What ludite took this?

That would be me.

In fact it is a still from a video diary that Toby @ Black.co.uk and I made while we were in Paris last Friday for fashion week. We had this idea that we would jump aboard the rich content band wagon and get video-recording.

Except the fatal flaw is that I am inept.  Instead of recording Toby's cutting-edge insights into Parisian fashion in landscape, I did it all in portrait. This means that anyone with even the faintest desire to watch his genious dazzle would have to do so with their heads at 45 degrees. How directional is that?

So what we are left with is this meagre, granular still, bolstered only by the magnificence of Chanel on Rue Cambon behind him; one of the sights I showed him in his education. I also showed him the Water Bar at Collette, took him for Hot White Chocolate at Angelina and at the end of the day showed him La Grande Epicerie de Paris - the best food hall in all the world. Then Steak Frites. Naturellement!

We also found time to do some work but as Absolutely Fabulous Patsy would say, 'I'm not prepared to reveal my vibe, dahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhling'.

Yesterday was Cashmere Day at Black.co.uk. It is an annual event where The Boss and The Buyer leave Black HQ in the pursuit of staple cashmere accessories for our cashmere-crazed Autumn/Winter season. It is a fine event. Very tactile. And if they're lucky they may leave with a goody or two. (Given, not stolen)

Usually The Buyer take lots of pictures as reminders of stuff they've seen, otherwise come ordering  time they resort to staring nonplussed at a reel of mile-long sample codes. Here are some:

Not sure about this. (Scarf not The Boss)

Love these:

Anyway, almost as important as Cashmere Day is the Post-Cashmere Day lunch here:

So The Buyer had a camera full of accessories, but failed to capture lunch. What a fool. They sat at the counter and The Boss had six Cornish Oysters (naturally). The Buyer did not. If food is so impenetrable that it causes a Herculean 25-year old Irish oyster-shell opener to be rushed out of the bar bleeding with his dismembered fingers suspended in a cool-box The Buyer feels it's not Nature's intention for it to be eaten. Worn, however, is another matter.  She would consider losing a finger or two for the sake of a Tahitian Black Pearl. Now there's an idea for some radical viral marketing.

Secretly, when everyone else is going 'when will it ever stop' and 'this is relentless' and 'this is the worst I've ever known it to be' (worth noting here that 'they' aren't talking about my deft conversational skills but rather the recent bad weather) I am on the thrilled side of happy.

'Why [you lunatic]?', you might ask. Because, I might reply, I have these heavenly cashmere mittens

So delightful are they that after writing this entry I plan to write to the Oxford English Dictionary about the worthiness of renaming mittens 'smittens', purely as an economical measure to stop those (i.e. me) who possess them from gushing endlessly about them, thus absenteeing themselves from productive work by writing to the OED and therefore doing NOTHING about our staggering budget deficit. 

London Fashion Week is in full-throttle, so we thought we'd get stuck in to some straight-up fashion talk. We are no strangers to the formula of fashion magazines; Grazia, Stella, Style, InStyle and our (obvious) favourite, Vogue. And all the blogs. And the tweets. And Facebook updates. It's fair to say that we have been driven to this. It is brilliantly infectious.

So, we (and by 'we' I mean 'I' - we are not yet a steaming juggernaut and there is no squadron of FashEds behind this facade...but 'we' will keep saying 'we' because it makes 'us' feel authoritative) came up with little, er, 'carefully edited' selections of accessories that we think go BRILLIANTLY together and that we have of course worn out and about and have road-tested, on the street, in the dales, underwater to insure against guffawing, sniggers or shrieks of 'what the HELL is she thinking??!!!'

'Our' favourite selection is this:

We would ask what your favourite collection is if we thought we would get an answer, but you need look only to our Facebook page for the probability of that.

“…like getting the news that your father has died, but on a novelty phone that’s shaped like a hot dog”.

Writer Caitlin Moran wrote the above in this Saturday’s Times Magazine feature titled “What happens when a real woman wears catwalk clothes’, describing the feeling you get when trussed up to the nines in high-fashion gear when something life-like happens to you and you are left looking, well, like someone ‘being dumped while [they have] a Play School top on”.

Moran’s article was part of  the voluminous swell of fashion and dress talk as a result of the concurrence of two events last weekend; London Fashion Week and the Baftas.

The Baftas were pretty underwhelming and not a little depressing for some reason (probably Jonathan Ross and the expectation that Avatar would probably win everything and the global economic climate, why not throw that in). However the appearance of Rebecca Hall in this:

proved Moran’s point. Caught in a snap shot, this isn’t so bad. However, in motion, while reading an autocue, opening an envelope or looking right and then up it was hard to behold and I quickly changed the channel to avoid witnessing whatever it was that was about to happen to her in it. It was quite like Morticia Addams engaging in a scrum at the Superbowl. Or paying the bill with a Lady Gaga claw-hand.

This is much more like it:

I reckon I could happily go foraging for sprouts in Waitrose wearing this. (Louise Goldin)

Here are some words most of us don’t hear often hear:

 

Yes, that’s right. If Kennedy can be a doughnut, I can be a boiled sausage.

Some called me insane. Some called me a maverick. Some had better things to do with their time.

 

 I don’t think I have ever been unable to make it into Black HQ. Nature's wrath, eh?

 

While it currently looks like this where I am in London:

 

It looks like this en route:

 

 

 

 

And like this where I need to be:

 

 

So I have been told to stay where I am.

 

I am not moving until it looks like this:

 

 

Because the last time I went out when it looked like this:

 

 

I lost one of these:

 

 

 

And could not have accounted for the loss felt by its absence, which led me the next day to return to the point where I had lost it; on a hill in the dark, stuck in the thick, treacherous snow and ice, back wheel revving insanely (somehow missed the snow-driving lesson as a youth); to find said glove looking rather like this:

 

 

 

Lesson: If you want to keep your beloved accessories from becoming road kill, do not make any unnecessary journeys. This also applies to anything cashmere-based.