This is how we do it in the Liv

This is where I was on Saturday night:

Liverpool's biggest band - the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic - was not at home because it was here in the arena, stacked in horizontal ranks, now red, now blue. They played a chunk from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and a little piece by Shostakovich. But most of the night they were the ultimate backing group, joining almost every band on every number, with their dynamic young conductor, Vasily Petrenko, riding high on a scissor lift and joining lustily in the Lennon singalong.

The RLPO was in the thick of it at the start, a melange of Rule Britannia, Amazing Grace (with images of slave ships), Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory, with mezzo Kathryn Rudge got up as Britannia to belt out the ruling the waves bit before being joined by two more singers, the Liverpool Welsh Choir, a brass band and semaphoring sea cadets. It was a wonderfully surreal moment. Very Liverpool.

It was the official opening of Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture. There was Echo & the Bunnymen, the Farm, Ian Broudie of Lightning Seeds, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, footage of the Cavern, and Ringo Starr. A hundred minutes of Liverpool The Musical and not a cliche in it. Just when you expected You'll Never Walk Alone, you got The Farm's All Together Now. When you expected John Lennon's Imagine, you got Ringo Starr belting out John Lennon's inconic anthem Power to the People. The Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress across the aisle from us rattled their chains of office as they bopped along. Liverpool's imperial past, its greatness built on slaves, sugar and shipping, was undercut by Gilliam-like cartoons of Queen Victoria straddling the globe, eating ships as if they were sweets, and a woodcut of slave galley with human beings like embryos packed in a long womb.

The other star of the show was 19-year-old RiUvEn. Check him out here on the track The LIV

Why is my teenage daughter dressing like Yasser Arafat . . .

. . . Jonathan Goldberg of London NW3 (that's Hampstead) asks Hadley Freeman in in the Guardian today. I have dealt with this question before in the Thoughtful Dresser, but Hadley puts her finger on it:

Now, before I sweepingly dismiss your daughter's dabblings in Yasser chic, there is a chance that she is merely showing her unflagging support for Palestinian nationalism, this being a particularly canny cause for a north-west London girl with the surname of "Goldberg" to light upon should she want to annoy her father. [my italics] But assuming that your daughter is more fashion-conscious than cheekily provocative, then she is doing this because she would like to be fashionable.

As we know, keffiyeh chic has reached catwalks. The Balenciaga keffiyeh at £750, sold out before it reached the shops.

Surely with tens of thousands of teeneg girls wearing Top Shop copies, an end to the Middle East crisis must be just around the corner?

Thought for the day

(CZ Guest, another socialite)

A woman should be an illusion. Ian Fleming

Five things to wear so you know it's 2008

1. Belts. Every wardrobe requires a repertoire. Last year’s were wide and blingy; this year’s are thin and understated.

2. Shoes. Bright colour and chunky are the bywords here. If there’s a new way to waft, it’s to do a semi-waft by toughening up pretty dresses with aggressive-looking shoes.

3. Bags: they’re definitely getting smaller. Some could even be classified as small.

4. If you’re bored with necklace mania, take heart. Now there’s bangle and cuffs mania.

5. Not just full, but really full skirts – the antidote to last year’s drainpipes. Wear with ballet pumps.

courtesy of the usually right Lisa Armstrong

Everybody's talking about

It says here

6: Linda Grant's The Clothes On Their Back

A gorgeous fashion-y novel with incredible soul, which isn't out until next month, but we strongly advise you to buy it the moment it is, because it's well cool. The woman who bought you fashion blog thethoughtfuldresser.blogspot.com ('because you can't have depths without surfaces') delivers an exquisite, moving (and we suspect, autobiographical)* number, which describes a sensible, credible love affair with style - and the people who have it (Little, Brown).

*You suspect wrong

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