Fond pride of dress is sure an empty curse; E'er Fancy you consult, consult your purse. Benjamin Franklin
Monday, 4 February 2008
Sunday, 3 February 2008
BBC interview
I will be interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour tomorrow, Monday, programme starts at 10am. There's a facility to listen on-line for up to seven days later
Sunday Times review of The Clothes On Their Backs
We are what we wear because clothes reveal our personalities but, as Grant makes clear as she guides us through a dizzying ethical maze, they also conceal them. We leave Vivien, now middle-aged and recently widowed for the second time, swinging a bag containing a svelte new dress – a symbol of hope for the future if anything is – and we understand that, in this meticulously textured and complex novel, beneath Grant’s surface dressing, what she is talking about is more than skin deep.
more
Thought for the day
A plain, genteel dress is more admired, and obtains more credit, than lace and embroidery, in the eyes of the judicious and the sensible. George Washington
Saturday, 2 February 2008
Mini interview in the Financial Times
How do you cure writer’s block?
I walk down Bond Street and look at the clothes.
Can you remember the first novel you read?
Hugely precociously it was Crime and Punishment, when I was 13.
What makes you cross to read?
Novels about nothing.
Into the new century
One of my favourite films is the strange bitter-sweet 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman. The author of the novella on which it is based was Stefan Zweig, and Patrick Wright has a long piece about him in the Guardian today. Antony Beevor once told me that Zweig's Beware of Pity was his favourite novel, and how odd that a Viennese Jew should have written the great novel of the life of a cavalry officer.
Zweig describes the late 19th century of his childhood as the "world of security". Its values were established and largely beyond question. Its members were confident in their monarchy and parliament. As for the possibility of violent disruption, scarcity, war and the intervention of life-changing fate, all such thoughts were swept under the carpets of a society devoted to bourgeois comfort.What did they see, asks Zweig of that world in which everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight? Each of them lived his life in uniformity. A single life from beginning to end, without ascent, without decline, without disturbance or danger, a life of slight anxieties, hardly noticeable transitions. In even rhythm, leisurely and quietly, the wave of time bore them from the cradle to the grave . . . What took place out in the world occurred only in the newspapers and never knocked at their door.
Should he decide to travel, the well-off European of this age might journey as far as India without a passport: the frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.
Formed in this atmosphere, but also torn out of it, Zweig was both the creature of his time and the roughly awakened judge of its illusions. He condemns the desiccated rigidity of its school curriculum, its confining customs of women's dress and its sexual hypocrisy. The people of this era were naively settled in their optimism and "touching liberalism". They had no idea that life could also consist of "tension, and profusion, and being lifted up from all sides", or that "each succeeding day that dawns outside our window can smash our life". They refused to heed the warnings of Sigmund Freud, who had argued that their optimistic idea of reason as the force of the future was a chimera floating over turbulent complexes and drives.
Floaty with a bit of a jacket
Jess Cartner-Morley in the Guardian today has given the name to the look I have been unconsciously wearing since the summer.
The "feminine" versus "hard-edged" aesthetics have swapped places so many times that no one can quite remember which is more fashion-forward at any particular moment in time. The more strategic element of the fashion show-attending sorority have adopted a new uniform, one in which they can fight on both fronts. We on the Guardian fashion desk have pithily dubbed this look "floaty with a bit of a jacket".Catchy, huh? As an acronym - FWABOAJ - it veritably trips off the tongue, does it not? But what it lacks in verbal snappiness it makes up for in functionality. It means that whichever way the fashion weather vane swings next, at least half of you will be pointing the right way.
The best thing about FWABOAJ is that it can be cobbled together from pieces you have in your wardrobe already. (I love calling clothes "pieces". It lends my mountain of half-decade-old Mango sale purchases such an air of rarity and refinement, don't you think?
Read on
Thought for the day
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Jane Austen
Friday, 1 February 2008
LaDress: the verdict
My LaDress dress arrived.
On the plus side: Prompt delivery, excellent packaging, good colour, well made
On the negative side: It was about three sizes smaller than my UK size. Partly because it turns out it is not an A line dress but falls in a straight line from the shoulders with no give for the hips. It's not cut for a pear-shape at all. The kick-flare in the skirt near the hem creates the illusion that it is. Also because, in a very rare occurrence for me, it is rather tight even on the top which means the overall cut is far smaller than its UK equivalent.
Back to the drawing board
Close call with cashmere
Regular readers will remember that a month or two back I passed on a tip from a long-time employee of Pringle that it was possible to whiz a cashmere sweater in the dryer for five minutes without ill effects.
I tried it and it worked. This morning, I washed my favourite brown Pure cashmere sweater, span it on a short cycle and put it in the dryer. The settings don't allow me to time for as little as five minutes so I noted the time on the clock with the aim of taking it out exactly five minutes later.
And then wandered off.
Some fifteen minutes later, returning to the kitchen, I emitted a high-pitched scream that might have woken some of you up in California. I slammed shut the off switch and waited for the lock release to open the door.
When I took the sweater out, it was almost dry. I tried it on and to my astonishment, it had not shrunk, it was unharmed. Now I do not recommend that you regularly tumble dry your precious cashmere sweaters, but it is a testimony to Pure cashmere that they can survive their owners' stupidity. See their site on the banner above.
The clutch: just say no
As every fule no, this season's It Bag is the clutch. Not quite the equivalent of Chinese foot-binding, but fulfilling the same function - forcing the arm to remain clamped to your side and restricting the ability to make large expressive gestures. And as someone who likes talking, the idea of not having two hands to aid my gob is unthinkable.
Thought for the day
The impulse and the will to carry through an unorthodox style are no casual matter. Kennedy Fraser
Thursday, 31 January 2008
It was FANTASTICALLY warm
Diana Vreeland and Marisa Berenson discuss the eighteenth century. What an odd accent Vreeland had.
And does she refer to the salons she remembers visiting in the eighteenth century?
Is it cotton?
Sir Steve Redgrave, Olympic oarsman, on his campaign to introduce a range of fair trade cotton into Debenhams.
The 5G for Maine range will launch in 116 Debenhams high street stores nationwide from mid-February, in time for Fairtrade Fortnight, February 25th to March 3rd, which the chain will be supporting with window displays and instore activities.
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
Depths and surfaces
A mysterious on-line magazine called No More: A Compendium of Wit and Folly, has the most intelligent and insightful review so far of The Clothes On Their Backs. And I'm pleased to see they read The Thoughtful Dresser, too.
Grant takes a firm interest in fashion and the history of fashion, but ‘serious’ facts and ‘frivolous’ fashion are not so easily separated, as she is keen to establish. The way we dress has always been part of the surface-depth conundrum, whether you are listening to homely wisdom (it’s what’s inside that counts) or depressing yourself reading the works of French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. It’s difficult to think of an anti-establishment movement that hasn’t been at least partly defined by a dress code, from Bolsheviks and their caps to Boudica and her face paint. It is even more challenging to imagine being oblivious to people’s clothes. They are simply part of the visible environment. Grant’s title, The Clothes on Their Backs, speaks of immigrants fleeing and arriving, ‘left with nothing but the clothes on their back’. These men and women lose more than just possessions: naked of context and familiarity, they need to construct themselves anew.
. . .
The Clothes on Their Back is about dark places and bright, beautiful clothes, which can help define and preserve identity, often under the most terrible circumstances.
Sunday Telegraph review of The Clothes On Their backs
Like money, clothes have real, symbolic and psychological value. Linda Grant understands these dimensions implicitly. Stitched beautifully into the fabric of her latest novel is an acute understanding of the role clothes play in reflecting identity and self-worth.
Sándor Kovacs, a refugee from Hungary, arrives in London in 1956 with just 'a mackintosh, a scarf and a leather satchel' - literally the clothes on his back. Over time he builds up a murky business empire as a landlord to immigrants from the West Indies, a career which eventually lands him in prison, sees him likened to the Kray twins and depicted in the media as the 'face of evil'.
The one image his niece Vivien has of him from her childhood is of his electric blue suit and suede shoes. Kept apart from this scandalous man by her hibernatory immigrant parents, Vivien's first present from him when she is in her early twenties is a green silk dress.
By this stage it's the late 1970s, the National Front is throwing its weight around, and Vivien changes her name to Miranda so that she can befriend her family's 'black sheep'. Gradually Sándor's stories about his early life act as a mirror, reflecting back to Vivien a stronger sense of herself.
Vivien's position highlights Grant's concern over how we validate ourselves. Is adopting the uniform of one particular gang (punks, skinheads, tango dancers) enough to forge our identity? For decades, British-born Vivien cannot get her bearings.
. . .
Grant's own particular beam reveals the way we acquire our sense of self from what gets reflected back to us, either in the mirror or in our relationships with others. She is as at home writing about the thrilling ripple of silk as she is charting social tensions.
So: Prada or Primark? Rather enticingly, Grant provides the best of both.
read the rest
Botox, etc some issues
Read, ponder
My own position on these treatments is that I am too much of a hypochondriac to have any non-essential treatments with side effects and would rather spend the money on a digital mammogram. And Creme de la Mer.A recent investigation by the consumer watchdog Which? found a woeful lack of professionalism within the UK's cosmetic treatments industry: non-medical staff giving advice, companies pressurising uninformed customers into buying treatments, and even nurses selling Botox jabs on eBay. When an independent panel of experts rated the 19 clinics that Which? investigated, they found none to be "excellent", and only five managed a rating of "good".
"People tend to think that procedures such as Botox and dermal fillers are safer than plastic surgery because they are quick and don't involve an operation," says Jenny Driscoll, a health campaigner at Which?, whose website (which.co.uk/cosmetic) provides one of the few comprehensive guides to treatments.
"But actually, the plastic surgery market is far better regulated because all surgeons have to be passed by the General Medical Council and the Healthcare Commission. Conversely, when it comes to non-invasive procedures, there is no single body you can go to for information, and rule-breaking often goes unchecked."Driscoll thinks that because cosmetic treatments are viewed as vanity procedures, the Government is reluctant to spend money on the industry. "But my argument is that if you do not have better regulation, you will only end up having to spend money on these people when they need NHS treatment if something goes wrong."
In your face
When I was young enough not to worry about the etiquette of showing cleavage, I did not do so because: dresses that showed cleavage were not in fashion, and even had they been, I did not possess one. Now I have a cleavage I must concern myself with adding to the list of proscriptions to the purchase of my perfect dress, is it cut too low?
I know a famous women in British journalism who smilingly asserted that her steps up the career ladder were aided by her decision to always wear a low cut top to the office. Duh. Why did I fill my head with literature instead of thinking up that one? Why did I assume that newspaper editors were interested in whether I could write and think? Obviously I could not think if I didn't work that one out.
The Telegraph today agonises over the new rules.
They are everywhere. Encased in lace, just visible beneath the check-out girl's uniform at Sainsbury's, harnessed by spandex at the gym, like two setting suns about to disappear beneath the horizon of Victoria Beckham's slashed Cavalli dress, spilling from overly ambitious frocks at award ceremonies. Enough, I say. British women are confused about breasts: we need new guidelines - a little breastiquette, please.
and comes up with the following list od do's and don'ts.
THE DOS AND DONT’S OF BREAST ETIQUETTE
At work or the school gates: There is one simple rule, regardless of age. The breast bone is your barometer – never wear anything that dips below its midpoint. A glimpse of inner cleavage or the underside of a breast is a step too far.
At a cocktail or dinner party: Under-40s can go as low as an imaginary empire line. For over-40s, especially the large-breasted, the neckline should rise an inch a decade, but there is no reason why – provided you have spent a lifetime shielding your throat from the sun – one should be confined to polo necks before the age of 70.
At balls: Under-40s may go as low as they dare. Over-40s, invest in expensive underwear and structured evening wear.
The surgically enhanced: Those who have turned to the surgeon for a little rafraîchissement in middle age should not feel tempted to pay and display. See above.
Visible underwear: “A tiny flash of pretty bra or a slightly opened button showing just a bit of cleavage hints at what could yet be revealed,” say Trinny and Susannah in their book What Your Clothes Say About You. Their advice is generous: visible underwear is a dangerous card to play, often yielding a crude result.
Accessorise when necessary: A common complaint is that all the most beautiful dresses are low-cut. Use scarves, pashminas and camisoles to make a dress more versatile.
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