A small but important addition

To my very small blog roll I have added the site of my friend Lisa Goldman. The Thoughtful Dresser is not a political blog but from time to time it does reflect some of my wider interests. Lisa is a Vancouver-born Canadian-Israeli journalist, now based in Tel Aviv. Building up to the summer of 2006 she worked to make contact with bloggers on the other side of the sealed border with Lebanon. When the war started and the bombs fell she insisted on doing everything she could to maintain contact with the ordinary individuals, bloggers and journalists like herself, who were supposed to be her enemies. She insisted on not accepting the demonisation and dehumanisation which is a characteristic of this conflict. She embodies for me the quote from Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, on the sidebar (a book which at some point I will write more of): 'The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and his right to these peculiarities.'

Prohibited from entering Lebanon because she holds, in addition to her Canadian passport, an Israeli one, she nevertheless went there this summer. The discovery, after she left, prompted a scathing editorial in the Beirut Daily Star accusing her of being a spy. The hundreds of emails and comments she received from Lebanese civilians thanking her for her visit, proves Grossman's maxim.

There are evil people in the world, but most of us merely struggle from day to day to find joy in whatever interests us, in love in friendship, in clothes or football. Flawed and often failing, we must nevertheless do what we can to live our lives in the circumstances, societies and political systems in which we find ourselves and sometimes we must struggle to change what is intolerable about those societies and systems. But mostly, we just live. And being alive is a unique wonder of its own.

Thought for the day

Now I'm trying to decide: Do I care more about clothing or about literature? There isn't any great difference. I respect clothing because it is literature. Wayne Koestenbaum

If you can't go shopping then read about shopping

In The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping which has arrived in the post today from my publisher. It contains, amongst many literary treats, an extract from my family memoir, Remind Me Who I Am Again, about a shopping trip with my mother when she was unable to remember who I was or how we were related but still managed to pick out a Ralph Lauren suit for herself.

Guilt

There is currently a riveting discussion on BBC Radio Four's In Our Time series about guilt* and particularly the difference between guilt cultures and shame cultures, which some say has a bearing on contemporary political disputes, particularly in the Middle East. The concept of honour and shame, in fact was a characteristic of much of the past European millenimum, particularly amongst the English upper classes, but was much pretty much left for dead on the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendale. Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori. You can hear it on the listen again link on the site or download a podcast.

* How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? None, I'll just sit here alone the dark

What do these three men have in common?

A few years ago, I was having lunch at Moro in Clerkenwell Market with the then women's page editor of the Guardian. Sitting at the next table were a group of adoring acolytes hanging on the every word of a flat bloke with a blonde bristly head like a pig, dressed in combats encasing thighs which oozed like over-ripe Camembert sluggishly running off the edge of his chair.

That, said my lunch companion, is Alexander McQueen.

And a spasm of pure rage passed through me. Who was this fat bastard to tell women that they were obese if they couldn't fit into a size 10? To make clothes that half the population couldn't wear? I am tired of fat men telling non-skeletal women that they don't exist. Granted, McQueen, like Lagerfeld, with the assistance of the finest trainers money can buy and no obligation to prepare family meals three times a day, have slimmed down, or in the case of Lagerfeld, turned himself into his own corpse, but fashion is full of fat men (sorry Alber, I really love you in every other way) giving normal-sized women an inferiority complex.

I had my picture take a couple of weeks ago to go with a magazine piece I'm doing . There was a photographer, a picture editor, a make-up artist and the manager of Hobbs all involved in this operation, and after the make-up artist had bemoaned that she couldn't find a pair of trousers to fit her in Zara, the photographer said that one her friends was a plus-sized model. 'What's plus size?' I asked. It's size 12 (US8) she told me.

Myself, I'd put every man in fashion who weighs over 150 pounds on the Atkins diet. And don't come back until you can fit into skinny jeans.

Happy birthday John

John is my brother-in-law and no, he isn't either of the two gents on the left.

Reader, she married him, in Vera Wang

I have always been interested in clothes, but only in the past few years have I actually begun to think about them, in a serious way. It all started with this piece in UK Vogue, which I wrote in 2004. Vogue doesn't put any of its features online so I've been waiting since this blog began for my webmeister to turn the text that's stored on my computer into a PDF and then a link. And here it is.

It's about how clothes have been treated by literature, though the ages, from Chaucer (enthusiastically) through Jane Austen (with disdain) to Proust (love and reverence) to Judith Krantz (max out your cards). I'm looking at how an author uses clothes to delineate character:

What did Hamlet wear? Black. And the Wife of Bath, riding to Canterbury? Red stockings and new shoes. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa? A pale primrose morning gown, with a recurring silver and gold pattern of violets, accessorised with diamond earrings, blue satin buckled shoes and black velvet gloves. Proust’s Duchess? The first Fortuny dresses. Jane Eyre? Black and pearl grey silk, despite Mr Rochester’s insistence that should take the pink satin, which made her feel like a houri in a Turk’s seraglio.

Read on

Thought for the day

'When I see people dressed in hideous clothes that look all wrong on them, I try to imagine the moment when they were buying them and thought, "This is great. I like it. I'll take it."' Andy Warhol

Liverpool

George Szirtes has written a lengthy interview with me in a new book just out, Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews.

Liverpool, my home town and a significant influence on my ideas as a writer, is 2008's European Capital of Culture. You can find more of my views on it here

Welcome to Bag Snob readers

My friends Tina and Kelly at the Bag Snobs: A Selective Editorial on Designer Bags, whom I interviewed for UK Vogue, have linked to me. The Bag Snobs is one of my favourite on-line sites, as someone who understands the importance of accessories. Everything you need to know about bags you will find there. So, if you don't know them already, go visit the Bag Snobs.

And if you are a Bag Snob visitor, don't worry, there will be much discussion of handbags to come.

Belt tightening. Buy only these five things

Sarah Mower in the Telegraph reports retail gloom and doom on both sides of the Atlantic and suggests which five things to buy if you can only afford to buy five things.

It's time to stop, or at least get a grip on what's actually worth buying. As a recovering Primark shopper and someone who can still slip into crazy-happy spending trances at the tills of Harvey Nichols and Selfridges, I realise I'm a fine one to talk about prudence and necessity in wardrobe planning. I mean it, though.

It's going to require the relearning of habits that people like me have almost forgotten our mothers ever taught us, such as thinking ahead and (yuck!) budgeting. It may involve stopping to finger fabric, thinking how it'll wear, looking at care instructions, turning garments inside out to inspect how they're made.

(Though I discussed this very matter in the Guardian a couple of months ago:

For taste, knowing what to wear is about buying the right thing, not about buying for the sake of it.This past summer with all its attendant miseries, its downpours, its gang murders, its stock exchange nightmares and its unwearable clothes, should have taught us to stand up to fashion. To buy in order to make us look good, not to be a perambulating advert for some scruffy graduate of Central St Martin's.

No plastic

For those of you who didn't manage to get an Anya Hindmarch I'm not a plastic bag and don't want to buy a fake on ebay, Marie Claire magazine is giving away a Plastic Ain’t My Bag shopper, free with the December issue, supporting We Are What We Do’s campaign to make this year a plastic bag free Christmas. Marie Claire says their bag is 'an organic cotton shopper that is the perfect accessory, sturdy enough for all your Christmas shopping.'

I did manage to get an (actually three) Anya Hindmarch I'm not a plastic bag(s), and I use one of them pretty much every day, for shopping, as a gym bag and for travel when you can only take one carry-on. It fits my laptop and my handbag. My acquisition of plastic bags has dropped to almost nothing. I don't say it will save the planet (persuading one billion Chinese people that a car isn't better than a bicycle is our only hope of doing that, save revolutionary technological fixes) but do we really want disfigure the environment with landfill sites full of the cast off detritrus of our shopping?

Chanel wins

I'm not surprised that Chanel won The Thoughtful Dresser poll (it can't have helped poor old Christian that this very site has a picture of her at the top.) Seeing Dior's dresses up close at the Golden Age of Couture show at the V&A (hurry on down there if you are in or can get to London), you understand what a consummate couturier he was. If I absolutely had to choose one dress from either of them, I think it would be a Dior. In a Dior dress you become someone else, you are the essence of the feminine. He seems to understand a woman's soul. In a Dior dress you dream, no - you become what you dream of. You are wearing the dress of a poet.

But Chanel understands a woman's life, the one she lives every day. She was one of the great pioneers of Modernism, of clothes to be worn in the machine age. She changed everything she touched, even the way we smell.

I wrote a piece about Chanel in the Telegraph a few weeks ago, exploring her life and work:

The very first LBD, the Ford of dresses, she called it, referring to the Model T car built on a production line for the masses, was designed to be democratic; any woman could wear one. The original design shows a long-sleeved, slim-hipped dress, gathered low at the waist and reaching to just below the knee. Its only adornments are two pleated Vs dropping from the shoulders and rising from the hem, meeting in the middle to further create the illusion of slimness. You could step out in it today and no one would notice that you were wearing something designed more than 80 years ago. Chanel would develop this concept for the rest of her life, altering the fabrics, adding sequins or chiffon trains, but the underlying structure remained. A black dress, with dropped waist and schoolgirl white collars and cuffs, worn over leather footless tights from 2003 reveals how radical her thought was. 'A fashion that goes out of fashion overnight is a distraction, not a fashion,' she said.

My name is Linda, I am a hypochondriac . . .

. . . and as such I am still alive. Hypochondria is a neurosis. On the other hand, my mother waited two years to see a doctor about a lump in her breast, 'because I was frightened.' I, on the other hand, never do a breast self-examination late at night or while on holiday because, on finding a lump it is my intention to run to the doctor shoving aside anyone with a little sniffle or a bad foot, crying, out of my way, I've found a lump. I am in a group genetically disposed to breast cancer, Ashkenazi Jews. Maybe I'll get it, my mother did, my aunt died of it. But what I will do is have it treated at once.

So my second thought for the day is, as yesterday, if you find a lump get it checked out now.

And please read Dina Rabinovitch's diary, republished in the Guardian today.

He asks a couple of questions, like when did you first find the lump, looking up from his sheet of white paper when I say, "Uh, quite a long time ago, probably when I was pregnant, actually." "How old's the baby?" he asks pleasantly. "He'll be three in a couple of months," I answer. Later, when I say, "I should have come earlier, shouldn't I", childlike, seeking dispensation, he offers it instantly. "We don't talk about what's already happened, no, no, no, it's closed."

Thought for the day

'I'm not going to recoil from the superficial. Surfaces, which are what the eye first falls on, usually say more than their contents, provisional by definition.' Joseph Brodsky* (thank you, Eamonn)

* He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you're going to argue with him?

Sadness

I am incredibly sorry to report the death of the journalist Dina Rabinovitch, aged 44. My love and condolences to her husband, Anthony.

If you have a lump, please, go to the doctor.

'In that detached way (quite possibly brought on by the two tiny, round morphine tablets I take each morning and night to stop the tumours from making my back ache) in which I register everything these days, I note first my slight sense of surprise at what the shop assistant has just said to me - "a size eight" - and then how little pleasure it gives me, and how odd that is, because once I would have thought size eight was great, albeit unattainable. Last of all, I note with some pleasure that I feel genuine anger. I'm glad because I've been worried at how muted my feelings have been of late, but here I am, violently angry at a culture that tricked me into thinking thin is good, when I can't stop myself losing weight these weeks, and I'm struggling to eat enough to stay well. Maybe it's the Jewish background, maybe it's actually the truth, but I believe that if I eat, I will be fine.'

Dina's Normblog profile

Today Linda is

Writing about Lanvin


Reading: Anita Brookner's The Latecomers

Dior or Chanel? The Thoughtful Dresser poll

Who was the most important designer of the twentieth century? Coco Chanel, who invented modern dress and who liberated women for modern times? Or Christian Dior whose New Look created some of the most beautiful clothes ever made?

Cast your vote in the Thoughtful Dresser Poll on the right.

Thought for the day

'Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.' Edna Woolman Chase

Further to the three shoe man problem

Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem: Commentary on Economics, Information and Human Action* writes:

. . . in general that's what most of the straight men of my acquaintance think. That is, until their women burrow into their subconscious and persuade them otherwise ... not counting athletic footwear (running shoes, bike shoes, etc.), the KP Spouse has about 5 pair of black or brown shoes of various degrees of formality, a pair of nice black boots, and a pair of nice brown boots. And the ubiquitous pair of Adidas Response trail runners that are the wear-around-always shoes. And the Teva sandals. I call that a respectable collection.

I've tried like the devil to get him in a sassy pair of retro-funky sneaker kicks, but nuthin' doin' ... as Linda says, though, that's OK, because it leaves more room in the closet for shoes for me ...

Eamonn has also returned, with a pertinent question for the Manolo, which I have hand-delivered to him in person, written on parchment and rolled up inside a chocolate shoe. I wait an answer when New York rises from its slumbers.

So, style warriors, a question for you. considering that I live in Buenos Aires where it's going to be unbearably hot and humid for the next 4/5 months, I work a lot at home and don't get invited to many formal events and I am anything but rich; what single footwear purchase should I consider making that would do most to raise me up from my badly shod state?

Just while I'm here, I might as well mention that Lynne adds.

Sitting in the Manchester, NH airport, coming home from a way cool conference on new frontiers in emergent order research ... the brain is too full to think of anything along those lines for a post! But courtesy of , I've found a new fashion read: The Thoughtful Dresser, by writer Linda Grant. I love one of her tag lines:

Because you can't have depths without surfaces.

Brilliant. Evocative. I can't wait to read more.