Christmas wishes

Star Carol

Across the field the city glows;
people shift from work to home;
the lights are steady in the tube;
moonlight silvers the great dome:
dome and spire and roof and mind
contain the hopes of humankind.

Out there, beyond, within, beneath,
the lights are glimmering like stars:
Come to us now, come now! they cry.
The moonlight strikes off speeding cars.
Cars and chariots burn in dreams
and everywhere light runs and streams.

George Szirtes

Lingerie: out of sight, out of mind wins

A clear majority of you in the lingerie poll think that it's either a waste of money to buy pretty underwear, or prefer it to serve the purpose of foundation. As I remarked in the comments, the eternal conundrum is that you want lingerie that gives you a good line under your clothes, but looks sexy when you get undressed. I tend to go with expensive (Lejaby) bras and M&S knickers.

Space NK

The people at Space NK like The Thoughtful Dresser so much that they have written to me to ask if can advertise on the site. They have a UK and US store - banner up top.

Givenchy

Book of the Week

Today's Book of the Week is all about the Thoughtful Dresser's muse, Helen Mirren

When she stepped up to get that Oscar last year, was there a woman over the age of 50 whose heart did not sing? She is said to have had no nipping or tucking. A make-up artist I met who has worked with her confirms this. Why does she look so fantastic then? Good bones and love of life. There was a series in the Sunday Times magazine which ran for years in which celebrities were asked to describe their normal day from waking up in the morning to going to be at night. In the entire history of the series Helen Mirren was the only person who said that the first thing she did every morning was have sex. She didn't even meet her husband Taylor Hackford until her late thirties, had to wait for him to have a very painful divorce, had to move to LA which she hated. But on she goes, indefatigable. Age has not withered her. And won't. (But she does say she's on a permanent diet.)

Thought for the day

Today let us honour
.....
the Victorian lady who has removed her hood, her cloak,
her laced boots, her stockings, her overdress,
her undredress, her wool petticoat, her linen
petticoats, her silk petticoats, her whalebone
corset, her bustle, her chemise, her drawers and
who still wants to!

Marge Piercy

'Is this a size four?'

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.