In which we speak

Nina Ricci Spring/Summer 2007

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched a new blog in which it invites the general public to comment on items in its Costume Institute collection. How fabulous if the V&A here would do the same.

Discussing it in the Wall Street Journal Rachel Dodes, writes:

Fashion criticism has long been the exclusive realm of an insular band of journalists who traveled the big runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York and seemed to speak their own esoteric language. But the Met's new exhibit, "Blog.mode Addressing Fashion," is inviting anyone with an Internet connection to critique the clothes on display. With its new blog, blog.metmuseum.org/blogmode/, which went up this week, the august museum is also acknowledging that traditional fashion criticism is over.

"There's a whole new field out there," says Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute's curator. He decided last summer to turn a retrospective of important garments acquired by the museum since 2000 into a three-way conversation of sorts between curator, designer and outside observers. "We wanted to further the practice of fashion interpretation and appreciation," he says.

Later it is revealed that Manolo Blahnik is a great fan of Manolo the Shoeblogger, 'I love it,' he says. Manolo the Shoblogger was the first fashion blog I ever read, and the first to wake me up to the possibilities of writing and thinking about fashion in non-traditional ways.

Thought for the day

Once it was power that created style. But now high styles come from low places, from people who carve out worlds for themselves in the nether depths, or tainted 'undergrounds.' Tom Wolfe

Tim Gunn, on the street

There are several reasons to watch this interview with Tim Gunn: one is to see the daughter of some friends of mine ask a pertinent question about skirt lengths, another is to hear his explanation of why New York is the most fashion forward city in America. It's about the street and the subways. They're runways on which people dress to be seen. And Italy, of course, with its highly ritualised passagiata, has the best dressed women in the world.

Italian women: best dressed in the world

I inadvertantly mis-set the closing date for the Thoughtful Dresser poll, it should have ended this morning and I'm closing it now. So sue me.

But there's no mistake about the result with Italian women 12 points ahead of their French rivals in the best-dressed women of the world contest. I added some other nationalities in order to stave off objections by proud patriots, but the real contest was never in question. Young British women are good at experiment, and are quick to adopt the latest fashions, America has given us street style, but that's mainly in menswear.

In Paris in September for a couple of days shopping at Le Bon Marche I had never seen so many incredibly well-dressed women in the same place at the same time, and as much as one looked at them it was difficult to see how they had done it, like great prose which seems simple, plain and effortless, yet cannot be copied. For it wasn't that they wore the latest styles, is was how they wore their clothes, how they pulled a whole look together, often out of very simple elements. But move of the fashionable neighbourhoods, and things don't look quite as good. Every French woman knows to buy a classic jacket, but in French towns of the interior you see women who are perfectly dressed, but dowdy. The young, too, seem to take clothes so seriously that there is no sense of fun, which surely is a component of being young? French women dress well, I think, because as a nation they are taught how to from an early age, are rarely overweight, and their bodies are in proportion. Far harder to dress well with a difficult figure, such as the large-bosomed women of Italy.



Italians have a saying which permeates every aspect of their lives: la bella figura, the beautiful form. They apply it to a palace and to a can opener. Design is everything. Italian women are show-stoppingly well-dressed. Not for them, the muted good taste of the French. They have a stronger sense of fashion and, crucially, they have at their disposal good design available at all budgets, from Armani to Benetton. I have been to small towns in Sicily, mafia-ridden impoverished villages, sleeping under the hot sun of the Mezzogiorno, and come evening, the time of the passagiata, the doors of the houses open and out come the women, carrying Gucci handbags.


So for me, Italians are the winners. Because you will find well-dressed Italian women (and men also) in every part of the country and at every social class and situation. What is the secret, I once asked an Italian? Ironing, he said. Very, very good ironing.

The Sartorialist interviewed

Jess Cartner-Morley in yesterday's Observer, interviews Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist, who has perhaps the single most important fashion blog.

Armed with a Canon G5 camera, Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist, has created a photo blog that is required reading for the fashion industry - despite featuring no celebrities and barely any It bags. With his portraits of real people who look great, Schuman "has firmly established himself as a fashion authority", says Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter.com and a pivotal figure in the fashion world. "We are huge fans of The Sartorialist at Net-a-Porter. The photography is sharp, the commentary astute, and we love that it celebrates individual style."

The celebration of the individual is at the core of what makes The Sartorialist different. By avoiding pigeonholing the subject into "tribes", Schuman has subverted all the rules dividing street style from high style. What's more, he may just have stumbled on the only people left who have the mystery necessary to capture our imagination as style icons: normal people, not the ones in reality TV shows, but the ones in real life. Clare Coulson, fashion features editor of Harper's Bazaar, finds the site compulsive viewing. "I am way more interested in what people on the street are wearing than I am in celebrities, who I just find quite dull these days. The Sartorialist is such a simple idea, but so clever. It's like those moments on the street where you see someone who looks fabulous and you wish you were them."

Lia Does Chanukah

Top baby Lia, currently residing in Istanbul, has now received from me her first designer label, this cherry dress from agnes b.

It is never too early for a girl to begin to learn to dress well. Also A line is so flattering for the pear-shaped nappy wearer.

The poncho and other crimes

According to a survey in the Daily Mail (so it must be right) the top ten fashion disasters, ie what you must not own are:

velour track suit
shell suit
puffball skirt
hot pants
leggings
ra-ra skirt
hooded sweatshirt
cowboy boots
poncho
parka

I have none of these, thought 96 per cent of those surveyed admitted they had. I'm a little surprised at the cowboy boots.

An American reader has enquired what a shell suit is. This is a shell suit:

(nice Jewish boy)

Our fashionable royals

In my day there were two royals, Prince Charles and Princess Anne and then the two little boys, you know, Andrew and Edward. We wore mini-skirts, they wore tweed hacking-jackets; we went to Rolling Stones concerts, they played polo.

Then . . . Princess Diana RIP, may the heavens weep, who single-handedly brought style and glamour to the royal family (the Bruce Oldfield dresses!)

Hadley Freeman has a piece today on the younger royals, as photographed in the family snaps for the Queen's 60th wedding anniversary, featured in Hello:

Zara Phillips, on the other hand, was the first to catch my eye on the magazine cover, mainly because she was wearing an empire-line silver coat with white buttons and collar from Paul and Joe's diffusion range, Paul and Joe Sister, that I had just that week tried on but rejected as too expensive, so, obviously, I was filled with a mix of both approval and murderous hatred. Perhaps that coat is slightly infantalising, a bit too Bonpoint for adults, but it's certainly an improvement on the sweeping pale tweed numbers favoured by most female royals, to say nothing of the sludgy fare generally sported by her mother, Princess Anne. Moreover, she wore it with a short dress, black tights, black shoes and black gloves, which is just how I was planning to wear it (the witch), which obviously makes it good, and, impressively, she also managed to find a hat that was suitably respectful but neither hideous nor laughable.

Pucci?

. . .
Her brother, on the other hand, is a different story. Even if Peter Phillips wasn't officially royal, with his penchant for badly fitted brass-buttoned blazers, bagging jeans and a hairline that recedes in direct correlation to his advancing paunch, I would assume that he was the product of youthful sowing of the royal oaks by any of Elizabeth's children if I bumped into him on the tube. Such is the strength of his royal style genes that he, like his cousin William, has managed to Sloanify his girlfriend. In the most recent pictures of the soon-to-be-married couple, Autumn Kelly has comfortably shifted from her former life as what one newspaper has intriguingly described as a "Canadian former air hostess, bartender and model" into a fully paid-up kitten-heel-wearing, sunglasses-as-alice-band-adorned Sloane, with a fondness for pastel wraparound cardigans. Well, they go so well with one's boyfriend's broad-shouldered blazers.

Help!

Help!

Street Clash

Lisa Goldman draws to my attention a site called Street Clash, where photographers and bloggers are pitted against each other in the contest for most stylish city. Check it out, here

Can you dress well at any size? Poll results

The Thoughtful Dresser poll this week asked the question whether it is possible to dress well at any size. The results - 67 per cent said yes, only 32 per cent said not at my mall - show that most of you believe that style does indeed come from within. However a simple push button poll of this kind does not do justice to the complexity of the question.

The first thing to say is that being catwalk size is little guarantee of good taste. You can have Kate Moss' body and still look a mess if you have no eye for colour. Still, if you are size 0 and wealthy you can have a stylist do it for you, and every department store these days will have an in-house service to help you shop.

proportion

The first problem anyone above the so-called normal size range will confront is finding something to buy in the first place. The UK size range found in most high street shops is 8-14 (US 4-10) though of course the actual size of clothes will vary from store to store with a Top Shop 12 being considerably smaller than a Jaeger 12 because they size from a much younger fitting model. For purposes of disclosure, I'm in the top end of that range. I couldn't get into a Top Shop 14 but I do fit a 14 from M&S and Jaeger. This means that theoretically I should be able to walk into any high street shop and buy what I want. But take yesterday, when I saw a dress I rather wanted to try in Zara. There were plenty on the rack but they were all small and medium; when I asked a salesgirl for a large, she said they had sold out. Because the larger sizes always do (thought it is the opposite situation at M&S, I've frequently been told.)

good legs

Now if you are outside that 'normal' range life will become much more difficult. M&S' regular range goes up to size 22 and its Plus range to size 28 , increasingly on-line companies are getting much better at carrying a wide range of sizes, but if you want a choice of clothes, you'd better live in the USA. Gap and Banana Republic, both brands that I rate for style, go up several sizes. Until it opens its doors at the old Dickens and Jones building on Regent Street in 2008, we in Britain have never had access to Banana Republic, and their online site does not ship internationally. We've had Gap for several years, but recently, having bought a pair of jeans in their Friendship Heights branch in Washington, I asked in the flagship Oxford Street store if they had another pair. I was told that the stock was somewhat different, and one of the differences being that they did not sell larger sizes in Europe. Ask any plus size expatriate about buying clothes in France where no-one appears ever to gain any weight, and you will be told to go west, young woman, to America.

attitude!

As for clothes above say, size 22, there are fewer opportunities outside the US, fewer still at the higher end. Italian women will not stand for being badly dressed, and so it is Italy which has produced some of the better designer clothes in large seizes, such as Marina Rinaldi, one of MaxMara's labels. But it goes without saying that a larger woman will never be able to wear any of the major houses: no Chanel, no McQueen, no Dior, no Philip Lim, no Lanvin. Armani Collezioni goes up to UK 18, but I don't think its younger line, Emporio Armani does. Whenever I see Suzy Menkes, she seems to be wearing the expandable Issey Miyake Pleats Please or the now sadly defunct label Jean Muir.

That is not to say that larger woman do not look fabulous, or as the Manolo would say, superfantastic, of course they do, but it is my observation that larger women who look amazing generally have the characteristic of having bodies in proportion. It is far easier to look good if you are an hourglass than if you are a pear. Dressing really well is having clothes that fit you properly. In my case, a pear, (or as Trinny and Susannah now tell me, a skittle,) with a pronounced waist, big hips and narrow shoulders, I take a larger size in trousers than in tops, and dresses and jackets are often tight around the bum and loose on the shoulders and under the arms. Not a good look.

the right shoes

I have also noticed that larger women who are tall, and who carry the weight on their shoulders, chests and stomachs but who still have great legs, can look more elegant than the petite woman who carries it on her stomach, hips and thighs.

Nonetheless, having said all of this, it is the truth that if you can find something to buy, and if what you buy fits properly, it is the woman with the strong sense of inner style, with the iron self-confidence of a Beth Ditto, with the insistence that she will be seen, the woman who knows colour, who understands accessories, who has a sure feel for fabric and who will have no truck with the fascist nonsense that fashion is not for big girls, who will outshone the size 10 woman in an oatmeal fleece, beige drawstring trousers and Crocs.

UPDATE

My sister telephones to point out that one of the most heartening experiences is being at the gym and seeing a woman with a perfect, toned body and then watching the transformation in the changing room when she covers it up with boring, badly fitting clothes.

Hamish Bowles

When The Devil Wears Prada came out, I asked a certain person in the fashion world how it had gone down at US Vogue. 'Hamish Bowles told me he'd been to see it,' she told me, 'and he said of the Stanley Tucci character, why are they laughing? This is my life.'


The Times today has a long interview with Hamish Bowles, Vogue's 'European editor at large'

“He’s pure genius,” observes the photographer Mario Testino, who credits Bowles with transforming him from a Peruvian “beach bum” during their bonding at Harpers & Queen in the mid-Eighties. “He has the makings of a Diana Vreeland; he has the sharpest eye there is.” Unlike Vreeland, though, Bowles doesn’t over-compensate for a lack of self-assurance by being a grand diva. While he embraces the style of Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant and the other “Bright Young Things”, he is no snob and finds little need to appear posher than he is. He observes his various orbits – whether it be fashion or society – in an unusually inclusive way. He is often the centre of attention – not because he desires to be, but because he is genuinely the epicentre of fashion, decor and society in New York, London, Paris or, for that matter, Jaipur and Tangier. Flitting around town in lavender Gucci patent-leather loafers, Bowles – wearing his neo-Edwardian suits with a mean waist – appears frail as a sparrow, but he has a tough interior (you have to be steely to survive at Vogue).

You can hardly see him – let alone find room to sit – in his Vogue office in New York. It is a veritable rainforest of Country Life and foreign decor magazines, endless press releases, scouting pictures, and years of notebooks filled with lightning sketches of what he’s viewed on fashion runways. There are pyramids of fashion monographs, a library of books on the floor, and a white Preen mother-of-pearl sequin dress in the midst of it all. What little decor there is consists of a blown-up reproduction of a 1934 Cecil Beaton watercolour of Elsie de Wolfe and a paper collage portrait of himself swinging his quilted Chanel bag, a goodbye present from his days at Harpers & Queen. “I find pristine desks to be downright antiseptic and disquieting,” harrumphs Bowles, who admits that Wintour “would be pretty alarmed” at the sight of his office. “You tend to go to her. Despite what people may think, the door is always open.” Besides, adds Wintour, “I’m not sure there’s room in there for me.”

How we dress in London, and LA

Emma Forrest, writing in the Guardian observes, of her return to London after a year in LA:

Riding the tube again, I feel intimidated by your outfits. You British ladies wear high heels with knee socks, pencil skirts and complicated makeup. During the day! After a year as an Angeleno I've figured out where Posh is going wrong. She looks out of place because you just don't wear fancy outfits during the day in LA, especially if you're as ambitious as she is. Dressing down implies that dressing up is a facet of your job, at which you are incredibly successful. So much so that come the awards season you are up to your ears in Valentino sheaths and are therefore relieved - no, delighted - to wear nothing but terry towel the rest of the year. Dressing up outside the context of a party/ceremony/gala suggests you need to invent your own reason to dress up because people aren't rewarding you.

It is my observation that we dress better in London than in the US, where clothes are both more casual and more conservative.

But Emma goes on to quote . . .

. . . LA actress Rose McGowan [who] thinks "that tired old cliche, 'Everyone in Los Angeles dresses down', is just that. A cliche. What people who aren't in the public eye don't understand is that you need armour, and clothing, hair and makeup can protect you against the world."

A crucial observation. In London, this vast, complicated, chaotic city, clothes are also your armour. Two fashion editors told me recently that they loved Alexander McQueen because his clothes felt like armour; they were a carapace. They felt they could do battle with their bosses in them. The rich and powerful don't need armour. Look at how Bill Gates dresses.

I've got nothing to wear for the revolution

Times fashion editor Lisa Armstrong gives tips for what to wear on the barricades, whether it's celebs supporting the screenwriters' strike or students protesting David Irving and Nick Griffin at the Oxford Union:

All the really successful anti-Establishment movements have had what fash-ionistas like to call A Look, whether it’s Boadicea’s striking face paint, the Roundheads’ distinctive hairdos, Eva Perón’s descamisados(shirtless ones) or those cute Bolshevik caps. Some of the lesser antiEstablishment groups – Mods, skins, Teddies – were so busy working their look that they forgot to think up a manifesto.

Then there’s the French, who, whether it’s 1968 or almost 2008, always put on a stylish performance out on the streets – a dash of black poloneck, an all-weather trench, a slim-line leather jacket like the one Cate Blanchett wore at the weekend to cheer in Australia’s new PM (and Che Guevara might have worn had he had a contract with Armani). Oh, and loads of black eyeliner for flirting one’s way out of a police cell.

Poll: Can you dress well at any size?

This week's poll asks whether it is possible to dress stylishly, with chic and elegance at any size?

Some would argue that true style comes from within, others would say that the range of clothing offered by the fashion industry is so limited as to restrict larger women's freedom to dress well. Notice, I say larger women, since size 0 women are well-catered for.

I will be returning to this subject at greater length, but for now, just go vote, on the right.

And go and look at the Manolo for the Big Girl

Hadley is coming

British readers will of course will know Hadley Freeman's eccentrically original Monday style column in the Guardian, Ask Hadley. Here she is today:

Women love shoes: we all know and - for the purposes of making a highly generalised argument in a relatively truncated space - accept that. Having realised that they were on to a highway to wealth here, designers have been making increasingly crazy shoes for some time, with prices going up accordingly. For example, I know a young woman - a charming, delightful, sparkling, witty and, frankly, brilliant young woman - who has been so brainwashed by this whole shoe mania that she has found herself in possession of three pairs of ankle boots with all manner of ridiculous buckles and chunky heels and different-coloured piping details, and when I say "three", I obviously mean "four" and when I say "young woman", I quite possibly mean "me".

Visiting my publisher's last week I was pressed back against the wall by an a black-suited figure sweeping along the corridors with her considerable entourage behind her: it was none other than Cherie Blair, for whose autobiography Little,Brown has just signed the usual six figure sum. Bringing up the rear was her agent, who managed to shout out as she passed, 'Linda! Can I send you a proof of Hadley's new book?'


So it was that I spent the weekend enjoying such gems as:

. . .one should never look for style guidance from a French woman: it would be liking hoping to pick up some mental arithmetic tips from Stephen Hawking. . .

I can't begin to tell how many pleasures are contained in the pages of The Meaning of Sunglasses: A Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable and the only way you're going to find out is to wait patiently until February when it comes out, though obviously ordering your copy on Amazon right now, to avoid disappointment. Though I notice that her book and my book come out on the same day so you'll want to order mine first. You can do that right now, just by clicking here

Lanvin

My piece on Lanvin is in the Telegraph today:

When Alber Elbaz took over as the head of Lanvin in 2002, marking a sensational comeback for the half-forgotten house, few people remembered that during her heyday in the 1920s Jeanne Lanvin had rivalled Chanel. The name conjured up for me an expensive, decorative sophistication. I saw her as a designer who clothed women of a certain age. Hers was a label you might aspire to but never quite reach. In fact, I have, unknown to me, been wearing a dress based on Lanvin's landmark shape, the robe de style. My version is by Ghost, but the silhouette is more or less identical. It consists of a dress with a full skirt gathered from a slightly dropped waist, with flat panels at front and back, the hem falling a little above the ankles. Softly feminine, universally flattering, it acknowledges that a woman has hips and a stomach she doesn't want to exaggerate with bunched-up fabric. The robe de style was the look of the 1920s for women who could not wear the tubular lines of Chanel. Move the waist up, and it prefigures, by a quarter of a century, Dior's New Look, launched the year after Jeanne Lanvin died. And, of course, in fashion there is nothing new under the sun. The robe de style was itself based on what had gone before, Infanta frocks, Camargo frocks, picture frocks, portrait frocks - all those bouffant styles are what a woman needs who wishes to conceal the flaws in her figure. . . . Read on

Thought for the day

Paloma Picasso

Fashion can make you ridiculous; style, which is yours to control individually, can make you attractive - a near siren. Marianne Moore

Reader's request - more Paul Poiret

Between the hour-glass figure and the little black dress, for a few years before the First World War, Paul Poiret made some of the most innovative dresses of the 20th century. This forgotten genius, who would die in poverty, almost single-handedly liberated women from the corset, created the world's first designer perfume and was the first couturier to branch out into interior design.

	Poiret dressed Peggy Guggenheim (left), and created the world's first designer perfume

His reign was heartbreakingly brief. At the turn of the last century dresses were rigidly fitted to a woman's form, the bum jutted out, the breast jutted forward. A woman's outfit resembled not so much clothing as upholstery, topped with horsehair wigs.

In photographs women appear buried under their clothes, a small oval of face under dyed, frizzed, artificial fringes, and perhaps an expanse of bosom peering out from the textile immolation. Decoration lay heavily over decoration, and a woman's true shape was unimaginable.

No wonder the rich required maids to help them undress, to unhook bodices, corsets, button boots. Edwardian outfits were completely unsuitable for the decades to come, for world wars, for the emancipation of women that would follow, for the speed of the motor car and the thrill of flight.

. . . .

Influenced by the Orient, Poiret set up his own house in 1903 and two years later married Denise Boulet, a young provincial girl who was said never to have worn a corset or high collar. Her slim figure, like a lance in repose, one observer remarked, became the template for a Poiret garment.

A fragment of film from 1911 shows her looking utterly different from the crowd among which she moves - as well as being married to a designer, she was always her own stylist.

With Boulet as his muse, Poiret created dresses and coats that fell from the shoulders, and instead of being fitted to the body, flowed along its natural lines. In inspiration they were a throwback to the style of the Directoire, the period of the Empire line 100 years earlier, but they were not pallid imitations; they cancelled every rule of clothing to create the foundations for what we think of as modern dress.

Culottes, harem pants, shifts, dresses cut on the lines of a chemise - his imagination stopped nowhere and prefigured almost every design innovation to come, except for what would follow from the House of Chanel - the severe, the uniform, the pared-back black dress.

For Poiret adored sumptuous fabrics and peacock colours; he described throwing into the 'sheepcote' of pastels 'a few rough wolves: reds, greens, violets, royal blues that made all the rest sing aloud'. Boulet would step out in a wig of kingfisher blue and viridian-green stockings.

Everything he touched was revolutionary: he seems to have invented that brief 1960s fad, the baby-doll nightdress; he made dresses with asymmetrical shoulders; he introduced the hobble skirt and, even more startlingly, the lampshade dress - a triangular tent with fringes hanging from the bottom, which, as American Vogue would write, every woman in the country had bought.

Read the rest

Classic dressing

Words of wisdom from Guardian fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley on classic dressing:

Simple clothes will make frizzy hair and shiny skin all the more noticeable; the time you save dithering in front of your wardrobe will be needed for an extra bit of spit and polish in the form of hairspray and powder - and, quite possibly, an extra hit of mascara or lipstick. And then, is the look a bit bland? If it's all too vanilla, observers might not realise you are illustrating this season's vogue for simple dressing, and mistake you for a non-fashionista.

Quelle horreur! Season to taste with an ankle boot, or a patent belt, or an It bag, and you'll be dish of the day once again.

Ossie Clark is back

I spent a fascinating Wednesday morning talking to the people at Ossie Clark London who are trying to revive the name for the 21st century.

Here's my piece from the Guardian today and here's a picture of the lovely Avish Alom Gur who is at the helm of the new enterprise and these are the clothes from his on collection:

I was in the reading room of the British Library in August 1996 when I took a break, opened the newspaper, and read that Ossie Clark had been killed by his ex-lover. It seemed the most colossal waste of such a talent, but it also returned me with a strong pang of nostalgia to those years in my early 20s spent floating around a university campus in an Ossie Clark-style dress with no thoughts of job, career or mortgage. Clark was about a careless, romantic, unstructured femininity; life lived in a slightly druggy haze. There was nothing practical, no office life. Ossie Clark was above all about the dress.

Article continues

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Three names defined 60s fashion in Britain: Mary Quant, Biba and the boutique Quorum owned by Alice Pollock, which sold the work of Clark and his wife and partner, the pattern-designer Celia Birtwell. You could not be young and alive in the late 60s and early 70s without wearing something that had its origins in the brain and fingers of Ossie Clark, his 30s and 40s-style chiffon dresses, often cut on the bias, in Birtwell's beautiful prints.

Clark was an utterly brilliant flash in the pan; he came from nowhere (actually Warrington in Cheshire and later Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, where he grew up) and his brief place in British fashion lasted less than a decade, from 1966 to 1974, though so decisive an imprint did he make on what we wore, that it seems far longer.

. . .

It is not unknown for labels to come back from the almost dead. Lanvin was still going, but in a dusty kind of way when Alber Elbaz revived it five years ago, yet Ossie Clark was not just a label but the man himself. He said he was a "master cutter. It's all in my brain and fingers and there's no one in the world to touch me. I can do everything myself." Gur, who like Elbaz trained at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Israel, is quiet, sweet and doesn't go to parties. "I'm a workaholic, a nutter, I've never been a party boy," he says. He grew up in the Negev desert, surrounded by Bedouin; his father was a German Holocaust survivor.

Fashion has changed, he says. "It's an industry; you can't live your life the way they did in the 60s. It's mission impossible to take something from the past with all its stories - and politics, which is something I'm not interested in - and bring this into the 21st and even the 22nd century. The shape, cutting on the bias and the use of print, the amazing tailoring and construction, the fit ..."

Read on