GREAT LENGTHS

It was a seminal moment in my fashion life, like the year I got married in Edwardian lace, or the year I bought my first serious handbag (Mulberry; lots of hardware). Two-thousand-and-eleven: the year my legs let me down.

Perhaps I’d taken them for granted, but I truly thought my legs - those betrayers! Those sneaks! – and I were getting along fine. Only that winter, we’d merrily marched through a cold snap together, clad in flattering opaque hosiery and spike heeled Alaïa booties for all the world as if we shared the same goal (to look fabulous), and would be buddies for life. Except unbeknownst to me, my legs had given up. The buggers had started to wobble and show their age at the knee. And like the cuckholded husband of Shakespearean cliché, I was the last to know.

When I stepped out in the perky Chloé mini I’d adored the year before, my legs gave me a rude shock. “You’ve got to be kidding!” they called. (And I can tell you; I didn’t like their tone.) “Where do you think we’re going dressed like that?”

As the Duchess of Windsor once told US Harper’s Bazaar: “The length of a skirt does help separate age groups; older women simply cannot wear very short skirts. The whole figure - ending up with the face - must ‘go’ with the exposed knee.”

Alas, mine no longer “went” with the Chloé skirt. I had to face facts; I had to go shopping for new skirt options.

By happy accident Fashionland is now abuzz with talk of “the new long” – be it Alexander Wang’s bias-cut satin worn with a T-shirt to make it cool, or hot UK label Alessandra Rich – high necks plus long skirts = AMAZING. Gucci’s flow-y chiffon nod to the 70s is not for me, but Forte Forte’s elegantly draped sand-coloured georgette has my name on it. ALL HAIL THE NEW LONG!

Lovely long looks by Alessandra Rich.

www.alessandrarich.com 

My Christmas In Pictures...

Cookies baked by Madeleine

Beautiful fragrant pine tree

Most fab ever giant wreath from Seasonal Concepts

Owl-ness

Sparkle-ness

Roses from Mr. Press (merci)

Mr & Mrs Press? Er no, two reindeer. But if we were reindeer, this would be us. Clearly.

A rabbit with a bauble, of course

Decorating

Anna Dello Russo's Advent Calendar

Every night on the way home I drive past this row of amazing Paddington terrace houses, each with an extravagant wreath on the front door. It's like one family did it, then another thought, "Hey, I can do better! Beat this!" and on it went until the last one is palest peach paper feathers worthy of a fashion show. It's crazy competitive Christmas wreath action gone mad! I kid you not. Keep meaning to take pics, but keep getting too busy. CHRISTMAS IS COMING LIKE A FREIGHT TRAIN! Time is running out my friends, come to my shop and buy yourself some stocking filler soap, quick smart!

In the meantime, trust my favourite Vogue style icon Anna Dello Russo to make her own super-cal-fashion-listic advent calendar. I love you Anna!

http://www.annadellorusso.com/

SARAH JESSICA PARKER, IRIS APFEL & LOOKING YOUR AGE

I just saw the movie, I Don't Know How She Does It, and my friend ways saying afterwards how she'd clocked Sarah Jessica Parker when she was here for Oakes Day: “Her outfit was great, but I find it so depressing to watch her aging in front of us. She just looks so old…” Say what? Old? She is precisely ten years older than my friend. SJP looks fabulous, and I’d say she looks her age, which is 46. 

What she doesn’t look is oddly frozen in time thanks to a face full of dermal fillers – I’m not saying she doesn’t have them, because I don’t know, but whatever her beauty routine, it’s not one hell-bent on turning back time, Cher-style. Not one that makes her look like a creepy, waxen, wrinkle-free surgery addict poised forever in her mid-20s.

And yet because that’s a pretty reasonable description of so many Hollywood leading ladies and TV stars these days, turns out it’s SJP who’s the one who looks unusual. The more we see something, the more normalized it becomes. And right now we’re riding the crest of the “youth = beauty” wave that’s been building for the past 10 years. We’ve seen so many artfully frozen faces we’ve forgotten what a natural one looks like. I think this wave might be about to break. I hope it is, not least because I’m no spring chicken myself; what I am is too chicken and conflicted to sign up for surgery myself. I also find it depressing to judge beauty and glamour by smooth skin alone. In August, actors Kate Winslet, Rachel Weisz and Emma Thompson gave a press conference in the UK about their newly formed Anti Cosmetic Surgery League, which saw Winslet, 35, proclaiming: “I will never give in!”

So will you? Will I? I reckon it’s pretty hard to say. I kind of like the idea of looking my age, because my age correlates with personal history, my wisdom, my experience. I kind of like it, but then there’s the other bit of me that says, That’s fine in theory, but you’re only 35! What are you going to feel like at 45? At 55? And who are you to come over all judgemental about a woman’s right to look her best, and do whatever she damn well likes to make that happen? No-one really relishes wrinkles any ore than they do grey hairs. I admit that I obsess over the latter. In theory, I’m cheering the Iris Apfel approach – grey and great and utterly fashion fabulous? Bring it on! In practice, I’m at the salon every month bleaching it blonde. 

Apfel shot for The New York Times

So like I said, it’s complicated.

On my pinboard, I have cutting of a fabulous story written by British Vogue editor Alexandra Schulman for UK newspaper The Daily Mail a couple of years back. In it she reveals her reasons for personally rejecting cosmetic surgery despite working in an industry that drives it. She writes: “We want to look younger because we remember youthful vigour. We want to be sexually attractive, we fear our bosses might think we are getting past it, and, basically, we don't want to be old and physically decaying. But while we want to look younger, we are emphatically not going to get any younger. And while we can a do a great deal about the kind of clothes we wear, and the food we eat, and the holidays we take, and the colour we paint our bathroom, we can't do a damn thing about the fact that we are going to get older.” So Schulman says she’d rather spend her downtime doing something useful- learning a language, reading a French novel – than injecting expensive goop into her face in a doomed bid to win a battle that, ultimately, cannot be won.  Doesn’t that just make marvellous sense? I wonder if SJP read it? Whatever. I think she looks bloody brilliant.

CATS LIKE CHRISTMAS TOO

Our Cat Mamma loves Christmas. She nests in the tree when we're not looking like a weird chicken. If Mamma were a woman rather than a cat-chook, I reckon she'd look like this fabulously festive 50s model....

 This isn't Mamma, but a cat off the internet. She will have to suffice until next week. We're getting our tree tomorrow and you can bet I'll have a snap of the Chicken in situ before next weekend.

In the meantime, is it not very funny indeed that this black beauty from The Catorialist website looks like the cat version of my book?....

SEPARATED AT  BIRTH...



Meow.



Happy weekend. x

TWO-TONE TERRIFIC

So today, for the first time, seriously, ever, someone told me my hair looked "amazing" Hurrah! Double hurrah! Fact is, I went to have my roots bleached yesterday at the fabulous Suki in Paddington, and was told be careful of the old stick-a-sleek-high-pony-in-the-same-spot-every-day, because you will break these poor bleached stressed-out strands in a nanosecond. Whoah Suki! Be kind! So...today I wore my extra-marbled super-long (seriously it's to my waist) blonde hair in a wild, messy low side bunch, with the dark caramel underneath bits on show and the very white-blonde top bits on show, and it looked, though I say so myself, kinda fabulous. I have always loved my two-tone hair, so why do I hide it? Hello? I'm letting it flow this week. Rapunzel, Rapunzel...

More two-tone marble heads for inspiration:

SJP, like mine but upside-down, with dark on top

Nicole, actually a lot like mine but with a fringe & mine's more white-blonde than gold

Okay so I wish I was Lily Aldridge. Who doesn't?

Fern Cotton + Me. Sisters

Drew doing the Two

Gaga! I am HATING the bandwagon pink thing right now, but love this kooky canary 'do

OBSESSION: Mulberry autumn/winter 2011/12 campaign video by Tim Walker

ANGRY BIRDS DAY

I'M HAVING AN ANGRY BIRDS KIND OF DAY. And it's only just gone 11am. Yikes. Honestly, sometimes I think if I don't get some time to myself I will explode. Or implode. Or like those naughty rogue i-Phone4s, spontaneously combust.
 I do hold graciousness very dear, plus I've just written a book about being gracious and elegant and delightful as possible at all times. So it's really super bad to be grumping and harrumphing about the place, simply because someone calls or comes by to collect something or drop something off. But this morning I am literally blowing dragon-like smoke out of my nostrils so stroppy and tired and desperate for a holiday am I.
I am dreaming so hard of an entire day spent sipping cups of herbal tea lolling in a swing seat surrounded by lupins and hollyhocks and a gentle but-not-too-cold-please breeze that I can almost taste it. Except not quite because I have to struggle with a load of dumb-ass tangled hangers that insist on falling on the floor and catching silks and thumbing their hanger-y noses up at me. And I have to do the banking, and write at least three overdue stories and take the hem up on a silver gown. And I have to sweep the shop because I'm on my own today. And I have to answer the phone at least seven times to tell some poor bugger in India that I don't want a new phone provider. Thank you, though, Thank you so much for thinking of me.
There is a scene I always remember in The September Issue where Nuclear Wintour (who is actually kind of warm in this movie, and in fact has been getting warmer ever since; the editorial ice caps are melting) says the reason she will stop being the boss, if in fact she ever does, will most likely be the same reason her father stopped being a journo: THE ANGER.  "He got very angry. I do see that tendency in myself. Perhaps, when I start getting too angry, it might be time to give up.”
Well I'm not quite ready to give up, but I might just throw my phone.

FEELING BLUE? BEAUTIFUL HYDRANGEAS IN A ROSE PRINT JUG. HAPPY FRIDAY XXX