Fashion

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Hair-raising

One of the best things about Beehives, Bobs and Blow-dries — yep, an exhibition about hairdressing — is the reaction of visitors. Some are getting on a bit and their pangs of recognition as they pass 1970s straightening tongs or Carmen heated rollers are evident. One woman exclaimed, as she passed a Ronson hairdryer with its shower-cap hood, ‘Ooh, they were good, they were. We’ve only just got rid of my mum’s.’ A hairdresser called Keith from Wakefield observed of the Beatles era that it was a worrying time to begin with: ‘Nothing happened for about two or three months. Nobody came. We thought we’d lost our business. But it

Pea Priestly

Why London Fashion Week needs to die

Twice a year, those fortunate enough to have climbed the emotionally hazardous fashion ladder descend upon London to participate in a circus of collection displays, parties and self-funded photo shoots. Festivities ended yesterday and though there are some troubling dynamics – real time bullying of interns, unpalatably thin models, the volume of waste derived from six-inch-thick paper invites – it’s an industry that brings £26bn a year to the UK economy while showing off some of our best talent. Yet, the trending conversation in all fashion circles is whether or not Fashion Week is relevant. For an industry that is built on turning ideas around quickly, it’s astonishing that this discussion has

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Worse for wear

Erté was destined for the imperial navy. Failing that, the army. His father and uncle had been navy men. There were painters and sculptors on his mother’s side, but they were thought very frivolous. Romain de Tirtoff (‘Erté’ came from the French pronunciation of his initials) was born in 1892 at the St Petersburg Naval School where his father Pyotr was inspector. When he was a little boy, his aunt bought him a set of wooden soldiers. Instinctively, he hated war, violence and, above all, uniforms. He burst into tears and threw the box out of the window. What he liked best was to play with his mother’s old perfume

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

May’s day

You may think you don’t know May Morris, daughter of William, but you’ll probably have come across her wallpaper. Her honeysuckle design was and remains a Morris & Co. bestseller, and it not only features in homes to this day, it’s been nicked by designer Jonathan Anderson for a Morris-inspired range for the very expensive fashion house Loewe. It’s all a bit dispiriting for a woman whose aesthetic sensibility, like her father’s, was bound up in her socialism. But it was embroidery that was May Morris’s art and craft and now a new exhibition at the Morris Gallery in Walthamstow lets us see it in its own right. The gist

Thursday

Carey Layton

A model life

This season, as London fashion week was starting, Vogue posted a video following the new model of the moment Kaia Gerber (who is Cindy Crawford’s daughter). It was so far from the reality of being a model that I almost couldn’t watch it: Kaia walking for all the top designers in her very first season; Kaia entering her ‘home for the week’ (a hotel room bigger than my apartment); Kaia being driven everywhere in a Mercedes SUV; Kaia and her friends jumping around on her massive bed, clad head to toe in Chanel and ordering room service… When I first started modelling I expected it to be just like that.

Jasper Rees

Football focus

The early 1970s was football’s brute era of Passchendaele pitches and Stalingrad tactics. The gnarled ruffians of Leeds United — wee hatchet man Billy Bremner, the graceful assassin Johnny Giles, Norman ‘Bites Yer Legs’ Hunter — embodied the age. Not that you’d guess this from the badge on the club’s shirt: the letters LU were styled into a grinning emoji in goofy yellow. In 1973, the club kit (pristine white, which they had changed to a decade earlier to mimic the lordly Real Madrid) was designed by Admiral, the company that dreamed up the wallet-emptying concept of the replica shirt. Admiral went in for hectic piping and busy collars. They

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

iAddicts

For many years The Spectator employed a television reviewer who did not own a colour television. Now they have decided to go one better and have asked me to write a piece to mark the tenth anniversary of the iPhone. I have never owned an iPhone. (In the metropolitan media world I inhabit, this is tantamount to putting on your CV that you ‘enjoy line dancing, child pornography and collecting Nazi memorabilia’). But, even though I’m a diehard Android fan, I still cannot help paying attention to every single thing Apple does and says. I don’t think this happens in reverse. I doubt Apple owners pay any attention to the

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The Jimmy Choo buyout shows that there are still plenty of big-money optimists out there

What with yet another warning from the Bank of England this week about rising consumer debt, and my own prediction that we’re heading for an economic trough within 18 months, this doesn’t feel like a good time to be paying top dollar for luxury brands. When Jimmy Choo, the maker of super-expensive strappy stilettos, was put up for sale by its German majority shareholder in April at a valuation of £700 million, I revealed that I definitely wouldn’t be a bidder. But it’s being so cautious that makes me a humble columnist rather than a wheeler-dealer billionaire: US fashion brand Michael Kors is buying the shoe company for £896 million

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Moths vs the middle classes

It’s not the free movement of people I spend my nights fretting about; it’s the free movement of pests. It’s the thuggy Spanish bluebells invading our woodland and killing our own delicate flowers; it’s the Asian caterpillars devastating our box hedges; it’s the black-winged killer ladybirds from North America wiping out our spotted red ones with a nasty fungal disease. And — particularly worrying for anyone trying to run a household — it’s the tiny webbing clothes moths, thought to have originated from South Africa, their larvae feasting on our favourite cardigans and carpets — probably feasting right now, under the very bed in which we are failing to sleep.

Thursday

Pea Priestly

Edward Enninful’s first act should be to purge British Vogue of Sloaney sloths

As far as I am concerned, British Vogue under its outgoing editor was complacent, borderline racist and lacked taste, therefore the benchmark for what constituted an improvement was heartbreakingly low. Then on Monday, Condé Nast announced that Edward Enninful would be taking the helm. This is probably the closest the UK will get to its Obama moment – an occasion where a mentally challenged leader is replaced by a black man with talent, charm and purpose – so it is only right that we all take a moment to consider what it means. The deluge of adulation Enninful’s appointment provoked is usually reserved for posthumous commentary. Naomi Campbell instagrammed ‘God is the greatest!! I love you ❤❤😍😍❤❤😘😘🙏🏾… #TODAY

Thursday

Taki

High life | 30 March 2017

 Gstaad It’s my last week in the Alps, and the snow is gone, replaced by brilliant sunshine. Silence reigns, broken only by the occasional clear, sharp wind. The town is now empty and clean, and the air bracing. I love the village out of season, when the shoppers have finally gone and the locals are preparing to release the cows into the mountains. Training at altitude will make it easy to go at it hard once I am back in the city — at least for a week or two. There is nothing like a three-month Alpine break for the old ticker. Dinner parties out of season are very gay

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 2 March 2017

My partner has become a recycling fascist. She checks everything I put into the bin. I received two bollockings today alone — the first at breakfast because I did not make a distinction between the top of my small bottle of Actimel (non-recyclable) and the bottle (recyclable). I do try to do my best, but is it time for her to be recycled? I can’t go on like this. — Name withheld, Hampshire A. First bear in mind that your best will never be good enough. The booby-trap potential is too great for anyone who hasn’t had the time or inclination to mug up on all the complex requirements for correct

Thursday

Laura Freeman

On the make

Rudolfo Paolozzi was a great maker. In the summer, he worked almost without stopping in the family’s ice-cream shop, making gallon after gallon of vanilla custard. In the slack winter months, when the shop made its money on cigarettes and sweets, he built radios from odds and sods. It was on one of these homemade radios that he heard Mussolini’s declaration, on 10 June 1940, that Italy, the country he had left for Scotland 20 years before, had entered the war. That night a mob attacked the ice-cream shop at 10 Albert Street, off Leith Walk in Edinburgh. The family lived above the shop and later, Rudolfo’s son Eduardo, then

Thursday

Tanya Gold

American English

Ralph’s Coffee & Bar is in the Polo Ralph Lauren flagship store on Regent Street. It is rare that fashion admits food exists and when it does, it usually does something insane with it, like when the Berkeley Hotel celebrated fashion week by inventing a shoe biscuit, so you could eat your shoe. But Ralph Lauren, who dresses Melania Trump because other designers will not — believing that the withholding of couture equals meaningful opposition to tyranny, a position that makes me laugh even as I place my head in the oven — goes beyond couture and into the weird lands of lifestyle. Don’t know who you are, but want

Thursday

Pea Priestly

Alexandra Shulman’s reign at Vogue will be defined by mediocrity, idiocy and flip-flops

The outpouring of love following Alexandra Shulman’s departure from Vogue was truly touching: she was described as ‘unpretentious’ and ‘very British’ (code for overweight and posh) as the UK fashion industry mourned the loss of this affable leader. Though I’m sure she was a very nice lady, there is something quite perverse about celebrating a fashion editor who could barely find time to comb her hair and was too busy glugging wine to look in the mirror before leaving the house. As the UK’s number one representative for fashion it was her responsibility to look presentable and deliver interesting work and she failed to do either. The correct response to mark

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Vinyl madness

I was at home enjoying an online episode of Tales of the Texas Rangers when my daughter interrupted me, wanting something on Amazon. Just to explain, Tales of the Texas Rangers was a 1950s NBC radio series featuring Joel McCrea as Ranger Jayce Pearson. There are 90 half-hour episodes available online. Once you tire of binge-listening to these, there are perhaps 200 more episodes of Dragnet and about 400 of Gunsmoke to choose from, the latter featuring the voice of William Conrad (detective Frank Cannon to anyone my age) as Marshal Matt Dillon. Yes, I realise it’s a bit weird using a fibre-optic broadband connection to listen to 1950s radio,

Thursday

Melissa Kite

How did you kill that hat?

The well-dressed lady turned the fur collar over in her hands and fixed me with a withering stare. ‘Is this real fur?’ I was helping out in my friend’s clothes shop, a fashionable haunt in a chichi area of south-west London. ‘Yes,’ I said, bracing myself. She stroked the luxuriant fur, then asked, ‘What is it?’ ‘Fox?’ I said, making the answer a question, as you do when you are expecting protest. ‘Where did the fox come from?’ This was too much. I hadn’t the foggiest. So I fixed her with a meaningful gaze and said: ‘Northcote Road. It was going through the bins.’ She didn’t laugh. Was she going

Thursday

Taki

High life | 12 January 2017

There are Dames and there are dames. Dame Vivien, an old friend, became one for her philanthropy. Dame Edna, the creation of yet another friend, was given a damehood for her middle-class morality and upper-class pretensions. And now we have Dame Anna of Vogue, honoured for affecting a faux-aristocratic grandeur to the peasants of the fashion world. There is only one thing to say, and that’s ‘Gimme a break.’ The last of the Dambusters crew members is refused a knighthood, Nigel Farage ditto, yet a flatulent embarrassment like Victoria Beckham is rewarded for preening and sneering. As the mayor of Hiroshima was said to have asked on that awful August

Thursday

Anne Jolis

Permanent ink

 Brooklyn Shall I have my sister’s skin peeled off for display after she dies? Specifically, the tattooed bits — the swatches on either forearm adorned with foliate designs by her favourite artist, and the patch on her wrist inked in her own handwriting with transliterated Hebrew. I’ve always liked them, and not just because they annoy Mother. Should they be separated from her mortal remains, preserved through the wonders of mortuary science, and mounted in a shadow box to grace my bookshelf in her memory? I ran the idea by her the other day while lounging in her Brooklyn garden. Without looking up from the barbecue where she was grilling

Thursday

Nicky Haslam

Halloween hire

To use a vulgar phrase, I can’t get my head around this exhibition. It seems anything but ‘vulgar’. Daintily laid out and dimly lit in the gloomier cloisters of Fortress Barbican is a series of dresses — the chaps hardly get a look-in, save for some of those white-knee-britched, jaboty, gold-laced-coat get-ups that people like Philip Green struggle into for their fancy-dress parties — some ancient, some modern, a lot very pretty, a few laughably ludicrous; anyone wanting a frightening clown costume for Halloween will find inspiration here. The clothes are, for the most part, exquisitely made. Many are elegant, and several supremely extravagant; however, the organisers of the exhibition