Cocosa, for when you just have to buy something

The dreadful events since Mumbai have sent shopping and fashion far from my mind (which has been focussed on certain scumbag freelance journalists quick to make a buck out of others' misfortunes).

But at a certain point, life has to return to a semblance of normality, a scrap of reality. And since I currently am reading 112 books for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, an element of superficiality has to enter my day at some point, in the form of the Cocosa site.

Cocosa is a membership-only fashion sale site. A couple of times a week it offers a small number of sale items from major designers. You get advance notice of the sale, then the date of the sale, then the sale preview, and then the sale opens for three days. With some items you have to very quick off the mark. The mark-downs are significant, usually 50% or more.

For some time I had been brooding over the Sonia Rykiel bags and yesterday at noon I pressed click and bought one. I bought it because I have long wanted a Chanel 2.55 without wanting to buy an actual 2.55 (my sister has one, and that would be copycat) and this is a version thereof.

All went smoothly. I bought an £800 bag for £399 plus £6 postage and this morning it arrived at my door less than 24 hours later exactly as described.

Cocosa keeps its membership numbers limited but you can join the waiting list. It doesn't cost anything and from what I've seen since it launched a couple of months ago, it has some spectacular bargains on very very good (mainly British) designers. There are sales coming up from Beatrix Ong, Luella, Jonathan Saunders and Richard Nichol. And they opened with McQueen and Lacroix.

Pear shaped women with bad legs are in fashion (with a caveat)

in days of yore

The 70s maxi-dress is definitively back, according to the Telegraph, which says that the iron rule that economic austerity goes with long skirts cannot be overturned, and this is not even a recession but a Depression.

According to designer Sonia Rykiel, the new longer lengths are there to lift us up above the mundanities of daily life, and on to more ethereal planes. "The thing about the long silhouette is that it is an intelligent way of dressing – light and powerful, hiding what needs to be hidden, and showing what needs to be shown," Rykiel tells me. "But long dresses this autumn and winter should be worn in different, cheery, colours: bright and pale."

Excellent. Avsh Alom Gur at Ossie Clark (see following) told me it was fine to wear my Booker dress at a lunchtime event as long as it was styled differently.

The new long dresses are best suited to pear shaped women who will not mourn being unable to show off their knees. But of course only tall pear-shaped women.

For pear-shaped British women the look may be heaven-sent, but there is one body type ill-suited to the drowning pull of drapery. "If you're short, this style will only shorten you further," says celebrity stylist Hannah Bhuiya. "So the best thing to do is wear a very well cut panelled long dress, say by the newly relaunched Ossie Clark label, one that accentuates your waist, Pierre Hardy clunky shoes and a large winter hat which will help you alter your proportions."

Can anyone explain what are the styles which make pear-shaped women's hips look smaller and which simultaneously elongate them? Stylists are strangely silent on this topic. I am 5 feet five inches, which I would describe as average height and always looking to make myself seem taller and slimmer. Perhaps it cannot be done (except, of course, by becoming slimmer, but that's a subject for new year's resolutions.)

Various items

I spent yesterday at the hospital with 'Harry', Will and Kelly. Please be patient, there will be more to report.

I am very pleased to have it pointed out to me that Helen Mirren is now so exasperated by the struggle to find sleeves that she's thinking of designing some herself.

"Dresses With Sleeves," is what she'd call her range. "There are no dresses with sleeves and we need to bring back the sleeve: fine, see-through ones, long or short," she says.

"There are so many wonderful things you can do with sleeves that people used to do, and then they stopped."

And bizarrely, The Thoughtful Dresser has been shortlisted in the British Design Awards in the fashion category. Er, I 'designed' this site myself.

Fashion
Helen Storey with Tony Ryan, Wonderland – biodegradable materials
Italian Vogue: A Black Issue, July 2008
Linda Grant, The Thoughtful Dresser blog
Louise Goldin, Spring/Summer 09 – Knitwear
Basso & Brooke, Spring/Summer 09
Alber Elbaz, Creative Director, Lanvin, Spring/Summer 08
Miuccia Prada and James Lima, Trembled Blossom, Fashion Film
Duckie Brown, Spring/Summer 09 – Menswear
Maison Martin Margiela, Spring/Summer 09 – 20th Anniversary Collection
Barbican Centre and Siebe Tettero, The House of Viktor & Rolf Retrospective
Prada by Miuccia Prada, Spring/Summer 09

Fabric care from the Bagpuss mice

On the sad death of Oliver Postgate, aged 83

This was voted the most popular children's television series of all time by British viewers. Note the state of the art animation.

The Bethnal Green Bambinos and some reflections on Englishness

While matters proceed on the Harry front, in the meantime here is a little something going on at George Szirtes place. A clip from one of my favourite films, Passport to Pimlico, with a little light music from the Bethnal Green Bambinos. Stick with it so you can see what life was like buying a dress for Miss Pimlico at the Palais on the ration.



As George says:

Much of the film is a recap of post-war conditions, but the core of it is about state versus locality, not so much who is who, but what is what; the small versus the great. Your first ties, the film firmly states, are to your neighbours and to history.

I loved it the first time I saw it, for much the same reasons as I loved Frank Capra films. They were instinctively egalitarian, democratic and generous, a kind of idyll. Tribal? Yes. Sentimental? Yes, that too. But it was a broad tribe and the sentiments were, it seemed to me, good sentiments. Such sentiments were what, I suspect, the war was popularly thought to be about.

Meanwhile, "... the most remarkable thing about the bream is when he's courting...

"

I came along with a piece I wrote some years ago about this very film:

Passport to Pimlico’ is a comic investigation of Englishness. Not Britishness, which is rarely mentioned. Britain is an institutional entity, it’s government, Home and Foreign Office; it runs the Empire. Englishness is what the characters feel themselves to be inside. The film’s most famous line encapsulates how people felt about their country in the immediate post-war years, after a struggle against both fascism abroad and the dreary restrictions of living entirely by the rule book. ‘We’re English,’ a woman says, leaning her head out of an upstairs window to shout to the Whitehall bureaucrats below, ‘we always were English and it’s just because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundian.’

On events of the weekend

On Saturday, in anticipation of Harry's homecoming, I went to our local Oddbins to buy him his requested bottle of single malt. A man was standing behind several shelves of whiskeys and stuff and I asked him where the single malt was. Here, he said, indicated with a broad wave of his hand.

And so I found myself uncharacteristically walking in the shoes of a man confronted with a make-up counter, who looks at all the indistinguishable creams, unguents etc - and panics.

Eventually, I pointed to a bottle of Laphroaig and said, I've heard of that one. And this is why so many husbands arrive home from business trips abroad clutching a bottle of Chanel No 5.

Last night Harry told me that often he goes into Oddbins just to peruse the single malts and engage in learned discussion with the sales person about their properties. Just as you or I might linger at the Bobbi Brown counter swiping lipstick on our inner wrists.

I would like to be able to report that the troubles of Harry, Will and Kelly are now over, that they had a comfortable flight back from Mumbai and that Will is now resting in an NHS teaching hospital with the finest medical attention this country has to offer. However what I have to report instead is so shocking that I'll wait until these matters are drawn to wider attention.

If you return from a poor and chaotic city like Mumbai you might expect to feel grateful and even proud to be British. You'd be mistaken.

UPDATE at bloody last, Will is now properly settled in hospital and his ongoing care is commencing. The Mumbai Hospital did an excellent job, by all accounts and can we all give a big round of applause for Harry himself who has been under appalling stress trying to ensure his son is properly cared for.

It's all in the accessories

Harry and his son and girlfriend are en route back to Britain, touching down later this morning.

Which means that I can afford to smile at these pictures of the queen in trousers, an unexpected sight - note the two scarves detail

A little more news from Mumbai

Harry's son is still in hospital and still not well enough to return to Britain.

If you are in the UK please take note of this organisation for future reference. Had we know about it this time last week things would have been considerably easier for everyone

To introduce an entirely unexpected fashion note, I'm pleased to say that a care package of small treats is being taken out by none other than Ossie Clark designer Avsh Alom Gur, who designed my Booker dress, and who is going to India tomorrow to source beading and embroidery for his next collection

Also he will be dressing me for this:

Literature continues to be an exciting category at the South Bank Show Awards with nominee Child 44, the serious crime novel by Tom Rob Smith, going up against the absorbing exploration of the notorious Road House murder case of 1860 in The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale. The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant – a beautifully detailed character study and poignant family history – is also nominated.

Post Mumbai

I am not feeling very much like writing about fashion at the moment.

To all regular readers, I'm sorry for the suspension of this site. My thoughts are absorbed with other things and as the week goes on there is a lot to do.

Vocabulary

An Irish friend this weekend mentioned that when she was younger she met several members of the IRA, who were immediately recognisable, she noted for their 'coldness and arrogance'. These two characteristics I suspect, are what you need to make a terrorist. For while millions have grievances, often legitimate grievances, it takes a specific type to turn that grievance into a plan to execute in cold blood civilians on a large scale. The numbers, in fact, are very small, though their impact immense.

On the news the terms 'militant' and 'terrorist' have been used interchangeably. As George Szirtes points out,

People who deliberately focus on civilians are simply murderers. If they do so for a political purpose they are terrorists and murderers. Not militants. Not an army. They are murderers with a vastly inflated opinion of their own honour and righteousness. which also makes them hypocrites.

Mumbai Update 3

The Guardian has published the following account of Harry's son and girlfriend's ordeal in Mumbai. It is incredibly harrowing reading and even worse than I thought.

For Will Pike and his girlfriend, Kelly Doyle, a night in the Taj Mahal hotel was meant to be a treat to round off a two-week holiday in India.

Instead it ended with Will, 28, lying in a Mumbai hospital intensive care bed, his back broken in an attempt to escape the bullets and choking smoke by climbing down an improvised rope made from bedsheets, curtains and hotel towels.

They had checked in at 6pm after arriving from Goa, ventured out to the Leopold café - later to become the first place in the city to be attacked - then returned to their room intending to go down to the bar. As they got ready, the sound of explosions echoed up from the lobby: the terrorists were bursting into the hotel, throwing grenades and firing automatic weapons.

For five hours, the couple, from Camden in north London, cowered in their room, listening to the sound of approaching gunshots while the terrorists roamed the corridors, apparently firing at their fellow hostages.

read on

Mumbai update

Thanks to all readers who sent Harry their good wishes and thoughts, which he has read. The situation is as follows: his son and his son's girlfriend were on the final night of a two-week holiday in India. After a couple of weeks on the beach they decided to blow the budget on one night in a luxury hotel in Mumbai before flying out the following day. Unfortunately they chose the Taj Mahal.

After hearing gunshots in the hallway outside, they barricaded themselves in their room for seven hours until a fire on the floors above them and grenade in the next room compelled them to try to leave through a third floor window, using knotted bed linen. Unfortunately Harry's son fell and has multiple fractures. An operation on Thursday was successful but it will be a long road to recovery. Harry has now managed to get to Mumbai, arriving this morning.

On a personal level I am stunned at the minimal help offered by the Foreign Office, British Airways and his phone company (who had blocked calls to India and then said it would take 24 hours to unblock them). The practical support he has received has come through a network of friends who have been able to provide essential contacts in India, including doctors and Mumbai families.

The Thoughtful Dresser: The Book

Publication is late February. You can pre-order now


I hope to have further information about a US edition soon

Mumbai: alert

Thoughtful Dresser contributor Harry Fenton's son and girlfriend were staying in the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai during the ongoing terrorist attacks. His son has been seriously injured. Harry is going to Mumbai later today. Any helpful information will be gratefully received

UPDATE I had always been under the impression that if you were in this situation you rang the Foreign Office number the BBC gave out and everything kicked in, including BA sorting out your flights. As I have now discovered, you ring the number, and someone gives you another number which no-one answers. You're on your own.

UPDATE Thanks to all readers who have sent their messages to Harry which he's read and which are greatly appreciated. Things have been ironed out now and he'll be on his way to Mumbai in a few hours. We should have more to report in a day or two.

The big men's creche on Regent Street

Egged on at the weekend by my sister and nephew who were laughing at my Iron Age iPod Nano, I went and bought an iPod Touch (at John Lewis, of course, home of middle-class, middle-aged electronics).

I am absolutely thrilled to bits with this piece of kit, but could not set up my main email account on it so I took in to the Apple store on Regent Store. It only took two tech support guys an hour and twenty minutes to set up my email during which I had plenty of time to observe that I was standing in a vast men's creche. All along Regent Street and Oxford Street women were shopping, having dropped their men off at a place where there were lots of toys to play with and play-leaders who would teach them how to use them.

Were these men shopping No! Shopping is a girl's activity, they were . . . well, what were they doing? I believe Harry has been known to frequent the Apple store, so perhaps he can tell us.

Harry Buys an Iron

Well, of course I already had one. But whilst recently struggling to get a sharp crease on a shirt sleeve it occurred to me that maybe the iron I was using was really not very good. Like the majority of our household appliances I fondly imagined that it was bought , my memory unreliably suggested, in a vague period called ‘a couple of years ago’. Which of course was wildly inaccurate. So maybe the iron was underperforming because of old age ( though why that should be the case I can’t imagine)

This domestic reverie prompted a recollection of a conversation I once had in Milan. I was in the company of a stylish ( well, obviously) creative director ( advertising not fashion).
Older than me, and with a degree of gravitas and that ‘not quite beard’ look that is quite difficult to carry off. A charming and quite taciturn chap.
I had worked with him for a while, so we knew each other.
Which is the kind of qualification I need to make before I say that I, a man, dared to ask him, a man, about clothes. ( This is an unusual conversational area for older males to venture into).
How, I asked , do Italian men always manage to look so stylish and well turned out? I went on: Italian men seem to gravitate toward what I see as being classic, almost anglo clothes. Tweed jackets ( which indeed Paolo was wearing) and nothing faddish . Understated and stylish, but managing to make the average Brit wearing similar clothes appear scruffy by comparison.
We were in a very recherché enoteca. As a solo visitor I would not even have noticed this tiny establishment. A small dark wood panelled room filled with wine bottles. A few stools. And rammed with Italian bourgeoisie quaffing a glass of wine at the end of the working day. Stylish to a man ( and woman).
His answer was very simple. We buy, he said , good quality clothes. Not many. Each season a new jacket , a coat, or trousers. That are well made, and fit. And then , he said, (rather pointedly I felt), we look after them. He admitted that he didn’t have an enormous wardrobe , but everything in it was immaculate.

So that was the difference! My thoughts immediately turned to my wardrobe. With many less than immaculate items that had seen better days. But which I was still inclined to pull out and wear because of some undisciplined notion that they still passed muster.
Well, the wardrobe remains full of sentimentally preserved schmatte. But I do make more of an effort to have the right creases in my shirts nowadays .

How to behave in a recession: haggling

I am the world's most unsuccessful haggler. I just want to hand over my money and get out of there. I have never asked for a better price (or an airline upgrade, for that matter) and got one. With the exception of the rug bazaar in Isfahan, Iran, where if you offered to pay the asking price they would make you a higher offer out of habit.

And so I am delighted to see this piece in which the author suffers a series of failures:

Nearby, John Lewis is full of customers in anoraks staring at rails of anoraks, but still I scent blood. It was reported last week that the store's sales are down 9.7% on last year. In the rug department, a man detaches himself from a silent group of salesmen. I express interest in a beautiful, pale pink rug with a big flower on it. It is £500. Will he take an offer? I heard sales were down; in fact, the sales in this particular store were down 9.1% last week. "We are not a concession store," the man replies. "We do not accept offers. The price is the price." I feel as if they will talk about me in rugs when I am gone. And, for the first time ever, I feel sad in John Lewis.

Selfridges is stuffed full of shoppers too. They are everywhere, like materialistic bacteria, grabbing handbags, stroking shoes. I ask for 25% off bags in Dior and Gucci. "No. Never. No," the women say. The lovely bags are whisked away, as if the grubby discount seeker will soil their perfection. So I corner Peppe in the Vivienne Westwood concession. "If I see anything I like," I say politely, gesturing at all the Westwoods, "would you be able to knock anything off? Maybe 20%?" "No," he says. 10%? "No." 5%? "No." It isn't acceptable to bargain in the UK," he says. "Try Italy."

"Haggling is just another form of negotiating," says clinical psychologist Cecelia d'Felice. "If you go in with the feeling that this is a difficult negotiation that will cause you embarrassment and loss of face if you fail, you will feel rejected if you do fail." And so? "Don't take a firm position, such as 'I want 20% off'," she says, "because they will immediately assume a firm position to combat it and you will be in conflict." And conflict, she says, breeds shame.

"Follow your interests instead," she suggests. "See it as a chat. 'Isn't this a nice dress? Has it been in long? I can't afford it. What a shame.'" She pauses. "Establish a narrative and build a relationship with them. Then you will have common ground you can cover." The British are, apparently, lousy negotiators. "We are so trained not to lose face and our society is so geared up to everything being right or wrong that we don't understand that it is fun to play games. And women in our society are supposed to give everything away in our role as nurturers. We are looked down on if we ask for more."

"

The man who saved Parisian couture

Lelong evening dresses from 1946. Which unknown designer in his employ might have designed them?

This is my piece from the Telegraph about Lucien Lelong, who stood up to the occupying German forces and saved Paris from being moved to Berlin:

Paris struggled on, but when war was declared on 3 September 1939 the couture houses closed down, some for ever. Mainbocher and Schiaparelli left for America. Vionnet never reopened. Lelong was now president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and, after the invasion, it was his job to negotiate with the occupying German regime. The Nazis wanted to move Paris lock, stock and barrel to Berlin by any means, including violence. On 20 July 1940 five Nazi officers arrived at the headquarters of the Chambre Syndicale on an 'inspection'; five days later they broke into the building and requisitioned the archive.

Under the Nazi plan the Paris ateliers would be moved to Germany or Austria, where they would train a new generation of German dressmakers. The designers would also be moved. Within a generation, the Nazis expected, couture would be German, not French. It was a breathtakingly arrogant ambition to believe that they could appropriate a whole industry.

Lelong pointed out that the plan was unworkable. French fashion was dependent on thousands of skilled artisans in tiny ateliers, each specialising in one small detail of finish, such as embroidery. The skills, he explained, were unteachable. You could not transfer them, and it took decades to reach the necessary levels of craftsmanship. The intransigence of the Germans was nothing compared with that of French couture. Lelong asserted the right of each country to produce its own fashion and argued that it was their home environment that allowed the workers to do what they did. The Nazis backed down and returned the archive, and Lelong negotiated to keep a supply of fabric that would maintain production. The only fall-back the occupiers had was to conscript into the army its labour force. They started by demanding 80 per cent; Lelong got it down to five per cent.

Initially, after the liberation, there were murmurs that Lelong had been a collaborator, though it was Chanel who had spent the war living with a German officer. His case came to trial, but he was acquitted. The judge ruled that Lelong had co-operated only minimally with the Nazis to save France's cultural heritage and the jobs of its workers.

In which it turns out I have something in common with Hitler

A movie must

Earlier this week I had a piece in the Guardian about Israeli cinema. There is absolutely nothing, not even the US elections, more guaranteed to induce flame wars on the internet than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nonetheless I am going to stick my neck out and commend to British readers a film which opens here nationwide, today, Waltz with Bashir.

The film which has had outstanding reviews across the board, is a documentary in the form of an animated graphic novel about the events which occurred in 1982 during the Lebanon war when Christian Phalangists aided by the Israeli army who turned a blind eye, entered the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp and murdered 2500 Palestinians to avenge the assassination of their own leader.

Ari Folman's film is seen through the eyes of himself and his friends, men now in their forties, married with children and careers, attempting to look back at their nineteen year old selves, 25 years ago.

The film is primarily about memory, the recovery of suppressed trauma and personal responsibility. It's an anti-war film, and it understands that all wars are fought by young men, and all wars are really rock and roll wars.

The distributors, Artificial Eye, have taken a huge gamble on this film, hoping to attract across the board critical acclaim (it has) and a large audience for a subtitled film.

I urge you to go and see it if you can. You won't be disappointed