Disproportion

An Israeli friend, Etgar Keret, author and film director, has this to say in the LA Times and it expresses my own feelings exactly. I have nothing further to add

Is there anything in the proportionality principle that can rationally justify killing of any kind?

The motives of vengeance, which drive us to kill those who have killed people we love, are completely irrational, even if we try to wrap them in rational packaging. We exact vengeance because we hate and are hurting, not because we excel in mathematics and logic. Early in the aerial bombing of Gaza, five young girls from the same family were killed, and many more children have died on both sides of the border in recent years. The attempt to introduce their bodies into an equation that would make their deaths justifiable or comprehensible might be necessary to influence current events, but it is still enraging.

The only equation I can wholeheartedly accept is one whereby zero bodies appear on either side of the equation. And until that time comes, I'll choose outcry and protest that appeal solely to the heart. I shall reserve my appeals to the mind for better times.

Graduates leave fashion schools with no basic skills

I'm sure Greying Pixie will have something to say about this piece in the Independent (perhaps this is why they don't know how to make sleeves)

While British designers dominate the world's fashion houses, the skilled artisans needed to translate the designers' visions into reality are becoming scarce. More than 3,000 fashion students graduate from UK universities each year, yet only 500 can expect to get jobs in their chosen field, with designers claiming that they could employ more graduates if they had the requisite technical skills.

"As a luxury goods manufacturer, craftsmanship is what sets us apart from the high street," said Ian D Scott, supply director at Mulberry. "There used to be a big pool of skilled labour, which has gone now. We did some research a couple of years ago and found that 50 per cent of our workforce is over 50, which shows that there are fewer young people coming through."

So concerned are the designers that they are lobbying the Government, with the aim of drawing attention to what they call a "growing education crisis" in fashion.

"If graduates do not have pattern-cutting, computer-aided design and production skills, they can't put their creative ability to use in the industry," said Linda Florance, chief executive of Skillfast UK, the sector skills council for fashion and textiles.

Sarah Palin and the Needless Mark-up

Sarah Palin and I do not exactly see eye to eye on a number of policy issues, but personally, I don't begrudge her or any woman who had dressed her entire life from a consignment store (or so she says) a $150,000 shopping trip to Neiman Marcus, or Needless Mark-up, as it's known. As we know, women in the public eye are scutinised in ways that men are not, and Hillary Clinton's attempts to look presentable for the hostile attention of a merciless media shows what happens when you get it wrong. Not being a hockey Mom, I don't feel betrayed by the shopping. I never thought she was anything like me. I'm sorry she doesn't get to keep the outfits when she returns home to Anchorage next Wednesday, as consolation prize for not becoming vice president. Inshallah.

That thing that's happening in America.

Yesterday I was asked at very short notice to fill in for another columnist at the Guardian and turn round a piece in an hour. I wrote about Sarah Palin and small town American values. If you'd like to read the piece it's here. If you'd like to comment I request you do it on the Guardian's site, not this one. I can't turn off comments for one post only, and I don't want to pre-screen comments unless it's really necessary. So head off there and join the fire storm.

US elections update

As you all predicted, this got nasty at once. I have deleted the post How America Looks along with all the comments. Let's stick with fashion.

Family drama

I have a piece in the Guardian today about how to make family films about the Nazi Death Camps. Or perhaps not.

This is a Hollywood version of the Holocaust, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is literally a Disneyfication (you wonder whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris). When you make films about the Final Solution for children there's not much you can say other than to introduce the historical events in a palatable way, and to make a general lesson about being nice to other people. When The Diary of Anne Frank was adapted for the stage in the 1950s, it was with the intention of suppressing the specifically Jewish element of the story to make it "universal".

Bye bye posh girls

The media has been rife with rumours that ITV are going to cancel Trinny and Susannah's contract. Now it so happens that I go to the same hairdresser as these two goddesses, and that hairdresser also does the make-overs for the show, when they actually still did makeovers.

A long time ago, these two posh birds used to tell badly-dressed women the truth about how they look. It wasn't nice, it wasn't kind but they did manage to shoehorn them out of their beige sacks. And in my view, it was the conjunction of fast fashion and T&S which really jacked up British style in the past few years.

Now we have this guy Gok Wan, who gets a fat woman to look at an ID parade of other fat women and force them to say that they look fabulous naked. Often I'm sitting there thinking, no, you don't look fabulous. Cover yourselves up! (This is equally a criticism of myself.)

Where it went wrong for T&S was when they turned themselves into agony aunts, to 'refresh the formula', delving into people's personal lives. For godsake, it's just the frocks we're interested in.

The point of What Not To Wear was contained in its title. It told you how to dress for your figure, age, colouring. It's not rocket science yet many of us still aren't very good at it. The pleasure for me was watching someone look and the mirror and realise that, whoa, I've got a waist. Their choices might have been eccentric at times, they were obsessed with bosoms, but they were like two bracing St Trinian's prefects. They took you for a walk on the wild side. I loved them.

Throwing foetuses down the catwalk

There's a very interesting piece about a scout for a model agency, who twice a week goes and hangs around Top Shop looking for new girls to take on.

'There was a girl called Emily Smith who I saw when she was 11. I kept in touch with her mum for three years. Eventually we took her on. We have five girls at the moment who are about 13 or 14 and we have to get child performance licences, doctor's certificates, permission from the council, permission from their school. It's proper.'

The interesting thing to me, is how young the girls are to whom she gives her card. Why do models have to be in their very early teens? Their job is to model clothes, what does age have to do with it? Sorry to come the feminist harpie but could this obsession with pubescent girls have anything to do with infantilising women? Compare and contrast with Agyness Deyn, who is a geriatric 25 and only discovered when she was well past 20. Interesting face, loads of self-confidence, actual personality.

Guest post: On Beauty

My (real life) friend the poet George Szirtes, has responded to my post on Misogyny:

I wrote three posts at my own place in response to the misogyny blog by Linda, that ended with a comment by a certain Stephanie who suggested men die first because they're stupid. My contribution was: fine, I am quite happy to die first.

I am not altogether stupid. I am a writer and that gives me certain advantages. But I want to discard the advantages here. I'd like to speak, if such a thing is possible, for Mr Normal, Mr Nothing Special. I want leave the gender wars out of this for now, as far as that is possible.

Beauty is something most people seek, and most men seek it, first and foremost, in women. There are many other qualities they seek but beauty is there somewhere at the core of it. And beauty is far from simple: it is not merely the ruddy glow of health or voluptuousness (what Eliot called 'pneumatic bliss'). It is not merely fleshly, though it is that too. Nor is it proportions drawn up according to a secret formula. What I said in my post was that it was "not to be owned by either the beholder or the object. And partly, because it cannot be owned like property, because it remains an elsewhere and, notionally, eternal, it is something that has always to be sought." It is in that way a spiritual yearning. We are not elsewhere and eternal. We are here and fugitive. That sense of life as something fugitive may go a little way to explaining why women's fashions change so frequently, why last year's fashion is ridiculous and no longer beautiful. Clothes are part of the beautiful, as are changes in clothes.

Next to the essential though, the momentary always looks a bit ridiculous, particularly when it is actually a product of labour. It takes considerable time. Humour is incongruity. And while, no doubt, the attitude Linda's blog refers to is part of the package, it is neither entirely a patriarchal plot nor gross stupidity. It is part of the tragic ludicrousness of life. Men and women often appear slightly ludicrous to each other. And women are far from reticent or decorous about what is ludicrous in men. In fact they are furiously critical – which is something I have never experienced among men regarding women. But we can be adult about this, can't we? Shall we, we thoughtful ones, try?

The email I have always wanted to send

Is here

Rape in wartime

I was otherwise busy this morning writing this short piece for the Guardian on rape in wartime, following the arrest two days ago of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

I details my own extremely brief career as a war correspondent.

Politics

It has always been my intention to keep politics well away from this site. We are here, regardless of nationality, religion, or what we vote, because we are interested in clothes. I may relax the rule slightly as we get nearer to the upcoming US elections, but certainly not at the expense of alienating readers who come here to get a fashion fix. There is nothing I dislike more than the flame wars of the political blogs (though I am sometimes guilty of indulging.)

But from time to time I have something to say about something in the news and I prefer to park those as guest posts at the site of my good friend Norman Geras, who first introduced me to the very concept of the blog, as it happens.

So if you are interested in my views on a recently released murderer, you will find them here. And find out what I do in my spare time when I am not being irritated about people who won't dress up at parties. Or writing books.

Fat black women in Italian Vogue

Italian Vogue's editor, Franca Sozzani, said her decision was influenced by the New York group, as well as by Barack Obama's success in the US presidential primaries.

Meisel, who worked with Madonna on her controversial coffee-table book, Sex, brought several of the black fashion world's big names aboard for the issue. He photographed Naomi Campbell, Iman, Tyra Banks, Liya Kebede, Jourdan Dunn, Alek Wek and Pat Cleveland, among others.

"I thought, it's ridiculous, this discrimination. It's so crazy to live in such a narrow, narrow place. Age, weight, sexuality, race - every kind of prejudice," he told the New York Times. He blamed designers, magazine editors and advertisers for the decline in the numbers of black women in fashion shows. "I have asked my advertising clients so many times, 'Can we use a black girl?' They say no."

Among the black models on his roster was the full-figured Toccara Jones. Meisel argued that weight was also an issue in the fashion world.

read on

and more, here

This magazine exists to inspire women. How do fashion editors get inspired by watching the same procession of anonymous, blandly pretty, very young, very skinny, washed-out blondes with their hair scraped back in show after show? The glamazon supermodels of the late eighties and early nineties (Linda, Christy, Cindy, Naomi, Claudia) all looked equal but different as they thundered down the runway. Like the Spice Girls, each had an individual personality, a different physicality. So did the late-nineties wave of sexy Brazilian girls (who come in all colors, from milk to brown). The current wave of Eastern Europeans all look pretty much alike, which is odd for a trade that thrives on appealing to a woman's personal style. And all are, obviously, white. Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm model agency in London, remarks, "It's a naughty thing to say, because I've got some beautiful Eastern European girls, but to be honest, when I go in cars with them in Paris, I do get snow-blinded."

Doing the vamp

Go babe, go!

A film is released today which stars four female characters all in their forties. One hits her fiftieth birthday during the action. The actress who plays her is 51. The other actresses really are in their forties, not 23 year olds with prosthetics. It was its female audience which made Sex in the City, not studio executives. Women of all ages watched it. It contains a character which I don't think had ever been seen on screen before, the single, financially independent vamp.

Kim Cattrall has her number:

But is her vamp persona realistic at the the age of 51? "It depends on where you live," says Cattrall. And on what you look like. "It also depends on your financial security. She's a very successful woman, and she takes care of herself."

The vamp understands the power of her sexuality. She gets the idea that it's not just looks, hormones, but the manipulation of a whole appearance through clothes, scent, jewels. This role has usually been taken by the mistress, the manhunter (think Rita Hayworth in Gilda), occasionally by those with inherited wealth. The potency of the single, sucessful city-dweller who insists on taking her pleasure on her own terms is a new creation.

Not of course one than many of us can emulate, but in an age of the sixty-something Harrison Ford reprising Indiana Jones, we at long last have the older women come to centre stage, at least in fiction. Good.

So tell me . . .

Betty Jackson says:

'I still think that clothes look better on thin people. I'm sorry, that's the truth. They look better in a size eight and ten than they do in a 16 and 18.'

Do we disagree?