town mouse, country mouse

As a child I used to read ‘The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse’ and try to work out which one I would be (if I were a fictional mouse character from one of Aesop’s Fables, and illustrated by Arthur Rackham).

Because if your formative years are shared between central London and rural Wiltshire you probably loved both in equal measure, and still do; home is two halves, emersion in one followed by the other, over and over again.Perhaps the happiest balance you can find is working in the town, weekending in the country.

It is the collision of so many lives and stories and neuroses in one place that I love about the city - noise and grit and traffic, Daft Punk, cabs and chai lattes, convenience stores, city parks, city florists. Conversations with strangers. Living in an apartment. Eating Wagamama noodles from the carton in bed.

The country on the other hand, is waking late and missing lunch and not knowing what time it is, when a visitor’s arrival is not a finger on the doorbell, but the sound of their car rattling across the cattle grid and a cloud of white dust at the end of the drive. The country is not packing your iPad and turning off your BlackBerry. You wear grey tweed and pick wild flowers, go lipstick-less, drive barefoot. In the country you sit around a fire of spitting logs until the starless night envelops you, while other people in the shadows remark on a gathering storm.

Wales is hard to leave, particularly on a Sunday night, particularly when it is hot and still and you have spent the weekend wild river-swimming and collecting eggs from the hen-house and driving too fast along ribbons of car-less road among craggy hills. Your phone hasn’t rung and the weather is so soporific that hardly a thought has entered your head all day; you have sat against the river-bank watching your boyfriend fly-fishing, casting his thin line across the swirling eddies of dark water and trying to keep your eye trained on his pale fly amongst the white pollen on the surface. It’s hard to pack up and leave for the city, when all afternoon it has been perfectly soundless, but for the spin and click of the reel.

     

     

~ + ~

Thanks to Marlene of Chocolate, Cookies and Candies blog who featured me on her recent Pass It Forward post.

Hot off the press: Marant for H&M

A press release announced today that Isabel Marant will be releasing a collection for H&M on November 14^th, 2013 which is to be available in stores worldwide and online and will feature clothing and accessories for women and teenagers, as well as Marant’s debut collection for men.

On the one hand, it could be a collaboration to die for (and many might, come November), as Marant’s threads and aesthetic could translate well to the high street, – if it’s done well, that is. And there’s no doubt that the steely-haired designer is shrewd – with this collection, she maintains creative control while targeting the other high-street brands, such as Zara, that so relentlessly copy her designs.

On the other, these hyped high-fashion collaborations are getting a bit repetitive now, aren’t they? And I wonder, with clothes this mass-produced, aren’t they terribly low quality and are they, then, even more of a rip-off on the high street than the real deal?

The idea of millions of cheap, knock-off acrylic-fringed sweaters does fill me with dread. I’m sitting on the fence for now.

Photograph re-blogged from lndiamond.blogspot.com

Stuck on Repeat

Thoughts on repeat purchases and brand loyalty

i.

My mum once told me that my father’s first wife (who needless to say was a thin, blonde German aristocrat) had a wardrobe full of Yves Saint Laurent, a beautifully lit closet containing shelves of tonally co-ordinated cashmere, rails of shudderingly expensive designer labels, but that she only ever wore a grey marl Lonsdale sweatshirt and Fioruuci jeans (well, it was the seventies). Jackie Onassis, similarly, used to buy a garment she liked in every colour, so that Aristotle famously grumbled, “one of everything in every colour, and in every home, but all I ever see her in is blue jeans”. Both brand-loyal and serial repeat-purchasers, then, but it made me wonder – why are we loyal to certain brands, and is repeat purchasing a smart consumer strategy or just a sign of OCD?

As someone for whom ‘ winding down’ on a Sunday evening typically involves hand-washing, ironing and folding my t-shirts by colour, someone who seasonally rethinks my wardrobe, routinely, and some would say rather anally, cleanses, prunes, and refines one rail of garments over and over again, I’m going to have to argue my case, here. Without getting too scientific about it – who knows why people like certain things, when their tastes develop, whether it is hereditary or random (but this is an interesting topic) – people have their routines, their way of doing things. Some girls are fastidious about their morning and night-time skincare regime, for example, whereas I am very much in the ‘make-up looks better the second day’ camp on the ‘cold water followed by Nivea’ side of the fence. But I am very particular about my wardrobe, far more so than practically any other area of my life. My diet goes up and down, my music collection is confused at best. But my wardrobe is the place I never neglect.

Recently – it was a Sunday – happily epilating last season’s knitwear and editing down to a stream-lined selection of crew-neck cardigans, a grey V-neck in cashmere and my ‘investment’ sweater (thus justified at time of purchase), a chunky pale-blue angora number, it occurred to me that a pattern was emerging; I seem to have duplicates of everything – two pairs of brogues, two pairs of the same suede ankle boots, four pairs of Acne jeans in varying shades of grey, two Equipment shirts, two identical blazers by Acne (one chambray, one stone) and so on and so forth. It had escaped my attention before quite how predictable I was in re-buying the same items, the same styles in a second or third colour, how apparently ‘loyal’ I am to a small pool of the same designers.

ii.

Considering how much is out there – the dizzying number of labels and department stores and online emporiums - it’s hard to find something I want to buy at all, let alone re-buy. Of course it was easier when I used to be a sporadic consumer, when it didn’t matter how many skirt-sweater combinations I had in my closet, but we develop behavioural patterns as we get older, I guess, we develop certain likes and dislikes and are less swayed, less distracted by the fads that trickle through from the catwalk to the street. It is rare, in my experience, to find designers that you like on every level – and by this I mean founders you admire, a history you have followed, an ethos you empathize with, staff you like, who intuit what you want and understand why, rare to find a business that are really good at all these things. It’s complicated, out there, and tried and tested might be increasingly what people need in order to part with their hard-earned wages. ‘It all makes me think that fashion retailers have got something very muddled up’, Maggie Alderson wrote for High 50 last year. ‘They think consumers want to be constantly thrilled by something new, when in fact there are some essential items we just want to be able to buy over and over again in the basic colours without any fuss.’

iii.

Market research indicates that loyalty stems from the relationship one has with a particular brand – a relationship which, like a friendship or a love affair, stems from values of trust, like-mindedness, understanding. ‘The ingredient that turns repeat purchase into true loyalty is the consumer’s relationship with the brand. If they feel that the brand is truly on their side, and is looking out for their long term interests, repeat purchase and loyalty will become synonymous’ writes business strategist Frederick F. Reichheld in The Loyalty Effect.

But is there something to this, or is it all consumer-research claptrap? Sure, we all have the obligatory Tesco clubcard, but we probably have a Nectar card too, and even a Co-Op card and this is meant to signify ‘loyalty’, for which consumers are rather patronisingly ‘rewarded’ with yet more vouchers for half-price eggs (usually during the precise duration in the month when you don’t need eggs) but realistically we go where the offers take us, don’t we? Wherever is cheapest, or most convenient on the drive home from work. In this case, we are all guilty of multi infidelities on a daily basis.

According to Co-Creation Consultancy, Promise, there are five steps to becoming ‘brand-loyal’ [read the full article here].

1.         Customers come back, the brand becomes the preferred brand (retention)

2.         Customers come back for more, more often (repeat purchases)

3.         The brand creates a habit (customers come unconsciously)

4.         Customers stay through bad times, are willing to forgive mistakes (when they happen and they are addressed) and find a reason to stay

5.         Customers advocate the brand (helping the brand retain existing business as well as win more customers).

iv.

Thinking about my own repeat-purchases and questioning whether I am ‘loyal’ in any way to a particular brand, and why, I made a list of four:

1. Isabel Marant – The ‘Etoile’ collection for the past five years has been an extraordinary success, and produces globally coveted clothes that are tousled and bohemian, a little bit tomboy, a little ethnic, inimitable Gallic chic, and most of all comfortable. Her most popular designs are her knitted, leather or suede-edged boucle jackets, Cuban-heeled ankle boots and delicious Aran-knit sweaters.
2. Church’s – English heritage family shoe-makers who opened their first factory in Northampton in 1873 and are now a leading international luxury brand famous for their brogues, chelsea boots and riding boots. Still producing the traditional styles, such as the classic ‘Burwood’ brogue, alongside more modern styles and seasonal colours.
3. Equipment – Founded in 1976 by Christian Restoin, this French brand produces androgynous, minimalist and timeless crepe-de-chine silk shirts with a masculine cut.

The fourth, and perhaps only label I feel I have had a semblance of what Reicheld would consider a ‘loyal relationship’ is the Swedish brand Acne.

Acne is reliably consistent; I buy a couple of pieces every season. I wouldn’t (and couldn’t) buy the whole collection and there are actually only a few pieces each season that I would choose to wear as I’m not courageous or cutting-edge enough for their more extreme styles.

My ‘relationship’ with this particular brand began with the basics – actually I started out with a pair of Acne jeans that I bought on eBay because I had heard that they were a great shape. I liked them enough that a year later I went back to the store on Dover Street and bought a pair full price, and then another and another and I’m now on my fourth or fifth pair. Then I tried a shirt, and loved it, and still wear it. So, as Promise predicted, the beginning of the ‘relationship’ was a series of several tentative steps. As is any, if you think about it.

Meanwhile, Acne seemed to have become more of a high-end designer label, with several collections a year and more accessories and footwear, and become extremely expensive – jeans at £190.00, shoes from £350.00, leather jackets at £1,200.00. They opened stores in Tokyo and offices in New York. But they retained their core selection of denim with the same styles and cuts and colours. Aside from the aesthetic, I think that might be what I like about the label so much – every season for as long as I’ve been following them, they bring out the same models of jeans, boots, motorcycle jackets, the same basic linen t-shirts. They might be ever so slightly improved, cut in silk rather than viscose or suede rather than leather, there might be a whole new colour palette, but it must be a testimony to how right they got the designs of those garments, that they are still around, still in fashion, still on the shelves and on the catwalk and on the street. A couple of years ago I acquired one of their classic lambskin biker jackets, which was the most expensive item I had ever bought – an investment that could have gone horribly wrong, but it has become an integral part of my wardrobe and has softened and bedded down and gone from something I ‘save for best’ to the thing I throw on with jeans and a t-shirt on a Sunday. I am genuinely fond of it; an old friend I will have for years, decades perhaps.

v.

Recently, I decided to buy a new hand-bag. My favourite tote bag was looking a little tired and I had started to wear my vintage Chanel too much to compensate. I saved up for a classic Mulberry ‘Bayswater’, because I like the style and the pebbled leather and over a period of months I thought about it and occasionally looked at the Mulberry website and pondered over the right colour. But I wanted to go to the store and buy my bag when it was the right moment, and it never seemed to be. If you’re going to spend £700 on a bag, you want it to be the right day, when you’re in a good mood, you want the sun to be shining and to know exactly the one you want, and it would be nice if you were in New York or Paris or Rome because you like buying things when you are travelling, so that every lovely thing you have reminds you of a holiday, and who you were with. Anyway, it came to the moment, and after so much thought and consideration, I walked into the Acne store, fell in love with a pebbled leather satchel and decided upon it, then and there, without really thinking about it. Mulberry never even got a look-in. I wasn’t thinking about being faithful to anyone, I was thinking about shape and weight and the feeling of the leather in my hands, but I unconsciously chose to make a significant purchase with a brand I know and trust – in terms of style and durability and quality, rather than with another I don’t regularly frequent.

vi.

I can’t help feeling that becoming loyal to a particular brand you love, repeat-purchasing the same items over and over again, does come down to basic human emotions – the desire for consistency, the need for trust, feeling safe, comfort, familiarity, but also it is so wound up with finding an identity – without wanting to sound too naval-gazey – one of the many fragmented factors of becoming you – a woman, an adult, an individual, a character. One of the nicest compliments I ever received was ‘I love what you’re wearing; it is so you’.

As much about the past as the future, it is finding a perfume that you wear throughout your life, like my grandmother, who always smelled the same. I never knew what her perfume was, but occasionally I will get a waft of it, somewhere, and instantly remember the way it felt as a child to hold her hand, the weight of the rings on her fingers.

There’s my friend, in her seventies, who always wears the most beautiful palette of greys and taupes, colours of mushroom and bone that always remind me of sitting in cafes discussing Sufi poetry and drugs and hanging on her advice about love, the nail varnish she always wore, by Paul & Joe, the colour of nougat. And the painter I used to model for, who I only ever saw wear the same shoes – faded black converse hi-tops. Of all his paintings there is one, a pair of black baseball boots, that I love the most, and when I wear mine they remind me of the time I wrote a terrible novel, lived in a beautiful large-roomed, high-ceilinged apartment on the Iffley Road and those slow months when I changed, and grew up, and fell out of love. But they’re happy memories, strangely, happy memories of a rather unhappy time.

I think that the clothes on our backs, the way we choose to portray ourselves to our colleagues, our friends, the strangers we pass on the street, to the world at large, is also so often rooted in feeling, in memory, nostalgia, in looking forward, in wanting to feel the way we did before again.

Breton

Breton is as much an enduring staple as a white t-shirt, a leather jacket, blue jeans. It is often the first thing you reach for in the morning; like a jar of Frank Cooper’s Vintage Oxford Marmalade, it adds a treacly coating, a zingy slick to whatever else is underneath. And the best Breton is without doubt the classic nautical Saint-James tricot, and it isn’t cotton or linen or anything else – it’s navy and cream double-twist wool, crisp, the perfect matelot. Saint-James have been making Breton sweaters for 125 years and still purvey the French Army and Navy with their uniforms. According to them, the fisherman’s sweater originates from a garment onion merchants sailing between Brittany and England would wear to make themselves recognizable at a distance at sea, or from the approaching shore. They’ve since become a cult classic; city girls wear them, seamen wear them, they keep you dry in the rain, warm in the cold, and are the perfect weekend attire, whether sailing or building bonfires.

A Breton, even though you’ve worn it to work a hundred times, never feels like work, it always feels like holiday, smells of your childhood, of buying navy leather shoes in Lymington; it smells of rock-pools you used to crouch over, searching for cockles on a grey Cornish day threatening rain, still has the brackish taste of crumbly yellow sea-salt where it has crusted and dried in the sun. You accumulate Breton sweaters, and you never throw them away, because they age with all the memories of summer, because they were always there, because your mother wore them. They are one of the few things you won’t shed over the years – one day you will have a porch with a wicker basket of them, a motley collection, alongside shooting socks and scratchy tartan picnic blankets and odd plimsolls. Your children’s pet rabbits will chew holes in them, just as yours did when you were a child.

And so that is why you buy a side-buttoned fisherman’s sweater in Paris. You buy it with half a mind on replacing the old white boat-neck you bought with your friends in Saint Tropez, which is falling apart and fraying along the neckline, but which you know you’ll keep anyway because the thick cotton, once stiff enough to be a seafarer’s second skin, is now as soft and as floppy as velvet. You won’t throw it away because every time you wear it you remember that day, how you felt that hot day, the silver fish and the stripes and the smells of the market.

Paris Notes

It seemed as if Paris had emptied of its Parisians. I think they have all moved to Fulham, where the weather is just as bad, but at least the coffee is cheaper. Empty chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg, empty seats on the metro, a free table mid-week at Marguerite. I expect this in August, when the city is choking on plane tree pollen and misted with the white dust that rises from the Jardin des Tuileries and there is that mass exodus toward the south coast, west to Cap Ferret, but even the usual tourist contingent seemed thin on the ground this May. Pockets of the city were eerily silent; it was as though when we felt tired from walking and looked for somewhere to sit down and take off our shoes, whoever had been there before had given up their seats for us, respectfully, and walked away out of view. That is the greatest pleasure of Paris, when you have a bench, a whole bench to share between two – then you can stretch out and look through your eyelashes, through the leaves of the quince trees or along a lime avenue at the clouds. In the lull of a Wednesday afternoon, to fall asleep there, with the sounds of the city around you.

And then there is Le Progrès: the Bohemians’ Canteen. If ever you want to while away a couple of hours over lunch or coffee and watch people go by, go to Le Progrès, which shoulders the corner of Rue de Bretagne and Rue Vielle du Temple in the 3rd arrondisement. If you find a table at the door, you can look down each street with a view of the pedestrian crossing and the traffic lights and watch the droves of cyclists and scooters and motorbikes stopping as the light changes to red, the helmets turning to the right to wait for the green, launching off again. Watching people in transit, being mesmerized by the endless stream of dark pony-tails and leather jackets and ballet pumps and briefcases. All the small dogs in handbags, all the different shades of lipstick.

We stay in Abbesses, the same hotel I always use these days because I like coming back out of the basin of the city at night and finding a hill to look down from. Abbesses reminds me of Richmond or Hampstead – it has that same, self-contained village-y feel to it. I like knowing somewhere well, even if it’s just a small area, and here I know that I can buy the best tartes de pommes a la Normande in Paris at Le Grenier à Pain around the corner, I know not to try napping in the afternoon in Square Rictus where the neighbourhood mothers and nannies take their youngest children the hour before collecting their elder siblings from school, the tucked-away little store that sells everything from toothpaste to plums and my favourite café for a carafe of wine in a small, sunny square at dusk. Here, everyone seems to know everyone, the streets are a steep, cobbled web from the carousel on Places des Abbeses, and it is quiet, even though you know that if you can’t sleep, if the hotel room is too stuffy or you wake up at two am and find yourself out of cigarettes, the bars along Rue des Abbesses will still be open and you can get a whiskey to send you back to sleep again, or a pack of Gauloise from a plastic bag under the bar for six euros. That’s the thing about cities, the comforting thing about them: there will always be someone up later than you, always a conversation still being had somewhere.

Ancient Greek Sandals

I have a confession to make. I have an incy-wincy girl-crush on Michelle Williams.

I loved her as Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, in Brokeback Mountain, even as Cindy in the most depressing romantic drama ever made, Blue Valentine. But, to me, Michelle Williams will always be Jen Lindley (and I don’t care what you think, I don’t care what you say, what diatribes come my way, I’ve always been a Dawson’s Creek fan - minus the pedal pushers and wedge sandals. No, I am a Dawson’s Creek fan, and that’s that). Jen Lindley, the girl from New York who grew up too fast and took drugs and had far too much sex too young. Jen Lindley who wore brown corduroy jackets and halter-necks and slouched and still looked good enough to eat. So, perhaps the programme was completely implausible, but what teenager cares about plausibility anyhow? I maintain that Michelle Williams has serious style. She works cute ditsy-print blouses from A.P.C. like no other. And she has good taste in haircuts, men and sandals.

The particular sandals I refer to are from the increasingly celebrated – and stocked (Matches, Net-a-Porter, et al.) – Athens-based label founded by ex-Balenciaga designer Christina Martini, Ancient Greek Sandals. Collaborating with footwear-business owner Nikolas Minoglou, Martini has produced a line of handmade natural-leather sandals inspired by Hellenic mythology, pottery and sculpture, and produced in earthy tones with utilitarian aesthetics.

One of the many things I love about these sandals is that they feature signature ‘golden wing’ buckles, and the story behind them; according to ancient myth, the gods and goddesses had their sandals made on the island of Crete by a sandal-maker who enriched each pair with magical powers. Famous for having made the flying sandals for Hermes, the sandal-maker’s personal embellishment was a winged buckle and Ancient Greek are now reproducing original styles which, apparently, have only recently come to light.

I’ve never been a huge sandal fan before – toes tend to be unsavoury digits and unless perfectly pink and pretty, would best be kept out of sight. But for Ancient Greek I am prepared to dare to bare, with the reinforcement of weekly pedicures and lots of Palmer’s Cocoa Butter, that is, because you can’t slip unpolished, unloofered paws into sandals this beautiful.

Ancient Greek Sandals come in a myriad of styles, whether you like simple gladiators like the ‘Korinna’ or the ‘Ariadne’, a plaited thong (‘Melpomeni’) or the ‘Medea’, which are wrought in a delicately cut vine around the ankle. There are the winged ‘Ikaria’, the ‘Pythia’ which wrap around and around the ankle and look not unlike a bird’s nest or the AGS for Marios Schwab knee-high fringed variety (only for the very brave, Beyoncé, or perhaps if you are thinking of playing a Thracian gladiator in an amateur theatrical production).

A.G.S. are exquisite, sure, but also comfortable, adaptable and surprisingly hard-wearing. They call for a hazy Mediterranean evening, an ice-cold jug of homemade elderflower, billowing clematis and the gleam of coconut oil on brown skin. Worn Tiina Lakkonen-style, in navy linen, after a swim and lunch on a terrace somewhere. I will definitely pack my rucksack and take both pairs back to the Greek islands this summer, along with a pile of white cotton kaftans and gold jewellery. Also, they have a non-slip sole which is useful when it’s mizzling, which here it often is.

For those wondering if they are worth the money (expect to be set back between £140 and £280), it’s an unequivocal ‘yes’ from me. I first ordered the ‘Nausicaa’ style which have narrow straps across the bridge of the foot, are completely flat and have a thick leather contraption band around the ankle. If I hadn’t heard they were so comfortable I would have steered clear of spending so much on shoes that look agony. But guess what? I put them on, walked to Blackwell’s bookstore, the cobbler, to buy groceries, to my parents and home again and – no blisters, no blisters at all. My second pair, the ‘Iphigenia’, in black, are winging their way from Greece as I write, and that I ordered them has nothing to do with the fact that I saw my girl-crush, Michelle Williams, photographed in New York recently, cool as a cat in her inimitable girl-next-door kind of way, ‘Iphigenia’-clad; nothing at all, honest.

Photo credits - 1, 3 + 4 re-blogged from Habitually Chic, 3 re-blogged from Fanpop, 5, my own

Tried + True

photo c/o Ariane Stippa of Primer and Lacquer blog

‘We’re on to each other, and to the world, and will forever be in cahoots’, Adam Gopnik wrote in an article on the secrets to a happy marriage. This I read aloud to my boyfriend over toast and coffee mid Sunday morning, and we held hands and looked at eachother in a moony, pleased sort of way as perhaps only those a year into a relationship can. But, much later, after we had semi-companionably done our laundry and been for a walk and visited my parents for tea, after a typical Sunday in other words, I admitted that really, while those sentiments are very much relevant in the case of he and I, I was also half thinking about my Acne Studios suit.

There’s no denying that I’m happy to buy into this brand, that I’m duped as much by their ‘non-marketing’ strategy as I am by the urban myth that one of the co-founders created a hundred pairs of raw denim jeans and gave them away to friends and family in Stockholm, and that’s how they started out. I like that they do not advertise themselves through visual campaigns. I like that I haven’t seen billboards, full-page spreads of nubile models in their clothes in magazines. I really like that the label markets itself through its publishing arm - a biannual magazine called Acne Paper which features art, fashion, photography, design, architecture and academia.

I’ve a few Acne pieces in my wardrobe now - an enormous fawn-coloured cocoon coat, a chestnut brown leather motorcycle jacket, several pairs of grey high-waisted jeans and a voluminous black sort of kaftan thing. I will say that Acne clothes look nothing on the hanger, they sag like fluttering empty bags, they don’t make sense. They’re guileless. If you cast a cursory glance over the collection in Browns you are struck by the diminutive presence of Acne clothes beside some of the louder designers, and while on the rail they might need explaining (because no-one browsing stark lines of Balenciaga or the latest popping, botanical pieces by Erdem are going to turn around and ask for a sagging, fluttering empty bag), on the body, the oversized silhouette just looks clean and artless. In an Acne outfit you want to put down anything showy or exaggerated, anything ‘fashionable’ and just ‘be’. Clothes to live in.

Women don’t really wear ‘everyday suits’ anymore but the casual suit accomplishes many things. For one, it is the only way you can really get away with wearing a two-piece, an all-over colour and not look matchy-matchy, like the sort of person who wears a twin-set. (There is a woman out there who can wear a twin-set, but she is very wealthy, and it’s Prada, and camel, and requires a lot of dry-cleaning. I’ve never met her, this woman, but I imagine her to be Tilda Swinton in ’I Am Love’ – a bored Milanese housewife with Hermes handbags and an unhappy marriage.) But an everyday suit is, always, such a good look, in a neat, French, put-together kind of way. A black linen trouser-suit, whether paired with heels or a ponytail and white Converse - you can’t argue with it.

Now, back to this suit, my suit. This suit is clever, it’s a very clever little suit. Firstly, it’s Chambray - white weft with a blue-coloured warp, and chambray is clever in itself, because, like denim, it suits everyone and goes with everything. Secondly, it is cut in lyocell, which looks like cotton or linen, but doesn’t crease, feels like silk, but without the price-tag and VPL issues that silk entails, and you get to tell anyone who cares to ask that, no, it is none of the above, but really just ‘regenerated cellulose fiber made from dissolving bleached wood pulp’. Yep.

This is not your conventional suit in so much as the trousers aren’t trousers at all, but shorts. And they aren’t hemmed either (shock-horror) but raw-edged, and they are gathered at the waist, which I always think should be widening. The jacket is long, a long, narrow blazer with slim sleeves and the buttons start below the belly button, which is a very silly place for buttons to start. All in all, the whole effect should be one of awkward, head-in-hand sartorial embarrassment, but it isn’t; it works. The punt paid off and I have worn it every which way since I bought it, both together and as seperates - dressed up for work, with plimsoles to coffee on Sunday, pottering at home, out to drinks with aforementioned “statement necklace“. Whatever time or day it is, whatever mood I’m in – sloppy and weekend-y or more coiffed mid-week, it obliges. Blogger Ariane Stippa wore it beautifully to her sister’s wedding (pictured). Because it’s also an obliging suit. My boyfriend calls clothes like this ‘old friends’; and I know what he means.

I don’t really know why I bought it. I’m having a bit of a ‘thing’ with Stockholm-based designers at the moment - Hope, Carin Wester, Whyred - they’re all producing great value, unpretentious clothes with the same simple lines that I love about Jil Sander. But until (and perhaps long after) the day  comes when I can stretch to Jil’s extortionate artfulness, the artless Acne and I will remain very much in comfortable cahoots; it’s decided.

Contra Mundum, Thoughts on Androgyny

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper…”
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Girls who are boys, who like boys to be girls, who do boys like they’re girls… Women in tuxedos, a bit of an enigma? Girls in brogues and braces and fedoras. Why is it that, as a girl, dressing like a boy - wearing a sharp suit, a crisp shirt and tie, flat shoes, why bobbing your hair, appearing frill-less, minus the frou frou, in a streamline palette of black, white, grey, navy - looks and feels so light, so prepossessing? Good shoes and a decent hat and relative blandness in between.

There must be a reason the great disguisers of English literature are either seductresses or murderers.Purposefully bewildering, like a woman in a man’s cologne, a gentleman’s watch – Viola, disguised as Cesario, trendless and classic, without all the fuss and powder that goes with being a woman in a man’s world. I like the fuss and powder, sometimes, (my nails are drying as I write this) and usually summer is the best season for floaty fripperies in silk and satin and spindly heels, but I suspect 2013 will be the one I look back on as the summer I finally settled for a uniform of crisp white cotton, neat tailoring and benchmade Church’s.

Brogues weren’t always this covetable. I remember being taught to tie my laces and taking amiss to those polished chestnut-coloured Russell & Bromley Oxfords I had to wear to school. Come to think of it, I felt like this about the wool cape, pinafore and straw boater I had to wear too, but have subsequently had flirtations with each - though never in combination. But the Burwood brogues in white perforated leather and I was in trouble at first sight. Even with the prettiest frock, they add a certain sensibility, a certain confidence that at least I look like I know what I’m doing, even if I don’t in the least. It helps that at the moment they’re fashionable – one of the things ‘fashion’ is actually useful for is softening some of the taboos around certain sartorial habits,making brogue-wearing acceptably ‘sphinx-like’ in the public consciousness, rather than Sapphic, and tomboys everywhere can breath a sigh of relief that it’s over for kitten heels, for the time being. Fashion is a cyclical beast, forever chasing it’s own tail.

 Think of Audrey Tautou in the film Coco Before Chanel, the night she becomes Boy’s lover, sulkily dressed in a suit and matching black bowler hat. (You’ll notice my preference is decidedly more Annnie Lennox than Boy George, which doesn’t quite hold the same appeal.) Or Tilda Swinton as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Yes, spring onwards, I want to dress as Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder were the summer of their trip to Venice - light in tans and creams, silk neck wraps, white piqué vests, trousers cut high at the waist. (Or wine-tasting at Brideshead, slowly getting drunk that hot night in black patent dress-shoes.) Clothes that are ethereal and refined, just one element in a haze of pale colour, misty bridges, the gleam of a motorcar, the sharp taste of strawberries and Château Peyraguey.

Welsh Retreat

A rather bracing yet restorative weekend with my boyfriend’s family in Wales. Other than a summery sojorn to The Gower and a few visits to Hay-on-Wye, I didn’t know Powys at all before he brought me here. The Irfon Valley reminds me a little of the Rift Valley – rugged and undulating – all crag and conifer and bright water under the Cambrian Mountains. It takes me a while to get used to the silence, to the swallowing sky at night, the stars and the darkness, unsettling after the continuous low hum of the city and the orange seepy glow of streetlighting. Here, an hour’s drive into Wales from Hay, the roads narrow to rough tracks and there’s such a pastoral pace to life that you are almost surprised to see another car, that the ruddy stranger behind the wheel of a tractor waves in passing.

Wales to me is scraped-back hair and no make-up, thick socks, wet dogs and Talisker, log fires and tartan blankets, long walks, drunken late night billiards and freshly laid eggs in the morning.

Easter Interval

For festivity, I almost prefer Easter to Christmas – it’s often colder but the air is fresh and the light is bright and the daffodils are yellow and insistent. Easter is decorated by twigs strung with painted wooden eggs and clusters of others – chocolate – in bowls, wrapped in glinting blue foil. Easter necessitates eating too much pudding. The cusp of a new season; the end of winter is sometimes as lovely as the start. It is now British Summer Time again and light into the evening, at last. The division of the year. An interval, of sorts.

This weekend I arranged flowers in jam jars, ate Easter cake with green icing, made a plum crumble for a dinner at my flat on Friday night, drank wine, took naps, leafed through a stack of fashion magazines. We had the perfect Sunday with my family at home, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, a walk along the river in a March wind so brisk it made our cheeks ache and afterwards dozed by the fire listening to Miles Davis and watched Brideshead Revisited. And to top it all, a great Eastery bouquet of flowers from my boyfriend’s Mum arrived and my flat smells lightly of freesias – such an ambrosial, April-y smell. It feels as though a spell of spring might be somewhere around the corner.

Photomontage

Collage (From the French: coller, to glue)

An assemblage of black and white images I have been collecting and thinking to apply to one of my big canvases in my flat. I love scruffy montages, the way they peel and fade in sunlight over time. I often think that my perfect apartment would be virtually unfurnished, but if it had parquet tiles, a floor lamp and my collection of canvases leaning against the wall, I think it would feel quite as homely there as it could anywhere.

Italian Porselli vs. French Repetto

Ballerines. My first pair were French Sole – petite and narrow. I wore them when my father took me to the opera at Glyndebourne in the June of 1996. The ballerinas were grape suede and I was probably a little too gauche for them. I remember we ate cold vichyssoise that evening and watched Cosi Fan Tutte and sat on picnic blankets in black tie on the flat grass lawns between box hedges. It is a perfect coming-of-age memory – the balmy night, the sound of leather soles on gravel and the crunch of taffeta, a whir of starched white and jet black, patent evening shoes on marble steps. I wasn’t a child, but I wasn’t an adult, either. I was about to leave my prep school and start at Bryanston in the autumn. I didn’t know who or what I was. But I was happy. I was with my father, and it was summer, and the music was so beautiful it made my stomach ache.

Whenever I slip on a pair of new flats, I think of shopping with my mother on Sloane Street for those first grape ballet slippers. How dainty they were after my school lace-ups. I didn’t think they were sexy enough at the time – too Sloane-y, far too flat. I wanted a pair of the silver strappy stilettos that my friends wore at hunt balls and dances in London, the Feathers Ball at the Ministry of Sound. In hindsight I was probably grateful at 1am when their feet were bleeding. But I never said.

Isn’t it funny – fifteen years later and I will tell you that ballet shoes are sexy because they’re the opposite of how sexiness is so often perceived to manifest itself. They’re subtle and modest – no arch of the foot, or peeping toes, no heel, no straps, just the tiniest flicker of toe cleavage. Ballet shoes are a bit prim. I think that’s why I like them now, in the same way that brogues always make me feel like a child going into an exam – excited and nervous all at the same time. Steeled, but apprehensive nevertheless.

This brings me to E. Porselli. E. Porselli slippers are Milanese, expertly handmade in kid leather in a little shop beside the La Scala theatre. I bought my first pair last year in oxblood – the perfect lipstick-y burgundy.  After years of stepping out in French Sole and Russell and Bromley pumps, these have trumped nearly every pair of ballerinas I have ever had. Firstly it is the shape – a long toe, a nailed-on leather heel, the lining in canvas and cotton, and then the lightness, the muddy, moody colour, the cotton grosgrain trim and cord bow. Quite simply kid slipper perfection. Porselli have been making these in their artisan workshops since 1919 and they feel like that to wear – hand-crafted leather that has been cut and shaped and held. Shoes don’t often feel like that anymore. Porsellis are ever so slightly blue-stocking, a bit Miss Jean Brodie. They are curled up in a silk skirt drinking green Chartreuse in the afternoon sort of shoes.

The thing with ballet shoes is that they are even prettier when they are aged. I say this guardedly because I am minded that they must be good quality and well cared for. There is simply nothing worse than those girls who wear cheap, battered ballet shoes and might as well be barefoot. Nothing says ‘poor’ more than that, except for wearing insubstantial clothing in winter and I am sure that ten, twenty pairs of cheap shoes will not outlast a decent, maintained set. But there’s something I love about beat-up leather ballet shoes. Sole and heel should be regularly tended to by a cobbler (for those Oxfordshire-based the best are Duckers on Turl Street and The Woodstock Cobbler, on Market Street in Woodstock) and they should be stored in bags and stuffed with tissue/shoe trees to keep their shape, but the leather upper just gets better and better. I recently saw an elderly lady leaving Waitrose on the King’s Road with a stick of French bread under her arm and beaten-up beige and navy Chanels that she probably bought in the eighties on her feet. That’s really the epitome of effortless chic.

I’m stuck on ‘ballerines’ at the moment. My precious shoe collection is getting to be more than a little repetitive this year. I have three trays – boots (Chelsea and ankle boots, mostly in tobacco-coloured suede), heels (t bar Mary Janes all) and flats, which I wear more than any others: (brogues and ballerinas) – Chanel, E.Porselli, Repetto. Repeat. The only thing missing in my flats department is a pair of K.Jacques roman sandals for the summer. Booking a holiday for August in the Greek islands this week I was nearly tempted to splurge, but they can wait, considering there are still patches of snow on the ground. Updating my spring wardrobe, however, I have purchased my second pair of Repetto ballerines last week and a pair of off-white skinny jeans from The Kooples, in a wild optimism that spring is just around the corner.

And these are my runners-up. The Cendrillon ballerina by Repetto in a mushroom-y taupe. Rose Repetto, the founder, started selling ballerinas from a tiny workshop near the Paris National Opera in 1947 and in 1956 on Brigitte Bardot’s request, she created the Cendrillon, which Bardot wore in carmin red in ‘Et Dieu créa la femme’.

I bought my first pair of Repettos – on holiday from a holiday in New York – in the Hamptons, in black suede and patent, with an ankle strap. And last year I stood in the store on Rue de la Paix in Paris unable to choose the colour of their successors so tide-subtle were the changes in colour from one pair to the next. I just looked at all those sorbet shades – held the violet, sighed over the old French navy, brushed along midori and pear suedes, pistachio and copper patents. But I left empty handed. I couldn’t decide.

Repettos are Brigitte Bardot in breton on a car bonnet. If you could batter them and eat them you probably would. They’re more buxom than Porsellis, all rounded, cherubic curves – so the patent suits them. In patent, they are the ruddy flush after a good meal or the shine of a glazed doughnut and can only be described as edible. I’ve got my eye on the next pair already – leather, in a cornflower blue worthy of the shadows in an impressionist painting.

Photo credits: 1. Rebecca Lowthorpe via What Elle Wears, 2. via Capture the Castle, 3. My own – Porselli, 4.  My own – Repetto

Socks

There’s something happening with the sock – in the same way that there was a certain, palpable excitement over the return of the friendship bracelet a while back, the comeback of the Dunlop Green Flash a while before that. And it isn’t just the brogue-sock merger I’m talking about. Socks are everywhere at the moment; people are being much more attentive to adorning that juncture at the ankle.

Without meaning to sound I told you so, I have to say that I have long been a fond advocate of the sock; it is an item that is so often, most often, overlooked – but, carefully chosen can make a surprisingly significant improvement to an otherwise banal outfit choice – rolled skinny jeans and lace ups, a dress and mary janes.

The socks that made me wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak, were 3-ply cashmere, an aubergine/burgundy from Marc Jacobs; a Christmas gift from a great friend who is always a thoughtful bestower of presents and clearly knows that while they might not be so elating to unribbon and unwrap, they are jolly nice to wear and that wear them you will, over and over, until the ankles thin and holes appear and one day you will reluctantly have to bid them farewell and search for successors.

I like a confident sock (confident as I am that I have ‘acquired’ the best pair from every boyfriend I have ever had). A coloured, ribbed cotton sock with a contrasting toe cap and heel, ideally, a gentleman’s sock that implies boarding school, ferocious hockey matches and gum-sheild fittings - in lavender and navy perhaps, or emerald and orange – something zingy, unashamedly attention-grabbing, a flash of tomato red beneath the hem of a chino. That coming together of unspeakably battered suede penny-loafers with immaculate purple socks in fine merino wool from Pakeman Catto & Carter (your father’s go-to gentleman’s outfitters in Cirencester). British style is famously profuse in eccentricity; the umpteen daft ways of wearing one’s accessories is definitely one of them. It’s tongue-in-cheek, it’s faintly embarrassing, yet donned with the most resolute proclivity.

The current sock trend is less about length than colour and the detail of the upper edging – a classic rib, a fold, a roll, layered? A frill? Perhaps even more noteworthy is how they are worn - with a certain sense of nostalgia for a school uniform of wool knee-highs and polished oxblood slip-ons. It’s a little like the yacht-y deck shoe or the Barbour, which, if you were forced to wear one as a child and still shudder with the memory of that damp waxed cotton and the smell of gun oil and rain down your neck, you might consider an unlikely orientation for anyone with even the vaguest curiosity about fashion. But like me and a lot of people I know, ridiculous though it may seem, you too perhaps had a change of heart in your twenties (when you realised that the arms of your childhood Barbour had long been too short) and rushed out to replace it with the new, improved model – the ‘International’, or the limited edition version by Anya Hindmarch with the Union Jack lining? And the Green Flash – what was that about? I remember defacing mine at school, hoping it might get me off squash on a Thursday night. But all of a sudden – there they are again, like the Barbour, like the sock and penny loafer combo -  haunting the blogosphere and peppering every festival and polo field from here to Cowdray.

The sock is the new pocket handerchief. See them, just watch them, vigorously worming their way into prevalent streetstyle, onto the sidewalk, down the catwalks (my favourites are taupe merino at Margaret Howell). But for the less ardent sock-lover, the mixed messages are getting to be confusing – so, is it okay now, to wear socks and sandals? And if that look is back, surely high-denier white tights and Laura Ashley florals with French Sole pumps can’t be far behind? Horrifying. (This was what I wore as a thirteen year old Sloane. Never again, I promise).

My theory is that socks are comforting, and not just literally. For we indigenous they are sort of ‘psychologically’ comforting in the same way that an old Mason and Pearson hairbrush is comforting, or Boris Johnson’s hair, or a faded airforce-blue picnic blanket. In the same way that we doggedly still love our first pair of riding boots, the same way that we reverently sniff a new pair of crisp leather Church’s brogues, the way we can’t get rid of that exhausted fishing bag in khaki canvas with the burnt orange net stained with trout blood.

 A few years ago I needed a new overnight bag, and, as is my wont, did quite a bit of research. I searched for something that was traditional, long-lasting, I looked at Mulberry weekend bags and JW Anderson holdalls, but what I ended up with was an atrociously worn second-hand classic 550 Billingham camera bag that had seen every war zone since 1982, and which I bought from a journalist on ebay who had decided it was time to trade up. It’s heavy and pockled and one buckle has snapped off, but if I analyse my split-second decision to bid, it’s probably because it looked a little like an oversized version of my school satchel - only minus the ink-flick stains and the tippex graffiti.

Pretty new socks render us dirty-kneed children with ruddy cheeks and an overflowing mixing bowl, characters from a Lucy and Tom book by Shirley Hughes. Of course every trend like this is cyclical – it comes in and it goes out and it comes in again, like turtle neck sweaters and velvet and the whole point is the nostalgia. But don a pair of brogues over some sweet socks in polka dot and tell me you don’t feel a little bit like skipping - because in these times when Celine box bags and minimalism and bizarre ear contraptions are the forerunners in the collective sartorial consciousness, isn’t it pleasant to have something tame and matronly to cling on to? Now all we need is some damp angel cake and a bucket and spade on a drizzly beach and it’s the summer of 1989 all over again.

I visited a Tabio store in London recently to spruce up my spring sock collection. Oh, if socks could be intoxicating, these were they - hand-knitted and fairisle and glittered and slippery stripes of silk in pink and white, like sugared mice. My boyfriend was present, so I only bought three pairs - but when he wasn’t looking, I might have whispered to the others – “I’ll be back for you”.