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

Thought for the day

Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except amongst the insane; usually they want witnesses. Simone de Beauvoir

Coming soon

The mutton debate goes on and on

Two weeks ago I wrote about Sarah Mower's piece in the Telegraph which advised consulting one's mutton-meter before purchasing a leather jacket. I had just bought this one.

It appears there was something of a backlash against Sarah's original piece as she writes, here:

Talk about lighting the blue touchpaper. When I wrote two weeks ago about the "mutton" question vis-à-vis the inadvisability of wearing leather jackets if you're over 40, the blogosphere lit up.

	Wear with care: leather is not suitable for all shapes and ages

In tones ranging from indignant to incandescent, women of the feminist generation rose up and took umbrage at the suggestion that the middle-aged should take care not to be caught dressing too young.

The London-based writer Linda Grant was put out because she'd just bought a leather jacket. Others raged more generally at the idea of age-related fashion don'ts. "I am going to be 56 and do not intend to disappear!" stormed one.

Another sister skewered me as the voice of patriarchal oppression: "Mutton dressed as lamb, indeed! That women have adopted this expression to police our own appearance is offensive."

Mower goes on to try to redefine what she actually meant:

Pretending to be 10 or 20 years younger than you are always shows. When it becomes truly desperate, people will catch their breath at the sight of you, only to let it out as a laugh behind your back. So all I was saying was this: dressing "younger" can actually make you look older, and absurd with it, so don't get caught out by accident.

Truly, 2007 has been a bad time for this. Though I'm averse to laying down laws, some of the people I've seen in girly above-the-knee dresses oughtn't have worn them - a point comically exacerbated by the addition of "on-trend" 6in-high wedges.

I don't care how skinny you are, or how toned your body: when the face-age doesn't match the dress-age, you look silly.

Difficult to disagree. I certainly wouldn't be wearing that leather jacket, not with my legs. I still think you can wear a leather jacket over the age of 50. More or my views and those of Thoughtful Dresser readers, here and here
But as I argued at the time, style for women of a certain age, is finding the true individual expression of yourself. It requires a lot of thought, and this is what this blog is all about. Thoughtful dressing.

Here is a picture of Agnes b whom I interviewed a couple of years ago.Here's what I said about her:

Agnès b is 65. I don't want to flatter her by saying she looks 45. I want to say that she looks how she must have looked most of her life. She has neither made any accommodation to age, conceding to its strictures about how a woman should or shouldn't dress, nor has she defied it through the surgeon's knife.

I can't even see much make-up, apart from some mascara. She's wearing dark jeans, a black jacket, a black-and-white shirt. Her hair is a tousled blond mop, looking as if she just got out of the shower and ran her fingers through it. She has none of the groomed-within-an-inch-of-one's-life look of fashion divas, and could even be described as scruffy. But the overall effect is of absolutely stylish individuality.

We begin to talk. And the more we talk, the more I warm to her. I'd panicked about what to wear, yet she doesn't look me up and down like a headmistress searching for deviations from the school uniform, which is how I feel when I'm in New York.

'I am making clothes to make people happy,' she says. 'I work thinking of it, of what can make them happy, to have confidence in what they wear. Clothes can be like a talisman, something good happened when they were wearing those clothes.' She points to my necklace, of jade, labradorite and gold, my favourite thing in the world. 'This is your talisman,' she says. And of course she's absolutely right. Whatever I'd worn to the interview, the necklace would have been part of it. She's noticed the one thing that really matters.

UPDATE
Dana in the comments notes of the unsuitable red leather jacket, above:

. . . change the skirt for pants, the super wide belt for a less wide one, and if you're a red patent leather person, go for it, whatever your age. Why not?

Thought for the day

Enter the ateliers of the great couturiers and you will feel that you're not in a shop but in the studio of an artist who intends to make of your dress a portrait of yourself, and one that resembles you. Paul Poiret

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.

Olay or Creme de la Mer?

Is a drug store beauty product really just as good as one that costs four times the price? Are we being sold impossible dreams and packaging by cynical corporations? L'Oreal owns Lancome, maybe the products are identical. This very interesting site examines the 'scientific' claims of of beauty products and on the whole finds them wanting. But is she right? Vote in the Thoughtful Dresser poll, on the sidebar, on the right.

I have my own views on the matter, but I'll stay shtum until the poll closes.

Istanbul

I returned last night from a scintillating long weekend in Istanbul where I learned a large amount about buying kilims, without actually buying one, purchased apple tea in the Grand Bazaar and witnessed the most important buy of the trip, a pair of turquoise and gold Aladdin's shoes with turned-up toes and pompoms, for 17-month-old Lia who was inducted into the art of wearing Difficult Shoes and spent all weekend practising.

Yesterday morning was spent at the spa at the Hotel Les Ottomans (not, alas, where I was staying, though I had a magnificent view of the Bosphorus, the Blue Mosque the Topkapi Palace and the sound of the competing muezzins woke me every morning at 5 am.)

If you ever find yourself with time to kill in this city, the hotel's spa is one of the most beautiful I've ever visited, and the only one where, as soon as I began to dry my hair the attendant came over with a variety of brushes and proceeded to do a salon-quality blow dry for me.

Botox, not.

Readers, you surprise me. Only two votes for botox, an overwhelming defeat. Perhaps I erred by telling you my own views on the matter, and influenced the vote, but given how many people I know do botox, I'm amazed at the decisive rejection. I've seen successful botox, but it's been used around the eyes to get rid of crows' feet. Nonetheless, I'm too much of a hypochondriac to subject myself willingly to unnecessary medical procedures. I rely on good genetic inheritance, and sunscreen.

Thought for the day

My husband gave up everything for me. I'm not a beautiful woman. I'm nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else. If everyone looks at me when I enter a room my husband can feel proud of me. That's my chief responsibility. Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor.

*Not one of my heroines, but still, an interesting remark

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.

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

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.