Fashion

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

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

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

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,

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

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

 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

‘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