Thought for the day

Diana Vreeland

Three-tenths of a good appearance are due to nature; seven-tenths to dress. Chinese saying.

London event

I will be doing one London event for The Clothes On Their Backs before leaving for Australia and New Zealand. The event is at Jewish Book Week* on Sunday 24 February, interviewed by Rachel Seiffert, whose first novel was shortlisted for the Booker.

Full details here

*You don't have to be Jewish

Fashion and conceptualism

Christopher Kane

Jess Cartner-Morley, in the Guardian, one of Britain's most intelligent and thoughtful fashion editors (her degree is in history) says this of the shows at London Fashion Week:

I start with the designers' ideas rather than the clothes themselves because ideas, rather than clothes, were what this week's collections seemed to be about. If London fashion week was uncharacteristically commercial last season, this week it retreated back underground. Last season's blockbuster collections were replaced by arthouse looks that made little attempt to appeal to the mainstream.

And while new ideas are a necessity for a good fashion week, they don't make a good fashion week by themselves. Great catwalk moments are made when a designer can take an idea and turn it into clothes that are not only original and interesting but beautiful and desirable in their own right. Alexander McQueen and John Galliano are the current masters of this - but although both are British, stage their catwalk shows in Paris. One of the most promising students of this on the current schedule is Noki, who makes his collection entirely out of second-hand clothing, giving punch to his message of sustainability by creating fantastical catwalk pieces that are more haute couture than hair shirt.

The bad stuff happens when designers drape fabric on to models in order to represent their ideas in a literal way, instead of really setting their mind to thinking through how to make those ideas work as clothes. The result is that the catwalk looks like a bad puppet show. But the flipside of the cerebral attitude of London designers is that when the clothes do work - when they go the extra mile, add the touch of magic that transforms the ideas into real clothes - they tend to be much more interesting to look at than clothes in, say, New York, which are usually great for making your legs look long but not exactly food for thought. Christopher Kane, Todd Lynn, Sinha Stanic and Giles Deacon all hit the jackpot, delivering collections that felt like clothes, not concepts.

Independent review

Grant bravely explores – and exposes – such unfashionable viewpoints. Her novel is at once a beautifully detailed character study, a poignant family history and a richly evocative portrait of the late 1970s. The book's sole significant flaw is its failure to establish its extensive clothing imagery as the overarching metaphor for which it strives. Attempting a career as a literary journalist, Vivien summons "all the cruelty of the first-time reviewer trying to make her mark". This long-term reviewer has mellowed, for it is a joy to welcome such a vibrant and thought-provoking book.

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Thought for the day

I should like my dress to be a poem about myself, my persona, the outward and visible presentation of my individuality. And that particular mode and fabric and manner which I should choose might not at all recommend itself to my next-dooor neighbour. Indeed, I hope it would not. For the loveliest and most human thing about humanity is the infinity of its types and modes of manifestation.

'A Girl Graduate'
Pall Mall Gazette 1884

What you see is not what you get

Last week I wrote about Net a Porter's decision to sell two dresses from the previous day's Halston show on its site.

Cathy Horyn, the New York Times' fashion writer decided to order a dress having actually seen the show. And here's what happened:

The dress arrived Wednesday afternoon at the office. The delay didn’t really bother me. What’s one day compared to waiting five or six months, as you normally would for a fall 2008 dress. But I was disappointed with the dress. Although Net-a-Porter had clearly described the dress as wool jersey, I had seen the style in the show—and it was in sleek silk satin and a warmer tone. Further, the dress didn’t seem to be worth $1,495. Unlike the thousands of women who logged into Net-a-Porter, I had had the advantage of seeing the collection in the studio and on the runway, and the clothes had seemed more substantial to me. I was also having trouble seeing what distinguished this wool jersey dress from another designer make, and, frankly, I had been seduced by the silk version on the runway. It looked cooler. Also, the dress didn’t fit—that was my fault. I should have gone for the 42—or, anyway, something smaller. I looked a little schlumpfy, if you know what I mean.

The Halston’s wool jersey dress that Ms. Horyn ordered, size 44, from Net-a-porter. (Evan Sung for The New York Times)

Was this a case of bait and switch? Was the wool jersey shirt dress part of the runway collection or was it a so-called commercial look done specially for Net-a-Porter’s Halston sale?

A day or so later, I learned that the wool jersey dress was supposed to be on the runway—it’s listed, in fact, on the run-of-show—but at the last minute Marco Zanini, the Halston designer, had pulled it and substituted the satin shirt-dress. Zanini told me yesterday that he had switched dresses because there was already a lot of wool jersey on the runway—one of the long, draw-string evening dresses is in the same fabric, as is a teal gown.

what was on the runway

I also telephoned Bonnie Takhar, the chief executive of Halston, and shared my consumerist misgivings about the dress. She was concerned. She said the dress came from the same factory that had made the samples, so the quality should be identical. (Neither Takhar nor Massenet will say how large the initial Net-a-Porter was, but production and delivery of the garments from the factory took about 30 days, which Takhar said was normal.)

Anyway, I said to Takhar that, apart from the size, maybe the problem was the dress didn’t seem in the same stylish company as the other runway pieces, and not as flattering (to my eye) as the satin shirt dress. Obviously it would have helped if BOTH styles, the low-back draped shift and the jersey shirt dress, had been on the runway, given all the ballyhoo about the runway-to-consumer concept. Takhar agreed. She then offered to have my dress styled as it would have appeared on the runway.

Which Zanini did yesterday, using a size-44 model and pairing the dress with a sleeveless cashmere turtleneck and high suede boots. In Halston’s defense, it looked great—and better, I think, without the sash belt that comes with each dress. Net-a-Porter has sold out of the brown shirt dress, though it still has a size left in the teal, and Massenet told me last Friday that she had not heard any displeasure from customers.

Giles Deacon: London Fashion Week experiments with sharia law

Thank You, Anya Hindmarch

This is mine in caramel (above)

This is it in cream

A courier has just arrived at my door with the currently waiting-list only Anya Hindmarch Cooper in caramel. I didn't even spot one at London Fashion Week, amongst the dozens of AH bags carried on the arms of the ingathered fashionistas.

Check it out here, or on Net a Porter or Saks.

Also delivered, in the nick of time for my Australia trip was an AH upright trolley just the right size to be an airline carry-on, as sold here, but in beige and gold.

Tribute to Saul Bellow

(pictured below contradicting the Thought for the Day)

On his death in 2005, I wrote:

Even if he was not writing, it was enough to know that Saul Bellow was alive and thinking. When I heard the news of his death on the radio on Wednesday morning, I screamed aloud in rage and sorrow because what Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive.

His vigour, vitality, humour and passion were always matched by the insistence on thought, not the predigested cliches of the mass media or of those on the left which had began to disgust him by the Sixties. 'I knew that what you need in a big American city was a deep no-affect belt, a critical mass of indifference,' he wrote in Humboldt's Gift. The Bellow character kept insisting on the right to feel that something mattered, it was an entirely personal integrity, the keeping of the terms of a contract, which was to know. And those characters knew a lot - the social conditions of the tenements they grew up in, Aristotle, Tolstoy, Al Capone. How to dress, how to make love.

. . .

Bellow was a writer about conscience and consciousness, forever conflicted by the competing demands of the great cities, the individual's urge to survival against all odds and his equal need for love and some kind of penetrating understanding of what there was of significance beyond all the racket and racketeering.

In the Fifties, he shared a place with Arthur Miller in Nevada while they fulfilled the residency requirements to divorce their wives. Bellow would go out to the desert and practise the therapy of the moment, the primal scream. That was him: I want I want I want. The yearning soul, now, unbelievably, silent.

Further review

From The London Paper

The Clothes on Their Backs
Linda Grant
Virago, £17.99

Award-winning novelist, journalist and creator of the increasingly indispensable fashion blog thethoughtfuldresser.blogspot.com, Linda Grant returns with the story of the introspective yet passionate Vivien. Born to mild-mannered Hungarian refugees in 1953, she grows up in a red-brick Marylebone apartment wondering what the world might hold for her. While her parents are reluctant to explore either their surroundings or their emotions, Vivien becomes fascinated by the appearance of a flamboyant uncle at the doorstep one day – a curiosity only fuelled when her father refuses to speak of him again. Their inevitable reunion provides Vivien with an education that is as harsh as it is glamorous, as she develops an understanding that it's the clothes we wear as much as the secrets we keep that define us. As a portrait of London in the 20th century, a coming-of-age tale and an explanation of why fashion is more than just frocks, it's a sublimely atmospheric and deeply moving novel.
Alexandra Heminsley

In which I completely disagree with Hadley Freeman

great length!

who writes:

With regard to the former, the slim and straight tunics - essentially long dresses without sleeves - are easily commercial, while the low-slung tuxedo-style trousers were some of the most flattering pieces seen all week. On the downside, the below-the-knee hem lengths, often described euphemistically as "awkward", would make anyone under 5ft 10in look like a squat mushroom, a comparison only consolidated by the muted colour palette. If Virginia Woolf were alive today, and perhaps worked in a publisher's office, her wardrobe would be sorted.

Pants to that

Can anything be more fatuous than this particular enterprise: a pair of orange knickers emblazoned with handcuffs, so when you drop your drawers you automatically think of Guantanamo:

As is the case in the happiest of marriages, this natural combination inevitably produced a most striking offspring: a pair of knickers in what is being described as "Guantánamo Bay orange", mini handcuff dangling from the front and the catchy slogan "Fair trial my arse" emblazoned on the, um, back. Happy Valentine's day, sweetie!

This is not the first time Agent Provocateur has mixed slogans with silk. There were the seductive knickers embroidered with the statement "The only Bush I trust is my own" because every woman secretly loves to wear a political pun on her pants. And it's a style that comes naturally to Corre, whose mother Vivienne Westwood likes to wear a shirt that informs onlookers: "I am not a terrorist."


But is there not a risk that flogging orange pants might diminish the seriousness of the politics behind them? Martha Lane Fox, a trustee of Reprieve, shrugs: "The absurdity of this collaboration reflects the absurdity of Guantánamo Bay, in which people are held indefinitely without fair trials. The pants are no more absurd than that."

No, the pants are absurd, the suspension of habeus corpus is something else again.

I notice when I go to the Agent Provocateur website there's a soft-porn video on the front.

Thought for the day

Saul Bellow

Poets, artists, and men of genius in general are seldom coxcombs, but often slovens; for they find something out of themselves better worth studying than their own persons. William Hazlitt

Love that girl

Erin O'Connor on how to get through London Fashion Week

I can’t get through fashion week without pair of flip flops: you need to let your feet breathe in between wearing high heels. And when it gets cold I wear thick socks and Birkenstocks. I always carry around a packet of mints, because champagne does weird things to your breath.

The Thoughtful Dresser on the road

My apologies for the intermittent posts here. A combination of the publication The Clothes On Their Backs, London Fashion Week and my imminent departure on 25 February for a tour of Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong have curtailed my time.

Fuller details of events will be going up on my main website in a day or two. For those of you in Singapore, there will be a book talk and signing under the auspices of the British Council at the Arts House on 26 February. Full details are here, and advance registration by email is required. This will be followed by a series of media interviews the following day: with Channel News Asia Prime Time Morning (live) at 9.20 am, then with the Straits Times, Business Times, Harpers Bazaar Singapore.

I will also be doing some bookshop events in Melbourne, as well as the main Adelaide Festival.

There are no events planned for Hong Kong, but if any regular readers of this site would like to take me shopping, make your presence known!

Thought for the day

Often I have turned into [London's] old clothes market to worship. With awe-struck heart I walk through . . . Monmouth Street, with its empty suits . . . Silent are they, but expressive in their silence: the past witnesses and instruments of woe and joy, of passions, virtues, crimes, and all fathomless tumult of good and evil in 'the prison called life.' Friends! trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable. Thomas Carlyle

Thoughtful Dresser poll - fashion forward

Christopher Kane

Halfway through London Fashion Week, The Thoughtful Dresser poll asks which city provides the most fashion forward fashion week - New York, London, Milan or Paris. Vote on the right.

Poll: Skirt lengths

Just below the knee the clear winner, there's a surprise.

Of course it's the most flattering length, it cuts the leg at its narrowest point, just before the curve of the calf. It elongates the leg and torso and hides bad knees.

Nuclear winter

Marios Schwab at London Fashion Week. A similar theme was at Jaeger. Why? But maybe we'll see a watered down version at M&S come October.

Why your clothes don't fit

I once, very briefly, studied Sociology. I recall sitting in a library reading a study which triumphantly concluded that people of different incomes lived in different parts of cities. I put the book down and thought. Money. Old Rope.

And now a landmark study by scientists! in Spain has reveals that many women can't find clothes that fit properly.

Scientists have confirmed what millions of women know already: the fashion industry does not make clothes to fit them. In the largest study of its kind Spain has taken full-body laser scans of more than 10,000 women and compared the resulting three-dimensional measurements with clothes on the high street

The conclusion was that four in ten women were unable to find clothes to fit them properly. “We are going to abolish the current system of sizes and move to another that satisfies the needs of women,” said Bernat Soria, the Spanish Health Minister.

The study found that women had three body types: a “cylinder”, in which the top, middle and bottom were broadly aligned, “hourglass” and “pear-shaped”. About a third of women fell into each category, though they tended to move from being cylinders to pears as they got older.

Women between the ages of 19 and 30 had the hardest time finding clothes that fit - mainly because they were too small or tight.

. . .

The Government hopes that if its new measurement system is successful it will be adopted as standard by all the countries in the European Union. Once it has dealt with women's problems finding well-fitting clothes, it will turn its attention to the other half of the population. Next into the scanning booth: 10,000 Spanish men.

Inshallah, as they said in Moorish Spain.