Our glorious leader

July Vogue has a piece on one M. Thatcher, style icon.

In the Guardian today, Zoe Williams says (and I think she is right) that back in the day, no-one obsessively commented on her clothes:

As improbable as it seems now, nobody seemed to care that much what Margaret Thatcher looked like in her heyday. There were very few remarks about her shoes; nobody was obsessively watching her weight.

[But. . . .]

I want to say those were nobler times, when everyone was less superficial, and that much is true; but truer and more salient was the fact that nobody cared what she looked like because we all hated her so much. You check out a politician's leopardskin kitten heels when she is an irrelevant person, talking irrelevantly about nothing. Conversely, when a politician is snatching your children's milk, smashing your union and kicking you in your metaphorical face, you tend not to notice what she's wearing.

Personally I think this is bollocks. The savagery unleashed on Hillary's Clinton's wardrobe is evidence to the contrary.

Guest post: On not giving up, by Harry Fenton, the Sharp Dressed Man

Introducing Harry Fenton, the Sharp Dressed Man,* who will be addressing questions of menswear from the perspective of a Londoner of a certain age.
* Don't bother googling, it's a pseudonym.

On Not Giving Up

By which I mean , the struggle to still care about clothes and what you look like.

Because when you get to a certain age you can wake up one morning and just be entirely underwhelmed by the clothing options that are in your wardrobe. Probably because the clothes there haven’t actually changed for a good few years.

But what once we felt was quite good/ quite cool/ perhaps stylish, is now, on closer scrutiny, looking decidedly boring. Or even worse than boring, a sort of a style vacuum. Dull neutral colours of the same old same old.

When I was a teenager in London in the Sixties, having failed to look like the Beatles, no sooner was one trying to look like the Who than we were introduced to the completely bizarre sight of the Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart. So I had to suffice with one of those surplus greatcoats from Kensington Market (I didn't know that they were to become the uniform for pimply physics students who listened to King Crimson).

In anticipation of wanting to cut a dash at university I bought an old pin-stripe double-breasted suit from an Oxfam shop and took it to a cleaners for the trousers to be tapered. They ended up looking a bit like jodphurs, but I imagined I was subverting some kind of norm. On reflection the suit didn't go that well with the Anello and Davide burgundy cuban -heeled boots. But I had wanted them for ages, ever since the Beatles had made Anello and Davide famous.

There was a terrible band in the late sixties called the Edgar Broughton band. basically a trio of thuggish guys from Leamington Spa who I had the misfortune to see a number of times. They were forever the support band to someone I actually half wanted to see. Anyhow the 'Broughtons' liked to finish their set with a heavy metal version of 'Out Demons Out'. Which some of us knew was the chant that Ginsberg and the Fugs came up with when they circled the Pentagon. Anyhow this provincial English travesty was simply appalling. But made all the worse by the fact that Edgar Broughton was wearing an identical pair of boots to mine. You can imagine my dismay. Shortly after that I think I wanted to look like the Incredible String Band.

Eventually I got a job. I went to work in an office. And went to a lot of meetings in other people’s offices in a number of different countries. Which meant that for years my clothes shopping was dominated by suits, shirts and ties. Work was the environment where it was most important for me to feel well dressed. Or, more accurately, well presented. And a suit that fits, and clean shoes, and a good tie can do that admirably.

But now I don’t inhabit the corporate world . And rather than reach for a suit I have actually had to start thinking about what to wear. And it’s not that easy.

Primarily because the default option is fraught with problems. Dress down Friday has become dress down the rest of your life. And there’s the rub. But more to the point , dressing down can so easily mean we look like a troop of older blokes gone casual. Slightly ill at ease out of uniform.

Because we probably haven’t given much attention to our dress down options. And the betting says that these options are stuck somewhere ten to fifteen years ago ( or even longer) So you are in danger of looking stale, or, more worryingly, (without it being a conscious decision), trying to look younger than your years.

Or , even worse , suggesting to others that you have the same approach to clothes as Jeremy Clarkson.

I don’t have a universal solution to this quandary. But it does start with actually bothering to think about clothes, and perhaps for the first time in many a year, trying to articulate what you do and don’t want to look like.

I have just three rules at the moment: I’ve got to like it. It must fit. There should be no visible logos.

But the biggest hurdle to overcome is that you have to start to go shopping again. Just like you did when you were a teenager. When it was, in some undefined way, important. And spending money on clothes made you feel good.

And going out in them on Saturday night made you feel even better.

no no no no*

*Clarkson is one of a few celebrities who have been blamed for poor denim sales. Louise Foster of Draper's Record, trade magazine to the fashion industry, is quoted as saying, "For a period in the late nineties denim became unfashionable. 501s — Levi's flagship brand — in particular suffered from the so-called 'Jeremy Clarkson effect', the association with men in middle youth."

More grooming, more fun

The Telegraph today has a piece on the new July Vogue style at any age issue and how to stay visible at 50. I like the advice from two grandes dames of British fashion, Vivienne Westwood and Joan Burstein. I can vouch for the fact that Joan always looks amazing:

Covering up necklines, legs or slack upper arms can be seductive in itself, insists 67-year-old designer extraordinaire Vivienne Westwood:

Everyone knows my clothes are sexy. It is playing with the idea of being clothed and then eventually unclothed. It’s much more sexy to be dressed. But for me, at my age, can I have a pair of high-heeled shoes? What really touches me is the woman who is chic, she knows herself, doesn’t buy into mass marketing or publicity, but takes the trouble to look good and shows off her best assets. This shows her to be generous yet discriminating and wishing to gain from her experience in life.

The older you get, the more grooming you require — but it’s also important to have fun, says Joan Burstein, fashion pioneer and owner of the Browns boutiques:

I am 81, so I’m very aware of the areas older women are concerned about. It’s all about deflecting from those areas. If you’re worried about your shoulders, upper arms or bust, buy a beautiful fine shawl and wrap it dramatically around yourself.

Also, use bright colours around the face: not white, which can be draining, but pale pink, blue or vivid — but not lurid — deep orange. And pay more attention to your hair and nails, because those are the things that pull you down.

If you go to the opera or out to dinner, swap your normal handbag for a smaller and nicer one, or get a professional make-up artist to make you up. These little things lift the spirits.

On the question of visibilty, having sold two of my Anya Hindmarch bags on ebay, I went yesterday to buy another. I knew I wanted a smallish cream bag which would go day to night. I did a lot of research, found the one I wanted on the AH site. When I actually saw it in the shop, it was exactly what I was looking for. Until the sales girl showed me another bag, in cream patent, the Alessandra, which simply had a bit more fizz. I bought it. Do not go entirely classic into that good night.

Coming soon

'Every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man.' (ZZ Top - thank you Deja Pseu)

Tomorrow, I hope

When the world was very young

Sometimes I get a bit miserable about being 57. Then I watch this and realise that only by being 57 now could I have been 13 then, for this.

"[Chuck Berry's] 'Maybellene' is a country song sped up," Thorogood told Rolling Stone in 2005. " 'Johnny B. Goode' is blues sped up. But you listen to 'Bo Diddley,' and you say, 'What in the Jesus is that?'"

RIP





And a belated minute's silence for the Duchess

The man who invented the trouser suit

My piece in the Guardian today

My first job as a teenage reporter on a local paper in 1969 had a dress code: no trousers. A man had to wear a tie and a woman wore a skirt. My workplace rebellion came the day I turned up in a grey flannel Young Jaeger trouser suit (as worn by Jean Shrimpton and photographed by David Bailey), and was sent home. As there was a time before the pill, so there was once life before the trouser suit, which Yves Saint Laurent, who died on Sunday, invented in 1966. Or rather he thought a new thought: Le Smoking, the tuxedo for women that would become a permanent feature of his collections and would morph into the single most transformative piece of women's wear since Chanel created the little black dress.

It was the perfect garment for the 70s and for women who went out to work. Women had been wearing trousers since the 20s, but pants had never managed to struggle out of the weekend and into the office. The trouser suit put women on an equal sartorial footing with men. And the trouser suit, not the urban myth about bra-burning, is what fashion gave to feminism. When wearing it, your legs took longer steps; men looked at your face, not your ankles, and were forced to listen to the words that came out of your mouth. It killed the miniskirt stone dead. Hillary Clinton, a woman who does not possess good legs, has lived in trouser suits on the campaign trail.

Yet, even when he dressed women in safari jackets and trenchcoats, Saint Laurent understood how to make them feel sexy. Le Smoking was not masculine but androgynous. At 21, he had been anointed Dior's successor on the death of the man who brought pleasure back to clothes after wartime rationing. In the early 60s, Brigitte Bardot declared that couture was for old ladies. Saint Laurent understood the next great change and the huge range of roles that women were about to play. For two decades, he had his finger right on the button of the times he lived in.

The Man Who Loved Women (just not that way)

Leading figures are rare in any field. In fashion, there were only five in the 20th century: Poiret, Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga — and Saint Laurent. All the dress ideas of the last century have come from them. There is a strong case to be made for Yves Saint Laurent as the most inventive, original and influential of all the five. Certainly, it is time to say that the way women have dressed in the past 40 years — regardless of age, class or wealth — has been the direct result of the ideas, often radical and even initially unacceptable, of Saint Laurent.
Times obituary

(There will be something from me in the Guardian tomorrow)

Notes from a muddy field

I spent an exhausting and scintillating weekend at the Hay on Wye literary festival. Had dinner with Albanian novelist, Ismail Kadare and his English translator, lunch with Don McCullin, the greatest living photojournalist, heard UCL don John Mullan deliver a riveting talk on why eighteenth and nineteenth century novelists preferred to publish their books anonymously or pseudonymously, saw John Irving's tattoo of a wrestling circle on his arm, was given a copy of the new right-wing magazine Standpoint, and observed festival fashion:

1. Mud. Field. Rain. Get out the Glastonbury kit

2. Droopy beige linen and pastel florals

3. 'I've walked all round the village and I can't seem to find Harvey Nicks.'

Enjoyed the perfect union of 1. and 3. effected by Lucy Yeomans, editor of Harpers Bazaar, who wore wellies and a Chanel 2.55.

Greatness falls

Yves St Laurent 1936-2008

'We must never confuse elegance with snobbery'

Excellent

This is a movie so unbelievably girly, whirly and twirly that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like reading three Andy McNabs back to back, just to get my testosterone back up to metrosexual level.

writes Peter Bradshaw, film critic of the Guardian.

UK Vogue: The Ageless style issue

Vogue has just biked round the July issue of Vogue which has a piece by me on 1968 fashion, Thatcher chic (apparently) by Mario Testino, a long piece by Lisa Arnmstrong, fashion writer of the Times on how to dress as you get older, a cover shot of Uma Thurman, facing forty with glamour and a piece by editor Alexandra Shulman on her own wardrobe at fifty.

Farewell, I might be some time.

Yet another reason not to buy cheap clothes

Every once in a while I take a bag full of clothes to the charity shop. My view is that yeah, all right, I've bought disposable clothes, but since they'll get a second lease of life in someone else's wardrobe, with the charity benfiting as the middle man, then when I buy something, I am, in part making a charitable donation further down the line.

Or so I thought.

“Disposability has caused an explosion of problems,” says Dr Lucy Norris, the co-curator of a new exhibition at the Horniman Museum in south London, which traces the odyssey of clothes dumped in Oxfam clothing banks and charity shops. “Clothing is now given in such huge quantities to British charities that they can’t sell it all in the shops. The volume is increasing, while the quality is decreasing.”

For charities to get a return on our tat, most of it is exported. But if you had visions of your old treasures being parachuted into Burma as aid, think again. Charities don’t give clothes away, they sell them. “It takes too long to ship things to disaster areas, and to air-freight them is too expensive,” says Rob McNeil of Oxfam.

Instead, the clothes end up in eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, where they are either sold whole or organised into great colour- coded mounds, as in Panipat, north India, then shredded, pulped and respun into what is known as “shoddy” yarn (recycled wool) and made into cheap blankets.

. . .

The problem is that much of what is donated is synthetic, which is the most difficult to recycle; cotton is also expensive to reuse. The easiest textile to recycle is wool, but the demise of knitwear over the past 15 years has seen the “shoddy” industry suffer. And while donation bins are being stuffed with synthetics, charity shops are struggling to stay competitive with the likes of £3 jeans.

Now that our castoffs are being shipped halfway around the world, what about the environment? Do the benefits of recycling outweigh the carbon cost of shipping? Oxfam hasn’t assessed that: the environmental benefit is only part of the story — cash is the rest. And it’s a difficult area. Second-hand clothing exports can damage the local garment trade — from 1985 to 1992, 51 out of 72 Zambian clothing firms closed, partly due to foreign competition. “If we sent stuff to where there is already a second-hand clothing market, it could undercut that industry,” says McNeil.

You really should read the rest.

Doing the vamp

Go babe, go!

A film is released today which stars four female characters all in their forties. One hits her fiftieth birthday during the action. The actress who plays her is 51. The other actresses really are in their forties, not 23 year olds with prosthetics. It was its female audience which made Sex in the City, not studio executives. Women of all ages watched it. It contains a character which I don't think had ever been seen on screen before, the single, financially independent vamp.

Kim Cattrall has her number:

But is her vamp persona realistic at the the age of 51? "It depends on where you live," says Cattrall. And on what you look like. "It also depends on your financial security. She's a very successful woman, and she takes care of herself."

The vamp understands the power of her sexuality. She gets the idea that it's not just looks, hormones, but the manipulation of a whole appearance through clothes, scent, jewels. This role has usually been taken by the mistress, the manhunter (think Rita Hayworth in Gilda), occasionally by those with inherited wealth. The potency of the single, sucessful city-dweller who insists on taking her pleasure on her own terms is a new creation.

Not of course one than many of us can emulate, but in an age of the sixty-something Harrison Ford reprising Indiana Jones, we at long last have the older women come to centre stage, at least in fiction. Good.

Into the dark

This rather muddled piece on credit-crunch chic takes its cue from the M&S A/W08 range which was had its press show last week. It seems to think that we'll all be buying colour and pattern because black is too depressing and we'll need to cheer ourselves up.

It's talking about style-conscious women who have been buying a mix of Primark, Zara and some designer labels. Will they now cut the designers? I'm not a trend-spotter and I can't speak of what others might do, but the credit crunch (and it has had knock-on effects on me) means that I can no longer afford to buy disposable clothing. Stopping and thinking, asking if this will last more than a season, has now become instinctive.

On the other hand, do I want to be wearing the same black jacket for the next seven years at every party? I don't go to huge numbers of parties, but I do go to several, and wearing the same thing every time makes me feel like when I come in people think, 'There she is, in her jacket.'

Smile corner

'There is a real vulgarity in the way women dress at the moment," purrs Roberto Cavalli, stubbing out his cigarette in a turtle-shaped gold ashtray and reaching into his green, lizard-skin manbag for a cigar. "They show off too much and try too hard. They don't understand where the line is between sexy and vulgar. I know where that line is."

	King of the world: Roberto Cavalli with Celia Walden

I expected many things from the 64-year-old Italian designer - lover of leopard-print and creator of red-carpet dresses that stay up against all the laws of physics - but not this. Remember the slashed, lime chiffon number worn by Victoria Beckham to her own Full Length and Fabulous ball?

There are many words to describe it: understated is not one of them. But then we are in Cavalli world - a floating parallel universe where the senses are assaulted by a frenzy of satiny animal prints, gilt, mahogany and orchids.

and on and on, a pleasure to read

What are these people on about?

Apparently the designers are pushing the cruise collections because global warming means we no longer have a winter. So that's why sales of shearlings have collapsed and why you can't see one in the shops and Joseph doesn't stock them any more . . .

You can no longer always tell what you are looking at," said Liz Walker, executive fashion editor at Marie Claire. "A winter fashion show may have no coats or sweaters, and the only thing that reminds you it's a summer show is if you see a girl in bikini."It's definitely to do with climate change. Ten years ago you knew you were going to have to shoot coats and sweaters in Russia or Iceland, but nobody wants those clothes anymore.

Some ebay items

Since my moth catastrophe I have been doing some serious wardrobe pruning and have decided to sell a few items, two Anya Hindmarch bags and one Nicole Farhi jacket which is a bit big.

You can see the listings for each item here:

Anya Hindmarch Cooper
Anya Hindmarch Whistler
Nicole Farhi navy swing jacket

Please note, none of these items have been infested by moths, but a Brora green cashmere cardie was.

Bank holiday Monday

An appeal to my readers

A friend of mine has been sending me some wonderful emails on the perils of menswear. He has written about the male mutton-dressed-as-lamb conundrum, and the difficulties of 'smart-casual' in the business environment - a sea of boring men in pressed jeans and polo shirts. Not to mention his early teenage forays into clothes buying in Swinging London.

I have invited him to come over as an occasional guest contributor. Among his long list of increasingly feeble excuses has been his contention that no-one would be interested.

So do we have any takers for a column from a well-dressed but cool Englishman of a certain age?

Record your responses below and I'll pass them on.

UPDATE
The gentleman in question has moved an inch or two, having sent me a list of possible pseudonyms, but has now pissed off abroad for a few days. I will update you when I hear more. All I can say is, it will be worth the wait.

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?