Bearing gifts

What words are there to describe a friend who brings to your publication dinner, as a celebratory gift, a pair of Prada shoes? Which fit.

Fit to wear Judy Garland's ruby slippers is what I would say about that friend

To the shops

The Guardian today has an extract from the imminently about to be published The Thoughtful Dresser - book:

My mother, who died at the age of 81 from a condition called vascular dementia, could not remember the beginning of a short sentence by the time she was approaching its conclusion, which more or less eliminated from her diminishing world the pleasures of conversation. In the last weeks of her life, the part of her brain that controlled language began to malfunction and she started to speak in weird phrases which, if you listened to them carefully enough, were made up of words and syllables from both English and Yiddish, her first language, which during the long years of her illness she appeared to have completely forgotten.

Her last full, coherent, grammatically intact message to the world was uttered to my sister: "I like your earrings." Her last words to me as mother to daughter, the person she knew to be her daughter and not merely someone she knew she knew, had been stated a few months earlier: "I don't like your hair."

But before she became immobilised by incontinence and other terrible afflictions, the one activity in which my mother was still capable of participating, heart and soul, with a fully functioning mind, was shopping for clothes. She would wander along the street crying and moaning, with me gripping her arm for fear she would fall into the traffic. Her own fate was terrible to her, and she knew it. Then we would get to the small clothing section of the Upper Street [Islington] branch of Marks & Spencer and her identity re-formed; she was a human being once again, capable of assessing the quality of knits and whether this season's hemlines were flattering on her small frame. The shopper's soul-shout, "I want!", raced through her bloodstream. Once, I pointed out that M&S had introduced a delivery service for certain postcodes. "Oh, yeah?" she said. "And you'll pay through the nose for it." But a second or two later she was grasping my arm and asking had I seen the sign that announced that M&S now delivered to certain postcodes.

I took her to buy an outfit for my sister's wedding. As soon as she had ascended the escalator she seized on a Ralph Lauren skirt and Jaeger blouse. She scurried around the store holding fabrics together, "because I've got to match the navy". She cried and stamped her foot when the blouse was too big in the collar, revealing her ruined neck. I understood for the first time that she always wore a little scarf not because her old bones were cold, but because she understood the feminine arts of concealment, how to cover and flatter. She had no intention of being mutton dressed as lamb.

The outfit, which I paid for, cost a bomb. In the taxi back to the home where my sister and I had incarcerated her against her will when she was considered no longer able to function alone, she held her shopping bags with a radiant face, looked at me, eyes milky with innocence and bewilderment. "How are we related?" she asked.

My mother shopped because shopping was what she did and what she was good at. She had an unerring capacity to enter any store and pick out the most expensive item in it; she had a fantastic eye. Even though she almost never had the money to buy the best thing in the shop, she knew what the best thing was, and following on from that, the calculations you needed to make in order to get as close to it as possible: such as when the sales started, or where you could get really good copies, or which secondhand shops had the kind of stock she was looking for.

She had, in other words, taste. And she learned her taste from a variety of sources, such as reading magazines and listening to friends' recommendations, but above all, she spent a great deal of time actually in the shops, looking at things and learning how to discern the good, the bad and the very best. Friends queued up to go shopping with her, for they knew she would take them to the right places and make them try on the things that she knew would suit them.

Poor her, running headlong into the 1960s and a daughter who deliberately frayed the hems of her jeans and wore a handbag made out of a bit of old carpet, instead of Young Jaeger. But, of course, all daughters eventually turn into their mothers, and she had encoded herself inside me already.

Most hostile responses to shopping see it as an act of acquisition, of avarice and greed for things that we do not need but advertising and marketing have made us think we want, a condition that Marx called "false consciousness". We are dupes, and only the strong individualist can hold out against mass consumption. And there are others, of course, who truthfully say that they have no political objection to shopping but they just can't stand it as an activity and regard it as a waste of time.

Against whom I would set those of us who regard it as a pleasure. What does this pleasure consist of, and why do others not experience it; why do they feel, instead, a sense of panic, overwhelmed by what they describe as "too much choice"? Why do I like looking at other people's gardens, while content to allow my own to degenerate into a badly designed, overgrown jungle of strangled plants and rapacious weeds? Because I can't be bothered going out there to do the work of making it bloom. I watch the flowers wither and die from lack of water, and mourn them. But if I wake up and know, at the moment of the mind streaming back from dark into light and consciousness, that what a new navy linen jacket needs is a scarf with a bit of red in it, then I will have ants in my pants until I can get to the shops to find that scarf.

Shopping. A gerund that did not exist before the middle of the 18th century because it did not exist in the way we understand it now. It involved the single revolutionary and emancipatory act of middle-class women with disposable income being able to leave the house. Before this, the goods, or the people who made them, came to the house, either the tailors and seamstresses or the pedlars who sold door-to-door to the poor.

read on

Catherine Hill: The clothes on her back

BBC Radio Four Woman's Hour today ran an interview with Catherine Hill, the chief interviewee in The Thoughtful Dresser (the book). You can listen to it online here

Catherine W. Hill is the doyenne of Canadian style. She set up and ran the influential boutique Chez Catherine in Toronto where she championed many Italian designers like Armani, Versace and Ferre at the beginning of their careers in the 70’s. Having survived Auschwitz and been amongst thousands of naked shivering women, Catherine has a deep understanding of our need to be clothed and our need for beauty. She believes her own desire to look pretty helped her survive the Holocaust. Jenni talks to her about the connections between her love of fashion and the concentration camp, and the therapeutic value of clothes in her life and the lives of women everywhere.
Linda Grant’s “The Thoughtful Dresser” which features Catherine’s story, is published by Virago on March 5th price £11.99, ISBN 9781844085569.

42 dresses with sleeves

At the Ossie Clark show yesterday morning. Sleeves. Sleeves. Yet more sleeves. Thank you.

Last night's Jaeger show

I managed to have quite a long talk with Karen Boyd, the Jaeger London designer, at the after-party last night, but such were the strength of the lychee and vodka cocktails, I can't really remember anything about it.

I imagine in the Autumn I'll be wearing this

The week ahead

We're coming up to publication of The Thoughtful Dresser which you can order from Amazon (see side panel) or if you're abroad, with free delivery worldwide from The Book Depository.

There will be an extract in the Guardian to which I'll give you the heads up once they've confirmed the day. On Wednesday, the book's chief interview will be appearing on Woman's Hour. Catherine Hill was seventeen when she was transported to Auschwitz with her parents who did not survive. She arrived in Canada as a refugee after the war and from the sixties built a career as the fashion maven of Toronto, famous for her Yorkville shop, Chez Catherine. She'll be appearing with me at an event in London at Jewish Book Week chaired by Linda Kelsley, a former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, (everyone welcome, even practising Wiccans). On Saturday I'll be at the Bath Festival taking about The Clothes On Their Backs. And there will be a second extract in the Guardian magazine.

The following Monday, March 2, I'll be on Start the Week and later that evening, Nightwaves. And sometime in the next few days you should actually be able to get the book.

Viral video of the week

Portfolio: an update

Yesterday I went in to Marks and Spencer's at their invitation to take a look at the Portfolio range for over 45s in the flesh, so to speak. At the Marble Arch store, there were some fabulous things: a Limited Edition tunic dress which looks as if it has missed its way en route to Net a Porter and several Autograph silk dresses and tops I loved.

But Portfolio. No. Not for me.

I looked around for the calf-length denim skirt but could not see it. And do you know why, ladies? Because it has sold out. Yes, the Portfolio range is massively popular and the denim skirt has flown off the rails. What does this tell us? It tells us that M&S is serving its customers. The one's who want affordable Marni look-alikes, and the ones who want to look like early 1980s geography teachers.

Across Britain there are tens of thousands of women who want to dress like frumps. Is this a crime? Personally, I think it should be, but I am an adamant supporter of freedom of expression, even when that freedom is the joy of beige.

I was taken upstairs to the press showroom and shown some of the next batch of stock and there were some big improvements, quite a few things I liked.

But I made the point as comprehensively as I could, that M&S like much of the rest of the high street is making far too many sleeveless dresses that rise above the knee. This will be passed on. We live in hope.

PS M&S also say that they now ship overseas.

The new curve

I notice that whereas fat women were once called fat (and many other things, as if being fat were something the Nuremberg laws should have dealt with) they are now referred to as women with curves. 'I am proud of my curves,' I read recently, of a woman with a big bum and bosom. I wonder if the hanging part of the upper arm can now be referred to as a curve?

Giorgio Armani has a blog!

Yes, it actually is him.

This morning, I was dressed in navy and ready to go at 7:40 a.m. I went straight to the store to check the L.E.D. lights that they had installed the night before over the entire exterior of the store. The lights are tiny dots that oscillate to create moving images on the surface, and I’m very pleased with the results. At 9 a.m., I headed up to 166th Street with Caroline Kennedy. It was the first time I’ve ever met her, and I found her to be very refined, with impeccable manners.

Riveting interview with Sonia Rykiel

Dotty and very, very smart.

Throughout our interview Rykiel refers to herself in the third person as “the creator”, alongside “the author”, “the poet” and “the painter,” Often incorporating words into her designs, she once told the International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes: “I feel more like a novelist than a fashion designer.”

Is there such a thing as intelligent fashion, I ask? “I don’t know,” she admits, touchingly. “All I can say is that it’s what I try to do. It doesn’t matter one damn bit whether fashion is art or not. You don’t question whether an incredible chef is an artist or not – his cakes are delicious and that’s all that matters. Fashion is there to serve a purpose.”

Just when you presume to think what Rykiel’s take on a certain subject is, she proves you wrong. When I ask whether celebrity came as an unwelcome partner to success, she shakes her head. “No, no. I wanted to be recognised – that really interested me. And as I’ve got older it means more and more to me, because celebrity is recognition of what I have achieved.

"This is an unbelievably difficult job and one I drain myself doing. They recently had a retrospective of my work here in Paris and I walked around it thinking that had it not been by me I would have been thinking: 'My God this woman is wonderful’.

Michelle Obama at New York Fashion Week

Michelle Obama's social secretary, Desiree Glapion Rogers, has been attending all the shows at fashion week, acording to Hillary Alexander.

Asked whether she was keeping an eye out for any designs which might be suitable for the First Lady, she smiled and gave me a big wink.

Ms Rogers, 49, a prominent Chicago businesswoman, is a close friend of the Obama family and was part of the campaign’s fundraising team. She was once married to the Chicago millionaire, John Rogers, and has a daughter studying at Yale.

Between the covers

The book of The Thoughtful Dresser will be published in two weeks. You can order it from Amazon (see side panel). The US edition will not appear for another year, I'm afraid, but if you're keen you can place international orders with The Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide. They have fulfilment centres globally and it's the best way to buy outside the UK. Click the link here to pre-order.

In which I am suddenly of interest

There are only three women in senior management positions on the British High street - Belinda Earl at Jaeger, Kate Bostock at M&S and Jane Shepherdson who joined Whistles from Top Shop. Shepherdson has engineered a buy-out from the Icelandic firm Baugur which hit the iceberg of the Icelandic financial collapse.

The under 25s with jobs and no mortgages, still living at home, continue to shop like it's 2005, but the over 40s are thinking much more carefully about how we spend, and it is to us that fashion is now looking. Shepherdson says:

"It's an exciting time. For years, there hasn't been anything to separate what 18-year-olds and 40-year-olds are wearing. We've all been buying the same things. But now there's a polarisation. There are things now that girls are wearing - like wet-look leggings - I couldn't possibly think of putting on. That's great, I think. Because what it's forced us to say is, what is anyone else going to wear?"
. . .
So what does a grown woman want? "It's the same, in a way," Shepherdson insists. "We want fashion. That isn't going to go away. We want to wake up and feel there's something new we want to wear. We don't want dumbed-down stuff. Classic, basic and understated is not the way through - if you look at something like that, you think 'No, I've already got it'. What you really need is something like a new silhouette to act on."

The day after Shepherdson sealed the new deal, she did what many women do when feeling good - she went shopping, bagging two pairs of Fendi shoes in a lunchtime. In fashion, the emotional and personal is also professional opportunity. "I love this obsession with shoes," she laughs, looking down at the pointy Chloé ankle boots she's wearing under Whistles jeans. "We haven't had a chance to get into it at Whistles, but we are soon. The thing is, you can wear quite plain clothes, but all you've got to do to make it sexy and glam is put on a fierce, aggressive pair of shoes and it completely modernises it. And I think that applies at whatever age."

I think she is right about one thing. If we are going to spend we want it to be special. No duplicates, few safe classics. No half-hearted purchases. You have to feel the love.

In the bleak midwinter

It's possible to go through life in complete ignorance of what others do in the privacy of their own homes, until you pick up a newspaper which alerts you to this

Patrica Field ad nauseam

Does Patricia Field have to style every fashion film?

Ossie Clark sale preview

Cocosa has a number of Ossie Clark items on sale at really good discounts of 50 per cent and up. Here's the dress I wore to the Booker (mine was in black and blue) reduced from £750 to £299 and the iconic blouse of this past season which the designer Avsh Alom gave me, reduced from £250 to £109.

You can join Cocosa if you haven't done already using this voucher. The sale opens noon, Monday.

Spring

The new Jaeger Spring-Summer collection has hit the shops. Yesterday I acquired the above items. I realise I keep banging on about this, but as I put them away, I understood how most of what I actually wear at the moment is Jaeger. The black and colour print top with black jeans. The cuff with an LBD. The broiderie anglais dress with my new Nicole Farhi shoes. But not the tie belt. It's an A line without it.

Glad to be grey

After widespread agreement yesterday that the new Marks and Spencer Portfolio range for women over the age of 45 is dire, I can't help but notice that some of the reviews of the actual clothes on the M&S site glow with approval.

Here is a woman from Lincoln on that denim skirt:

at last a denim skirt that fits. nice fit around the hips attractive plaited belt. comes in two lengths. the hem swings as you walk it made me feel 10 years younger and ready to dance. a must have for every girls wardrobe.

I can't help but notice that the writer signs herself 'frumpymama'. This raises a question. Do middle-aged women wear dreary clothes because they don't know better and the scales would fall from their eyes if you showed them Marc Jacobs, or do they actually like this sort of thing? Do they look in the mirror and think, This is fabulous. I look great.

Or is that they actively wish to buy and wear clothes which make them look anonymous, invisible and so blank they they are a grey mist in the air? And is that a bad thing? If that's want you want? I think it is a bad thing, but feel free to disagree.

Let them wear polyester

I have often thought that if there were a national referendum on whether to scrap either the Royal Family or Marks and Spencer's, it would be the tiaras and state banquet dinner services that the removal men would be wrapping up in tissue paper, not bundles of reasonably priced reinforced gusset knickers.

So much as I hate kicking M&S, (I am currently wearing a pair of their jeans) I cannot help agree with Sarah Mower's account of its new Portfolio range, aimed at the over-50s:

If there's one thing worse than mutton dressed as lamb, it's mutton dressed as mutton. I wanted to approve of M&S's Marie Helvin-promoted Portfolio range, but wild horses wouldn't drag me into that stuff. I just can't see how it's supposed to offer anything different from the rest of the M&S stock, and the attempt at "elegance" for the over-50s is worse than patronising.

What woman (of any age) could possibly want a pair of pull-on jersey bell-bottoms with gold "sailor" buttons? For a start, the shape is not fashionable in any sense. Second, the thought of what they would do to anyone's backside and thighs is enough to make one cry. And third… hang on, aren't these just souped-up versions of the synthetic slacks M&S has sold since time immemorial? I had a Saturday job in Bath's M&S as a schoolgirl, and I know of which I speak. At that age, I hoped someone would shoot me before I got old enough to need flared crimplene bottoms.