I dreamed a dream: on the limitations of appearance

I'm sure that there are many readers of this site who are better dressed than Susan Boyle, better looking, with better figures and more lively romantic histories. And perhaps you too (I know I do) long to step in front of Simon Cowell and belt out a number that would cause his jaw to drop. But in my case that will never happen. It will not happen because however much I dream that dream, however much I spend on the right dress, however much botox I had, I can't sing, and Susan Boyle can.

I now read that Piers Morgan is now planning to take her on her first ever date. Can no gallant man offer himself, in Morgan's place? George Clooney, please step up.

Patrica Field ad nauseam

Does Patricia Field have to style every fashion film?

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.

As we all thought

Sceptics of the harem pants point is proved

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.

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.

Pixel by pixel

I have a subscription to Vanity Fair and when it arrived yesterday I was a bit baffled as to why they had printed some ancient photos of Catherine Deneuve and Sharon Stone.

But it turns out to be Kate Winslet. I might as well just buy my own version of photoshop, take some pix of myself with my mobile, send them out to the media and never leave the house. Yes, I actually do look like Bianca Jagger in her 20s, of course I do.

** The shoes in the picture are the ones Avsh Alom Gur gave me for the Booker which I couldn't walk in.

What the guru wears

The woman who taught McQueen

And while Wilson is undoubtedly a daunting presence, it's not because of the chic glossiness you might expect from someone so revered in the fashion world. Dressed in her uniform of plain black top and skirt (she refuses to mention designer names), she is matter-of-fact and decidedly unshowy: 'I wear black, because I'm a large lady, and I have many exact replicas of the same black outfit. I'm normally so dismissive and bitchy about my students' work, so if I always wear the same thing I kind of dissolve. I'm not putting myself in the firing line,' she booms, her comments loud, quick and fiery with expletives.

Off piste, off trend

I suppose it must be the economy, but equally I think it's fashion's own desperation and exhaustion: I am truly bored with 'trends.'

Here's the Guardian with a list of what we're to expect:

Strong-shouldered jackets
Massive shoulders at shows like Balmain mean the style will last way into 2009.

Skin-tight trousers
This silhouette rules for next season - bodysuits at Jil Sander and Balenciaga, and tight pants at Givenchy.

Painful shoes
If your heels are huge, like the YSL Tribute boots, then a scrum will form around you, looking for the sort of killer shoes that saw models tumble at Prada.

No bag
When Carine Roitfeld began arriving at the shows carrying her phone and nothing else, the big-bag trend was over. If you must have a bag, then make it a clutch, like those that were just seen at Balenciaga.

I am going to be following none of these. I was at L.K Bennett yesterday taking back the shoes which Av had deemed not right for my dress and I was only offered an exchange or credit note. It was a real struggle to find any non-stilettos (I don't wear flats) and in the end found a pair of square-toed purple patent pumps with a stacked heel. When I got home there was an email from a fashion editor friend telling me her day-in-day-out shoes are stacked heel platforms by Stewart Weitzman from Russell and Bromley. So even the fashion editors aren't wearing these sky high shoes. Walking through Hanover Square yesterday I saw three young women who were; they were chatting on the windy street before turning and trooping painfully back into Vogue House, headquarters of Conde Nast. Their bosses know better.

I confess I have been on a buying spree lately and this must be the last gasp before the retail economy contracts and we start to see bankruptcies. I bought a scarf and a necklace yesterday. I could still be wearing them at 80 and might have to.

We know there must be fashion even in a slump. That's what fashion is, that's what fashion does, it rises above. One of my favourite films is Preston Sturges Sullivan's Travels, about the necessity of laughter. But fashion needs to remember that in a depression we're all going to need cheering up, and art school clothes that belong in an art installation, self-referential and ultimately quite boring, are literally museum pieces.

What men want

Best to stay away from very sharp knives

From Giles Coren and others:

Also, I want a woman who is prepared to admit that what she wants from a man is a big c*** and a lot of money. I am fed up with women always claiming that what they find most sexy is a sense of humour. Because it isn’t true. I know this because I am hilarious. Way more funny than most of the slack-arsed, car-obsessed, office wonk baldies you’ll meet in a wine bar on a Friday night, and yet I practically never get laid. If it were true that women are turned on by a man who makes them laugh, Woody Allen wouldn’t have had to marry his own daughter.

As for a woman with a sense of humour, that’s fine, as long as it simply means that she will laugh at my jokes. Most women only laugh at their own jokes. Shut up. If you say something funny, I’ll let you know. And don’t give me “career”. Only women have “careers”. Men have jobs, to get money, and if we could stop and have babies while someone else earned the loot, believe me, we would. We don’t need a “career” to feel validated. We don’t want to feel validated. We just want to feel boobs. As many as possible. And then, at the last minute, quickly have babies and then die.

I've got nothing to wear corner

The Guardian's women's page editor, Kira Cochrane, has been monitoring the process of her slow weightloss. She has not weighed herself but used her own clothes to work out if she's heading in the right direction. Now she's down to UK size 16, US 12, she has discovered that she can't find anything to buy in the shops:

The reality is that as you get bigger, your clothing options get much, much smaller. Once you reach a size 16 or more, buying brilliant - or even just marginally attractive - clothes on the high street is markedly more difficult. This is ridiculous. Just because you've gained a few pounds, it doesn't mean that you're any less likely to want clothes that are colourful, exciting, flattering - in fact, buying fantastic clothes that boost your confidence becomes even more of a necessity in the face of rampant anti-fat sentiment. What you're too often faced with is a mountain of frump and I'm convinced that someone could make an absolute killing by setting up a boutique selling clothes in size 16 and above by cutting-edge young designers. There are those who argue that fat people should be stigmatised, that by offering them nothing but ugly tents to wear, they're more likely to lose weight. Actually, the opposite is true. Deprived of easy access to threads that make you feel presentable, finding solace in the fridge is the obvious next step.

Fat or unfashionable?

Jess Cartner-Morley in the Guardian asks, I assume rhetorically of the new peg leg trousers:

In my ignorance, I initially dismissed the look as an unflattering trouser shape that would never catch on. The second time I saw it, I suspected it was a ruse to quieten the size-zero debate by making models look twice as broad as they are. But the third time I saw it, I had to accept it was a trend.

Ever since, I have been dreading the day I would have to write about peg-leg trousers. For photographic purposes I have wimped out of the cutting-edge version of the look, in which the trousers are the same shape but lopped off above the ankle, in favour of a more forgiving, ankle-length pair, but still. The brutal truth is that unless you are blessed with long legs and a tiny waist, they do you no favours. Yet the peg leg is indisputably the on-trend trouser shape of the season. So we are faced with a stark choice: to look fat or unfashionable?

Come again?

Can anyone explain the link between the following two paragraphs from the usually accurate Lisa Armstrong?

Trousers. They’ll be everywhere – and not just the old fall-backs of jeans, straightlegs and drainpipes. The tailored trouser is back. The most modish are high-waisted, short-legged (they stop at the ankle – it’s a must) and need to be worn with heels and neat, tucked-in tops. YSL’s are the template, but Gap will have good versions, so will Joanna Sykes at Matches and, under the expert eye of Jane Shepherdson, the new, rebranded Whistles should be your first port of call. These are worth stalking, I promise.

For the first time in ages, we have genuine fashion statements that flatter pear shapes. Time to stock up.

More Croc evil

Once the anti-smoking message took hold in the West, the tobacco industry had to find new markets for its products and aggressively sought out the Third World, creating an evil addiction where none has existed before.

Similarly, a sharp downturn in the US sale of Crocs, has led their manufacturers to look elsewhere for sales:

Shares in the shoes' Colorado-based manufacturer plunged by as much as 47% at one point yesterday as the company warned that its sales were likely to be lower this year than last.

Crocs chief executive, Ron Snyder, blamed economic conditions: "We are obviously disappointed with the economic situation in the US and part of Europe, however we remain confident about the long-term prospects."

Crocs had been aiming for second-quarter sales of between $247m and $258m (£130m). According its new forecast, it will only make $218m to $223m. To cope with slowing demand, it is closing a factory in Canada.

Snyder said there were plenty of countries where Crocs were gaining ground and vowed to press ahead with global advertising to build the brand. "We believe many of our markets are under-penetrated and should provide meaningful growth opportunities for our products well into the future."

One day, the floor of the rainforest will be bright with discarded plastic shoes.

The woman who spent £3000 to get a flat stomach . . . read on

from the Times

I remembered an article I had read by a journalist whose similarly stubborn belly was “melted away” by Smartlipo; she'd had it done in the lunch-hour in New York. Two weeks later, she wrote, she was patting her “concave” belly and flaunting herself in a new bikini. After a week's deliberation I booked a consultation at a private clinic in London, one of the top British places for Smartlipo. While waiting for my consultation I was handed a cuttings book full of similar testimonials. It was going to cost £3,000, but even before I saw the expert, I was sold. Yippee, I thought, I'm on my way to a concave belly.
. . .

One would have thought that after not one but two sessions of Smartlipo, and fat removal, my stomach would resemble Keira Knightley's. Alas, no. Perhaps it is my age. Perhaps it is my lifestyle. You know how debauched journalists are. Well, maybe, but I spent six months training for, and ran, the London Marathon this year. In under four hours.

What a silly waste of money

Perhaps it is my genes. Anyway, what a silly waste of money; and what a potential risk, having an intrusive procedure done to my healthy body that was deemed necessary because I deemed it thus. I put the experience behind me and resigned myself to loving my tummy. Then I went on a press trip to St Tropez, where, lo and behold, I bumped into the journalist who had written the original Smartlipo testimony that had so encouraged me. And do you know what, she wasn't wearing a bikini.

“Oh, Smartlipo! It didn't work for me either,” she laughed. After I had picked myself off the floor, I asked her what she would suggest instead of Smartlipo. “There are cheaper, less invasive ways of getting a flat stomach. Do Pilates and yoga, and stop eating so much sugar and drinking so much. Then spend the £3,000 on a holiday!”

Harry examines men in flip flops

Harry Fenton, the Sharp Dressed Man, discusses the Male City Flip-Flop:

You’re not at the beach. So why are you wearing flip –flops?

I don’t actually say this, of course, but kind of want to when I see a would be modish youth on a mission on the streets of London. I don’t have any problems with the retro T shirt. Nor the ironic vinyl shoulder bag. And it’s their choice to wear downright ugly sunglasses. But flip flops?

Ok, the sun may have come out. It may actually be hot. But the city is not the beach. Sometime in recent years street smart became street casual. It then osmosed into downright scruffy. And from there it has spawned a sort of ‘I’m so laid back it’s like I’m on holiday, man’ look.

Just so wrong. Mens’ feet are ugly. They will get dirty in the city. Flip flops just have to be a health hazard on public transport. Or even crossing the road. And they look just plain stupid.

Don’t they have friends to point this out to them?

‘Beneath the pavement is the beach’: one of the more lyrical 1968 Situationist slogans in Paris. The classic Situationist text is, of course, The Revolution of Everyday Life. But I don’t think wearing flip flops is the kind of revolution Raoul Vaneigem* had in mind. ( But, hey, I might be wrong)

* [Me neither, LG]

Useful idiots

A man I know, a man not unknown to military manoeuvres on the battlefield, a man who, in fact received a battlefield promotion during the Yom Kippur War, tells me that he too has moths in his house.

His moths are on the lower level, and he says that to ensure that they do not ascend the stairs and eat his Gieves and Hawkes jackets, he has given them a small carpet to eat.

For if we give Germany Czechoslovakia and Poland, they'll leave France alone, won't they?

Don't

Pale denim is back. This is what it will look like on you.

Darling, to die for

A journalist once said to me, apropos of a certain features editor on a paper that shall remain nalmeess, 'X's idea of a perfect story is, Elizabeth Hurley - has she had too much media attention?'

But with interviews like this, what can you do, what can you do?

Hurley herself is apparently looking forward to the moment she never has to pose in a bikini again (although one fashion editor reports, “She is very confident in her body – I turned around and suddenly she was naked”). “Shooting bikinis is now my life, which, as you can imagine, is unmitigated hell,” she says, in her golly-gosh diction, which is peppered with words like “unpleasant-making” and “jolly”. “I can’t think of anything worse in the world than another bikini shoot – and I’ve got two next month. It’s unbearable, and I bring it all on myself. I’ve got nobody else to blame. It’s literallah torture. If you get a photographer you don’t know, of course, you think, ‘Oh God.’ But if you signed on for the gig, sadly, you have to go and be jolly in a skimpy white bikini. So I now rely on nice photographers, and a bit of retouching.”

Ah, yes, digital retouching. “I like a certain amount of retouching, like anybody,” she admits cautiously. “We all like to get rid of spots and shadows under our eyes. I’ve always been quite particular – I don’t like my face to be retouched. Often, people will want to correct one’s face, and with me, they always want to change my nose” – she squishes it – “and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, I can’t look like that. I don’t mind if you want to make me a bit thinner and a bit younger, but you can’t give me a different jaw or eyebrows.’ But the vanity retouching – well, who wouldn’t?”

Hilariously, Hurley’s retouching habit extends to her holiday photos. “I don’t have professional Photoshop, just the one that comes with your camera,” she says. “Every time I download my holiday snaps” – she lowers her voice for effect – “I always go over them. Just the red eye and colour enhancement. I don’t do any slimming, because you need a silly programme, but the colour enhancing is heaven.”

Smocks - what are they good for?

I nipped down to Jaeger this morning to try on this top, thinking that I might be in need of a cool loose top on my travels.

Who exactly do smocks suit? Not me, and not most of the Jaeger customers, according to the intelligent and helpful saleswoman. 'Most of our ladies find that smocks make them look quite big,' she said.

I went to Cos and found a rather good navy coat, which I'll be travelling in. Click on the hyperlink and check out their SS08 collection on the video. Cos, for my American readers, is the upmarket arm of H&M, only available in the UK, Belgium, Germany and Denmark. Ha! And soon we'll have Banana Republic (20 March) and if ever we get Zappos, that'll be the end of those New York shopping weekends.