Fashion

‘Let’s play a game. Yohji or Burkini?’ a friend and fellow fashion writer in Paris lazily suggested. We were sitting by Paris Plage, on deckchairs on the edge of the river Seine. Tourists, families, screaming infants and the usual Paris bobos, clad, this year, in impeccably chic austerity, with hardly a square centimetre of skin revealed, all mingle. Our conclusion was that it’s hard to tell the difference between conceptual designer Yohji Yamamoto’s latest outfits and the modest styles worn for religious reasons. The burkini, designed in 2003 in Australia but barely known in France until recently, could also easily be worn by both fashion divas or the devout. Yet it has now become a subject of

Men don’t look good in black tie. They might think that they look like Sean Connery in Dr No, but they end up looking like David Brent at the Wernham-Hogg annual Christmas do. Black tie doesn’t lend parties glamour; it just makes them depressing. The one good thing about black tie is that it is an invariably reliable pointer to a terrible evening. Agonising teenage balls, with adolescents clashing braces in dark corners? Black tie. Boorish sports club dinners at university? Black tie. Prize-giving evenings in cavernous hotel ballrooms? Black tie. Business conventions with an after-dinner speech by Jeffrey Archer? Black tie. The words ‘black tie’ on an invitation hope

Not only are today’s young girls having to work hard on their abs, butts and glutes, now the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian are instructing the poor lambs in the art of keeping their ‘lady garden’ in mint condition. Subject to the approval of their best mates, apparently, the formerly taboo subject of ‘down south’ is now open for discussion. Some celebs now cultivate, manicure and moisturise the ‘no-fly zone’ with as much effort as they put into their faces. Whatever next? Will Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt suddenly inform all studs how to take care of their gentleman’s gentleman? I’ve been on Twitter for four years now

Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times a morning. Lycra isn’t just a fabric; it’s a state of mind. At work, these often portly, always angry, red-faced individuals might be mild-mannered middle managers who work in marketing. But in their cycling kit they are superheroes who happen to swear a lot. The double Olympic champion Laura Trott was once asked to help

Last time I went to Thailand, there’d been something of a misunderstanding about accommodation, and my friend and I ended up in a dive on Khao San Road. In a grim room with stained mattresses and peeling paint, the thud of beats from the disco made everything vibrate gently. Stalls outside offered fake IDs, tatty souvenirs and novelty edible insects. I’m not averse to eating crickets, but these ones needed embalming fluid, not cooking oil. So we took a tuk-tuk across town to the Grand Palace, just seeking a break from sunburned students in short shorts drawling about full-moon parties. Instead, what happened next was one of the highlights of

The last time I reviewed a restaurant in Selfridges, a PR man rang up to ask what he could do to change my opinion of Selfridges. Don’t worry, I told him, Spectator readers don’t go to Selfridges to sit in a fake Cornish fishing village, because they are too busy eating the remnants of the Labour party. And they don’t care about shopping. You don’t dress a Spectator reader. You upholster it. I felt guilty about mocking the stupid fake Cornish fishing village so I avoided the next themed restaurant in Selfridges, which was a fake forest on the roof (‘inspired by an autumnal forest’… because who can be bothered

Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never be entirely sure that you will not see a man dressed as a wizard having sex up against a tree. I thought it would be a fake forest, like the pines you see wilting from the M25, but it is a proper forest, with shrubs, deer, puddles and lakes. But for the looming presence of Center Parcs, which operates five ‘villages’ in England as emergency respite care for people with young children, it would be paradise. The centrepiece — the altar — is the ‘subtropical swimming paradise’ which floats, like

 New York Things turn very frivolous around this time of year. Barf-inducing parties given by pop-culture schlock merchants selling their wares are a nightly transgression. The hacks duly report the shenanigans of doped-up rappers the next day as once upon a time they detailed the haut monde. London isn’t much better. Last week, at the British Fashion Awards, a designer by the name of Jonathan Anderson said that he was ‘honoured to be on the same stage as Karl Lagerfeld’ — a bum-clenchingly vapid pronouncement if ever I’ve heard one. Lagerfeld is a preening, self-important freak whose trademark is rudeness and that other badge of ultimate ghastliness, the ponytail. Over

The V&A have defended their decision to turn down the offer of Margaret Thatcher’s wardrobe on the basis that it only collects items of ‘outstanding aesthetic or technical quality’ rather than those with ‘intrinsic social historical value’. Yet in the same statement, they also suggest that the museum is responsible for ‘chronicling fashionable dress’. I’m not entirely sure how the V&A believes it can fillet out the ‘social historical value’ from their aim of ‘chronicling fashionable dress’. I’m also not sure I believe them. Thatcher is a divisive figure, and many people – some of them, presumably curators at the V&A, dislike her intensely. I do not know whether Martin Roth, the German

Selfridges is skilled at making things that are not hideous (women) look hideous (women dressed as Bungle from Rainbow or a tree, after shopping at Selfridges). So I was not surprised to discover that it has summoned a ‘pop-up’ restaurant to its roof. It is called Vintage Salt and it is based on a Cornish fishing village. Not a real one, such as Newlyn, but a fake one, such as Padstow, which is based on Selfridges anyway. Selfridges shoppers do not want reality but a half-remembered contortion of something they read in Vogue while having their hair dyed banana yellow in St John’s Wood High Street in the company of