I seem to enjoy starting most posts with a whispered confession, and today will be no different. What am I owning up to today? Well, brace yourselves. This is shameful stuff, the kind of thing that no one should admit – particularly not anyone over the age of 19. Here goes. I am 23, and I still watch Skins. I know. I KNOW. I’m a terrible person. If you’ve somehow missed the concept of the show, it essentially centres on a group of attractive and bizarrely dressed yoofs scampering around Bristol, taking lots of drugs and wishing that someone, anyone would understand the intense pain they’re experiencing, the pain of being young, attractive and the owner of a mild crack addiction.
Anywho, let’s gloss over the casual dependencies, the sheer misery, and the bizarre ‘Bristol’ accents, and look at something infinitely more important: the clothes. Ahh, the clothes. If you know me in person, you know I go slightly loopy over clothes. Possessive and all wide-eyed when I see something I want. The Skins wardrobe varied from the exceptionally odd (those lace cycle shorts that no one really wore) to the sublime (see my project below). In the third generation Skins – at least I think it was the third, I stopped counting, and they suddenly all seemed about 10 – I was particularly entranced by the wardrobe of one Mini McGuinness. That’s despite her wearing of the aforementioned ghastly cycle shorts, and penchant for Paul’s Boutique bags.
She was often seen lolling around in a jacket that I found particularly covet-worthy. It was essentially a black leather jacket, but seemingly sprayed with gold, so that the bottom half of the jacket was engulfed in glowing clouds of warm bright colour. I was sunk. It was glorious. I sat, rewinding and replaying any scene containing the object of my affections. I searched for a similar item, but it proved fruitless. Having a spare black leather jacket in my possession, I made some quick calculations. I assumed it had been spray-painted with some kind of hardy paint, but I couldn’t find any information whatsoever on it, or anyone who’d attempted something similar.
That was last year, and having stumbled across the jacket again, I finally decided to get off my lacy cycling short clad bottom (just kidding, calm down) and spring into action. I tried one more Google search, and there it was: apparently the costume designer had covered the bottom of the jacket in hundreds of sheets of actual gold leaf. Yes…well, sadly, I do have some semblance of a life, and the patience of Alan Sugar, so I chose not to follow this. I also have to say, I don’t actually think you can tell that, from the pictures above. I still think it just looks like spray paint.
Montana Gold spray paint
I hot-footed it to my local art shop, Saltmarsh in Tunbridge Wells, and purchased what I can only assume to be the Don of spray paints. Named Montana Gold, it was priced at something like £6.95, and I tucked it into my handbag feeling like Banksy. The girl in the shop informed me it would go onto ANYTHING, any surface, and that it was very long-lasting. I’ve Googled it, and I can see people have used it to paint their cars. It sounded perfect. I set myself up outside with a big dust sheet, some plastic gloves and a scarf over my face, and prepared to spray.
Jacket pre-spraying....
It’s VITAL to shake the can for about 3 minutes. If you don’t, the colour will be totally off, or it’ll just sputter some clear looking liquid out. After that, it’s the easiest thing in the world. The Montana Gold paint is a dream to work with. It goes on easily and dries quickly, and the coverage is fantastic. I was anticipating it would form a sort of ‘skin’ (see what I did there?) over the jacket, rendering the fabric really stiff and impossible to wear, but it didn’t – the jacket stayed pliant. The colour is beautiful, a really bright, glowing gold.
It’s up to you where you draw the line – I was very tempted to just drench the whole jacket in gold, feeling a bit Midas-like, but stopped myself as I was trying to achieve the effect of the Skins jacket. You could even mask the point where you want the gold to stop if you’d like a neater line, but I liked the effect of the scattered gold particles that settled lightly on the black part of the jacket. I also wanted an uneven line. I wanted it to look like the jacket had been dipped in a molten lake of gold, then pulled out before it was completely submerged.
So that’s my glam rock jacket! Good luck if you create your own….just be sure to do it in a well ventilated space (I did all of mine in the garden), and be sure to chuck a scarf over your mouth and nose. It’s potent stuff. I’m going to get some better photos up of it, once it’s all dried and sorted, but these should do for now 🙂
Lots of love,
Amelia xx
ameliaflorencesimmons 
That is quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen. I would be so tempted to do everything I own!
Thank you! Yes, I think I should have put a warning in: can get seriously addictive. I started wandering around my room going ‘ooh, THAT would look better in gold….so would that…that definitely would….come here, iPhone. Don’t be scared’. Oh, crikey.
i loooove adn sorry.. im gonna copy :)!
Awesome! Go for it 🙂 Lots of luck, hope it goes well for you! X
Omg so beautiful. I need to do this myself. God. I am a sucker for this style kind of coat.
I was curious, but did you run out of the montana gold quickly? I would love to do this but I am nervous that in mid-paint I wil run out. Also, is the spray paint okay to use in warmer climates? (Sorry for the silly questions!)
Nope, I had heaps of the stuff left! Only used the tiniest amount on the jacket. The one thing I would say is that I’ve found it has rubbed off quite a lot, so I’d recommend finding a fixative or something to set the colour in place. Good luck! Let me know if you have any more questions! X