did this on a Friday.
For the shipping address, I put both my P.O. Box address as well as my street address- this has worked wonderfully for me when ordering from ASOS, Topshop online, and Aldo.com. Never has a package been mistakenly sent back because I'd put both my P.O. Box address and my street address in the form.

On Sunday, two days after the boots had been ordered, I still had received no email notification that my money had gone anywhere legitimate. Worried, I checked their website and realized their website stated they only wanted my street address.
I used their customer service chatline (they never replied to my emails) to confirm that it would be okay to do this. They told me they would look into it for me. A mere 30 minutes later, I received an email notifying me my order had been cancelled because I provided a P.O. Box address, even though I had provided a P.O. Box address AND a street address, they just hadn't bothered to read one more line of the address I'd provided.
I went back onto their customer service chatline to talk to a customer service representative about this and was rudely informed in erroneous English there was absolutely nothing they could do about it and I would just have to replace an order. So grudgingly, I went back to the same boots I'd previously ordered, only to find that they had almost TRIPLED in price.
The price I had ordered them at was $59, but the price they had become was $169.
The customer service representative told me that the tripled price was what I would have to pay for the EXACT same product, even though I'd paid for them at roughly 1/3 their price only two days before and it was THEIR mistake to cancel my order without actually checking my address or confirming it with me beforehand.
Apparently, the "best they could possibly do" was to give me 35% off 2 pairs of shoes, which is completely disgusting to me. The shoes are obviously not worth $169 if they were being sold for $59 to start with. And between you and me, we both know that 35% off the purchase of 2 products is little assuagement to this situation and they probably could have tried much harder to provide better customer service.
But it's the simple fact that a company wants me, the customer, to pay for the mistake they made leads me to state, with utter and complete certainty, I will never purchase anything from choies.com ever again, and neither should you.

VOGUE paris septembre 2012

Something I read in the September issue of Vogue Paris made me laugh. I wanted to share it with you.
It is an excerpt of an interview between Vogue and Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, the two guest photographers for this edition.

"En quoi aimeriez-vous vous reincarner? En nous-memes, avec quelques modifications. A savoir: les jambes de Daria, les cheveux de Gisele, les levres de Kate, les seins de Lara, les fesses de Naomi, les yeux de Natalia, et le sexe de David Beckham."

 J'adore Vogue Paris, c'est une ambiance completement different que l'un du Vogue americain. Je voudrais commander les edition futurs, mais je pense pas que c'est possible. Dommage!

the city

Cities are such interesting places, and quite a strange idea if thought about objectively. They contain the stories and hopes and troubles of millions upon millions of people. The lives of people are so intermingled in cities- any one person's actions, whether as subtle as smiling at a stranger, or as significant as causing a car crash, could easily affect the lives of many other people.

And yet, it is a rare occurrence that people in cities acknowledge each other. We see through other spiritually absent citizens of our homes like they are made of air and often ignore the ones who are present and acknowledge us. 

The idea of a city, the concept, is truly one that could only have been thought of by human beings.

existence

            “Who are we? What is this? What is the purpose of all this?”

            This genre of moody thoughts has haunted me quite a lot recently, and has wormed its way into my mind and wrapped itself around each and every one of my thoughts and actions. It isn’t just common teenage rebellious musings, or maybe it is, I don’t really know (and neither do you, unless you know exactly what goes in other people’s minds).

            As children, we are carefree and naive, untainted by society's demands! expectations! reality!. We make up elaborate stories about trivial things and they become true. The world is a magical place where anything can happen and anything we dream of can happen and life is golden, even if we don’t know it yet. We believe with authority that we can dig all day and end up in China.

            But as we grow up, we learn that the center of the planet is made of molten lava and solid iron, and even if we were able to drill a straight tunnel through the planet, we would actually end up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This realization is the first of many that taint our childhood dreams.

            As teenagers, we lose the naivety that made us believe in the unrealistic and the downright impossible. We lose the comforting simple-mindedness that allowed us to find joy in now-meaningless things like stuffed animals and digging to China. We learn that there are certain things that we aren’t good at, things that we may even be complete shit at, even though we were told otherwise by our teachers/parents/relatives/friends/authority figures in the past life known as ‘childhood’. Our dreams may never become reality because that’s how life works sometimes. The former gloriousness of the world has become gray and crumbling, and we see through the things we were once blind to. We look back on past events and realize the exact significance of them, crushed.

            We change so much throughout our lives.

            If people are such transient beings, it makes me wonder who exactly we are. I question what the meaning of life is every day, or if I even should be bothering to wonder what the meaning of life is, and just let it be, à la existentialism, but I am now also questioning if I will be questioning these things in 2 or 3 year’s time.

            Do we lose this sense of pointlessness as we grow older? Will I lose these occastional bouts of deep thoughts about life and the meaning (or lack of) of life? Do true adults not think about how pointless this all is? (You can’t sneak gold past Death, no matter how much you try) Do people forget or do they just figure out that they have to forget in order to become ‘successful’? (what is ‘success’ anyways?) Is that why we end up bending to society’s demands and end going to university/findajob/getmarried/buyahouse/havekids/die

?