The etiquette of gentlemen's snow wear

Watching the news last night, I could not help but notice that every single reporter standing in the snow reporting on wrecked cars/stranded commuters/snowmen were wearing a Michelin Man jacket with the words the North Face embroidered in the breast. A brand new to me (I have a Nicole Farhi shearling) - do they show in New York or Milan?

Meanwhile in this little BFI film from the snowy winter of 1963, we see a steam train set out alone the English landscape as it were en route from Moscow to Novosibirsk. Tough navvies clear the snow from the tracks wearing what appear to be tweed jackets, caps, mufflers and in one case, the hint of a tie. And bare hands. The train driver, obviously, wears a tie, as do the passengers.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

North London goes for a minimalist palette

UPDATE
This is so exciting. The most snow we have had for 18 years in London and it is still snowing. There are no buses and not much underground service either, and our London parks are full of people tobogganing.

This evening there will be an all-comers snowball fight in Trafalgar Square

In Regent's Park

Cue Dallas theme tune

How to dress for the Eighties revival, god help us. Advice from Sam Fox

Everything was big - the jewellery, the shoulder pads, the hair. Everybody had a perm, and then you put rollers in to make it even bigger. There was a hairspray called Hard Rock - your hair didn't move for three days.

The makeup was quite ghastly - blue eye shadow and dark lip-liner with a paler lipstick, really Jodie Marsh - so I tried to tone it down and went big on hair and accessories. Butler & Wilson was where we all used to go for jewellery. For a dress for a night out, it was all sequins, very Dynasty. Jumpsuits were a great look, especially for women who wanted to hide a bit of a bulge.

We wore a lot of ripped denim. You ripped your own. On the cover of Touch Me, my first single, I didn't want to show my boobs because I had just finished being a page 3 girl. My mum and I came up with the idea of ripping a hole in the bum of my jeans. It was just a bit cheeky, you know? I also used to like wearing a denim jacket with lots of bling on it, which me and my mum also made - my auntie had just died and we took her old crystal jewels and sewed them on. You would wear ripped denim with Converse trainers. They're huge again now, aren't they? It's almost as if I could go into the attic and dig everything out again, though it might be a bit mouldy.

'I drew in Dior'

Katherine Whitehorn was the journalist who inspired me to be a journalist, when I was a teenager in the Sixties. Stylish, witty and intelligent, she was the model career woman.

Here she is returning to the Paris collections after a first visit in 1956 and recording the differences:

But just about everything else has changed since I was the Observer's fashion editor in the very early 1960s - let alone when I was flung into the job of covering the collections for Picture Post in 1956 because the only other girl on the magazine had left for the south of France with the sacked editor. Last week I was in Paris with the Observer's fashion editor, Jo Jones, and her deputy, Helen Seamons, to gawp and report on how different things have become.

The shows aren't, for a start, held in the same places. No more the silky, scented salons of the couture houses themselves, but an outside venue, which can be Lacroix on the entire ground floor of the Pompidou Centre (looks like a disused factory), or a vast black marquee in the grounds of the Musée Rodin (Dior), holding at least a thousand people sitting in stands as if watching football, the models emerging from a translucent wall like a medieval stained-glass window, with the "Raindrop Prelude" belting out at a volume loud enough to be the Hailstone Prelude. Or a huge room (Chanel) rumoured to have once been a bank, beautifully decorated with paper flowers, entirely in white, to look like the fairytale palace of the Snow Queen.

The models were always beautiful, but there are differences. Today's girls work for lots of houses, sometimes several shows in a day, up to 30 of them walking swiftly by in teetering shoes; they have to be more or less interchangeable, girls and clothes much the same size - which is nine feet high and four inches wide, with expressions that are always stonefaced and frequently sour. Models were always aloof, of course, but in Lanvin and Nina Ricci they were even sometimes allowed to smile. Back then they mostly worked for an individual designer and for far longer, not just the one show, and changed frantically in the cabine from one outfit to another. I remember Pierre Balmain praising one with pale hair and a white skin. "She is colourless!" he said - so he could design for her as on a blank sheet.

One difference that struck me right away was that everyone was taking photographs - not just a heaving bank of mostly male photographers at one end, looking like something out of Brueghel, but everyone else on their mobiles. In my day the couture houses were paranoid about secrecy, about the fear of being copied - which they constantly were, of course. You weren't even allowed to sketch, let alone photograph - one of my friends was barred from all the shows for doing so. "I drew in Dior," she wept. Which didn't stop commercial buyers having someone with a photographic memory race back to his hotel room and frantically draw - and I suppose I can admit, after 50 years, that once when I was stuck a friendly fashion chain let me have some of such pirated sketches for the Observer. There were embargoes and release dates, and magazines weren't even allowed to photograph the models until weeks after the shows; you had to choose the girls, choose the clothes and then come back for the actual photo shoot.

The endless moment

I sometimes think that fashion only has two moments, endlessly copied: court of Marie Antoinette and Thirties film star:

Here are both in Lacroix's couture show this week.

Men prepare to grab that all-important bargain at the sales

On the catwalk

Ines de la Fressange, aged 51, on the catwalk for Jean-Paul Gaultier at the Paris Couture collections.

Fashion models “are not just 14-year-olds,” Mr. Gaultier said later. “There are no [age] barriers to beauty.” The French designer explained that the curvy Ms. de la Fressange embodied the sexuality demanded his raunchy Spanish themed show, which also featured high-waisted pinstripe pants for women, suspenders and elbow-length gloves.

Ines' curves and mine are slightly different in scale.

Several things

NPR's All Things Considered had a rather good review of The Clothes on Their Backs, yesterday afternoon. It's only a couple of minutes, you can listen online

In the US Scribner will be publishing The Thoughtful Dresser, (the book) but not until next year, so if you are in the US and can't wait, you can order from UK amazon (see link at the side) or The Book Depository which offers free shipping but for some reason does not allow pre-orders (the £ by the way is pitifully low against the $ at the moment, around 1.42, so I'd doubt if you would save anything by waiting).

I will be doing an event at Jewish Book Week on The Thoughtful Dresser (the book, see side panel) in the company of the book's main interviewee, Catherine Hill, who survived Auschwitz to become the doyenne of Toronto fashion. She is coming over to London specially for this event, which will be chaired by Linda Kelsey, former editor of Cosmpolitan. You don't have to be Jewish to attend and it would be very nice to meet some of the regular readers in person. The event is at 7pm on Thursday 26 February. Tickets are £8 and you can book here

The self-making jeans

Balmain has produced a pair of jeans which cost £1059 - there they are, above. Here's Sarah Mower offering Balmain's explanation of the art of making distressed jeans.

Take two: Monday morning and I find myself at Alexis Mabille's show in Paris, sitting next to a woman in a Balmain tennis-ball shouldered jacket and faded black skinny jeans. She is the beautiful, cool, 30-something Emmanuelle Alt, a French Vogue stylist who is the muse-consultant to Christophe Decarnin, Balmain's man of the moment.

I ask her about the recession-defying price of the hit house denim. "Oh, yes, they are so expensive," she agrees, but goes on to explain that they're all hand-made and every last rip is finished in the atelier. "There are so many processes, the dyeing, the washing, the fraying." All this could be done at a fraction of the cost in China. "But, you know, it is all made in France." (Note to the outraged: can keeping skilled workers in Europe in employment be a bad thing?)

Then the big question jumped out of my mouth: what jeans was she wearing? I'm sure Alt has plenty of Balmain denim at her disposal, but that wasn't what she had on the other morning. " Oh, Topshop," she shrugged. "Really old."

I looked over and noticed they were developing a little hole above the knee.

How to play a Hollywood Nazi

Not like this (above)





Like this

And utterly irrelevant

Tuesday lunchtime: post of no consequence

Hussein Chalayan at the Design Museum

I went to the Hussein Chalayan show at the Design Museum last week, as part of a repetore of five arts related openings for the BBC's saturday review show. It helped ameliorate the rage of watching Tom Cruise cast as a Nazi in Valkyrie (great story, shame about the casting, script and direction) . My fellow panellists agreed that the Chalayan show was a blast of fresh air from the future. Indeed it was a futuristic show.

Chalayan says his influences are migration, that sort of thing, not making beautiful frocks for averagely endowed women. He's really an installation/performance artist. Yet once you have gawped at the dress with lasers, you can't help but notice that he also produces lovely wearable clothes.

The American church hat

Vicki Woods ponders the church hat. On Sundays in London we see many elderly black women on their way to church in hats, making a pleasant contrast with the ubiquitous weekend leisurewear all around

I'd forgotten there is a demographic of hatty people in America – millions strong. The matriarchs who pack out the gospel churches always wear the full fig (hats, gloves, best coats). And, of course, it was a church hat Franklin wore, out of R-E-S-P-E-C-T for a pretty churchy occasion.

So, I was wrong about the absence of milliners. The Queen of Soul is from Detroit; and so is her hatter Luke Song, who runs the business (started by his Korean-immigrant mother) for a clientele of "90 per cent churchgoing African-American women". He made Aretha's grey felt cloche with the hugely oversized bow for about $400 (£290); I thought she looked fabulous in it and I wasn't alone. Almost as soon as My Country 'Tis of Thee died away, Song was hit by a Diana wedding-dress-style tsunami and he's rushing out lookalikes (for $179) and buying up all the felt he can find. He told the Detroit Free Press that, "people are calling from England, asking for the hat, I'm shocked".

I'm mildly shocked, myself. We have the world's most fashionable hatters (Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy.) There's no call to start Googling "detroit hat aretha" in search of gala headgear, when people can pick up hats influenced by these brilliant milliners in any high street. (The Princess Royal bought her Queen Mother funeral hat in Debenhams.)

Alas, Aretha Franklin, at nearly 70, is not of an age to start a trend among young London fashionables for splashy over-sized church hats (more's the pity). Young women in this country don't wear hats any more, unless forced to by protocol. Even then, they prefer "fascinators", which are basically exaggerated hairslides with feathers, worn tipped over one ear. But Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy make those, too.

125 years of Jaeger

Here's my piece in the Telegraph on Jaeger's 125th anniversary

Jaeger was for women who wanted sophisticated, quality clothes – the tweed suit and little black dress – but who could not afford to go to Paris. Its flagship store on Regent Street, opened in the 1930s, was a cathedral of plate glass and chrome modernism. Like Viyella and Windsmoor, it occupied a middle-class niche. The ideal customer was the wife of a home-counties stockbroker. Self-made men and their spouses (like my parents) aspired to Jaeger, the next best thing to a Savile Row suit. From 1956, when Jean Muir joined the company, the label started to attract a younger clientele. Muir was one of several British contemporaries, including Mary Quant, who were beginning to move away from Parisian couture towards what would become the archetypal British fashions of the 1960s, more casual and more geared to what was then called 'sportswear’.

As a teenager in the 1960s I was caught between Carnaby Street and Jaeger’s innovative label, Young Jaeger. My mother was always guiding me into its Liverpool branch offering to pay for separates modelled in the advertisements by Jean Shrimpton and photographed by David Bailey. They were urban and chic, more Yves Saint Laurent than Granny Takes a Trip, an antidote in her mind to the hippie excesses of the velvet bell-bottoms and Afghan coats I was wearing. Young Jaeger, she believed, would put me on the path to adult smartness. And it was difficult not to covet Jaeger in the 1960s because it gave provincial young women (and men) a scent of sophistication.

Some women

The Guardian has a slideshow of Obama's women. Above is Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor. There's nothing I like more than seeing a woman who looks like she's been round the block a few times, giving powerful men a piece of her mind.

Change from top to bottom

I was impressed by Hillary's first appearance as Secretary of State and particularly with the appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East. Drinking in every word of his speech, particularly this:

"Conflicts are created, conducted and sustained by human beings - they can be ended by human beings. I saw it happen in Northern Ireland," he said.

"I believe deeply that with committed and persevering, patient diplomacy it can happen in the Middle East."

While listening attentively to the briefing on CNN, which also appointed Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, I noticed two things - the number of times all parties used the word diplomacy, and um, Hillary's very very good hair colour.

In the hand

At both the Booker and the South Bank Show awards, I carried a loaned sample Anya Hindmarch Pipkin from the SS09 range. It come in gold, silver, black and white and I have the gold on order.

I'm not normally a fan of the clutch but with evening wear, there's something about a tote or a shoulder bag that looks wrong. You need to learn to clamp under the arm.

Now here we have an outfit

I was completely unaware until this morning that amongst Michelle Obama's cousins there is a rabbi

And his everyday workwear takes some beating, let alone what he wore to the inauguration

And so we turn to the junior members of the party

You can't get the coats just yet. The double-breasted blue coat Malia wore, and the light pink one Sasha wore, both accessoried with satin and velvet ribbons tied around the waist, were specially designed for the girls by the American chain J Crew. This company has been a favourite with Michelle Obama - the green leather gloves she wore to keep out the Washington cold were also from the label. In the week it was revealed that Sarah Palin had been given a $150,000 wardrobe budget for campaign outfits, Michelle appeared on Jay Leno's show in an outfit from J Crew, thereby endearing herself to millions of Americans with her choice of safe but stylish - and, crucially, affordable - clothes. The company says that "highlights" from the girls' outfits will be available in its 2009 autumn collection.
Emine Saner

Malia looks like she's ready to set the world on fire already, and she's only ten.