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.

The Colour Purple

The people have spoken. The Thoughtful Dresser will not address the US election. Well, until the actual day of the election when I observe the right to say my piece.

In the meantime, let us consider Michelle Obama and the colour purple:

Kate Moss is over; Sienna who? The UK high street has decreed that this season's fashion icon is none other than ... Michelle Obama. Sort of.

It's not so much Obama who has prompted such adulation, but a very specific dress of hers: the purple shift she wore in Minnesota in June when her husband clinched the Democratic nomination and she, famously, did the fist-bump with him.

Now, it is no exaggeration to say that this dress caused near hysteria among the fash pack: it prompted the New York Times to write an adoring piece about her wardrobe under the headline "She Dresses to Win". The paper ruminated that the colour was "symbolically rich, even if its message may have been so subtle as to be subliminal".

Symbolism, schmymbolism; that colour looked hot on her, something the high street noted, too. Purple has long been neglected and Obama reminded the world just how flattering it can be. Now everyone's suddenly got a bit of regal Michelle purple (which is very different from Ribena purple). Reiss, for example, has tricked out a gorgeous strapless evening dress in the shade.

I am huge fan of purple, it's THE colour for brunettes and redheads (I used to be the former and am now the latter). If Michelle Obama is the agent by which there is more purple in the shops then it's Go, Democrats, Go!

All is explained

Why does fashion regularly produce hideous fashions, when we were getting along so nicely with the trend for dresses and opaques?

You see, these sorts of people [fashion snobs] like to look different from the masses. Nothing wrong with that. Problems arise, though, from the fact that the masses often have quite sensible taste (with the exception of Ugg boots, but let's not talk about such distressing things on a Monday morning. Gladiator sandals are bad enough). Anyway, fashion snobs then have to find something that the masses don't like and don't wear - often, though, for a reason. Hence the sudden popularity of ridiculously high-waisted jeans over hipster versions among the Dazed & Confused types, and ditto for gladiator sandals over less Greco-Roman ones.

Harry Agrees With Hadley

Well, up to a point.

Hadley Freeman in the Guardian was asked recently what is ' the safest way to compliment a lady?'. ( Read it here).

The question is revealing. It shouldn't be about what is safe, but what is right.

She has certainly got it right in identifying some of the things that should not be said: ( 'that dress makes you look pretty').

But I am less convinced of her recommendation. Yes, it may be ok to say 'That's a nice dress',. Or 'that colour really brings out the colour in your eyes'. But in my humble opinion neither of these are likely to pass muster.

Because they sound like a rehearsed response. Unless the male in question has a track record of paying attention to others ( perhaps a loaded question) , and  a track record of comment and compliment, this is going to sound anything but spontaneous.

Ok, it's difficult for men. So many ways to get it wrong. It's not surprising that steering through these troubled waters results in something anodyne.

The real answer is simply 'You look fabulous'.

But it has to be said unprompted, and with spontaneity.

There may well have been time for a couple of martinis before being called on to say anything. That's what the martinis are for.

I have nothing further to add

Ask Hadley

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Chic without sweatshops

Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain

Monday July 7, 2008
The Guardian

I was so shocked by the revelation the other week that small Indian children made some of my Primark clothes. What can I do to make sure this doesn't happen again?
Mary O'Keefe, London

Um, don't buy clothes that cost £3 maybe? Before anyone (ie, Primark's lawyers) get upset, I'm not saying that all cheap clothes are studded with the sweat and blood droplets of half-starved children. But to continue buying cheap-as-chips clothes and then to express shock that they are not made by happy couturiers, sewing the pieces by hand while reclining on goose-feathered pillows and chortling contentedly seems - and I really mean no offence, Mary - a touch naive, let us say euphemistically. Someone is paying the price for those clothes, my dear. And seeing as it's clearly not you, and it's unlikely to be the store (most stores tend to be a bit reluctant to sell clothes for less than they paid to have them made - they're funny like that) perhaps it's someone else. Someone around the age of 10, maybe.

It's like those diets that promise you can eat stuffed-crust pizza, pasta carbonara and deep-fried chocolate gateau and still lose weight. People, it just doesn't work like that - well, not unless the chocolate tastes like rehydrated and artificially sweetened seaweed because, well, that's what it is. And a beaded top that costs £2.50 is either going to be very badly made, sewn by people content to be paid 60p a day or has the wrong price tag on it. Guess which makes stores more money?

Of course, if one takes this argument too far then you end up saying that the only kind of clothes people should buy is couture, which really is made by the aforementioned happy couturiers (although even they might not always get to be pillow-recliners). The reason we buy cheap clothes is because most of us are not Dasha Zhukova and don't have boyfriends who buy us £50m paintings on a whim. But just as the best way to eat is to eat a normal-sized amount of half-decent food - not Michelin-starred, not greasy, battery-farmed offcuts - at reasonably spaced intervals, so the best way to shop is to buy the occasional well-made piece of clothing. Not Gucci necessarily, but something that costs more than a latte, perhaps.

And ultimately, I truly do believe it works out cheaper. Buying one dress for £75 that lasts you a good handful of years is definitely more economical than buying a new £20 dress every time you have a party because the last one didn't make it to 10pm without ripping. So, in conclusion, you'll be living with more money, better clothes and without guilt.

I think I just saw a ray of light break beyond those clothes yonder.

More shoes I'm not going to be able to wear

Hadley writes:

At Balenciaga - pretty much the bellwether for trends that the high street masses will be adopting - the gladiator sandals it knocked out last season have been replaced for autumn/ winter by shoes so pointy they will probably double as weapons for the requisite eastern European villainess in the next Bond film.

Even Marc Jacobs, who is surely Coco Chanel's successor in his tireless promotion of the sweet and girly look, has pushed aside his beloved mouse pumps (literally, ballet pumps with little beaded eyes and whiskers fixed on the tip) for decidedly more grown-up and less rodenty pointier toes, at both his own eponymous label and in the current collection for Louis Vuitton. Similarly, the Lanvin woman seems to have matured from the pretty, round-toed mademoiselle she was just a few seasons ago to a full-on vamp, with black, sharp-toed teetering heels. "Round toes are on their way out and pointy toes are marching back into our wardrobes!" one fashion magazine gleefully announced this month.

Hadley Freeman is banned from Paul Smth shows

Although bans have been sprinkled around the fashion press for some time, they do seem to be coming down with increasing frequency - a sign, perhaps, of a growing anxiety in the luxury market that with the impending economic downturn not as many people are buying £900 dresses and trousers. It is also likely to be a reflection of the power of advertising. Fashion magazines and some newspapers are financially dependent on fashion advertisers, which muffles the writers who work for them. They are unable to say anything remotely negative about the clothes, out of fear of losing that precious £100,000-a-year advertising account, which is why so much fashion coverage often reads as little more than advertorial puff and fluff. Designers then get used to such obsequiousness so that any words of dissent are treated as a shocking display of heresy.

read the rest

Art over commerce

Hadley Freeman has a very interesting piece about being a judge at Graduate Fashion week.

Her point is that because fashion courses in Britain are based at art schools, designers have a supreme understanding of art and none about commerce, ie how to produce clothes that someone would want to wear. Including the designers themselves:

That brings us back to the question of why British students favour the artistic over the commercial. Marian McLaughlin, head of the international office of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, is attending the London shows and agrees that undoubtedly British fashion students favour "quirkier designs". "You can really see the difference between them and other nationalities," she says. "Probably it's because of the art-school influence. It does produce interesting clothes, but I don't know whether they get jobs afterwards. All of our students definitely do."

But Marten Andreasson, fashion tutor at the University of Middlesex, disagrees.

"I think that, for the students, it is definitely more important to emphasise the creative because this is the time when they have the freedom to experiment and express themselves," he says. "By the time they get to their graduate show, then they should have decided whether they want to go commercial or be more experimental." But what happens to the ones who want to make collections based on the Holocaust? He makes a tactful shrug. "They probably go off and do MAs ..."

This is another thing that puzzles me. Fashion students say that their work is about "self-expression", but what they make always seems to be an awfully long way away from what they actually wear. There are a lot of pretty printed dresses and German tourist-esque shoes in the audience - almost none on the runways. Sharon Dewar, 29, a student at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, agrees that the delicate, multi-layered black dress she has designed doesn't seem to have much in common with the jeans-and-grey-cardigan combo she is wearing. "That's true. But I design things I aspire to, as opposed to things I actually wear, and it's a designer market I'm aspiring to." So what does she think is more important - being commercial or being experimental? "It's a balance really, isn't it? You want to enjoy making the clothes and other people to enjoy wearing them."

UPDATE Greying Pixie has some trenchant remarks on this in the comments.