The best face cream on the market, Definitely.

It says, here.

Scarves

I have been thinking a lot about scarves since a visit to Bon Marche in Paris last September, where I bought several, including one by Dior and another by Christian Lacroix. As we get older it's best to have some colour next to the face and the scarf (like the handbag) is one of those garments which do not torment us with being the wrong size or too uncomfortable to wear, like a pair of Manolos.

Even expensive scarves are cheap compared to expensive bags and shoes, let alone jewellery. When I had tea at Claridges with Joan Burstein a few weeks ago, (that is the Joan Burstein who is old enough to have saved her clothing ration to buy copies of the New Look when it was first launched,) she was wearing, at 82, a black Marni dress, a navy coat and a long, filmy scarf in pale blue. And some stonking diamond earrings.

The plain palette of an elegant dark dress and coat was the setting for the accessories which lit up her face.

After the moth genocide I had to go very carefully through all my clothes to see what they had eaten and discovered it was only an Ann Louise Roswald skirt and a brown scarf I bought at the Galleries Lafayette in Paris just before interviewing Agnes b, because it was unseasonally cold. I have a lot of scarves and apart from those velvet ones from the Nineties, none of them seemed out of date, indeed yesterday I wore one I bought in 1996 at inflight duty free on a BA flight from Vienna to London, having spent two very long weeks in Iran.

R. and I spent some time on the phone the other night talking about the Hermes scarf and whether we were leading up to buying one. I am a but unsure about some of their designs, which I find somewhat bourgeois (every middle-class Iranian woman seems to have one) and R. was uncertain how to tie them, but I explained that if you pop into an Hermes shop they will give you a little book.

In Paris every single woman knows how to tie a scarf in a way which gives her outfit that totally distinctive chic. Perhaps it is in the fingers, perhaps it is taught at school. But in an age of too short skirts and hopeless struggles to find what we want, perhaps it is the humble scarf that is the real investment and we ought to learn.

Buchmendel updated

I have been judging a literary prize which has meant that I have had little time for personal reading, and much of what I was obliged to read for the prize was not at all good.

Last weekend at the Du Maurier Festival in Fowey, I shared a platform with the editor of Virago Modern Classics, to mark the list's thirtieth anniversary. She gave me some works unknown to me from that list and I have selected a passage from one of them over at Buchmendel.

R. A case study in thoughtful dressing

Regular readers will be familiar with Top Baby Lia, she of the Agnes b cherry dress. The day before yesterday, Lia's mother, R. rang me to tell me of the Rick Owens dress she has just bought and to point it out on the Net a Porter website.

R. has for some time been a source of great interest to me. She is in her early thirties and describes herself, with a degree of irony, as a 'grey bureaucrat.' She works in the public sector arts field and does not have a large income. Yet R. only ever buys designer clothes. She was shopping at Emporio Armani when she was a teenager. Her parents are not rich. How does she do it? She buys, she says, very few clothes. But only the best clothes.

R. studied fine art at Cambridge. She has a strong and extremely definitive visual sense, as does her partner, an architect. She claims that she has a few things from H&M, but I have never seen any evidence of this. What she does have is a wardrobe full of stunning enduring clothes that can be worn season after season. Once, I took her with me to Anya Hindmarch so she could use my press discount. It took her an hour to choose a bag, an hour in which she looked at it from every single angle, discussed it, thought it through. No, I like it, I'll take it. This was shopping as hard work.

I asked her once if she could settle for more but cheaper clothes. She sounded puzzled, as if I were asking her if she might consider leaving her two-year-old daughter unattended in the middle of Oxford Street for a couple of hours while she went off to do something. The suggestion was insane.

Some people have nothing but lovely clothes and some of us have a wardrobe full of mistakes. And it seems you don't even have to be rich to be in the former category.

UPDATE
R. rang me last night to deny ever having stated that she owned anything from H&M. After some twenty minutes she conceded that it was true she had some Rakph Lauren for H&M trousers.

R. was also given a present by the Queen the day before yesterday. Yes, you read that right. HM Queen Elizabeth II gave her a gift with her own hands. It is a signed photo of herself and her husband in a Smythson frame. I think it's going to look lovely in the flat and look forward to seeing it next time I'm there. I suggested she could put it in Lia's bedroom and tell her the old couple are friends of her grandparents.

The Estee Lauder ad campaign

Fascinating piece on the history of the face of Estee Lauder. If you flick through a mag today, what you see, because of photoshop, is a close-up of skin not flawless but not skin at all, a face with only two dimensions.

A decision was taken to personify the brand's products in the likeness of this fiction. The campaign would use the same model in its advertising photography over a run of years. Each of the exemplars projected a different kind of physical beauty, though they had much in common. Caucasian women, they are slender but not excessively thin, graced with elegantly long necks, trusty high cheek bones and classically regular facial features. Although a smiling face is thought of as being part and parcel of US product advertising, few of the Lauder lovelies succumb to a parting of the lips. A characteristic expression is of cool don't-mess-with-me reserve.

Consistency was essential in the visuals and this was the responsibility of the Chicago-based photographer Victor Skrebneski, who was assigned to shoot the pictures throughout. In an interview in Town & Country magazine, he said, 'I love to design photographs, to consider the proportions of the figure, the space around it, the edge of the picture.' Among his best-known sitters are Audrey Hepburn, Orson Welles, Vanessa Redgrave, Fred Astaire, and among younger members, Jasmine Guinness.

Owing more than a nod to Hollywood lighting effects and film-still poses, the shoots went flat out for the aspirational. Whether location or studio, a whole slew of fashions in living were called on and called in: impressive houses, designer dresses from the likes of Oscar de la Renta, Halston and Valentino, remarkable accessories and interior design details with an emphasis on collector's level art, both antique and contemporary. In my telephone interview with Skrebneski, he recalled, 'The photographs caused a lot of public comment. People were interested in everything in the picture. The designers whose dresses were shown did quite a lot of business and I was always being asked where we had got hold of an item of decoration.'

Interestingly for such ephemera, the portfolio had an afterlife. It was thought that the pictures communicated more than segments of powder and paint time. A selection of the shots was first published in hardback in 1987 with an introduction by Hubert de Givenchy.

Eco fashion - beyond guilt

Lisa Armstrong nails it in the Times:

Not that I am recommending that you buy something worthy out of guilt. For guilt, as I hope we all agree, is the very worst motive for partaking in any sort of retail activity. It is only through not being bought out of guilt that eco and fairtrade set-ups discover what we really want, especially if you follow your rejection with a comment on their websites. Call it tough love.

And they are improving. Honestly. In the past you looked. You pondered. You thought: “What a nice idea, I really must support it.” Then you went to H&M.

But things are changing, thanks to some serious hard work and soul-searching. “We are constantly working on ways to keep our customers engaged,” says Sim Scavazza, of adili.com, which describes itself as “a sort of ethical department store” (it has cute fair-trade trousers, wrap miniskirts and necklaces, by the way).

“We change the home page weekly, as you would a shop window, and are adding an entire section on news and features. And there's not a hemp dress in sight. We know that the demand is there. The high street is taking note and London Fashion Week has its own eco-brand section. It just hasn't reached critical mass yet,” Scavazza adds.

So what first attracted you to the millionaire Harvey Weinstein?

Me and the emerald necklace

Laurel spray made for Empress Josephine

This is a piece I did for the Telegraph on the new jewellery gallery which is about to open at the V&A. I'm going to the private view next week - champagne, canapes and staring at tiaras. And where are you now, moths?

Chadour-Sampson takes out what looks like an ordinary plastic bag (though it's conservation-grade plastic) and opens it to reveal an emerald and diamond necklace and earrings: the Beauharnais emeralds, given by Napoleon to his adopted daughter, Stéphanie de Beauharnais, on her marriage in 1806 to the heir to the Grand Duke of Baden, and probably made by Nitot & Fils of Paris. It was about this time that jewellers began to develop open-back settings, which allowed more light through the stones. The simplicity of the setting, the square-cut and pendant emeralds surrounded by diamonds and connected by chains of diamonds and emeralds, must have been an early form of minimalism. Clasping it to my neck, I regret that I am not fit enough to make a run for it down the stone steps.

Cameos (the Victorian equivalent of keeping a picture of your loved one on your mobile phone), lockets containing strands of your nearest and dearest's hair (dead or alive) and jet mourning jewellery were all characteristics of 19th-century decorative jewellery, though it still incorporated religious motifs such as crosses. By the 1860s the trade had been transformed by mechanisation. Jewellery went mass-market with gold-plated base metals and machine-made chains, and was now worn by all classes. Inevitably, the simplicity of great - and easily copied - sets like the Beauharnais emeralds had to give way to jewels as works of art in themselves, such as a spectacular art-nouveau orchid of gold enamel, rubies and diamonds, designed to be worn in the hair, which has the slightly sinister fin-de-siècle decadence of the symbolist painters. At the turn of the last century the tiara became a fashion item, and no longer the preserve of royalty and aristocracy. Cartier was the leader in the making of tiaras, such as the piece made for Alexandra Comnène for her marriage in 1913 to Robert Everts, a diplomat, with cabochon rubies - early examples of synthetic stones, supplied by Comnène herself

Karen Cole dress report

I ordered this dress on Thursday. On the plus side it arrived by special delivery the following morning (shame I was away). On the minus, it was not very well packaged: in a plastic bag then shoved in a jiffy bag so it was extremely creased. The dress is as shown, a heavy knit jersey. It fell very well but there was cling, around the stomach. It like no cling there at all. I also felt that the v of the neck was a little wide and low as shown above. The big disappointment is that it wasn't the colour I wanted,; I was looking for a dark navy, a few shades under black. I would call this French navy. It looked good on, but my overall feeling was, not special enough for the price and not the right colour, so back it goes.

And so farewell, moths

Victory is ours.

Happy birthday

To all of my friends who are celebrating today, the famous and the not-so-famous:

It might not be what Ben-Gurion had in mind, but that’s what there is.

זה מה יש

What an unpleasant week, but Barbie is Jewish

Moths, builders, flu, too-short dresses . . .

However this piece of old news made me smile:

Although Barbie may seem to be an Aryan ideal, the doll was the brainchild of a Jewish woman named Ruth Handler. San Francisco filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards, considers Handler's role in creating Barbie one of pop culture's great ironies and explores that notion in her new film, "The Tribe: An Unorthodox, Unauthorized History of the Jewish People and the Barbie Doll ... in About 15 Minutes," written with her husband, UC Berkeley Professor Ken Goldberg. The film, narrated by Peter Coyote, premieres Saturday at a sold-out screening at Herbst Theatre. It will also screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

The short of it

Every year I buy a fairly simple cheap summer dress, the kind of dress you can lounge around in on a hot day and not feel you look like a mess. Not a special dress, just an okay summer dress you don't mind spilling a glass of white wine all over. M&S always has a good supply.

So last week I ordered this



It arrived this afternoon and I was very pleasantly surprised It was a great colour, had a shocking pink cotton lining and was a perfect fit, in all but one respect. Unlike the picture, it comes above the knee. And when you sit down above the knee is mid-thigh. Now I am 5'5" which means I am taller than than model. How can that be?

And when will this madness end, I ask, as I pack it up for return?

Judith Krantz.

I am still ill, When I get better I'll be writing a piece on Judith Krantz. Share your thoughts if you have any.

The great unstriped

Every single year the fashion pages tell us that this year the big story is nautical chic, and every single year it isn't in the shops and no-one is wearing it.

I am not having a nice time

I went to bed on Sunday night with most of the cupboards cleared out, but with considerable mess all over the place. I woke up on Monday morning with viral flu, the symptoms of which I will draw a veil over, but required several trips to the bathroom.

An email from a friend arrives this morning:

I saw on your blog that you have moths - lots of sympathy, we had them SO badly year before last... they munched loads of my jumpers, and C's, and the silk linings of M's suits, and hung out in the carpets and the piano felts too....

I know you will have had loads of advice but anyway, we found that what worked for us - other than a big clearout, lots of drycleaning (and stashing clothes in rotation in the freezer), was to get a company called Terminex to come in twice, and they sprayed the flat from top to bottom, esp curtains, carpets, sofas, but also the insides of wardrobes and chests of drawers, under beds, etc etc, with really strong insecticide (they wear masks, it's not the kind of stuff you would handle yourself). We had to go out for a few hours each time for them to do the work, but it really did work - the moths haven't come back as far as we can see.

I am sleeping, and talking to a friend on the phone who is going to the dinner with the Queen on board HMS Invincible (a work thing) about the definitiuon of cocktail. I say it's knee length, the Palace says ankle-length. So in lieu of any fashiony posts you can discuss that.

Hiroshima

Short of burning the house down to get rid of the moths, the present course of action is as extensive as it can go. The loft conversion in this house has cupboards all around the eaves, into which I have crammed many many years of accumulated junk. The moth larvae have set up house here.

I have spent the past three days clearing this out, sorting out and hauling about fifty black bags down the 35 stairs to be stashed in the front garden from where I hope to persuade a young man with a van to take it to the dump.

I have found: letters dating back to the mid-70s that were yesterday's version of email, files, old magazines, large sets of my mother's Royal Albert dinner and tea services, tarnished silver, a suitcase full of clothes I last wore in the early 80s, when, without my understanding it at the time, I must have been actually thin.

A love letter to my father, not from my mother.

But mostly, just dusty moth-infested rubbish. And however long I keep going, there is always another box.

More fumigation. More vaccuming. And on Thursday the carpet cleaners are coming.

Lesson: Do not store old carpets.

Naked self-interest

I just want to mention that as part of the mammoth clean-out operation that awaits me today, I will be taking about 20 items to the dry-cleaners and buying a lot more moth death ray spray and a lot more insecticide, which of course means I can't buy any new clothes. Unless you ordered something from Pure Cashmere from the link above and I get 12 per cent of whatever you spend. Or 22 per cent if you're a new customer. Don't you need a pashmina? But, you know, no pressure.

How to look your best

This simple, straightforward set of rules is so basic and obvious that they scarecly need stating, but taken toegther they seem to me to represent the Ten (actually Six) Commandments of dressing, and as such, should be taped to the inside of every woman's wardrobe:

Top styling tips

The second you put a limb into a piece of clothing, you should feel good about wearing it. Throw away anything you haven't worn for more than three years. Never buy clothes you need to be slim to fit into. Every outfit should have one "wow" factor item, be it belt, shoes or a piece of jewellery. Never buy clothes that wear you: people should notice you first, not what you are wearing. Buy jeans to suit your figure, rather than the jeans of the season.

The root of all evil is

. . . a cupboard at the top of the stairs containing an old rug, which has formed a sort of moth Waitrose, aisles and aisles of delicious things to eat. I now have to clean out the whole thing. The floor is covered with larvae.

On the plus side, they don't seem to have got into the wardrobe. I hope.

UPDATE
Having had the most disgusting morning putting half-eaten stuff and other stuff covered in larvae into bin bags, and having found a half-eaten vintage coat from the early 50s which a friend gave me in 1985, my cleaner has arrived and is going over the carpet inch by inch with a vacuum cleaner, crevice tool and insecticide. Next week the carpet cleaners are coming.

I have to go to the gym now and have my trainer make me pick up heavy things. Lovely. Then home to find out if this is the new mayor of London, as predicted by all the news media.

UPDATE UPDATE
After I spent four hours this morning clearing out the cupboard, spraying moth killer and laying down insecticide, and my cleaner spent five hours vacuuming, this evening the moths are still there, on the walls and ceiling in the hall.

I have had an email . . .

Greetings --

just a quick note of commiseration! it's a testament to the laxity of my cleaner that oh, god, nearly a year ago last november, i noticed some bald patches in a rug I'd bought at John Lewis (normally very reliable in all things) and when i turned it over, it was teeming with larvae and suchlike. it took me ages and ages to get rid of the damn things, using some of the same products I see you've got. unlike you, i'm not smart enough to store woolens in bags so ended up tossing a few things, though nothing quite as mind boggling as the rug itself! i'm not at all squeamish about bugs (rodents are another story) but I was grossed out. moths are so persistent, too.
and just when I thought it was safe, I saw one flying round the room the other night. Luckily, so far, seems to be a solo flight. But the shorter version is just to say perservere and I feel for you!