Technical problems

I can't work out what has happened to the lovely picture of a pensive Coco Chanel which should appear at the top of the page and is horizontally squeezed right now. I shall look into matters further when I have more time.

Lingerie again

Many thanks to all of you wrote about your appreciation of the half slip. The industry has been fixated in the past few years with the changing shape of knickers - bikini to boy-short, not to mention control pants (what our mothers called 'roll ons,' 'foundation garments', or, bluntly, corsets.) But I'm inclined to think that we are in for a revival of the slip, which I have hitherto regarded as old lady wear. I suppose young women abandoned them in the Sixties because the ones on offer were too long to wear under a mini-skirt, and the whole point of clothes when you are 20 is how quickly you could get out of them.

The vest has been revived, in different form, those garments I wear under a top that's too low-cut or see-through for my taste. I had a look at Figleaves (see ad on the left) and they have lots of full-length slips which they call chemises, but no half-slips, apart from a couple of Spanx control ones. I wore the Vanessa Bruno dress with the half-slip last night, and it worked like a dream. So I'm even thinking along full slip lines now. Sleek 'n Chic offers vintage lingerie, but not sure if it's pre-worn. Yuck.

Thought for the day

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of our arm and breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. Virginia Woolf