A forgotten maestro of British fashion

Bill Gibb remembered - my piece in today's Telegraph:

In the summer of 1970 a friend and I laboriously made ourselves long coats out of multicoloured patchwork velvet squares. The sleeves were gathered at the armholes because we didn't know how to fit them, and they fell like the tunic of a medieval page-boy, wide at the wrists. We were dedicated followers of fashion who had grown out of Chelsea Girl, the 1960s equivalent of Topshop, but it would be a year or two before we discovered the vintage stalls at Kensington Market. With our hennaed hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and Biba purple lipstick, we wafted about in Afghan dresses, skirts made of Indian bedspreads and loose velvet tops from India with tiny mirrors inset in the embroidery. Nothing matched. The clash of colour and texture was the point. The only rule was that you must not look anything like your mother, who had outrageously started to wear her skirts an inch or two above the knee.

Twiggy’s outfit for the Los Angeles premiere of The Boy Friend, 1971

Because we were only teenagers, what we knew about clothes came not from the fashion press (Vogue was scarily grown-up), but from copying everyone we knew. So I was completely unaware, until I opened the pages of a new book about his life and work, that for a period of about three years in my late teens and early twenties, I had been a walking advertisement for Bill Gibb. Gibb's early death at the age of 44 in 1988, and his too-brief period in the 1970s as one of the defining designers of his age, has meant that he has been partly forgotten - except by those who wore his clothes. He dressed Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, Anjelica Huston, Marie Helvin and Twiggy, who described Gibb as 'my knight in shining armour', after he rescued her car from a snowdrift on a cold London day in 1967.

Bill Cunningham: Who Knew?

I've been reading the US press online this week because of the VP debate and the bailout and discovered the wonderful photo and audio essays on fashion on the street by Bill Cunningham in the New York Times.

I had never heard of this guy, but he is wonderful, here he is talking about the new trend for lace. And he's been doing this for fifty years!

My weekend re-reading

The masters of the universe - where are they now?

The Clothes On Their Backs US publication update

The US edition of The Clothes On Their Backs is being rushed out by Scribner for publication early November. I have seen the first draft of the cover which I adore. As soon as it appears on Amazon, I'll post a link. Or you can order directly from the Simon and Schuster site. There will be a simultaneous hardback and $14 trade paperback.

British style explained

It's true that there is a lot of vacuous fashion writing out there, but there is some brilliant fashion journalism too, usually by people who've been around the block, like Lisa Armstrong at the Times whom I first met 20 years ago when she was working on Elle. And here she is, explaining the origins of British style (also taking in class, necessarily, this being Britain):

No discussion of Britain’s sartorial tics proceeds very far before it collides with a cloud front, a rainstorm and the occasional heatwave. The weather doesn’t merely affect the way we dress, it defines it. It may be no exaggeration to say that most of the enduring wardrobe components this country has given to the world – the trench coat, the argyle sweater, the cashmere twinset, the wellington, the sprigged tea dress – arose from a need to combat the elements. As for our other great contribution, thank 1,000 years of military doggedness. Savile Row tailoring wouldn’t exist without Army uniforms. Without tailoring there would be no mods, no Vivienne Westwood, no easily definable system for telegraphing one’s class. Punks wouldn’t have looked nearly so sharp.

Pragmatism may be the fundamental principle on which British style is built. A country which for centuries had no equivalent of la passeggiata, that evening parade in Mediterranean and Latin countries in which beautifully turned-out people stroll along the balmy streets, found more idiosyncratic ways to communicate its sense of chic. Layers, that stand-by of the draughty British home, are something at which we excel, and a habit the rest of the world now emulates, thanks to avatars such as Kate Moss and brands such as Burberry, which took the haphazard approach of chucking on any old ropey jumper over a summer dress, over a pair of woolly tights, and made it look chic and luxurious. Lo, modern eclecticism was born.

Harry Revisits Highway 61

The other day I was on a mission to find a polka dot shirt.
Having tried Beyond Retro, a cavernous vintage store south of Oxford Street, I continued on to Carnaby Street. There has recently been a bit of a retro /mod revival and a few stores can be found in its environs. Sherry’s in Ganton Street had a large mod roundel outside so that helped me identify it.
‘I’m looking for a polka dot shirt’ I explained to the pleasant young man ‘for someone a lot smaller than me ( ie thinner) who wants to look like Bob Dylan for the evening.’

He was able to produce one straight away. It had a button down collar, and when I enquired whether they did any with tab collars I got the expected answer: No.
I was just musing as to whether said shirt was authentic and stylish enough when the assistant told me something moderately fascinating. The US magazine Entertainment Today had recently been doing a photo shoot with Bob Dylan, and their stylist had contacted the shop to get them to send over some polka dot shirts, just like the one I was holding. 'How cool is that ?' I thought.
A few moments later he was wrapping the item and then proceeded to tell me that Liam and Noel had both been in recently and bought the identical shirt.
Well, of course, we are all so familiar with the Gallagher brothers from Oasis that I guess first names only are de rigeur.

Later, over a cup of coffee, I interrogated the story that went with the transaction. And on reflection decided that it was extremely unlikely that the esteemed Bob would ever put himself in the hands of a stylist from Entertainment Today.
But as sales patter goes, I thought it was inspired.
And sometimes , maybe, it’s quite enjoyable to be gullible.

There are perhaps a couple of questions prompted by this post .
Why is someone I know wanting to look like Bob Dylan?
And why can’t one get hold of a tab-collar shirt?
I’ll answer the first question in my next post.
And I will ruminate on the second very soon.

Election rally

Fashion is no longer fashion. . .

. . . It's conceptual art

Off piste, off trend

I suppose it must be the economy, but equally I think it's fashion's own desperation and exhaustion: I am truly bored with 'trends.'

Here's the Guardian with a list of what we're to expect:

Strong-shouldered jackets
Massive shoulders at shows like Balmain mean the style will last way into 2009.

Skin-tight trousers
This silhouette rules for next season - bodysuits at Jil Sander and Balenciaga, and tight pants at Givenchy.

Painful shoes
If your heels are huge, like the YSL Tribute boots, then a scrum will form around you, looking for the sort of killer shoes that saw models tumble at Prada.

No bag
When Carine Roitfeld began arriving at the shows carrying her phone and nothing else, the big-bag trend was over. If you must have a bag, then make it a clutch, like those that were just seen at Balenciaga.

I am going to be following none of these. I was at L.K Bennett yesterday taking back the shoes which Av had deemed not right for my dress and I was only offered an exchange or credit note. It was a real struggle to find any non-stilettos (I don't wear flats) and in the end found a pair of square-toed purple patent pumps with a stacked heel. When I got home there was an email from a fashion editor friend telling me her day-in-day-out shoes are stacked heel platforms by Stewart Weitzman from Russell and Bromley. So even the fashion editors aren't wearing these sky high shoes. Walking through Hanover Square yesterday I saw three young women who were; they were chatting on the windy street before turning and trooping painfully back into Vogue House, headquarters of Conde Nast. Their bosses know better.

I confess I have been on a buying spree lately and this must be the last gasp before the retail economy contracts and we start to see bankruptcies. I bought a scarf and a necklace yesterday. I could still be wearing them at 80 and might have to.

We know there must be fashion even in a slump. That's what fashion is, that's what fashion does, it rises above. One of my favourite films is Preston Sturges Sullivan's Travels, about the necessity of laughter. But fashion needs to remember that in a depression we're all going to need cheering up, and art school clothes that belong in an art installation, self-referential and ultimately quite boring, are literally museum pieces.

The white stuff

white haired old gentleman

Despite being emphatically in the anti-grey hair camp when it comes to my own carefully tended barnet, I draw the line at male dyeing, sorry. And how strange it is that wealthy men like Paul McCartney can't afford a good dye job

George Clooney indeed does have it right, and I'm not even that much of a fan of Gorgeous George:

Friends, mostly women, tell me that George Clooney has perfect hair. A light sprinkling of salt and pepper, looking natural and suited to his age. Well-seasoned, in fact. I've no idea whether Clooney spends a small part of his fortune on his hair or whether it's natural, but it's certainly a model for others to aim for. Instead, even the wealthy come a cropper whenever they unscrew the toner.

I don't mean the Paul McCartney auburn rinse, during the high summer of Heather - having a different hair colour can be fun. I'm talking about the straight black and brown, like boot polish. Some people seem to deploy industrial-strength dye, as though it's a totem of manhood that their locks can stand up to the onslaught.Next time you see an ageing rock star, check out the inevitable goatee. Monochrome. Dark as a 1970s bass line. A case of "Hope I dye before I get old." My friend at the bar had the same problem. He didn't look bad, just weird, as if someone had dropped a wig on him. Bald would have been better.

I know this sounds less than gracious from a man in his fifties blessed with a full head of hair. But I, too, know what the hair police can be like. When things started to turn white, my teenage children used to play a game called "Hunt the Badger" in supermarkets. But I never dreamt of airbrushing out these signs of mortality.

So why do they do it? The most obvious answer is a desire to hang on to their lost youth, to summon some of the virility of the past by returning to the same colour. But that doesn't really work.

To have a lined and aged face under a helmet of black matting is only to draw attention to age, rather than to divert it. It's like putting a granny in a tutu.

What men want

Best to stay away from very sharp knives

From Giles Coren and others:

Also, I want a woman who is prepared to admit that what she wants from a man is a big c*** and a lot of money. I am fed up with women always claiming that what they find most sexy is a sense of humour. Because it isn’t true. I know this because I am hilarious. Way more funny than most of the slack-arsed, car-obsessed, office wonk baldies you’ll meet in a wine bar on a Friday night, and yet I practically never get laid. If it were true that women are turned on by a man who makes them laugh, Woody Allen wouldn’t have had to marry his own daughter.

As for a woman with a sense of humour, that’s fine, as long as it simply means that she will laugh at my jokes. Most women only laugh at their own jokes. Shut up. If you say something funny, I’ll let you know. And don’t give me “career”. Only women have “careers”. Men have jobs, to get money, and if we could stop and have babies while someone else earned the loot, believe me, we would. We don’t need a “career” to feel validated. We don’t want to feel validated. We just want to feel boobs. As many as possible. And then, at the last minute, quickly have babies and then die.

Dark, dark, we all go into the dark

Martin Margiela

I've got nothing to wear corner

The Guardian's women's page editor, Kira Cochrane, has been monitoring the process of her slow weightloss. She has not weighed herself but used her own clothes to work out if she's heading in the right direction. Now she's down to UK size 16, US 12, she has discovered that she can't find anything to buy in the shops:

The reality is that as you get bigger, your clothing options get much, much smaller. Once you reach a size 16 or more, buying brilliant - or even just marginally attractive - clothes on the high street is markedly more difficult. This is ridiculous. Just because you've gained a few pounds, it doesn't mean that you're any less likely to want clothes that are colourful, exciting, flattering - in fact, buying fantastic clothes that boost your confidence becomes even more of a necessity in the face of rampant anti-fat sentiment. What you're too often faced with is a mountain of frump and I'm convinced that someone could make an absolute killing by setting up a boutique selling clothes in size 16 and above by cutting-edge young designers. There are those who argue that fat people should be stigmatised, that by offering them nothing but ugly tents to wear, they're more likely to lose weight. Actually, the opposite is true. Deprived of easy access to threads that make you feel presentable, finding solace in the fridge is the obvious next step.

The heelless boot

As worn, inevitably, by Mrs Beckham

My Booker dress

not me, not the dress, but yes - Av

I took in my MaxMara dress and my L.K. Bennett shoes to Avsh Alom Gur at Ossie Clark this afternoon. I felt as if I had asked Saul Bellow if he'd like to join my book group to discuss Bridget Jones' Diary. The seams! The stitching! The horror!

No, he said. This is not good enough. No. No.

He has given me an Oscar length blue and back sheer silk georgette dress with sleeves and is designing and making me a full length slip to go under it. He is also lending me a Donna Karan wrap (he used to work for her) to arrive and leave in. He is giving me a pair of vertiginous heels. When I said, 'I can hardly walk in these,' he said: 'They cost £600. I'm giving them to you. Are you sure you can't walk in them?'

UPDATE
I had an email late last night from Av, which contained a detailed list of everything I needed to wear and know for the big night. All I can say is, I know now how the stars squeeze themselves into their Oscar dresses and how they come not to pay for them. I know which hair products to use, what bra to wear etc etc etc. I had two grown men giving me and hour and a half of extremely intense attention. I learned that my taste, which I thought was good, isn't all that when it comes to evening wear. The shoes I had bought on the basis that I could stand in them are going back. There are ongoing discussions involving the phrase 'Manolo Blahnik PR . . . product code.'

I now concede that black tie wear is out of my realm of experience. It's much much harder than it looks and Av has saved me. Thank god for him. Oh, And did I forget to mention that he has also given me this?

Dead past thirty

Quite coincidentally, a person called L. Grant of London asks Hadley why she can't find an evening dress with sleeves. It can't be me because I would never use the word 'lady' and Hadley would never edit down and rewrite a flawlessly worded query by a Booker shortlistee:

To paraphrase Kanye West's "George Bush doesn't care about black people" remark - albeit with more of an emphasis on frocks than housing - designers don't care about grown women.

Which is kinda odd, seeing as they tend to make up the majority of their customer base, given that it is a rare twentysomething who can afford to spend £800 on a dress for a night out with the girls. But, you see, older people don't model in the shows, and older people don't model in magazines and, perhaps most importantly, the only examples of older women many designers seem to be aware of are, in this order of importance, brittle fashion magazine editors, suspiciously well-preserved fortysomething actors and skeletal society mavens. These women tend to have twiggish upper arms which they are rather fond of showing off, if only to demonstrate to the masses that a life of sensory deprivation really does get you somewhere: to a place where smiling is no longer possible but short sleeves are. Now, there's a life well lived, I'd say.

The fashion industry, like many creative industries, has become so besotted by celebrity and magazine coverage that it occasionally forgets about those pesky little flies, "the customers". Yah, yah, let them eat cake, right? (And they probably actually do eat cake, those repulsive carb-gobbling fatties.)

Part of the problem comes from the dresses. A long-sleeved dress can make a lady look like the spells mistress at Hogwarts or, on a bad day, the Wicked Witch of the West. But this is why we have people called "designers", who are there to make clothes look nicer than we could ourselves. Which then brings us back to the original problem.

Sorry, you didn't get the part

A beautiful man

Last night I was wondering whether my headline about Paul Newman was correct, that he really was the last of the great Hollywood stars of his generation. Liz Taylor is still alive, and as the radio news pointed out a few moments ago, so is Clint Eastwood, arguably a greater actor and certainly a great director. But I can't imagine the same intense feelings of sadness and nostalgia when Eastwood dies, perhaps because he has always been a man's man, while Newman appealed across the board.

Paul Newman was a wonderful actor, a mensch and an all-round beautiful person. We rightly distrust the elevation of physical beauty, and we rightly argue that good looks don't equal moral character. But sometimes you just have to give in and say you're glad that the world is full of what is wonderful to look at. When Paul Newman smiled he lit up everything.

But even Paul Newman wasn't quite born beautiful, as his very first screen test with a guy called Jimmy reveals

Judy!

I wan to draw your attention to a new book by a dear friend of mine, Susie Boyt's My Judy Garland Life which is currently running through a series of rave reviews this weekend.

Susie is the daughter of Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. She is always fabulous company, but in this work which is not quite memoir and not quite biography she traces the life of a lonely child who first heard Judy Garland sing Over the Rainbow and found a friend. It's a book about being a fan, and it's a book about feelings. Here's the first review:

This book is a bit insane. It is too much. It is well over the rainbow. It is embarrassing. At the same time it is a brilliant analysis of embarrassment; it suggests that such strength of feeling is maybe something “to be prized”. What a self-deprecating, funny, moving, entertaining read it is, a mad love letter (“I inhale her and exhale her”) from Susie Boyt to Judy Garland, who “created a whole new theatrical idiom in which glamour and frankness nudge and jostle unabashedly”. Its unabashedness is its delight, and a large part of its moral courage.

It conjures up a hopeless openness of empathy, presents its readers with a sensitivity which, by its nature, can't not be damaged, then radiates cowardly-lion bravery. It makes for a new kind of memoir, one that finds a way to insert, philosophically and emotionally, between the plain words “my” and “life”, the everyday pathos, bathos and surreality of being alive in the modern, celebrity-glutted, couldn't-care-less Western world. . . .

This book, though, is stark naked. It wears its vulnerability like a birthday suit, and does so for all of us, in a spirit of born celebration. Can cynicism really be so simply out-argued? Can a book really be so analytical and high-kicking, so fragile and defiant at the same time? An insecure, anguished, megalomaniac, voracious, truly altruistic piece of modern thought, this wonderfully clever book gives its whole self, flings its arms out in a rainy street like a wonderful diva. Brava.

And did I mention she writes a weekly column about clothes among other things in the Financial Times?

Last of the Greats

1925-2008

He had it all