So tell me . . .

Betty Jackson says:

'I still think that clothes look better on thin people. I'm sorry, that's the truth. They look better in a size eight and ten than they do in a 16 and 18.'

Do we disagree?

It's not a love story

Ripped off from Norm, who spotted it first, this very telling insight from David Baddiel, about Jane Austen, summing up my disgust at the recent biopic (not to mention the increasingly Mills and Boonish quality of film adaptations of her work.

I first read Austen as a teenager, given Nothanger Abbey as an O level set text. I did not much enjoy it, unable to appreciate at such a young age, what Baddiel so effectively describes. I am not, like Norm, a Janeite, but Baddiel's assessment of her as the firs modernist, will take me back there, right now:

However, the great writer who has really been portrayed this way most frequently in recent times is one who hasn't yet been visited by the jaunty Gallifrean: Jane Austen. Both in the film Becoming Jane and the TV movie Miss Austen Regrets, Austen was depicted as a waspish cynical tomboy, clever with words if not so clever with men: a sort of Regency Sue Perkins. In the TV movie, there was a greater stab at complexity, as the character grew bitter with age - an Elizabeth Bennett who never nabs Mr Darcy - but in both there was, I would hazard, an incipient underlying sexism, based on the notion that Austen's work was underpinned by her own failures in love.

Because here's the thing about Jane Austen. She was a very great genius. She is possibly the greatest genius in the history of English literature, arguably greater than Shakespeare. And her achievement is not that much to do with love, although that was her subject matter. It's to do with technique. Before her there are three strands in English fiction: the somewhat mental, directly-reader-addressing semi-oral romps of Nashe and Sterne and Fielding; the sensationalist Gothic work of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe; and the romances of Eliza Haywood and Fanny Burney.

However great these writers are, none could be read now and considered modern. When Austen gets into her stride, which she does very quickly with Sense and Sensibility, suddenly, you have all the key modern realist devices: ironic narration; controlled point of view; structural unity; transparency of focus; ensemble characterisation; fixed arenas of time and place; and, most importantly, the giving-up of the fantastical in favour of a notion that art should represent life as it is actually lived in all its wonderful ordinariness. She is the first person, as John Updike put it: “to give the mundane its beautiful due”, and her work leads to Updike as much as it does to George Eliot.

I have no idea how a mainly home-educated rector's daughter came by all that, but I know that imagining her as a kind of acerbic spinster flattens out this genius. It becomes all about the subject matter and not at all about the huge creative advance her work represents.

Gay or grey

Let me very firmly indeed declare myself on the side of the author, here:

I look dreadful with both white hair and blonde hair. I am a dark-haired woman. And so shall remain.

And there's the rub. Women will admire Anna Ford and the rest of the glamorous grey brigade, but they will hesitate to follow suit. We don't want to go grey because of ageist prejudice, but the guilty secret is that many of us are scared we haven't got the cheekbones or the chutzpah to carry it off. My suspicion - and OK, it's deeply unsisterly - is that some women are happy to turn silver because they know they still look hot; it's not so much authentic ageing as a subtle assertion of superiority.

The other problem about grey hair is that it is such a high-maintenance option. You don't have to get your roots retouched every five minutes, but if you want to stay fabulous, the rest of your grooming has to rise exponentially. Flawlessly styled hair, immaculate clothes and perfect make-up are indispensable, as is a trim figure.

What French women do differently

When I was sixteen I was packed off for the summer to a kibbutz. Me and agricultural labour are not a match made in heaven, nor the spartan socialism of daily life. One hot morning, and every morning got hotter than the next, I was walking along a lane-type arrangement holding a small scythe to hack away the dead leaves in a banana plantation when I raised my arm for some reason. The kibbutz girl next to me screamed. Oh, she cried, you are bald.

I was supposed to have looked like this

apart from the red sequinned dress and the clutch, obviously.

Susannah Frankel, in the Indie, writes:

It is the stuff of legend that European women the chic, beach-loving French in particular are less likely to remove underarm hair than their British counterparts, who are, also famously, considered not to be as comfortable in their own skin. Given that France is a country where beauticians will wax eyebrows, top lip, chin, nostrils (yes, nostrils) in the blink of an eye, this is not just an oversight. Instead, while hair on legs and, indeed, pretty much anywhere apart from the head might be considered unsightly, armpits are left just as nature intended.

Hemlines

As Jess Cartner-Morley points out

Wearing calf-length is this season’s way of telling the world you read Vogue. It is so very fashionable that you won’t even see it in the shops yet, because this is next season’s trend. The trouble with fashion, of course, is that it is so very often at cross-purposes with old-fashioned notions like Looking Nice. (You will notice that Anna Wintour, though presumably well aware that calf-length is quite the dernier cri, does not go near it with a bargepole.)

Useful idiots

A man I know, a man not unknown to military manoeuvres on the battlefield, a man who, in fact received a battlefield promotion during the Yom Kippur War, tells me that he too has moths in his house.

His moths are on the lower level, and he says that to ensure that they do not ascend the stairs and eat his Gieves and Hawkes jackets, he has given them a small carpet to eat.

For if we give Germany Czechoslovakia and Poland, they'll leave France alone, won't they?

Patricia Field for M&S

'Wait till Carrie finds out what she's wearing next'

I wasn't able to make the M&S A/W08 launch yesterday but here's news of it

Marks & Spencers announced today that they have signed a deal with trend-setting Sex and the City stylist, Patricia Field to sell a one-off 35 piece fashion range. This is due to launch mid October and will be available from 10 M&S stores, online and with selected pieces going to a further 50 stores across the U.K and several stores abroad. Of her collaboration with M&S, Field said that she “wanted to be involved with a brand who really understood women of all ages”. This retailer has always lived up to the maxim of ‘being all things to all women’ and in these uncertain times they’re going to have to try as hard as ever to deliver that.

Actual M&S outfit available this Autumn

For those in Monaco this summer

'Linen kaftans and dresses and jewelled leather sandals were invented in the land of the mummies to suit the needs of the people based on climate and on social status.
Today kaftans are a must have accessory for covering up at the beach and leather bejewelled sandals help protect against scorched soles of the feet, when leaving sun chairs in search of refreshments. Linen dresses; trousers, tops and tunics are currently filling up the high street waiting to be purchased by holidaymakers, or Brits who believe that their summer has not been the two sunshine filled weeks in May.
'To celebrate Ancient Egyptian women, including their attire, the Principality of Monaco will this summer host the largest Egyptian exhibition ever to be staged in Europe, the Reines D’Egypte. The exhibition will be the first to focus on the female pharaohs, wives, mothers and daughters who influenced three thousand years of Egyptian history, including exhibits on Cleopatra, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti and Nefertari.
'More than 250 superb antiquities and works of art will go on display at the Grimaldi Forum between the 12th July and the 10th September 2008.'

Clothes origami

Word of the Plume Cocoon dress is all over the shop.

Thinking the same thing at the same time

The largest number of comments ever received on this site is the discussion on scarves. It seems like everyone is thinking about them.

Now the Telegraph has two pieces about the economy of having things made bespoke, an even greater rejection of the throwaway culture of cheap clothes. It argues that buying bespoke is the way to go during an economic downturn, the sartorial equivalent of 'only the rich can afford cheap shoes.'

"It may seem contradictory that people want a more specialised service when talk is of less disposable income," says Lauretta Roberts, editor of the fashion industry magazine Drapers. "But it does seem to go that way: we trade up in a downturn.

"Buying bespoke is about finding your own style and investing in it, rather than falling prey to every trend. It becomes about spending wisely and not wasting money."

During the good times of the past decade, the idea of having something custom-made was eschewed in favour of fast, throwaway fashion. But now frivolous spending on cheap clothes feels wrong - not to mention ecologically unsound - and our appetite for unique, well-made replacements is growing.

"There is a huge backlash against mass production and anything that suffers sameness," says Marian Salzman, a New York-based trendspotter. "Thus one-of-a-kind has great status. Bespoke makes us feel like we're enjoying a good life. It's the new special."

This woman had this dress designed and made for her. Personally I think it's bloody awful but if she likes it, and feels good in it, and it fits, that's the main thing.

On the recommendation of the Manolo

I am awestruck.

For the past couple of the weeks, the Manolo has meaning to recommend to you The Clothes on Their Backs, the latest novel from the Manolo’s good friend Linda Grant.

The reason the Manolo recommends this book to you is not just because Linda Grant is the friend, but because The Clothes on the Backs is among the best things the Manolo has read in many years.

There are many reasons the Manolo loves this book, one of the most important of which is that our friend Linda does such the masterful job of demonstrating one of the Manolo’s core beliefs: that the clothes we choose to wear say volumes about us, not just about that which we choose to reveal, but also that which we attempt to conceal.

Linda Grant’s memorable characters wear memorable clothes that aptly reflect their status, their personalities, their era, and their internal condition. And so, if you love clothes and you love shoes, and are prepared to think about them in complex and meaningful ways, you will find this book very satisfying.

But, beyond this narrative facility with fashion, the Manolo especially loves the Clothes on their Backs because there is real life in this book–messy, complex, disappointing, sometimes difficult, sometimes glorious life–our preconceptions are overthrown, moral clarity is difficult to come by, and, just as in real life, things rarely go as we would have wished. In the end, however, the message comes through, you cannot shirk life, you can only live it.

So, you must buy The Clothes on Their Backs and read about Uncle Sandor and Vivien, and their clothes, and their lives, for in all ways this novel has to it the ring of authentic truth.

'It never will be clear as long as she's explaining it'

Courtesy of George Szirtes, the following. Sublime.

Don't

Pale denim is back. This is what it will look like on you.

The male mutton

In a feature on the divine Nicky Haslam, whom I once sat next to at a New Statesman lunch, of all places, this observation:

But in real terms, 'mutton' is much more of an issue for men (mutton dressed as ram, perhaps?). Women have lived in fear of committing this premier fashion sin for generations. This has left us extremely well-equipped to do and wear whatever the hell we want, without looking daft or inciting judgment. We know how to get away with stuff.

Men don't. Men - who have only recently been introduced to the possibilities of metro-sexuality, of Beckham-endorsed experimentation with challenging fashion statements, of expensive denim and He-vage (man cleavage, achieved with especially deep V-neck T-shirts) - are not yet aware that an extremely fine line divides these thrilling, liberating styles from age-enhancing daftness. They don't know how to age these brand-new looks, how to carry them off into their thirties and beyond. See 33-year-old Beckham's over-plucked eyebrows and too-tanned skin; the contrast between 35-year-old Jude Law's thinning hair and his army jackets. And Russell Brand, who at 32 should start rethinking his signature silhouette quite soon, because his hips are perhaps no longer as lithe, and his arse no longer as trim, as his super-skinny jeans require (and the kaftans aren't distracting us). These boys are a couple of years and a couple of bad denim choices away from Tony Blair and Jeremy Clarkson in jeans status. Or Richard Madeley, in weekend garb.

On the face

Deja pseu in the comments sums up to the letter my views on cheap face creams:

Every time I've tried the new Olay "wonder cream" du jour, it's sat on top of my skin like a sticky film.

I did not start using a moisturiser until I was in my early thirties for this very reason. Every cheap cream I tried made me want to wash my face as soon as I put it on. Then one day Shiseido launched in Canada, where I was living, with a machiney thing that took a picture of your skin and told you the rate at which you were ageing. Needless to say, I bought the entire range. It was apparent that one of the big differences between cheap and expensive creams was/is the formulation rather than the contents.

I have used a variety of brands since then, and every excursion into the budget ranges including Boots No 7 has produced exactly the same sensation of wanting to wash my face because they don't seem to be absorbed by my skin.

I no longer now buy anything without consulting first with Mary Greenwell, so a week or two ago I asked her to recommend a lighter weight summer night cream. She is a big fan of Chanel and she told me to try HydraMax+. I found the fluid formula to be perfect for summer, and that's what I'm now using. Do I believe that it will give me younger firmer skin? No. I just want it to do the business of supplying moisture.

The best face cream on the market, Definitely.

It says, here.

Scarves

I have been thinking a lot about scarves since a visit to Bon Marche in Paris last September, where I bought several, including one by Dior and another by Christian Lacroix. As we get older it's best to have some colour next to the face and the scarf (like the handbag) is one of those garments which do not torment us with being the wrong size or too uncomfortable to wear, like a pair of Manolos.

Even expensive scarves are cheap compared to expensive bags and shoes, let alone jewellery. When I had tea at Claridges with Joan Burstein a few weeks ago, (that is the Joan Burstein who is old enough to have saved her clothing ration to buy copies of the New Look when it was first launched,) she was wearing, at 82, a black Marni dress, a navy coat and a long, filmy scarf in pale blue. And some stonking diamond earrings.

The plain palette of an elegant dark dress and coat was the setting for the accessories which lit up her face.

After the moth genocide I had to go very carefully through all my clothes to see what they had eaten and discovered it was only an Ann Louise Roswald skirt and a brown scarf I bought at the Galleries Lafayette in Paris just before interviewing Agnes b, because it was unseasonally cold. I have a lot of scarves and apart from those velvet ones from the Nineties, none of them seemed out of date, indeed yesterday I wore one I bought in 1996 at inflight duty free on a BA flight from Vienna to London, having spent two very long weeks in Iran.

R. and I spent some time on the phone the other night talking about the Hermes scarf and whether we were leading up to buying one. I am a but unsure about some of their designs, which I find somewhat bourgeois (every middle-class Iranian woman seems to have one) and R. was uncertain how to tie them, but I explained that if you pop into an Hermes shop they will give you a little book.

In Paris every single woman knows how to tie a scarf in a way which gives her outfit that totally distinctive chic. Perhaps it is in the fingers, perhaps it is taught at school. But in an age of too short skirts and hopeless struggles to find what we want, perhaps it is the humble scarf that is the real investment and we ought to learn.

Buchmendel updated

I have been judging a literary prize which has meant that I have had little time for personal reading, and much of what I was obliged to read for the prize was not at all good.

Last weekend at the Du Maurier Festival in Fowey, I shared a platform with the editor of Virago Modern Classics, to mark the list's thirtieth anniversary. She gave me some works unknown to me from that list and I have selected a passage from one of them over at Buchmendel.

R. A case study in thoughtful dressing

Regular readers will be familiar with Top Baby Lia, she of the Agnes b cherry dress. The day before yesterday, Lia's mother, R. rang me to tell me of the Rick Owens dress she has just bought and to point it out on the Net a Porter website.

R. has for some time been a source of great interest to me. She is in her early thirties and describes herself, with a degree of irony, as a 'grey bureaucrat.' She works in the public sector arts field and does not have a large income. Yet R. only ever buys designer clothes. She was shopping at Emporio Armani when she was a teenager. Her parents are not rich. How does she do it? She buys, she says, very few clothes. But only the best clothes.

R. studied fine art at Cambridge. She has a strong and extremely definitive visual sense, as does her partner, an architect. She claims that she has a few things from H&M, but I have never seen any evidence of this. What she does have is a wardrobe full of stunning enduring clothes that can be worn season after season. Once, I took her with me to Anya Hindmarch so she could use my press discount. It took her an hour to choose a bag, an hour in which she looked at it from every single angle, discussed it, thought it through. No, I like it, I'll take it. This was shopping as hard work.

I asked her once if she could settle for more but cheaper clothes. She sounded puzzled, as if I were asking her if she might consider leaving her two-year-old daughter unattended in the middle of Oxford Street for a couple of hours while she went off to do something. The suggestion was insane.

Some people have nothing but lovely clothes and some of us have a wardrobe full of mistakes. And it seems you don't even have to be rich to be in the former category.

UPDATE
R. rang me last night to deny ever having stated that she owned anything from H&M. After some twenty minutes she conceded that it was true she had some Rakph Lauren for H&M trousers.

R. was also given a present by the Queen the day before yesterday. Yes, you read that right. HM Queen Elizabeth II gave her a gift with her own hands. It is a signed photo of herself and her husband in a Smythson frame. I think it's going to look lovely in the flat and look forward to seeing it next time I'm there. I suggested she could put it in Lia's bedroom and tell her the old couple are friends of her grandparents.

The Estee Lauder ad campaign

Fascinating piece on the history of the face of Estee Lauder. If you flick through a mag today, what you see, because of photoshop, is a close-up of skin not flawless but not skin at all, a face with only two dimensions.

A decision was taken to personify the brand's products in the likeness of this fiction. The campaign would use the same model in its advertising photography over a run of years. Each of the exemplars projected a different kind of physical beauty, though they had much in common. Caucasian women, they are slender but not excessively thin, graced with elegantly long necks, trusty high cheek bones and classically regular facial features. Although a smiling face is thought of as being part and parcel of US product advertising, few of the Lauder lovelies succumb to a parting of the lips. A characteristic expression is of cool don't-mess-with-me reserve.

Consistency was essential in the visuals and this was the responsibility of the Chicago-based photographer Victor Skrebneski, who was assigned to shoot the pictures throughout. In an interview in Town & Country magazine, he said, 'I love to design photographs, to consider the proportions of the figure, the space around it, the edge of the picture.' Among his best-known sitters are Audrey Hepburn, Orson Welles, Vanessa Redgrave, Fred Astaire, and among younger members, Jasmine Guinness.

Owing more than a nod to Hollywood lighting effects and film-still poses, the shoots went flat out for the aspirational. Whether location or studio, a whole slew of fashions in living were called on and called in: impressive houses, designer dresses from the likes of Oscar de la Renta, Halston and Valentino, remarkable accessories and interior design details with an emphasis on collector's level art, both antique and contemporary. In my telephone interview with Skrebneski, he recalled, 'The photographs caused a lot of public comment. People were interested in everything in the picture. The designers whose dresses were shown did quite a lot of business and I was always being asked where we had got hold of an item of decoration.'

Interestingly for such ephemera, the portfolio had an afterlife. It was thought that the pictures communicated more than segments of powder and paint time. A selection of the shots was first published in hardback in 1987 with an introduction by Hubert de Givenchy.