Apologies for the lack of content

I seem to have been poisoned by a bottle of bad wine on Thursday night and am still recovering.

Reports on Jaeger's first London Fashion Week catwalk show and the Ossie Clark relaunch coming up

Out of the USSR

Sitting having a cup of coffee just before the hairdresser's at Sloane Square this afternoon, I saw two tall, expensively blond middle aged women walk towards me and sit down at the next table. They seemed gold from head to foot. They wore suede and bracelets. Their lips were the colour of dark honey. Then they started talking in Russian, and I could not help but wonder what they were wearing 20 years ago in Moscow or Leningrad, and feel glad for them that, having missed out on all the delight of frivolous, fashionable youth, they had found Joseph before it was too late. Viva democracy.

Camel toe

Camel toe is the phrase which describes the phenomenon pictured above, in which an outfit is too tight in an area where you really would not like it to be too tight.

New York Fashion Week takes time to reflect on Super Tuesday

Joss Stone's thoughts on meeting Laura Bush:

"I saw the Bush lady ... I care for American politics because it affects the rest of the world so much, but I just don't really care for the Bush family," Stone said. "I'd actually met her before at the White House and it was like 'Hey how are you,' and then she was gone. I mean, to be fair, I guess she seemed like a nice enough chick, but I don't really know."

Tim Gunn picks the best-dressed candidate - Obama: "He's not taking himself too seriously, and he's not wearing a uniform"

Thought for the day

It is eleven years since I have seen my figure in a glass. The last reflection I saw there was so disagreeable, I resolved to spare myself such mortifications for the future. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

What women want

Twenty-four hours after the Halston AW08 show in New York, this brown jersey below- the-knee shirt dress has sold out on Net a Porter. Style.com is sniffy:

But overall, the collection left you wanting more. More of Halston's double-face cashmere coats, yes, but also more of a sense of how Zanini will take the label forward. The unstructured evening gowns he showed today won't cut it.

And yet the dress is sold-out. Do the fashion press ever wonder why?

I had a sneak preview today of the Ossie Clark relaunch collection which will show at London Fashion Week on Monday, and about which I will have much, much more to say.

Avsh Alom Gur, OC's creative director, says yes, he can make me a couture dress, but can it wait till Tuesday?

I found my dress

Last year I received three hot tips about where to shop: from Anya Hindmarch, Alexandra Shulman and Hillary Alexander, fashion director of the Telegraph. Jaeger. And I wrote about it here.

Jaeger now has three womenswear lines: Jaeger Collection, the don't-frighten-the-horses clothes we all recognise; Jaeger London, innovative dresses and separates for contemporary working women; and Jaeger Black, its premium range of what it considers investment dressing - the perfect sleeveless black shift dress, the evening coat. Jaeger seems to be aiming itself squarely at women in their 30s and up who know what is on the Paris, London, Milan and New York catwalks, and also know that they are not prepared to buy anything that does not suit them. "Fit and flatter" is the unsurprising message the company received from the focus groups it commissioned.

For decades Jaeger has been in the doldrums, the place where Home Counties matrons buy their expensive navy polyester shirt-waister dresses but under the direction of its new CEO, Belinda Earl, the company has become fashion forward as they say in the trade. The current fashion for star fabrics was sparked last Autumn when Kate Moss wore a star blouse from Jaeger.

My best dress of 2007 was Jaeger and yesterday Belinda Earl, her head of press Iona Hames and I had lunch to discuss the forthcoming AW08 show this Sunday, its first ever at London Fashion Week, and then we went back to the Regent Street flagship shop so they could show me the new SS08 Jaeger London range which had just come in. And there I found my dress.* It fulfills the brief exactly, right length, right shape, sleeves, and the colour is this season's yellow in geometric shapes on a black ground (and no, it doesn't make me look like a wasp). I also bought a mimosa yellow jacket in heavy, lined linen, so I am all set for the Spring.

I think that Jaeger is doing really interesting clothes for grown-up women, and they have something for all shapes. On their sizing, my dress was two sizes smaller than the LaDress dress which was too sizes too small. I concede that they are expensive, but they use quality fabrics (my dress is a mix of silk and cotton) and they should last and last.

* No, it's not the one in the picture, that's AW07.

Thought for the day

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul. Quentin Bell

The Thoughtful Dresser Poll - hem length

What is the most flattering hem -length, above the knee, on the knee cap, just below the knee or calf length? Vote right and reasons below.

I wish I were an hourglass

The imperfect figure most of wish to be is the hourglass. Obviously. Men love it, and it's in proportion so you can find clothes that fit.

Halston

Jess Cartner-Morley writes:

Halston's original success was in being at the forefront of a defining moment in style. In the early 1970s, his clean, unadulterated lines, free of unnecessary seaming and embellishment, cut a glamorous swath through a world growing bored with patchwork, beading and tiered skirts. That kind of fashion moment is impossible to reproduce, but what Zanini, Weinstein et al are hoping to recapture is the spirit the brand came to personify: cool, urban, glamorous and decadent.

Zanini's new Halston may come as a surprise to those who associate Studio 54 with disco balls and Lurex. Eveningwear was simple and sculptural, in floorlength draped jersey with bare shoulders or a low cowl neck; high-waisted trousers and crepe-de-chine blouses for day were demure and elegant. Minnelli proclaimed it "wonderful, sensual, and chic".

Just one day after the show, two of the outfits - including a teal blue shirt dress which brings back to life the spirit of Halston's 1972 classic Ultrasuede shirt dress - are available to buy today on Net a porter a full six months from the time any of the other outfits in the show, or indeed any of the other outfits at New York fashion week, will go on sale.

In the world of designer fashion, which still operates on a six-month time-lag between catwalk and store, this is a groundbreaking move. It is the first attempt by a designer label to combat a serious problem faced by the designer clothing industry: high street labels have recently become able to sell cheaper versions of the trends launched on designer catwalks during the six-month gap between the catwalk show and the designer collection going on sale. In effect, a designer can start a trend, only to find that by the time the real thing hits stores, the high street has milked the look for all it is worth.

Super Tuesday

Thought for the day

Dandyism is a state of being composed entirely of nuances - as always occurs in extremely old and extremely civilised societies. Jules Amedee Barbey D'Aurevilly

Let the dressmaking begin

I have found a dressmaker. He tells me he can copy this, by Alberta Ferretti, but below the knee and in a different colour. And the fabric will be silk crepe de chine.

Diane von Furstenberg comes to her senses

BELOW THE KNEE

Guardian's Sounds Jewish podcast

A new half-hour show courtesy of the Guardian where we discuss the American elections, Israel at 60, a man who decided to live according to every law of the Bible for a year - in Manhattan (and yes, he did find someone to stone for adultery) and a very funny discussion of Yiddish.

Listen here

Evening Standard review

. . .The Clothes On Their Backs is a return to the form of Linda Grant's first and best novel, The Cast iron Shore. Gripping and written with keen understatement it managed to be a domestic coming of age story, even as it takes in, via Sandor, the tumultuous sweep of the 20th century (in Sandor's run-down boarding house, Vivien doesn't only find her roots, her great grandfather "with the curls in front of his ears', but animal sex, too.)

In other words, that rare thing, a novel of big ideas that never forgets to tell you a story. Any frocks and bolero jackets you happen to come upon along the way are just the icing on the cake.

Not yet online

BBC Radio Four Woman's Hour interview

If you go here, and click on listen again latest programme, it's 30 minutes in

Further thoughts on botox

It says here

This kind of procedure - which carries no benefit, and appeals to none but the very vain - is never going to attract the most rigorous medics. My half-sister was trained to give Botox injections, on a course that lasted a day, cost £120 and was full of half-qualified dentists whose medical training doesn't extend below the thorax. Most proper doctors (no offence) don't want to get their hands dirty administering poisons for cosmetic reasons. And when problems do occur, it is reasonable to expect that it would take a skilled physician to notice (one symptom is muscle paralysis: since that's the purpose of the injection in the first place, you can see why a dentist or layman might miss it).

I wouldn't say it only appeals to the very vain, lots of people I know have had it, and I won't say it hasn't crossed my own mind. But it's still a no. I also hear that it hurts.

Who is responsible for the revival of British fashion?

Professor Louise Wilson, at Central St Martins, that's who

Wilson, 45, has run London's Central Saint Martins fashion MA since 1994. Even given its exalted history - alumni include Alexander McQueen, Sophia Kokosalaki and Jonathan Saunders - she's on a roll. Of the designers in this month's London Fashion Week, more than a third - Giles Deacon, Christopher Kane and Luella Bartley included - are ex-pupils; a remarkable number from one tutor.

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With Wilson's exclusively black wardrobe, fondness for foul-mouthed tirades and methodology described as everything from "exacting" to "fascistic", her reputation precedes her. "If someone spoke to me like I speak to the students, I don't know what I'd do." The former Donna Karan designer, who herself studied at Saint Martins under Ossie Clark, says getting students into LFW isn't the remit of the course. Nurturing individuality is.

"If you murdered somebody and went to prison for 12 years, you'd get a social worker to help you re-enter society. When my students come to me they've been in education since they were five, and they're damaged. Damaged by a system of not thinking for themselves."

Talking to Wilson, it's clear that she loves her job, really - she even refused time off to recover from breast cancer. "Is that why people hold me in regard? Because I was a sad fucker who gave up my whole social life?"