On not being able to leave the house

“The hardest thing to sell at the moment is a black kitten heel,” says Rebecca Farrar-Hockley, the buying and creative director of Kurt Geiger. According to her, a shoe boom is nigh, spurred on by It-bag fatigue and pared-down ready-to-wear.

Incredibly useful article about shopping in Paris

. . . and how to look like a Parisian. Here

I was in Paris in September and the key to looking like a Frenchwoman is scarves. Artfully tied.

Do you want to look old?

I have a piece in today's Telegraph about a new book about to come out in the UK but which has already courted controversy in the US, Charla Krupp's 'How Not To Look Old.'

In the 1950s and 1960s there was a craze in America for a procedure called rhinoplasty, in which a cosmetic surgeon broke the patient's nose to give her a new, always smaller, one. Little upturned ski-slope noses sat on faces they did not fit, but they had solved an age-old problem: how not to look Jewish in Wasp America. When Charla Krupp published her how-to manual in America at the beginning of this year, entitled How Not To Look Old, there was something of a furore in the press. Krupp argued that, since older women were discriminated against, the best way they could deal with the issue was not by tackling the discrimination politically, but by changing the way they look. As she pointed out in the New York Times, 'There was a book on how not to look Jewish. It was called The Preppy Handbook and it was a bestseller.'

Tight jawline!

But Krupp's book touched a raw nerve in the American media. 'Age management' is the essence of her thesis. 'Until age becomes a non-issue,' she writes, 'I don't think it's particularly smart for women to advertise their age… As Christie Brinkley said in her CoverGirl commercials, "I love being the age I am, I just don't want to look it." No one wants to "look it", because of age profiling and the fear of being outed. Why does anyone, besides your doctor, need to know your age anyway?'

To the feminist baby-boomer generation it was an outrage, for they (and that includes me) were the first to challenge every assumption about women's lives from contraception to menopause. To a politically correct American media, Krupp's book was as shocking as suggesting that Barack Obama use bleaching agents to lighten his skin; and yet during the presidential race Hillary Clinton has been proudly promoting feminist values with a face that looks suspiciously stiffened by Botox and a glare of forensic scrutiny about her appearance that her Republican rival, John McCain, aged 72, has evaded. For the reality for many of those outraged women is that in a highly competitive workforce and a culture in which celebrities are never seen to age - where all the role models have had face-lifts and a 50-year-old looks 35 - it is hard to get a job when you resemble the age on your birth certificate.

The baby-boomers' unique selling point has always been youth. We are a generation born, we believed, to be young and stay younger forever, as if ageing were a lifestyle choice for our parents, a more conservative generation who longed for Crimplene dresses and set hair. But, though the generation born after the war and up to the early 1960s has rewritten most of the rules about how to behave over 40, watching iconic figures such as Twiggy age and become the face of Marks & Spencer's with-it granny look has been extraordinarily unnerving. Sir Paul McCartney's perennially bad hair-dye job, and Mick Jagger's wrinkled visage beneath his own light-brown locks, remind us that there is no real Dorian Gray option, short of the surgeon's knife.

Read on

Thought for the day

I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher. Jonathan Swift

Thought for the day

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God. Deuteronomy 22:5

Banana Republic comes to town

£100 less in America

For years I have been taking advantage of the weakness of the dollar to buy clothes when I'm in the US, and first port of call was always Banana Republic, cruelly denied to us Brits, and a favourite for well-priced fashion we couldn't get at home. I loved the 5th Avenue flagship store in New York and my wardrobe has several good things that have done service for years on end.

So we've all been drumming our fingers on the table waiting for its first European outlet to open in the old Dickens and Jones building on Regent Street, and lo, yesterday, it did. And as I had an hour-long gap between lunch with my agent and afternoon tea with a fashion editor at Liberty, I hurried in there out of the driving rain and bitter winds.

What a let-down. Maybe it's a question of forbidden fruit, you want what you can't have, but overall the stock was disappointing: Marks and Spencer's Limited Collection without any of the edge. And more expensive. They've introduced a UK only label which is supposed to be a bit more dernier cri, and there was a very nice white trench coat I tried on, but I'm not in the market for a white trench coat. The bags were okay, a very limited collection of shoes, some jewellery including one sensational yellow bead necklace, very this season. A good, Spring-weight leather coat at £300. But across the street is Cos and you could actually look out of BN's window's into it and see clothes that are more stylish, more European, more interesting - and it's owned by H&M.

According to the Daily Mail, BN is 'imposing huge mark-ups' on its UK prices:

A snapshot survey of Banana Republic's UK prices by the Daily Mail shows a printed silk halterneck dress sells for £95 in this country - 58 per cent more than in the U.S.

It can be teamed with a £125 Flatsunglasses-iron baby satchel, which is 40 per cent more, and a pair of espadrille wedge shoes that are 62 per cent more expensive here.

The entire outfit would cost £299.50 in the UK, £100 more expensive than the same items in the U.S.

An orange, textured coat appears on the firm's U.S. website at a price of just £60, while the figure in the official UK catalogue is £140 - a mark-up of 133 per cent.

A cap sleeve silk dress in pale gold is £55 on the other side of the Atlantic but £95 here.

A pair of black peep-toe wedge shoes is £79.50 in this country, a mark-up of 62 per cent on the U.S. price.

There is a similar mark-up on some accessories.

The fashion editor remarked that one problem with BN is its colours, which are probably better suited to the stronger light of America. I also had an impression that the sizing is smaller, as I usually go a size down in BN in America, but not here.

So I dropped in at the Jaeger press office for a cup of tea and they showed me some things that are coming in at the end of April, and I saved my money for those, instead.

Thought for the day

Some ladies think they may, under the privileges of the deshabille, be loose and negligent of their dress in the morning. But be you, from the moment you rise till you go to bed, as cleanly and properly dressed as at at the hours of dinner or tea. Thomas Jefferson

In classical times . . .

Sarah Mower and I might have had our differences in the past regarding the mutton question (see passim) but here she is in the Telegraph today laying out the bible for women of common sense this Spring and Summer:

This season, though, I've come back charged with a sense of clarity. What I want is actually very simple. It's not a flowery see-through chiffon dress, no matter how pretty they looked on the spring runway six months ago. It isn't a jumpsuit, in spite of the number of spring fashion shoots that are pushing them. And it absolutely, definitely is not a pair of drop-crotch trousers, dhotis, harem pants or any hybrid thereof.

Rarely has the word "classic" looked so tempting. For one thing, this is hardly the time to be wasting money on insubstantial fads that will be over in a second (the multi-floral thing, for example, which - according to the latest collections - will be dead by next winter).

And for another, having just emerged from spending a month embedded in the advance guard of some of the world's most dedicated dressers, it became startlingly clear to me how few editors, stylists and buyers have taken spring's notions literally. The really great dressers - the women you stare at across runways - have whittled their purchases down to a few brilliant things, which they then vary with maddeningly clever choices of tops, shoes, scarves and jewellery.

After years of bingeing on fast-fashion that falls apart in weeks, that knack - the ability to play with classic, long-lasting clothes in a creative way - is something we need to relearn.

You should definitely go and read the whole thing, because she has several entirely wearable key pieces, and how to wear them, to look our best this summer

Thought for the day

Ms Mills

No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise.

William Congreve

High maintenance

At my lowest ebb on the grand tour of Australia and New Zealand I got my publicist to book me in for a blow dry at a salon in Christchurch. And emerged feeling more fully human than I had done in many days. At the hairdresser's in London *on Monday, I recalled that in the 50s and 60s, my mother twice-weekly had a shampoo and set and always looked perfectly coiffed. It was the Vidal Sassoon five-point cut and later long hair, which drove us away from regular hairdressing and now I think that might have been an error. We all know that Anna Wintour has a hairdresser who comes every morning to her house to do her blow dry, and while can't all reach to that ideal, I'm starting to think that 25 quid for a blow dry once or twice a week might be a better use of one's income than regular manicures or taxis. Not that my hairdresser charges £25 for this simple service, but plenty of local ones do. And of course, in America it can't cost more that two cents.

* My stylist Roger tells me that a couple of you have gone along to him at my recommendation - I very much hope that worked out for you.

Thought for the day

The energy of imagination, deliberation, and invention, which fall into a natural rhythm totally of one's own, maintained by innate discipline and a keen sense of pleasure - these are the ingredients of style. And all who have it share one thing: originality. Diana Vreeland

Orange Prize longlist in full

Anita Amirrezvani* The Blood of Flowers
Stella Duffy The Room of Lost Things
Jennifer Egan The Keep
Anne Enright The Gathering
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Tessa Hadley The Master Bedroom
Nancy Huston Fault Lines
Gail Jones Sorry
Sadie Jones The Outcast
Lauren Liebenberg The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Charlotte Mendelson When We Were Bad
Deborah Moggach In The Dark
Anita Nair Mistress
Heather O'Neill Lullabies for Little Criminals
Elif Shafak The Bastard of Istanbul
Dalia Sofer The Septembers of Shiraz
Scarlett Thomas The End of Mr Y
Carol Topolski Monster Love
Rose Tremain The Road Home
Patricia Wood Lottery

*I met Anita at the Adelaide festival and liked her very much. She is an Iranian-American whose parents left at the time of the 1979 revolution.

Discussion of the longlist here. and here. As usual there is the conventional moaning about the list excluding men, moaning which is curiously absent when it comes to any of the other literary prizes and their exclusions. I'd love to win the Pulitzer but as I'm not an 'American author', I can't.

Maureen Freely on the Guardian books blog, has an excellent piece addressing the inanities of the 'sexism' complaint:

In my view, the most significant thing about the Orange Prize is not that it is only for women. The prize's great virtue is that it is for all women writing in English. Most prizes, most notably the man Booker, respect (and so enforce) national boundaries. This despite the fact that national boundaries in Anglophone fiction became less significant with every passing day.

A quick look at the 2008 Orange long list bears this out. There are seven countries represented, eight if you include both nationalities claimed by the US/Iranian first novelist Anita Amirrezvani. Dalia Sofer, listed as an American author, is also Iranian by birth. Elif Shafak, though she carries a Turkish passport, was born in France. Later in life, she spent many years in the US. Though she writes mostly in Turkish, The Bastard of Istanbul, her seventh novel, is her second novel in English. Like so many of their readers, these authors are hybrids, and they are much better served by a panel that isn't bothered by that.

I've often wondered how many of our national treasures here in Britain would fare if they were pitted against a shortlist that included writers such as Roth and Ford or Orhan Pamuk and David Grossman.

News of shoes

I got it into my head while I was travelling, that on my return I would buy a new pair of shoes, having consigned to a hotel waste bin, for reasons of expediency, a pair that looked shabby and were perhaps not such a great idea in the first place. Though inexpensive. After the hairdresser's I walked up Sloane Street to Salvatore Ferragamo, where, legend has it, they make very good quality classic shoes, perhaps not the dernier cri, but wearable. I was not looking for flats, or sensible walking shoes, but day-to-nights: shoes I could wear to a smart lunch or a party, but no bling.

Heels.

The bastards have done it again. First we had kitten heels. Then we had clumpy heels. Then we had high clumpy heels we couldn't walk in. Now we have high stilettos we can't walk in. There being almost nothing to try on in Ferragamo, I went to Fratelli Rossetti. Same thing. So I went to Harvey Nicks' shoe department and the dreadful truth was revealed. We are back to needle thin points. There were a few pairs of shoes of high clumpy heels, but not many. There were no shows with medium height points. The wedges were tall and wooden, make them too heavy to walk in.

Eventually, with the assistance of a very helpful Lithuanian sales assistant, I bought a pair of black patent Dolce e Gabbana peep-toe shoes, with a wearable clumpy high heel. I think I can walk in them. Just. They do fit. They cost £300, making them the most expensive shoes I have ever owned, though beautifully made. Of course they're cheaper in America, on Raffaelo.

I have no idea when I will next be able to buy any more shoes, if this is what faces us for the next couple of seasons, or more.

These are the shoes I bought, but in black patent - does anyone think I should have got the white instead? I couldn't decide in the shop, and thought I should be sensible and get the black, But now I'm not sure . . .

Thought for the day

There are skilled dyers and weavers in Masahiro's household, and when it comes to dress, whether it be the colour of his under-robe or the style of his cloak, he is more elegant than most men; yet the only effect of his elegance is to make people say, 'What shame someone else isn't wearing those things.' Sei Shonagon c. 966 -c. 1013

Orange prize longlist

This is not supposed to be released until tomorrow, but has been leaked by the Telegraph after the site accidentally went live on Thursday for 20 minutes.

I can disclose that the longlist for the £30,000 award for women writers includes heavyweights such as Anne Enright, for her Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering, and Rose Tremain, for The Road Home. Others listed are When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson; The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy; The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant; and In the Dark by Deborah Moggach

Hillary's clothes

Hadley Freeman has thought about Hillary and her clothes.

It is obvious to the point of cliche that Clinton is in a trickier position in many ways than Obama: when he is emotional, he is persuasive; when she is emotional, she is betraying her feminist roots. So just as Obama can cut a dash in his slimline, clearly style-conscious suits, Clinton has to hide herself in garishly coloured squares going under the name of "jackets", or else risk being dismissed as so vain that she would be too busy putting on her lipstick to respond to an international terror threat.

But is this necessarily true? One need only look at Condoleezza Rice to see that, contrary to what some might think, American voters aren't always horrified to see a woman in power who doesn't look like Eleanor Roosevelt, and Rice has to placate a far more conservative group of people than the one Clinton is meant to be wooing. Nor did Rice's appearance several years ago in US Vogue seem to harm her credibility. Clinton, on the other hand, was so fearful of such a possibility that she backed out of a shoot with the magazine at the last minute last year, provoking a diatribe from Vogue's editor, Anna Wintour. To make matters even worse for Clinton, who should appear that same month on the cover of Men's Vogue but Obama, appearing very suave and relaxed, whereas Clinton now looked as if she was neurotically focus grouping her campaign to death.

I declare myself to be in the deepest sympathy with any female politician at the receiving end of the mad-dog media about her dress sense. I work in an occupation in which I have little visible public profile, apart from book tours and readings, and my fashion mistakes are not dissected by strangers on a daily basis. I would also point out that Rice cuts a better fashion figure than Clinton because, simply, Rice has a better figure. Hillary has awful legs, she's short, she's stocky. No beanpole myself, I understand how difficult it is to dress this shape. Suits don't suit her.

Thought for the day

Clothes without a wearer, whether on a secondhand stall, in a glass case, or merely a lover's garments strewn on the floor, can affect us unpleasantly, as if a snake had shed its skin. Similarly, a pregnant woman describing how the little frock hanging up in readiness for her as yet unborn child seems like 'a ghost in reverse.' Elizabeth Wilson

Can I dance in these?

Justine Picardie advances a theory about unwearable shoes.

What, exactly, is the point, you might well ask? You probably won't be able to walk very far in these shoes, and you certainly can't run in them; so what is one meant to do with them? Put them on a mantelpiece, like a quirky sculpture? This is always an option - a perverse one, I grant you - but I have a theory, borne out by years of personal practice, that if you love a pair of beautiful shoes, however fantastical, you are miraculously able to dance in them. Thus the right heels - and you know them when you find them - will lift the spirits as well as the feet.

I would sneer, but I have a pair of Kurt Geiger red suede stilettos, bought in 1999 which I adored and found them perfectly comfortable. I was looking at them yesterday with a view to sending them off to a new home at the Cancer Research shop, and I was asking myself why I didn't find them so comfortable any more. And Justine might have answered that: that I no longer love them as I once did.

Jil Sander bag

This is the bag I bought at the Hong Kong outlet. It's from the Raf Simons SS07 line and the bagsnobs liked it then. The one I got is silver. Simple, small, chic, minimalist.

I might not have mentioned that in another outlet I got a 'Marni' necklace and Sarah negotiated a chunk knocked off the price for me. And a yoga t-shirt (like I do yoga). And Aesop handcream, which, after intense discussion with Sarah over iced coffee, we agreed was the best.

Home

At 5.30 am Hong Kong time I got in a taxi and drove through the darkened city, and saw, for the first time - undistracted by the soaring illuminated towers - the port. I was reminded of those old pictures of three-masted schooners densely rocking on a tide, but the spires were not sails, rather the cranes of the docks, loading the manufactured goods of China and setting them out on their container ships to the rest of the world. For here was the epicentre of fashion: not the Paris or Milan atelier, not the St Martin's graduate in his Shoreditch studio, but what comes of the reality of all those dreams. Hard commerce. And I could not help but think how distracted we are in Europe with the wrong political preoccupations, while under our noses a whole new superpower has sprung into life out of our needs and wants and desires. Ruthless, with not a democratic bone its collective body, all America's tarnished idealism (its Founding Fathers, its constitution, its will to happiness) is absent; trade is its DNA.

On the 13 hour flight, I finished Richard Ford's Independence Day and could have knocked my head against a wall for not reading it sooner: a hymn to suburban America, the philosophy of real estate and why there is always dignity in finding another man a home. I watched Elizabeth: The Golden Age (dire) and The Assassination of Jesse James (ponderous, but beautifully scripted and acted, another examination of American myth), three episodes of Kath and Kim, and three episodes of Extras.



I return to the new issue of UK Vogue with a piece by me on the emotional wrench of throwing things away, and on the cover, Victoria Beckham, whom Nick Kent has partially managed to convey as if she the subject of a Cecil Beaton between-the-wars society girl. Alexandra Shulman (vogue.com has a video of Alex talking about the decision to feature her) has written a definitive appraisal of her: her helpless urge to succeed, hints at her insecurity, an essentially suburban marriage, her teenage desire to always have the right thing: her shoes are always too big because she gets catwalk samples from the shoes, and has to stuff them with tissues. Trying too hard, not pretty enough, never thin enough for the mental picture inside her head, she's the triumph of the will: an oddity, a girl with nothing going for her except her determination that, knocked down, she will always arise and live to dress another day.