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)

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.

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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

Things I don't like

. . . and neither, it seems, does the Manolo

Yes, we know, Tattooed Person, you are the outrageous rebel who must express your rebellious nature through the medium of permanent self-mutilation…you and 45 million other Americans.

Thought for the day

I have to dress pretty well in my business. Willa Cather

Spring/Summer 08

Yesterday began, as all good mornings should, with an 8.30 am car to take me to the studio of the relaunched Ossie Clark London label. I'm writing something for the Guardian about this, so will have more to report tomorrow.

Next to the SS/08 press view at Jaeger at the closed-off second floor of the Regent Street HQ. The Jaeger London label was incredibly strong and cohesive, grey, mimosa the striking keynote colours. The chief executive Belinda Earl showed me round the collection, which includes a bridge line, Jaeger Limited, for professional women who are not quite ready for Jaeger London. They have also just signed an exclusive deal with Saks in the US.


I wrote about Jaeger's revival last summer. I like the innovation and slight quirkiness of their design, and if, as I reported, Hilary Alexander, style director at the Daily Telegraph, is wearing Jaeger, it's good enough for me. I was particularly struck by the strength of the accessories, particularly the jewelry. I bought a couple of pieces from them in the summer and they have earned their place in my wardrobe, which is what one demands of all new purchases. Also, if you want an Anya Hindmarch Elrod style bag (without the distinctive AH hardwear)at less than half the price, check out their Britannia bag.


Next to the Marks and Spencer show, held in a cavernous space in what appeared to be a vast subterranean chamber beneath the University of Westminster. The design seemed more outre this year, with small sensations like a red patent cropped swing jacket, and more classic numbers like a buttermilk suede trench coat. M&S doesn't lead, it follows, and Stuart Rose has given his design team free rein to plunder the catwalks at will.* The current season's leather dress sold out, and even Ms Beckham is said to have bought one.They have just hired Lily Cole to be the new face of their Limited range, and you don't get more Vogue than Lily Cole.
Interestingly, Kate Bostock, their head of womenswear, says that they believe women are moving away from disposable fashion, and that the strong sales of leather and cashmere indicate renewed interest in classic quality pieces, as I have been saying for some months now.

(*does this look slightly familiar?)

Chinese readers note: M&S opens in Shanghai this month (coals to Newcastle as much of its stock is made there.)

Check in tomorrow for more on Ossie Clark London.

Read it and weep . .

. . . with envy. Bag Snob Tina's ode to the Chanel jacket.

Regardless of how one prefers to wear their CHANEL jacket, we all agree that there is no other piece of clothing that transcends time, style and age as gracefully. I wear mine with jeans for lunch and shopping dates, wide legged trousers for cocktails and a full length multi tiered silk chiffon Chanel skirt for black tie. My CHANEL jackets are my secret weapon, the pull it out and be fabulous no matter how much I weigh or feel at the moment kind. Nothing in my closet is as glamorous or versatile, I own dozens of CHANEL jackets and do not plan to part with any of them! Some I have had for 13 years, since I first started collecting at age 25, and some are new additions from this season. I keep each and every single one in a cedar lined closet in its original Chanel wardrobe cover with a photo on the outside for ease of dressing. Call me obsessive but those of you who own these amazing creations know what I am talking about, the ones who don't, you need to go and try one on. Just for the experience. And you'll most likely leave with one.

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.

The boundaries between art and dress

I'm very busy today, so will leave you with this piece from the Telegraph earlier year

In 1935 the 22-year-old Meret Oppenheim was studying art in Paris when her Jewish father (a friend of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whose ideas led the young art student into surrealism) was forced to leave Nazi Germany and could no longer support his daughter financially. Needing to earn her own living, she decided to collaborate with the fashion world and made a fur bracelet for Schiaparelli, whose belief that haute couture should make the everyday extraordinary meant she was the ideal partner for a surrealist. For Schiaparelli all fashion was a metamorphosis - a dress could become a painting and a shoe could become a hat. When Oppenheim showed the bracelet to Picasso in a café, he remarked that anything could be covered in fur. Oppenheim agreed, pointing to a cup and saucer on the table, and went on to design the fur teacup and spoon that is one of surrealism's most famous works.

Thought for the day

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. Oscar Wilde

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.