The quality of shoes

I mentioned last week that I had bought a pair of Dolce & Gabbana shoes. I wore them for the first time on Thursday. When I got home the leather on the soles was pitted and worn away. I was going to take them back to Harvey Nichols for a refund but first went into my excellent local shoe repairers for an opinion. They told me that the shoes were not designed to be worn before having rubber soles put on them if you were going to wear them in the street, rather than carpet, and if it rained, and that L.K. Bennet shoes apparently contain a warning to have them resoled before wearing them. I said this seemed like something out of Alice and Wonderland, and picking up my £300 Dolce & Gabbana shoes he said, well, you see they use cheap, thin leather.

Thought for the day

(has been photoshopped)

This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind

Stevie Smith

Clive Owen on being the new face of Lancome

Resting after discovering the potato

“I would argue that this whole thing is not about vanity,” says Owen practically. “This is not plastic surgery, Botox or make-up, it’s just skin creams and aftershaves. I’m not standing up there saying, ‘I’m great and I’m so sexy and cool, and that’s why I am doing this.’ It’s more to do with acknowledging the way that the whole products-for-men thing is changing. Most guys I know do use moisturiser. In theatre and film, looking after your face is a pretty normal thing. It’s just business.”

Buying vintage: The pros and cons

Personally, my days of buying vintage are long behind me. In my early twenties everything I wore came from the second hand clothes boutiques in Kensington High Street antique market or Portobello Road, or, when I moved to Vancouver, a shop called Joe's Old Clothes. I would swan around the windy university campuses in 1930s bias cut evening dresses worn with Mary Quant purple opaque tights bought at Liberty, with no thought to occasion-appropriate and didn't own a single pair of jeans. I still dislike trousers and prefer dresses to anything else.

Here's a piece in which sort-of famous people give their tips on buying vintage:

'This Ossie Clark top is the first designer item I ever bought. I was 18 when I got it on the King's Road in London, and since then both my mum and my daughter Leah have tried to nick it from me. I stole it back eventually. Isn't it amazing that three generations of my family have worn it, and it's never gone out of style?'

'I found a handkerchief in the pocket of a pair of second-hand trousers, which really made me realise that I was wearing a dead man's trousers. Old clothes do have a kind of aura of death, but a good wash usually sorts them out.'

Thought for the day

I had always looked on my beauty as a curse, because I was regarded as a whore, rather than an actress. Now at least I understand that my beauty was a blessing. It was my lack of understanding the way to merchandise it that was the curse. Louise Brooks

apropos of nothing

Clive Owen - the new face of Lancome

On not being able to leave the house

“The hardest thing to sell at the moment is a black kitten heel,” says Rebecca Farrar-Hockley, the buying and creative director of Kurt Geiger. According to her, a shoe boom is nigh, spurred on by It-bag fatigue and pared-down ready-to-wear.

Incredibly useful article about shopping in Paris

. . . and how to look like a Parisian. Here

I was in Paris in September and the key to looking like a Frenchwoman is scarves. Artfully tied.

Do you want to look old?

I have a piece in today's Telegraph about a new book about to come out in the UK but which has already courted controversy in the US, Charla Krupp's 'How Not To Look Old.'

In the 1950s and 1960s there was a craze in America for a procedure called rhinoplasty, in which a cosmetic surgeon broke the patient's nose to give her a new, always smaller, one. Little upturned ski-slope noses sat on faces they did not fit, but they had solved an age-old problem: how not to look Jewish in Wasp America. When Charla Krupp published her how-to manual in America at the beginning of this year, entitled How Not To Look Old, there was something of a furore in the press. Krupp argued that, since older women were discriminated against, the best way they could deal with the issue was not by tackling the discrimination politically, but by changing the way they look. As she pointed out in the New York Times, 'There was a book on how not to look Jewish. It was called The Preppy Handbook and it was a bestseller.'

Tight jawline!

But Krupp's book touched a raw nerve in the American media. 'Age management' is the essence of her thesis. 'Until age becomes a non-issue,' she writes, 'I don't think it's particularly smart for women to advertise their age… As Christie Brinkley said in her CoverGirl commercials, "I love being the age I am, I just don't want to look it." No one wants to "look it", because of age profiling and the fear of being outed. Why does anyone, besides your doctor, need to know your age anyway?'

To the feminist baby-boomer generation it was an outrage, for they (and that includes me) were the first to challenge every assumption about women's lives from contraception to menopause. To a politically correct American media, Krupp's book was as shocking as suggesting that Barack Obama use bleaching agents to lighten his skin; and yet during the presidential race Hillary Clinton has been proudly promoting feminist values with a face that looks suspiciously stiffened by Botox and a glare of forensic scrutiny about her appearance that her Republican rival, John McCain, aged 72, has evaded. For the reality for many of those outraged women is that in a highly competitive workforce and a culture in which celebrities are never seen to age - where all the role models have had face-lifts and a 50-year-old looks 35 - it is hard to get a job when you resemble the age on your birth certificate.

The baby-boomers' unique selling point has always been youth. We are a generation born, we believed, to be young and stay younger forever, as if ageing were a lifestyle choice for our parents, a more conservative generation who longed for Crimplene dresses and set hair. But, though the generation born after the war and up to the early 1960s has rewritten most of the rules about how to behave over 40, watching iconic figures such as Twiggy age and become the face of Marks & Spencer's with-it granny look has been extraordinarily unnerving. Sir Paul McCartney's perennially bad hair-dye job, and Mick Jagger's wrinkled visage beneath his own light-brown locks, remind us that there is no real Dorian Gray option, short of the surgeon's knife.

Read on

Thought for the day

I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher. Jonathan Swift

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