Chanel in 1962

You don't have to understand French to get the gist of this 1962 Chanel show

Crimes against fashion

Via the Bag Snobs

It's Louis Vuitton by Marc Jacobs, it costs four figures and it might be worn by attendees at a dolls' tea party. Hopefully the dolls' owners will eat too many cakes and be sick on it.

Lia in the cherry dress

Intermission, and an oddity

I am away until the beginning of the second week in January and don't plan to spend too much time in the company of a computer. I'll try to keep you entertained in the meantime with some semi daily delights. Here is the first, in which designers of the 1930s try to predict the fashions of the future

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.