Poll: Lingerie

Some women will spend the earth for fabulous lingerie, even if only they know it's there. Others regard it as underpinnings, bring on the Spanx!

Go and cast your vote, to the right.

Poll winner and my dissent

A huge majority of you believe that good clothes are available at all prices and it is unnecessary to max out the credit cards. I demur on this one. I have just thrown away my second Zara LB day dress, because it has fallen to bits. The zip is broken, the fabric on the visible collar lining has faded to grey, and the skirt is coming away from the waistband. It was a great dress, but now it's unwearable. It cost I think about sixty quid and it's been replaced by one which cost twice as much; twice burned, now finally shy.

There are good quality clothes on the high street - I rate Marks and Spencer and Gap - but if you want something that is going to look good in two years time, you need to spend money. Of course unless you are Victoria Beckham or the wife of a Russian oligarch, you're going to have a budget. Almost no-one wears couture every day and even major designers churn out badly-made crap. But for enduring quality, particularly tailoring, I would go into debt to buy what I wanted. (Would? See overdraft - but you can't, it's a secret).

There's another issue with cheap clothes. See this:



It's a bracelet from Asos. It costs £8. Can anyone explain to me how it can cost £8 without someone, somewhere, being reduced to penal servitude to make it?

If you go down to the woods today

Thank you Miuccia, just what I've always wanted. A sequinned teddybear iPod cover.

Thought for the day

The ineluctable movement of fashion had its origin as a form of presumption - the desire to imitate and resemble something better, more free, more beautiful and shining, which one could not actually aspire to. Anne Hollander

V&A jewellery gallery to open in May

A press pack from the V&A arrives with details of the opening, in May of the new William and Judith Bollinger Gallery which will tell the story of European jewellery during the past 800 years. There will be jewelled pendants given by Elizabeth I to her courtiers, diamonds worn by Catherine the Great, the Beauharnais Emeralds which Napoleon gave to his adopted daughter, and tiaras worn by the Empress Josephine. And Lady Mountbatton's 'tutti frutti' ruby sapphire, emerald and diamond bandeau, bought from Cartier in 1928.

In the unlikely event of you not possessing any world-ranking jewels, the V&A shop is commissioning several new ranges, affordable by the likes of us .

And if you can't get to London, buy the catalogue.

Pure Cashmere

A few weeks ago I wrote about one of my favourite things to wear, indeed what I'm wearing right now, Pure Cashmere. I've bought several brands of cashmere sweater but Pure do the best range of styles, best fit, softest wool, and crucially, the best colours, because they dye the yarn not the garment.

I'm delighted that Pure is now an advertiser on this site. Indeed they have a 20 percent off promotion at the moment, see the banner up top or side panel at the right. And of course if you order your sweater from this site, then I can buy another.

They do ship to the US, according to one of my regular readers.

Book of the Week

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl.

The facts of Shakespeare's life are so meagre that it is difficult to produce more than a monograph without considerable speculative padding. Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World a few years ago, placed Shakespeare at the centre of his time, of the political events of the period. Nicholl has an entirely different task. At the beginning of the last century a manuscript was discovered showing that Shakespeare, while living as a lodger in a house on Silver Street in London, was called as a witness to a legal dispute about the failed payment of a dowry. Nicholl recreates the ordinary, everyday life of the neighbourhood, the street, the house, and even the kind of furnishings of the room in which Shakespeare wrote. It's as if we are seeing Doris Lessing going out to the corner shop to buy a tin of cat food. There is an increasingly eerie sensation as we move closer and closer to the fabric of Shakespeare's reality: the playwright among one of many neighbours earning a living, buying and cooking food, stopping to talk on the street. In the end we are no closer to this man's incomprehensible genius, but we do understand that he took his influences not from thin air, but the lives of those around him, brief forgotten lives given an additional meaning by falling beneath the gaze of one who would change the way we think and feel.

You can buy it here


or here

Public service message: the party shirt

Every year a certain senior male executive appears at a certain UK newspaper's Christmas party in what he calls his party shirt. The fashion desk moves to the opposite end of the room. This year drastic measures have been taken to preempt the appearance of the party shirt.

I am sure The Thoughtful Dresser's male readers are far too sophisticated to wear a party shirt, but perhaps you'd like to print this out and hand it to friends:

. . . don't be tempted to wear "party" clothes to the Christmas office do. It looks desperate, uncool, irritatingly chipper and unforgivably Brentian. By all means dress up a bit. Wear one of your better suits, carefully iron a decent shirt, leave your trousers in the Corby that bit longer - and then set about thoroughly ruining the lot. (Office parties, like weddings, are a social war zone, where the agony of the banging hangover is matched only by the horror of discovering ripped and stained battle scars in your brand new Prada whistle.)

If you overcook the outfit, with, say, a garish, swirly "party" shirt or unfunny Santa cufflinks, for instance, you are painting a picture of a man who gets pathetically excited at the prospect of free booze, talking to women and spontaneous gynaecological Xeroxing.

Thought for the day

In the factory, we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope. Charles Revson

How high can a shoe go?

The most expensive bag that I have bought is an Anya Hindmarch Carker, for £530. I bought it in the Autumn of last year, and carefully kept when not in use, I would expect it to last the rest of my life. Indeed I am still using bags of my mother's, purchased in the Fifties. I would never buy an It bag that I did not expect to wear for years to come. As I've said, I have no problem still using my red and purple Fendi baguettes, even though all around me are carrying clutches. I just don't care.

£530 was not the upper limit I was prepared to pay for that bag; had I been able to buy a Hermes Birkin, I might have done so. But I will not pay £745 for a pair of shoes. Like these:
Yet people do, indeed you can go and buy them yourself if you click on the Net-a-porter ad on this page, and stunningly beautiful they are too.

But as Justine Picardie says, in the Telegraph today:

Net-a-porter is doing a brisk trade in Christian Louboutin party shoes this Christmas, but who is buying the black satin slingbacks with a Swarovski crystal embellishment for £745? (Quite a lot of people, presumably, given that they've already sold out in three different sizes.)

Then there are the Jimmy Choo sapphire crêpe-de-chine peep-toes for £585, and black T-bars for £365 from Russell & Bromley. (Russell & Bromley! It's where my affordably priced, sensible school shoes used to come from!

>It's enough to take the enjoyment out of buying a new pair of frivolous shoes - for if you're worrying about how much you've spent on them, then the point of the purchase is lost. Party shoes should be escapist, though not so expensive that they leave you unable to afford Christmas presents for anyone else.

Plus, if your expensive high heels let you down - as mine did, catastrophically, when a crucial strap snapped on my silver Louboutins, halfway through an evening out last week - then you are liable to feel more than usually outraged.

Hence I am giving up on the broken Louboutins in favour of a pair of red satin slingbacks from the Autograph range at M&S for £55; less than a tenth of the designer versions.

If you want to spend money on shoes, my own tip, particularly to British women, who are less familiar with the brand, is Stewart Weitzman. He's an American shoe designer, stocked at Russell and Bromley, Selfridges and Harrods, who makes really good quality, beautiful and fashionable shoes which rarely sell for more than £200. I have lots of pairs.

Thought for the day

Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth. But we seem to have no other. Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Thought for the day

Q: How does drag make you feel?
A: I feel like Superman. It's very empowering. You become the God of your imagination.
Ru Paul

Technical problems

I can't work out what has happened to the lovely picture of a pensive Coco Chanel which should appear at the top of the page and is horizontally squeezed right now. I shall look into matters further when I have more time.

Lingerie again

Many thanks to all of you wrote about your appreciation of the half slip. The industry has been fixated in the past few years with the changing shape of knickers - bikini to boy-short, not to mention control pants (what our mothers called 'roll ons,' 'foundation garments', or, bluntly, corsets.) But I'm inclined to think that we are in for a revival of the slip, which I have hitherto regarded as old lady wear. I suppose young women abandoned them in the Sixties because the ones on offer were too long to wear under a mini-skirt, and the whole point of clothes when you are 20 is how quickly you could get out of them.

The vest has been revived, in different form, those garments I wear under a top that's too low-cut or see-through for my taste. I had a look at Figleaves (see ad on the left) and they have lots of full-length slips which they call chemises, but no half-slips, apart from a couple of Spanx control ones. I wore the Vanessa Bruno dress with the half-slip last night, and it worked like a dream. So I'm even thinking along full slip lines now. Sleek 'n Chic offers vintage lingerie, but not sure if it's pre-worn. Yuck.

Thought for the day

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of our arm and breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. Virginia Woolf

Shopping: online, and not.

Liverpool girls wait for the shops to open

As you can now see, there are several advertisements on this site. I have tried to keep them as unobstrusive as possible.

At the bottom you will find a large display ad for Net-a-Porter. You can choose to order from the UK or US site simply by clicking the change currency button in the top left-hand corner after you've clicked on the banner. Even if Net-a-porter is way out of you league, go and feast your eyes, anyway.

Today, at Cricket, I saw a row of Lanvin dresses, and ten £1000 Balenciaga handbags just lying on a shelf waiting to be bought. Round the corner where the Cavern Club used to stand, where the Beatles started out, is a whole Vivienne Westwood store. You could stay at the about to be completed Hard Day's Night Hotel - ie live inside a Beatles song, and then go shopping. Liverpool redux!

Nails and slips

On the matter of how much it costs to maintain one's grooming, the prices some readers have been coming up with manicures and pedicures in the US have been making my jaw drop. I recently made the mistake of having a perfectly ordinary manicure at Harvey Nichols, which cost a whopping £40 ($80) but my neighbourhood salon, where I have a monthly pedicure, charges £25 or $50, and once again, for nothing special. And you have to make an appointment.

My colonial cousins, you do not know how lucky you are.

Meanwhile, here in Liverpool I have noticed that one sign of the city's regeneration is the number of serious handbags you're now seeing on the streets. At the MetQuarter, I walked into Flannels, where you can pick up and fondle bags by Yves St Laurent, Prada, Fendi, Miu Miu etc and hurriedly put back a £785 Gucci dress. I did buy a Vanessa Bruno jersey LB day dress, but was worried about slight cling. The sales assistant gave me a top tip: go to M&S and buy a half slip, she said, the dress will glide over the slip instead of sticking to your bum. The half slip is a really old-fashioned piece of lingerie, and I couldn't believe they still sold them, but yes, they did and as she said, it did the trick.

Thought for the day

Once it was power that created style. But now high styles come from low places, from people who carve out worlds for themselves in the nether depths, or tainted 'undergrounds.' Tom Wolfe

War is declared on Britain

My attention has been drawn to to this piece in the Times today comparing British and American women's appearance:

I’m recently back from a two-month sojourn in Los Angeles and New York. Maybe I have come back with fresh eyes. Maybe I have grown accustomed to the effort American women put into their upkeep. Either way, you don’t exactly need callipers to figure out in which country the women look after themselves more.

An informal poll of my US female friends revealed that they spend roughly $700 (£350) a month on what they consider standard obligatory beauty maintenance. That covers haircut, highlights, manicure, pedicure, waxing, tanning, make-up, facials, teeth whitening etc. They will spend a further $1,000 (£500) a month on physical conditioning such as military fitness, spinning sessions, vikram yoga, Pilates, deep-tissue sports massage, personal training etc. On top of that, add the occasional spa day, a week-long “bikini boot camp” in Mexico at the start of every summer and seasonal splurges on personal shoppers and clothing. I’m not sure any of my British female friends spends £700 during an entire year on her appearance. American women see these costs as a simple and sensible investment in their future.

Hard to argue with our bad nails and eyebrows, but we lack here those Vietnamese walk-in nail salons who will strip down every follicle and push back your cuticles in ten minutes flat for $30. I don't quite spend £350 a month on grooming, but it's a lot more than £700 a year.

Tim Gunn, on the street

There are several reasons to watch this interview with Tim Gunn: one is to see the daughter of some friends of mine ask a pertinent question about skirt lengths, another is to hear his explanation of why New York is the most fashion forward city in America. It's about the street and the subways. They're runways on which people dress to be seen. And Italy, of course, with its highly ritualised passagiata, has the best dressed women in the world.