Conventional dressing

From The New Republic - I like this because it doesn't just deal with how the women are dressed:

Like his niece, Ted Kennedy, who delivered the most moving (at moments heartbreaking, given the circumstances) speech of the evening, was dressed in navy blue. If, as Diana Vreeland once quipped, "pink is the navy blue of India," then navy blue is the navy blue of politics. All the prominent politicians of the evening--Joe Biden, Jim Leach, John Kerry, Kennedy--wore navy blue jackets, white or blue shirts, and white-and-blue patterned ties. Their ensembles were so similar one began to suspect they had, like a clique of junior-high girls, called each other the night before to coordinate outfits. (Kerry's take, however, was rather more patrician: cornflower blue tie; matte where others' fabrics were meretriciously shiny.) The reasons for all the blue are obvious. It's patriotic, and it's also the party's color. Perhaps more relevantly, navy seems safe and stalwart in this aforementioned time of war and economic insecurity: the color is free from the suspicious slickness of black, and the dowdy, Beta-male connotations of brown. A real man throws on a navy blue sport coat when he cleans up and goes out. Navy blue is a color that will--to quote another commentator from CNN's very deep bench, who was himself quoting Groucho Marx --"play well in Peoria."

Politics or not? YOU decide

I had this idea that with the US election coming up I'd have a post a week where everyone can talk Obama/McCain, but there's a feeling that you want this to be a politics-free zone.

I'm a great believer in democracy so I'll go with the popular vote. Punch your hanging chad in the comments below. One comment, one vote.

But if you're in New Orleans, just get in the car and go NOW.

Ain't she sweet

The strange world of me

I have a deadline. The deadline is actually tomorrow but I managed to get an extension to the end of next week. The deadline is for the book of The Thoughtful Dresser and I have been stuck in London all summer finishing it, and a cold, wet and windy summer. It's not been good or memorable.

But I have done something I have never done before, I have now almost completed buying my Autumn/Winter wardrobe. I broke with the habits of a lifetime and instead of going into a shop and saying, 'Ooh! I like that', I sat down and thought about what I needed, looked to see what was coming in to the shops and then went and got it. Yesterday I bought knee length boots, the day before, ankle boots, the previous week, winter coat. I bought scarves on eBay, a coat-dress at Jaeger and I've ordered a bag which will be in mid-September. One more item and I'll be done. I bought stuff when it had just arrived in the shops, and the sales were still on. They had not sold out of my size.

The clothes are all hanging in the wardrobe, unworn, under protective anti-moth covers, so it makes them feel old before I ever wore them. A little of the joie de vivre of life has gone, the impulsive purchase. I have far greater confidence in the capsule collection of clothes I've chosen. I have some marvelous investments in there. But it feels old. I feel old.

I realise that what I really want is to be rich enough always to wear new things. Change keeps the heart light.

US elections

Two months to go. Since there seems to be a lot of interest in discussing the issues arising from the election, I'm proposing to have an open thread every Friday where you can discuss the past week's campaign.

If any American voters would like to write a guest post, drop me a line at lindagrantblog(at)googlemail.com

Fat or unfashionable?

Jess Cartner-Morley in the Guardian asks, I assume rhetorically of the new peg leg trousers:

In my ignorance, I initially dismissed the look as an unflattering trouser shape that would never catch on. The second time I saw it, I suspected it was a ruse to quieten the size-zero debate by making models look twice as broad as they are. But the third time I saw it, I had to accept it was a trend.

Ever since, I have been dreading the day I would have to write about peg-leg trousers. For photographic purposes I have wimped out of the cutting-edge version of the look, in which the trousers are the same shape but lopped off above the ankle, in favour of a more forgiving, ankle-length pair, but still. The brutal truth is that unless you are blessed with long legs and a tiny waist, they do you no favours. Yet the peg leg is indisputably the on-trend trouser shape of the season. So we are faced with a stark choice: to look fat or unfashionable?

Family drama

I have a piece in the Guardian today about how to make family films about the Nazi Death Camps. Or perhaps not.

This is a Hollywood version of the Holocaust, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is literally a Disneyfication (you wonder whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris). When you make films about the Final Solution for children there's not much you can say other than to introduce the historical events in a palatable way, and to make a general lesson about being nice to other people. When The Diary of Anne Frank was adapted for the stage in the 1950s, it was with the intention of suppressing the specifically Jewish element of the story to make it "universal".

Harry Peers Through The Looking Glass

There has been something of a debate recently on these pages about unwearable designs and the fashion writers role in promoting them.

The problem , it seems to me, lies with the fashion pundits
or style arbiters and what they say about these clothes, rather than with the designers.
It’s not only ok for the designers to produce clothes that are impractical and perhaps even unwearable: we want them to. We want to have glimpses of a fantastic world where fabulous people wear fabulous creations. It plays to our innate child like sense of wonder. We like to imaginatively believe that there is a wonder land somewhere out there . And, just as we did as children, we get to this land by reading about it , and, very importantly, by looking at pictures. The higher reaches of fashion and style have become , for many, the enchanted land that is populated by princesses , and princes, where real life is suspended and all sorts of things may , or may not , happen, just by dreaming of them. For many, of course, the door to this land can be found in the metaphorical wardrobe.

Most of us would maintain that we left fairy tales behind us years ago. We’re wrong . The fables that nurture us have just taken on a different guise. Hollywood once understood better the adult appetite for enchantment. Fred and Ginger didn’t just live in a world where people danced at the drop of a top hat. They lived in a world where people wore immaculate clothes, in houses with drawing rooms as big as a hangar, and rooms furnished in sleek cream leather. It may have been monochrome , but we were transported to a world of otherwise unimagined glamour.
Hollywood doesn’t seem to deliver this anymore ( perhaps it is Bollywood that has taken up the fabulist role)

So what are we left with? Fashion and style. And celebrity and gossip. And these volumes of fairy tales are published monthly, or weekly, and the newsstands are like carnival kiosks forever hawking new instalments.

Of course, some readers have a more refined taste . But for many a quick cheap fix will often do. I am referring to the acres of photographs devoted to second rate celebrities, and the spreads of the tacky lifestyles and bad taste mansions inhabited by the rich and famous. These celebrities don’t really pass muster as the princesses and prince charmings that we are looking for.
But in the more rarified reaches of fantasy inhabited by the likes of Vogue we do see a fabulous world. And it’s been designed by Prada or Galliano. And it’s been art-directed. And beautifully lit. And dramatically photographed. And populated by exotic and beautiful creatures. And they are wearing fabulous clothes. That we have never seen before. Or imagined.

That’s when the fashion writers step in and ruin it all. There is no point in telling people that this is what they must buy and wear. That’s actually got nothing to do with it. It should be about feeding the imagination , not laying down rules.

Not all fables appeal to all people. My advice is simply to devour and cherish the fables that you like. And ignore the commentator.

Occasionally the real world has palpitations when it seems that someone has managed to inhabit both the real and the fabulous world. Step forward Ms Paltrow, recently to be seen in just about every newspaper in the UK. The allure of Gwynneth in the highest of heels is surely because she plays to a sense of this fabulousness. She doesn’t need to run for a bus. Heavens, she doesn’t actually need to walk if she doesn’t want to. She has untold riches. Almost like living in a movie . And this is her way of communicating it. And we lap it up.

Bye bye posh girls

The media has been rife with rumours that ITV are going to cancel Trinny and Susannah's contract. Now it so happens that I go to the same hairdresser as these two goddesses, and that hairdresser also does the make-overs for the show, when they actually still did makeovers.

A long time ago, these two posh birds used to tell badly-dressed women the truth about how they look. It wasn't nice, it wasn't kind but they did manage to shoehorn them out of their beige sacks. And in my view, it was the conjunction of fast fashion and T&S which really jacked up British style in the past few years.

Now we have this guy Gok Wan, who gets a fat woman to look at an ID parade of other fat women and force them to say that they look fabulous naked. Often I'm sitting there thinking, no, you don't look fabulous. Cover yourselves up! (This is equally a criticism of myself.)

Where it went wrong for T&S was when they turned themselves into agony aunts, to 'refresh the formula', delving into people's personal lives. For godsake, it's just the frocks we're interested in.

The point of What Not To Wear was contained in its title. It told you how to dress for your figure, age, colouring. It's not rocket science yet many of us still aren't very good at it. The pleasure for me was watching someone look and the mirror and realise that, whoa, I've got a waist. Their choices might have been eccentric at times, they were obsessed with bosoms, but they were like two bracing St Trinian's prefects. They took you for a walk on the wild side. I loved them.

Sir Salman and me

There's a Q&A interview with me on the Man Booker website (and the other longlisted authors, too)

Democratic National Convention: Reprise

And here's a lesson on how to beat the credit crunch (is that really the National Rifle Association backing the New Deal?)

Trousers: The Truth

The Telegraph has gone through all the trouser trends and tells you which ones to wear for your height/shape.

You can read this in full, if you like, but what you are about to find out is: There are no trousers that suit pear shaped women of average height.

"Cropped trousers only suit those with long legs,"

"Wide-legged trousers are ideal for tall women,"

"High-waisted trousers are wonderful on tall or petite women with hourglass figures," says Pinnot, "but they should be avoided by pear shapes as they accentuate the hips and the waist."

"Skinny jeans look fantastic on petites," says Pinnot. "But curvy women should steer clear, because skinnies accentuate curves."

"Peg legs are an interesting, edgy cut," says Pinnot. "They flatter taller women, and drown small frames."

What we're left with is the boot cut:
"Boot cuts suit women of all shapes," says Pinnot. "They flatter the leg and bottom and create subtle curves." (Because pear shaped women need more curves?)

My problem with bootcut jeans is that if they fit on the waist they're tight on the thighs and I cannot stand the sausage thigh, I like trousers to skim, that is right, skim over the thighs. But then they're too big on the waist.

I am 5' 5". I have one pair of trousers, they are wide legs and they skim over the thighs. If only we could lower the hem of the dresses to below the knee I could stop worrying and forget about trousers altogether.

In which Margaret Atwood and I speak of many things

In all the various excitements, I neglected to mention that I had dinner with Margaret Atwood and her husband (and several 19-year-olds) on Saturday night. Despite the noise in the restaurant we managed to talk at some length about Margaret Laurence, Janet Frame, and even for a minute or two about the importance of clothes.

Cashmeres died so I might live

Lagerfeld: I am not an intellectual

He glides in looking relaxed, wearing a black suit jacket by Tom Ford, black jeans by Christian Dior, a 4in-high Edwardian collar, and fingerless biker gloves adorned with rings. He offers a gloved hand and a well-practised apology, and takes a seat at a large wooden table in a room attached to the main studio, surrounded by sleek filing cabinets, yet more books and stacks of hip fashion and design magazines.

“I’m mad for books,” he says, sitting motionless behind his black Dior shades. “It is a disease I won’t recover from. They are the tragedy of my life. I want to learn about everything. I want to know everything, but I’m not an intellectual, and I don’t like their company. I’m the most superficial man on Earth.”

Lagerfeld relishes such contradictory language – or should I say, he relishes talking rubbish, probably because it makes understanding him more difficult and shields his private life. “There are many Karls,” says the publicist Caroline Lebar, who has known him for 22 years. “He is like – how do you say in English – the animal that changes its skin?” A snake? “No, a snake changes only once in life.” A chameleon? “Oui, oui. Karl is like a chameleon. Always changing.”

. . .

Discussion about “the hidden depths”, as he calls them, should be avoided. “The quest to find yourself is an overrated thing concerning not very interesting people very often. Psychoanalysis – I don’t want to hear about it. Before Freud, people weren’t tortured by these things that have undermined the territory of perception. You have to live with your shortcomings.”

I’m just trying to get behind the many faces of Karl, I suggest. He laughs.

“This reminds me of when Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vanity Fair. I didn’t know her very well then, and she said, ‘I have to spend three days with you to see what’s behind.’ And I said, ‘Annie, you’re wasting your time. Look at what you see.’ ” He casts his hand theatrically over his face. “There is nothing else.” Why do you want to be known as superficial? “I like that image. I don’t want to look like an old teacher.

from the Times

Baby come home

Today, I am going to pick up this.

When I have brought it home, I will show it to you

I speak!

The excellent on-line magazine Nextbook has quite a long audio interview with me on the subject of The Clothes On Their Backs

I am now firmly of the opinion that you get a far better deal and better service from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide Though charging in £s, they have several fulfilment centres in the US

A well-judged column

So rare that finds a really, really good writer about menswear. Harry has disappeared to his country retreat, so I am offering the position of locum menswear writer to Hardeep Singh Kohli. I wonder what he does with the rest of his time?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a well-made cotton drill sweat top as much as the next slightly overweight, amply-arsed man, but there is a time and a place for such frivolity. Perhaps I belong to another era - maybe the 1950s - but I do yearn for all men to enjoy the suit again, feel pride in their smartness and become elevated by elegance. It's time to promote the peacock and I am happy to be at the vanguard of the strutting. I have plenty of denim and trackwear but I'd rather been seen in a beautifully tailored, plum-coloured three-piece suit, a multi-stripe double-cuff shirt and an appropriately complementary tie. Upon my oversized, calloused feet I would have tasselled Bally loafers. I have even invested in half a dozen pouchettes and a handful of cravats, either or both of which I intend to coordinate with my turban. I will be embracing dandyism in every way possible.

Second place in the Karachi Bonniest Baby Contest

Last week I commended to your attention the weepingly funny account of author Imran Ahmad's trip to the Edinburgh International Book festival where he met Gordon Brown, while dressed in shorts.

Yesterday afternoon, in the the authors' yurt in Edinburgh, a pleasant man in a linen suit came over to introduce himself to me. This was Imran Ahmad in person. He had been deluged with visits to his blog from The Thoughtful Dresser, more he said, than from all the other sites put together.

He pressed into my hand a signed copy of his book Unimagined: A Muslim Boy Meets the West, which I read on the plane coming home. Later he would persuade Salman Rushdie to take a signed copy off his hands. And has the photographic evidence to prove it.

I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed this book, particularly his account of how he was robbed of the title of Karachi's Bonniest Baby by political corruption and nepotism. Here he is, pictured on the cover, in the contest.

Look, just go and buy it. It's the story of a Pakistani Muslim Adrian Mole. What's not to like? Eh?

UPDATE

Imran has updated his account of Edinburgh:

On Sunday morning, a quiet chap wandered into the Writers’ Yurt. I could see that he had no Festival ID and obviously wasn’t supposed to be in here – maybe another wannabe writer?

The Festival staff were all very busy, so gallantly I stepped in to deal with this situation, with my characteristic sensitivity and tact.

I shared with him some advice on writing and getting published; I gave him a signed copy of my book (so that he would gain an appreciation of the standard of writing which has to be attained in order to get published); I let him have his photo taken with me; and then I gently nudged him out of the Writers’ Yurt.

Although I am a successful internationally-published writer, I’m always ready to help aspiring writers on their long journey to some form of publication.

PLEASE NOTE: The Writers’ Yurt is strictly for invited writers, authorised Festival staff and nominated guests only (all to be wearing Festival IDs, unlike this gentleman).

Here's another bit:

I returned to the Festival on the weekend of 23-24 August, taking a train up to Edinburgh on Friday night.



At Kings Cross, there was a huge crowd waiting to board the train, but I was quite relaxed. This being the last train to Edinburgh on the Friday evening before a holiday weekend, I wouldn’t even contemplate this journey without a reserved seat in First Class.



The crowd surged forward as soon as the platform number was revealed, and I still got caught up in the herd mentality – even though I knew I had a comfortable seat waiting for me. I boarded the train and began to arrange my stuff around my seat (suitcase in the luggage rack, jacket on the overhead shelf, food bag at my feet, book on the table etc).



A man in the next carriage was yelling into his mobile phone. An attractive woman seated at the next table smiled at me, as we both realised we could hear a phone conversation taking place so far away.



“… THERE ISN’T A SINGLE UNRESERVED SEAT! …”



He was moving towards me …



“… THIS IS A COMPLETE TYPICAL F--- ING FIASCO! …”



He came into my carriage … He was a thin man, with very short, dark hair and wearing jeans and a t-shirt …



“… MY TICKET? IT’S A STANDARD SAVER RETURN …”



He sat down in the reserved seat opposite me (although a Standard Saver Return would not entitle him to a seat in First Class).



“… WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO F---- ING DO? …”



An elegant Japanese couple stood hesitantly alongside me, conferring together and looking back and forth between their tickets and the seats opposite me.



“May I see?” I asked them, and examined their seat reservations. “Will,” I said to the man on the phone, “these visitors to our country are waiting to take their seats.”



Studiously not acknowledging that he had heard me, Will Self moved off down the carriage, back in the direction he had come from – still yelling into his phone.



Later during the journey, I was unable to overcome my curiosity. I made the hazardous journey into Standard Class and down the length of the train, to find out what had happened. The aisles and connecting areas were strewn with people on the floor: reading, talking, sleeping and (in some cases) drinking far too much.



Eventually, I found him. He had a seat and was furiously scribbling notes and using a purple highlighter in a copy of Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’.

A curmudgeon writes

Norm goes shopping:

I will leave aside the fact that my body is always overcome by a draining fatigue the instant I arrive in this environment - a physiological phenomenon I have never been able to comprehend. And I will leave aside the puzzle that, on entering a large department store, the intending purchaser never arrives at the part of the store he (for he it is in this case) needs or wants; there are always floors to negotiate, by lift, stair or escalator, and then vast spaces to cross, as if shopping doubled as a training ground for long hiking expeditions. And I leave aside, too, that the air in such places is like a condensed falsehood all of itself. These obstacles and inconveniences I now know, in the light of much experience, I must expect.