Reminder - The Thoughtful Dresser competition

You have until Monday to enter the Thoughtful Dresser competition. Put your entries here

There have been 51 so far, keep them coming.

Hadley Freeman on the rise of granny chic

She's considering the inexplicable rise of vintage

Nonetheless, I think it's fair to say that the majority of pieces culled from vintage bargain bins tend to be things such as floral blouses and tweed skirts and I think it is similarly fair to say that they were probably last worn and then donated by more mature women. Yet because vintage had become a byword for a kind of eccentric trendiness, this has led to the strange sight of twenty- and thirty-something women in predictable parts of east London and similarly image-conscious areas proudly sporting too-tight tea dresses, frumpy cardigans and battered, Queen-like handbags.

Quite satisfying that young girls are wearing the ugly clothes and we get to wear the beautiful ones, no?

Thought for the day

She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners. Louisa May Alcott

The world is all that is the case

The dire record of mainstream British publishers (not to mention the US, but that's a separate story) in publishing foreign fiction is exposed by this piece by Joan Smith in the Guardian today on the funding cuts to small presses like Arcadia which go out of their way to find foreign fiction which has been rejected by everyone else, as being uncommercial. I have been on the receiving end of this philistinism from the English-speaking world by American publishers whose rejection letters rave about my work but then say, in sorrow, it is 'too British.'

So with alacrity I co-signed the letter together with 500 other writers, including Doris Lessing, Alan Hollinghurst, James Kelman, Graham Swift and Lady Antonia Fraser, complaining about Arcadia's 25 per cent cut in Arts Council funding. Joan writes:

Believe me, there is no other way for such writers to get published in this country. The dreadful state of mainstream publishing is an open secret; profit and celebrity are what drives the industry, and marketing departments don't see either in a promising young Polish or Croatian novelist. Earlier this week, one of the country's most distinguished publishers told me he had snapped up a Swedish crime novel, which has been a runaway best-seller in Scandinavia, after it was turned down by just about every mainstream house in London.

This kind of risk-taking is almost unknown in commercial publishing these days. Mainstream houses are more interested in publishing Russell Brand and Jeremy Clarkson than confirming Britain's role at the heart of an expanded Europe by bringing the best European fiction to British readers.

It's precisely that narrow, philistine view of culture that's been confirmed by the Arts Council's drastic cuts to small publishers. That's why so many of us are up in arms, trying to save the government from a catastrophe that is entirely of its own making.

The Anglo-American relationship

Over at the Bag Snobs, they are talking up a pair of Louboutins available at Net a Porter for $730. Checking Net a Porter UK, I note that exactly the same shoes sell for £400, that's $800. Why the difference? There are issues about exchange rates, of course, ansd the strength of the pound against the weak dollar, but the rule that clothes and pretty much everything else are cheaper in America than Britain has held whatever the exchange rate. Why? One explanation is the sheer size of the US market. Stores like Saks and Neiman Marcus can negotiate aggressive discounts for their customers on the grounds that they will simply sell more of any product.

The American market is an exceptionally insular one. Neither Gap nor Banana Republic will ship outside the US and Canada and nor will the giant shoe sites like Zappos. The sheer size of the American market makes it impervious to the outside world. It sets its own rules. Zappos simply has no UK equivalent though increasingly high street stores like Marks and Spencer and upper end ones like Jaeger are making their stuff available on-line. But the difference is this: in America it is entirely possible to live hundreds of miles from any major shopping centre while in Britain, unless you dwell in the North of Scotland, you're never likely to be more than an hour's drive from a a concentration of: M&S, Jigsaw, Reiss, Hobbs, etc. And a swathe of the Midlands and North have Selfridges and Harvey Nichols.

So we have in Britain excellent access to high quality fashion, but we must pay often a third as much again as in America. This is why New York shopping trips have become the new vacation.

Gentlemen's corner

According to Charlie Porter in the Guardian today, the new trend in menswear is the jumpsuit. Let's revisit that sentence againsand see what is the matter with it. Spot the problem? The new trend in menswear. Men change the style of their clothes with the speed of glaciers. In my lifetime all I can remember altering is width of the amount of fabric on the lower leg and the with of the amount of fabric on the chest. But brave Charlie ploughs on:

Men's jumpsuits are now arriving in stores from the likes of Prada, Calvin Klein and Mulberry, and I think they're a challenge we should accept. Yes, there are hints of Guantánamo Bay, and the jumpsuit is decidedly old blue-collar, but that's why I find it so delicious. Much of the trusted male wardrobe is derived from functionality, such as the military trench coat, or denim jeans. Jumpsuits traditionally work for hard labour because you can forget you've got the thing on and focus on the job. When I'm in a suit, I'm distracted by paranoia: Is it all straight? Is everything tucked in? Is it making me look like a fraud? With the jumpsuit, you can just get on with living.

But apparently there are ways and ways of wearing a jumpsuit, as Charlie explains:

Last October, I borrowed a slate-grey tight nylon jumpsuit with electric blue trim from Alexander McQueen to wear to the Fashion Rocks event at the Royal Albert Hall. It was a black-tie affair, so I put a tux jacket over the top. Between acts, Tom Ford came over and said he didn't approve of how I was wearing it. His comment: lose the underwear. It's not advice I have taken.

Many man and some innocent women would go into a swoon if Tom Ford told them to remove their delicates, and perhaps Charlie was misreading the signals but there again he has more practical tips on how to wear a jumpsuit:

Prada's jumpsuit is for those who are lucky enough to be lanky, as are most of the designer jumpsuit offerings [and the author]. If you try one on, and I do hope that you will, make sure you look at yourself from all angles, particularly the side. Paunches are what prevent most men from engaging in designer clothing, and jumpsuits have a nasty habit of riding a touch too tight over that humiliating area. Also make sure the jumpsuit fastens low enough to allow yourself quick access at the urinal. And, finally, you need to ask yourself the all-important romper-suit question: do I look like a grown-up baby? After all, I'm jealous of the ease with which my friend Ruth dresses her newborn son Arthur, but nobody wants to look as if they swap fashion tips with under-fives.

Thought for the day

Fashion is a branch of the visual and performing arts. Camille Paglia

A little slice of heaven

For several years I lived in Canada and became unaccountably addicted to a crisp, dry salty cracker called Stoned Wheat Thins which seem to be unavailable anywhere else, and certainly not here in Britain. So I would like to shout a big thank-you across the Atlantic all the way clear to Vancouver to Nancy, Val, Ann and Sam for sending me a giant box which arrived courtesy of Parcel Force this afternoon

How not to wear black

Advice from the Times

— If the thought of orange, fuchsia and turquoise scintillating on the rails is one that gives you palpitations (black, black, wherefore art thou, black?), panic not. Dark shades twinned with primary-colour tights or a pair of jewel-hued shoes offer refuge. “If you’re scared of colour, then wear a bright pashmina, beads or choose a colourful handbag,” advises Henderson. One experienced member of the Times fashion team was spotted in a black dress with beacon-like emerald green Marc Jacobs über-wedges: a simple lesson in how vivid block colour can transform a more muted outfit.

Thought for the day

As any fleeting fashion in dress comes to be admired by man, so with birds a change of almost any kind in the structure or colouring of the feathers in the male appears to have been admired by the female. Charles Darwin

The Thoughtful Dresser Competition

No poll this week, instead a competition. How exciting!

Here is what you have to do. You simply need to dream up a Thought for the Day - a sentence or a two, an idea, an aphorism - about fashion, clothes, style. Do not be intimidated by the brainy observations that I have run so far. 'A good handbag makes the outfit', a perfect piece of sartorial wisdom, was dreamed up by my mother who left school at 14, and the family motto, 'There's only one thing worse than being skint and that's looking as if you're skint,' by my immigrant grandfather who never even learned to speak English.

You can place your entry in the comments box below or email it to me. The competition will stay open for one week and then I will choose a winner. That winner will receive a signed hardback pre-publication copy of The Clothes On Their Backs, which can be shipped to any country, free of of charge, and of course the winning entry will become the Thought for the Day. Feel free to add a picture, if you wish. You can enter under a pseudonym if you wish, but please don't opt for the popular Anonymous as there are too many of that name. The winner will need to email me with a mailing address.

Shoes win

Three-quarters of you prefer shoes to bags, according to the Thoughtful Dresser poll. You know, I really just don't get this at all. I know shoes are significant, I know we don't wear ugly shoes, I know what high heels do for the figure, but half the time you can't even see them. Surely the eye is not drawn down to the feet first?

Perhaps my problem is that I have wide feet, bestowed upon me by centuries of shtetl-dwelling Poles and Ukrainians, but when I go into a shoe shop and ask for a apit of shoes I like a) they don't have them in my size (which is a 'massive' Continential size 39, US 9,) and b) if they do, they don't fit properly.

Bags. Bags always fit. Bags are always available in my size. Bags, if looked after do not wear out. Bags pull an outfit together, bags are the most exciting accessory.

Perfect example of shoes I cannot wear

One more reason to support the screenwriters' strike

Hadley Freeman writes in the Guardian today:

When designers start to value celebrities over actual customers, the clothes become more expensive, more impractical and seemingly more irrelevant than ever, as is increasingly the situation. Once fashion did seem to reflect the changing lives of modern women, as with Dior's New Look of the 40s, or the shoulder-padded power suits of the 80s. Now it often feels as if designers are tailoring their collections to pander to celebrity stylists and the paparazzi - which would at least explain the continuing popularity on the catwalks of crippling stilettos, minuscule dresses and other clothes designed for lifestyles based on maximum photo opportunities and minimal body fat.

When we were very young

I was touched and amused by the supermodel Erin O'Connor's short memoir of her fashion youth in the Observer this weekend. She writes:

Then something wonky happened to me at 14; my friends and I evolved a look that (we thought) proudly proclaimed: 'I don't give a shit!' The basic uniform involved tie-dye gypsy skirts, crucifixes worn upside down as necklaces, and piercing in inappropriate places (although I was never allowed to get one of those, either); we dyed our hair pink with food colouring, and developed a passion for stripy tights, Doc Martens boots, and everything purple. These grubby-looking, salvage-effect items were all shop-bought and overpriced, but - oh, how happily my friends and I wore them, and danced to the folky diddly-di music of the Levellers, or dreadlocked each others' hair, while hanging out in the back of the bus. (NB, all photographic evidence of this time has since been destroyed and I find it hard discussing such a painful and unfortunate period.)

The great joy of being young is making your first stab at a definitive style. You have no idea that you don't look good, and yet you will never take such pleasure in clothes again. For the first time in your life you are dressing yourself, and understanding the power that comes with it. The pleasure derives from the certainty: I am dressed just right, exactly like all my friends.

I'm reminded of the moment several years ago when a friend's teenage daughter came down into the kitchen in tears because, she wailed, she had looked all through her wardrobe and she had nothing to wear. Her mother took her on her knee and together she and I imparted the wisdom that only an older generation can hand on to the next: 'However old you are, and however many clothes you have, for the rest of your life you will always have nothing to wear.'

(Erin O'Connor, later)

Thought for the day

No fashion is ever a success unless it is used as a form of seduction. Christian Dior

Will you look like this, Kate?

Carmen Dell'Orefice, at 76, is the oldest working supermodel. 'How many other ladies of 76 can say that the snapshot on their senior citizen's card was taken by Norman Parkinson?' she asks.

Clearly we all want to know what her beauty regime is. And here it is:

In fact, her big beauty secret boils down to nothing more complex than a unpromising-sounding product called Bag Balm, an ointment developed by a dairy farmer for softening cow teats. Now it's mainly used for equine purposes, 'and if it's good enough for horses, it's good enough for me.' She says it's like Elizabeth Arden's cultish Eight Hour Cream, but a fraction of the price. 'Three dollars ninety-nine for a year's supply!' she exclaims, jubilant. Here is a woman who likes a bargain. When I admire her expensive-looking ring, she takes great pleasure in yelling, 'Twenty-eight dollars! Banana Republic!'

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