Le giraffe

Ines de la Fressange has been given the Legion d'honneur. I saw her at the party to launch the Golden Age of Couture show at the V&A. Tall women are sometimes called giraffes, this was the only time I have seen a woman who did exactly look like another species. You could see her everywhere you looked around that crowded, fashionable room. And I'm sure she eats only little leaves from tall trees.

(Which reminds me. On an entirely tangential note, it's official. Jews can now drink giraffe's milk.)

The ageing process is greatly helped when you're tall, thin and look a bit like a boy, albeit one with excellent hair, because let's face it, there's simply less of you to go south/downhill/wrong. So I actually believe her when she says she's reasonably relaxed about getting older, partly because she doesn't appear to have had any work done, and partly because age doesn't seem to be compromising her taste in clothes and accessories at all.

“That's not quite true,” ripostes de la Fressange in her perfect, idiomatic English. “I can't wear really short shorts any more, or fluorescents. Actually, I'm a bit of a navy jumper maniac now. But I'd certainly never go to a shop for 50-year-old women. And I wouldn't go really classic - it's very ageing.” This from the woman who used to live in Chanel, before Lagerfeld unceremoniously fired her as the house's face. But that was when she was still in her twenties, and even then she would mix her tweeds with T-shirts and jeans. Standard practice now, this was considered une vraie scandale at the time.

Summer in the City

It's what, on this side of the Atlantic, could be called the washed out Boden look. Probably borrowed wholesale in some of the smarter London postcodes ( we Brits are nothing if not impressionable) from the east coast of the USA.

Deck shoes and no socks. Distressed chinos. And a faded short sleeved shirt.

There is a message. And it goes something like this: the family has a house in Cornwall ( the Hamptons). We summer there. I am only temporarily in the city. I can't be bothered to change. And that's because really, if you take away the Porsche Cayenne, I'm just a surf dude.

Which, I reckon, is the same as the flip flop tendency. Which, unwittingly, is possibly trying to say: if you take away the Oyster card, I'm actually an Australian.

The world's greatest fashion museum

is in Santiago, Chile:

Yarur's grandfather founded the country's biggest bank, which his father went on to run as president. As an only child, Yarur inherited a fortune large enough to build his museum. But it is his parents' taste in fashion, not evidence of their wealth, that he wanted to preserve. As a prominent socialite and wife of a banker, his mother amassed a covetable collection of designer outfits, all of which she had kept in perfect condition. 'My mother was not a fashion victim, but she liked to dress in a special way,' Yarur, 46, says. In photographs his mother, who died in 1996, bears a resemblance to Rita Hayworth. With wavy, dark hair and voluptuous curves squeezed into silk blouses and pencil skirts, she was extremely glamorous - and she obviously loved to shop. Of the 8,000 pieces in the museum, 500 belonged to her, many of which were bought on her eight-month honeymoon in Europe.

Inside the museum are hundreds of photographs of Yarur's parents, along with home videos taken before Yarur was born: his mother on the beach in a scarlet swimming costume and matching lipstick; his handsome father swaggering towards the camera across the sand; his parents laughing together on holiday. Yarur, who now lives alone in his own house in Santiago, says the films and photographs still affect him. 'Every time I see them I feel sad. I was an only child so I don't have any other family.'

While he was devoted to his mother, as the only son of one of the country's most successful businessmen, and as a quiet, sensitive young man, Yarur found the weight of his father's expectation hard to bear. 'I didn't know what I wanted to do. My father wanted me to work for the bank. It was a very heavy burden.'

It was only after his father died in 1991 that Yarur began to think about creating a museum. 'After my father died, my mother told me that he had once talked about wanting to turn their house into an art museum. After they both died I didn't want to stay in the house, but I didn't want to sell it because of all the memories, and the house itself is quite important architecturally. So I decided to keep it, but to do something with it.'

I wouldn't do this but it does sound like fun

A few mates go to Manchester for a spot of shopping.

Ronke (pronounced Ron-kay) sweeps into the room in a riot of colour - from her draping orange and pink dress to her long tan leather coat tied with a green scarf at the back. I have a suspicion she's wearing a 1970s curtain but decide she must know what she's talking about.

We, her 'patients', line up on the sofa ready to be transformed into fashion-conscious divas; eager to discover our own style. We are four women in a city, contemplating a weekend of shopping. But this is Manchester not Manhattan and we haven't done our hair. Rather, we have booked a personal styling weekend to spruce up tired looks and get insider's tips on the latest trends. Our home from home will be a designer riverside apartment stocked with the latest Apple gadgets and a fridge full of organic treats.

The dress

According to Hilary Alexander, news of the dress's death have been greatly exaggerated:

But the "special occasion outfit" has passed its sell-by date, to be replaced by the "new special": a way of dressing that is much easier to achieve - and a lot more fun.

It's a trend long pioneered by a host of funky, high-profile, stylish dressers, from Gwen Stefani and Natalia Vodianova to Kate Moss, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and the reincarnated Gwyneth Paltrow - and it hinges around one adaptable wardrobe staple: the dress.

. . .

This season, they are everywhere - prom styles, floaty maxis, romantic, ruffled, you name it. And they are key to making this idea work. The trick is to invest in one great dress that makes you feel good, rather than "appropriate"; one that suits your body shape, highlights your personality, and makes you feel comfortable, confident and sexy.

It could just as easily be something you have worn on holiday, for work, or a favourite piece you have had for years, as something bought with a specific outing in mind. Then, you just "dress up the dress", adding accessories and layers as you feel inclined.

The best thing of all about the "new special" is that you can dress it down just as easily. You should be able to take off the jacket, swap your pill-box for a straw "pork pie", trilby or even a sun hat, trade your smart high heels for gladiators and your beaded clutch for a casual tote - and you're ready for a beach party or barbecue.

Basically, this is an argument for the LBD and its vairiants, ie it doesn't have to be black. But she's right, accessories maketh the outfit.

dress down
dress up (it's a cocktail ring)

Small Jacobean manor house

with small ornamental palms

the Orangery
the coach house and stables
the English garden

a couple of swans on the Thames

Harry examines men in flip flops

Harry Fenton, the Sharp Dressed Man, discusses the Male City Flip-Flop:

You’re not at the beach. So why are you wearing flip –flops?

I don’t actually say this, of course, but kind of want to when I see a would be modish youth on a mission on the streets of London. I don’t have any problems with the retro T shirt. Nor the ironic vinyl shoulder bag. And it’s their choice to wear downright ugly sunglasses. But flip flops?

Ok, the sun may have come out. It may actually be hot. But the city is not the beach. Sometime in recent years street smart became street casual. It then osmosed into downright scruffy. And from there it has spawned a sort of ‘I’m so laid back it’s like I’m on holiday, man’ look.

Just so wrong. Mens’ feet are ugly. They will get dirty in the city. Flip flops just have to be a health hazard on public transport. Or even crossing the road. And they look just plain stupid.

Don’t they have friends to point this out to them?

‘Beneath the pavement is the beach’: one of the more lyrical 1968 Situationist slogans in Paris. The classic Situationist text is, of course, The Revolution of Everyday Life. But I don’t think wearing flip flops is the kind of revolution Raoul Vaneigem* had in mind. ( But, hey, I might be wrong)

* [Me neither, LG]

Short hiatus

I'm going away for the weekend, to stay with friends who have inherited a small Jacobean manor house in Wiltshire. Well, someone has to inherit these places and it certainly isn't me.

Harry will hold the fort.

Jews

A new BBC series called Jews starts on June 18th , this is a piece I wrote on the series in today's New Statesman

After the 11 September 2001 attacks, both Jews and Muslims ceased to be people and became ideas, concepts to be discussed in newspaper columns, internet chat rooms and blogs. Jews and Muslims as three-dimensional beings, independent of their role in terror or the war on it, separate from their opinions of the Middle East, dropped out of sight. The BBC has sought to rectify this situation by commissioning three films about Jews from the award-winning documentary-maker Vanessa Engle, whose 2006 series Lefties made me laugh out loud. The presence of the name Anthony Wall, a long-time editor of the Arena arts strand, also inspires confidence.

. . .

Engle's series tries to get to grips with Jewish life in Britain. What you are left with are those faces. The crooked smile of the Auschwitz survivor from Salonica. The trapped eyes of the Hasidic drug dealer. The cornered look of the Jewish atheist who doesn't want to hurt his father. They aren't issues. They're what life is, before you start having opinions about it and turning it into an issue.

Scarves II

Some of you will, I hope, be pleased to hear that Harry Fenton, the sharp dressed man, has agreed to become a regular contributor to these pages.

Last night he showed me some photos from 1970 of himself and his unversity friends. Apart from the fact that all the boys had beards, the other salient characteristic of their wardobe was that they all wore silk scarves.

This is a forgotten era in menswear, and one which we should encourage to return.

UPDATE Mr Fenton has asked me to point out that he does not himself appear in this photo, which was merely chosen to illustrate the notion of male hippies wearing scarves. Mr Fenton in his photo has a much smaller beard and very long legs in blue cords.

Our glorious leader

July Vogue has a piece on one M. Thatcher, style icon.

In the Guardian today, Zoe Williams says (and I think she is right) that back in the day, no-one obsessively commented on her clothes:

As improbable as it seems now, nobody seemed to care that much what Margaret Thatcher looked like in her heyday. There were very few remarks about her shoes; nobody was obsessively watching her weight.

[But. . . .]

I want to say those were nobler times, when everyone was less superficial, and that much is true; but truer and more salient was the fact that nobody cared what she looked like because we all hated her so much. You check out a politician's leopardskin kitten heels when she is an irrelevant person, talking irrelevantly about nothing. Conversely, when a politician is snatching your children's milk, smashing your union and kicking you in your metaphorical face, you tend not to notice what she's wearing.

Personally I think this is bollocks. The savagery unleashed on Hillary's Clinton's wardrobe is evidence to the contrary.

Guest post: On not giving up, by Harry Fenton, the Sharp Dressed Man

Introducing Harry Fenton, the Sharp Dressed Man,* who will be addressing questions of menswear from the perspective of a Londoner of a certain age.
* Don't bother googling, it's a pseudonym.

On Not Giving Up

By which I mean , the struggle to still care about clothes and what you look like.

Because when you get to a certain age you can wake up one morning and just be entirely underwhelmed by the clothing options that are in your wardrobe. Probably because the clothes there haven’t actually changed for a good few years.

But what once we felt was quite good/ quite cool/ perhaps stylish, is now, on closer scrutiny, looking decidedly boring. Or even worse than boring, a sort of a style vacuum. Dull neutral colours of the same old same old.

When I was a teenager in London in the Sixties, having failed to look like the Beatles, no sooner was one trying to look like the Who than we were introduced to the completely bizarre sight of the Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart. So I had to suffice with one of those surplus greatcoats from Kensington Market (I didn't know that they were to become the uniform for pimply physics students who listened to King Crimson).

In anticipation of wanting to cut a dash at university I bought an old pin-stripe double-breasted suit from an Oxfam shop and took it to a cleaners for the trousers to be tapered. They ended up looking a bit like jodphurs, but I imagined I was subverting some kind of norm. On reflection the suit didn't go that well with the Anello and Davide burgundy cuban -heeled boots. But I had wanted them for ages, ever since the Beatles had made Anello and Davide famous.

There was a terrible band in the late sixties called the Edgar Broughton band. basically a trio of thuggish guys from Leamington Spa who I had the misfortune to see a number of times. They were forever the support band to someone I actually half wanted to see. Anyhow the 'Broughtons' liked to finish their set with a heavy metal version of 'Out Demons Out'. Which some of us knew was the chant that Ginsberg and the Fugs came up with when they circled the Pentagon. Anyhow this provincial English travesty was simply appalling. But made all the worse by the fact that Edgar Broughton was wearing an identical pair of boots to mine. You can imagine my dismay. Shortly after that I think I wanted to look like the Incredible String Band.

Eventually I got a job. I went to work in an office. And went to a lot of meetings in other people’s offices in a number of different countries. Which meant that for years my clothes shopping was dominated by suits, shirts and ties. Work was the environment where it was most important for me to feel well dressed. Or, more accurately, well presented. And a suit that fits, and clean shoes, and a good tie can do that admirably.

But now I don’t inhabit the corporate world . And rather than reach for a suit I have actually had to start thinking about what to wear. And it’s not that easy.

Primarily because the default option is fraught with problems. Dress down Friday has become dress down the rest of your life. And there’s the rub. But more to the point , dressing down can so easily mean we look like a troop of older blokes gone casual. Slightly ill at ease out of uniform.

Because we probably haven’t given much attention to our dress down options. And the betting says that these options are stuck somewhere ten to fifteen years ago ( or even longer) So you are in danger of looking stale, or, more worryingly, (without it being a conscious decision), trying to look younger than your years.

Or , even worse , suggesting to others that you have the same approach to clothes as Jeremy Clarkson.

I don’t have a universal solution to this quandary. But it does start with actually bothering to think about clothes, and perhaps for the first time in many a year, trying to articulate what you do and don’t want to look like.

I have just three rules at the moment: I’ve got to like it. It must fit. There should be no visible logos.

But the biggest hurdle to overcome is that you have to start to go shopping again. Just like you did when you were a teenager. When it was, in some undefined way, important. And spending money on clothes made you feel good.

And going out in them on Saturday night made you feel even better.

no no no no*

*Clarkson is one of a few celebrities who have been blamed for poor denim sales. Louise Foster of Draper's Record, trade magazine to the fashion industry, is quoted as saying, "For a period in the late nineties denim became unfashionable. 501s — Levi's flagship brand — in particular suffered from the so-called 'Jeremy Clarkson effect', the association with men in middle youth."

More grooming, more fun

The Telegraph today has a piece on the new July Vogue style at any age issue and how to stay visible at 50. I like the advice from two grandes dames of British fashion, Vivienne Westwood and Joan Burstein. I can vouch for the fact that Joan always looks amazing:

Covering up necklines, legs or slack upper arms can be seductive in itself, insists 67-year-old designer extraordinaire Vivienne Westwood:

Everyone knows my clothes are sexy. It is playing with the idea of being clothed and then eventually unclothed. It’s much more sexy to be dressed. But for me, at my age, can I have a pair of high-heeled shoes? What really touches me is the woman who is chic, she knows herself, doesn’t buy into mass marketing or publicity, but takes the trouble to look good and shows off her best assets. This shows her to be generous yet discriminating and wishing to gain from her experience in life.

The older you get, the more grooming you require — but it’s also important to have fun, says Joan Burstein, fashion pioneer and owner of the Browns boutiques:

I am 81, so I’m very aware of the areas older women are concerned about. It’s all about deflecting from those areas. If you’re worried about your shoulders, upper arms or bust, buy a beautiful fine shawl and wrap it dramatically around yourself.

Also, use bright colours around the face: not white, which can be draining, but pale pink, blue or vivid — but not lurid — deep orange. And pay more attention to your hair and nails, because those are the things that pull you down.

If you go to the opera or out to dinner, swap your normal handbag for a smaller and nicer one, or get a professional make-up artist to make you up. These little things lift the spirits.

On the question of visibilty, having sold two of my Anya Hindmarch bags on ebay, I went yesterday to buy another. I knew I wanted a smallish cream bag which would go day to night. I did a lot of research, found the one I wanted on the AH site. When I actually saw it in the shop, it was exactly what I was looking for. Until the sales girl showed me another bag, in cream patent, the Alessandra, which simply had a bit more fizz. I bought it. Do not go entirely classic into that good night.

Coming soon

'Every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man.' (ZZ Top - thank you Deja Pseu)

Tomorrow, I hope

When the world was very young

Sometimes I get a bit miserable about being 57. Then I watch this and realise that only by being 57 now could I have been 13 then, for this.

"[Chuck Berry's] 'Maybellene' is a country song sped up," Thorogood told Rolling Stone in 2005. " 'Johnny B. Goode' is blues sped up. But you listen to 'Bo Diddley,' and you say, 'What in the Jesus is that?'"

RIP





And a belated minute's silence for the Duchess

The man who invented the trouser suit

My piece in the Guardian today

My first job as a teenage reporter on a local paper in 1969 had a dress code: no trousers. A man had to wear a tie and a woman wore a skirt. My workplace rebellion came the day I turned up in a grey flannel Young Jaeger trouser suit (as worn by Jean Shrimpton and photographed by David Bailey), and was sent home. As there was a time before the pill, so there was once life before the trouser suit, which Yves Saint Laurent, who died on Sunday, invented in 1966. Or rather he thought a new thought: Le Smoking, the tuxedo for women that would become a permanent feature of his collections and would morph into the single most transformative piece of women's wear since Chanel created the little black dress.

It was the perfect garment for the 70s and for women who went out to work. Women had been wearing trousers since the 20s, but pants had never managed to struggle out of the weekend and into the office. The trouser suit put women on an equal sartorial footing with men. And the trouser suit, not the urban myth about bra-burning, is what fashion gave to feminism. When wearing it, your legs took longer steps; men looked at your face, not your ankles, and were forced to listen to the words that came out of your mouth. It killed the miniskirt stone dead. Hillary Clinton, a woman who does not possess good legs, has lived in trouser suits on the campaign trail.

Yet, even when he dressed women in safari jackets and trenchcoats, Saint Laurent understood how to make them feel sexy. Le Smoking was not masculine but androgynous. At 21, he had been anointed Dior's successor on the death of the man who brought pleasure back to clothes after wartime rationing. In the early 60s, Brigitte Bardot declared that couture was for old ladies. Saint Laurent understood the next great change and the huge range of roles that women were about to play. For two decades, he had his finger right on the button of the times he lived in.

The Man Who Loved Women (just not that way)

Leading figures are rare in any field. In fashion, there were only five in the 20th century: Poiret, Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga — and Saint Laurent. All the dress ideas of the last century have come from them. There is a strong case to be made for Yves Saint Laurent as the most inventive, original and influential of all the five. Certainly, it is time to say that the way women have dressed in the past 40 years — regardless of age, class or wealth — has been the direct result of the ideas, often radical and even initially unacceptable, of Saint Laurent.
Times obituary

(There will be something from me in the Guardian tomorrow)

Notes from a muddy field

I spent an exhausting and scintillating weekend at the Hay on Wye literary festival. Had dinner with Albanian novelist, Ismail Kadare and his English translator, lunch with Don McCullin, the greatest living photojournalist, heard UCL don John Mullan deliver a riveting talk on why eighteenth and nineteenth century novelists preferred to publish their books anonymously or pseudonymously, saw John Irving's tattoo of a wrestling circle on his arm, was given a copy of the new right-wing magazine Standpoint, and observed festival fashion:

1. Mud. Field. Rain. Get out the Glastonbury kit

2. Droopy beige linen and pastel florals

3. 'I've walked all round the village and I can't seem to find Harvey Nicks.'

Enjoyed the perfect union of 1. and 3. effected by Lucy Yeomans, editor of Harpers Bazaar, who wore wellies and a Chanel 2.55.

Greatness falls

Yves St Laurent 1936-2008

'We must never confuse elegance with snobbery'

Excellent

This is a movie so unbelievably girly, whirly and twirly that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like reading three Andy McNabs back to back, just to get my testosterone back up to metrosexual level.

writes Peter Bradshaw, film critic of the Guardian.