Literary fabulousness

I am doing a gig at the Edinburgh Book Festival next weekend (with Rose Tremain - too late, it's sold out!) and having dinner with Margaret Atwood on Saturday night, apparently.

This account by a writer attending the festival is the most amusing summing up I have ever read of the sheer glamour and pace of the literary life and the social whirl we all move in, hanging out with Mart and Phil and Salman and even Gordon. This is why Madonna and Sarah Ferguson started writing books, you know.

US stores that do not ship internationally

A useful guide here

Who ships to Canada (and other countries where indicated)
American Eagle- Ships to Canada, but not other destinations
eBay- Make sure to check where the seller ships BEFORE bidding
NeimanMarcus.com- must call 1-888-888-4757
Bloomingdales.com- must call 001-1-513-573-8170 for international shipping
Bluefly.com- Bluefly ships to the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, and Switzerland. (other countries via Access-USA)
YOOX.COM- ships pretty much to every country in the world
Beauty.com and drugstore.com (via AccessUSA)
Bare Necessities- Ships to Canada.
figleaves.com- (via i’s UK site)
Torrid.com- Ships to most international destinations
LaneBryant.com- Ships to Canada Only. Must have a Canadian Billing and Shipping Address.
J Crew to Canada and Japan only

Who doesn’t ship to Canada
Gap.com
OldNavy.com
BananaRepublic.com
Nordstrom.com
SaksFifthAvenue
Bebe.com
SmartBargains.com
Spiegel.com
Newport-news.com
Zappos.com
Target.com
Macys.com

You might think what with the credit crunch they'd be begging for our funny foreign money, but no.

The thick/thin of calf are booted

I have these in purple suede from two years ago

Some of us are doomed from birth with chunky calves and there is nothing you can do about it. Indeed, sweating on the treadmill will only bulk those muscles up. So for decades knee length boots were only shangrila to me. There were other women whose knee-length boots flapped around their skinny calves but you couldn't expect me to feel sorry for them. At least they had boots.

And then there was Duo which has their Autumn range just in. You pick the boots you like, take a tape measure round your calf, measure at the widest point, fill in your shoe size, and there you are - matchstick calves or calves like milk bottles, they can fit you.

It's mail order unless you live in Bath or Manchester, where they have a shop, or go to one of their fitting rooms, where they have the full range. They measure you, you try them on, pay and they arrive a couple of days later in the post. Yes, they do ship internationally. I am embarrassed to say how many pairs I have, just let's concede that I've been buying a pair or two a year since I first stumbled across them.

Are they as stylish as boots by Marc Jacobs? No, but I can't have boots by Marc Jacobs.* Every year I manage to find something. There are fifty-eight styles this year.

* A saleswoman at Russell and Bromley told me that fifty per cent of the customers who came in looking for boots, could not find anything wide enough to buy.

NOTE for any of you who are thinking of ordering, I have always found Duo to be a really reputable firm with first class customer service. On one occasion, when I rang them with a problem with Royal Mail who had lost the package, they passed me on to the owner of the company who dealt with chasing it up personally. The sole (ouch) problem I have encountered is that on one occasion I found the shoe fitting of the boots too narrow and they had to be returned. My chief complaint is that I think their styles are always a season or two behind, but if the main lines won't make boots that fit, there's no other option.

Fun without needles

(Thank you greying pixie)

Some cruel types might observe that the women demonstrating the techniques has a) had botox and b) has either a bad case of rosacea or a heavy hand with the blusher brush

Banana Republic: The Jackson Fit

Well, ladies. This afternoon I went to the UK (and Europe's) only Banana Republic where they now have the entire Autumn range in. Before me, black trousers as far as the eye can see so I begin to go from rack to rack searching for the Jackson and I do not find them. Eventually, I ask a sales assistant, who marches purposefully to the rack I have just come from, swings round a ticket, and says, 'Oh!'

I traipse along behind her as she goes through all the racks I've been through and cannot find any Jacksons.

She goes off into the office, and when she returns she tells me that every single Jackson in every style, and every size has sold out, 'because they have turned out to be more popular than we expected.' The stock, she says, was ordered a year ago, nine months before the London store opened its doors and that the company had 'misread the market.'

There are more Jacksons coming in on Saturday and all I can say is, get in line.

The man behind Zara

Further to yesterday's post about Zara, there's another piece on its reclusive founder, Amancio Ortega Gaona. It's worth reading it all. Zara spends almost nothing on advertising, which itself keeps costs down. There is no 'face of'' Zara. As I said yesterday, I think its design is amazing, but the quality control is dire:

The 72-year-old son of a railway worker is now, according to Forbes, the seventh richest man in the world. He is astonishingly reclusive - only one known photo of him is in existence. He is thought to be deeply involved in all areas of the business, including design, but little is certain. Zara was one of the first to bulk-buy Chinese fabrics at a time when rivals dismissed them as of low quality. Zara legend has it that Ortega himself felt the cloth and made the decision, but as he has never given an interview we can't be sure.

He opened his first store in Galicia in 1975 and expanded slowly across Spain. In 1984, he met computer whizz Jose Castellano, who developed a production and distribution system that allowed clothing to go from drawing board to shop floor in as little as 10 days. Zara recruited a team of young designers - 200 at the last count - who created clothes inspired by the catwalk as well as adding their own ideas.

"So-called 'fast fashion' is now common in the high street," says Maureen Hinton, lead retail analyst at Verdict Research. "But before Zara arrived in the UK in 1999, all retailers offered three or four seasons. Zara introduces new stock every week, which caught our stores on the hop.""Zara has absolute control of the design, manufacturing and distribution process," explains Robert Clark, senior analyst at Retail Knowledge Bank. "Fifty per cent of its product is made in Spain, 26 per cent in the rest of Europe, and 24 per cent elsewhere. With others, 50 per cent or more is made in Asia. Fast-fashion items, roughly half its sales, are made in company-owned factories in Galicia. It's the basic T-shirt staples that are outsourced."

Although Zara owns its factories in order to speed up the process, this has also allowed it to dodge many of the sweatshop accusations that hound the likes of Primark - although in June it closed a textile supplier's factory in Dhaka over poor conditions, insisting that the factory introduce unions if it wanted to remain a Zara supplier.

Zara has overtaken Gap

In sales, that is, not style, which happened light years ago. But I have stopped buying Zara, however affectionately I remember its badly made dresses:

Unlike Gap, there isn't a definitive Zara look - it is so dedicated to following the twists and turns of fashion that its very lack of definition is key to its philosophy. It is as hard to pin down and as fast-moving as mercury. But it does do directional, it does great winter coats, (one of my most memorable buys was a bright yellow swing coat which reminded me of Courrèges in the Sixties) smart trenches and brilliant tuxedo evening trouser suits. It is capricious and fun. I don't always find something there, but I wouldn't dream of going more than a fortnight without a visit.

While Zara innovated, Gap never responded imaginatively to the arrival of the internet and its instant catwalk reports, or to the globalisation of production and demand. (Meanwhile, Zara was zipping from "inspiration" on a catwalk in Milan to a Zara production line in Spain and back to a store on the King's Road.) Or to the fact that we have all started dressing up more; we are all ladies who lunch now and, if necessary, invent events where we can dress up - just like Sex and the City - indeed the queues to get in to that movie were red-carpet gangs of girls wearing you-know-what.

Woman goes mad with needles

From the Times. Is there a woman over forty who has not played around in her mind with the idea of a little injection here, a teeny bit of filler there? Twice I have made appointments and cancelled them. This woman went ahead

Things only got weirder after we moved on from playing with needles in NY, to LA, where we flirted with knives and lasers. I was on the rollercoaster, it was a thrilling ride and, my, there was a hell of a lot more of it to go before I was going to get off.

It was pathetic how quickly I went from someone determined to embrace ageing with some grace, to someone who was willing to let a fairly inexperienced doctor remove some fat from my backside, take it to a lab, separate out the stem cells and then inject it back into my ageing, sunken cheeks, up through the inside of my mouth, while also, seeing as he is up there and has got me under a general anaesthetic, getting the knife out and “redraping” the sagging skin under my eyes like a pair of old curtains.

The fat transfer didn't happen. A chance phone call at the last minute, telling me that nobody should work on me following the Sculptra injections, made me call off the procedure that could have left me looking ridiculous. Looking like a freak, I always thought, would keep me away from cosmetic enhancement, but in America, you meet countless women who look weird, yet think they look great. I reckon it's easy to join them. Perhaps I already have.

When you monkey about with what nature intended, things do go wrong. The Restylane in my top lip has slipped - there's a funny lump that shouldn't be there. Since the Fraxel laser therapy on my eyes (performed in LA by Dr Persky), the aforementioned tuna tatare has faded and, certainly, my eyes look less baggy, but, still, seven weeks on, they are a weird brown colour. My forehead is glassy and does not move. A glassy brow is not considered good Botox, but I now like this egg-like badge of self-inflicted paralysis. I may go back for more.

People have commented, constantly, on how well I look, and it started the moment I walked out of Brandt's office, when the sound man told me: “You're a real Manhattan girl now. You look awesome.” Even Anna Davies, the serious, Oxbridge-educated, bluestocking director, liked my lips. My best mate, P, who I had thought would be mildly disgusted, said: “You look great. I haven't seen you like this since the mid-1990s.”

Once you are inside, it's hard to get out. At a certain point, the Botox won't be effective enough, and it will be time for an eye-lift, a neck-lift, a face-lift and so on. If you want to be dramatic about it, you could say that injectables are the weed to surgery's heroin. More pragmatically, if you're going to play the self-improvement game, you had better accept you're in it for life. Boob jobs last only 10 years; eye jobs require volumising materials to be injected regularly into the under-eye area to stop you looking hollow.

Pears in pants

I have never quite forgotten the sage advice of Ogden Nash on this matter:

Sure, deck your limbs in pants,
Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance . . .
Have you seen yourself retreating?

Come again?

Can anyone explain the link between the following two paragraphs from the usually accurate Lisa Armstrong?

Trousers. They’ll be everywhere – and not just the old fall-backs of jeans, straightlegs and drainpipes. The tailored trouser is back. The most modish are high-waisted, short-legged (they stop at the ankle – it’s a must) and need to be worn with heels and neat, tucked-in tops. YSL’s are the template, but Gap will have good versions, so will Joanna Sykes at Matches and, under the expert eye of Jane Shepherdson, the new, rebranded Whistles should be your first port of call. These are worth stalking, I promise.

For the first time in ages, we have genuine fashion statements that flatter pear shapes. Time to stock up.

Is your wardrobe bad for the planet?

You can have someone come round to the house and tell you.

We begin by analysing everything I've purchased over the past year. With laptop in hand, the screen presents an exhaustive list of clothing types to chose from, from cotton socks to jeans to silk shirts to wool suits. Having been in maternity clothes for 12 months, it's easy enough to remember what I've bought, although I need to think hard when it comes to household linen. I can count on one hand the number of clothes my husband's bought this year, even though he's a style-conscious Italian.

Admittedly, this is what differentiates us from the "average" household where a woman buys 34 new items of clothes a year, a figure that has nearly doubled in the past decade. What makes this possible is that, in that same time, the average cost of clothes has dropped by 36 per cent, with £1 in every £4 now spent on bargain fashion. Retailers exacerbate our obsession with "newness" by producing up to 20 different clothing collections a year. In this constantly revolving carousel, getting on the clothing treadmill has become too easy.

The next part is where I get into trouble. Over the following screens, I answer a rapid-fire set of questions. How many clothing washes do I do a week? About one wash a day. At what temperature? 40 degrees (I don't have a 30 degree setting). How many times do I tumble dry a week? None, we don't even have a tumble dryer. What about ironing? About seven hours a week. Phil gasps...

A couple clicks of the mouse, then a figure appears at the bottom of the screen. Our household EDUs is 1,282. A breakdown shows that our actual clothing EDUs is quite low at 558. But then there's the laundry, which at 724 EDUs is slightly alarming. It includes 324 from washing and a whopping 400 from ironing.

The ironing is what did us in, more environmentally damaging than our washing. "It's like having the kettle switched on for seven hours straight," says Phil. But more shocking, if we add seven tumble-dryer loads a week. The figure more than doubles.

My Generation

One of the more intelligent and perceptive clients I once worked with gave a paper on marketing to the older consumer.

He observed that as a boy he was aware of senior citizens in his northern home town all looking rather similar. Waiting outside the pub ( those were the days when enjoyment was rationed) or chatting outside the Co-op ( no cafe culture back then). Their fashion tended toward sturdy shoes , baggy trousers, tweed jacket and waistcoat, and flat cap.

As a child he assumed that this was what you ended up wearing when you got to a certain age.

It was only after having been in marketing for a while that he revisited this assumption. And his realisation was that these chaps were simply wearing the clothes that had become them many years before. Given the period, this was probably similar to the de-mob outfit that those lucky enough to have survived to the end of 1918 were issued with.

The clothes were signifying the wearer's age by referring back to their youth. The time when they dressed up for Saturday nights, and strutted their stuff on the dance floor.

He invited his listeners to dispense with any preconceptions about what older people currently looked like, or ought to look like, and prepare for marketing to pensioners in denim jackets and Rolling Stones t -shirts. If marketers don't understand that people identify most strongly with their youthful selves they will end up making wrong assumptions and being clumsily patronising.

I think he was remarkably prescient.

Now I am of a certain age I wonder if I have become set in my ways. And in contemplating this I wonder if I have a choice of what ways to be set in.

It's true , I do seem to hark back to earlier periods in my life. I am currently growing my hair ( yes, I know I am lucky). This references student/ hippy days ( but I will forego the crushed velvet trousers and cheesecloth shirts). I am also drawn to the slightly earlier mod ethos. A bit of tailoring with a slightly fitted jacket , or a casual Harrington. Sharp shoes . A well pressed shirt. And then the career era. Suits and shirts of distinction. This isn't a big deal. But at least I am avoiding nostalgic rock and roll merchandise. Or fake vintage / post modern garb.

It means that I look for stuff when I am shopping, not really knowing what I am looking for, but having to think whether it resonates in the way I want.

And of course there doesn't seem to be a single shop that caters for me.

Where is Lord John when you need him?

Readers' corner

I have just discovered an excellent new site, The Book Depository which will ship books worldwide for free. While its discounts aren't always quite as good as Amazon, because there are no shipping costs the price often works out the same (and they give you a price comparison). It's extremely useful for books not available in the US.

You'll find The Clothes On Their Backs there, though they don't seem yet to have a pre-order facility for The Thoughtful Dresser - and my limited posting at the moment is down to my rushing to meet the end of the month deadline for delivery of the MS of that book.

Ethics in the boardroom

This Guardian piece pinpoints the problem with the with ethical fashion labels, that they still favour the young, ethnic look of the people who run them and have little to offer anyone who needs to go to work in an office every day. Do they have anything to offer someone who needs to to work in an office every day? Apparently not. A reader writes that she'd like an ethically made suit with pencil skirt, and they fail to find one:

The ethical fashion industry is still, despite huge growth in recent years, such a small part of the gigantic fashion behemoth that more specialised requirements can sometimes be tricky – and in ethical clothing, smart workwear definitely counts as specialised. A good suit requires sharp tailoring. Companies working in a genuinely fair trade way will not simply outsource to skilled workers but work to support local weavers and tailors and develop their skills over a long period of time. This is one of the many reasons why setting up an ethical fashion company is a long-term investment and not a route to a quick buck. And it means that while it is perfectly possible to find sharply cut ethical clothes, it does sometimes require a little patience and a lot of hunting.
. . .
Finally we must tackle shoes. Ethical shoes are always tricky – is leather always the least ethical option when plastic is often the alternative? It's a question I'd like to come back to in the future but suffice to say that the jury is still out. At any rate, most ethical shoes tend towards the casual – trainers, flip-flops and the like

Fashion v Sport

The Thoughtful Dresser thoughtfully invited me to accompany her to the V&A last night. For the launch party of the new exhibition Fashion v Sport.

We had both agreed, over a civilised drink beforehand, that sport was not our forte, and hence not an area of the highest  interest when it comes to clothing. But the catalogue to the exhibition maintains that

'sports styles are adapted to make fashion statements , both on the high street and through high fashion'. 

To be honest the clothes on display didn't engage me. But then I am of a certain age. Some examples of what I would call art school experimentation seemed  designed to provoke a John Macenroesque response (' you cannot be serious'). Then there was the opportunity to exclaim ' Oh look, some more retro Nike high-tops'. And , to be honest, I find it difficult to believe that people are still trotting out Keith Haring as being a stylish or contemporary design motif.

They did have Paul Smith's bicycle, but strangely not the range of cycle clothes that he brought out last year.

Of course the venue was captivating as ever ( as someone once said, 'the best place to lose yourself in London' ). The fizz was in plentiful supply, and the attendant throng were well decked out ( with not much sports influence in evidence I am pleased to say).

Truth to tell, I do actually own some sportswear. Because that's the appropriate thing to wear to the gym ( not for me the faded old t-shirt and distressed baggy shorts look). I was in Lanzarote earlier this year and made the mistake of taking one of my gym shirts, dark blue micro-fibre. The one day I chose to wear it my dapper host Bill looked at me somewhat askance and enquired ' Harry, is that synthetic by any chance?

Guest post: On Beauty

My (real life) friend the poet George Szirtes, has responded to my post on Misogyny:

I wrote three posts at my own place in response to the misogyny blog by Linda, that ended with a comment by a certain Stephanie who suggested men die first because they're stupid. My contribution was: fine, I am quite happy to die first.

I am not altogether stupid. I am a writer and that gives me certain advantages. But I want to discard the advantages here. I'd like to speak, if such a thing is possible, for Mr Normal, Mr Nothing Special. I want leave the gender wars out of this for now, as far as that is possible.

Beauty is something most people seek, and most men seek it, first and foremost, in women. There are many other qualities they seek but beauty is there somewhere at the core of it. And beauty is far from simple: it is not merely the ruddy glow of health or voluptuousness (what Eliot called 'pneumatic bliss'). It is not merely fleshly, though it is that too. Nor is it proportions drawn up according to a secret formula. What I said in my post was that it was "not to be owned by either the beholder or the object. And partly, because it cannot be owned like property, because it remains an elsewhere and, notionally, eternal, it is something that has always to be sought." It is in that way a spiritual yearning. We are not elsewhere and eternal. We are here and fugitive. That sense of life as something fugitive may go a little way to explaining why women's fashions change so frequently, why last year's fashion is ridiculous and no longer beautiful. Clothes are part of the beautiful, as are changes in clothes.

Next to the essential though, the momentary always looks a bit ridiculous, particularly when it is actually a product of labour. It takes considerable time. Humour is incongruity. And while, no doubt, the attitude Linda's blog refers to is part of the package, it is neither entirely a patriarchal plot nor gross stupidity. It is part of the tragic ludicrousness of life. Men and women often appear slightly ludicrous to each other. And women are far from reticent or decorous about what is ludicrous in men. In fact they are furiously critical – which is something I have never experienced among men regarding women. But we can be adult about this, can't we? Shall we, we thoughtful ones, try?

The £200 plastic shoes

But they are not Crocs, they are designed by architect Zaha Hadid and are ecological and only available from Dover Street Market in Mayfair and will be launched at Fashion Week. They come in eight colours including silver.

Too many questions arise, such as how the sweaty-feet question is dealt with (and will your tights slip around inside them?) Or am I being a philistine? At least they have a good heel for walking.

Hommes en Jupe

working this summer's florals

I often daydream about time travelling into the future, just to see what people are wearing, and if there is anything new to come in fashion.

A small revolution in France might give a clue:

Dominique Moreau is a trailblazing freedom fighter, a man battling for equality and recognition in a world of prejudice and gender-based stereotypes. At least, that is what his supporters say. To others who may be less aware of the socio-political implications of his sartorial habits, however, Moreau's heroism is less apparent. To them, he is just a bloke in a skirt.

"Today, millions of men around the world wear skirts, like the sarong in Asia or the djellaba in Africa, without being bothered," he insists. "Why not us?"

Moreau is the president of Hommes en Jupe (Men in Skirts), an association of about 30 men in Poitiers, western France, who don skirts to go about their everyday lives. For them, getting dressed in the morning is less about style and more about political substance: they are fighting to reclaim an item of clothing last worn by Frenchmen more than 500 years ago.

"We're fighting against prejudice and cliches," says Moreau, a 39-year-old civil servant who quotes Virginia Woolf as a gender-bending inspiration. "Women fought for trousers; we're doing the same with the skirt."

And yet trousers are more functional. If you're a man and don't have does-my-bum-like-big-in-this issues, which on the whole men do not. What with their lean legs, an' all.

Hobbs, unexpectedly

At a dinner on Wednesday night, at which the hostess, as ever, was in one of her proper designer dresses (she doesn't do high street, and nor of course would I if I were rich) I wore, after a lot of hesitation, a two-year-old purple silk dress from Hobbs, which is a British mid-range chain. And was gratified to get an email the next morning remarking on my 'beautiful dress'.

For years I simply ignored Hobbs, the epitome of English rose ware (what you wear if you can afford better than Boden) dull and dated, until I actually saw the purple dress in the window of the Kings Road branch and bought it. Last year I bought an excellent pair of wide-leg black trousers. This summer I bought a plain blue unlined linen jacket to wear with a simple white very hot weather dress. (We have to cover the arms). The range was not exciting but you could find the occasional useful piece.

I now read, from the pen of the fabulous Polly Vernon in the Observer, that Hobbs is hot:

We did not see this one coming. Hobbs – previously the spiritual home of the uninspired day-dress, the enduring-but-dull crew-neck knit and not very much else, let's be honest – has come up with a storming collection of clothes for autumn/winter 2008. These pieces are brilliant: sharply tailored, totally dramatic, with significant fashion edge. We're especially enamoured of the silken cocktail frock with the feather ruff (and why wouldn't we be? It's exquisite!); but we'd be pretty happy with any of it, really.

The Hobbs revelation compounds Observer Woman's strongly-held theory (first expounded in the mag, by me, in the December '07 issue,) that mid-market grown-up lady fashion is going to rule the world, any day now. To wit: Whistles totally rocks under Jane Shepherdson, Banana Republic's had such an amazing inaugural season in the UK that it hasn't even bothered getting itself into a dirty summer-sale scenario, and Jaeger's incoming collection is blowing our minds. We love it when we're right.

I already have one piece from the Jaeger collection and plan to buy more.

Misogyny defined

. . . one of the great rhetorical tricks of patriarchy, which is to define women’s value in terms of appearance, and simultaneously to define appearance as something so utterly trivial that only completely shallow and useless creatures — like, say, women! — would care about it.

writes Kate Harding,