BUY ME A PONY...

For some unimaginable reason the bods who set the festive television menus seem to think that Will Ferrell in Elf will ignite our holiday passions.

Fools!

If you want to dream and create and wonder and swoon, it's all about The Thief of Bagdad. This "Arabian Fantasy in Technicolor" from 1940 that was designed by Vincent Korda and features costumes by the dandy master Oliver Messel and Vogue illustrator Marcel Vertès.

This NYE, I'm all going to channel June Duprez's Princess in blue and gold lamé harem pants and bejewelled veil. Heck, I might even sniff a blue rose (it makes one forget everything apparently, just the ticket for a wild night). Hopefully my Prince will arrive to rescue me on his borrowed flying carpet, if that pesky giant genie doesn't stop him. Or perhaps he might steal the Sultan's flying horse to take me, and my so-hot-right-now harem pants, for a crazily beautiful sky ride? Shhh....don't wake me. I'm enjoying this dream...

Don't know about you, but I've always got time for a pony. Because we are friends and I don't believe in secrets between buddies, I don't mind telling you that my husband bought me three candy-coloured plastic ponies with comb-able manes for Christmas this year - do you think he was trying to tell me something? If so, what? Maybe he heard me talking about Ralph Lauren's pink motif and got confused. But I digress. Point is, there is the most fantabulous scene in The Thief in which the evil usurper Jaffa (no cake, he) tries to distract the Sultan from his passions for his daughter (Jaffa's passions, that is) via the production of a magnficient mechanical white horse. Wind him up (the gee-gee, not the usurper), and he gallops high into the sky o'er the pastel hued domes of the rooftops of Arabia.

Giddy up, I say.

Now turn off bloody Elf and let your spirits fly.

Museworthy: Cyd Charisse, 1922 - 2008

Legs eleven? Come dancing! If you're looking for pinspiration as hems climb higher and higher, you could do worse than Hollywood's golden era lady of the luscious legs. Texan born Cyd (whose real name was Tula) starred in Singin' in the Rain with Fred Astaire and stepped out on a gazillion war time pin-ups. She looked tops in silk stockings and knew her way around a thigh split. I'd have loved to see her in a Balmain mini with train, wouldn't you? Go Cyd!

Museworthy: Lisa Fonssagrives, 1911-1992

Lithe and lovely personification of elegance, 1950s supermodel and wife of legendary snapper Irving Penn. Fonssagrive's chiselled cheek bones were so famous in the 40s and 50s that she's since been dubbed the first super model, and why not? Such grace, such poise.

According to her obituary in The New York Times, she commanded 40 bucks an hour at a time when other girls were lucky to get 10. Penn shot her frequently for US Vogue, and she was a also a favourite of Horst, but seemingly none of the razzle dazzle went to her pretty Swedish head. In 1949, she told Time magazine: "It is always the dress, it is never, never the girl. I'm just a good clothes hanger." Can someone please tell Naomi Campbell?

Chictionary

F'row Word of the Week

Pre-fall. (pre-forle) n. No, not pride before a fall, although that indeed was a risk for designers who hadn’t quite hit their creative stride when they offered journos an early look at their moods for A/W‘10 this month.

Keep up now, ladies. If you thought the fashion calendar could be divided neatly into two - spring/summer and autumn/winter - you thought wrong. These days, fashion fans can look forward to showings at least six times a year, and that’s just taking Paris, London, Milan and New York into account.

Each late February/early March and late September/early October, the Ready-to-Wear circus hits the big four. This has long been balanced by the Couture in Paris: Spring in January and Autumn in July (go figure). Once upon a time the latter was all there was; fashion equalled Paris couture and that was that. But recently new rounds of shows have been added at such a dizzying rate that the editors can barely keep up, let alone us civilians.

The Resort collections – A.K.A. Cruise – happen all over the place each May (Chanel commandeered the Venice Lido this year) and give the big names a chance to flog swimwear and kaftans to their clients who winter in the Caribbean or are married to Greek shipping magnates.

Pre-fall is the latest fashion event to be invented by buyers bored of summer sale stock and media-hungry brands eager for greater exposure. What started as literally a sneak peek at the season to come via an early drop for department stores, perhaps with one model posing in the designer’s HQ, has morphed into a full-blown mini season complete with runways and blowing out budgets. What’s next? Apres-couture? Pre-pre-spring? My brain hurts.

In conversation. Hints and tips for daily use:
“Alexander Wang was way off for Pre-Fall this year. All those layers were just so serious. He should stick to the body con dresses.”

Your friend at US Vogue asks: “Are you coming to New York for the Pre-Fall? Some of the guys are doing some interesting shows this time.”
You reply: “I wish! They never fly us anywhere if they can help it. Can you believe they made me write the Couture report from Style.com?”

BLOOMSBURY

I am reading Martin Green's review of Bright Young Thing culture, Children of the Sun, and, at the same time, Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Philip Eade's rollocking biography of the last Ranee of Sarawak. Both tales touch peripherally on the Bloomsbury set - Green's because his protagonists scoffed at Virginia Wool'f set; Eade's because Sylvia fancied herself a writer and knew George Bernard Shaw. Okay so Shaw wasn't Bloomsbury, but he was mates with Vita Sackville West and if you fancy another tenuous link, the Nicholson part of Weidenfeld &...was Sackville-West's son.

Anyway, I love Bloomsbury, although I don't like blue stockings (make mine black lace). This photograph is by Alice Wesley-Smith of the artist Kevina-Jo Smith's paper blooms. Bloomin' marvellous, no?

CHICTIONARY

(I speak, you speak, we all speak...FASHION!!!)

F’row Word of the Week
Fa-at (fah-aaaat) n. 1. Fa-at, with its emphatic long ‘a’ sound is the extreme form of fat (with a short ‘a’). The sort that comes with too many Nice biscuits, and threatens curves and wobbly bits, as opposed to the sort that fashion editors pretend to be to make their assistants tell them they look “like, really, really thin” in that new Jasmine de Milo dress.

In hip-hop circles “phat” is a good thing, but believe you me fat is the enemy in Fashion Land, a place of such distorted reality that here Sophie Dahl will be forever tagged a “plus-sized” beauty (she may have shed kilos since she did that Opium ad but, hello, she’s just written a book about cooking pancakes so clearly she’s fa-at at heart). To be fa-at is to have lost the fashion battle. Fa-at is never in vogue.

Notes: The fashion hang-up up about fa-at is rooted in the fact that most of the Skinny Minnies recoiling in horror about normal body shapes are just really hungry, hence angry. And yet, despite the fact that more ordinary people are size 16 and over than ever before, the skinny fashion Minnie would rather starve to wear hotpants than shelve the shorts and have a nice pasta dinner.

For these gals plus is a minus; “SAMPLE” is the Holy Grail size, the size all fashionistas yearn to be, even as that seems to shrink each season. Gucci samples are reportedly so small these days that 14-year-olds can’t squeeze into them. But hey, even if you have to give up food for good, at least you won’t be FA-AT.

In conversation. Hints and tips for daily use:
1. On seeing Beth Ditto on the cover of Love magazine: “Woaaahhh! She is fa-at and fabulous. [In whining tone, while thinking angrily of contraband whip cream] No-one told me you could be both.”

2. On being ever so slightly too fat for Gucci and/ or fishing for a compliment about your size 8 arse: “Gawd, I’m so fat!” (Whereby fat has a short ‘a’.)

Your underlings should reply: “No way! You are so tiny. I wish I were that small.” Nuff said. Now you can move on and treat yourself – and your team – to a glass of water and a Ryvita.

3. On bumping into a frienemy who used to work in your fashion office and has suddenly fallen off the social circuit: “O. M. G!! Congratulations! We didn’t know you were expecting! Who’s the daddy? Or…are you just fa-at?”

Ouch. Pass the violet creams, I think I need a comfort eat.

[ends]

The Butterfly Effect

Oh my, have you ever seen a prettier thing than this butterfly hat by Lil Jen? I bet you haven't. And if you think you have, which like I said, I totally bet you haven't, well show me the evidence.

Of course the problem with butterflies in the great outdoors is that they only last five minutes. Or three days. Or something. Which is sad, whichever way you look at it (even in a glass half full sort of a way). And even those paltry few hours are fraught with danger; there are all those pre-Nintendo kids, the ones in the alternate reality, trying to catch them with their butterfly nets. When it's cold, they can't fly (the insects; not the kids). They taste stuff through their feet (eeek!). And don't even get me started on the sinister Victorian botanist with his pins and boards. I bet Charles Darwin killed butterflies.

Being a real butterfly kinda sucks. Being a fake one on this hat, however, is one word: good.

Lil Jen Butterfly hat, $385, from Mrs. Press Dressing Room.

CHICTIONARY

(I speak, you speak, we all speak FASHION!!)

F'row Word of the Fortnight:
Billionheir (bill-ee-on-air) n. 1. Loaded offspring of someone famous, thereby possessed of both bags of cash and bags of cachet with which to launch a major fashion label/fund a low paid gig as an actor between jobs/ flit from fash cap to fash cap just for the fun of it.

See veggo designer Stella McCartney, (daughter of Beatle Paul); handsome dilletante Otis Ferry (son of old rocker Bryan); UK Vogue November '09 issue cover girl Georgia Jagger (youngest daughter of Mick and Jerry); Peaches and Pixie (bad girl offspring of Sir Bob Geldof).

In conversation. Hints and tips for daily use:
When a jetset friend asks if you got Nicky Haslam in to do your new dining room: "No, we went to Ikea. What do you think I am; a billionheir?"

Your PR calls to ask about the guest list to your Christmas drinks: "This is the big one. Ask Leigh Lezark to DJ and go heavy on the billionheirs."

Museworthy: Isabella Blow, 1958 - 2007

Blue-blooded hat fan, buck-teethed stately home resident, stellar style eccentric and Tatler magazine fashion director. Blow, nee Delves Broughton, loved tartan, “discovered” Sophie Dahl and Alexander McQueen (she bought Lee's entire Central St Martin’s graduation collection) and kept Irish society milliner Philip Treacy in business.

In her last decade, she became the primary muse for the latter’s surreally fabulous creations, famous for wearing his wacky lobsters, fans and architectural experiments on her noggin whenever she went out and about, not to mention at her last hurrah - her coffin was topped with a Treacy creation instead of a floral tribute.

“Izzy” to her friends, Blow was a creative genius with oodles of ideas and demons to match. After several failed attempts to do herself in (she once jumped off the Hammersmith flyover) she finally succeeded, fatally drinking weedkiller in 2007. A great loss - they don't make 'em like Blow anymore, more's the pity.