Fashion

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

Wearing well

Born in the same year as John Lennon (1940), I was a sucker for the Beatles from the start. They were the accompaniment of my youth, love’s obbligato. I liked their music because it replaced the raw animality of rock ‘n’ roll with sophisticated melody. I think Schubert would have been proud to have composed ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hey Jude’. Also, unlike most of the rock ‘n’ roll hunks, the Beatles were skinny. So was I — grievously thin — and it was a relief that we skeletons could now come out of the cupboard. In the early photographs of the Fab Four, wearing the monkey-suits their manager Brian Epstein insisted

Friday

David Blackburn

The Royal Wedding: across the web

Here is a selection of articles on the Royal Wedding from around the web. For those, like me, who wouldn’t know an Empire Line if it slapped them in the face, Vogue’s fashion live blog has all the details and photographs of what broadcasters have called a “festival of British fashion.” Sam Cam was wearing a dress from Burberry, Princess Beatrice was bedecked in Vivienne Westwood and, the main event, Kate Middleton’s dress was made by Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen. The Telegraph’s outgoing Fashion Editor, Hillary Alexander has more details here. It’s been quite a sales demonstration for Britain’s leading designers. Export led recovery here we come! As Vanity

Saturday

Nicky Haslam

Fish and chaps

This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book. This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book. It focuses on that singular decade between the years of rockers and punks, when toffs, freed from school or army uniforms, and toughs, discarding skinhead aggression, found a sartorial meeting point. This new style, the cool child of late Fifties mods, had been given a huge public oomph by the Beatles and ‘their silly little suits’ as David Bailey (who has stated that he, along with myself, was the unwitting originator of the look) succinctly puts it. It was sharper, leaner and hinted at androgeny. Its creators were no longer found in caverns down Carnaby Street, nor high

Thursday

James Forsyth

Ed Miliband will hire tails for the Royal Wedding

If you’re fed up with stories about what politicians will wear to the Royal nuptials, look away now — for I can confirm that Ed Miliband will wear a morning suit on the 29th of April. Miliband takes the view that a Royal Wedding is no time for gesture politics.   A Labour spokesman told me this morning that, “This wedding should be all about William and Kate. This is their big day. It is now clear that the appropriate thing is to wear a morning suit and that is what Ed will do.”   But Miliband doesn’t actually own a morning suit. He will now be heading down to

Wednesday

Susan Hill

Chic lit

First, I must declare an interest. I have never met Nicholas Haslam. As everyone else has, this makes me uniquely qualified to review his book without partiality. But not without interest, for Haslam is an intriguing man. I think there is more to him than meets the eye — whichever Nicholas Haslam it is that currently happens to do that. He is the easiest person to send up — but that surely is not the whole story. Then what is? — and can we read it here? There are some useful questions to be asked about the subject of a biography/autobiography. Has this person justified their existence? On balance, have

Friday

Vicki Woods

The new look that never aged

The Allure of Chanel, by Paul Morand, translated by Euan Cameron Should anyone ever ask me that daft magazine question about who you’d invite to your dream dinner-party (‘anyone in the world, alive or dead’) my answer would be short: Mademoiselle Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, on her own, with only an ashtray between us. And maybe an ace simultaneous translator, lest my pidgin French bore her to volcanic rage. She was easily bored and, though she was a lifelong anglophile, she never liked women much. Fantasy dinners aside, this enchanting, tiny book is the closest anyone can get to a face-to-face with Coco. It’s written in her voice (‘that voice that