Working Chic - new concept in women's clothes from Peacocks

Some interesting high street fashion news zips across the wires this week, as high street value fashion retailer Peacocks launches an interesting clothing collection called Working Chic.


It's a very clever name for the range, as it encapsulates what the collection is all about - namely: style for work.


The collection, incredibly, offers an entire working week's clothing - and here's the cool bit - at a cost of less than £20 per day. 


Working Chic includes a black pencil skirt with fitted cardigan, black dress with white trim, and with a truly contemporary touch, skinny jeans for dress down Friday.


There's more information on this collection over at fashion website StyleClone, who describe it as a range where "Each piece oozes sophistication"

Cheap eating

Cheap eating doesn't mean having a boiled egg for tea, especially now in the age of the internet coupon - where once there might have been a voucher to clip out of the newspaper every now and then, there's a whole host of generous offers for restaurants and cafes.

Then of course there's the supermarket value ranges. A lot of good stuff to be had there, and a lot of it comparable with the dearer stuff - factor in all the two for one deals etc in the supermarkets and there's a bit of cash to be saved on the shopping.

And if you're going to try and save some cash on the groceries, may as well try eating healthy and cooking simple pasta and stir fry dishes which often work out pretty cheap.

One of the main ways to save money on food is to think laterally, and buy foods that don't spend ages in the oven. This is in fact one of the reasons that stir-fry became so popular in Chinese households - legend has it that the fuel to cook the food was very expensive, so people favoured a cooking method that took as little time as possible - makes perfect sense. Why spend over the odds on cooking fuel when you can reserve your cash for some lovely noodles and vegetables, and maybe some soy sauce.

Vat Attack!

So, despite pre-election pledges, that's the VAT gone up, meaning that a fairly hefty 20% of certain types of purchase goes to the government. Whether this will haul the country from recession remains to be seen.

Yes, as Alan Sugar says at the start of every episode of the Apprentice, these are tough times economically. But the VAT rise doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to be too poor to afford anything. What I reckon it will mean is that manufacturers and retailers might have to absorb some of the VAT rise - I mean, how come designer clothing can go into a sale at half price?

Other not so great news is that rail fares have gone up, despite some of the UK's rail services being unarguably poor. Anyone who has travelled for more than an hour on most UK routes will have their story to tell.

So will 2011 be the enemy of cheapness? In some respects it looks like it, but if the retailers respond intelligently, it might not be so bad.