Literary quotes of the year

“Q: How much time, if any, do you spend on the web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

Jenny Diski: Acres of time, wasted, wasted. I play poker (and lose), I play ludo and mah jong. I check out MetaFilter. I buy frocks. Anything. It’s a kind of hell. I sometimes think I might go back to typewriting. But you can’t get the ribbons.”

"We want a Ninety-Nine; God how we want it: that shaggy-bark chocolate stick plunged into a mound of air-pumped chalky glop, which would be called vanilla were it not to defame the dark bean . . . You don’t eat ice cream, you gorge on it. Open wide and dream — perhaps of the perfect but as yet unrealised flavour. Mine would be made from the two most mysteriously succulent Edenic fruits I’ve yet eaten, both in the Dominican Republic: the milky-fleshed caimito — a flood of scented flavour, ethereally light; and its opposite, nispero — the unappealingly leathery brown skin concealing a bronze-coloured, honey-tasting flesh.”
Simon Schama celebrates ice cream, Vogue

Norman Mailer to Philip Roth, in queue for the loo before a memorial service: “Phil, sometimes I have to go into a telephone kiosk to pee. You just can’t wait at my age.”
Roth: “I know, it’s the same with me.”

From the Sunday Times

Thought for the day

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed figleaves together, and made themselves aprons. Genesis 3:7

Care of tights: the higher learning

From Lisa Armstrong in the Times today

Our continental cousins invest in quality, rather than hype. Then they hand wash them in the soap equivalent of Krug and fold them correctly thereafter (three folds up the leg, tucking the resulting flat rectangle into the waistband so the tights are neatly encased inside out to prevent snagging in the drawer). Don’t knock it. Until you’ve re-folded all the tights in your drawer, you don’t know the meaning of therapeutic. They even understand tights in Austria, the birthplace of Wolford, purveyor of exceedingly good tights. So how hard can it be?

'I think I need more glitter and I think you need more lashes' - Dior at Versailles

Care of cashmere

In Harpers this month a former executive with Pringle advises on how to wash a cashmere sweater, advice which I followed yesterday and which worked.

Hand wash in warm water using liquid soap. Soak for five minutes, then gently swish the suds through the garment to make sure they penetrate all the fibres, that's swish not knead like you're making bread. Rinse thoroughly. Put in washing machine on short spin cycle. Put in dryer on low heat for five minutes which fluffs up the fibres and prevents pilling. Dry flat.

Thought for the day

Elegance should have an ill-dressed air. Raymond Radiguet

Online sales

Net-a-Porter (UK and US), Pure Cashmere, Yoox (international) and Figleaves now have sales on this site.

It's a shop

Why some clothes last longer than others

I spent this morning with the design and management team of a UK fashion house for a story I'm doing. At one point the conversation turned to the high street, and whether the public was tired of cheap, disposable clothing.

I mentioned that I had bought a couple of Zara dresses that had fallen to pieces, and finally replaced them with a Vanessa Bruno dress which cost more than twice as much. I was told the reason why they fell apart. The label said machine washable.

A jersey dress that costs £49.99 will lose its colour when it's machine washed, particularly if it is black. The cheap thread and slapdash stitching will come undone in the rough and tumble of the spin cycle. The zip may slightly lose its placement and become difficult to do up. So why does it say machine washable? Because the high street knows that people won't buy a cheap dress you have to dry clean. More expensive dresses often have dry clean only on the label, and can in fact be machine washed, but the designer won't say so, because a machine washable designer garment sounds cheap.

We moved on to the baffling story of a pair of Zara trousers. I tried them on but didn't buy them. Changing my mind, I came back the next day and finding the same size on the rack, bought and paid for them, thinking that since I'd tried them on the previous day, they would fit the next. When I got them home, they were too small. This is because Zara allows for say 2 cm of 'slippage' ie the same item in the same size may be up to four cm different in size. On top of that lax quality control means that clothes will always get through that are out by more than the slippage limit. So the two pairs of trousers I tried on could have been six or eight cm different in size.

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?