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.

Gentlemen's corner

writes Dave Hill

Alas, the breast pocket is under threat. I read that 90% of shirts sold ten years ago had one, but now only 25% do. It's a sin: a vanity thing, apparently. They say it "spoils the line" of the garment. Absolute rubbish, of course. I've been a breast pocket man since the heyday of Ben Sherman and nothing is going to change me now. I'm also a manbag man.

Do something

From time to time I have taken part in fax/email campaigns to try to prevent the forced deportation of women asylum seekers and their children, and these actions, always at the last minute, have had a good success rate.

The latest appeal which arrived this morning is on behalf of Meltem Avcil and her mother Cennet, who have been held in Yarls Wood detention centre for almost three months, and are facing removal to Germany on 07.30 Hrs, Thursday 15 November. Meltem is just 14, and has been living in this country for six years.

Juliet Stevenson, the actress, who met Meltem last week while visiting Yarls Wood detention centre with Women for Refugee Women, said, "I am shocked that this young girl is being put through such an ordeal."

Meltem's mother and father were persecuted in Turkey for being Kurds, and she and her mother are in a terrible state at the prospect of being deported to Germany from where they fear they will be sent on to Turkey.

Meltem and her mum are asking you to ask the German authorities not to receive them into Germany and they are asking you to ask British Airways not to fly them to Dusseldorf this Thursday.

You can do something from very quickly your own computer, the details of what to do and more information on this case are in the comment box below. Please go and look to see if you can help.

UPDATE

'There is growing speculation that Meltem Avcil and her mother Cennet were NOT put on the BA flight to Dusseldorf this morning – apparently the British Airport police informed the German airport authorities Meltem would not be on the flight. We are awaiting confirmation from the family themselves and will update you as we get news.'

FUTHER UPDATE:

'13 YEAR OLD Meltem Avcil and her mother Cennet were so distraught they had to be removed from the British Airways flight to Dusseldorf this morning. They are now on their way back to Yarl's Wood detention centre. Their lawyer will now resume the legal battle to keep them in the UK.'

Uggless

I have just discovered that the Celtic Sheepskin Company, which makes things out of sheep, and does an Ugg rip-off,* also sells sheepskin insoles, so you can have all the comfort of Uggs without the social embarrassment. You can even cut them to fit exactly the shape of your shoes, were you to have say, pointy toe boots. They cost £5 each (around $10), ship internationally, but note the sizes are UK and you'll have to convert. I'm not putting up a picture of what they look like because it's not terribly attractive but here they are

I have placed my order.

*Correction. The Celtic Sheepskin Company are the original Uggs. They sold the name to a US company who market them under the brand name Uggs Australia.

The Botox poll

Everyone I know seems to have had, or is thinking about botox. Personally, I use the less invasive method of a fringe, which my hairdresser tells me was the pre-botox solution. I haven't had botox because I am a hypochondriac and don't like injecting myself with foreign substances, particularly toxins, and cannot help recollecting that in the Twenties there was a fad for monkey gland injections which were supposed to keep you youthful; it turned out that many of the monkeys were syphilitic, as did become the injectees. Besides, when I look in the mirror, the line between my eyebrows isn't particularly what I see that depresses me, it's the dark circles and bags under my eyes.

But don't let me influence your vote. Cast your own, over there, on the right.

Thought for the day

The Cranford ladies' . . . dress is very independent of fashion: as they observe, 'What does it signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?' And if they go from home, their reason is equally cogent. 'What does it signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?' Elizabeth Gaskell. 1810-1865

The Philosophical dresser

Philosopher Eve Garrard, with whom I have previously had an extensive email correspondence about the search for the perfect rose-pink lipstick, has a disquisition on the very subject of The Thoughtful Dresser, here on Normblog

Most of us aren't beautiful - most of us are, at best, good-looking on a good day, plain on a bad one. But for each of us, there's a kind of beauty which we would embody if we lived in a perfect world, however little we may do so here in this mundane workaday sphere. Sometimes we see this clearly in our friends: I have a loved friend, who is tall and slim (as sadly I am not). Again, she's not beautiful: she's pretty on a good day, harassed and worn on a bad one, like the rest of us. But when I look at her, with the eyes of affection, I see her as Modigliani might have done. In a perfect world, she would be a long, vertical Modigliani beauty.

For each one of us, something similar is true, and what the beautifully-cut jacket, the perfect rose-pink lipstick, does is to help us catch a clearer glimpse of that ideal beauty which we so signally fail to realize in our persons here and now (especially when we're wearing an old black fleece with holes in it and hair which hasn't met a serious, or at least an expensive, hairdresser for longer than I'm prepared to reveal on a family blog like this one). And why is it worth spending money, and time, and careful, thoughtful, longing attention, on so fleeting a glimpse of a Platonic ideal, which will never be fully realized? Well, beauty is like that, it's worth seeing for its own sake; and the chance to participate in it, however briefly, is not to be lightly passed up, as any dancer, or musician, or mountain-climber knows. It draws us to itself, and if we want to know more about that, we need to read Plato, or perhaps Yeats

Dressing

From Dressing by George Szirtes

.. For whose sake
Do you become who you are? Are you alone
In the dark? Is it for yourself you ache

In the morning? Even if you were stone,
Like this goddess, you would desire beyond
Your fixity something already half-known

Yet negotiable. As a child you respond
To the adult’s gravity with a blank stare
Of instinctive hunger. You touch your blonde

Hair and bunch it in your fist. You prepare
Your flirtatious look. You play at control,
Then lost, start crying at the small despair

You’re stuck with. But this is the soul
Prepared for you, these garments that glow
In the dark and burn as fierce as coal...

Ughs

Hadley Freeman in the Guardian today takes on the Uggs question in a response to a reader who wants to buy some:

. .. come ON! How can you, a wise woman I have no doubt, actually want to spend your hard-earned money on an item that has the onomatopoeic name of a grunt of disgust? There is nothing acceptable about the Ugg: it is girlishly fluffy ("Ooh, look at me, I'm so cuddly I wear pillows on my feet!"); it is smelly; and it is such a tediously obvious means of making one's legs look thinner. If you bought a pair when they first emerged a handful of years ago, that is just about acceptable (though, Christ alive, they must be proper rank by now), but to buy into them now, since their adoption by the most grating examples from the D list of celebrities and It girls, well, that is just not acceptable, Debra.

I am all about the comfortable shoe. But last time I checked on the BBC weather site, Hackney's climate was not exactly Californian and a shoe that is little more than rain-sodden soggy mulch is not comfortable. What is wrong with a nice flat boot with a cosy woolly sock inside, I ask you? It's warm, it's waterproof, it's comfy, it's easy and it runs no risk of you being mistaken for Jennifer Ellison, and with that final reference I think I can justly say, game, set and match.

Hadley is quite right. There is frankly no excuse for wearing anything that is uggly about one's person, even when constrained by comfort and warmth issues. Some trends do become essential classics - the pashmina is not a style statement, but it it plays the same role in one's wardrobe as, say Elizabeth Arden's Eight Hour balm, or Yves St Laurent Touche Eclat. You don't want to draw attention to it, but you need to know it's there. Owning a pair of Uggs is like wearing blue mascara. Unnecessary, adolescent, cringey.

Thought for the day

Fashion contains the potential for renewal and transformation. The more costumes one has. the more fantasy personas one can adopt.
Edith Gould

The Big issue - high heels

There has been so much discussion of the High Heels Question, that I want to keep it up on the front page for a bit longer.

There are some fascinating comments, including an attempt by a 23-year-old man to enter the debate with an observation on how male sexuality is manipulated by high heels and other womanly wiles (followed by a bit of slapping down.) Interesting stuff!

Step right this way to join the debate.

Dior

My piece on Dior is in the Telegraph today:

A snapshot of Christian Dior's plump face frozen in fright just before the first model girl sashayed on to his salon floor on 16 February 1947 shows the very moment that fashion history was about to be made. It is not always easy to pin down when something decisively changes, but Dior's first collection was one of those occasions when we can put a date and a place to a total alteration in fashion consciousness. The women in the audience at that first show sat on their gilt chairs dressed in square-shouldered, wartime suits with skimpy skirts. Five days later Nancy Mitford would write to her sister Diana Mosley that her life had been made a desert of gloom, for now all her clothes had been rendered, at a stroke, unwearable. She just had to have one of the new dresses with their tiny waists, narrow sloping shoulders and pavement-skimming skirts. Customers, she wrote, were fighting over them, and it was like a scene at a bargain-basement sale just trying to place an order.

Read on

Thought for the day

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork. Jonathan Swift

RIP Norman Mailer 1923-2007

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation. Norman Mailer

Kate Moss demonstrates her command of current affairs

Kate Moss meets possibly the future prime minister and mistakes him for a plumber

David Cameron,* the Conservative leader, has told how he was recently mistaken for a plumber by the model Kate Moss.

The pair were introduced by Sir Philip Green, the billionaire businessman who owns Topshop, at a charity dinner. A star-struck Mr Cameron had no idea what he should talk about, so instigated a conversation about flood damage.

The model was so impressed with his knowledge that she asked him for his phone number so that she could ask his advice on drainage.

. . .

"I went to a charitable dinner the other night and Philip Green came up to me and said, 'Would you like to meet Kate Moss?' So I said, 'Well, of course I'd like to meet Kate Moss.' I went over to her table and, on the way over, I thought, what on earth am I going to say?

"And I remembered she actually has a house in my constituency - and we'd had these terrible floods in west Oxfordshire.

"So I said: 'Very nice to meet you, very sorry about the flooding in your house. I know your local pub has been flooded, I've been to see the publican and I know you like to go to the pub and so I know it's going to re-open in six months.'

"So I went on like this and she turned around and said: 'God, you sound like a really useful guy, can I have your phone number?'

"I went back to my table and said: 'The good news is, I met Kate Moss and she wanted my telephone number. The bad news is, I think she thinks I'm something to do with drainage'."

* Cameron's wife, Samantha, is creative director of Smythson, which makes this:

The It bag of the season.

Other shoe matters

A new blog is born. Off Tha Cuff (Things that feed my soul and eat my pockets), a young person of my acquaintance, who might just have the inherited the Grant family motto only the rich can afford cheap shoes, launches his new site where all matters male footwear are considered from the perspective of a young-man-about-London-town.

Take a taste:

There's no doubt that I have so many pairs because I love trainers, because I'm materialistic, and because they're all part of forming identity. Its ironic that by trying to stand out from others we buy into brands that seem to represent individuality, yet end up wearing the uniforms of non-conformity. I suppose if i really wanted to be different I should buy shoes made out of Hemp and crafted on a commune in Oregan buy some guy called 'Star' or 'Astro-Belt', but the rain in London doesn't really suit the "I foraged for my footwear" style.

(The spelling and punctuation fascist will be visiting the blog as soon as the blogger wakes up)

Thought for the day

My dream is to save [women] from nature. Christian Dior

Things I like

Makeup Alley

It would be a nice idea if those of you with hot beauty tips could share them here (that's the comments below, but obviously make up alley, too, because that's what it's for.)

Hillary and the shoe question

The Guardian writes:

. . . the journalist and women's rights activist Gloria Steinem says support for Clinton generally breaks along class lines. "They say you can tell a Hillary supporter by her shoes. If she is wearing nurse's shoes, or waitress's shoes, she supports Hillary," Steinem told me. "Overwhelmingly, women of colour, single women, poor women who have a better sense of their interest in issues, are for Hillary."

High heels win

The empowering qualities of high heels won the Tuesday poll, by 55 per cent of the vote.

My thoughts on the subject are contained in this Telegraph piece which is not on-line:



This past year something has gone badly wrong with shoes. We are supposed to be a nation of shoeaholics, vain spendthrifts who cannot make it through a pay day without running out to buy a pair of Manolos or Jimmy Choos. But in the Autumn I made a dozen tours of shoe shops – Russell and Bromley, Kate Kuba, LK Bennett, Office, even Clarks as well as the over-stocked shoe departments of Selfridge’s and Harrods - without finding anything to buy. Whether it was Carvella or Chanel, before me were rows of towering fetish footwear, monstrously high heels atop thick platforms. I am only five feet five and not averse to acquiring the additional height, but I cannot walk in these shoes. When I say I cannot walk, I do not mean that I am unable to balance. Of course I can walk in high heels, but when I say walk, I mean the kind of walking you do to go about your everyday business, not totter a few feet across the floor of a shoe shop. Walking without searing pains in my ankles and creaking knees.

This is what I mean by walk: walk down the stairs from my bedroom, walk to the bus stop, wait for the bus, get on the bus, stand until it reaches the tube station. Walk down the steps to the platform, wait, get on the tube, stand again, get onto the escalator, then along the street a few blocks to my first destination. In average day, I would expect to spend a good hour walking from one place to another. This is not exercise, it’s everyday life. But at the end of that average day walking in heels my back is spasming, my calves are aching and the evening must be spent soaking in Radox.

When I look around the streets, I do not see anyone wearing the shoes in the windows of the shoe shops. I see women wearing flats, I see them wearing boots with chunky heels, I see them wearing trainers, but I don’t see anybody at all running for a bus in this season’s shoes. At a catwalk show in the Autumn, I looked at the front row of fashion editors and saw a line of skinny jeans worn with boots or flats. No platforms, no high heels.

So what are they for? Are they car to bar shoes, designed only for a night out? Fine, if they are, I am not immune to buying the kinds of shoes one knows one only has to stand in for a few hours at a party. I have these shoes. But what are we supposed to wear the rest of the time? In my dozen trips round the shops this season, I would sometimes spy a pair that I could walk in, and on every occasion, I was told, with a puzzled look on the face of the assistant, that they had sold out very quickly, which would surprise her because, as she admitted, they weren’t the hot new shoes of the season, and it was funny that they went so fast. Finally at Kate Kuba in Sloane Square a young man admitted that this season’s shoes were so outré that anything wearable sold out at once.

We are in a devilish pickle since the demise of kitten heels. Between flats and platforms, there is nothing. You have to wait until the summer when wedges reappear, those feet friendly shoes whose banishment by fashion diktat has to be imminent, because it seems to be a rule that if you can walk in shoes, there must be something the matter with them. A clever marketing exercise was done on Manolos, when Sara Jessica-Parker told interviewers that hers were as good as fleecy slippers, ‘I could run in these!’ she said, and there she would be, on our tv screens racing along through the streets of New York. And then you went down to your nearest Manolo store and tried some on and their freakishly narrow proportions meant you could barely get your feet into them. As Joan Burstein, the legendary owner of Brown’s, the South Molton Street shop, and first employer of the teenage Manolo Blahnik, admitted to me, Manolo’s are not comfortable if you have wide feet.



I love the look of beautiful shoes and for this reason, every morning, as soon as I turn on my computer, I click on to the delicious site of Manolo the Shoeblogger, the anonymous New Yorker who combines a fascination with shoes with a witty and erudite writing style. He views shoes both as works of art, and as artefacts which should be made by the master craftsman. ‘Do not wear cheap shoes!’ he enjoins his readers. But cheap or dear, if the shoe does not fit you cannot wear it.

The backlash against unwearable shoes has come in the form of its opposite: the eminently wearable but utterly hideous shoes. If you want sensible footwear, buy ugly Uggs, or those disgusting luridly-coloured rubber shoes with holes in them, called Crocs, which were originally designed for wading into ponds to clean out the algae.

The unnerving popularity of Uggs and Crocs is testament to women losing their patience with contemporary shoe design. I find my feminist hackles rising when I look at shoes which more and more resemble a sadistic attempt to reinvent Chinese foot-binding. My mind fills with dark conspiracy theories: that the emancipation of women is being punished with exquisite pain applied to the feet, followed by blisters and bunions. And then I look at the Uggs and the Crocs and I ask why we are forced to make a choice between Crippling Beauty and Slouching Beast.

There is no other part of the body we would surrender to ugliness or pain. We don’t wear jeans that make our bums look big (or don’t if we have any sense), we don’t squeeze ourselves into too-tight clothes, yet is there a fashion conscious woman who does not have at least one pair of shoes that don’t fit and never will fit because they were half a size too small when we bought them, in the hope that somehow they could be forced to stretch?


When did shoes get so absolutely impossible? Until the 1950s, women wore closed-toe shoes with a low heel. They wore lace-up brogues to work and thought no more of it. In 1955 the stiletto heel arrived from Italy. The tall, thin heels transmitted a large amount of force in a small area, and had to be strengthened by a metal rod and a metal or hard plastic tip. The great pressure transmitted through such a heel (greater than that exerted by an elephant standing on one foot, apparently) alters the posture causing the hips sexily to sway out but also causes back pain. By the mid-Sixties, round-toed shoes with low heels replaced them, as dresses became shorter, and we should be seeing a return to these kinds of shoes with this season’s Sixties, silhouette, except we are not. High platform heels reappeared in the Seventies, along, briefly, with wedges. High heels reappeared in the Eighties, as a counterpoint to the power suit, then in the Nineties were replaced by the hideous clumpy shoes, so beloved of teenage girls.

Yet the lure of high heels won’t leave us alone. I sought a master class in the wearing of heels from novelist Susie Boyt who never wears anything else and does not own a single pair of flats. She bought her first pair of heels (Robert Clergerie in black suede) on Bond Street in 1990, after taking time out from university. ‘It made going back doable,’ she says. ‘It might not have been possible had I not bought them. I like the height they give you, I feel much more me in high heels, my best self, and I don’t feel like myself when I haven’t got them on. ’ She learned that wearing heels is ‘a discipline, like going to the gym. I wouldn’t admit to feeling pain. Your body gets used to it. I always wear bare feet at home and I did masses of dancing when I was younger which makes it easier to wear heels. There’s a lot of exercises you can do which make high heels not hurt. If I didn’t do them, they would hurt more. And I do take them off on buses and in cinemas and restaurants.’

I asked her if she could run in them, as Sarah Jessica-Parker claimed she could do in Manolos. ‘I could run if I was chased,’ she said. ‘I once walked from Crouch End to Hyde Park Corner in a pair of four inch suede strappy sandals. It must have been seven miles and I didn’t have any pain. On the other hand I know people who only wear heels and have mild, heel-induced agoraphobia. They won’t walk to the end of the road or want to take taxis three blocks because they can’t walk in their shoes and they're always grumpy. That's no way to live.’

I remain ambivalent about this you-must-suffer-to-be-beautiful philosophy, though I greatly admire Susie’s fortitude and dedication to her true self. I’m not sure that it is mine, though. Many years ago I had a pair of perfect shoes. They were pink suede wedges with pink suede ties, like Grecian sandals that wound around the ankles. They were beautiful and functional, I could walk in them and run them and wherever I went, people called out, ‘Beautiful shoes!’ Carelessly, I threw them away when they wore out. I was young and I believed that ahead of me was a whole life-time of beautiful, functional shoes; that you just had to go to Dolcis or Ravel or Saxone, and there would be another pair, waiting. My beautiful pink suede wedges were like my first pair of ice skates: in them I could glide away, effortlessly dancing, swooshing and twirling.

I was young and I was poor and I only had three pairs of shoes. Now I am old and rich and I have forty pairs of shoes and some of them may be beautiful but I can’t walk in them, let alone glide or swoosh or twirl, and some I could climb Mount Everest in, but they are never taken further than the local shops because they are hideous. Is fashion really without mercy, or compromise?