Metallic Trousers By Balmain Or Joe Fresh?

Let’s see, glitterific skinny jeans by Balmain or Joe Fresh? You pick.

CHEAP & CHIC | If you leafed through the shiny part of the Globe and Mail last Saturday (a.k.a. the style section), you would have noticed an arresting full-page ad for The Room at The Bay. It featured a long-limbed model wearing spray-on metallic leather trousers by the Parisian luxury fashion house Balmain. What stopped me dead—besides the exquisiteness of the pants—was the thought that just last month I’d purchased a pair of metallic skinny jeans that I love and wear a lot, only mine (pictured here) are from the house of Joe Fresh.

Okay, so Balmain’s trousers (pictured here) are an absolute perfection made of the finest stretch leather and stitched by skilled dressmakers in France, and my Joe Fresh equivalents, made of cotton and spandex in a factory somewhere in China, are not. But then I only paid $49 for my Joes not $5,400, the approximate price for the Balmains.

My gold Joe Fresh metallics, with whisker detailing and skinny legs, fit really well and work for both daytime and evening. Clearly Joe Fresh creator Joe Mimran knows how to cull from the top inter- national collections and pick fashion winners that are totes on trend and that fashionistas are going to buy.—Annabel Lee

For more on Joe Fresh visit www.joefresh.com; for more on Balmain visit www.balmain.com

Photos top to bottom: Courtesy Joe Fresh; Balmain runway fw2011; Joe Fresh runway fw2011, photographed by Irina Luca, www.irinaluca.com