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.)

In the real world

Last night I did the military trend, a tunicky black coat dress with double-breasted gold buttons, so I'm all ready to go and invade somewhere.

Jess Cartner-Morley explains how actual people wear the trends on the catwalk. Here is Paris:

So far as there is a "look" to be derived from this week's shows, it goes something like this. It focuses on the shape of the torso and the shoulders: often a corsetted waist and ribs, contrasted with pointy, vaguely sci-fi shoulders. Sometimes there are straps tracing the lines of the ribs or looped in faintly fetishistic multiples around the shoulders. At Givenchy, the look was less gothic than last season, and more glam rock - that'll be the leather trousers with flame detailing along the thigh - but the intense, angular, skinny, black aesthetic remains essentially unchanged. At Stella, black bands were wrapped bandage-tight, in the style made famous by Azzedine Alaïa.
. . .

Don't panic. We are not actually going to be wearing this. I know, because all week I've been watching what the French fashion editors wear. When they want to do a bit of a strappy thing, they wear a top with loose, draped straps (Vanessa Bruno does a good line in these) under a black jacket with pointy shoulders and maybe even a hem that points down at the front. They wear this with slim trousers and heels, or a short skirt and long boots. Often the finishing touch is a thin scarf wound around the neck, and there you have it: the same elegant-edgy, strappy-black thing without looking like a science-fiction prostitute. Alternatively, if they want to channel a bit of a Victorian dummy silhouette, they go with a tightly belted jacket over a very short, very full skirt, worn with ankle boots - this gives the same abrupt-looking, jagged silhouette.

These straps and silhouettes, however, don't really make a trend by themselves. In Paris, as in the other fashion cities, this season of shows has failed to produce one headline-making, soundbite-friendly major trend: no Boho, no 60s. There was no consensus. But perhaps we don't need one. To allow Karl Lagerfeld, appropriately enough, the last word: "As long as you agree with yourself, that's enough - non?

"

Fashion is no longer fashion. . .

. . . It's conceptual art

Dark, dark, we all go into the dark

Martin Margiela

To the floor, again

Looking at the SS09 shows, it's clear that the maxi dress continues for a third year. The maxi dresses which appeared on the runways the summer before last were too much like the maxi dresses of the 70s for me to feel comfortable wearing them a second time round, but this seasons they're evolving away from the frills and tiers. Here's Cavalli's take.

Interesting that as long makes a return in daywear it dies away in eveningwear

London Fashion Week and to Milan

A slide show of highlights from all the collections, here

That's Richard Nichol, above. What did I tell you about sleeveless jackets?

Meanwhile Milan Fashion Week opened with, sit down hold on to a stable surface, ask for brandy if necessary, the Elena Miro show. Elena Miro designs for plus size.

I personally don't like her collection, but see what you think.

Jaeger: new readers start here

Jaeger is a brand which is 125 years old. It started out making woollen underwear (George Bernard Shaw said he looked like a radish in his) but by the 30s had branched out into fashion and established the Regent Street flagship store it still occupies. By the 60s Jaeger was a byword for very good quality beautiful clothes and its junior label, Young Jaeger had ad campaigns modelled by Jean Shrimpton and shot by David Bailey. Many fashion houses went under in the 70s, Jaeger survived, but its clothes were in a word, frumpy. They were clothes your mother wore, if your mother liked understated, boring beige elegance. By the turn of this decade Jaeger was essentially a brand for old ladies.

Just before it was sold to its present owner, Chairman of the British Fashion Council, Harold Tillman, it divested itself of its US standalone stores, and took on designer Bella Freud who injected some youth into the label. By the summer of 2006, with a new CEO, Belinda Earle at the helm, who had turned around the department store Debenhams by introducing line-ups with designers like Jasper Conran, Julien McDonald, and Ben de Lisi, it had take stock of what it was producing and discovered that it had lost its DNA. It was making beige and pastel polyester sacks.

It divided the company into three labels: Jaeger London, Jaeger Black (high-end conservative investment dressing) and Jaeger Collection, the continuation of what it had been doing for the last couple of decades so as not to lose its existing customer base. Jaeger London is what I will be talking about here.

It was the summer of 2006 that I started noticing a black tunic dress with little bobbles at the hem. Anya Hindmarch was wearing it and when I asked her where it was from, she said with a blush Jaeger though she had 'had to fall over several zimmer frames to reach it.' The dress was featured in the fashion victim's bible, Grazia. Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue, mentioned Jaeger to me, and finally I saw Hillary Alexander, the Telegraph's fashion editor, wearing a Jaeger dress with a MaxMara jacket at a party at the V&A. (She was wearing the same dress at Jaeger's show on Monday.)

This was when I bought my first Jaeger dress.

Last February Jaeger London held its first ever show at London Fashion Week and it was a sensation. The clothes started arriving in the shops in the middle of August and most are now in. I have been steadily buying several pieces and they form the mainstay of my wardrobe. On Monday Jaeger held its second show, and the reviews were all raves. This is down to the vision of Belinda Earle and the design talent of Karen Boyd who had a label with Helen Storey in the 80s.

What is it I like about Jaeger? Two things:

- I have been convinced for a year now that over a certain age, and in this economy, it's better to buy a smaller number of well made garments than loads of cheap of-the-moment items from Zara and H&M. Jaeger prices at the lower end of the designer price-range, so within reach and they have excellent sales

- Jaeger designs edgy clothes for older women, by older, I mean over 35-40, which they recognise to be their market. Belinda Earle told me that the mantra for their customer is fit and flatter, but we're the generations which were wearing mini skirts in the 60s or body con bandage dresses in the 80s. We don't want to look like our mothers. We want to go forward with style.

Sitting on the second row on Monday, directly behind Erin O'Connor, and two of the Jagger girls, you understood that Jaeger's mission to throw off its frumpy associations were complete. Kate Moss wears Jaeger and now Lizzie Jagger does too. The coat I nearly bought was worn by Shirley Bassey and Erin O'Connor, over fifty years apart in age.

I understand that in the next year Jaeger will be expanding internationally and into partnerships with US department stores. So if you're in the US and can't yet get your hands on this brand, I'm really sorry, because as the US economy staggers from disaster to disaster with worrying consequences for all of us, it's nice for us over here to be a bit proud to be British.

London Fashion Week: Jaeger

London Fashion Week started on Sunday and I have been a bit out of the loop because of the previous week's excitement but I wouldn't miss Jaeger's second catwalk show in its 125 year history, particularly as my Autumn/Winter wardrobe is dominated by what I saw at the February show.

LFW shows take place in a marquee in front of the Natural History Museum in Kensington. There's a champagne bar while you're waiting to go in and what struck me was how many women in the crowd were wearing Jaeger. Now it's only polite to wear the designer to the show, but the crowd were fashion journalists who dash from one collection to the next and it's hard to see how they could change between shows. I was wearing this top, and I must have seen it on seven or eight other women.


Most gratifying of all was sighting Mary Portas, the woman who masterminded the transformation of Harvey Nicks, wearing a coat-dress I have waiting in the wardrobe to be worn. She wore hers as a mini dress, with bare legs. I'll be wearing mine over a skinny rib sweater and wide leg trousers, as soon as it gets cold enough.


One Jaeger wearer is Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister's wife, who wore Jaeger at a party she hosted last night at 10 Downing Street to celebrate the launch of fashion week.

I had ten minutes or so with Alexandra Shulman to discuss my Booker Prize dress, and we agreed that the sleeves issue is a total nightmare. You might think that being editor of Vogue you would no longer have such problems. You would be wrong. I was stunned by one of the disasters she recounted to me.

Took my seat on the second row and immediately about twenty snappers came and started shoving their lenses into my face, and how nice, I thought that the fashion world recognises literary excellence, until I realised I was sitting behind Erin O'Connor and two of the Jagger girls. O'Connor was wearing this coat, which I had nearly bought but finally went for the Armani instead, and seeing it on her, I am very glad I didn't. It would have destroyed it for me. I am not quite the same shape or size or height as Erin O'Connor.


The key to the show was colour - dragee shades, which I love, stronger than pastels- and sleeves - floaty, handkerchief sleeves on maxi dresses and tops, Incredibly clever of the Jaeger people to work out that we will wear maxi-dresses, but not if they're halter neck.


You can see the whole show here, but first on my list to buy next summer is this top



I'm incredibly pleased that in Britain we have a range which is priced at the low end of designer with such strong quirky style. I wonder if the fact that Jaeger is producing such beautiful wearable clothes is down to the fact that its designer, Karen Boyd, looks like this:

I have that scarf
and yes, that's my neck to the left of Erin's head.

At last, the New York shows

Michael Kors

In all the excitement I have completely missed the big stories of the week, that sciency thing that happened on Wednesday, and the New York collections.

Jess Cartner-Morley in the Guardian has the summing-up:

What this means in terms of steering the direction of fashion is that femininity - in its American form as wholesome, healthsome and sunshine-bright, rather than the European incarnation as complicated, mysterious, troublesome and flouncy - once again rules the catwalk. The seeds of androgyny and sci-fi futurism sown in so many of last season's influential shows have fallen on unfriendly ground here. There was a clear sartorial divide, this week, among the show audiences who parade around the venue between pre sentations: while the Europeans are embracing sharp black tailoring and challenging trouser shapes, the Americans are all about an uptown citrus shift (think Cindy) or a cute floral leavened with a black belt (pure Michelle).