Reminder - The Thoughtful Dresser competition

You have until Monday to enter the Thoughtful Dresser competition. Put your entries here

There have been 51 so far, keep them coming.

The Thoughtful Dresser Competition

No poll this week, instead a competition. How exciting!

Here is what you have to do. You simply need to dream up a Thought for the Day - a sentence or a two, an idea, an aphorism - about fashion, clothes, style. Do not be intimidated by the brainy observations that I have run so far. 'A good handbag makes the outfit', a perfect piece of sartorial wisdom, was dreamed up by my mother who left school at 14, and the family motto, 'There's only one thing worse than being skint and that's looking as if you're skint,' by my immigrant grandfather who never even learned to speak English.

You can place your entry in the comments box below or email it to me. The competition will stay open for one week and then I will choose a winner. That winner will receive a signed hardback pre-publication copy of The Clothes On Their Backs, which can be shipped to any country, free of of charge, and of course the winning entry will become the Thought for the Day. Feel free to add a picture, if you wish. You can enter under a pseudonym if you wish, but please don't opt for the popular Anonymous as there are too many of that name. The winner will need to email me with a mailing address.

Normal service will resume

on Tuesday, with Thought for the Day and the Thoughtful Dresser poll and the answer to the question, how many and what type of shoes should a woman have.

Intermission, and an oddity

I am away until the beginning of the second week in January and don't plan to spend too much time in the company of a computer. I'll try to keep you entertained in the meantime with some semi daily delights. Here is the first, in which designers of the 1930s try to predict the fashions of the future

Space NK

The people at Space NK like The Thoughtful Dresser so much that they have written to me to ask if can advertise on the site. They have a UK and US store - banner up top.

Technical problems

I can't work out what has happened to the lovely picture of a pensive Coco Chanel which should appear at the top of the page and is horizontally squeezed right now. I shall look into matters further when I have more time.

North

I am going to Liverpool, my hometown and 2008's European Capital of Culture for a few days. Blogging will be light and late today.

Advertising - further updates

There are now two Amazon stores on this site, one for UK purchases the other for orders to the US. Be sure to use the right one. I'll be adding more titles to the US site.

Unfortunately I have no current information about US availability for The Clothes On Their Backs so if you would like to order it, for the moment, it will have to be from the UK site.

Advertising

In the coming days you will start to see some advertising on this site. I have added Amazon. If you were to be so inclined to wish to purchase any books, by clicking on the link at the side, Jeff Bezos and his shareholders are deprived of five per cent of the income from the sale which comes to me instead. But please don't let that stop you from patronising any excellent independent bookshop near you. At the moment the link is only to my own books, but that will change in a day or so, when I can work out how to do it or get Camelmeister to do it for me.

UPDATE
The books listed in the Amazon Box My favourites are books I have read and loved. They have the Thoughtful Dresser seal of approval. You, of course, may disagree.

I have added several coffee table books about the great designers. I have reviewed all of them in the Telegraph. All highly recommended

In Spanish

Spanish publisher Ediciones Urano have just bought the rights to The Clothes On Their Backs for their new literary fiction imprint, Plata.

Happy Chanukah and all the other festivals of light

Chanukah's first candle is lit tonight

Here are some already lit

The importance of good hairdressing

The poll on whether you can dress well at any size closes early tomorrow, and I will be disclosing my own views on this subject.

Meanwhile I'm off to the hairdresser's. When I was talking to Louise Chunn about the mutton question, she remarked that she thought my hair was so much better than when she was commissioning me back in the 90s, when she was women's page editor of the Guardian. I think that the one thing you should really throw money at as you get older is the best possible hairdressing you can afford. The salon I go to, Richard Ward, does the make-overs for Trinny and Susannah, and indeed my own team of Mario (colour) and Roger (cut) do the hair of Trinny and Susannah themselves. The key to colour as you get older and greyer is to soften it and bring it in line with your changing skin tone. The original colour of my hair was dark brown, it's now warmer and redder and I rarely go a week without someone asking me where I have it done. Roger has also persuaded me of the importance of a more structured cut and of not doing the whole Anna Wintour thing and having a signature look, but changing it with the seasons. See my cousin's guest post on the matter of changing one's hairstyle.

It costs an absolute fortune and I must buy fewer clothes, but you wear your hair 24/7 and you can't say that of a dress.

Some site changes

This site has been running for coming up to a month. I am going to make some small changes.

If you would like your site to be linked to this one in the blogroll, please either put the URL in the comments below or email it to me at lindagrantblog[at]googlemail[dot]com (I'm sure you can work out that the bits in [] are to deter spam and know how to do it properly) with Blog add in the subject line

If you would like to be emailed a weekly digest of Thoughtful Dresser posts, send your email address to the same address as above, with Digest in the subject line. Nothing further will be done with these email addresses, they won't be sold or given to anyone else or seen by anyone but me.

Finally, I will shortly be making a cautious experiment with Google Adsense. We'll see how it goes.

Hiatus

I am away until Monday evening here so no new posts until Tuesday. Have a good weekend, and shop wisely - I'll be buying carpets at the soukh (though I don't think it's snowing in Istanbul yet)

Check back tomorrow

When there will be reports on the Spring/Summer press shows today from Jaeger, which has just signed an exclusive deal with Saks Fifth Avenue in the US, and Marks and Spencer. Two very strong collections. Also first words on the press briefing this morning of the relaunch of the Ossie Clark label under the creative direction of Avsh Alom Gur.

But now I'm going to drink a Cosmo.

Small changes

This blog is just over two weeks old. It was born after some period of thought and with more than a little help from my friends Normblog, Manolo the Shoeblogger and the Bag Snobs. It was my intention from the start to have a blog focussed on intelligent thinking about fashion and style with some of my other interests added, chiefly literature and very occasionally politics. Anyone who knows my writing should have an idea of where I stand politically, but everyone is welcome here. We all have to wear something.

My great webman Camelmeister, who designed my original website back in 2002, set this blog up for me. I have made a small change today, from now on there will be five days worth of posts available on the front page, and the rest searchable.

As you'll have seen there will always be a thought for the day, which I hope will build up to be an archive of ideas about fashion. I should have said before now that these are mainly taken from Tobi Tobias' Obsessed with Dress, published by Beacon Press and dedicated to the memory of her mother, Esther Meshel Bernstein. It's my bible.

There will be a poll each Tuesday, and reports from the shows as they happen - I am going to three tomorrow. And there will be competitions with actual prizes. My latest novel, The Clothes On Their Backs, will be published in February, and I will be on a book tour in Australia (at the Adelaide Festival) and New Zealand, with a possible stop-over in Singapore from late February. More news closer to the time. It remains my intention to restrict the blog roll at the side only to those I read every day and which inform my own thinking.

There have been nearly 8000 visits to the site since launch day and I'm delighted to see that some you you are regulars. I hope you'll enjoy what is come.

A small but important addition

To my very small blog roll I have added the site of my friend Lisa Goldman. The Thoughtful Dresser is not a political blog but from time to time it does reflect some of my wider interests. Lisa is a Vancouver-born Canadian-Israeli journalist, now based in Tel Aviv. Building up to the summer of 2006 she worked to make contact with bloggers on the other side of the sealed border with Lebanon. When the war started and the bombs fell she insisted on doing everything she could to maintain contact with the ordinary individuals, bloggers and journalists like herself, who were supposed to be her enemies. She insisted on not accepting the demonisation and dehumanisation which is a characteristic of this conflict. She embodies for me the quote from Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, on the sidebar (a book which at some point I will write more of): 'The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and his right to these peculiarities.'

Prohibited from entering Lebanon because she holds, in addition to her Canadian passport, an Israeli one, she nevertheless went there this summer. The discovery, after she left, prompted a scathing editorial in the Beirut Daily Star accusing her of being a spy. The hundreds of emails and comments she received from Lebanese civilians thanking her for her visit, proves Grossman's maxim.

There are evil people in the world, but most of us merely struggle from day to day to find joy in whatever interests us, in love in friendship, in clothes or football. Flawed and often failing, we must nevertheless do what we can to live our lives in the circumstances, societies and political systems in which we find ourselves and sometimes we must struggle to change what is intolerable about those societies and systems. But mostly, we just live. And being alive is a unique wonder of its own.

Welcome to Bag Snob readers

My friends Tina and Kelly at the Bag Snobs: A Selective Editorial on Designer Bags, whom I interviewed for UK Vogue, have linked to me. The Bag Snobs is one of my favourite on-line sites, as someone who understands the importance of accessories. Everything you need to know about bags you will find there. So, if you don't know them already, go visit the Bag Snobs.

And if you are a Bag Snob visitor, don't worry, there will be much discussion of handbags to come.

About the links

The list of blogs on the right-hand side are the ones I read every day.

Manolo the Shoeblogger - he the Daddy! The greatest fashion and celebrity blog on the web today. Behind the Manolo is an anonymous New Yorker whose witty, brilliant mind takes a passion for shoes into an erudite and incredibly funny take on our modern times. Particularly check him out on Wednesdays for his guessing game Whose Shoes?

The Bag Snobs, Tina and Kelly, write about my favourite accessories, bags. They vigorously review every new handbag of note and are merciless in their condemnation of ugly, badly designed bags, whatever the brand or the price. They go where no fashion magazine dares. And they still allow you to dream that one day you might own a crocodile Hermes Birkin.

The Sartorialist is a series of photographs of ordinary people, or people who work in fashion, taken on the street, often with little or no comment. They invite the viewer to develop an understanding of what makes individual style, which is rarely the slavish following of fashion. His pictures from Sunday mornings in Harlem illustrate that you need be neither young nor slim to have inimitable style.

On matters of world significance, I invariably take my lead from Professor Norman Geras whose Normblog investigates the maddening questions we all need to get our heads round since September 11th. I greatly admire his ability to patiently examine the moral complexity of these difficult times. He also likes cricket and country music and has been known from time to time to link to The Manolo.

Finally, George Szirtes, is the place I go to when I want to think about literature and visual art. George, winner of the T.S. Eliot poetry prize, and his wife the artist Clarissa Upchurch are the people to whom I dedicated my forthcoming novel, The Clothes on Their Backs and whose poem 'Dressing' forms its epigraph.

Please go and read these fantastic blogs.

Thinking about clothes, literature and other matters

In the next few months I will be writing about clothes, about literature, and very occasionally about news and current affairs. I'll also be reporting on parties, exhibitions and private views, in other words life in London in these interesting and rather fabulous days - whether it's the opening of the new Anya Hindmarch flagship store on Sloane Street next month, or what goes on in Brick Lane, where my rapper nephew lives. Finally, this is not a political blog, let's save those weighty concerns for other places. I welcome all comments and will moderate only very sparingly. I will not tolerate abusive posts.