The philosophy of style

FASHION: T he Thoughtful DresserBy Linda Grant Virago, 308pp. £11.99

LINDA GRANT is a prize-winning novelist with a grand passion for clothes which she writes about in an articulate, self-deprecating and amusing way. Her occasional newspaper features and blogs (thethoughtfuldresser.blogspot.com) on the subject are always heartfelt and clear-headed, her honesty endearing her to a sympathetic audience, whether writing about Herculean efforts to find the right winter coat or shopping with a mother suffering from dementia.

Fashion is never an easy subject to fathom and “you can’t have depth without surfaces”, she argues, but what this book tackles in an intelligent, non-academic way is the transformative power of dress and the subtle ways in which clothes can affect our lives and express our twin desires for pleasure and change.

Her motto, learnt from an immigrant Jewish grandfather at an early age, is that “the only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you’re skint” and, along with her mother’s insistence that “a good handbag makes the outfit”, these have been her guiding principles and values.

Contemptuous of those who consider an interest in clothes derisory, she strengthens her case by drawing on a formidable line-up of writers and philosophers who have thought about clothes, from Zola, Proust and Diderot to Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

A racy if scattered read, the book combines personal memoir and confessional interludes with short essays on fashion history such as the birth of Dior’s New Look in 1947, the effect of the war on female dress and in particular on a woman called Catherine Hill, whose story of surviving Auschwitz and becoming the owner of one of the most fashionable stores in Canada plays a central role in the narrative.

At London Fashion Week recently I saw Grant and Hill sitting on the opposite side of the catwalk at the early morning Ossie Clark show, and recognised the impeccably groomed Hill from her description in the book, dressed in a Galliano denim jacket decorated with mink.

The story of Catherine is both the strength and the weakness of what is otherwise a provocative and sparkling defence of stylish regalia. Caveats would be that Grant doesn’t discuss the professional buyer’s non-sentimental and arguably unemotional attitude to clothes which they buy to sell. The Auschwitz background ultimately overstates important points about survival in adversity, and becomes a different focus.

With all sails hoisted to a full wind, she gives full vent to a dissertation on the history of department stores and shopping, an activity she describes with the fervour of a true devotee as “a meditation, a frame of mind, a therapy, a balm for the troubled soul”, though admitting later that having found, after a feverish search, the perfect winter coat (at Armani) but in a size too small, “I was wild with anger, I was seriously enraged and bitter and disappointed”.

The thorny question of clothes and sex is tackled adroitly if obliquely by an interview with the Israeli fashion designer Avsh Alom Gur who states that clothes are important because they make women feel sexy.

Drawing a distinction between feeling and looking sexy, Grant argues that when we dress to feelas opposed to looking sexy, "we are doing something so complicated I can't begin to understand it". On the subject of porno chic, a current teenage trend, she quotes the creative director of Barneys in New York as saying that by copying Britney Spears these innocents "are letting their clothes write checks that their personalities cannot cash".

Inevitably, shoes and bags are discussed; the list of bags she owns, including a cache inherited from her mother, attests to a serious absence of thrift and, on the subject of the extraordinary discomfort of the present vogue for sky-high platform stilettos, she announces grandly that “pain and discomfort and distress” are part of fashion and that alternatives like loafers “make you look short and fat”, so like it or lump it.

Interesting theories on the question of dressing and age are advanced. She cites her desire to acquire a black leather bomber jacket, successfully finding one in Marks Spencer only to reel back at a fashion editor’s imperious diktat that pretending to look younger makes women look older and that biker jackets are the sole preserve of rock chicks.

Rejecting the so called charms of “classic” dressing, Grant’s preference is for glamour with a touch of vulgarity, “old school, in your face, sock-it-to-me-Mamma high heels and a hint of cleavage,” and counsels middle-aged women never “to go beige into that good night”.

Acknowledging the effects of recession and the temptation to resist buying in troubled times, she is equally defiant. “In a recession the last thing I want to feel is depressed . . . wearing dreary, cheap clothes . . . in an economic downturn you cannot afford to buy cheap disposable clothes. So I plan to go and buy the most beautiful winter coat I can afford. You cannot allow life to turn beige.”

Now that’s what I call style.

Deirdre McQuillan is Fashion Editor of The Irish Times