Mary Quant

Mary Quant, now in her seventies, is interviewed about her mini skirt being commemorated on a Royal Mail stamp as an example of 60s design.


There is one way to age gracefully, retaining your style without the facelifts. Love too the upper class accent from an earlier era

I do not like pockets

We are supposed to replace bags with the newly fashionable pockets, ruining the line of your clothes . And what's with those pockets set directly inside the side seam so you look like a chicken trying to get your elbows into them, and bulging out your hips?

"I'm obsessed with pockets," says Anita Borzyszkowska, of Gap, a store that has been at the forefront of the pocket revival on the high street, from hoodie-style pouches on sweater dresses to Chanel-style patches on cardigans and invisible slips sewn into the side seams of dresses. Borzyszkowska - whose personal pocket tally for the day is seven (jeans plus a boyfriend-style cardigan) - cites Gap's collaboration two years ago with the designer Roland Mouret as the turning point. His collection of 10 dresses, much lauded at launch for its jolliness of colour and blousy styling, was in fact conceived with something else in mind. "One of the goals," says Borzyszkowska, "was for everything to have a pocket."

I tried on those Roalnd Mouret dresses and the pockets was the reason I didn't buy one.

Happy fiftieth birthday Motown

The sweetest most innocent popular music ever recorded, the sound of my early teens

Propping up the dollar

Despite the pound's dismal performance against the dollar, the sight of racks of clothes at 70 per cent off before Christmas at the Chevy Chase branch of Saks defeated my no shopping resolution.

Before and after the Mexico trip I bought two sweaters by a a brand unknown to me, Magaschoni, who make amazing, interesting knitwear. I got a grey and silver flecked zip up cardigan and a black one with fringed collar and cuffs. I feel as if I'm fiddling while Rome burns but the echoing, empty floors of Saks made me also feel rather guilty. No-one was buying anything and the bargains were so great.

A closed down shop is a depressing sight, and that Chevy Chase Saks always makes me feel as if I have returened to the womb.

Meanwhile Pure caashmere (see banner above) is 60 per cent off

Important advice on how to be in style now

Among other tips the Observer advises:

3 Do nude nails

You know how the old adage goes: when the It bag is bright, the nails must be light-er, pink. (Yes, we totally made that up just now.)

4 Read the Thoughtful Dresser

Hurrah for the extremely clever Linda Grant's latest book on fashion - a collection of essays and notions and fashion-related stories. It's not out till March, but why not pre-order at Amazon?

5 Buy a chunky necklace

The more noise they make - and the harder it is for you to stand fully erect while wearing them - the better.

Yes, why not?

The US edition will be published by Scribner, by the way, no date yet.

Who mkes a £30 cashmere sweater?

Illegal immigrants being paid half the minimum wage, unsurprisingly.

Britain's high street fashion giant Primark was at the centre of a storm last night over allegations that illegal immigrants paid just over half the minimum wage had been employed to make fashionable knitwear for one of the firm's bestselling ranges.

Primark announced yesterday that it had launched an inquiry after an investigation by the Observer and the BBC revealed that Manchester-based garment firm TNS Knitwear may have breached key employment and immigration laws. Breaches of the legislation could lead to fines of up to £10,000 for each illegal worker and potential prosecution for tax evasion and employment law abuses.

Primark also said it had handed material uncovered by the investigation to the UK Border Agency.

The workers, caught by an undercover journalist on a hidden camera, were allegedly being paid £3 an hour - just over half the minimum wage of £5.73 - for 12-hour days, seven days a week. Many of the garments made by the Pakistanis, Afghans and Indians over the past five months had ended up two miles away in one of the retail giant's largest and most profitable stores in Manchester's bustling Market Street.

The allegations were put to Primark this weekend, five months after an undercover investigation began into Primark's British supply chain. The investigation focused on Manchester's textile industry and in particular TNS Knitwear, which supplies 20,000 garments to the firm every week. Fashion Waves, a supplier used by TNS, was also investigated.

So much for buying British.

Disproportion

An Israeli friend, Etgar Keret, author and film director, has this to say in the LA Times and it expresses my own feelings exactly. I have nothing further to add

Is there anything in the proportionality principle that can rationally justify killing of any kind?

The motives of vengeance, which drive us to kill those who have killed people we love, are completely irrational, even if we try to wrap them in rational packaging. We exact vengeance because we hate and are hurting, not because we excel in mathematics and logic. Early in the aerial bombing of Gaza, five young girls from the same family were killed, and many more children have died on both sides of the border in recent years. The attempt to introduce their bodies into an equation that would make their deaths justifiable or comprehensible might be necessary to influence current events, but it is still enraging.

The only equation I can wholeheartedly accept is one whereby zero bodies appear on either side of the equation. And until that time comes, I'll choose outcry and protest that appeal solely to the heart. I shall reserve my appeals to the mind for better times.

How to tie a sarong

In 1963 Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and John Houston came to Mismaloya to make Night of the Iguana. Then, Mismaloya was a little cove on the Bay of Banderas half an hour's drive from Puerto Vallarta. Today millionaires' mansions climb up the hill and there are various shacks on the public beach where they'll grill you a red snapper but the pueblo of Mismaloya is still a dirt road.

We were in one of those millionaire's mansions, near the top of the hill with vast shimmering views of the bay, lumbering v formations of pelicans, schools of whales spouting, humming birds, butterflies, frigate birds gliding in the thermals. Life consisted of getting up to the sound of the er servants making us breakfast, wandering down to the beach in the company of mainly Mexican families and observing the numerous ways in which it is possible to tie a sarong, for example, making a halter neck dress out of it. We drank the tequila production of Mexico dry. We spent New Year's Eve in the pool, watching the fireworks like a jewelled chain exploding along the line of the bay and then went down to the hot tub for tequila shots.

Now, blearily I confront the bitter cold of this London Arctic winter. Normal service resumes. Sullenly.

Donde es los pelicanos?

How come I am not here any more?

More tomorrow.

British Design Awards

Check out the fashion shortlist here

More to be added, I believe.

Adios amigos

The Thoughtful Dresser decamps tomorrow first to Washington DC, then to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where I will be obliged to spend many hours in our villa, lying by the infinity edge pool and having delicious meals prepared by the chef. I will not be taking my laptop.

The collapse of Lehman Bros in September forced upon us this act of economic compassion. Personally, I would rather have stayed at home, but rental villas were lying empty, so what could we do? We must save the world economy.

See you in January.

Invitation from Cocoa

I wrote a couple of days ago about my Sonia Rykiel bag bought from Cocosa, the membership only designer sale site at a 50 per cent discount

Cocosa have contacted me and have created an exclusive invitation code for Thoughtful Dresser readers.

It's free, you don't have to buy anything, and the items they sell and the discounts are very, very good.

Click here to jump the waiting list and join

Whatever happened to

That thing you bought at Primark?

I have only once been to this emporium, the week its megastore opened opposite Selfridge's, and unable to stop myself buying something I purchased a bronze green anorak thing which I wear in wet weather to go to the shops. It cost £10.

As far as the eye could see was a top. In every size and every colour. The same top. A whole room of one top.

Where does that cheap crap from Primark go when no-one wants it anymore? A long and informative piece in the Times today tells the depressing tale.

In his textile recycling factory on the industrial outskirts of East London, Lawrence Barry wades across a floor feet-deep in other people's discarded clothing. Above him, precarious fabric dunes lean against the walls and reach up to the corrugated iron roof. The air is heavy with mothballs and the sweet, cloying stench of stale sweat.

There was a time, 58-year-old Barry says, when the clothes coming into his warehouse reeked of love, instead. “People used to buy a good-quality suit and that was it. That was their suit,” he says. “The clothes that ended up here were worn to death, treasured, loved.” Now the 100 workers at LMB Textile Recycling spend their days sorting through the detritus of our addiction to throwaway fashion - cheap, synthetic, often unworn, rarely loved. And Barry and his employees have unwittingly found themselves at the cutting edge of British eco-policy.

Textiles have never been a great concern for keen-to-be-seen-to-be-green governments that get more brownie points from an easy tonne of glass or paper. But the textile problem has become too vast to ignore.

In February the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will launch a “sustainable clothing roadmap” to try to reduce the environmental impact of our clothes. In preparation, it has commissioned a series of studies in which the true extent of our shopping habit is revealed in stark detail.

In the past five years, with the rise of “value retailers” such as Primark, H&M and TK Maxx, and supermarket fashion ranges, the price of clothing in the UK has plummeted by up to 25 per cent. At the same time, the amount of clothes we buy has increased by almost 40 per cent to more than two million tonnes a year.

Instead of two annual seasons for clothes - winter and summer - we are now offered, and can afford, new apparel every few weeks. We buy fresh holiday wardrobes, which we wear for a fortnight. Our style icons are celebrities who are never seen in the same outfit twice. And as our high street stores reel from the credit crunch, still we are cashing in - packing out the shops, desperate for discounted clothes.

As a result, textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. About 74 per cent of those two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester, viscose and acrylic blends.

Graduates leave fashion schools with no basic skills

I'm sure Greying Pixie will have something to say about this piece in the Independent (perhaps this is why they don't know how to make sleeves)

While British designers dominate the world's fashion houses, the skilled artisans needed to translate the designers' visions into reality are becoming scarce. More than 3,000 fashion students graduate from UK universities each year, yet only 500 can expect to get jobs in their chosen field, with designers claiming that they could employ more graduates if they had the requisite technical skills.

"As a luxury goods manufacturer, craftsmanship is what sets us apart from the high street," said Ian D Scott, supply director at Mulberry. "There used to be a big pool of skilled labour, which has gone now. We did some research a couple of years ago and found that 50 per cent of our workforce is over 50, which shows that there are fewer young people coming through."

So concerned are the designers that they are lobbying the Government, with the aim of drawing attention to what they call a "growing education crisis" in fashion.

"If graduates do not have pattern-cutting, computer-aided design and production skills, they can't put their creative ability to use in the industry," said Linda Florance, chief executive of Skillfast UK, the sector skills council for fashion and textiles.

Bah humbug, etc.

Courtesy of George, the New York Times explains that we love It's A Wonderful Life - because we actually live in Pottersville.

Cocosa, for when you just have to buy something

The dreadful events since Mumbai have sent shopping and fashion far from my mind (which has been focussed on certain scumbag freelance journalists quick to make a buck out of others' misfortunes).

But at a certain point, life has to return to a semblance of normality, a scrap of reality. And since I currently am reading 112 books for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, an element of superficiality has to enter my day at some point, in the form of the Cocosa site.

Cocosa is a membership-only fashion sale site. A couple of times a week it offers a small number of sale items from major designers. You get advance notice of the sale, then the date of the sale, then the sale preview, and then the sale opens for three days. With some items you have to very quick off the mark. The mark-downs are significant, usually 50% or more.

For some time I had been brooding over the Sonia Rykiel bags and yesterday at noon I pressed click and bought one. I bought it because I have long wanted a Chanel 2.55 without wanting to buy an actual 2.55 (my sister has one, and that would be copycat) and this is a version thereof.

All went smoothly. I bought an £800 bag for £399 plus £6 postage and this morning it arrived at my door less than 24 hours later exactly as described.

Cocosa keeps its membership numbers limited but you can join the waiting list. It doesn't cost anything and from what I've seen since it launched a couple of months ago, it has some spectacular bargains on very very good (mainly British) designers. There are sales coming up from Beatrix Ong, Luella, Jonathan Saunders and Richard Nichol. And they opened with McQueen and Lacroix.

Pear shaped women with bad legs are in fashion (with a caveat)

in days of yore

The 70s maxi-dress is definitively back, according to the Telegraph, which says that the iron rule that economic austerity goes with long skirts cannot be overturned, and this is not even a recession but a Depression.

According to designer Sonia Rykiel, the new longer lengths are there to lift us up above the mundanities of daily life, and on to more ethereal planes. "The thing about the long silhouette is that it is an intelligent way of dressing – light and powerful, hiding what needs to be hidden, and showing what needs to be shown," Rykiel tells me. "But long dresses this autumn and winter should be worn in different, cheery, colours: bright and pale."

Excellent. Avsh Alom Gur at Ossie Clark (see following) told me it was fine to wear my Booker dress at a lunchtime event as long as it was styled differently.

The new long dresses are best suited to pear shaped women who will not mourn being unable to show off their knees. But of course only tall pear-shaped women.

For pear-shaped British women the look may be heaven-sent, but there is one body type ill-suited to the drowning pull of drapery. "If you're short, this style will only shorten you further," says celebrity stylist Hannah Bhuiya. "So the best thing to do is wear a very well cut panelled long dress, say by the newly relaunched Ossie Clark label, one that accentuates your waist, Pierre Hardy clunky shoes and a large winter hat which will help you alter your proportions."

Can anyone explain what are the styles which make pear-shaped women's hips look smaller and which simultaneously elongate them? Stylists are strangely silent on this topic. I am 5 feet five inches, which I would describe as average height and always looking to make myself seem taller and slimmer. Perhaps it cannot be done (except, of course, by becoming slimmer, but that's a subject for new year's resolutions.)

Various items

I spent yesterday at the hospital with 'Harry', Will and Kelly. Please be patient, there will be more to report.

I am very pleased to have it pointed out to me that Helen Mirren is now so exasperated by the struggle to find sleeves that she's thinking of designing some herself.

"Dresses With Sleeves," is what she'd call her range. "There are no dresses with sleeves and we need to bring back the sleeve: fine, see-through ones, long or short," she says.

"There are so many wonderful things you can do with sleeves that people used to do, and then they stopped."

And bizarrely, The Thoughtful Dresser has been shortlisted in the British Design Awards in the fashion category. Er, I 'designed' this site myself.

Fashion
Helen Storey with Tony Ryan, Wonderland – biodegradable materials
Italian Vogue: A Black Issue, July 2008
Linda Grant, The Thoughtful Dresser blog
Louise Goldin, Spring/Summer 09 – Knitwear
Basso & Brooke, Spring/Summer 09
Alber Elbaz, Creative Director, Lanvin, Spring/Summer 08
Miuccia Prada and James Lima, Trembled Blossom, Fashion Film
Duckie Brown, Spring/Summer 09 – Menswear
Maison Martin Margiela, Spring/Summer 09 – 20th Anniversary Collection
Barbican Centre and Siebe Tettero, The House of Viktor & Rolf Retrospective
Prada by Miuccia Prada, Spring/Summer 09

Fabric care from the Bagpuss mice

On the sad death of Oliver Postgate, aged 83

This was voted the most popular children's television series of all time by British viewers. Note the state of the art animation.

The Bethnal Green Bambinos and some reflections on Englishness

While matters proceed on the Harry front, in the meantime here is a little something going on at George Szirtes place. A clip from one of my favourite films, Passport to Pimlico, with a little light music from the Bethnal Green Bambinos. Stick with it so you can see what life was like buying a dress for Miss Pimlico at the Palais on the ration.



As George says:

Much of the film is a recap of post-war conditions, but the core of it is about state versus locality, not so much who is who, but what is what; the small versus the great. Your first ties, the film firmly states, are to your neighbours and to history.

I loved it the first time I saw it, for much the same reasons as I loved Frank Capra films. They were instinctively egalitarian, democratic and generous, a kind of idyll. Tribal? Yes. Sentimental? Yes, that too. But it was a broad tribe and the sentiments were, it seemed to me, good sentiments. Such sentiments were what, I suspect, the war was popularly thought to be about.

Meanwhile, "... the most remarkable thing about the bream is when he's courting...

"

I came along with a piece I wrote some years ago about this very film:

Passport to Pimlico’ is a comic investigation of Englishness. Not Britishness, which is rarely mentioned. Britain is an institutional entity, it’s government, Home and Foreign Office; it runs the Empire. Englishness is what the characters feel themselves to be inside. The film’s most famous line encapsulates how people felt about their country in the immediate post-war years, after a struggle against both fascism abroad and the dreary restrictions of living entirely by the rule book. ‘We’re English,’ a woman says, leaning her head out of an upstairs window to shout to the Whitehall bureaucrats below, ‘we always were English and it’s just because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundian.’