Thought for the day

(Babe Paley)

One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Revenge: a modest proposal

The Guardian's resident doctor today advises a reader who wishes to take revenge on her no-good cheating ex-boyfriend. Possessing a highly developed imagination, I particularly enjoy revenge fantasies though I have never actually carried one out. Some years ago, when discussing a particularly obnoxious ex with a friend, she told me a story which I am sure is an urban legend, but still, it shows the extent to which human ingenuity can be stretched, and far more satisfying and ethical than bunny-boiling:

Woman's boyfriend cheats on her with best friend, then leaves her, moves in with best friend. Woman finds way of getting into house. She unscrews the knobs at the end of the curtain rod and into the hollow tube she inserts, at regular intervals, several fresh shrimp. The knobs are put back on and quickly the shrimp decay causing a dreadful smell. The couple take the place apart looking for dead rats, cats etc, find nothing. Call in professionals who draw a blank. In despair they move, taking with them the curtain rod.

The ankle boot

Jess Cartner-Morley writes of this season's trend for ankle boots worn with skirts:

I have recently adopted the ankle boot trend with all the raging zeal of the late convert. I resisted for ages, because every piece I read raving about ankle boots ended with a caveat along the lines of "ankle boots look brilliant on us beautiful people, because they contrast so winningly with our adorable, pipe-cleaner legs, but they look freaking hideous on disgusting size 12 weirdos who need liposuction".

American readers please note, UK size 12 = US size 8.

Thought for the day

(Dior)

Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey. Ambrose Bierce

Pessimism for Beginners

The shortlisted authors for the T.S. Eliot poetry prize have been reading their work all week on BBC Radio 4. Make sure you listen to Sophie Hannah's sensational Pessimism for Beginners, here. I was transfixed in the bathroom this morning, rooted to the spot, listening to it.

Lingerie and burlesque

The Guardian explains the rise in sales of expensive lingerie thus:

Before then, the only acceptable way for a normal woman to blow a week's wages on underwear was to buy a pretty but practical and sturdy set from sensible bra supplier to the Queen, Rigby and Peller. The rise and rise of underwear can also be attributed to the burlesque boom: "Before burlesque exploded a few years ago, lingerie was typically seen as either functional, trashy, or lacy: you could either be the virgin, the whore, or the grandma," says Shell. "With burlesque, there was suddenly a new, confident look that was sexy yet coquettish, vintage yet modern ... I think it gave lingerie a cooler, more glamorous image."

Thought for the day

A girl whose cheeks are covered with paint
Has an advantage with me over one whose ain't.
Ogden Nash

I'm supposed to look a bit like something that's been left over in the jungle in Vietnam

Where to start to describe this BBC radio interview with Vivienne Westwood in which she describes what she's wearing and then the interviewer asks Vivienne what she thinks of what she's wearing?

'Everything's very literary with me and it's got to have a story . . .'

'My idea of sex is you've got to look important . . .'

'I'm not a women's lib person . . .'

'The more you dress up the better life you have. . .'

'I've never wanted to go around looking like a little girl who's just been raped . . .'

'I guess I've got an image of myself and I dress for the image . . .'

'I'm not interested in people who don't bother . . .'




Make a cup of coffee, settle in and listen. (and thanks to my sister for finding it)

The Great Mutton Debate - yet more

Lisa Armstrong in the Times today writes about how to dress for your age. It's an interesting piece for me to read because I first met Lisa back in the late Eighties when she commissioned me to write for the newly-launched British Elle. She was in her twenties then, I was in my thirties. I have a huge respect for her as an incisive, intelligent fashion writer. Here she is on how to dress in your seventies and eighties:

By your seventies and eighties, you should really be enjoying clothes. Focus attention around your face and wrists with necklines and bracelets, get regular manicures, splash out on the status bag or suit you’ve always wanted, keep reading the fashion pages and never succumb to elasticated waistbands.
. . .
Keeping up to date with the big picture in fashion is a good place to start when it comes to tweaking — or revolutionising — your look. Fashion doesn’t become less important as you get older, it becomes more. One of my personal style mentors is Joan Burstein, the octogenarian owner of the influential Browns fashion stores. Always extrapolating the shapes — knee-length, loosely cut shifts, trouser and tunic tops in luxurious fabrics — from the coolest designers (current favourites include Lanvin and Fendi), she is eternally stylish, elegant and hip.

And here . . .

is a picture of Joan Burstein, aged 80 infront of Brown's, the legendary London store which she co-founded with her husband in 1970 (she discovered John Galliano and gave a teenage Manolo Blahnik his first job in fashion.) The picture goes with an interview I did with her. We had tea at Claridges.

Thought for the day

I like fashion to go down into the street, but I can't accept that it should originate there. Coco Chanel.

Yum

The Anya Hindmarch Spring/Summer range has arrived at Net a Porter - see What's New at NET-A-PORTER

This is the Cooper which I pre-ordered at the press preview back in October

And this is the Spider clutch

Politics, briefly

To my American readers: it's not my place to tell you how to vote for your President and that's not my intention. It's merely my incredulity, looking at the array of candidates from both parties taking the stage at New Hampshire that only one was a woman. Never mind who that woman is, what her politics are, who her party is or who she is married to. Why only one woman not even to have a shot at becoming President, but just to have a shot at getting the nomination for becoming President? And let's face it, if Hillary Clinton had not been the former First Lady would she have even been on that stage?


Why in America, the powerhouse of the struggle for women's rights this century, where second wave feminism was born - the country that gave us Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millett - has there been no-one before even close to the Presidency? Only one vice presidential candidate.


In Britain we have had a woman prime minister, a woman running for leadership of the Labour Party and women in two of the three top Cabinet jobs (Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary). Angela Merkel in Germany. Helen Clark in New Zealand. Benazir Bhutto running again in Pakistan before the thugs gunned her down. Indira Gandhi in India. Golda Meir in Israel (and Tsipi Livni currently with her eyes on the top job.)


What is it about America that is so afraid of women running for the highest office, or is it that the system requires so much independent wealth or fund-raising that only candidates with the most powerful machines behind them can have a tilt at the White House? There is a deeply conservative side to America which thwarted the Equal Rights Amendment, but there are deeply conservative elements in India, Israel and Pakistan.


I'm a voter on policy, not gender. I never voted for Margaret Thatcher. But the issue is whether the system is open to everyone, not just minorities, but 51 per cent of the population.

Hair and handbags

I have a little piece in the Guardian today about the rocketing price of handbags:

As designer fakes proliferate, handbag makers have aggressively put up their prices. One day last year at the stroke of noon, Chanel put up the prices of all its bags by 20%. The purchase of bags far beyond the income of the average woman has become a frenzy running parallel with the rise of Primark, for there is no fashion for cheap, disposable bags. Instead, there are vastly expensive disposable bags. Twenty-year-olds on £14,000 a year are going into credit card debt to buy £1,000 bags they have seen on the arm of Victoria Beckham or Keira Knightley, who did not, of course, pay for them. These bags will be hopelessly out of date by the end of the season.

Read on, there's a bit more.

But there's also a longer, more fascinating piece about the unsung stars of fashion, the hairdressers, and why London is the world epicentre of the profession:

By the dawn of the 60s, however, hairdressing was still essentially perms and waves, Marcels and bouffants, and layers and layers of lacquer - anything, in fact, to disguise the poverty of the cut. Then along came a young man born in 1928 in Shepherd's Bush, the son of a carpet dealer from Thessaloniki and a mother of Russian Jewish descent. After an apprenticeship in Cohen's Beauty and Barber shop in east London and a spell in the Israeli army, Vidal Sassoon became Bessone's assistant before opening his own salon in Bond Street, and changing hairdressing as profoundly as Henry Ford changed carmaking.

"It's impossible to overestimate Sassoon's importance," says Cox. "His impulse was genuinely philosophical and aesthetic, it was a real intellectual step - architecture for the head. Sassoon brought everything back to technique: to cutting, not styling, to form following function. There was no more need for blowdrying or setting or spraying, he produced precision geometric cuts that fitted people's faces. He did the asymmetric bob, Mary Quant's five-point cut, Mia Farrow's urchin look for Rosemary's Baby. He helped make the 60s, for sure, but his influence extends far, far beyond that."

Equally importantly, Sassoon saw that good haircuts demanded properly trained hairdressers. He set up a network of academies that, with their emulators - invariably founded by disciples of the great man - are, in Cox's eyes, the real reason why British hairdressing now rules the world. "This is the Harvard of hair. People come from literally everywhere to train here, from a short course costing a few hundred pounds to a masters course with the international creative director. You have to think of that as like going to an atelier in Paris with John Galliano, except, of course, that there's no such thing."

Thought for the day

'Whatever comes,' she said, 'cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.' Frances Hodgson Burnett.

(Had you heard of the anti-landmines campaign before Diana got involved? I hadn't)

Net a porter sale - up to 75 per cent off

From tomorrow, there's 75 per cent off many items at the Net a Porter sale. They are also adding to the sale stuff from Chloe, Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs, Miu Miu, Roberto Cavalli, Burberry Prorsum and Alexander McQueen.

Check it out here NET-A-PORTER Homepage

H Nicks online

Not my kind of thing

Harvey Nichols has launched online handbag shopping amongst other items

Fortunately they are not, at present, offering any designers I particularly like apart from Lanvin

How many shoes does a girl need?

My sister and I spent some time analysing our shoe collections. We concluded that the elements of the average female shoe collection are:

Flats, heels.
Flats in different colours to match different outfits, heels in different colours to match different outfits
Heels you can walk in, and heels you can't walk in
Boots
Ankle boots, knee length boots, sheepskin boots
Flat or low-heeled ankle boots to wear with jeans, high heeled ankle boots to wear with more formal trousers
Knee length boots with high heels and knee length boots which are flat or have low heels
High heeled boots with heels you can walk in and high heeled boots you can't walk in
Boots, ankle or knee length, in different colours to go with different outfits
Sandals
Evening shoes
The kitten-heeled mules that are out fashion but might come back into fashion
Shoes which the sales assistant said would stretch, but didn't
Shoes which don't go with anything else
Shoes that were in the sale and which were bought because they were so cheap but which you don't really like
Shoes that seemed like a good idea at the time
Ugly comfortable shoes
Shoes so beautiful and uncomfortable that they can only be worn when you only have to stand or walk for a minimum of three minutes.
Shoes to wear at the gym
Shoes to wear round the house
Shoes which you've forgotten about
Shoes that only exist in a partial dimension, having left the other one at a hotel

I hope this explains the matter more fully for members of the a man only needs three pairs of shoes brigade

UPDATE
I do in fact possess a pair of boots of the type used for walking in rough terrain which I was forced to buy for a journalistic assignment to a remote and mountainous part of Turkey several years ago. I also have a couple of pairs of flipflops, but I don't count any of these as shoes, more like protective gear such as umbrellas or earmuffs. Possession of Crocs voids the entire shoe collection.

Poll: Bags or shoes

A very simple poll - which fabulous purchases can you least do without, bags or shoes. As ever, I will express my own views next week.

Thought for the day

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? Erica Jong

Normal service will resume

on Tuesday, with Thought for the Day and the Thoughtful Dresser poll and the answer to the question, how many and what type of shoes should a woman have.