Le giraffe

Ines de la Fressange has been given the Legion d'honneur. I saw her at the party to launch the Golden Age of Couture show at the V&A. Tall women are sometimes called giraffes, this was the only time I have seen a woman who did exactly look like another species. You could see her everywhere you looked around that crowded, fashionable room. And I'm sure she eats only little leaves from tall trees.

(Which reminds me. On an entirely tangential note, it's official. Jews can now drink giraffe's milk.)

The ageing process is greatly helped when you're tall, thin and look a bit like a boy, albeit one with excellent hair, because let's face it, there's simply less of you to go south/downhill/wrong. So I actually believe her when she says she's reasonably relaxed about getting older, partly because she doesn't appear to have had any work done, and partly because age doesn't seem to be compromising her taste in clothes and accessories at all.

“That's not quite true,” ripostes de la Fressange in her perfect, idiomatic English. “I can't wear really short shorts any more, or fluorescents. Actually, I'm a bit of a navy jumper maniac now. But I'd certainly never go to a shop for 50-year-old women. And I wouldn't go really classic - it's very ageing.” This from the woman who used to live in Chanel, before Lagerfeld unceremoniously fired her as the house's face. But that was when she was still in her twenties, and even then she would mix her tweeds with T-shirts and jeans. Standard practice now, this was considered une vraie scandale at the time.