Many happy returns

I started this blog on Friday 9 March 2007 so Happy Birthday to Shelf Appeal.

For me, blogging has been nothing other than interesting, fun and satisfying. It took me a long time to get this off the ground. Procrastination should be my middle name. I wanted it to look right. I wanted to write about things that inspired me, rather than things I was paid to write about. I wanted to write when it felt right and not tie myself down to the pressure of daily or even weekly posts. I wanted it to be ‘fit and proper’ as this birthday card for the Clarks shoes Lucky Two Club states. All in all I was, as the cliché goes, writing it to please myself.

But there has been a steady stream of visitors. Sudden spikes on Google Analytics let me know someone has found something they liked and linked through. It’s nice that only for a very few days has Shelf Appeal sat lonely, with no one reading it.

I have been happy for readers to stumble upon this blog. There is immense appeal in finding things on the internet from browsing random ideas and remembrances. Many visitors have come via Google images and I’m sure that is how I would have found it. It is constantly surprising to me that anyone wants to read this stuff. It’s mostly about obscure objects that get my visual antenna vibrating and my fingers typing. But if the internet does anything, it shows you how small the world is. That, no matter what it is you like, there is a website, blog or at the very least, a Flickr group out there about it.

At any point when I have been at a loss for something to blog - yet feeling I would like to - I have got distracted and overwhelmed by just how much there is out there. And I usually end up not posting after all. On two such occasions I searched Flickr for items ‘just to see’ if they might already be in there. Shows you how out of things I am. There they were, with a vengeance; search for cupcakes and start browsing some of the 178,565 images that come up. Or for coloured pencils and look through the 20,047 images that result. Scary yet reassuring stuff. So many people interested in and writing or photographing what might once have been thought of as obscure stuff. Andy Warhol would have loved it.

I'm a marionette

You expect advertising to make products look as good, if not better, than they do in real life. Despite knowing that, Uniqlo was a disappointment to me. A bit like a washed up Benetton, with some H&M chaos thrown in.

But their recent campaign, featuring 'puppets' made from various pieces of clothing from the shop, was a classic and had made me venture into the shop. Beautifully contrived and photographed, the images really stepped off the walls of the underground and shined in the pages of the free Uniqlo Paper magazine.

In fact, if you didn’t feel the need to buy a less than sumptuous cashmere jumper, you could do worse than pick up a copy of that free paper - far more inspiring than the clothes on sale. Of course, I find it hard to leave any free shop literature behind anyway, whether it's a tiny leaflet on washing your purchases (agnès b) or a more substantial catalogue (Habitat or Muji).

I have been meaning to post about this campaign for a while, it’s the only one that has caught my attention - and got my antenna twitching - for a good long time. But I always like to assimilate what I think about things. The puppets were made by Gary Card, set designer and model maker, who has collaborated with stylist Nicola Formichetti on previous Uniqlo projects. Those two seem to have one of those empathetic creative relationships (like Tim Walker and Shona Heath) that takes their work onto the next level.

Work like this is rooted in imagination and craftsmanship. But, like a lot of great fashion imagery, it dabbles with the hyperreal, too.