007 Essential tension and life lessons from the wardrobe advisor to the ultimate grand dames
How to avoid fashion sameness, the fallacy of capsule wardrobes, vale Betty Halbreich and the Miranda July hotline.
Prada’s autumn/winter ‘24 Miranda July hotline campaign!
Books
Days of Abandonment - Elena Ferrante
I read this basically holding my breath, feeling in my bones the rage and seeping-in madness of a woman who has just been abandoned by her husband for a much younger woman. James Wood wrote in the New Yorker that the woman is in possession of “a mind in emergency, at the very limits of coherence and decency.”
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. - Eve Babitz
I’m on a Babitz binge since I mentioned her in my last newsletter. Nobody does sexy and longing and seeing right through people in LA like her.
ADORED this. I found the writing gorgeous but also the Blue sisters have remained with me days after I finished it! Sisterhood bonds can be so stretched and ruined and put back together and essential.
I also simply have to brag that I received a galley of my brilliant friend Jessica Stanley’s new book, Consider Yourself Kissed (out next year).
I’m dipping in and out of Dorothy Parker short stories, which is something everyone should do.
Marc Jacobs’ book selfies are one of my favourite things on the internet, and this is one of my all-time favourite books.
Fashion’s love affair with books continues. Obviously it’s my favourite thing to write about (like here in 2021, and ‘22 and 2023 - it’s my beat!). But so many things have happened since then. Valentino sponsored the Booker Prize! Miu Miu’s literary club! Fashion writer Charlie Porter’s fab new book on the Bloomsbury set! - and now Prada’s new Miranda July hotline for its autumn/winter 24 campaign. It’s not the first time July has worked with Prada, of course it’s not - she’s such a Prada woman - the house staged a retrospective of her work at the Fondazione Prada earlier this year. Anyway you can call the hotline and July will give you advice (from a script, but ultimately, essentially, don’t we all kind of want the same things anyway)?
One piece of advice I like from Miranda July is this quote: “Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.”
& Nice Things
I was in Barcelona for work last week and on the trip we did a tour of some of the little shops in the older parts of the city. Here you can find tiny workshops above the shop floor where people are sewing the clothes, a jewellery shop run by a mother and son duo, a woman who carefully sources special things for your home and great vintage shops. In one of the vintage shops I found myself drawn to a heart shaped cocktail ring. It’s set with a jumble of glass gem stones and it’s a little gaudy - my colleague described it as like the jewellery version of Anna Wintour’s first Vogue cover with the Lacroix and the jeans! Perfect. I love it so much. I bought it - the very nice man gave me a discount, though initially I thought he said 390 Euros but he actually said 39 Euros. I hesitated at 390 Euros but not in the manner that it wasn’t entirely possible I would not buy it at that price.
It reminded me of how I think I’ve forgotten how to shop. Buying something because you looked at it and you love it. Not because you saw the right kind of person (of taste!) wearing it on Instagram. Or it was written up somewhere. Or you’ve seen it enough times that it doesn’t feel risky to buy.
This poster in a little gallery we visited also felt pertinent.
I’ve been thinking about the specialness of vintage pieces a lot lately. One of my most incredibly glamorous friends told me she’s only been buying vintage pieces, specifically a lot of Alber Elbaz (RIP to this dear man) when he was Lanvin and also Azzaro because the cut is exquisite and the colours are beautiful. Otherwise, we said over a furious text exchange (don’t you find with all your best friends you can never find where you’ve had a conversation because they stretch across text, IG, Whatsapp!) it just feels all so samey right now. So many blazers!
But my friend said she’s been drawn to these pieces because everything had a noticeable point of difference and the design was super tight. She wants freshness. She doesn’t just want good styling on a runway show.
Alber Elbaz’s Lanvin, spring ‘16
Vogue Business wonders if we’ve hit peak basics. According to Google Trends searches for capsule wardrobes and uniforms are up and there is a slew of brands offering up the ‘building block’ pieces we’ve all been told make up a capsule wardrobe. The white T-shirt, the well-cut trousers, the blazer etc etc etc.
As Amy Francombe writes in the piece, “Designed to make it easier to get dressed, many extol the virtues of basics, believing they remove choice and reduce unnecessary consumption. But, as the market is inundated with the same nondescript, identical-looking clothing, it’s fast defeating this purpose.” What if you buy ten white tees? What if you don’t even like white tees so you don’t end up wearing them anyway? When was it decreed there is only one way to have a capsule wardrobe anyway? As Hurs noted this week too on flatness and sameness in the fashion industry, “in chasing the ‘right’ look, we’ve abandoned the joy of discovery and true self-expression.”
I loved fashion writer and novelist Charlie Porter’s manifesto on fashion this week. (I cannot wait to read his new book). Tension, something skew-whiff or ‘off,’ is why Prada and Miu Miu and Loewe are some of the most interesting and desirable brands right now.
I especially loved the one where he says that we need tension in the way we dress to make it interesting. This does not come from a fashion starter pack!
Back to my vintage shop find that gave me such a flash of joy in Barcelona, I was similarly struck by vintage expert and archivist Cherie Balch of the fabulous Shrimpton Couture note on Instagram this week.
Special things are always relevant. You do keep them forever. Indeed perhaps they’re an even better investment for your “capsule wardrobe” than a well-cut blazer.
Vale Betty Halbreich
Image via Instagram
‘The world’s most famous personal shopper,’ Betty Halbreich died last month, aged 96. Sartorial seer to, as the New York Times put it ‘genuine and aspiring grand dames’ (I’m the latter) once told The New Yorker “My work is like lay therapy. You listen, you prescribe—clothes are a fix—and you hold up a mirror. Most people can’t see themselves.” She worked with everyone from Babe Paley to Meryl Streep and consulted to shows like Sex and the City.
Some of her iron-clad rules included:
“You should love yourself in something immediately.”
“Never ‘that looks awful on you.’ Rather ‘the dress is awful.’”
“I don’t take the second wife if I’ve dressed the first one, and I don’t take the mistress.”
Halbreich saw how clothes can be, for many women, a fix for unhappiness, a quest for eternal self-improvement and thus, “best used in moderation and only when one understands a little of the motivations that lurk beneath the surface.”
Halbreich never retired and a book will be published next year, No One Has Seen It All: Lessons for Living Well From Nearly a Century of Good Taste, with a foreword by Lena Dunham, who was a client. Halbreich had a picture of her in her cream office suite in Bergdorf’s.
Airmail has published Dunham’s foreword this week and I love this insight into Halbreich’s knowledge of not just clothes, but people.
“There’s a reason she called her shingle Solutions. A prom dress was more than a prom dress. A funeral look for a cheating husband’s wake had to express multiple realities. Yes, it was about cut and fit—a sense for which Betty had honed during her daily walks through the store, touching each garment like she was squeezing the shoulder of a new friend—but it was also about storytelling, about the image we project for others and the way we need to feel when we look in the mirror.”
How I’m going to dress this spring!
I rewatched Notting Hill on the plane to Barcelona last week and was struck again by Julia Roberts’ sheer star wattage, and also her excellent twin sets worn with v fashion person thongs and her suits and ties.
Also, did you also forget just how dishy Hugh Grant was? Floppy <3
Love,
Annie xx
Blue Sisters is next on my list! And the ring is 🤌🏼