A male reader of The Thoughtful Dresser emails me to enquire:
. . . when does The Thoughtful Dresser expand into the area of clothing hitherto untraveled: I mean the lingerie department, with detailed analysis and pictures.Happy to oblige with some Donna Karan knickers
And I don't mean the low level common consumer schmattes of Victoria's S. but rather more refined designer stuff.
The greatest Yiddish-language writer of the 20th century features on a list of 100 books chosen to inaugurate a daring, long-term project to bring landmark foreign works to Arabic-speaking readers.
The Collected Stories Of Isaac Bashevis Singer, by an author who was raised in Poland but for decades dominated Yiddish writing in New York, will join titles ranging from Sophocles and Chaucer to Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami among the first selections of the Kalima translation programme.
The Kalima (meaning "word" in Arabic) project aims to revive the art of translation across the Arab world and reverse the long decline in Arabic readers' access to major works of global literature, philosophy, science and history.
"The choices reflect what we consider are the real gaps in the Arab library," said Karim Nagy, the founder and chief executive of the project, which was launched yesterday in Abu Dhabi. "We shy away as far as possible from best-sellers."
Women aren't just buying one workhorse to go with everything, Bostock has noticed, but a few statement-making pieces. "Our customers are treating themselves to two or three high-quality coats for different occasions," she says. "It's no longer just about practicality; outerwear plays a key role in winter's trends." (notes the Telegraph)
I'm busy writing a piece for Vogue today, so I leave you with some thoughts about Harry Potter - a piece I wrote as a guest post for Normblog in the summer:
Finishing the seventh and final volume of the Harry Potter series over the weekend, I was struck by the fact that a generation of children has grown up immersed in a morally complex world in which the traditional epic battle between good and evil is clouded by questions. The discussions on the many Harry Potter fan sites bear out this view that J.K. Rowling has exposed her readers to some of the most important and difficult dilemmas of our own age. That these discussions are often awkward and sometimes illiterate does not detract from the real passion and sense of enquiry with which they are entered into.
. . .
In the final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, released on Friday, the Ministry of Magic has fallen to Voldemort's forces and the totalitarian state is emerging. The plan is that the magic world will take over the Muggle world which is to be a vast slave labour camp. Muggles (ourselves) are the lesser breeds - the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, blacks. Those drawn to Voldemort's cause are obsessed with ideas of racial purity, they pride themselves on being 'pure-blood' (entirely magic) and despise those 'half-bloods', the products of mixed-marriages (though ironically Voldemort himself is a half-blood) or worse, the 'mudbloods', those wizards and witches who are Muggle-born.
In one of the most horrifying sections of the book, Voldemort introduces Nuremberg Laws. Families are investigated for potential half-blood ancestry and the 'mudbloods' are accused of having stolen their magic powers from real magic people. Deprived of their magic wands, the source of their power, they are reduced to pitiful beggars in Diagon Alley, in scenes reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto.
But what of the 'good' wizards, those who have heroically fought the takeover? They are not without the taint of evil themselves, for they are slave-owners - of the degraded house-elves who are under an oath of loyalty to the family who owns them, whatever the orders. One scene, towards the end of the book, shows the burial of a house-elf given his freedom, and the simple inscription on his grave: 'Here lies Dobby, a free elf.' In order to defeat evil, dubious alliances must be made: for example, with the goblins, the makers of swords and the guarders of gold, who regard all property as owned by the maker of it, and only 'leased' to others for their own lifetime; at the point of the leaser's death, it must revert to its maker. The wizards' cheating of these rules is, says one character, something on which they should reflect. Many species will not ally with the wizards because of bad relations, old grudges and grievances.
. . .
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.
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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
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:
Mower goes on to try to redefine what she actually meant: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."
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.
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.
. . . 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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.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 ..."
. . . 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.
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?)
. . . 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.
