Thought for the day

Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.

Conrad Aiken

A couple of London sales

Hermes - 24 to 27 January

Up to 80% off Hermes womenswear, menswear, accessories and homewear.

24 to 27 January (10am to 6pm) 26 South Molton Lane, London, W1K 5AB.

Secret Sample Sale - 1 to 3 February

Studio/catwalk, showroom samples and clearance stock at to 80% discount

Studio/catwalk or showroom samples and clearance stock from London's designers, agents and retailers for men and women at up to 80% discount from retail price. Designers include Gharani Strok, Anna Rita N and Alchemist along with accessories from Jimmy Choo, Prada and Tods. 1 February (12pm to 7pm), 2 February (11am to 6pm) and 3 February (11am to 6pm) T2 , F Block, Old Truman Brewery, 1st Floor, 87 Brick Lane (opposite Woodseer Street)

Armani couture

A womanly shape for a woman's body. The bubble hem falls rather than gathers. Look at the slight flare of the sleeves. Look how the shoulders are cut. Pret a porter would lose the jacket decoration and it still would be a wonderful suit.

See the rest of the slideshow here

Thought for the day

Fashion is cleavage, style is collarbones. Betty Sue

Anya Hindmarch

The Anya Hindmarch S/S08 lookbook arrived in the post this morning. I was in the Sloane Street shop on Saturday, staring at the Cooper which I will be receiving from the October press preview any day now.

Above is the Aretha. Check it out on What's New at NET-A-PORTER

Poll: Lipstick etiquette

I have heard that there is a transatlantic divide about the etiquette about reapplying one's lipstick in public. I would not bat an eyelid about taking out my (Dior) compact and my (Guerlain) lipstick and reapplying it at a restaurant table, but American friends say it is a vulgar no-no.

Vote on this matter on the right.

The Thoughtful Dresser competition - the winner

Thank you for all the wonderful entries, which I really enjoyed reading.

Many of you offered sage advice from parents and grandparents and much of it amounted to what is fast becoming the mantra of The Thoughtful Dresser - don't buy cheap clothes.

Toby Wollins' father laid down the invaluable rule that clothes should always fit on the shoulders; the cloth falls from there so if a garment doesn't fit properly there, it won't fit anywhere.

I adored Ingrid's Hungarian immigrant mother's advice 'Wear it like you mean it!' and it would have been in the running for the winner had I not already posted something much like it in a previous Thought for the Day.

I discovered the truth of Bernie's 'If it matches nothing it goes with everything' when I bought a cream handbag. And kagoo had a significant variant: 'Don't worry about whether this goes with that; if you buy what you love, everything will go with everything.'

V pointed out that 'the mistake a lot of people make is that they dress from a place of abject terror.' Very true.

Eve Gerrard, who is a philosopher, advanced the following erudite piece of wisdom: 'Fashion enables us, for a brief period, to see the beauty buried in even the most hideous of colours or shapes. However crude the colour or unflattering the style, fashion can temporarily transform it into something rich and strange and desirable. The vision doesn't last, of course, as the back of our wardrobes attests.' A brilliant description of how fashion works.

Cal's mother pointed out 'Never wear black to a party, no matter how beautiful the dress you will fade into the background because the men will be wearing dark jackets.' I observed this at several Christmas parties.

I loved Isabelle's 'Wear your inner beauty on your sleeve, but I was looking for an entirely original thought, and googling, I did find this one in use elsewhere.

So the winner is (drum roll) the very first entry, from Betty Sue whose grandmother advised her: "What is the difference between fashion and style? Fashion is cleavage, style is collarbones"

Fantastic and accurate observation.

Congratulations Betty Sue, and if you would email me at lindagrantblog[at]googlemail.com , I can arrange for your prize to be delivered. And your thought to be credited to you in its own stand-alone Thought for the Day.

Dior: a world of his own

Reports of the first Paris haute couture shows are coming in:

Today's Dior collection was based on the same conceit: clothes that appear girlishly light and frothy, but are in fact based on serious sartorial engineering.

So the torso of a leopard-print ballgown appeared to be wrapped gently around the waist, when in fact the apparent softness concealed a heavy-duty corset beneath; a voluminous opera coat, puffed up and proud as a perfect yorkshire pudding, was fashioned out of silk stiffened and printed to resemble crocodile skin. The art of pulling off dressmaking impossibilities with difficult fabrics is a tradition in haute couture, because it showcases the skill of the designer. Cristobal Balenciaga liked to work in heavy boiled wool because he knew no one else could fashion elegant silhouettes from this lumpish cloth.

But while Madame X wore unadorned black velvet, today's Dior outfits came in jewel-box brights, each encrusted so densely with embroidery that the catwalk resembled a box of giant jelly babies, brightly coloured and sugar-dipped. All the signature silhouettes of haute couture were featured: the cocoon-shaped coats, the mermaid-shaped dresses, the slender-sleeved peplum jackets. The parodic femininity of the tightly corsetted, impossibly long-limbed shapes was emphasised in the virtuoso make-up: feather eyelashes and diamante eyeliner, bringing together the aesthetics of the drag queen with the skill of the world's best make-up artists to stunning effect.

US advertising

In the course of the next week or so US readers will notice more US advertising. I have selected stores which fit in with the overall ethos of this site - high quality, high fashion clothing and accessories. Some of these sites will ship overseas and will offer advantageous prices given the size of the US market and strength of the pound.

Last day of the Thoughtful Dresser competition

I'm going to be picking a winner in the Thoughtful Dresser competition this evening and will announce the winner tomorrow morning. You still have a chance to enter, and check back tomorrow for the result.

Gentlemen's corner

Here is a picture from the Prada menswear show AW8. If you were to take a shirt and slit it down the back and then gird it with some horizontal braces and put it on Agyness Deane, I can guarantee that two things would happen: a) Victoria Beckham would be wearing the self-same shirt the following week b) a month later I would be standing on the tube looking at hordes of teenage girls shivering with cold backs.

And yet I can also guarantee that you are not going to see this shirt on anyone. You will, in fact, never see it again. Why? Because men are not mugs. They don't wear stuff like this, they get women to wear stuff like this.

But at last the worm is turning, according to the Guardian:

Now, female designers are getting their own back. At the menswear shows in Milan last week, two labels built in the image of their female figureheads put out autumn/winter collections that suggested things are only going to get tougher. After her show, Miuccia Prada told critic Suzy Menkes that her theme had been "the things that men usually do to women - it's revenge!"

Prada's male models had walked out in flashes of flesh-coloured fabric, trousers with frilled tops that looked like tutus, vests that stopped at navel height, and pants that poked above the tops of trousers like so many women's g-strings did for a spell in the late 1990s. A couple of days later, Marni, headed by designer-founder Consuela Castiglioni, put men in turtlenecked jumpers that ended just below nipple height and tops that zipped up at the back, ensuring that you would need a good strong woman's helping hand to get in and out of them. The designer even indulged in a bit of pointed name-calling - Marni's fur-coats were made of weasel.

Nice try, Miucca, but all the boys I know in their early twenties are still devoted to the perfectly draped low-slung baggy jeans and the perfect t-shirt. They found their uniform aged 15 and they have stuck to is, as has the man I mentioned yesterday who, having adopted the levis, t-shirt, leather jacket and boots ensemble worn when he climbed into his VW van back in 1968 to drive down to raise the Pentagon with Abbie Hoffman, has seen no reason to alter his style as he nears 60.

The extraordinary conservatism of men and their clothing is a twentieth century phenomenon. For a thousand years men dressed as peacocks. Now they don't. They dress for function. With some colour sense. Personally I find it quite boring, but perhaps it says something about a crisis of masculinity as a response to feminism - butch it out. Or maybe not. Others can offer their own thoughts on this matter, below.

Thought for the day

A policeman in plain clothes is one man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence in the earth. Thy move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor,. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it. Mark Twain

Long to reign over us

(This is what 62 can look like)

Within one second I am totally in awe of her. She is so confident and so beautiful that the thought of it flies out of my head. She is, to be honest, dazzling. She is wearing a black, strappy, knee-length linen dress with a red belt, a black shrug, black high heels and a bunch of pearls. Her hair is dyed the palest ash blonde and so expertly cut I want to ask her who did it. But it's her eyes that are so amazing. They are deep, deep greeny-grey-blue.Usually it's men who go into raptures about Helen Mirren. In the past I have been told she's a man's woman, but I say phooey to all that because she is as about as charming to me as she could possibly be. Not that there isn't a hint of steel in her. But how on earth could she have survived the past 40 or so years in her profession without developing a pretty tough skin?

read on

Literature and the planet

Philip Pullman, who is one of the nicest people I know, is interviewed today, about his life and his concerns for the environment: Well worth reading the whole thing, but here are a couple of highlights:

Frightening people is a very good way to make them passive and supine. You can be terrified into an abject denial of everything and you don't want to know about it: you just shut your eyes and your ears. But the most useful, the most helpful and most energising thing is to say: "You can do this, and this, and this, and you can press your Government to do that."

Environmentalists need to know something about basic storytelling in order to make their words effective. Samuel Johnson apparently said something I find very useful to remember: "The true aim of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."

Research is much easier than writing, so the temptation is to shove all the research in. But page after page after page of the stuff goes by and, of course, people stop reading.

I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it's almost infinitely rich, but it's in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it.

. . .

AS: What gives you a sense of wellbeing?

PP: My first answer would have to be a good day's work. If I have done my thousand words, my three pages, and it's gone well, then nothing else matters - I'm satisfied. If I've done it and it's gone badly, well, I can correct it tomorrow, it's there.

If I combine that with a little bit of exercise, a little bit of play, which for me involves usually making things with wood, or playing music, and if my family is well and happy, and I have something nice to eat - that would be a good day for me.

I am very lucky. And I'm wary of preaching about how we should live, because I know how lucky I am: very few people have the chance to do what they want to do and stop doing it when they want to, and I do. Mind you, for 30 years I didn't. I had to write in my spare time while I was doing other jobs.

So perhaps I am entitled to preach a little bit. I'm entitled to say that in order to do the thing you want to do then you have to do it, whether or not you've got the time. If it means missing Neighbours, then miss Neighbours, or EastEnders or whatever. You must ask which is more important to you in the end.

The Great Mutton debate - menswear

With with AW/08 collections about to kick off, in the Observer Jeremy Langmead, editor of Esquire, explains that for the past few years the menswear shows have been throwing stuff down the catwalks that looks like it should only be worn by the founders of facebook - beanie hats, jeans with the crotch slung down the mid-thigh. Who wants, he writes,

. . . to look like the work experience guy unless they are the work experience guy? More fun surely to look like the boss with the bonus, comfortable in your middle-aged skin, rather than tragically aping the low-slung, hip hop style of the mail boy?

Personally, I can't say I know any 40-year-olds who dress this way and I do know several style-conscious men (and one who recently replaced a US army surplus jacket he bought in New York in 1970 while in town from Boston for a demo against the Vietnam war, with another one exactly the same, which went in the wardrobe for 'best' while the original remains his everyday wear.)

But Jeremy assures me that

The kidult look that has, for the past three or four years, monopolised the catwalks and therefore the high streets - cue hordes of metropolitan men dressing like their children, a sad sight in every sense - may finally be on the way out. There are early signs that fashion-conscious men may start dressing like grown-ups again. Instead of baggy, low-slung jeans or skintight trousers, the designers are sending models down the catwalk looking like adults: three-piece suits, loose trousers and coats that actually keep the cold out. Gone are beanie hats and manbags; in are briefcases and spectacles.

Someone in Milan and Paris, the world's two most influential fashion hubs, has recognised that style-conscious metropolitan men with money, usually those from their thirties up, may be wearying of being forced to look as if they want nothing more than to get down with the kids.

And then he makes rather a cutting point:

It is women, in fact, who have helped men realise how dangerous the desire to look young can be. We have watched them submit themselves to the surgeon's knife, spend thousands on caviar-filled potions and eat nothing but low-cal yoghurt in order to fit into size six dresses. It doesn't look fun. Men might have been oafish enough to encourage it, but we're not foolish enough to follow it. While gender generalisations are never popular, men, on the whole, do tend to look a little longer before buying into something. And thankfully, with this youth cult thing, we've realised just in time that it's not worth the money.

And still we await the return of the doublet, hose and pantaloons.

Thought for the day

(Yoko Ono being presented to the Queen - there is only a seven year age gap between them)

A man must be a profound calculator to be a consummate dresser. One must not dress the same, whether one goes to a minister or a mistress; an avaricious uncle, or an ostentatious cousin; there is no diplomacy more subtle than that of dress. Edward Bulwer-Lytton

At the sales

I went to the hairdressers' today at Sloane Square which is a brisk, ten-minute calorie-burning walk to Harvey Nichols so I dropped in to look at the final reductions in the sales. Since my resolution to stop buying cheap clothes my spending has dropped away to almost nothing, so with signs in the window saying up to 70 per cent off, I was well within my rights to see if they had anything I liked.

I tried on an Armani Collezioni jacket, at 60 per cent off, but it wasn't special enough to win a place next to all my other black jackets.

I tried an Anne Klein cocoon-shaped black wool coat, which was original, but the mark-down wasn't that great and I don't think the cocoon shape is a trend with any legs. And I have two black wool coats already.

I tried a DKNY short mac in a sensational yellow but it was too big.

I tried a Donna Karan slate jersey dress reduced from £1995 to £675 but thank god it was too small because I couldn't afford it.

And looking round I thought how utterly uninspired I felt by everything. Far too many of the dresses were too short, there was a world of black and beige and stone everywhere you looked. The clothes depressed me. Either they were ugly or they were unwearable. I looked in at Zara and saw a scrum of women fighting over tat, black tat.

Fashion has lost its bearings. The fad for cheap disposable style has revved up the speed of design, so trends come and go in a heartbeat, there's an air of desperation. There is nothing with authenticity and confidence, and nothing at all which issues that old siren call . . . wear me. Clothes have little relation to the bodies that they are supposed to dress.

Perhaps this is why there has been a retail slump. No-one wants to buy the stuff.

Look at all you derive just by being alive

Voting for the Fabbies

I know that my very good friend Manolo the Shoeblogger was infuriated when the annual blogging awards once again ignored fashion blogs so the fashion blogosphere has started its own which are going to be awarded at New York York Fashion Week.

I'm pleased to say that I have been nominated in the category best new fashion blog, and if you would care to vote, which you can do up till 30 January, you can go here

UPDATE The organisers have had several problems with the site which is now closed and also have now extended the voting until April.

Thought for the day

Dress has not only no social but also no significant aesthetic existence unless it is actually worn. Anne Hollander