Einstein on clothes

Dressed by mother

The world, or rather a highly exclusive part of it, had to come to Einstein if it wanted an audience. And come it did. The most famous names of the era, like Max Planck, Rabindranath Tagore, Heinrich Mann, Chaim Weizmann and Käthe Kollwitz, made the pilgrimage to Caputh to see Einstein, and some were shocked to find him warmly greeting them barefoot and in his sailing shirt. (When Elsa Einstein complained about his informality, Einstein said, "If they want to see me, here I am. If they want to see my clothes, they can look in my closet.")

From here via here

The Clothes On Their Backs: US publication

The Clothes On Their Backs will be published in the US by Scribner in February. I will be joining on that list Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, John Le Carre, Hanif Kureishi and up and coming writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Details of further international editions (Dutch and Czech rights have also been sold) are available here

India

And many more, here

I love Simon Doonan

I don't see how anybody could disagree with that statement. Here he is on his brilliant career:

But then Doonan, who is in his mid-50s, has long led a fabulous life. As a Reading boy turned window-dresser turned creative director of Barneys and celebrated newspaper columnist, he has documented many of his adventures in two memoirs, the second of which, Beautiful People, is the inspiration for a new television series. The book recounts Doonan's escape from Reading, accompanied by his best friend Biddie, in pursuit of the elusive beautiful people of London - and beyond. He says that the series has done "a magnificent job. They preserved a lot of essential elements, and the message of looking for the beautiful people, but here they are all along."

Doonan got his first sniff of the high life in John Lewis in Reading. This was a summer job taken after leaving the local cork factory, which, he says, "was hideous, because these insects used to crawl out of the cork, and I thought working in a shop would be better - you could get all dressed up and not get covered in insects". After university he returned to the store and contemplated his next move. "Biddie was in soft furnishings and I was in clocks and watches and we thought, we have to get the fuck out of Dodge."

Still, John Lewis had taught him a great deal and introduced him to the world of window-dressing. "I especially loved the dress fabric windows," he recalls with glee. "That's something you don't see much any more because people don't make their own clothes now, but back then they would have a birch log and a piece of fabric over it like that," he wafts his hands in the air, "and they would pull up each fabric like that, and nylon it so it was invisibly suspended. And then you'd throw a pair of pinking shears on the floor, and a little fan of patterns just to remind people what the hell it is they're supposed to be looking at. I wish we sold dress fabrics at Barneys so I could do that!"

To the floor, again

Looking at the SS09 shows, it's clear that the maxi dress continues for a third year. The maxi dresses which appeared on the runways the summer before last were too much like the maxi dresses of the 70s for me to feel comfortable wearing them a second time round, but this seasons they're evolving away from the frills and tiers. Here's Cavalli's take.

Interesting that as long makes a return in daywear it dies away in eveningwear