A Swell Party

Harry would once again like to congratulate The Thoughtful Dresser . Getting to the shortlist was fantastic. Getting the USA publishing deal is obviously a great outcome.
And the party was pretty good too ( English understatement). So I’d like to say a big thankyou for that.
Of course the star of the party was elsewhere until the awards ceremony was over. But when Linda finally arrived there was spontaneous applause. Although I suppose it could have been for the frock.

During the party I took the air on Dean Street and I chanced upon a short chap with a leggy young woman on each arm ambling along the pavement. I thought for a brief moment that it might be Wayne Rooney ( extremely gifted , but not the most handsome footballer on the planet), but as he got closer I realised it was Alexander McQueen. Harry didn’t think he was particularly well turned out. I think your average footballer would have made more effort.



The high point of the evening for me was being asked by someone if I was Antony Beevor. Shortly after that I was asked by someone else if I was Harry Fenton.
I was , of course, entirely delighted to meet her, and several other charming readers of this blog.

Apologies are due for me not posting this earlier.
Last night I was MC for an evening of words and music celebrating the wit, wisdom, and sheer genius of Robert Zimmerman. And , as one of the co-organisers of the show, had my work cut out during the day . But the polka dot shirt made all the difference on the night. Not worn by me you understand.
I was trying to look like Tyler Brulee.

Rules are made to be broken

Here's a dress by McQueen. Well, you couln't wear it because it shows off the bingo wings etc. But hey, apparently by putting a top underneath it, you have made an edgy new look. Now personally, I would have thought that a top under a dress like that would look silly. But fashion says, no, it's okay now.

In which a piece of music loses its meaning and becomes something else

The more I watch this, the more unpleasant do I find it. Though I suppose if you were unfamiliar with the music the experience would be quite different. But it can hardly be because McQueen didn't know. There again, it's only a movie sound track.

How we dress in London, and LA

Emma Forrest, writing in the Guardian observes, of her return to London after a year in LA:

Riding the tube again, I feel intimidated by your outfits. You British ladies wear high heels with knee socks, pencil skirts and complicated makeup. During the day! After a year as an Angeleno I've figured out where Posh is going wrong. She looks out of place because you just don't wear fancy outfits during the day in LA, especially if you're as ambitious as she is. Dressing down implies that dressing up is a facet of your job, at which you are incredibly successful. So much so that come the awards season you are up to your ears in Valentino sheaths and are therefore relieved - no, delighted - to wear nothing but terry towel the rest of the year. Dressing up outside the context of a party/ceremony/gala suggests you need to invent your own reason to dress up because people aren't rewarding you.

It is my observation that we dress better in London than in the US, where clothes are both more casual and more conservative.

But Emma goes on to quote . . .

. . . LA actress Rose McGowan [who] thinks "that tired old cliche, 'Everyone in Los Angeles dresses down', is just that. A cliche. What people who aren't in the public eye don't understand is that you need armour, and clothing, hair and makeup can protect you against the world."

A crucial observation. In London, this vast, complicated, chaotic city, clothes are also your armour. Two fashion editors told me recently that they loved Alexander McQueen because his clothes felt like armour; they were a carapace. They felt they could do battle with their bosses in them. The rich and powerful don't need armour. Look at how Bill Gates dresses.

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.