Giles Deacon: London Fashion Week experiments with sharia law

Thank You, Anya Hindmarch

This is mine in caramel (above)

This is it in cream

A courier has just arrived at my door with the currently waiting-list only Anya Hindmarch Cooper in caramel. I didn't even spot one at London Fashion Week, amongst the dozens of AH bags carried on the arms of the ingathered fashionistas.

Check it out here, or on Net a Porter or Saks.

Also delivered, in the nick of time for my Australia trip was an AH upright trolley just the right size to be an airline carry-on, as sold here, but in beige and gold.

Tribute to Saul Bellow

(pictured below contradicting the Thought for the Day)

On his death in 2005, I wrote:

Even if he was not writing, it was enough to know that Saul Bellow was alive and thinking. When I heard the news of his death on the radio on Wednesday morning, I screamed aloud in rage and sorrow because what Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive.

His vigour, vitality, humour and passion were always matched by the insistence on thought, not the predigested cliches of the mass media or of those on the left which had began to disgust him by the Sixties. 'I knew that what you need in a big American city was a deep no-affect belt, a critical mass of indifference,' he wrote in Humboldt's Gift. The Bellow character kept insisting on the right to feel that something mattered, it was an entirely personal integrity, the keeping of the terms of a contract, which was to know. And those characters knew a lot - the social conditions of the tenements they grew up in, Aristotle, Tolstoy, Al Capone. How to dress, how to make love.

. . .

Bellow was a writer about conscience and consciousness, forever conflicted by the competing demands of the great cities, the individual's urge to survival against all odds and his equal need for love and some kind of penetrating understanding of what there was of significance beyond all the racket and racketeering.

In the Fifties, he shared a place with Arthur Miller in Nevada while they fulfilled the residency requirements to divorce their wives. Bellow would go out to the desert and practise the therapy of the moment, the primal scream. That was him: I want I want I want. The yearning soul, now, unbelievably, silent.

Further review

From The London Paper

The Clothes on Their Backs
Linda Grant
Virago, £17.99

Award-winning novelist, journalist and creator of the increasingly indispensable fashion blog thethoughtfuldresser.blogspot.com, Linda Grant returns with the story of the introspective yet passionate Vivien. Born to mild-mannered Hungarian refugees in 1953, she grows up in a red-brick Marylebone apartment wondering what the world might hold for her. While her parents are reluctant to explore either their surroundings or their emotions, Vivien becomes fascinated by the appearance of a flamboyant uncle at the doorstep one day – a curiosity only fuelled when her father refuses to speak of him again. Their inevitable reunion provides Vivien with an education that is as harsh as it is glamorous, as she develops an understanding that it's the clothes we wear as much as the secrets we keep that define us. As a portrait of London in the 20th century, a coming-of-age tale and an explanation of why fashion is more than just frocks, it's a sublimely atmospheric and deeply moving novel.
Alexandra Heminsley

In which I completely disagree with Hadley Freeman

great length!

who writes:

With regard to the former, the slim and straight tunics - essentially long dresses without sleeves - are easily commercial, while the low-slung tuxedo-style trousers were some of the most flattering pieces seen all week. On the downside, the below-the-knee hem lengths, often described euphemistically as "awkward", would make anyone under 5ft 10in look like a squat mushroom, a comparison only consolidated by the muted colour palette. If Virginia Woolf were alive today, and perhaps worked in a publisher's office, her wardrobe would be sorted.

Pants to that

Can anything be more fatuous than this particular enterprise: a pair of orange knickers emblazoned with handcuffs, so when you drop your drawers you automatically think of Guantanamo:

As is the case in the happiest of marriages, this natural combination inevitably produced a most striking offspring: a pair of knickers in what is being described as "Guantánamo Bay orange", mini handcuff dangling from the front and the catchy slogan "Fair trial my arse" emblazoned on the, um, back. Happy Valentine's day, sweetie!

This is not the first time Agent Provocateur has mixed slogans with silk. There were the seductive knickers embroidered with the statement "The only Bush I trust is my own" because every woman secretly loves to wear a political pun on her pants. And it's a style that comes naturally to Corre, whose mother Vivienne Westwood likes to wear a shirt that informs onlookers: "I am not a terrorist."


But is there not a risk that flogging orange pants might diminish the seriousness of the politics behind them? Martha Lane Fox, a trustee of Reprieve, shrugs: "The absurdity of this collaboration reflects the absurdity of Guantánamo Bay, in which people are held indefinitely without fair trials. The pants are no more absurd than that."

No, the pants are absurd, the suspension of habeus corpus is something else again.

I notice when I go to the Agent Provocateur website there's a soft-porn video on the front.

Thought for the day

Saul Bellow

Poets, artists, and men of genius in general are seldom coxcombs, but often slovens; for they find something out of themselves better worth studying than their own persons. William Hazlitt

Love that girl

Erin O'Connor on how to get through London Fashion Week

I can’t get through fashion week without pair of flip flops: you need to let your feet breathe in between wearing high heels. And when it gets cold I wear thick socks and Birkenstocks. I always carry around a packet of mints, because champagne does weird things to your breath.

The Thoughtful Dresser on the road

My apologies for the intermittent posts here. A combination of the publication The Clothes On Their Backs, London Fashion Week and my imminent departure on 25 February for a tour of Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong have curtailed my time.

Fuller details of events will be going up on my main website in a day or two. For those of you in Singapore, there will be a book talk and signing under the auspices of the British Council at the Arts House on 26 February. Full details are here, and advance registration by email is required. This will be followed by a series of media interviews the following day: with Channel News Asia Prime Time Morning (live) at 9.20 am, then with the Straits Times, Business Times, Harpers Bazaar Singapore.

I will also be doing some bookshop events in Melbourne, as well as the main Adelaide Festival.

There are no events planned for Hong Kong, but if any regular readers of this site would like to take me shopping, make your presence known!

Thought for the day

Often I have turned into [London's] old clothes market to worship. With awe-struck heart I walk through . . . Monmouth Street, with its empty suits . . . Silent are they, but expressive in their silence: the past witnesses and instruments of woe and joy, of passions, virtues, crimes, and all fathomless tumult of good and evil in 'the prison called life.' Friends! trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable. Thomas Carlyle

Thoughtful Dresser poll - fashion forward

Christopher Kane

Halfway through London Fashion Week, The Thoughtful Dresser poll asks which city provides the most fashion forward fashion week - New York, London, Milan or Paris. Vote on the right.

Poll: Skirt lengths

Just below the knee the clear winner, there's a surprise.

Of course it's the most flattering length, it cuts the leg at its narrowest point, just before the curve of the calf. It elongates the leg and torso and hides bad knees.

Nuclear winter

Marios Schwab at London Fashion Week. A similar theme was at Jaeger. Why? But maybe we'll see a watered down version at M&S come October.

Why your clothes don't fit

I once, very briefly, studied Sociology. I recall sitting in a library reading a study which triumphantly concluded that people of different incomes lived in different parts of cities. I put the book down and thought. Money. Old Rope.

And now a landmark study by scientists! in Spain has reveals that many women can't find clothes that fit properly.

Scientists have confirmed what millions of women know already: the fashion industry does not make clothes to fit them. In the largest study of its kind Spain has taken full-body laser scans of more than 10,000 women and compared the resulting three-dimensional measurements with clothes on the high street

The conclusion was that four in ten women were unable to find clothes to fit them properly. “We are going to abolish the current system of sizes and move to another that satisfies the needs of women,” said Bernat Soria, the Spanish Health Minister.

The study found that women had three body types: a “cylinder”, in which the top, middle and bottom were broadly aligned, “hourglass” and “pear-shaped”. About a third of women fell into each category, though they tended to move from being cylinders to pears as they got older.

Women between the ages of 19 and 30 had the hardest time finding clothes that fit - mainly because they were too small or tight.

. . .

The Government hopes that if its new measurement system is successful it will be adopted as standard by all the countries in the European Union. Once it has dealt with women's problems finding well-fitting clothes, it will turn its attention to the other half of the population. Next into the scanning booth: 10,000 Spanish men.

Inshallah, as they said in Moorish Spain.

Jaeger AW08: terrifying the pony club

Jaeger showed for the first time at London Fashion Week this evening. No-one could accuse the clothes they sent down the catwalk of being safe. With some pounding music which seemed to have pumped directly from a club in Shoreditch, and the models with long poker straight hair by Sam McKnight, the colours were black, petrol blue, forest green, camel.


What can you say about a shaggy Mongolian bomber jacket, sailor trousers buttoned up at the sides, long, lean silhouettes almost to the ankles, huge bows and lots of fringing?


I shared the car of a magazine editor to the after-show and she pointed out that a decade ago Burberry made macs. So maybe Jaeger can become an international fashion brand.

Huge buzz about Ossie Clark, their press person inundated with requests for tickets this morning, he tells me.

By the way, no prizes for guessing what colour the majority of the audience at London Fashion Week wears . . .

What am I supposed to wear?

Do I have to wear a jumpsuit. Where is my waist? Can I get the bootcuts out of the wardrobe? Swing jacket, yes or no?

Fifty answers to those Spring-Summer 08 fashion questions are right here

Inside UK Vogue

What shocks me is that many of the clothes on the rail are quite grubby - some of them are even torn. Apparently these designer samples go from magazine to magazine, location to location, getting staler all the time. I can't see why fashion houses don't run up some more samples but apparently they don't, so one of the many problems of organising a shoot is that you have to book the clothes, as well as the photographer and models, and return them on the due date on pain of death.

The clothes are all size 10 but Kate Moss 'can fit anything'. Apparently she even has 'miracle feet' that can wear any shoe size. But Alex is a bit worried about her hair. 'Does she still have the fringe? I don't mind the fringe but I don't want her hair scraped back.' She also tells Phelan not to let Kate look 'too boudoir. Keep that coolness about her, not too overtly sexy.' (A couple of weeks later, I see the photos of Kate Moss in the art room and exclaim rudely, 'God, she looks awful.' She has a sort of Mia Farrow or pottery-teacher hairdo and looks dead-eyed and desiccated. The art room goes into shock until Robin Derrick the creative director murmurs, 'Of course we haven't done any retouching yet'.)

Alexandra Shulman

I ask Alex if Kate Moss is always a safe bet for a cover? 'Nobody's a safe bet, but a famous model helps.' One of her problems, she says, is that there are so few superstar models now. In the good old days you could take your pick of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Helena Christensen and a dozen others but now - although there are plenty of good models who are well-respected in the fashion industry - their names mean nothing to the public. They work so hard, they don't seem to have any life outside modelling.

Read on

Standing still for five minutes

And still I am feeling rough, so in the meantime, courtesy of George Szirtes who got it from someone else, this

Purchase

mine is purple

Without intending to, I bought this LK Bennett tweed jacket on Thursday, when I went out to pick up my new contact lenses. I got it in purple. I wore it Thursday night while being poisoned by Sardinian red wine, and I wore it at my publisher's lunch for me on Friday. It has been much admired. I always thought LK Bennett was a bit home counties for my taste, a more sophisticated Boden, home of the kitten heel and all that, but in this case, I think it came good. I wore it with the Jaeger dress.

Shoes in battle

Thank you Eamonn for sending me this fine photograph taken by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa's girlfriend and fellow snapper-in-arms during the Spanish Civil War. It's captioned, 'A photograph of a woman in Barcelona, Spain training for a Republican militia in August 1936, taken by Gerda Taro. '