Lately I’ve had cause to think about dress codes. Or to borrow from eternal style icon and high maintenance queen, Kath Day-Knight, to team with the theme.

@notreallykathandkim#kathandkim

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I love a theme. Which is lucky because working in the watch industry means there are a lot of them. Usually it’s simply “business casual” which reads: navy suit. But occasionally it’s something rather more esoteric and often it comes with a mood board. This is the thing about watch events, one minute it’s a powerpoint and business casual and the next it’s a mariachi band playing Hey Ya (maybe one of the single greatest nights of my life).

In any case, dress codes are an opportunity to play. When they basically don’t exist anymore we need to embrace them more than ever - I think deep down we want to be told what to wear! Also, when a mariachi band comes on you just need to dance. One thing I have realised as I get older is that it’s way, way less embarrassing to just join in - whole heartedly - than it is to be too cool. But also, unlike Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, I have absolutely no mystique. CBK would never look at a shopping article online about how to get a look by the way. We’ve found every angle in and it’s time to let her and her perfect buttery blonde be. (Obviously since Love Story I have added to my canon of writing on her style, here). But I agree with my friend Ren that we need to be looking deeply at Calvin Klein’s personal style!

Would wear! Image Credit : David Turner/ WWD

Anyway, in the past few months I’ve googled F1 WAGS to copy their style for the Melbourne Grand Prix, worn a dress that made me feel like a mermaid (and like Ariel, kind of a slutty one!) and most fun, became for one day a horse girl.

The chance to wear a Driza-Bone jacket while riding a horse in a Byron Bay forest and then along a beach is not one I will soon forget. Dress for the life you want! Someone (look I can’t remember who) told me that Byron Bay is one of the few spiritual deposits of the world and honestly, on the trail ride I felt it. I felt more grounded and peaceful than I have felt in months. Maybe it was just two hours without my phone? Still, nature is healing and sometimes you really, truly need to go outside and touch grass. Speaking of woo woo, one time for a story I had a session with a light healer who told me I was operating on a higher plane! As I send emails and pack lunchboxes I wonder if I am really tapping into this power source?

A look directly paying homage to every F1 WAG I looked up.

A few other thoughts

At a work dinner I was seated next to the wonderful Penelope Seidler, who was as chic as you could ever hope to be. Last month I met a fabulous woman who was maybe in her ‘60s who gave me the kind of frank advice you just don’t come by very often! My main goal in life is to befriend more older women, I want to know what’s ahead.

For a few weeks in March I wore the Piaget Sixtie watch and I have to say that despite my earlier urgings to touch more grass and be more spiritual, life is really, really good with a gold watch. I felt authoritative. Maybe this is my higher being!?

On a plane I was listening into two older women (there’s a theme here) who were heading to a reunion of ‘the canteen mums’ and I know they were going to get up to no good! I’ve never wanted to invite myself along somewhere more.

Sometimes I am the older woman! In February I went to the concert of Esha Tewari who I met when she was five, and now she’s playing the Sydney Opera House and touring the world! Eleanor will be able to dine off her once giving her a piano lesson for the rest of her life. The crowd was mostly cute goth girls who really truly dressed for the theme, or dressed to be part of something and dressed to find themselves. I loved all of them.

Teddy on the walk to school, “wow Mama, you look like you live in a mansion!” My dream aesthetic perfectly surmised by my five year-old.

BOOKS

I think Lost Lambs might well be my favourite book of the year. I told my friend David last week that it might be my new barometer for whether I know I will like someone (luckily he liked it!). So funny and original and cutting and also a reminder that life is only tolerable when you find your people, however weird they are.

I gulped Belle Burden’s marriage/divorce memoir Strangers in one afternoon. OOOFFFFTTTTTTTTTT. How well do we really know anyone?

I also really loved David Szalay’s Flesh, so good on desire and people and power and the toll of all of it. The cool, detached tone might not be for everyone, but I found it compelling.

On a warmer note, The Correspondent was a delight. I only bought it, at an airport, because I was worried my book would not carry me through the weekend. I’m so glad I did. I laughed and cried. People can always surprise you, don’t give up on them!

Love,

Annie xx

A shirt to be a diva in.

I love a diva. I mean a proper one. A grand dame. A slasher of tires, thrower of plates. Imperious and exacting, a sensualist of the highest order and, crucially, in possession of some kind of transcendent talent. I was listening to The New Yorker’s The Critics at Large podcast this week on exactly this. It started with a quick fire round of diva or not. Susan Sontag? Diva. Maria Callas? OBVIOUSLY a diva. Norman Mailer? Just an arsehole. As one very funny woman I met at a lunch earlier this year posited: are you a diva or are you just difficult? It’s worth asking yourself. You’ve got to have the goods to get away with it! People tire of difficult.

While a colleague (the inimitable Natalie Reilly in fact, who just launched her own Substack and whose office hot takes I miss enormously) once described me as a sensualist, alas, I will never be a diva. I am too much of an elder millennial accommodating people pleaser! I do love lolling about reading and eating oysters and drinking good champagne though. But I have been thinking this week about how qualities of the diva - a sensualist approach to life (my favourite Nigella Lawson saucily dipping her finger into the custard etc) and straight-up hedonism is a nice counter balance to insidious wellness culture and the loss of appetite, all kinds of it. This is one of the many pages I dog-earred in Helen Garner’s How to End a Story (a book I have found personally transcendent), a line from Peter Craven on ‘the deep moral value of fun.’ Fun, right now in short supply, feels profound.

Beautiful older models at Chanel, women who Matthieu Blazy says, ‘have life.’ Image: courtesy of Chanel

Anyway, the matter of being a woman in Garner’s diaries hit me hard - nobody is a closer observer of others, or herself. This includes her own ageing. This is another thing I have been thinking about. Like everybody else, I noticed, and then felt depressed for noticing, women’s faces on screen that look like they’re meant to. Women like Claire Danes in the horrifically scary (had to watch with my hands over my face) The Beast in Me and Kerry Russell in The Diplomat and Emilia Clarke in Ponies. Faces that emote and move and crinkle. I love their faces (and yes, they’re all in possession of more beautiful faces than most, but that’s not my point!). And I loved the casting at Matthieu Blazy’s first haute couture show, the first model in her ’40s and then enough of them that as Vanessa Friedman put it in The New York Times, “to make it clear they weren’t tokens.”

Backstage Blazy said of his beautiful, light-as-air collection, “Women who are more mature bring a completely different dimension to my clothes.”

“They have life; they’ve seen the world.”

This is a paragraph that I loved in Zadie Smith’s essay on ‘Agelessness’ a word or a mode of being that has, somehow, become the thing prized more than anything above all. What a useless folly!

“It is commonly thought that time is the particular enemy of women. Because we supposedly have so much to lose: our ‘looks’, our fertility, our cultural capital. There have been feminist modifications to this story over the years, but it remains powerful: a tale long told by men and subsequently retold and internalised by women.”

“But there are other ways of looking at it. That women have timepieces built into their bodies—primarily ‘biological clocks’ and the menopause—signs that must eventually be heeded, signs that are, finally, impossible to ignore, seems to me at least as much gift as curse. That our bodies should bring us such concrete signs of time passing—that they should have the miraculous ability to bring us news of what is actually the case—surely means that every woman is offered the opportunity to be, as Young Disciples have it, a “conscious observer” of her own life.”

I think this is why I so loved Helen Garner’s diaries. She observes, and this includes her ageing. Not even HG or Zadie Smith are immune to the way the world wants us to feel about ageing. But what if you grab at life and ageing is the reward? Most of us know that not all of us get this privilege. And what a privilege it is. Life is for sucking the marrow, when you can. You want to be a woman who has life.

On the topic of indulgence, I was in Paris for work last week and there was no line at Angelina’s (?!) so I had a hot chocolate with cream.

[And speaking of my own personal hedonism, have decided my only goal for 2026 is to go to more oyster happy hours - a pure, time sensitive pleasure!].

[I also found a Tom Ford - i.e. sensuality king - era Gucci silk shirt on The RealReal that I plan to wear as often as possible. Slink is a virtue!]

BOOKS

Obviously I cannot recommend Helen Garner’s Collected Diaries enough, I think they should be required reading for all women - whatever age.

I also inhaled Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection Dead and Alive.

Love,

Annie xx

An unserious, serious person about to have the high of her year at the Chanel show.

Somehow it’s the end of the year and I’m pleased to say that I have the same goal for summer as Zadie Smith did for the most recent Northern Hemisphere winter. Which is to read all five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Smith’s thoughts on how you can be both serious and seriously glamorous.

Virginia Woolf, like most of us, suffered terribly from what she called “frock consciousness.”

She cared what people thought of her clothes, but she also cared that people knew she cared about her clothes. Serious people aren’t meant to care about such things!

But we do, and we can.

Virginia Woolf illustrated the utter agony of feeling wrong in your clothes, in yourself, as per Zadie’s essay in British Vogue:

“This is the last day of June & finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom.”

And to quote Zadie Smith, “Oh, Virginia, girl—I feel you! The shame of wearing the too-big thing or the overly shiny thing or the thing that’s just wrong in every way for the occasion… We’ve all been there.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. But the thing about clothes too is that the right outfit can make you invincible. Which seems to be an awfully promising kind of power to be cast off so easily.

It’s the same for sexiness. Alexa Chung said on Bella Freud’s podcast that a whole generation of women (mostly millennials who were too busy girlbossing themselves into the sun!) denied themselves sexy clothes. In my ‘20s my favourite dress was quite literally a hessian sack (by a Danish designer but still)! But then I binge watched Emily in Paris, which as ever, arrived at the exact moment of the year when you need it most, and was reminded by Sylvie Grateau that sexiness has very little to do with age and mostly to do with attitude.

Can a serious person wear a floral dress with gumboots? (Yes!)

The inimitable Tina Brown said in a recent podcast interview with the Times that she could publish 30 thousand words on, say, atrocity in El Salvador but everybody only wanted to talk about her buzz. Glamour is a double edge sword, too much of it, supposedly, and nobody takes you seriously. But nobody wants to just take their lumps either. Let’s be real. Anyway, as Tina Brown also said on the podcast, it’s better to be talked about than to sink without a trace. Also I love nothing more than hearing very smart people talk about ‘un-serious’ things, like Rachel Kushner with Bella Freud, where they spoke about not letting intelligence get in the way of a good outfit, and vice versa.

Here’s another thing I’ve been thinking about - how Victoria Beckham says at the end of her Netflix documentary that she just wants to make her family proud of her. And her husband, Sir David Beckham - former soccer star and Cotswold beekeeper - says they’d be proud of her if she made cheese on toast. The point being that she doesn’t need to prove anything - and also children will never be impressed by their parents’ achievements! It’s probably worth remembering that. Also you should never regret the outfits of your youth or getting a throne for your wedding. I’m so bored of good taste anyway!

In 2026 I want to wear sexier clothes and read more books. Go high and low. Revere glamour. Take clothes seriously but know that none of it really matters all that much. Don’t give up your soul for it! Because the thing is, I’ve also been thinking about how true character is how you behave when nobody can see you, and how kindness doesn’t expect anything in return. Glamour comes up hollow without any grace, for others and for yourself.

Here’s to having both good character and true glamour in 2026 - and wearing our slinkiest, silkiest shirts just a button below ‘good taste.’

Books

Heart the Lover - This book broke my heart and I think is my favourite of the year. It really got under my skin, like first love tends to do.

I then immediately went back to read Lily King’s earlier Writers & Lovers which - and I won’t spoil anything - can be viewed as a companion. It is also a reminder that you shouldn’t give up on your secret dreams. Mine is to write a book, just to keep me accountable.

I gobbled up It Girl of course, like any self-respecting Francophlian fashion girl.

I’m re-reading Madame Bovary, poor Emma Bovary!

Wreck, by Catherine Newman. Just lovely, a warm hug for anxious mothers.

This was compelling, unnerving and brilliant - Intimacies by Kate Kitamura.

Workhorse is hitting way too close to the bone. I am, obviously, a workhorse.

Love

Annie xx

How I want to dress forever.

Truly there is no phrase to bring one back to earth from a Paris fashion week high than a text as you land from your husband that reads “Eleanor has gastro.” Well actually he wrote “poor Eleanor was up all night with the runs and just threw up.” But this is a newsletter about nice things and this is the worst thing. Also, my poor husband who capped out a week of solo parenting with solo gastro. This man deserves a medal!

But we don’t appreciate the highs without the lows? And it’s easy to forget that behind every photo of a martini at Bar Hemingway is a woman who also has to disinfect her entire bathroom and pray everybody doesn’t get struck down with the bug.

Paris was full of highs though. The biggest was seeing Matthieu Blazy’s debut for Chanel at the Grand Palais. I actually think I should probably retire as I’m not sure I will witness such a moment again. It’s not only that the collection was beautiful but it felt like we were witnessing something seismic. Fashion history. A break!

The magical Chanel set inside the Grand Palais.

This season there’s been a lot of discourse around who gets to be a fashion critic. Is it anybody with a wifi connection? Anybody who loves fashion? Legacy media only? Do you need to see the clothes up close? I had an interesting conversation with a fashion critic and archivist I really admire (during our conversation the head of the Palais Galleria came up to say hello for e.g.) about how fashion has become part of the culture in such a different way. He thinks a shift is coming toward looking up to designers in the way we did in the McQueen/Galliano era. But he has little time for people who look at, say Blazy’s debut, and say “it’s giving Zara.” Or that it’s not Chanel. For one, it was deeply Chanel. Blazy clearly had great reverence for Chanel, and for Gabrielle Chanel. This is something that everyone I’ve spoken to from Chanel shares, but I think Blazy connected with her spiritually. Cosmically, even. “Codes” aren’t just about blinkers on doing tweed. There’s a lot of freedom in constrictions, as Chanel president of fashion Bruno Pavlovsky told me earlier this year, the best designers and creatives understand this. Blazy breathed new life into Chanel, he blew away the cobwebs, he’s building on Gabrielle and Karl and Virginie (let’s not wipe her contribution out either!) with such cleverness and appetite and curiosity. Also Gabrielle Chanel was at heart a contrarian, and as Blazy said in an interview, it’s “Chanel because we say it is.”

And because we all believe it is too.

I had so many favourite parts!

Including:

The collaboration with Charvet. Purveyors of the perfect shirt since 1838 and a favourite of Sofia Coppola and just about every fashion editor. Gabrielle Chanel was said to wear them too, which is such a clever way to approach her legacy. Just when you think there are no new angles into the story! I love the chain detail on the hemline - found in all Chanel jackets and tops too. It’s the perfect, perfect shirt.

One of my own perfect shirts.

The crumpled 2.55 bags. Blazy wanted them to look like they’d been taken out dancing and it’s such a good way to think about luxury. Wear and love your precious things to death! And going out dancing is always the cure.

The silk dresses knitted into camellias (Coco’s favourite flower).

This glorious, joyful moment of course. If this was a season for a reset, this moment embodied it. Fashion needs to make us feel something.

As I wrote in my story for the paper this week too, people were feeling a shift. There were a lot of debuts and new ideas but also I think designers realising that they need to make people want - irrationally! - the clothes.

I also liked a conversation I had with Michael Rider after his sophomore show for Celine. It was about how he thinks about making clothes people are going to wear over and again. But that aren’t basic or “quiet.” And I loved this collection for exactly this - pieces interesting enough to last forever, ones you could add to what you already have and also you should pile on jewellery. But I always think that. I can’t wait to be one of those old ladies with rings on every finger and enormous earrings.

Other Paris highlights:

Pedro Pascal practically brushing past me and me basically expiring on the spot. The charisma of this man!

So too seeing Tilda Swinton. She truly is otherworldly.

Holding this lush suede Birkin (there’s a reason Hermes has defied the luxury slowdown) and thinking about the woman I could be!

A perfect Madeleine (Proust was right!).

I actually did this when I was Paris two weeks earlier (I know, my body knows) but visiting the flea markets and finding this vintage Chanel top (it has chain in the hemline ofc).

The people watching at the Comme des Garçons show was incredible, I loved the reverence and the fandom and look at Michelle Lamy!

A visit to the Schiaparelli showroom. I love Daniel Roseberry’s mind.

Blame the eternal obsession with ‘French Girl style’ but the minute I get to Paris you cannot get me into a silk scarf fast enough! Here are two ways I wore them and you can bet I will be copying Mrs Prada in wearing one around my shoulders next.

As a bandanna.

Because I saw a girl at Copenhagen Fashion Week do this and I like how it ‘breaks’ and jazzes up a fairly plain outfit otherwise.

Anything Mrs Prada does, I will faithfully copy.

Books

I’ve done it again. By that I mean left a book I was loving in an airport :((( but I’m halfway through Gene Pressman’s They All Came to Barneys and it’s so juicy and great. Pressman is such a good storyteller and it’s a total fashion history lesson, but a fun one.

I also read a fascinating, unflattering biography of Vivienne Westwood and I love, love, loved Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything. I found it surprisingly profound. I appreciate his honesty, like in a post today that how even when things are good for most of it’s all hanging on by a thread.

keithmcnallynyc

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I’m currently reading Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, which is delicious.

Love,

Annie xx

Giorgio Armani A/W 1984-85. Image credit: Photography by Aldo Fallai

Giorgio Armani changed the way the world thought about fashion and luxury. In part because he allowed all of us a taste of Sprezzatura, that is, the studied art of carelessness. Or a mode of being that never loses its allure.

Mr Armani, as he was known in the fashion industry, died on Thursday aged 91. His business - the one he started aged 40, selling his beloved Volkswagen Beetle to do so and that which made him a billionaire - this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.

It is not only that new words were invented to describe Armani’s preferred colour palette, “greige” and “biscuit” or that he tamed the excesses of the ‘80s with suiting that draped and slouched. He made Richard Gere into a style icon - and announced his arrival as a movie star - with the easy elegance of his wardrobe in American Gigolo. So too Julia Roberts when she wore an oversized grey Giorgio Armani suit to the Golden Globes in 1990.

It is a look that has remained on just about every fashion designer’s mood board ever since. Armani - a true cinephile - was prophetic in his embrace of Hollywood, dressing stars before such things as ‘stylists’ were invented. As Dijanna Mulhearn, author of Red Carpet Oscars, to which Armani contributed, said of the biggest impact on red carpet fashion in our lifetime,

“I think the biggest moment is the ’90s and Giorgio Armani bringing in that minimalist aesthetic. [Actresses] were looking for ways to be taken more seriously and Giorgio Armani came up with the solution. Yes, you could look incredibly chic without looking like a mirror ball.”

He took out the lining and the padding and created a new kind of soft power. He believed in elegance - a scarce commodity in a voracious and hype chasing world.

American critic Dodie Kazanjian once wrote in Vogue that Armani was “doing for the jacket what others were doing for philosophy, architecture and art”.

For what he did was change how people move through the world. You did not need to have an Armani label sewn into your own jacket to be taking on his ideas around style and power - that impact did not need to be flashy. He thought about what newly empowered working women would need. Quiet luxury owes much to Mr Armani, the idea that pared back things were an epitome of taste. But what separated Armani from any semblance of bland, was his idea that real style is related to one’s values. It is not just about presentation, though this matters, but a guide for life. That remaining humble and hardworking and true counts for much.

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“Style for me is a mood that can be applied to everything,” he once said. “I’ve always thought fashion is much more than just clothes: it is a way of being.”

It is a value Armani held up throughout his entire, wonderful life. For what is style if it doesn’t have meaning? What’s the point of chic if it’s hollow? Armani, for one, spoke out against the rampant pace of the fashion cycle and the endless cycling in and out of what was ‘fashion’. In an open letter in 2020 he described such velocity as immoral. As with many things, Mr Armani was ahead of his time in the way conversations in fashion would sharpen against hype and hubris. Chic is a word overused but it’s always perfect for Mr Armani. As relevant to the campaign images he created with Aldo Fallai (the very definition of chic!) to the way he was always said to be gracious and kind and to remember people he had met before. Chicness is more than the way things look. Also it has something to with being a little unknowable.

The very definition of Sprezzatura! Picture: Mondadori Portfolio

Armani stayed true to his own vision of style - of greige and soft power, for his haute couture collections, of elegance as a way to really live.

He was not in attendance for the presentation of his Giorgio Armani Prive collection in July. Only the second time Mr Armani was not backstage, and did not take his customary bow. Though he had emailed many editors to say that his hand had touched every look, and yes you could tell. The models took their time walking through the gilded room of Armani’s private hotel particulier They wore lush black velvet and smart little hats. You couldn’t say from what era they belonged. Except they felt so right now - a time where many of things Mr Armani held steadfast - elegance, quality, thoughtfulness - feel in short supply.

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Once Mr Armani said that “Elegance is not standing out, but being remembered.”

His life, his ideas of style will not easily be forgotten.

Love,

Annie xx

Just really celebrating myself! Photo by Myles Kalus

For a good amount of time I thought I was going to be a woman mysterious about her age. To never mention it, or casually knock a few years off. Maybe say things like ‘oh 30-something,’ or ‘a woman never tells!’

I must admit to a minor mid-life crisis about turning 40 (40!) this year. It’s too late for me to be a wunderkind! I haven’t written one page of the book I keep talking about and I forgot to have a gap year. But then I remembered a beloved English teacher telling her bunch of awkward 17 year-olds on the verge of everything that we’d never really feel older than we did right then. And then also how lucky, lucky, lucky I am to be 40.

Anyway, 40 isn’t 40 like it used to be. How can it be when all of the markers of success are so out of reach for many or we don’t want the same things as previous generations and also we definitely don’t baste ourselves with baby oil and literally roast ourselves in the sun. Though I’m not sure how I feel about Kylie Jenner (et el) giving the coordinates of her boob job. Is it good we’re no longer pretending we just have good genes or has another floor of requisite maintenance been unlocked? There was an article in The Times recently about how different 60 looks now, and so does 40.

In any case, I had a party and it was maybe one of the top 10 days of my life. My friends, all women (mostly, I did allow a few token male friends but absolutely no husbands!) are ones I’ve picked up along the way. I left my small town in Tasmania when I was 18 and moved to Melbourne. Lara, one of the world’s original extroverts, was the first friend I made and thank god for that as I literally may have disappeared into the corner. I’ve lived in several share houses - including one in Redfern where the parties were legendary and I met two of my dearest friends. I’ve changed jobs too many times and I stole a few of my husband’s friends. Because I’ve never stayed put, I don’t really have a cohesive ‘group,’ more like a series of them and a slew of Whatsapp chats. But people in my life always get along with each other because they tend to be friendly and open and also the best.

Lara, who took pity on me as an out-of-her-depth 18 year-old (with ill-advised black hair) in my first week in Melbourne! Photo by Myles Kalus

My friend Alana flew in from Dublin! My university friends all flew up from Melbourne! The next day both my head and my cheeks hurt from laughing and also 10,000 glasses of champagne. Birthdays should be celebrated! Because by 40 we’ve all experienced hardships and sadness and disappointments and you realise this about others, too. Ah, grace, it’s a work in progress. But happy moments, well, these need to be grabbed with both hands when they come your way. Dancing wildly with your girlfriends after all that has been is practically enlightenment.

Some things I’ve learned at 40 (but am still working on!)

You can’t control how things will turn out by trying to imagine every worst case scenario. And anyway, most of the truly worst things come out of nowhere and knock you for six.

Then the thing is, you get through them.

There is more than one way of being tough!

To borrow from Graydon Carter, it is important not to confuse kindness with weakness.

My mum was right about a bob suiting me. Some of us don’t have growing hair! But as my incredible hairdresser John Pulitano at Headcase Hair says, there are bobs and there are bobs. It has to be short enough or long enough and not the mumsy length in-between.

Not that there’s anything wrong with looking mumsy!

Re-reading your favourite books is like catching up with old friends.

Though life is too short to finish a book you hate. Abandon!

Good for her, not for me, remains an ultimate perfect refrain for when judgement rears its sour head.

Real happiness is hardly ever ‘documented’ or at least not by you. But do try and get photos with your friends when you can! Make your partner take photos of you with the baby! The best decision I have made this year was have my friend Myles take photos at my 40th because I knew I would be having too much fun to take any. My plan is to print them out and send them to everyone - which is another thing I would like to be better at.

Even if you hate the photo, in ten years time you will be aghast that you thought you looked [insert favoured insult for yourself].

Be kinder to yourself - nobody has been harder on me than, well me, and maybe in my 40s I’d like to be nicer (to others and also to myself).

There is no fashion high like a vintage find! This is the Chanel vest I found for my never-ending birthday celebrations.

Most things will blow over, did they deserve the angst you gave them (no).

Turning up counts for a lot!

A silk scarf is essential. Especially in my lifelong goal to be a grandee. Two groups of friends gifted me with beautiful Hermès scarves and I plan to become one of those chic women who have always have one on their person - worn in a multitude of ways - at all times. I was in Bangkok for work this week and tied one around my dress, which I know is me trying too hard to be a Copenhagen girl/Leandra Medine, but it felt like a holiday?

Nobody has work/life ‘balance’ perfectly calibrated. Everybody is doing their best!

But kids really love it when you turn up to at least some of their special days at school. You will never have a taste of what it must be like to be a celebrity than when you show up to one of these things when you’re not always there. Also, I don’t think teenagers will run up to meet you in the playground! Treasure this.

Real style is a lot more about how you wear things than what you’re wearing.

The best way to see your friends is to book in for the next dinner as soon as you’re paying the bill. Three months sounds ridiculously far away but it comes around fast!

Also, girls’ dinner is a balm for the soul and sacred and essential. Make an agenda and tick everything off!

Only drink black coffee in Europe.

It’s very glamorous to be someone who has a definitive list when asked places to go in a city.

So too an exact martini order.

(And your favourite champagne - Ruinart Blanc de Blanc and Billecart-Salmon pour moi).

Trust your own instincts about what you like. If you’re drawn to it, it’s you.

Everybody has their own challenges, be gracious toward this.

I’ll never forget a social worker friend telling me that the people who are hardest to love usually need it the most. I really do think about this a lot.

Most of the time, it’s not personal.

Let it go.

Let it go!

BOOKS

Gwyneth by Amy Odell. Obviously I gobbled this up and I think Amy Odell is an incredible reporter - as another great reporter, Marisa Meltzer said on the Fashion People podcast, she is the kind of reporter who will call people way down in the IMDB credits for their take. It is the people on the periphery and the junior roles who tend to have a pretty good take on who a person is. You can tell a lot about someone by how they treat someone who can’t do anything for you. BUT, we shouldn’t all be judged forever on our worst day! My main takeout though was that we can never really know Gwyneth, she is complex and enigmatic and I love how she has never pretended to be a regular person. She’s not like us! Also, “reserved for G-Spot,” I MEAN.

I’m working my way through an incredible stack of books courtesy of Chanel’s Literary Rendezvous (yes, the absolute best mail day and the only book club I want to be part of). And I keep dog-earing pages in Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett.

Obv I loved this line about nice things, “Having nice things makes you feel like you’re doing a good job and shuts everybody up.” Ooft.

I absolutely inhaled - flashlight under the doona style - Claire Lombardo’s Same As It Ever Was. A rumination on marriage and middle age and parenting and all the love and hard edges and disappointments that you keep poking at.

Obviously as a person still working in the media I’m also reading the latest Conde Nast biography, Empire of the Elite. Annoyingly I left my copy at the pub (I never go anywhere without a book, just in case!) so had to reorder it and I’m left on the edge of my seat. So far I think I agree with Emilia Petraca that these golden days of unimaginable excess and unlimited budgets does, with hindsight, seem like a beautiful grift? “We were expected to be walking billboards for the fantasy we were selling,” said Vanity Fair editor Dana Brown. People are willing to pay a lot for cultural cache and a taste of the inner sanctum.

Also, obsessed with this detail feretted out by Emilia from one of my favourite imperial grand dames (I have such a weakness for women like this): Diana Vreeland demanded that her secretaries serve her a daily scoop of ice cream with a “precise, semi-melted consistency.” If you’re going to be a diva, do it properly!

Love,

Annie xx

Recovering from dying of swoon after meeting Pierpaolo at the Ritz.

There is no season like the haute couture season in Paris. Where else can you see a Chanel client wearing top-to-toe tweed alongside her dog also in top-to-toe tweed? Or my favourite this year, a very stressed man talking into a headpiece wearing a see-through PVC blouse in the sluggish heat of Paris. I mean the man had condensation. This kind of commitment is everything I want to see at a fashion week! Especially couture. I want to see the effort! I want to see the workings. There should be an element of suffering, or at the very least feeling. Maybe it’s a shared desire - according to the Business of Fashion, sales of leggings are down and are no longer the bottoms of choice. Even at the gym! Leggings are not pants after-all, it turns out. Comfort isn’t the only choice. Just ask my PVC guy in Paris (sincerely do hope he made it through the night without expiring though). Fashion does have its limits.

“Ohhh it’s an inspiration trip,” a very nice woman I’d just met said when I tried to explain, over-explain really, why I was roaming about Paris on my own. I could have kissed her, because that’s what it was.

Coffee at the Ritz!

Not only was it inspiring because I attended a handful of haute couture shows, including the Chanel show (the last before Matthieu’s arrival!) and the Giorgio Armani show which was an ultimate lesson in elegance and three things I find quite fundamental to the kind of woman I want to be: one who wears hats, who knows how to make an exit and who owns a cigarette holder. But also in having a few precious days to watch people and roam the markets looking at vintage jewellery and reading books.

My bag is enormous because I fit a veritable tome in here. I didn’t want to waste precious reading time in Paris!

A few highlights:

Visiting the Demna retrospective at Kering HQ. A reminder of all the ways he influenced fashion and culture during his ten years at Balenciaga, and he baited and enraged us and made us think differently about the purpose of fashion. As he said in one of the (many) excellent coverlines on the magazine for the exhibition catalogue: Fashion has to be radical (otherwise it’s pointless).

Maybe especially so now.

I can’t stop thinking about the vintage tank bracelet I nearly bought from the frankly fabulous woman at the Saint Ouen flea market in Paris. I think I might regret not buying it. And also not buying a chandelier. Or this snake bracelet (in my dreams!).

The Piaget apartment for its high jewellery presentation. Apparently it was an apartment featured on The Parisian Agency (the only real estate porn show I’ve ever become obsessed with, and I have to admit I feel like speaking about real estate in French is way less awful than it is in English/Sydney?).

Briefly meeting Pierpaolo Piccioli in a corridor at The Ritz. I was with my editor who had met him several times and spoke to him in Italian while I said hello and then basically died of swooning. Then when we were both already dying over our encounter (and a coffee that I think cost approx. 30 euro) we realised Nicolas Ghesquière was sitting directly opposite us. It was fashion Christmas!

Seeing the new Celine collection from Michael Rider up close at the re-see - so many ideas on how to get dressed. I’m immediately buying a thin white turtleneck to layer under everything and all I want is a silk scarf to wear a million ways. The Celine rep taking us through said Michael Rider really thinks about how people get dressed in the real world, how they mix and match and re-wear things. He doesn’t believe in a full look policy!

I’ve never needed to know ways with a scarf more!

A croissant every morning. My ultimate breakfast, and I don’t think past me would have ‘allowed’ myself to eat exactly what I felt like every day. I just ate it, and moved on. Is this freedom? Is it happiness?

An incredible facial at the Ambassade Biologique Recherche near the Champs-Élysées. I love this brand, even though my family all screw up their noses when I use the products because they are inordinately stinky but very efficacious! I honestly felt like a new woman after the facial. Maybe it was also because I was in Paris and to quote one of my favourite books about a girl who goes to Paris (all my favourite books are about girls who go to Paris), “The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we're all going to live forever!”

Of course none of this is true and now that I am no longer young, I know just how deeply untrue this is. But in Paris you can sometimes feel like this anyway. And this is the ultimate best thing about an inspiration trip to Paris.

BOOKS

Other than eating and moving my self-imposed agreed upon acceptable time to have a glass of rosé, I read in Paris too.

I absolutely inhaled Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan and oof, what an ultimate state of the union/world/analysis of the precarious ways we build our belief systems about society, ourselves. I loved it so much I crammed it into my handbag at Chanel.

I also gobbled up Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment, which makes us question ideas of fate and if we believe it, what is preordained and what is peace. Also to make the most of our precious lives!

I didn’t love Among Friends as much as I thought it would - I normally adore a clear eyed, insidery take on class and high society but I found the writing a little overegged maybe? I did still read it in a day.

I’m also still ploughing through Princess of 72nd Street, which is appealingly weird if a little unsettling!

And I’ve just started Same As It Ever Was and know I’m going to love it.

Love,

Annie xx

What we all think we look like when we wear this outfit!

Who knew such a furore could be caused by one dead looking Birkin and a slip skirt that was definitely bought on the high street! Of course I’m talking about the test shots released of Ryan Murphy, King of Camp’s new series about John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the world’s most moodboarded woman. Apart from maybe Joan Didion, in front of that Corvette specifically.

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But actually I did know it would cause a stir because the second I saw them on Instagram I sent them to my colleague Jonah - my absolute brain box authority on fashion and thank god he wrote about it! - because I was aghast. I could see that Lauren Santo Domingo, founder of Moda Operandi, creative director of Tiffany & Co.’s home category and one of the world’s chicest women had already commented that these costumes weren’t right. And Santo Domingo knows because as she once told me in an interview, she grew up in the same area as Bessette Kennedy and she was absolutely it already then. Once in high school Santo Domingo got a train to New York’s Canal street to buy the exact perfume that Bessette Kennedy was rumoured to wear.

“I remember when I was in high school we heard stories that she would go to Canal Street and pick up this patchouli fragrance from this street vendor, and so the second I was old enough I was taking the train into the city and finding the same perfume, even before she was famous. I think she always had that sort of It factor,” she told me.

I was thinking about this as I truffled up every skerrick of commentary about how wrong the clothes were this week - where was the vintage Yohji! The Prada shoes! The hair does not have buttery chunks! In my career I must have written at least five articles about Bessette Kennedy, including interviewing the author of CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, A Life in Fashion. I was invested!

This was the woman whose style was described as ‘effortful effortlessness,’ she did meaningful minimalism and ‘throwaway chic.’ Michael Kors once described her as the ‘perfect image of the American girl.’ According to Lauren Sherman of Puck, someone she knows once saw a moodboard at The Row which was full of pictures of Bessette Kennedy. Ralph Lauren reportedly told his designers to think of her as their muse.

(As a side-note I am obsessed with Ryan Murphy calling up Sherman to let her know that he definitely has bought a lot of the right clothes for the show! Doth he protest too much!?).

In any case, all of these things are things that have been said about Bessette Kennedy, thought about her, projected onto her. There’s barely any interview recordings of her speaking in her too short life. As the recent biography of Bessette Kennedy, Once Upon a Time (absolutely gobbled this up too) details, she was very private and struggled with the invasion of her personal life that was the side effect of marrying into American royalty. Her mystery, in these oversharing times, is of course part of the allure. As the inimitable Robin Givhan once wrote for The Washington Post, "The couple died before the era of Instagram and Twitter, back when personal lives were something that people still sought to protect rather than curate and then monetise. The couple died when discretion was admirable, before it became quaint and then vaguely obsolete."

Privacy is making a comeback as we all realise what we’ve willingly handed over. As Phoebe Philo (whose clothes Bessette Kennedy would have loved) once said, the chicest thing is to not be on Google!

This is something that Sunita Kumar Nair, the author of CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, a Life In Fashion told me she was keenly aware of in documenting her fashion.

“Carolyn was a super-private person and I wanted to maintain that, and hear how she chose to present her persona through her clothes, that is what CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy A Life in Fashion is about. It’s a chance for the fashion world to decipher what she stood for from a fashion perspective. Carolyn wanted to remain mysterious and that is the most important thing she managed to maintain.”

But the thing is, even if the clothes were exactly right, we still can’t really capture the essence of Bessette Kennedy. We’re trying to distill an entire captivating person just by what she wore. Even if we did manage to track down her exact shoe or her exact scent. The question to ask is, well, why do we need to quite so badly?

Speaking of projecting, I really loved Julianne Moore in Sirens - mostly for her goddess gowns in a sea of Lily Pulitzer fever dreams. Preppy style is a minefield of trip-ups, the only way to survive is to be above it all and not buy in!

Julianne Moore in Sirens. Picture: Netflix. Dress: The Row!

On the The Run-Through with Vogue Podcast Moore described her character as a “constructed personality.” More than ever I’m thinking this is the only way to get ahead. Well, until your time runs out!

And my god, her jewellery. Also the aforementioned wonderful Jonah reminded me of Moore’s incredibly risqué Bulgari campaigns from the early aughts that were TOO SEXY for St Marks Square in Venice.

I’ve finally finished my biography of Bunny Mellon, another current obsession and then I went down a rabbit hole on her gardens thanks to AD.

This is the garden at her Antigua home.

Picture: Roger Foley

Here is a sentence I enjoyed this week: “Summer is a season ripe for scandal; people tend to be overheated and understimulated, looking to mist their crisping minds with idle gossip.”

I saw the exhibition when I was in New York in April and felt an affinity with Madame X! Also, what a profile.

It’s from The New Yorker in a bit about the Singer Sargent exhibition currently on at the Met Museum. Or specifically it’s about l’scandal surrounding Sargent - an ambitious American in Paris (is there any other kind?) whose painting of ‘Madame X’ scandalised the city of love when it debuted in Paris in 1884. So much so that Sargent painted that wanton strap slipping down her shoulder back on and the subject, American beauty, alleged seductress and another total It-Girl Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau was said to have removed all mirrors from her house. Now of course the portrait is the gem of the Met. Madame X now represents an appealing saucy opulence and the irresistible idea of reinventing yourself that seems right for now when every party favour is a cigarette lighter and the mood for the Northern Hemisphere summer is, to quote Leandra Medine on the Fashion People podcast, an ‘homage to Italian tackiness.”

Loved this quote in the exhibition too: “Of all the undressed women, the only interesting one is by Mr. Sargent.” Joséphin Péladan. L’Artiste, June 1884.

Quite!

Books

I have been so busy these past few weeks so here is a quick list of the pitifully few books I have read of late.

The Examined Life by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz which was almost like a balm in its generous observations of people and why we behave the way we do.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki - I haven’t finished this yet because UNBEARABLY I left it behind in my Kyoto hotel room this week (when I tell you it was a joy to be reading a book set in Japan while I was actually in Japan!). But I can’t wait to read the last few chapters. Upsettingly this will have to be on my phone as I can’t buy the same book twice and I’m worried I’ll have to wait too long at the library.

The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich. Like The Examined Life this is also an insight into why people behave the way though they do, only less loneliness-fixing.

Annie xx

Let’s go with I meant to wear my top backwards to a Cartier party this week!

Should I blame deadlines for the lack of newsletter in recent weeks? Moving house? Or the fact that lately I feel like I’ve been on a plane so often I feel like I’m at sea inside my body? Anyway, my theory for that is the shorter the trip the less chance jet lag will paralyse you.

New house is starting to come together. Teddy calls this room ‘mummy’s ‘alaxing’ room.’

Sometimes people ask how I travel so much (and get away it is the subtext), and the truth is it is easy and hard. Mostly you are too busy and absorbed to feel too homesick but then in New York you will see four year-olds holding hands as they walk through Central Park on a school excursion and your heart will physically ache. I’m very lucky to have a husband who doesn’t feel that the mental load is the work of the mother. This man runs a tight ship! He is the one who remembers that it's a wear yellow day at school, say (because he puts everything in the shared calendar) and his plaits have improved dramatically. I’ve been thinking lately that my expectations of a partnership were in some ways established by my father. My mum was a nurse who often worked night shifts and then often people would call in sick and she would work a double shift. I can only now fathom how bone achingly tired she must have been. So often it would be dad who would take us to piano lessons (he actually took up piano lessons when I was learning and his duet with my mother at the end of year recital was mortifying then, triumphant to me now!) or be up late icing a birthday cake. When I got my first period in grade six it was my dad who came to the school with approximately a year’s supply of pads and handed them to me hurriedly. My children are loved by a lot of people - we have a family who pitch in and this is a great blessing. Especially when I am away from them - chasing dreams that I hope are going to be worth it.

In the past few weeks I’ve been to Geneva, London and New York.

When I say Geneva though I mainly was in a convention centre at the annual Watches & Wonders trade show. It is, quite frankly, Disneyland for watch nerds. It’s when around 60 of the top watch brands present their novelties for the year ahead and it is the week I most lose track of my real life outside the Palexpo! I think it’s the lack of fresh air or maybe too much contact with incredibly expensive things at once? Or perhaps it’s simply because for five days I exclusively consume a daily diet of 12 espressos, Swiss chocolate and champagne?

A moment of serenity, despite the espressos!, in the Cartier booth with the truly wild - and wildly fabulous - new Panthere watch

Anyway, I LOVE IT. Yes, for the watches, but also for the people. Here are six lessons from Watches & Wonders that have almost nothing to do with the specifics of the watches I tried on.

1. Always meet your internet friends. I’ve emailed with Hodinkee style editor Malaika Crawford for a few years now - the woman gives excellent quotes. We were seated next to each other at a Bvlgari dinner on the first night and got along like a house on fire. It can be strange meeting people ‘IRL’ when you already have a parasocial relationship with them. You just need to kind of start again. And real conversations are so much better, always.

2. Like anything - visiting an art gallery, watching a fashion show - developing your own taste is about paying attention to what you like. And, crucially, what you don’t like! It’s easy to get caught up in the ‘right’ things to like but this can be at the peril of honing your own eye.

3. Wrist watch shots are an under-appreciated art form - these are not easy to do well!

4. Don’t worry too much about knowing everything. In the watch world - like any, really - there are people who will talk at you and over you about what they know and make you feel like you don’t know enough to speak up. Let alone ask a question. But here’s the thing, you should never feel afraid to ask a question because you worry you will sound dumb! It’s much dumber to pretend to understand something. Also, a lot of people are almost guaranteed to be grateful that you asked it. Nobody knows everything anyway, and always it’s better to stay curious.

5. Try not to get stuck in Geneva on a Sunday! But if you do, always visit the swans - they’re aggressive but pretty. And that’s a quite compelling combination.

6. Now is the time to be a fan. If you love something, say it; if you admire someone, tell them. Hardly anybody is going to mind if you barrel up to them to say that you love their work! Rigorous exuberance is a philosophy I believe in, more than ever.

On this, here are some things I’ve loved these past few weeks:

I watched Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door with glorious Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore and yes, it was illuminating on topics of assisted suicide and the value of a life and exquisite to look at (the houses! The porcelain! Julianne and Tilda!). But oh my god Julianne Moore’s sweaters! Perfect colours, perfectly slouchy. I arrived back home in Sydney and immediately purchased this green one from Assembly Label to copy her autumnal wardrobe.

The vibe I am trying to recreate this autumn.

I visited the iconic Casa Magazines in New York City while I was there and accidentally spent $50 (aud!) on a copy of The Gentlewoman but actually I regret nothing. It was full of things I wanted to read! I also picked up the latest copy of US Vogue and can’t stop thinking about this line from Jeremy O’Harris in his piece on the role of style in his life ahead of the complicated theme for this Monday’s Met Gala.

“Shame is the enemy of all exuberance. Shame comes from fear, and fear is the enemy of style.”

On eschewing shame - the top image of this newsletter is me wearing my favourite new Harris Tapper top BACKWARDS without realising it. I’m going with avant garde, and that I did it on purpose. Actually, I think I pulled it off? Anyway, the truth is, nobody is thinking about you like you think they are, and a woman chased me down on the dance floor to ask where it was from.

Speaking of style, I was mere centimetres away from Greta Lee - practically brushing up against her - last week and she is as chic as we all think. Those in possession of true chic are magnetic.

BOOKS

I tore through Graydon Carter’s memoir and yes of course it made me nostalgic for a time I never lived in (specifically ‘90s New York media and budgets) but it also really made me think about how the only protection against AI and indifference is to make something really, really good (right?!).

I also LOVED The Wedding People by Alison Espach - set in Cape Cod it unpicks class and love and the complexities of people in such a warm-hearted way, allowing its characters to change.

I’ve also started reading a biography of the socialite and terrific gardener Bunny Mellon who tended to her incredible gardens in custom Balenciaga gardening outfits. A level of chicness to aspire to.

Love,

Annie xx

Michelle Pfeiffer, shot by David Sims for Saint Laurent. No notes!

Fur was everywhere at fashion month, a US Office of Personnel employee got fired for her OOOTD (office outfit of the day) selfies when her agency began rounds of layoffs and ‘old Hollywood glamour’ is the only acceptable red carpet ensemble for hopeful starlets. Oh baby, it’s Boom Boom.

Trend forecaster Sean Monahan - AKA the guy who gave us ‘normcore’ and elevated Jerry Seinfeld to style icon (still is) and the ‘vibe shift’ - coined Boom Boom as an elastic catch-all for the rude truth that you don’t need to pretend you’re not rich anymore!

He touched on it again during Paris Fashion Month when the shoulders and the heels were high and the stocks were low. He says how he and Interview editor Mel Ottenberg clocked how Saint Laurent’s perfect Michelle Pfeiffer campaign was everywhere, and maybe prescient.

“The editor of Interview Magazine, Mel Ottenberg saw the parallels though: “It really is wild how eighties power dressing is all the rage on the runways, in popular culture…and then tonight we had Saint Laurent, which was giving full Yves Saint Laurent 1987…but also the stock market is crashing?” 1987 famously being the year when Black Monday knocked almost two trillion off stock market balance sheets worldwide.”

Anyway, forget ‘quiet luxury’ (yuk!) when billionaires are catapulting to space. Now we have ‘Republican hair,’ and American Psycho is getting a remake, high heels are back and ‘office siren’ is everywhere - from “respectable up top, dirty down below” suiting at Saint Laurent and Haider Ackermann’s sensual debut for Tom Ford, languid suiting intended for the “morning after.” It’s Carrie Bradshaw chasing after Mr Big in ways that we can now see are deranged wearing his white shirt. It’s the fact that Carrie, everybody, kind of wants a guy in finance?

Carrie Bradshaw, pretty boom boom! Image: HBO

What about everybody knowing that the status watches on The White Lotus - the ultimate rich people behaving badly - signify something about them? At least with The White Lotus we know there will be some consequences? Or will there? Maybe not! Maybe fortune favours the gauche!

(Read my interview with the show’s costumer designer on Vogue - she literally scrolled through the photos people tagged at five star resorts!)

What else? Oh, Gen Z is corporate cosplaying and everybody is wearing neckties, but not for the office. Nobody knows how to dress for the office anymore but they know where the good light is (in most offices this is “nowhere!”). Nice girls don’t get the corner office anyway, we all know that by now.

As Emilia Petraca noted in The Cut of the Boom Boom mood you can see everywhere if you’re looking,

“As runway collections are conceived of months in advance, I wondered if boom boom, like Trump voters, had been right under our noses for a while, quietly gaining ground. Maybe the “mob wife” aesthetic was the writing on the wall. Or perhaps this turn to the ostentatious was the natural next step in style’s constant progress, following the comeback of J.Crew and its “old money” look and The Row’s beige choke hold on actually wealthy American women — turning up the volume on quiet luxury until it was no longer quiet and then really very loud. When Balenciaga sent out fake wads of cash as invites for its spring 2023 show, was that a warning sign? Or when Kim Kardashian was named GQ’s Tycoon of the Year and covered the December 2023 issue wearing an oversize suit and tie? As conventional wisdom goes, five years into a decade is when it really becomes a decade. So here we are: the 2020s. Succession teed it up. Now, Playboy is back in print and an American Psycho remake is on the way. It’s no longer gauche to be bougie and brash. Online retailer Ssense currently sells a $55 T-shirt that reads YOU’RE A SLAVE TO MONEY THEN YOU DIE. The purists here are the butt of the joke.”

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We weren’t meant to aspire to the lives of anybody in Industry and Succession, Meghan Markle (Sussex?) as Caitlin Moran noted has sad eyes as she sprinkles dried flowers on everything while everybody says she’s out of touch with the times? But what are these times? Will they sell? Are they boom boom?

A book I am DESPERATE to read

Graydon Carter’s memoir about the absolute glory days of magazines, of course. Obsessed with this writer’s rare candour in revealing he was paid more than $498, 000 (USD!) to write three articles a year.

I also liked this line from Carter to the malcontents he was firing, that they had confused kindness with weakness. It’s absolutely not the same thing!

A book I inhaled

Curtis Sittenfeld’s book of short stories, Show Don’t Tell. I don’t usually love short stories but these - middle aged yearning really spoke to me… Also to be reunited with Lee Fiora at her boarding school reunion? Ooft, reading Prep for the first time as an out-of-place 20 year-old was like being turned inside out.

Love, Annie xx

Phoebe Philo’s debut for Celine, spring 2010 (obv I’d wear this still!).

There is surely nothing more alluring than the possibility of reinvention? The lore of all those ‘90s makeover movies lodges deep in our psyches! She’s All That we’ll say as we take off our glasses and shake down our hair.

Who gets to reinvent themselves though? After-all, wherever you go, there you are.

Which is why a personal rebrand can feel kind of off. Or at least, it will never feel quite authentic if you’re saying it yourself, you know? It’s kind of like trying to give yourself a nickname.

I was thinking about this when I watched Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s latest Instagram video about her new business. Firstly, this woman does not need any more criticism, let her have her jams!

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But was it cringe? (Yes). Does it matter? (No).

I loved Addison Rae’s cover and interview for Vogue France this month. Proof for one that you can rebrand - from TikTok star to French Vogue cover star. But actually you can be all of these things at once. Or you don’t need to forsake one part of yourself to get to another.

My favourite part, other than all of the very French questions (though must flag that I read the translated from the French version as my dream of learning French is not exactly going to plan) is her response to a question on cringe:

“Cringe” is the new “awkward”! But is it really awkward to be awkward? When you think about it, awkwardness is just an unexplored feeling, an unknown sensation. Any new emotion can cause discomfort, because you don’t know how to handle it. Cringe is sometimes that. But honestly, it would be too silly to be afraid to take the plunge for fear of being cringe. It’s by taking the plunge that you discover things about yourself.”

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I have a high sensitivity to awkwardness, mostly because I recognise it deeply in myself! I feel awkward a lot of the time, but I know too that you miss out on a lot if you spend your life trying to avoid it.

I also deeply think that if someone isn’t bothering anyone then simply let them be, and if they are - maybe we need to examine why this is so (see: personal anathema to cringe).

I’ve been thinking about reinvention in fashion this week too. As anybody remotely interested in fashion right now could authoritatively say, it’s been a season for “designer musical chairs.” So much upheaval, so much pressure. Which, obviously, these are big - and often publicly listed - businesses.

One of my favourite luxury analysts Luca Solca from Bernstein spoke of this on Lauren Sherman’s Fashion People podcast this week. “Being a me too without the qualities of the brand you are trying to imitate is not a recipe for success,” he said of where brands go wrong.

Meaning several things. One, trying to do what everyone else is doing will never work for you, or not forever, and two, you need to stay true to your own qualities. This doesn’t come from saying what you’re going to do, but, well, doing it.

When designers are tasked with reinvention a lot can get lost. You can only reinvent so far at a major fashion house - new ideas are demanded, but not so new they lose the qualities that make the brand exactly what it is. There needs to be some essence, in any way it can be parsed, of what the brand is. Otherwise, what’s the point? Trying to do what someone else is doing is not the answer either. Of course, of course, fashion is endlessly referenced and influenced by (and copied).

Think of the “Celine effect,” when brands tried to be like Phoebe Philo’s Celine to varying degrees of success. By the time you copy someone though, if they’re worth copying, they’re already onto their next idea.

Rachel Tashjian wrote recently about the “Rowdents,” for The Washington Post. That is, all the brands trying to be just like The Row. And well, who wouldn’t want to be like that? But also, where does it get you? Including as a consumer.

Maybe here: “Creative directors believe that an interesting outfit means you have a rich inner life. Sometimes that’s true, but with all this copying going on, we’re mostly seeing wearable credit card debt.”

Hermes spring/summer ‘25

I spoke about reinvention with Pierre Alexis Dumas, the artistic director of Hermès, and great-great-great grandson of Hermès founder Thierry Hermès in an interview for WISH two years ago. Not incidentally, Hermès is one of the few luxury brands truly defying the global slowdown right now.

Dumas is a deeply philosophical man who greatly respects creativity. He is incredibly generous with his time in interviews.

Hermès famously does not have a marketing division. It doesn’t do what other brands do!

“The world is changing. Nothing is constant, and the world of fashion changes all the time. So in an ever-changing world, how can we remain the same? The paradox is you've got to change to remain the same. I think we're sailing in the right direction. The direction has not changed. I feel we are very different from other brands. I don't compare myself, but we are a family-owned house. It's our name. It's the name of my grandmother at the entrance of the store. So, we really try to be true to our heritage, and we try to help the house evolve and be relevant in this day and age.”

Perhaps the most relevant thing in this day and age - with its constant urge to define ourselves, our personal brands, our authenticity - is to just actually stay true to ourselves.

Which is very easy, and very hard.

As the late Marianne Faithful - another misunderstood woman who defied what people thought of her - “All I have to do is what's right for me.”

The proof is in the jam!

Books

I’m out of sync with my own truest self and have not read much this week! Am still dipping in and out of Portrait of a Lady and am also reading a biography of Pamela Churchill, another misunderstood woman!

I also bought Anne Tyler’s new book, Three Days in June. I’m hoping to read it one weekend - everybody needs an Anne Tyler Afternoon every now and then, it’s practically medicinal.

Annie xx

Bridget Jones forever (Image via Universal)

‘If I’d known you were coming I would have worn a tinier nightie,’ Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, craggier, grumpier, still would) tells Bridget Jones in the new movie when she comes to visit him in the hospital.

He’s only reflex flirting though - an eternal lothario, which is a trope practically and sadly obsolete these days! Actually, it’s a quite sad scene in a quite sad film. He’s realised that his life, hanging out with models in the kind of bar when he probably asks them to turn the music down so that he can read the menu (with his phone torch!) is just a touch short of tragic. I still want his recipe for a perfect Filthy Bitch though.

Ageing, the way life batters you and you have to keep going is at the centre of the new Bridget Jones film and I think it’s Bridget Jones at her best.

Mostly, because she’s still exactly as she is. The difference is that in her ‘50s and having experienced true, shattering loss, she’s more confident. Less shapewear, more lacy thongs, less sticking it out at a terrible party and more ditching it for her real friends (real friends don’t make you feel bad unless you really deserve it!) and not putting up with less than she deserves.

Which isn’t to say that she isn’t terrified of the scary school mums who seem to be put together in every way. It’s just that probably she realises that everybody has their own stuff going on. Usually the meaner someone is, the unhappier they are.

It sort of feels like Bridget’s triumphant return. She’s always been the patron saint for messy women who are visibly trying (effortlessness afterall remains the ultimate and impossible mantra for how a woman should be!).

Then she got a bit out of step with culture because she dared to say out loud that she didn’t like her body. The bossy edict was that we had to love our bodies no matter what. A sham ultimately exposed by the take-up of ozempic (definitely feel that Bridget Jones would absolutely have had a dodgy doctor to supply her but then ultimately give it up because she’s a woman of appetite!).

Now she feels right again. Or maybe it’s that the women who grew up with her, and the Gen Z women who have discovered her, have realised that muddling through is really the best we can hope for.

This s/s ‘24 Miu Miu show was Bridget Jones coded right down to forgetting to put on trousers before leaving the house - relatable!

It’s why that Miu Miu show with the models racing down the runway with completely overstuffed handbags and little cardigans slightly askew resonated so deeply. This is me, I thought when I first saw those pictures. Then when I see Bridget with her battered Mulberry bag and messy ponytail, trying to do her best at home, at work, with her friends, I think this is me too.

Much has been written about the “frazzled English woman” aesthetic (a term coined by my brilliant colleague Ella!) with its nubby cardigans and hastily assembled and slightly eccentric ensembles.

"She's a whole mood, Bridget," the show’s costume designer Molly Emma Rowe told Instyle. "She's quite eclectic. She puts things together that she likes, and it doesn't always work, but she doesn't care. But as chaotic as Bridget is, I think there's something so confident. She doesn't care what people think.”

What freedom!

I don’t think Bridget thinks about her clothes too much - the movie’s costume designer says as much. Most of the clothes were sourced in Hampstead Heath vintage shops and then washed over and again to look well-worn. Bridget really wears her clothes, she doesn’t spend a lot of money on them apart from a few pieces. The movie is full of special little fashion Easter eggs (the Tiffany & co. silver heart, now with an added D charm, the coat she wore to the curry buffet dinner in the first film, her son wearing Mark Darcy’s terrible Christmas jumper at the holiday part - sob!).

But I think she’s less about an aesthetic and more an accumulation of a life. When you do this, you’re comfortable in your skin. Is this just getting dressed or is it true personal style?

Lately I’ve been thinking about mystery. Bridget Jones may have her complexities, like we all do, but she also has absolutely no mystique. Remember when her mantra is to be a “poised ice queen” but she’s too warm for that!

Bridget wears her heart on her sleeve and is famously verbally incontinent. I too have no mystery. I long to be the kind of woman who keeps her cards close to her chest, and doesn’t feel the need to fill a gap in a conversation. To be inscrutable and chic and to never post on Instagram.

The other week one of the Vogue fashion assistants complimented me on my skirt. I cannot underscore what it means to have a Vogue fashion assistant (the coolest fashion girls on earth!) compliment a geriatric millennial mother-of-two on her outfit! By the end of the day I’d sent her a link to the skirt - it’s on sale! I wrote - and considered tagging her in an IG story. Too much, Annie, I eventually thought.

But I’ll never be the kind of person who doesn’t immediately tell someone that something is on sale!

I loved that Bridget Jones ultimately finds peace and that it includes all the parts that are heart breaking and embarrassing and wrong. That in all this her outfits are always a little bit skewiff.

That’s just life. It’s better to be comfortable with yourself, just as you are.

Anti-depressant fashion

Loved this line - antidepressant fashion - in one of Sarah Shapiro’s dispatches for Puck this week. She described it as a shift in American consumers desiring comfort and practicality to fashion that reflects how life is strange right now. Clothes should either reflect or offer respite from this. What this is, writes Shapiro, is tension.

Most recently at New York Fashion Week I think we’re seeing this - feeling this maybe even more - in bulbous and fantastical shapes at Marc Jacobs, and the sense of prim coming undone into fun at Altuzarra. Maybe in Kendrick Lamar’s bootcut jeans too? Can’t wait to see the shows later this month. What is Mrs Prada thinking about!

To borrow from the Normcore guy, I think a vibe shift is happening. It has to be, life is too unsettling for it not to be.

Books

Currently I am dipping in and out of several books at once (I’m feeling unsettled!).

This is what I have on the go:

The Portrait of a Lady

A gentleman of style! This year I’m reading and re-reading classics and the sentences in this are perfect and I wouldn’t be the only woman who can relate to Isabel Archer, wanting more for her life but not able to pin down exactly what this is.

Fashion is Spinach

This is a fascinating, no-nonsense book written by Elizabeth Hawes, who was a stylist, copyist (the story of the once boom industry of American department stores copying Paris designs is fascinating and integral to understanding how fashion works) and Depression-era fashion designer.

Cherie

I devoured this one. The follies of lust and beauty! This sensuous book is over 100 years old and yet is right on the zeitgeist for the current mode for ‘age-gap’ or ‘May- December’ relationships and the unpicking of power and the exchange inherent in them.

Annie xx

A question that fashion people love to ask is whether sexy is back. Sexy dressing being, after-all, kind of the antithesis of fashion until it is decreed that it isn’t. Intellectual, kooky, oversized, pared-back effortlessness tend to be the go-to propositions (wink!) for insidery fashion. A few years ago when we were all asking if sexy was back I asked my gorgeous Vogue colleagues to dress in the ‘new sexy.’ We were all talking about how post pandemic (actually it was still going) the fashion world was reacting to those confined, sweatpant-ed times with corsets and cut-outs, filmy silks and mini-skirts.

The mini-skirts stayed - in fact they went too when pantlessness came in - so too the crop tops and scant lingerie-inspired looks from the likes of London-based Albanian designer Nensi Dojaka.

I interviewed Dojaka during this time and she told me thinks of her designs as empowering for women, a summation of contrarian instincts.

“When I design and I think about looks, if I have a look that is a bit more on the aggressive side, I always have a very lightweight bottom because for me, this fragile and delicate part is very important. Because this is how I see women, you know, between … strong and delicate. This is how femininity is for me, about the balance of both.”

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But what is sexy dressing really? It’s not the Victoria’s Secret runway, another absolute antithesis of fashion and also sexiness - which returned last year and nobody cared.

Is it Balenciaga’s lingerie on the runway last year that caused the inimitable Vanessa Friedman to ask if ‘sex is back on the table?’

What about Lauren Sanchez’s overtly sexy Inauguration ensemble? The white bra heard around the world was, if anything, a crystallisation of an overt shift in culture. As Naomi Fry wrote in the New Yorker, the return of breasts (another thing that fashion periodically decrees are either in or out, which is unfortunate for all of us in possession of them) signals something as such.

Of this hostile political climate we can make of the return of cleavage, as Fry writes, “The long-held hemline index, a theory that correlates the strength of the economy with women’s skirt lengths—minis in a bull market, midis in bear—doesn’t quite fit our current sociopolitical moment, but it could make more sense to consider what might be called the boob index. What does it say about the times we’re in when vocal attention is paid to breasts in the public sphere?”

As Fry writes too, these are not tasteful and demure times. It’s every woman and her hoiked up, pushed-up breasts for herself.

This past week I’ve watched a lot of movies about sex, but actually they’re about power. Anora, which broke my heart, is about Ani, a dancer and sex worker who’s trying to get her piece of the American Dream. Are her fake nails and tiny little thongs and fur sexy? Then I watched Babygirl - Nicole Kidman a revelation! - her pencil skirts and silky pussy bow blouses with trailing ties and spiky heels definitely are, but is that just because we’ve been told as such? In 9½ Weeks I can’t get over how good the ‘80s beige overcoat and little grey linen suits and perfect white shirts are. The bowler hat though, it has to go! Was Kim Basinger the hottest in the movie when she dressed as a man for the scene in the club and smoked a cigar? Maybe!? What about the scene in the equestrian shop? No wonder Helmut Newton once said Hermes was “the world’s greatest sex shop – with its whips, saddles, spurs”.

Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and the bowler hat in 9½ Weeks.

Oh then, Newton, creator of some of the world’s sexiest fashion editorials (not everybody loved them, Susan Sontag called him a misogynist to his face). I had cause to revisit one of his editorials made with the inimitable Polly Mellen who died, aged 100, late last year.

The Story of Oh, is - as Emilia Petrarca wrote in Harper’s Bazaar in an article called ‘The Serious Woman’s Guide To Dressing Sexy’ , it’s on the brain huh - the kind of editorial that would probably get you fired today!

It’s very erotic. It makes you feel something. Even, as Petrarca notes, with Mellon’s breathy little bits of copy. Things like “the dégagé charm of a neckline left untied” and “the imagination to knot a streak of fishnet around her bare throat” and “this isn’t the moment for anything else on the body except perfume.” Fragrance ought to be applied by the way, notes Mellen, in one’s ‘episternal notch,’ the hollow at the bottom of the throat.

Anyway, I think what we’re looking for in these movies, in sexy dressing, is the contrary, the ugly, the perverse.

Pencil skirts, for one, are sexy because they’re both demure and hot, repressed and up for it.

As Vogue wrote in the 1940s of the tailored skirt suit, “A suit to work in, serve in, live in, all through the busy daylight hours of your new double-duty life.”

Ahhh, double duty life. Isn’t this the power source of the allure - the librarian who lets her hair down, the chief executive who laps at a bowl of milk, the brassy sex worker who’s smarter and more self possessed than the people who own the private jet.

Fashion has always been obsessed with tension. It’s why it will always toy with ideas of sexy dressing. Ultimately it’s on us to decide. That’s our power source. All of these clothes can be sexy clothes, it just depends on its wearer.

Not the bowler hat though!

Books

I absolutely inhaled John Fairchild’s Chic Savages. Fairchild was the editor and publisher of Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) from 1960 to 1996 and the founder of W magazine. He was acerbic and witty and feared and admired and beloved and this book, written in 1989 is so perfect on fashion’s many follies and frailties and fabulousness. Obviously so much has changed since then, this is pre the internet for one! - but also people kind of stay the same. One thing I dog eared was his ‘ins and outs’ list. Fairchild really invented this kind of list, in its truest form. Like all the best lists it is both imperious and opaque, definitive and illogical (this is why I adore society decorator Nicky Haslem’s lists of what’s common every year, for eg, last year it was almond milk and Whatsapp - I don’t know, it just is!).

But the important footnote is his reminder that it’s a very fine line between who is in and who is out, and these places can swap in an instant.

Speaking of imperious, I’m also dipping in and out of The Diary of Virginia Woolf (volume 1, 1915-19). One of the things she can’t stand are “fashionable ladies, who want to be told what to read.’ Oh no!

Love,

Annie xx

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Has there ever been a more enticing concept for an optimised self than being a woman in possession of a ‘uniform?’

A woman so decisive she wears the same shirt she gets made custom with her just-so Levi’s and scuffed-enough cowboy boots. A woman with a look so defined you know her interior world is rich! Which is the point of chicness anyway, you can’t have it - not the proper kind - without an interesting mind and an inimitable point of view

Yet the alluring thing about having a uniform is that it implies you’re too busy doing other things, or want to be, to think about what you wear. But the kind of person who wants a uniform tends to be the kind of person who thinks a lot about clothes. A conundrum!

For the other kind of uniform is worn by people who truly do not care about clothes and I don’t think that this is us? Or it’s not me. Maybe it’s your dad with a five-pack of Bonds t-shirts? Anyway, the New York Times says normcore never died, it just got more expensive! Dads have the best style.

Anyway, the women whose ‘uniform’ has been valorised aren’t particularly this either.

Like Fran Lebowitz. Who fits the exact description above. Whose interior world is vast and rich and she has, she told me when I interviewed her for Vogue last year, 12,000 books in her apartment (and a private librarian to sort them, a dream job?!).

What’s more, Lebowitz hates it when people say she has a uniform. Other things she told me that are overrated? Everything!

This is what she said when I asked her about it:

“People show me pictures of myself [and say], ‘Look at this picture from 1977, you are dressed exactly the same.’ So first of all, no. To you it looks the same because you know nothing about clothes. I mean, it’s the same kind of idea. But the clothes I have now... they’re not the same jackets, they’re not the same shirts. They are the same jeans however, yes, that is true. But other than that, they’re really not the same. People also say, ‘You wear a uniform,’—it’s not a uniform. ‘You always wear a black jacket.’ I don’t even own a black jacket except for my dinner jacket,” she says.

“I love clothes. I’m really interested in them. But most people who think that they’re interested in clothes are not really interested in clothes. They’re interested in conveying some sort of notion of themselves.”

Ah, notions of ourselves. Tricky things.

Lebowitz is very interested in clothes. Most of the smart people I’ve ever come across are! And like a person who really loves clothes, like truly does, Lebowitz is pedantic about them. She learned this from her father who had shoe trees in his shoes. She takes care of her things. If you paid more attention to her clothes, she was saying, you’d see that it wasn’t a uniform. It’s her things that she loves and chooses carefully!

I’ve been rethinking uniforms anyway after reading Once Upon a Time: the captivating life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Like every other fashion writer I’ve written a thesis on the allure of her style, how she was mysterious and chic because she kept her private life to herself, about her ‘effortful effortlessness’ and ‘throwaway chic’ style and how it was minimalist but also avant-garde and still influences fashion today! (These were all different articles over the course of six years - the hold has been strong!). Uniforms are more to do with having style and not being too fashion.

(I do think about, and perpetually try to recreate this perfect Yohji look all of the time though).

carolyn_iconic

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(One of the many, many instagrams dedicated to CBK’s style)

But I didn’t really know that Bessette-Kennedy was actually a life force who had it drained from her by the veracity of the press and everybody who wanted a piece of her. Who raged against the invasion of her privacy. She started wearing her spare, monochrome ‘uniform’ to try and get the press to stop being so interested in her, but it only made her ‘timeless.’ She tried to be perfect so they’d have nothing on her.

In all of this Yohji Yamamoto was her protector. As the designer once said of his work, “I make clothing like armour. I wanted to protect the clothes themselves from fashion, and at the same time protect the woman’s body from something.”

But as the book points out, until now all we really have from her too short life are the clothes she wore and what we think they mean. And it means a lot, but it’s not everything.

So too the idea of a uniform as a shorthand for who you are, or aren’t.

Anyway, I really like thinking about clothes. I’ll never have the arch discipline required to be exacting about my taste in them. But I think I’m learning it’s better to let go of notions of yourself - especially the ones of others.

Bridget forever

Skirt off sick? Honestly, I’d wear this to work today!

I watched the first Bridget Jones movie on a plane last week (it remains perfect if from a v different time, just as it is!). I think for all the reasons I adore Bridget Jones this is the main one: that you don’t have to be a self-serious person to be good at your job. You can also do things your own way too. Most of us are just fannying about with press releases anyway.

I loved this interview between Hugh Grant and Renee Zellweger in British Vogue and I really loved how pedantic Hugh Grant is about jeans. You simply must be!

HG: I did a film last year. I needed a pair of jeans and said, “but not stretch”. They couldn’t find any in the whole of the United States of America.

RZ: Levi Strauss! Get you some Wranglers!

(“But not stretch”).

Something else I’m thinking about is Jonathan Anderson’s interview on Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast where he talked about people with great faces. Like the late Maggie Smith who he put into a Loewe campaign because Anderson puts only the best and most interesting people in his work. People with faces, he said, that wear their time on this planet. That look like they’d be great at a dinner party. What gets lost if we don’t have faces like this anymore?

Inimitable Maggie Smith for Loewe.

A footnote on the return of ‘normcore’ (obviously it never went away, it’s the ultimate status dressing) this was such a nice line from Jacob Gallagher: “I encountered a conventional camel V-neck in a feathery cashmere and black leather clogs that were like Birkenstocks sent to finishing school.”

Ha!

BOOKS

I gobbled up The Mitford Scandal: Diana Mitford and a death at the party. Straight to the Hons cupboard! These books are so light and frothy and if you’re a Nancy Mitford obsessive you will love the fantasy of more time with the Mitford family and the glittering assortment of people in their orbit throughout history. With a bonus murder mystery!

Ex-Wife - I cannot believe this came out in 1929. It could have been written now! I think women who colour outside the lines got cheated by the ending. Though reading about the life of author Ursula Parrott, who lived a glamorous, high-blazing, unconventional life but died alone in a charity cancer ward, I understand why she did it though. Nobody wants to know it might not all end well. Then again, who’s to say the price of a different life isn’t worth it. Anyway, spiky, hard-edged women obsessed with clothes are my cup of tea!

Love,

Annie xx

Portrait of @pollyallenmellen by @stevenmeiselofficial for @vogueitalia (Polly Mellen forever)

You have to feel bad for ‘aesthetic.’ It used to stand for something! I was thinking about this when I read a tiny collection of Virginia Woolf essays on art on our way back from Fiji this week (I heartily recommend slim novellas for an easily won sense of accomplishment). In it she defends the notion of “aesthetic emotion”. It was in the context of the colours of Cezanne’s paintings, but the idea is that everybody has access to aesthetic emotion. You don’t need to know what you’re experiencing, just to experience it. To feel something! Anyway language doesn’t always explain what you’re feeling, it can be slippery like that.

This is how I want to approach 2025. To go to art galleries and see what I respond to. We just bought a house (a house!) and I want to gradually choose things I’m drawn to and not think about our house as having any ‘aesthetic’ other than things we love and that mean something to us. I feel like I want to paint a wall green and have a striped armchair, I don’t know why, I just do!

Picture: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf in a Deckchair (1912), Oil on board, Mimi and Peter Haas. (Apparently Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, said this portrait was “more like Virginia in its way than anything else of her” and this is exactly how I hope to spend the rest of the summer break).

This is how I want to get dressed too. Or actually, I’m going to be channeling the late Polly Mellen, the iconic fashion editor - creator of what is still the world’s most expensive fashion shoot (a 26 page spread lensed by Richard Avedon with Veruschka in Japan!) who died this year.

Polly was a true original. She lived to be 100! Like true originals (she was the protégé of another such one, Diana Vreeland) she had her own idiosyncratic way of speaking. She made declarations.

One editor described her mode and manners as speaking as “fashion iambic pentameter.”

“like a Vogue caption, often in triplets. Say anything three times and it sounds important. Somehow she sounded like she was addressing the human condition.”

Honestly, I think she probably was!

She was also, obviously, one of what seems an increasingly rare breed of person who dressed for herself and didn’t need to wear the ‘right’ things, or worse dress to fit in.

As she told The New York Times of her school years at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington (alma mater of Jacqueline Bouvier), “I’d wear my sweaters backward or tie my shoes with red laces. Looking like everybody else bored me. I should have paid more attention to my studies. Instead of college, I went to the College Shop at Lord & Taylor.”

Polly, and oh my god you have to see her Connecticut garden, famously cried when she really loved a fashion show. The designers would ask backstage if she had.

This is one newspaper headline about her: “Oh, my. Nobody hyperventilates over fashion like Polly Mellen!”

Here are two things I love: grand dames who make declarations and fans. Here’s to a 2025 of showing what we love, and effusively so.

BOOKS

I’ve been thinking about my top ten books of 2024. As usual, there’s scarcely a book by a MAN in sight (exceptions always for Alan Hollinghurst). This year I tried to expand beyond my favourite genre of complicated, spiky women figuring out how to be. Though these still feature prominently. Something I’m going to keep on with in 2025 is to read more non-fiction and classic books I haven’t read, or read when I was younger and missed the point of them. I love going back to books with more life under me, more understanding of how people are and why they do the things they do.

So, below, my top ten reads of the year (in no particular order).

Scaffolding, Lauren Elkin

A novel, of sorts, or maybe more a series of observations from three people who live in the same apartment in Paris in different periods of time eking out what and why we desire, what kind of love lasts, what makes a home, how to find peace with yourself. Illuminating.

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner

I’ve been on a spy jag of late, who hasn’t (Black Doves on Netflix was perfect, even if the voice of Paddington as a gun for hire was unnerving!). This upended the trope and unpicked people’s weaknesses and it was unnerving and delicious.

Wives Like Us, Plum Sykes

I adore Plum Sykes! It’s like she is constantly wearing a wire in her interactions with society (and those aspiring) and she’s perfect on what people wear and how they decorate their homes when they’re either thinking too much, or not at all, about what their ‘aesthetic’ says about them.

All Fours, Miranda July

This knocked me out!

The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton also basically wore a wire (or would have had they been invented in her time) in her interactions with the upper crust society she belonged to. Nobody captures their manners and whims and fears better and this book about ambitious Undine Spragg is an apt-for-today warning about how happiness doesn’t come by acquiring things. Or at least, it has a cost beyond fiscally!

Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst

Not my favourite Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty is), but as elegant and languid and devastating as I could hope for. The ending wounded me.

Consider Yourself Kissed, Jessica Stanley

This one isn’t out until April but you must, must buy (pre-order!) my brilliant friend Jessica Stanley’s perfect book. Any woman in their ‘30s, and especially mothers, will feel recognised in still trying to hold onto your precious dreams that you barely even whisper out loud.

Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout

Oh, Elizabeth. Nobody understands people’s peculiarities and what makes a community and what makes a person like her.

The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne

Everything I could hope for in a celebrity memoir - truly juicy, Harrison Ford when he was still a carpenter, almost too much airing of dirty laundry, Joan Didion. Perfect!

Foster, Claire Keegan

That thing I said about novellas? You can read an entire Claire Keegan in your lunch break and feel profoundly moved, like socked to your stomach and your most secret self. Not a word is wasted.

Wishing you a peaceful, emotionally aesthetic 2025. Thank you for reading my newsletter, I can’t believe how many smart and lovely people write to me to say that you do.

Love,

Annie xx

Image: courtesy of Saint Laurent

Like many overlooked women in their time, Eve Babitz was right about many things. Including that it is much better to describe the feeling of being entirely burnt out this time of year as squalid overboogie. You’ve gone to the third venue, and it’s never a good idea! In my next life phase I’m going to really know this.

Of course, like every self-respecting bookish elder millennial who has written at least one essay in the style of Joan Didion, I inhaled Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik’s new book.

I’ve got a piece coming out on it soon but something I really took from it - other than style is something you can work at - is that it takes a lot of courage to live an unconventional life. And it can come at great cost.

I was reminded of this when I saw the Sydney Theatre Company’s utterly brilliant Sunday this week. Based on the life of Sunday and John Reed, who built an artist’s utopia in Heidelberg in Melbourne (it’s a beautiful museum and garden that you can visit now). Sunday was a woman who was game and brave and determined to live on her own terms in a world that then, and now, doesn’t tend to like this. I haven’t seen a play in a long time that moved me like this. It was profound.

Nikki Shiels was mesmerising in Sunday! Also very chic trousers and blousy shirts - v redoubtable way to dress.

Also I really liked a line Sunday says to her son at the very beginning when she tells him off for swearing and he says but you swear! And she says something like, ‘a woman saying bloody means she’s redoubtable, a man saying bloody is just common.’ A redoubtable woman! Yes.

Another redoubtable woman I came across this week is Ophélie Renouard, the French PR executive who founded Le Bal des Débutantes, i.e. the gloriously anachronistic debutants ball that showcases the creme de la creme of debs and their cavaliers (usually obscure minor Euro royals). Obviously I’m obsessed with it.

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As Rachel Tashjian, another redoubtable woman, wrote in The Washington Post of the spectacle,

“Le Bal captures the strange inanity of debutante balls — to whom are these women … coming out? — but it also reveals their deluded splendour. Whereas the traditional deb ball solidifies a social stratus enforced since the debutante’s birth, at le Bal, heirs to defunct monarchies and children of billionaires mingle with the finest spawn of Hollywood and other forms of corporatised culture.”

The good thing about this ball, I guess, is that it shows that money is the great equaliser!? You can buy your way in and this ball allows you to (finally!) show off your spoils.

Renouard, I’m gathering from the Proustian Q&A she did with Airmail, is the kind of woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. Part of being redoubtable is being definitive. It’s a power move!

Her enemies? “Vulgarity, dishonesty and disloyalty.”

Her kiss off? “See you soon” (lol!)

Her insult: “Not worth it” (this is of course perfect, it’s better to be talked about than not at all!)

Speaking of Proust, I’m obsessed with Saint Laurent’s new short films based on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Waters, Chloë Sevigny, Addison Rae and more). Why aren’t we talking about this more!

It took me into a google rabbit hole of Yves Saint Laurent’s obsession with Proust - though apparently he never finished the book! This is where I confess I too am someone who likes the idea of being someone who reads Proust but am also yet to finish it. I’m in search of lost time! Maybe over the Christmas break.

I came across an article by yet another redoubtable woman, the New Yorker’s Judith Thurman, one of the ultimate fashion writers, on Saint Laurent’s retirement and his final show. This is a line from his press conference,

“I have grappled with anguish and I have been through sheer hell . . . I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquillisers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of a hospital. But one day I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober. It was Marcel Proust who taught me that ‘the magnificent and pitiful family of the hypersensitive are the salt of the earth.’ “

Image: courtesy of Saint Laurent

(Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow - mother of this year’s star deb at the Bal, Apple - was turned away from the door, though Lauren Bacall, Bianca Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Nan Kempner, Diane von Furstenberg, Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve were in attendance, I mean!).

Later in the piece Thurman writes that Proust taught Saint Laurent well, that “art, elegance, snobbery, nostalgia, and vice distilled with supreme purity make an eau-de-vie that goes straight to the head.”

I loved too her observation that no other designer had been so “gallant” toward women, or “resistant to the temptation of modern fashion to make clothes as difficult, ironic, contemptuous, or ugly as modern art. Saint Laurent takes it upon himself to anticipate every potential humiliation in the bulge of a seam, the pucker of a pleat, the mockery of a bow. His cutting and drapery are a lover’s discourse with the female body.”

I.e clothes for a redoubtable woman!

Image: courtesy of Saint Laurent

Finally, I think to be redoubtable you can’t have regrets. How else would you have character? I loved this interview with the artist Maira Kalma about her new book that examines the idea of remorse, a different thing, through figures such as Tolstoy and his wife and Chekhov.

This is how Kalma differentiates the two:

“And I say regret is, ‘I’m sorry I ruined the roast, I’m sorry I didn’t come to your birthday party.’ Regret is OK,” she said. “Remorse is, ‘I’m sorry I ruined your life.’ Remorse is deep sorrow and guilt. There is more history. There’s more, ‘What did I do to somebody?’”

I loved this bit too where she talks about observing people sitting next to her in the lunch kiosk at the MOMA:

“The last time I went there, the two people next to me ordered a million desserts,” she said. “I said, ‘Are you having some kind of dessert tasting?’ And they said, ‘No, we just ordered all the desserts.’ And I thought these people know how to live.”

BOOKS

(Speaking of knowing how to live! I read this beautiful book in the most glorious place!)

I was reunited with Olive Kitteridge in Elizabeth Strout’s beautiful new book Tell Me Everything. Oh I loved it! I dog-eared so many pages, one of my many bad qualities. It’s about how people are just people. They are mean and petty and make mistakes and are kind and good and accepting because they’re people.

“People suffer. They live, they have hope, they even have love, and they still suffer. Everyone does. Those who think they’ve not suffered are lying to themselves.”

“It’s just life, Mrs Hassellbeck, that’s all it is. Life.”

We’d all have more grace if we remembered that!

Love,

Annie

Diane von Fürstenberg, still the sexiest woman alive. Picture: Disney+

I skipped my newsletter last week. I could say it was because I was in China for work. Or because my to-do list makes me want to cry (this includes finding an outfit for my daughter’s glam ‘n’ glow disco!). But really, I have the same amount of hours in my day as Beyonce! It’s not that. 

The real reason is, like it is every time, is that when the world gets unbearable my genre of journalism (luxury! watches and jewellery! fashion!) always feels a bit piffly. This is me taking on the bias of all the men with their shirt sleeves rolled up in a news room, I know! I am the first person to defend fashion. It’s not only a big business that employs hundreds of millions of people, but it is an essential lens to understand politics, the world, economies, people and what motivates them. I believe in fashion. Still, I wanted to write about hats and the only one I could think of was bright red and unbearably ugly.

I interviewed a fashion designer recently who spoke about creating his beautiful world, and you’re allowed to come in, but don’t bring your shit with you! This is how I feel with my newsletter and the things I post on Instagram. But I have resolved one tiny thing. I don’t think it is a good thing to be quite so stomach droppingly surprised anymore. I don’t want to lose faith in people. But I need to expand my world. So when it turns out that someone I follow on Instagram, just some random, turned out to be a rabid Trump supporter - the worst, gleeful kind, I didn’t immediately unfollow her. I hovered over the button! What we give our attention to in this strange world is telling (and money making) after-all, and I don’t want her to have mine. But I’ll keep her there as a reminder that outside my beautiful, lucky world are people who have hardened and narrowed. I need to understand why so I don’t keep being surprised. 

Of the many articles and pieces of analysis I’ve read post election I found odd comfort in is this one, shared by Cheryl Strayed (balm to everyone’s soul). It’s easy to say things, it’s much harder to do them.

Martha with her car phone in the ‘80s.

Back to nice things and there are several things I am obsessed with this week, chiefly the Martha Stewart and Diane von Fürstenberg documentaries. Ballsy, tough, glamorous women who have sensual oil paintings of themselves in their homes and had a car phone in the ‘80s are my favourite kind. Martha’s quotes have been memed to death, but what I took from the documentary is that it is a powerful thing to reinvent yourself.

This goes for DVF, who must be the world’s most sensual woman. Her success, as Fran Lebowitz (did I tell you her I interviewed once!) says in the documentary is that extraordinary thing where she makes it seem like with one nifty little wrap dress you too could be a little bit like her. It’s not going to happen of course, but there’s still that tantalising little bit of, well, it might.

Some other notes from DVF:

• If you pack lightly you live lightly - my goal is to be a better packer in 2025, but tell my husband I’m not going to use his packing system! I want to roll like two slinky little wrap dresses and a pair of heels and one multi-purpose oil into my suitcase

• Fear is not an option! What if I stopped worrying about everything? How much more time I’d have to sit for an oil painting of myself?!

• You want to remember the woman, not the dress - the only way to do this is to wear clothes that you feel like yourself in.

Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast is a masterclass in finding clothes you feel like yourself in, and why this matters. Zadie Smith was on it this week (!) and it was a joy. In part because it was a reminder that, of course, you can be the smartest woman on earth, and also care deeply about clothes. Appreciation of fashion is a kind of intelligence I think, especially when it’s so easy to dismiss.

It’s something that Zadie Smith talks about on the podcast, about how she dressed like a serious man, or in shapeless sexless blazer-y things in her early years so that she would be taken seriously as a writer. And how age has freed her to truly not care what people think.

I loved so much about this conversation. Like how when she attended an event with a dress code ‘business casual’ Stella McCartney told her that her bizarre outfit made her look like a secretary at Nat West in the ‘70s and she felt wrong and out of sorts all night (“I couldn’t think, I sweated!”). Firstly, business casual is an impossible dress code, and second, a bad outfit affects your ability to think straight. It’s true! I loved that Joan Crawford is one of her style icons, that she is a style advisor to her friends and that she thinks handkerchief hems are an abomination.

Knowing what you hate is as important as knowing what you love - in fashion and in life, I think. Zadie mentions Martin Amis (of course, because she doesn’t have a smart phone like the rest of us with our decaying brains) in this too, about how he said something about not being a leaf in the wind of a trend.

The quote actually came from an interview he gave to the Los Angeles Review of Books and it was about how he and his father disagreed about Catch-22.

“My father and I used to disagree about Catch-22. He thought it was crap. He used to say of me that I was a leaf in the wind of trend and fashion.”

Same, Martin.

As Bella Freud says in this episode, with the right outfit you can think better. And it’s not even about it looking great. It’s more that you’ve cleared the decks in a way to concentrate on other things.

It’s something I spoke to Amy Smilovic from Tibi about earlier this month too. With her styling sessions online and her philosophies around ‘creative pragmatism’ and ‘without fail’ wardrobe pieces, she’s given women a way to dress in a way that gives them space to just be. 

Amy Smilovic from Tibi.

As she told me for the article:

“I hear this often, and I know it might just sound so bizarre, but [customers] will tell me that even on the day of their husband’s death or their son’s death, going to a funeral, on a day that you’re not looking to be the best dressed at the funeral. And it is the last thing you ever want to think about ever having to do or get dressed for. But to somehow just sit there and at least feel like yourself in whatever you’ve just grabbed is so oddly comforting,” she says.

“So whether it’s you’ve got a big meeting with board members or the worst day of your life or the best day of your life, just to be able to show up and enjoy that day or experience what you should be experiencing that day rather than anything else is so liberating for people.”

We also spoke about trends, and how most of the micro-trends you see online are not real things! Step outside and you will not see people wearing clown-core or whatever. But we also spoke about how trends are actually essential in understanding fashion history, the roles of women, how we live.

As Amy says, “There's trends and then there's trends. If you think about the way trends were historically looked at, there were trends for corsetry, which meant that at that time, women were really confined to being at home or being looked at. And then you have the twenties where the corsetry was removed and there was a lot more freedom and experimentation. You have the fifties where things got very cleaned up and proper. You have the sixties, which started to bring in a movement of youth culture. And the seventies were about rebellion and the eighties were about strength. And the nineties were about kind of grounding and settling and experimentation. Those are trends that are driven by the waves of what's happening in the world and where our head is. I fully subscribe to those trends.”

So do I!

Grounded fancy!

Finally, I am dressing with more joy right now. You’ve got to find it when you can! And I’ve found it in a new, mid-life, obsession with sequins. Specifically sequined skirts which I have now realised are the perfect thing for adding a kind of glimmering, swishing texture and vitality to a look! The key thing to not feeling like a prom queen or a six-year-old at her glam ‘ glow disco (my own six-year-old loves this look for me) is to balance it out with something more utilitarian. My favourite outfit formula right now is a sequin skirt with a navy crewneck sweater and sandals or flat slingbacks. A plain T-shirt would be perfect too. I also wore my Harris Tapper one to the ballet with a white button-down I stole from my husband. All of these formulas offer a grounded kind of fancy. Anyway, as my friend Hannah says, sequins give joy to everyone - people always comment on them because it lifts their spirits too. Basically they’re an act of public service.

This is my favourite ever skirt from Jac & Jack

And this is my other favourite ever skirt, from Harris Tapper 

One more really nice thing: I loved this speech from Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry, who won the CFDA international designer of the year. 

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When I interviewed him in 2022 he also told me the line he said in the speech, about how someone important to him had told me that dreams are expensive. So is it worth it? I asked him, and he looked at me in his very thoughtful way and I SWEAR he said, wow, these are really good questions. 

And he said:

“God, I think so. I don’t know if I’ll know for sure until like in 20 years. It comes at a huge cost. I just feel you have to walk through the doors that are open to you in life and this door is just open, so here we are. I think that it is worth it. I think it is.”

Books

I finally finished Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, and it was beautiful. It was both a coming out, and coming into being story. I took from it the gift of ageing and who softens and who hardens into themselves and the possibilities when you let someone in. Also, Alan Hollinghurst is so funny.

I’ve decided to go on an Edith Wharton jag - nobody chronicled the peculiarities of the upper classes, and those aspiring to be, better. I’m currently reading The Custom of the Country.

Annie xx

Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals - woof! Picture: Disney+

Sometimes I think telly comes along at exactly the right moment. Like Emily in Paris in the depths of lockdown. And a proper Jilly Cooper bonkbuster when the world is unrelentingly heavy. You know what I think we’ve all  been craving? Decadence and some jolly, winky, campy innuendo. It’s sorely lacking in daily discourse! That’s probably why everybody went so mad for Andrew Garfield and Amelia Dimoldenberg’s flirt-fest on Chicken Shop Date. Everybody flirts in Jilly’s bucolic, sybaritic worlds! 

As Guardian fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley once wrote of Jilly Cooper’s universe, “I love that there is no bad day that can't be vastly improved by washing your hair and opening a bottle of champagne.”

Victoria Smurfit as Maud, wife of TV star Declan, on Rivals - now this is a party dress, and an entrance (on a camel!). Picture: Disney+

I adore Jilly Cooper, though I admit I have only read a few from her oeuvre - which is vast and unendingly delicious. 

But Riders and Rivals, her two most famous, I have, and I’ve loved caddish Rupert Campbell-Black hopelessly since. The Disney+ adaptation is the biggest treat and beyond it being so lush and campy and fun, I’m obsessed with the fashion. I love Cameron’s high octane houndstooth suits and the taffeta party dresses (bring back proper party dresses), the lurid Argyle jumpers and the pinstripes and cigars of awful Lord Baddingham.

The Eighties, that much maligned decade of baby’s breath and bubble hems, shoulder pads and taffeta puffs is having a glorious revival. It is in full roar in Rivals. Princess Diana, queen of the Sloane Rangers and patron saint of pie crust collars, was clearly on the vision board and I cannot get enough.

In proof that you really ought to hold onto your clothes, the most recent seasons have been rife with polka dots (Valentino), bubble skirts (Coperni), leopard print (everywhere but especially Versace) and major shouldered suiting (Saint Laurent, Rabanne). Anthony Vaccarello said Patrick Bateman, problematic pin-up for the office, was an inspiration for his Saint Laurent menswear collection, not to mention the strong shoulders and Working Girl references for his womenswear collection in Paris this month. On the American Psycho revival by the way, my pick is Patrick Bateman wearing only Loro Piana, his suits made in perpetuity by the late Edward Sexton and a very rare Patek Phillippe Nautilus! A fun fact, Bret Easton Ellis once read out of one of my tweets (I used to tweet!) at an event in Melbourne years ago (I bought tickets to see Bret Easton Ellis!) and said it was cute.

Saint Laurent Spring ‘25.

Anyway, as the show’s costume designer Ray Holman told Grazia UK of the fashion on the show: ‘Power dressing was the thing and maybe we’ve come full circle, maybe people need to feel that tingle of a glamorous outfit and feel the power of a shoulder pad.”

Golly, don’t we all want to feel a tingle right now? 

Some other Jilly things: Pandora Sykes interviewed the cast.

One of my favourite ever Sentimental Garbage episodes was JoJo Moyes on Riders (Caroline O’Donoghue says that Riders was her MOST requested book for the podcast!)

Nobody does ghastly quite like wonderful David Tennant. I love when the very pure Cockney millionaire Freddie Jones tells him he’s the worst kind of snob, the kind who’d forgotten where he came from.

There is no better class barometer in England than the state of your waxed Barbour jacket and riding boots.

On the subject of riding boots (everybody wants a pair!) am also obsessed with Vogue bringing back this tidbit from Tatler on King Charles starring on the cover in his polo-playing years with the headline, 

“Is Prince Charles too sexy for his own good?” 

The King, by the way, is a man of a style.

Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, I’d wear this today!

Speaking of the ‘80s, I watched You’ve Got Mail on the plane home last week, and Meg Ryan’s outfits were adorable and perfect. I know When Harry Met Sally is the pin-up for cosy, nubby sweater weather outfits, but the cardigan twin-sets here, the black tights and Oxfords cutie Kathleen wore with everything were just right. The show’s costume designer told Instyle US of her approach to Kathleen’s wardrobe, “[Kathleen’s] always the same person. She has a T-shirt, a sweater, slacks—which are just plain slacks [with no designer name]. They’re not jazzy or fashion-y.”

Consistency is a key thing to having great style. It doesn’t mean a uniform, it just means a recognisable thread!

Also jazzy is a word that ought to be used more.

tmagazine

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On that NYT Jonathan Anderson profile: Obviously I googled to find out which of the “three fashion critics whom he pays much attention to called the show ‘great’ and ‘inspiring’“

(Cathy Horyn).

I sometimes wonder, if I was a creative genius, would I read my reviews. I think probably not given I can’t even bear to read the comments on my articles. I do read and respond to my Substack comments and emails though, because they’re all so lovely!

Loved this: “The problem with the world,” Anderson says, “is that there are so many things to discover.”

One other thing I loved this week was a tidbit in Hamish Bowles’ British Vogue piece on a new Vogue exhibition coming to London and how Gertrude Stein was in the front row at Balmain’s first show.

Here is her dispatch where she writes of knowing Pierre Balmain as a boy, during the war and he made her suits in those cold, hard years, 

“I suppose there at the opening, we were the only ones who had been clothed in all those long years in Pierre Balmain’s clothes, we were proud of it. It is nice to know the young man when he is just a young man and nobody knows, and now well I guess very soon now anybody will know. And we were so pleased and proud. Yes we were.”

Books

My only recommendations this week are Riders and Rivals, obviously! 

Still savouring the new Hollinghurst though. Best read in the bath. Like most things.

Love,

Annie x

Sienna Miller in Anatomy of a Scandal, still wearing everything I want to wear!

Back in the days of the Vogue forums (rip!) where circa 2003-2006 I was a vociferous poster, my favourite threads were what I’m wearing today and also, slightly problematically, what I’m eating today.

Bizarrely, and also I think crucially, what I’m wearing didn’t include any photos - you had to use your imagination about what your internet friends were wearing! I’m just realising I totally could have lied about what I was actually wearing, which is probably what other people were doing in a kind of lo-fi The Sims kind of way. 

Anyway you would write things like:

Denim mini-skirt - light wash

White wide studded belt

Matthew Williamson for Sportsgirl multicoloured floaty top

Balenciaga City bag (this bit is the lie)

Cute flats

Hair in loose ponytail

Lancome juicy tubes in Dreamsicle

By the way, if you did have a Balenciaga city bag in this period - I would have cut off my right arm for one, though I would have needed said arm to hang it in the crook of my elbow just so - you should bring it back out. Because why would you buy the exact same bag again when we are living in the era of designer “reissues?”

As Faran Krentcil writes in The WSJ, “Like Hollywood reboots of existing franchises, fashion doubles offer newness and nostalgia at once, even if the vintage versions can often be found on the resale market for far less.”

Anyway, I lived for this corner of the internet! Every outfit I described was, obviously, me trying to dress like Sienna Miller. I still am! Including everything she wore on Anatomy of a Scandal, our universal reminder of Miller’s innate sense of style.

You would also sometimes describe what you were doing that day and there were also sub-threads for things like ‘airport outfits.’

There are two questions I dream of being asked (other than would you like us to adapt your award winning and critically acclaimed novel into a Netflix series starring Nicole Kidman as a chilly and rich blonde in a high camp prestige series?). They are, what’s in your handbag? and what is your perfect travel outfit?

I can’t get enough of it. Mine would be, amazingly, quite similar to Zadie Smith (!) who gave hers to The Times last week. Only I do not, sadly, only use a non-smart phone, and I am also, sadly, not Zadie Smith. 

“Four or five copies of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, mostly unread. Three or four books, only one of which I’m reading. A very bright red lipstick. Loose nuts, half a bar of dark chocolate covered in dust, old tissues, a Tampax that somehow is also loose, many shreds of tobacco, an afro pick, a broken lighter, reading glasses, sunglasses, dog bags, a bottle of water with the lid not on properly that will soon leak, my Nokia, many pens without lids, antihistamines.”

If anybody wants my travel outfit outfit though, here it is for my trip to Singapore this week:

Christopher Esber bias cut trousers - elastic waist, elevated but feel like track pants

Organic cotton white T-shirt

Cashmere socks - crucial for in-flight and the best gift to give someone 

Oversized boxy Frankie Shop blazer that doesn’t crush

Sneakers - current ones are my favourite new Golden Goose ones which have my children’s initials on them in case I forget!

Light grey knit tied over your shoulders, over the blazer, for when it gets chilly on the flight and also so that you look chic and busy 

Why don’t you… use your sweater as a scarf

On the topic of tying a sweater over a blazer in the airport, I am well aware that this has become a fashion girl trope. Kind of like the new ‘shoulder-robing’ of a blazer. This is less annoying though because it’s tied on and less likely to keep slipping off and also you can use your arms.

Here is super chic Lisa Aiken from US Vogue doing it perfectly:

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Why do I like it so much? I think it adds a bit of preppy pep but without the Country Club vibe. It adds texture to an outfit. It has that frisson of being a kind of fashion person thing to do. It makes you look sort of crisp and capable. And also, if it actually does get chilly you have a back-up jumper! 

A nice thing

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Bella Freud has just launched a new podcast called Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud and it’s basically fashion therapy. I just listened to the episode with Rick Owens and it was like a balm for my soul!

He spoke of wearing his signature platform boots as a “protest” and an affront to “good taste”. I was overjoyed by his description of really exquisite leather as “juicy” and “tender” (please, no more “buttery” leather!).  I also loved how his wife and muse Michelle Lamy is planning to throw a “rave” for her 80th birthday. Yes! I love people who show that there are other ways to age - i.e. with joy and fun and appetite for life. 

Bella Freud also spoke about trying on a beautiful jumper at The Row and “disappearing,” becoming a “random middle aged lady.”

Which is something I think ties in with the idea of living with appetite. People always talk about feeling invisible as they age, and it’s true, that the world still prizes youth. The thing is, if we’re lucky, we all get older. You can’t hold onto your youth as your special thing because it goes. Everybody was young once! Instead you need to have character and know what suits you and what kind of party you want to have. That’s the way to not disappear - and by that I mean, not disappear in your eyes.

Books

It took me a beat to get into Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, but then it really moved me. The idea that love doesn’t come in just one form and that it can be stretched and still stay somewhat intact is something I always like to be reminded of.

I can’t say much about it as it’s not out until next year and I had an uncorrected proof (blatant brag!) but my friend Jessica Stanley’s Consider Yourself Kissed is so brilliant! I stayed up reading until midnight two nights in a row and I didn’t want to leave the characters and their world behind.

I’m still on my Rachel Cusk jag and re-reading The Outline trilogy - coming back to a book with more living under your belt is something I recommend. I’m reading Outline and of the many things I’ve dog-eared, I liked this line: he often caught himself in the mistaken belief that transformation was the same thing as progress.

I started reading the new Alan Hollinghurst on the plane and it is GLORIOUS. Will report back.

Love,

Annie xx 

Louis Vuitton spring/summer ‘25. Image courtesy of Louis Vuitton.

I’m writing this on a flight (solo) from Tasmania with my two children. I’d like to say they’re playing quiet STEM games and eating a bento box of nutritious snacks. But they’re both mainlining their iPads and only surfacing from the fog for periodic bribes from the genius packet of Mentos in my pocket. I’m doing my best!

Anyway, I loved when Chloë Sevigny told The Cut that she is “a schlepper.” Mums get this in their (weary!) bones.

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While I was staying at my parents home in Tasmania I did three big interviews - a couple of CEOs and a fashion designer. One was fascinated by me being in Tasmania because he is, and he stressed, he really didn’t mean to name drop, friends with the King of Denmark (AKA husband of Our Mary). I do think my eighteen year-old self, who could not get out of this place fast enough, would have been kind of impressed that I would one day meet someone who was friends with the King of Denmark. 

Fashion magazines, like they were for a lot of people from small towns or with zero access to this world, meant everything to me as a teenager. They were my escape! My portal. Proof of life beyond.

I loved listening to Nicolas Ghesquière, creative director of womenswear at Louis Vuitton, on The Run-Through with Vogue podcast talk about this very thing, of reading his mother’s magazines and feeling desperate to get to Paris, where all the action was. He also said this thing about seeing history through fashion, which is something I really believe in too - that if you see the world through the lens of  fashion you can learn so much. Maybe everything?

Louis Vuitton spring/summer ‘25. Image courtesy of Louis Vuitton.

Anyway, another thing I loved that he said was that you need to be, as a fashion designer and I think as a creative person more generally, in a state of “aesthetic danger.” 

“If you consider yourself a leader in fashion you will be dead!” Ghesquière said, despite him being, obviously, a leader and genius in fashion. 

In a totally different way it made me think about how, as revealed in that Bloomberg magazine profile, the worst thing you could say to Mr Arnault, is that sales were good.

But what Ghesquière was talking about particularly was the idea of putting out ideas before people are perhaps ready for them. To have people question you. To have to stand in your convictions. He spoke too of hoping that creativity becomes revered again. Yes. 

Aesthetics have, of course, gotten a bad wrap since people started describing things as aesthetics. Sally Rooney’s new book devastated me (in a good way). In it there’s a line about how meaningless aesthetics can be. 

One line: “Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically.”

This is why I love the principle of aesthetic danger. It’s about pushing things. Not being afraid of weirdness or awkwardness or even ugliness.

Just so long as we don’t call pushing yourself ‘an aesthetic.’

It’s just living!

I also listened to Chemena Kamali, creative director of Chloé, on the Vogue podcast (imagine if fashion podcasts had existed when I was growing up in my hometown!) talk about how she wants women to feel in her clothes - that it’s not ‘transformative’ but instead feeling like yourself. And how she felt something was missing in fashion and I agree. That’s why we’ve gone totally gaga for her ‘70s spirit and the reactivation of the Sienna Miller obsession portal in our brains and the sudden and urgent feeling that you want to wear frills and flounce and pirate boots. 

A Chloé look from 1972. Chicness!

Kamali spoke a lot about her admiration for the founder of the house, Gaby Aghion, too. With her ready-to-wear collections Aghion was a breath of fresh air in the stuffy worlds of haute couture. She revolutionised how women dressed, how they lived their lives! It’s not enough to eat lunch, she told her husband in 1952. She made clothes for women who wanted to do more than that. She also had a practically unparalleled talent for spotting talent (e.g. Karl, Phoebe, Stella et al all worked for Chloé). She once said that she thought fashion should be “as fresh as salad!”

YES.

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Anyway, really wish I could have unearthed my impressive collection of wide studded belts at my parents’ house ever since boho made a comeback. Though as Kamali said in the interview, it’s not really about ‘boho’ coming back. More like it’s about a certain spirit of the ‘70s awakening in our consciousness.

In any case, I think it’s an appetite for living, and I’ve never wanted to wear a jangly coin belt more. 

What happens to the status handbag when the ultimate status symbol is no handbag?

I’m still thinking about a fashion editor colleague who was at an event with me in Melbourne recently without a handbag at all. She looked so chic and confident and unbothered! And there’s me forever rummaging.

As Vanessa Friedman put it in response to a reader question this week, 

“Indeed, you could say there is an inverse relationship between handbags and authority. The truth is, the bigger the job, the smaller the handbag — if a handbag comes into play at all.”

God!

Love,

Annie xx