I have found a dressmaker. He tells me he can copy this, by Alberta Ferretti, but below the knee and in a different colour. And the fabric will be silk crepe de chine.
Monday, 4 February 2008
Let the dressmaking begin
Guardian's Sounds Jewish podcast
A new half-hour show courtesy of the Guardian where we discuss the American elections, Israel at 60, a man who decided to live according to every law of the Bible for a year - in Manhattan (and yes, he did find someone to stone for adultery) and a very funny discussion of Yiddish.
Listen here
Evening Standard review
. . .The Clothes On Their Backs is a return to the form of Linda Grant's first and best novel, The Cast iron Shore. Gripping and written with keen understatement it managed to be a domestic coming of age story, even as it takes in, via Sandor, the tumultuous sweep of the 20th century (in Sandor's run-down boarding house, Vivien doesn't only find her roots, her great grandfather "with the curls in front of his ears', but animal sex, too.)
In other words, that rare thing, a novel of big ideas that never forgets to tell you a story. Any frocks and bolero jackets you happen to come upon along the way are just the icing on the cake.
Not yet online
BBC Radio Four Woman's Hour interview
If you go here, and click on listen again latest programme, it's 30 minutes in
Further thoughts on botox
It says here
This kind of procedure - which carries no benefit, and appeals to none but the very vain - is never going to attract the most rigorous medics. My half-sister was trained to give Botox injections, on a course that lasted a day, cost £120 and was full of half-qualified dentists whose medical training doesn't extend below the thorax. Most proper doctors (no offence) don't want to get their hands dirty administering poisons for cosmetic reasons. And when problems do occur, it is reasonable to expect that it would take a skilled physician to notice (one symptom is muscle paralysis: since that's the purpose of the injection in the first place, you can see why a dentist or layman might miss it).
I wouldn't say it only appeals to the very vain, lots of people I know have had it, and I won't say it hasn't crossed my own mind. But it's still a no. I also hear that it hurts.
Who is responsible for the revival of British fashion?
Professor Louise Wilson, at Central St Martins, that's who
Wilson, 45, has run London's Central Saint Martins fashion MA since 1994. Even given its exalted history - alumni include Alexander McQueen, Sophia Kokosalaki and Jonathan Saunders - she's on a roll. Of the designers in this month's London Fashion Week, more than a third - Giles Deacon, Christopher Kane and Luella Bartley included - are ex-pupils; a remarkable number from one tutor.
With Wilson's exclusively black wardrobe, fondness for foul-mouthed tirades and methodology described as everything from "exacting" to "fascistic", her reputation precedes her. "If someone spoke to me like I speak to the students, I don't know what I'd do." The former Donna Karan designer, who herself studied at Saint Martins under Ossie Clark, says getting students into LFW isn't the remit of the course. Nurturing individuality is.
"If you murdered somebody and went to prison for 12 years, you'd get a social worker to help you re-enter society. When my students come to me they've been in education since they were five, and they're damaged. Damaged by a system of not thinking for themselves."
Talking to Wilson, it's clear that she loves her job, really - she even refused time off to recover from breast cancer. "Is that why people hold me in regard? Because I was a sad fucker who gave up my whole social life?"
Thought for the day
Fond pride of dress is sure an empty curse; E'er Fancy you consult, consult your purse. Benjamin Franklin
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?
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