Thought for the day

The first purpose of clothes . . . was not warmth or decency, but ornament . . . Among wild people,* we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries. Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881

*We no longer speak of 'wild' or 'barbarous' people, yet the observation remains interesting, for it goes to the heart of the question, why do we decorate our bodies with clothes, cosmetics and jewellery? Despite the Puritans' assertions, clothing has never been merely a matter of warmth and protection. LG

In which we speak

Nina Ricci Spring/Summer 2007

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched a new blog in which it invites the general public to comment on items in its Costume Institute collection. How fabulous if the V&A here would do the same.

Discussing it in the Wall Street Journal Rachel Dodes, writes:

Fashion criticism has long been the exclusive realm of an insular band of journalists who traveled the big runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York and seemed to speak their own esoteric language. But the Met's new exhibit, "Blog.mode Addressing Fashion," is inviting anyone with an Internet connection to critique the clothes on display. With its new blog, blog.metmuseum.org/blogmode/, which went up this week, the august museum is also acknowledging that traditional fashion criticism is over.

"There's a whole new field out there," says Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute's curator. He decided last summer to turn a retrospective of important garments acquired by the museum since 2000 into a three-way conversation of sorts between curator, designer and outside observers. "We wanted to further the practice of fashion interpretation and appreciation," he says.

Later it is revealed that Manolo Blahnik is a great fan of Manolo the Shoeblogger, 'I love it,' he says. Manolo the Shoblogger was the first fashion blog I ever read, and the first to wake me up to the possibilities of writing and thinking about fashion in non-traditional ways.

Pointless debate succintly summed up

Xmas tree at Trafalgar Square

A Jew in this country who's bothered by the prevalence of Christian symbols at Christmas should find something more important to worry about. Normblog

Uggs: The Thoughtful Dresser recants

Winter has come cold and early to Britain. Frost on the car roofs in the mornings, biting wind, clear skies. I bring out my year-old brown shearling (which has suffered a small amount of unaccountable wardrobe shrinkage in the past year, a condition only solved, in my experience, by going more regularly to the gym - a scientific mystery!) I have lots of knee-high leather or suede boots, but it is so cold. Meeting some old friends for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant on Edgware Road yesterday, and walking up Oxford Street, into Marks and Spencer and out again and into Selfridge's for rather longer, detained by a DvF dress that just might go in the sale, what I cannot help but notice is




Everyone is wearing them, Everyone is wearing their jeans tucked in, or with thick tights. All the shops are selling variants of them. This once teenaged fad, Uggs worn with bare legs in the summer, has decisively passed into the mainstream. The basic, classic Ugg has been superseded by sheepskin boots that no longer look much like Uggs, laced up, cuff turned over, split side seam . . . there are endless variations.

These are mine, but in black

Even M&S is doing its own Ugg.

Warning, not made from real sheep

And indeed I was wearing them myself, and so warm did they keep my toes, that in a shearling, cashmere sweater and my new John Smedley scarf, I felt like I was in the Bahamas.

So, yes, I am prepared to recant. The cold snap did it and now smart British women who shop on Bond Street are shod in Uggs. Thus does an ugly fashion with pluck and determination eventually win us over. The only downside is that you have to take them off when you go to bed.

But absolutely no to Crocs.

Thought for the day

I work in three shades of black. Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garcons)

Cultural turkeys

Prospect Magazine asks various movers and shakers which were the most underrated and overrated cultural events of 2007. I, somewhat laconically, chose the film of Ian McEwan's Atonement as most overrated and am pleased to find myself in the company of Antony Beevor on this one.

Me: Overrated
The film of Atonement: a shallow adaptation of a much more interesting and ambitious novel. Too Gosford Park for its own good.

Beevor:Overrated
I was deeply disappointed by the film Atonement. Perhaps my expectations had been too high, having greatly admired the novel. The film certainly opened well, but the vastly expensive Dunkirk sequences—a massive self-indulgence on the part of the director—wrecked what might otherwise have been a great success.

However I cannot fault Keira Knightley's green dress

Great Mutton Debate Part 2163

Amanda Harlech, 40-something muse of Karl Lagerfeld

Because of my trip to Liverpool last week, I missed Sarah Mower's second column on the Great Mutton Debate:

I am becoming impatient with all the crossness and whingeing about how difficult it is to dress past a certain age and about being sidelined. I particularly despise the lack of self-esteem being paraded in this debate. To my observation, things can get better as you get older - especially if you're a British woman.

This was illustrated to me to perfection last week at the Chanel Paris-Londres show that Karl Lagerfeld brought to town. By a miracle of good timing, I ended up alone with him backstage, and the conversation - which started with a discussion of Coco Chanel's penchant for Englishmen - turned to Daphne Guinness and Amanda Harlech, the merry divorcées of British high style.

"They look like life should be," he said. "They are stimulating, sparkling, not just clothes horses. They're clever, civilised. They read, they have lives, children.

"And you know," he added conspiratorially, "these kind of women exist only in Britain. Not in France; after a certain age, they just…" He didn't finish, but it was obvious what he meant: run to beige. Which, of course, is very French.

Several people in the comments have made the point that Sarah Mower has missed the point. It is never hard to dress well at any age with a model-thin figure and unlimited income. The difficulty is finding clothes that fit well and flatter within your budget when the shops are full of mini tunics with no sleeves.

London sales

London sales date here

Hello Armani Collezioni.

Thought for the day

What would a man be - what would any man be - without his clothes? As soon as one stops and thinks over that proposition, on realises that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nothing. Mark Twain

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.