The Big issue - high heels

There has been so much discussion of the High Heels Question, that I want to keep it up on the front page for a bit longer.

There are some fascinating comments, including an attempt by a 23-year-old man to enter the debate with an observation on how male sexuality is manipulated by high heels and other womanly wiles (followed by a bit of slapping down.) Interesting stuff!

Step right this way to join the debate.

Dior

My piece on Dior is in the Telegraph today:

A snapshot of Christian Dior's plump face frozen in fright just before the first model girl sashayed on to his salon floor on 16 February 1947 shows the very moment that fashion history was about to be made. It is not always easy to pin down when something decisively changes, but Dior's first collection was one of those occasions when we can put a date and a place to a total alteration in fashion consciousness. The women in the audience at that first show sat on their gilt chairs dressed in square-shouldered, wartime suits with skimpy skirts. Five days later Nancy Mitford would write to her sister Diana Mosley that her life had been made a desert of gloom, for now all her clothes had been rendered, at a stroke, unwearable. She just had to have one of the new dresses with their tiny waists, narrow sloping shoulders and pavement-skimming skirts. Customers, she wrote, were fighting over them, and it was like a scene at a bargain-basement sale just trying to place an order.

Read on

Thought for the day

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork. Jonathan Swift