More mutton observations

Materfamilias observes, 'Generally, I'm looking for clothes with a bit of attitude.' Now this observation seems to me to go to the heart of the mutton question.

Society demands of women over the age of fifty that they go away, be unseen. It reinforces this by trying to sell us what it considers to be 'classic' clothes in bland unflattering shades. In the past this might have indicated a certain timidity and resistance to fashion in older women but we are talking here about the baby boom generation who wore mini skirts, tie dye, false eyelashes, Biba feather boas and Mary Quant purple lipstick.

If we choose not become invisible as we age, we need to find clothes that fit and flatter, that express our individuality, not repress it, but at the same time we should, I think, avoid clothes that are too girly (and by that I don't mean too feminine, not at all.) There is nothing more sad and desperate than a woman of fifty boasting that she can wear her daughter's clothes. It's too do with the contrast between the body and the face.

But having attitude is a signal of self-confidence. Clothes, as we get older can be stronger, not weaker. At the 2002 S/S Paris collections I saw a woman aged circa 80, on the arm of a very young man - probably her grand-son or even great-grandson. She was dressed from head to foot in khaki combats with copper discs the size of small plates dangling from her ears. And she walked through the crowd like a queen.

Similarly a decade ago in New York, two extremely elderly women, making a slow progress across the lobby of the Carlyle in that season's Chanel little black suits.

The point about these three was that they understood that the parade has most certainly not gone by. None of them looked ridiculous, they had elegance and distinction and above all, a strong sense of personal style. You understood at once that their clothes mattered to them, because they understood why clothes matter.

Look at me, they said. And I did.


(yesterday, at the State Opening of Parliament)

Thought for the day

Fashion dies very young, so we must forgive it everything. Jean Cocteau

Educational opportunity

I draw this email to your attention:


I am pleased to invite you to the John Lewis Oxford Street Lingerie Academy for Men on Thursday 13th and 20th December, from noon until late.

To help confused and stressed men shopping at Christmas, the Lingerie Advisers have transformed their department into a men-friendly sanctuary with beer, mags, plasma screen TVs and even a Wii. Finally lose the fear of entering the Lingerie Department and find out what to buy for wives and girlfriends that will be happily worn and shown off, not hidden at the back of a drawer or returned!

Please see below for further details and a checklist of things to remember when lingerie shopping.

All best,

Ruth

WISE UP AND SIZE UP
WELCOME TO THE JOHN LEWIS OXFORD STREET LINGERIE GIFT ACADEMY FOR MEN

Giving lingerie as a Christmas gift to your wife or girlfriend should be the ultimate romantic gesture. However, when many women open their presents on 25th December, they are often confronted with the results of a 5pm panicked, self-conscious shopping dash on Christmas Eve – lingerie in the wrong colour, the wrong style and sin of sins, the wrong size.

This year, John Lewis is inviting men along to the John Lewis Oxford Street Lingerie Academy for Men on the 1st Floor of the flagship Oxford Street store on the 13th and 20th December, from noon until late. The lingerie department will be transformed into a gentlemen's paradise with leather sofas, chilled beer, plasma screen TVs and a Wii. Shop in style with expert Lingerie Advisers on hand to give one-to-one guidance to help you find the perfect present and guarantee a red-hot Christmas.

Maria Walker, Chief Lingerie Adviser for John Lewis Oxford Street, reveals the most common mistakes men make when scouring the lingerie department and how best to shop for smalls..

· Size

No woman wants to receive a bra that is too small or knickers that are too big. We are used to unprepared male customers using their hands to indicate breast size or comparing their partners to other women in the lingerie department! The first lesson of 'Boob Camp' is - glance in her wardrobe or laundry basket to find out her size, you'll save a lot of time and embarrassment and also surprise your girlfriend. If you do completely forget, why not consider a slinky negligee instead?

· Colour

While red may appear to be a sexy and indeed seasonal choice, men should remember that few women would actually choose red lingerie for themselves. For a seductive look, black is a fail safe classic. Chocolate is this year's hot colour and is kinder to pale, winter skin. A Lingerie Adviser will also be able to recommend colours to compliment her hair colour, eye colour, and skin tone.

· Style

The lingerie department at John Lewis has a huge variety of styles, from silk to lace and underwired to padded or strapless to backless and plunge to push-up. Try and strike a balance between what you would like her to wear and what she likes to wear. Talk to a Lingerie Adviser about her lifestyle and make the most of browsing the department while it is men-only. Always buy lingerie in a set – bra and knickers – this shows that you are generous and thoughtful!

· Presentation

To round off the LingerieAcademy for Men in style, the Lingerie advisers will also be available to gift wrap your purchase and gain you some cheeky extra brownie points this Christmas.

History

"A newspaper today might be full of bullshit," says Yoni Stern, "but it's all a part of the history of culture - the bullshit, too, no less than the reality. You can't get that from history books."

Putting every copy of the Guardian and its sister title, the Observer online, from their first issues in 1821 and 1791 to today .

The mutton question

Reading Sarah Mower's informative piece in the Telegraph last week on grown-up dressing, I was nonetheless, taken aback by the following statement:

Everyone past the age of 40 needs a "mutton monitor". I belong to a telephonic kaffee klatch that does the job without the slightest risk of false flattery.

In the case of black leather biker jackets – this winter's high street sell-out – there wouldn't be the minutest margin of a doubt. Should one of our number be tempted to revert to Suzy Quatro mode, she'd just have to be stopped.

The rock chick mantle must always be passed to those in their twenties, fact. That means it's the property of the likes of Amy Winehouse. Even Kate Moss, moving up into her mid-thirties, will be pushing the mutton-button with that one any minute now.

Erm, I just bought a leather jacket. I had been looking for a leather jacket of this length and shape for four years.

Now Sarah Mower has enveloped it in slight doubt.

The mutton question is relative, like whether one can wear a short skirt after the age of forty. In my case, with my knees, I shouldn't have been wearing a mini-skirt at sixteen - it's the legs that matter, not the age.

What are often hauled out in fashion magazines as styles suitable for the over fifties, labelled 'classic', make me look like a frump, particularly as they are recommended in those shades known as neutrals, first developed in England amongst the country house set, so as not to frighten the grouse, then taken up by Donna Karan and transferred to New York.

Classic neutrals turn me into the invisible woman. They make me feel depressed. I am not myself. Working out what suits you is a fine art, and the younger you begin your training the better for you will need it in later life. By all means wear what everyone else is wearing at fifteen, even if it is one of those midriff-baring tops, revealing a bluish slab of wobbling goose-pimpled flesh. Adolescent bad fashion, like drugs and bad sex,* are part of the rites of passage we need to go through to weather us for the storms ahead. Then the real work begins.

A while back I had lunch in my neighbourhood with an American artist who had just turned sixty. She was wearing paint splattered jeans with the bottoms rolled up, Converse All Stars and a sweater. Her hair was what's known in the US as a Jewfro - a mass of wild reddish curls with streaks of grey. She looked just fabulous. You're not supposed to dress like that at sixty, I said. Whose law? she asked.

Jeans and a leather jacket at sixty are a wonderful look, I contend, combined with fantastic hairdressing,** which from the age of forty-five should be a woman's single largest personal investment. A subject to which I shall no doubt return.

* Though just say no, is good too
** Thank you, Mario and Roger

Heroism

For a few months, when I was a teenager, I knew a woman called Eve Hall. My obituary of her appears in the Guardian, today:

One summer's afternoon in 1970, by the banks of the river Cherwell in Oxford, I went on a picnic and received a political and culinary education. Eve Hall, who has died aged 70, was the wife of my new boss, and she explained to me that the secret of a good potato salad was to use new potatoes and to toss them in olive oil while they were still hot. Sprinkled with finely chopped parsley, they seemed to me then, aged 19, the epitome of continental sophistication.

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As we ate, Eve went on to tell me, equally insouciantly, of her time in a South African jail. In a case that had startled the white community in the early 1960s, she was one of four women - "mothers and housewives" - sentenced to six months' imprisonment for a clandestine leaflet and poster campaign promoting the banned ANC.

Eve was born in Paris to a Jewish father and a German mother (her uncle was a famous actor in the Munich theatre). The second world war broke out while her father was visiting South Africa, and her mother was left behind to cope with a half-Jewish child under Nazi occupation - she refused to pin the yellow star on her daughter's clothes. In contrast, her sister-in-law, an opera singer, wore hers with pride, only to be taken from the street to an unknown death camp. Eve's paternal grandmother died in Treblinka.

Arriving in South Africa after the war to join her father, Eve later enrolled at Witwatersrand University, where she met her future husband, Tony. Together, they became, in their own words: "Gypsy journalists and development workers." Eve joined the ANC the day after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Four years later, after being listed as members of a banned organisation and prohibited from being published, the couple were forced to leave South Africa with their three sons and banned from ever returning.

Read the rest here

Thought for the day

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only. Samuel Butler

High heels

I have added a poll at the right-hand side - High heels: Empowering for women or the contemporary equivalent of Chinese foot-binding?

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below in support of your beliefs.

Designer Warehouse Sale, London

Next date, November 30

Bring sharp elbows

Hollywood Writers' Strike

I support. There's an old joke about the starlet who was so stupid that she slept with the scriptwriter. American tv is in its golden age at the moment, and that's because of the phenomenal quality of the writing. So pay for it.

Comrades, the massed ranks of the Society of Authors are behind you all the way.

Meanwhile, aspiring writers who think there's a living to be made from literature, should check this out.

Jellyfish

Last night I saw the second London screening of the film Jellyfish directed by my friend Etgar Keret and written by his wife, actress Shira Geffen.

They won the Camera D'Or at Cannes this year.

A young waitress whose boyfriend has just left her finds a little girl wearing nothing but a rubber ring around her body, wandering on the beach. A Filipino care worker, a long way from home, looks after the cantankerous mother of a busy actress while homesick for her own little boy. A bride gets locked into the toilet at her wedding reception, climbs over the top of the compartment and injures her leg, so they have to honeymoon at home. A beautiful woman has taken a hotel suite all by herself.

These stories play out separately, occasionally interconnecting. The sea, full of mysteries, draws all of them, vivid and blue. Full of longings, hidden pain, the legacy of suffering pervades this film yet it is charming and beautiful, sad and hilarious.



This is an ice cream seller on the beach. The actor is Etgar's father, and he's some story in his own right. He's in the hospital right now, but Etgar says he's getting better. Some survivor.

I dreamt of this film all night long.

The war within

I had a cortisone injection on my left ankle on Wednesday. Every since then my left foot has been contorted into an awkward position, hanging around my left ear, begging, wheedling, demanding, that I buy it these.



However the rest of my body has sent up a more deafening crescendo. 'Don't listen. If you buy those, you'll wind up looking like this.'




And furthermore the whole business might end up here.

Or worse, like this

The only kind of non-old lady slippers are red leather Moroccan mules, with artificially pointed toes, an Aladdin's lamp air about, them and preferably some gold around the toes.

Thought for the day

It's almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim you are beautiful. Edith Wharton

Items in the news

The great Hilary Alexander in the Telegraph reports that the Ossie Clark label is going to be relaunched, headed by Avsh Alom Gur, who has previously worked with Donna Karan and Chloe, at the next London Fashion Week. That's Clark, to the left, and his then wife , Celia Birtwell, in a double portrait by David Hockney which hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.

Last week Gap was exposed for using child labour. Seven days on and it's planning a new Sweatshop-free label

Yesterday, Gap's senior vice president, Stanley Raggio, flew from San Francisco to New Delhi to meet the anti-sweatshop charity the Global March Against Child Labour, to hammer out proposals to tackle child labour.

According to Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer from the charity, the US conglomerate set out a series of ambitious proposals including a move that would see it relabelling its garments to allow the consumer to directly track online exactly where they are made.

The system would closely mirror the highly successful RugMark programme which has largely eradicated child labour in India's carpet industry.

The Observer also has a piece on COS, which is an H&M owned label only available in Europe. When I was in Berlin a year ago, I noticed it really seemed to have take off there and the Regent Street store in London is always busy. I haven't bought anything quite yet, but the colours and minimalist shapes are very good. As Polly Vernon says here, it's excellent for affordable staples.

And a review of the third volume of John Richardson's biography of Picasso:

Picasso with an immaculately svelte wife on his arm was an indefatigable socialite, always present on the sidelines of the innumerable mock battles staged by Parisians in this era of brawl and counter-brawl, pillow fights at fancy-dress balls, turbulent first nights, openings disrupted by Dadaist punch-ups and Surrealist reprisals. Politics passed Picasso by. So did the bleak realities of social and financial disintegration in postwar France. Even the final throes of the 1914-18 war seem to have impinged on him chiefly as a tiresome inconvenience that cut off supplies, detained friends at the front, and interfered with Diaghilev's ballet bookings ('German and Austrian troops had broken through the Italian lines, so Rome was out; the third battle of Ypres was going badly, so Paris was out...').

Thought for the day

Photocredit, The Sartorialist

Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. Wallace Stevens

Scent

Miller Harris perfume (the one in the picture is not the one I wear)

Wedding dress made out of toilet paper

This is the winner of a contest for the best wedding dress made out of toilet paper.* I have no idea whether the dress as going to be worn on the actual Big Day (what if it rains? was the sensible point made by English recipients of the email in which I received it.)

I think this toilet paper wedding dress thing comes from American bridal showers. Still, I find something touchingly heroic in the enormous amount of time, patience, ingenuity and imagination given by the contestants to this pointless but almost poetic task, like the baffling hobby, popular in England in the 1950s, of building models of Salisbury cathedral out of used matches.

* with thanks to Susan Paley who sent it to me

Thought for the day

Think of dress in every light
'Tis woman's chiefest duty:
Neglecting that, ourselves we slight
And undervalue beauty.
That allures the lover's eye,
And graces every action;
Besides, when not a creature's by,
'Tis inward satisfaction.
John Gay 1685-1732

Something UK shoppers should know about

Fashion Confidential

Tales my mother told me

Some time ago, I was talking to the daughter of a Most Distinguished Intellectual. ‘I had a very difficult relationship with my mother,’ she told me. I was astounded. Nothing could have pleased me better than to have grown up in Hampstead, in a political, book-lined home where they read the Guardian over the breakfast table and discussed its contents; where it was taken for granted that you would go to Oxford, and where there was no pressure to get married, have children and make your mother a grandmother.

What was wrong with her, I asked. ‘Oh, you know, she was very angry with the Nazis for stealing her childhood, she could be very bitter. But she did teach me some important values about opposing oppression, and feminism of course. Are there any lessons your mother taught you that have stayed with you, Linda?’

We were driving through Swiss Cottage at the time, held up at the traffic lights. I tried to think. My mother was not an intellectual, she read the Daily Mail, lived for shopping and what-will-the-neighbours-think and was also a difficult woman, but for different reasons altogether. But indeed, I suddenly realised, she had taught me an important lesson and it had not only stayed with me all my life but I could consider it a defining part of my identity.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She taught me that a good handbag makes the outfit.’

‘I wish my mother had taught me something useful like that.’

Two days after the 7/7 London bombings, understanding that if I didn’t get on the tube now, maybe I never would, I set off on the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus. Police with heavy weaponry milled about on the platform, the passengers were jittery. Rescue workers were still trying to retrieve bodies in the deep tunnels below us. I got out at Oxford Circus, into a profound, sunny morning, high blue skies and walked up to Selfridges. Inside I passed a man from Liverpool on the phone: I’m alright, Mum, there’s no bombs, I’m just trying on a Paul Smith jacket, I’ll ring you back.’ When people shop, life goes on.*

In the January sales in Harvey Nichols a few months earlier, I had bought a purple DKNY coat, and on the way out passed a cream/pink Furla handbag which was one of those coup de foudre, fall in love encounters frustrated by my bank balance. Now, in Selfridges, seven months later, it was the very last day of the summer sales, with an additional 10 per cent off to lure in terrified Londoners (because that’s what terrorism’s goal is, not merely to kill but to terrify those who survive). And there it was, my bag, patiently waiting for me, reduced from £330 to £93.

That bag was later stolen, recovered by the police with most of its contents gone, its leather subsequently ruined in a very heavy downpour in Budapest but I can’t quite throw it out because it was, in its time one of the best bags I have ever owned. It made every outfit I wore it with.

Eventually I replaced it. This came about because of my historic (for me) meeting with Anya Hindmarch and her wares when Alexandra Shulman sent me off to her Pont street shop after a fruitless five-day search for a brown day bag. Buying bags is about finding the best one you can possibly afford that is a classic - that is not a bag that you have seen in a magazine on the arm of a celebrity (which she got for free, 'gifted' by the designer) and which will be out of date in three months. A magazine editor told me that 20-year-old girls on £14,000 pa are buying £1000 handbags and going into crippling credit card debt to pay for them. Bags they will be ashamed to be seen with in a year.

If the best bag you can afford is an Hermes Birkin, buy it. If it’s a Chanel 2:55, buy it, if it’s an Anya Hindmarch Carker, buy it, if it’s a Furla buy it. It’s not a pet, it’s not a Xmas tree decoration, it’s an accessory. It’s designed to be right for the occasion, whether it’s going to work or going to a party, and it’s designed to pull together the rest of your outfit. Were I have to surrender all but three bags from my own collection they would be: my brown Carker, a red suede Fendi baguette, and a sequined evening bag inherited from my mother.

When she died in 1999, we put in her death notice in the Jewish Chronicle, ‘She taught us to respect others, that a bowl of chicken soup can cure almost anything, and a good handbag makes the outfit.’ I’ve worn her evening bag to Vogue parties thinking of the day, sometime back in the Fifties when she bought it, little knowing that from suburban Liverpool it would one day be held with pride and affection, with no jealousy at all of what Kate Moss had on her arm (Pete Doherty, as it happens.) It makes the outfit every time.

Norm has something to add