Woman puts out fire with emergency knickers

The big knickers, the old knickers you should have thrown out but keep for emergencies

London swings

I am expensive

BEMBERG the aristocrat of man made yarns

I hope you drop dead and I'll come to the funeral in a red dress

A scene from one of my favourite films

A young Yves St Laurent launches his collection

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?