Thought for the day

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God. Deuteronomy 22:5

Banana Republic comes to town

£100 less in America

For years I have been taking advantage of the weakness of the dollar to buy clothes when I'm in the US, and first port of call was always Banana Republic, cruelly denied to us Brits, and a favourite for well-priced fashion we couldn't get at home. I loved the 5th Avenue flagship store in New York and my wardrobe has several good things that have done service for years on end.

So we've all been drumming our fingers on the table waiting for its first European outlet to open in the old Dickens and Jones building on Regent Street, and lo, yesterday, it did. And as I had an hour-long gap between lunch with my agent and afternoon tea with a fashion editor at Liberty, I hurried in there out of the driving rain and bitter winds.

What a let-down. Maybe it's a question of forbidden fruit, you want what you can't have, but overall the stock was disappointing: Marks and Spencer's Limited Collection without any of the edge. And more expensive. They've introduced a UK only label which is supposed to be a bit more dernier cri, and there was a very nice white trench coat I tried on, but I'm not in the market for a white trench coat. The bags were okay, a very limited collection of shoes, some jewellery including one sensational yellow bead necklace, very this season. A good, Spring-weight leather coat at £300. But across the street is Cos and you could actually look out of BN's window's into it and see clothes that are more stylish, more European, more interesting - and it's owned by H&M.

According to the Daily Mail, BN is 'imposing huge mark-ups' on its UK prices:

A snapshot survey of Banana Republic's UK prices by the Daily Mail shows a printed silk halterneck dress sells for £95 in this country - 58 per cent more than in the U.S.

It can be teamed with a £125 Flatsunglasses-iron baby satchel, which is 40 per cent more, and a pair of espadrille wedge shoes that are 62 per cent more expensive here.

The entire outfit would cost £299.50 in the UK, £100 more expensive than the same items in the U.S.

An orange, textured coat appears on the firm's U.S. website at a price of just £60, while the figure in the official UK catalogue is £140 - a mark-up of 133 per cent.

A cap sleeve silk dress in pale gold is £55 on the other side of the Atlantic but £95 here.

A pair of black peep-toe wedge shoes is £79.50 in this country, a mark-up of 62 per cent on the U.S. price.

There is a similar mark-up on some accessories.

The fashion editor remarked that one problem with BN is its colours, which are probably better suited to the stronger light of America. I also had an impression that the sizing is smaller, as I usually go a size down in BN in America, but not here.

So I dropped in at the Jaeger press office for a cup of tea and they showed me some things that are coming in at the end of April, and I saved my money for those, instead.

Thought for the day

Some ladies think they may, under the privileges of the deshabille, be loose and negligent of their dress in the morning. But be you, from the moment you rise till you go to bed, as cleanly and properly dressed as at at the hours of dinner or tea. Thomas Jefferson

In classical times . . .

Sarah Mower and I might have had our differences in the past regarding the mutton question (see passim) but here she is in the Telegraph today laying out the bible for women of common sense this Spring and Summer:

This season, though, I've come back charged with a sense of clarity. What I want is actually very simple. It's not a flowery see-through chiffon dress, no matter how pretty they looked on the spring runway six months ago. It isn't a jumpsuit, in spite of the number of spring fashion shoots that are pushing them. And it absolutely, definitely is not a pair of drop-crotch trousers, dhotis, harem pants or any hybrid thereof.

Rarely has the word "classic" looked so tempting. For one thing, this is hardly the time to be wasting money on insubstantial fads that will be over in a second (the multi-floral thing, for example, which - according to the latest collections - will be dead by next winter).

And for another, having just emerged from spending a month embedded in the advance guard of some of the world's most dedicated dressers, it became startlingly clear to me how few editors, stylists and buyers have taken spring's notions literally. The really great dressers - the women you stare at across runways - have whittled their purchases down to a few brilliant things, which they then vary with maddeningly clever choices of tops, shoes, scarves and jewellery.

After years of bingeing on fast-fashion that falls apart in weeks, that knack - the ability to play with classic, long-lasting clothes in a creative way - is something we need to relearn.

You should definitely go and read the whole thing, because she has several entirely wearable key pieces, and how to wear them, to look our best this summer

Thought for the day

Ms Mills

No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise.

William Congreve

High maintenance

At my lowest ebb on the grand tour of Australia and New Zealand I got my publicist to book me in for a blow dry at a salon in Christchurch. And emerged feeling more fully human than I had done in many days. At the hairdresser's in London *on Monday, I recalled that in the 50s and 60s, my mother twice-weekly had a shampoo and set and always looked perfectly coiffed. It was the Vidal Sassoon five-point cut and later long hair, which drove us away from regular hairdressing and now I think that might have been an error. We all know that Anna Wintour has a hairdresser who comes every morning to her house to do her blow dry, and while can't all reach to that ideal, I'm starting to think that 25 quid for a blow dry once or twice a week might be a better use of one's income than regular manicures or taxis. Not that my hairdresser charges £25 for this simple service, but plenty of local ones do. And of course, in America it can't cost more that two cents.

* My stylist Roger tells me that a couple of you have gone along to him at my recommendation - I very much hope that worked out for you.

Thought for the day

The energy of imagination, deliberation, and invention, which fall into a natural rhythm totally of one's own, maintained by innate discipline and a keen sense of pleasure - these are the ingredients of style. And all who have it share one thing: originality. Diana Vreeland

Orange Prize longlist in full

Anita Amirrezvani* The Blood of Flowers
Stella Duffy The Room of Lost Things
Jennifer Egan The Keep
Anne Enright The Gathering
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Tessa Hadley The Master Bedroom
Nancy Huston Fault Lines
Gail Jones Sorry
Sadie Jones The Outcast
Lauren Liebenberg The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Charlotte Mendelson When We Were Bad
Deborah Moggach In The Dark
Anita Nair Mistress
Heather O'Neill Lullabies for Little Criminals
Elif Shafak The Bastard of Istanbul
Dalia Sofer The Septembers of Shiraz
Scarlett Thomas The End of Mr Y
Carol Topolski Monster Love
Rose Tremain The Road Home
Patricia Wood Lottery

*I met Anita at the Adelaide festival and liked her very much. She is an Iranian-American whose parents left at the time of the 1979 revolution.

Discussion of the longlist here. and here. As usual there is the conventional moaning about the list excluding men, moaning which is curiously absent when it comes to any of the other literary prizes and their exclusions. I'd love to win the Pulitzer but as I'm not an 'American author', I can't.

Maureen Freely on the Guardian books blog, has an excellent piece addressing the inanities of the 'sexism' complaint:

In my view, the most significant thing about the Orange Prize is not that it is only for women. The prize's great virtue is that it is for all women writing in English. Most prizes, most notably the man Booker, respect (and so enforce) national boundaries. This despite the fact that national boundaries in Anglophone fiction became less significant with every passing day.

A quick look at the 2008 Orange long list bears this out. There are seven countries represented, eight if you include both nationalities claimed by the US/Iranian first novelist Anita Amirrezvani. Dalia Sofer, listed as an American author, is also Iranian by birth. Elif Shafak, though she carries a Turkish passport, was born in France. Later in life, she spent many years in the US. Though she writes mostly in Turkish, The Bastard of Istanbul, her seventh novel, is her second novel in English. Like so many of their readers, these authors are hybrids, and they are much better served by a panel that isn't bothered by that.

I've often wondered how many of our national treasures here in Britain would fare if they were pitted against a shortlist that included writers such as Roth and Ford or Orhan Pamuk and David Grossman.

News of shoes

I got it into my head while I was travelling, that on my return I would buy a new pair of shoes, having consigned to a hotel waste bin, for reasons of expediency, a pair that looked shabby and were perhaps not such a great idea in the first place. Though inexpensive. After the hairdresser's I walked up Sloane Street to Salvatore Ferragamo, where, legend has it, they make very good quality classic shoes, perhaps not the dernier cri, but wearable. I was not looking for flats, or sensible walking shoes, but day-to-nights: shoes I could wear to a smart lunch or a party, but no bling.

Heels.

The bastards have done it again. First we had kitten heels. Then we had clumpy heels. Then we had high clumpy heels we couldn't walk in. Now we have high stilettos we can't walk in. There being almost nothing to try on in Ferragamo, I went to Fratelli Rossetti. Same thing. So I went to Harvey Nicks' shoe department and the dreadful truth was revealed. We are back to needle thin points. There were a few pairs of shoes of high clumpy heels, but not many. There were no shows with medium height points. The wedges were tall and wooden, make them too heavy to walk in.

Eventually, with the assistance of a very helpful Lithuanian sales assistant, I bought a pair of black patent Dolce e Gabbana peep-toe shoes, with a wearable clumpy high heel. I think I can walk in them. Just. They do fit. They cost £300, making them the most expensive shoes I have ever owned, though beautifully made. Of course they're cheaper in America, on Raffaelo.

I have no idea when I will next be able to buy any more shoes, if this is what faces us for the next couple of seasons, or more.

These are the shoes I bought, but in black patent - does anyone think I should have got the white instead? I couldn't decide in the shop, and thought I should be sensible and get the black, But now I'm not sure . . .

Thought for the day

There are skilled dyers and weavers in Masahiro's household, and when it comes to dress, whether it be the colour of his under-robe or the style of his cloak, he is more elegant than most men; yet the only effect of his elegance is to make people say, 'What shame someone else isn't wearing those things.' Sei Shonagon c. 966 -c. 1013

Orange prize longlist

This is not supposed to be released until tomorrow, but has been leaked by the Telegraph after the site accidentally went live on Thursday for 20 minutes.

I can disclose that the longlist for the £30,000 award for women writers includes heavyweights such as Anne Enright, for her Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering, and Rose Tremain, for The Road Home. Others listed are When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson; The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy; The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant; and In the Dark by Deborah Moggach

Hillary's clothes

Hadley Freeman has thought about Hillary and her clothes.

It is obvious to the point of cliche that Clinton is in a trickier position in many ways than Obama: when he is emotional, he is persuasive; when she is emotional, she is betraying her feminist roots. So just as Obama can cut a dash in his slimline, clearly style-conscious suits, Clinton has to hide herself in garishly coloured squares going under the name of "jackets", or else risk being dismissed as so vain that she would be too busy putting on her lipstick to respond to an international terror threat.

But is this necessarily true? One need only look at Condoleezza Rice to see that, contrary to what some might think, American voters aren't always horrified to see a woman in power who doesn't look like Eleanor Roosevelt, and Rice has to placate a far more conservative group of people than the one Clinton is meant to be wooing. Nor did Rice's appearance several years ago in US Vogue seem to harm her credibility. Clinton, on the other hand, was so fearful of such a possibility that she backed out of a shoot with the magazine at the last minute last year, provoking a diatribe from Vogue's editor, Anna Wintour. To make matters even worse for Clinton, who should appear that same month on the cover of Men's Vogue but Obama, appearing very suave and relaxed, whereas Clinton now looked as if she was neurotically focus grouping her campaign to death.

I declare myself to be in the deepest sympathy with any female politician at the receiving end of the mad-dog media about her dress sense. I work in an occupation in which I have little visible public profile, apart from book tours and readings, and my fashion mistakes are not dissected by strangers on a daily basis. I would also point out that Rice cuts a better fashion figure than Clinton because, simply, Rice has a better figure. Hillary has awful legs, she's short, she's stocky. No beanpole myself, I understand how difficult it is to dress this shape. Suits don't suit her.

Thought for the day

Clothes without a wearer, whether on a secondhand stall, in a glass case, or merely a lover's garments strewn on the floor, can affect us unpleasantly, as if a snake had shed its skin. Similarly, a pregnant woman describing how the little frock hanging up in readiness for her as yet unborn child seems like 'a ghost in reverse.' Elizabeth Wilson

Can I dance in these?

Justine Picardie advances a theory about unwearable shoes.

What, exactly, is the point, you might well ask? You probably won't be able to walk very far in these shoes, and you certainly can't run in them; so what is one meant to do with them? Put them on a mantelpiece, like a quirky sculpture? This is always an option - a perverse one, I grant you - but I have a theory, borne out by years of personal practice, that if you love a pair of beautiful shoes, however fantastical, you are miraculously able to dance in them. Thus the right heels - and you know them when you find them - will lift the spirits as well as the feet.

I would sneer, but I have a pair of Kurt Geiger red suede stilettos, bought in 1999 which I adored and found them perfectly comfortable. I was looking at them yesterday with a view to sending them off to a new home at the Cancer Research shop, and I was asking myself why I didn't find them so comfortable any more. And Justine might have answered that: that I no longer love them as I once did.

Jil Sander bag

This is the bag I bought at the Hong Kong outlet. It's from the Raf Simons SS07 line and the bagsnobs liked it then. The one I got is silver. Simple, small, chic, minimalist.

I might not have mentioned that in another outlet I got a 'Marni' necklace and Sarah negotiated a chunk knocked off the price for me. And a yoga t-shirt (like I do yoga). And Aesop handcream, which, after intense discussion with Sarah over iced coffee, we agreed was the best.

Home

At 5.30 am Hong Kong time I got in a taxi and drove through the darkened city, and saw, for the first time - undistracted by the soaring illuminated towers - the port. I was reminded of those old pictures of three-masted schooners densely rocking on a tide, but the spires were not sails, rather the cranes of the docks, loading the manufactured goods of China and setting them out on their container ships to the rest of the world. For here was the epicentre of fashion: not the Paris or Milan atelier, not the St Martin's graduate in his Shoreditch studio, but what comes of the reality of all those dreams. Hard commerce. And I could not help but think how distracted we are in Europe with the wrong political preoccupations, while under our noses a whole new superpower has sprung into life out of our needs and wants and desires. Ruthless, with not a democratic bone its collective body, all America's tarnished idealism (its Founding Fathers, its constitution, its will to happiness) is absent; trade is its DNA.

On the 13 hour flight, I finished Richard Ford's Independence Day and could have knocked my head against a wall for not reading it sooner: a hymn to suburban America, the philosophy of real estate and why there is always dignity in finding another man a home. I watched Elizabeth: The Golden Age (dire) and The Assassination of Jesse James (ponderous, but beautifully scripted and acted, another examination of American myth), three episodes of Kath and Kim, and three episodes of Extras.



I return to the new issue of UK Vogue with a piece by me on the emotional wrench of throwing things away, and on the cover, Victoria Beckham, whom Nick Kent has partially managed to convey as if she the subject of a Cecil Beaton between-the-wars society girl. Alexandra Shulman (vogue.com has a video of Alex talking about the decision to feature her) has written a definitive appraisal of her: her helpless urge to succeed, hints at her insecurity, an essentially suburban marriage, her teenage desire to always have the right thing: her shoes are always too big because she gets catwalk samples from the shoes, and has to stuff them with tissues. Trying too hard, not pretty enough, never thin enough for the mental picture inside her head, she's the triumph of the will: an oddity, a girl with nothing going for her except her determination that, knocked down, she will always arise and live to dress another day.

Hong Kong: The Shops

A few weeks ago I asked if any reader of this site wanted to take me shopping in Hong Kong during my one-day stop-over and by great good fortune I got a reply from Sarah Wyatt, who grew up in the city and knows it like the back of her hand. This morning she came to the hotel with a bag full of Hong Kong gifts, including a small silk bag she made herself. An artist, mother of two and thoughtful dresser, Sarah took me on a tour of the city that only an extreme insider could offer.

We got a cab and headed off for an anonymous high rise office building in an anonymous suburb, or rather it seemed like an office building, but wasn't. On every floor were outlet stores, where they sell the unsold stock from the previous season: not just fashion but toys, interiors, you name it. We ascended in the lift to the 25th floor to the Joyce warehouse. Inside? Alexander McQueen. Dries van Noten. Issey Mayake. Jil Sander. Chloe. Marni. I only end the list there because frankly I can't remember any more, so dizzying was the sight of all those designers. Menswear, womenswear, bags, shoes, jewellery. The tags showed a descending list of prices, over a period of several months into the future, so if you can hold your nerve and wait two months, it will be even cheaper still. I bought a small silver Jil Sander bag at 75% off and an Etro scarf. I was tempted by a McQueen bag, but in the end the colour wasn't quite right.
Then we went down ten floors or so to another outlet, even larger: Armani. Pal Zileri. I couldn't take it all in. All this is real stuff, no fakes here.

Next we got a cab to Central District, and one of the most crowded, humid and polluted spots on earth, where stunningly beautiful women carrying every designer bag known to the accessories department of Barneys surged along in blacks, grey and other neutrals. Juxtaposition of wealth and intense urban jostle. Quick Vietnamese lunch in a kind of alley full of tables with hundreds of people eating, smoking, densely humanly many.

A block away, we go to a shop that sells second-hand designer bags, Chanel 2:55's, Hermes Birkins. In Hong Kong women discard their It bags every season. The owner was interviewed and asked if he sold fakes, they try, he said, but never get away with it. Across the street we climb some rundown stairs, ring a bell, a man answers, lets us into a little outer room. He pulls the sleeve of a red kimono and out of it pops a key on a string, he opens the next door and in we walk into an Aladdin's cave of designer fake bags. I won't buy fakes, I don't approve of fakes, but as Sarah points out., some of these bags are being made in the same factories and on the same machines as the originals: because as we now all know, a Prada bag isn't made in Italy, it's made in China. I see a fake Anya Hindmarch Elrod, similar apart from the lining which is fabric, not suede, and it still doesn't have the same production qualities. But the place is full of satisfied customers who come back over and over again, and will do, until the store is raided by the police.

Out on the street I am suddenly overcome by the pollution, can hardly breathe. Some people are wearing facemasks. So we ascend the longest escalator in the world, a moving walkway that takes us up and up through the sides of a densely inhabited hill and come to an area called Soho, narrow lanes of small shops and cafes, more European than anything I've seen so far. Sarah shows me some of the Hong Kong designers. Then I see something absolutely fascinating. A clutch made of the same silver distressed leather that Anya Hindmarch has been using for the past two or three seasons, and using the same leather-covered magnetic snaps except this is is not a fake, not even a copy: it's a bag by a Hong Kong designer who simply has access to the same materials. The bag has a sensational red silk lining and I would have bought it on the spot had it not been ruined by a garish cheap-looking gold fastening which is completely the wrong colour for the bag.

As Sarah points out, if the designers are using Chinese factories to make their products, then inevitably some of the materials will end up out of the designers hands, and later I will see fabrics I recognise being used to made dresses with the labels of Hong Kong designers.

We finished up at Shanghai Tang. My head was full of everything Sarah had told me about the ambiguous world of designer production, of what is real and what is not, and how they can overlap. And also the history of Hong Kong, its government, its relation to the mainland, its economy and its architecture. I told her that she would make a fantastic tour guide for anyone who wanted to see a Hong Kong unavailable to to those with a guide book. She was the most fascinating, informed and warm shopping companion. If anyone would like to engage Sarah's services for a similar trip, let me know and I'll pass on her details. I told her she should charge. It will be worth every penny.

If it's Thursday it must be Hong Kong

After the most hectic two and a half weeks of my life, involving scary flights on 20 seater prop planes to the place where the sun comes up first in the world and across the horizon is the International Date Line, I finally flew from Auckland to Sydney to Hong Kong where I stepped off the plane into the most extraordinary place in the world, surely? It makes Manhattan look like a sleepy village in the Cotswolds. Visibly gasping as the taxi drove me to my hotel, Le Meridien Cyberport, I felt like a child in primary school with eyes like saucers.

After my overnight in Singapore, I have spent some time thinking about South-East Asia and its extraordinary dynamism, energy and its rampant capitalism. I have no idea what to say about it, except to absorb, absorb absorb. At 10 am Thoughtful Dresser reader Sarah will take me shopping.

Two small recommendations: Richard Ford's Independence Day, gently urged on me over breakfast in Adelaide by David Malouf, and which absorbed me on the journey from Auckland to Hong Kong; and a skin-care range new to me called Ultraceuticals, which was in the Qantas business class amenity bag. I thought the moisturiser and SPF30 sun screen were exceptionally good. It's available in SE Asia, parts of the US and Canada, but not Europe, annoyingly, and Sydney duty free only had $AUS$200 packs containing the full range, and weren't allowed to sell individual products.

Meanwhile The Clothes On Their Backs, only out a month, is already reprinting, and was, apparently, last week's most mentioned book in the Australian media. Normal service resumes on Momday. After I've been to the hairdresser's.

The Ossie Clark revival

From a public computer at Melbourne airport en route to New Zealand I bring you this long piece I have been working on for several months on the revival of Ossie Clark, which appears in today's Guardian

Seven minutes. This is all the unknown designer Avsh Alom Gur and his backer Marc Worth have - seven minutes to convince the arbiters of fashion of the comeback of the century, the revival of a defunct label and a dead name: Ossie Clark. The fashion press and the buyers are on the front row, watching with chilly eyes the product of four months' work, presented on the etiolated forms of teenage Latvian models robed in a yellow dress, a turquoise snakeskin suit and an organza pierrot blouse.

The models step on and off revolving metal plinths and rotate to a soundtrack of Jefferson Airplane's LSD anthem White Rabbit - a tribute to the 60s or, perhaps, to Clark's drug addiction. There is the silence of ennui, then a sudden, frenzied heads-down as the fashion press make notes. A long pause as the last model disappears. The designer runs through the two rooms to take his bow, and the audience briefly applaud, scramble to their feet and into taxis. It's on to the next show, which is Jasper Conran.

London Fashion Week is not one long cocktail party; it is an impatient wait for shows that are running late, and other shows that are running late because the last one ran late, and nothing can start before the key editors and buyers arrive. And nothing exemplifies the reality of Fashion Week more than the brevity of these shows and the terrifying and final speed of the verdict. No time for thought, reflection, a second look. It's all in the momentary impression, the practised eye. The Ossie Clark collection, one of the week's hottest tickets, was launched at the Serpentine Gallery on a day that began with high hopes and ended with the threat of legal action by Clark's two sons.

Hello world

My apologies for the lack of activity on this site. I arrived in Melbourne yesterday morning from Adelaide and did two bookshop readings, thanks to those readers who attended, particularly the lady from Budapest - it was a pleasure to meet you. I very much enjoyed the observation by a a member of the audience at Readings who said that in New York in the 1960s, when a Jewish woman reached 50 she was awarded a fur coat. And with that carapace around her shoulders, she demonstrated her status. We need to find a modern-day equivalent of the mink.

Meanwhile, those of you of a literary disposition may believe that writers are lovely, sensitive souls. After seven full days in the company of some of the most important writers in the world, I can tell you that the clash of egos, the arrogance, the selfishness, insecurity, the anxiety about pecking orders, is a sight to behold.

I can say no more, but if you are interested in reading authors whose private personalities actually match up to their prose, try here.