Staging Your Comeback by Christopher Hopkins arrived yesterday and I read it straight through.

The book’s really aimed at the post-menopausal reader - the youngest women featured are about 48, and most are in their mid-50s to 60s (Rici, seen here before and after, is 63). But don’t let that put you off if you’re any age over 35 - there’s still a lot of valuable information in here, especially if you’re feeling frumpy or in a rut.

Christopher Hopkins is known as ‘the makeover guy’ but he started out as a hairdresser. Importantly, that means he’s dealt with clients and he understands how (and why) women can be totally intransigent about changing their look. He can also be merciless, which is useful. Camp as a nine-bob note and amusingly full of himself, he started out believing himself an ugly duckling and didn’t begin to blossom till later in life. That is something he and I share, and I note that he fully understands how received messages from your childhood can hamper your personal style long after you become an adult.

The book is designed to be interactive with a website he’s set up, so you can give feedback and suggestions (possibly for later editions), and also download forms to fill in, which also figure in the back of the book. You’ll need these because throughout there are a fun bunch of quizzy tickbox things to fill in (I love this kind of stuff) to work out your style personality, your ’shadow’ personality, your body shape etc. Interestingly, he looks as closely at your horizontal shape as at your vertical shape, which is rare. This is the kind of thing you only tend to learn about when you sew garments, but it’s useful to understand how to dress when you’re long in the upper body but short in the waist, for instance. Many women’s shapes change with age - protruding belly, flatter backside etc - and he deals very well with these issues.

There’s a lot of sound advice here on how to update the look you’ve always had: how if you’ve always been a classic dresser you can end up boring; if you’re a romantic or dramatic dresser you can end up as mutton dressed as lamb; if you’re an ‘innovative’ you need to tone down your zaniness with age. He doesn’t deal with fashion trends but focuses instead on clothes. The quizzes enable you to quickly identify what kind of dresser you are, and pointers are given to help you find your way in the future.

In case you were wondering, I came out as a classic dresser with an innovative ’shadow’ side and I think that’s very true. Two thirds of my wardrobe is well-cut basics and the other third is vintage clothes and handmade jewellery. I also scored quite high on casual, and that’s because of my lifestyle, which is a jeans and t-shirts sort of life.

The advice in the make-up section you can mostly get elsewhere, except you will not see anywhere a better description (with pix) of how to shade your eyes if you have drooping eyelids. This is the thing that sends thousand of women screaming for a blepharoplasty, but here you’re shown a really great technique to hide it. He’s also adamant about softer lip colour, which is very sound. In general, though, I found the make up too heavy, which is something I notice all the time in US publications - European women simply don’t wear this much slap. He doesn’t mention products at all, so if you want this kind of advice, go to ‘How not to look old’ by Charla Krupp, which details the best foundations, primers, blusher and eye makeup.

The section on hair is golden - he really does know about cut and colour and their transformative effect. And he is blunt about grey hair - it makes you look older. Striking maybe, interesting maybe, but older - it’s your choice. Many of the haircuts featured show an uplifting effect to counteract a drooping face which I found very interesting.

The before and after section at the back, featuring mainly women in their 50s, is so transformative you can hardly believe they’re the same people (would you guess that Nancy, above, in her frumpy cardi was the same woman as the babe on the right?). No surgery and no Botox - nothing other than clothes, make-up, hair and sometimes some weight loss and these women rewind the clock by 20 years. This section is truly inspirational and it’s a relief to see these makeovers done on women of normal height and weight.

Above all, it’s a peppy book - upbeat about ’second act’ women and their potential, and worth reading to buck yourself up (and to make you feel ashamed you don’t spend more time in the gym). Probably the next-best thing to having a personal consultation.

Staging Your Comeback is available from  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

I thought I’d start an occasional series about my personal style icons, so let’s start, for no particular reason, with Tina Chow

Tina Chow died a premature death but her personal fashion sense remains an inspiration.

Chow was a jewellery designer, model and wife of the restaurateur Michael Chow. She also collected vintage couture. Her collection contained both contemporary items by designers such as Azzedine Alaia and Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and early couture pieces by the likes of Alix, Vionnet and Fortuny. In particular, her collection of Fortuny gowns and coats was unparalleled outside a museum, including both Delphos pleated dresses and fabulous printed velvet mantles.

Chow was born Bettina Louise Lutz in Cleveland in 1950. Although assumed by many to be Chinese, she was actually of German and Japanese descent. She became a model as a teenager and during her sporadic career her luminous beauty was photographed by the leading photographers of her day, including Helmut Newton and Stephen Meisel, as well as captured in paint by Andy Warhol. She married Chow, 12 years her senior, in 1972 and the couple became leading members of the contemporary glitterati and art scene.

Chow owned some of the world’s most beautiful clothing and was photographed wearing it for the Rizzoli book ‘Flair’, which is one of the gems of my fashion collection. But despite her couture wardrobe, the image of her that is the most enduring is her great simplicity. Chow sported a daily uniform of close-cropped black hair, almost no makeup, a white vest or t-shirt and black pants. To top it all, she would usually wear jewellery of her own design - big bangles in clear acrylic, or plaited bamboo. Her elegant simplicity is still a great act for women to follow, whatever your age or size, and can be achieved on any budget. In my 20s I dressed like this in white vests and black jeans - in my 40s I’d add longer sleeves and some neck interest, but you can create a look that is basically the same, from chain store to high street to Bond Street.

Chow died in 1992 at the age of 41 from AIDS. Nursed by her daughter China, she passed away peacefully wearing her favourite Fortuny Delphos gown.

If you want information on how to look younger over 40, here’s the place to find it

I’ve had Charla Krupp’s book How Not To Look Old on my desk for a few weeks now, awaiting a review. The reason it’s taken me so long to get round to it is that I wanted to be fair.

I wasn’t keen on the title and the fact is that Krupp and I clearly see the world in rather different ways. In her tongue-in-cheek quiz at the start of the book, she happily admits to being high maintenance - that’s mostly A’s. I answered mostly B’s, which makes me medium maintenance, but as I progressed through the book, I started to feel that I was so low maintenance that I was actually off the scale. (And I’m more interested in fashion and beauty than virtually anyone I know.)

Maybe it’s that although I am interested in clothes and fashion and beauty, they’re still only a small part of my life. Asked to choose between spending money on my garden or on my wardrobe, I’d choose the garden without hesitation. Or beads, or music, or books. Krupp, in contrast, is a beauty editor - she’s spent her life evaluating beauty and fashion products, trying one procedure after another, and readily admits to spending about $7,500 a year on beauty maintenance (that’s about two thirds of my income). She also has rather a dictatorial approach to beauty. You MUST, she asserts, make the most of yourself, because otherwise in this dog eat dog world, you’ll be out of a job in no time. With this, I do not agree.

However, let’s not criticise this book for what it is not, and look instead at what it offers. The truth is, if you’re over 40 and looking for tips on how to dress, specific makeup products, foundation primers, brow shaping, shapewear, the best lipsticks, eye shadows and dermatology procedures, this book is jam-packed with information. Krupp has no truck with the idea that more expensive is necessarily better, and many of the products she has approved are from cheap fashion chains and drug stores. This alone makes the book very useful because she has no axe to grind - she’s not a manufacturer trying to plug her own product, nor a make-up artist unwilling to offend a supplier.

She is also refreshingly upfront about her own beauty hangups, her lack of willingness to endure pedicures or paraffin hand treatments, the fact that she didn’t know her own bra size, and that she’s had plastic surgery herself.

The division into low, medium and high maintenance options is a useful rule of thumb, as you can see roughly where you are on the scale (and have a good laugh at the idiots in the other categories…), and there are many nice photographs of women over 40, both famous and unknown, to illustrate Krupp’s points.

Overall, although our attitudes to fashion and beauty may differ (and I dislike the peppy cheerleader approach), she and I are pretty much on track in terms of advice: having a smaller wardrobe of clothes that you wear all the time; only wearing brown eyeshadow; lightening your hair colour and lessening your makeup. Other advice, such as what to wear after Labour Day means nothing to a European, and some I think is plain wrong, such as not wearing nude-colour tights but going bare-legged instead. (Not that I wear tights at all, but for many women, this is just not an option.)

The chapter on jeans is very useful - personally, I had never thought about pocket size - but many of the names mentioned mean nothing to me (I wear Boden, Next and La Redoute). And I still wear dark velvet scrunchies to tie my hair back - so if that’s out of fashion, then tough tits: I’m not about to split my hair follicles with elastic bands.

We seriously parted company in chapter eight, about dermatology, because I am dead against procedures such as Botox and Restylane-type fillers, the very idea of which fill me with horror (since they don’t stay in your face, where do they GO exactly?). Here’s where I draw my personal line in the sand, along with plastic surgery and Lasik eye surgery. Krupp, in contrast, though not in favour of the full face lift or permanent silicone fillers, is a fan of procedures I would rate as beyond the pale. But if you’re thinking of having a procedure and want to rate it, you will find here a very fair appraisal of costs, dangers, what to expect and recovery times.

Overall, I liked about 90 per cent of this book very much. Where we differ, we differ strongly (I principally believe in diet, exercise and meditation to stay young), but for most of it, we’re in total agreement.

How Not To Look Old is available from:  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

The end of cheap clothing is nigh, and bloody good riddance, say I

The BBC is running a story today entitled ‘The end of cheap clothes is near‘.

It was obvious this was going to happen, as I prophesied a while ago. With a worldwide rise in food prices, not only will everyone from east to west have to curb their clothes-buying to stretch the family budget, land that is currently producing cotton will turn back to food production as the prices for food crops increase.

Every which way, clothing is going to cost more to produce. Even third and second-world workers have seen wage rises over the past few years (gee - I thought they were going to eat straw forever), fertiliser costs are rising, and as transport costs increase because of the oil crisis, clothing will cost more to ship from production site to retail outlet. That means the price increase will be loaded onto individual garments at retail level, so we will be able to buy fewer of them.

Getting on my puritan high horse here, I can’t help thinking that a bit of this could be a very good thing. (more…)

The kimono is a fabulous way for a woman over 40 to look individual - and it is flattering to every figure type

When it comes to talking about kimono, I’d better confess an interest. I am a kimono addict - I have over 80 of the things, all vintage, and all bought on Ebay.

This isn’t something you could do even 10 years ago, but with the rise of the Interwebs, you can now get kimono direct from Japan for very modest sums, plus about $12 postage and upwards (it depends on weight). They date from Victorian times (the Meiji era) onwards, but the majority are from the 1960s or more modern, and many have either not been worn, or show hardly any wear.

I am not talking here about the long kimono we’re all familiar with, that you can wear for dressing gowns and for lounging around in. I do have a bunch of those, and will write about them another time, but what many women don’t know is that there are kimono jackets too, which are eminently wearable over normal Western clothing. These go by various names such as hanten, michiyuki and hippari, but the ones that are really interesting from a fashion viewpoint are called haori. These images are of a red rinzu haori with embroidery, applied goldwork and shibori dyeing.

Haori come in various lengths, from hipbone to about knee-length. Unlike a full-length kimono, which wraps over, a haori is designed to be open at the front, and it has long, turned-back lapels, and ties that fit across the bustline. These long lapels give you a slimming vertical line that is very flattering.

Haori are very beautiful. As with all Japanese traditional garments, because the shapes hardly vary, all the design energy goes into making the fabric gorgeous. Therefore haori come in a very wide range of colours and patterns, from plain black to screamingly bright, and use all kinds of techniques in their manufacture, including hand-painting, shibori tie-dyeing, embroidery, applied goldwork and metallic brocade weaving. They are almost all made of silk. These images are of a matt silk haori with urushi brocade chrysanthemums.

Although you needn’t go as nuts with haori as I have, even one is a great addition to a wardrobe and gives you a chance to own genuine art-to-wear. More times than I can mention, people have crossed restaurants to ask me where I got mine from, and my sister has had the same results with one that I gave her. Meanwhile, my MIL wears hers indoors as a warm lounging jacket. Some haori linings are so beautiful that western women prefer to wear their haori inside out, as I am doing in this picture.

How to wear them
When you wear a haori, you should pull the collar down at the back, away from your neck, and then the front will fall properly. This feels a bit odd to a westerner, but Japanese garments aren’t designed to fit close to your neck at the back, as you can see in this picture. Haori are voluminous, but if you have a fuller bust, you may find the central gap is still too wide. In this case, you’re better off flipping the lapels forward (they’re often held with cross-stitches that you have to snip), ironing them flat and holding them shut with a long pin or with ties. Quite often, what I do is use proper haori cords (these are like short, thick, woven ribbons) looped around a couple of buttons sewn onto the front lapels. These pictures show the haori I’m wearing above, as photographed by the vendor. As you can, the garment is always photographed flat - it will not give you any idea of how it looks on the body.

Haori are easier to wear than you might think, so don’t be put off by the long, dangling sleeves. Obviously, you won’t want to do the washing-up in one but eating at a table, for instance, isn’t difficult. If you have to lean over the table, just hold the sleeve out of the way with your other hand (this is what the Japanese do), but while you’re actually eating, the sleeve is kept out of the way by the table edge. You can easily wear a haori to go out to a restaurant, or for evening events such as the theatre or cinema, on top of a black dress, skirt or trousers, or even over jeans. For stand-up events, choose a haori with a beautiful design on the back - many of these are plain black at the front and function like a tuxedo jacket. I wear my single-layer transparent haoris over bright clothes that I want to tone down, while longer haori make lovely evening coats: my favourites are in the technique known as ‘urushi’, which is metallic brocade weaving. These images show a rinzu haori covered with shibori tie-dye, which puckers the fabric.

How to buy them
I buy my haori on Ebay, and the following vendors are foolproof: Yamatoku, Ryujapan99, Ichiroya. However, there are many other reputable vendors - look for those with very full descriptions, and LOTS of crisp photographs, including close-ups or a map of any stains or wear. Start with something fairly cheap in case you’re hit for Customs Duty and until you get a feel for things (but be warned - once you get the bug, it can be difficult to stop). These pictures show a 1930s haori with hibiscus pattern and a bright lining - you can’t tell from the picture, but it is very long, almost knee-length on me.

I am currently writing a book about kimono, and looking for a publisher, but meanwhile, here’s a brief glossary of terms you might come across.

Rinzu - silk jacquard weave which may be used shiny or matt-side out.
Omeshi - thick, heavy, glossy silk of almost furnishing weight, often coupled with urushi (see below)
Meisen - thick, glossy silk like a thick taffeta
Chirimen - silk crepe with a matt finish and flattering drape
Urushi - metallic brocade weaving usually in gold or silver
Yuzen - hand-painted dye technique
Bokashi - watercolour effect (usually a print)
Shibori - tie-dyeing, often in tiny dots that give the fabric a texture similar to seersucker

Deconstructed fashion has some pretty big names, but it also has many smaller players, ranging from one-man-bands making one-off clothes to small firms making limited-edition clothing.

Wall
One of my favourite small companies is Wall. I would LIVE in these clothes if I had the budget. Sticking usually to a narrow palette of greige, beige and black, Wall clothes are very timeless and flattering, and suitable for all figure types - clean, intellectual clothes for women with a brain. The firm concentrates on high-quality fabrics such as alpaca and pima cotton, and loose, wrapped or body-skimming designs with flattering necklines. (more…)

Deconstructed clothes are neither in fashion nor out of it, so when fashion sucks, they give you somewhere to run for cover. Further to my earlier article, here are some more fab deconstructed designers

Junya Watanabe
Another Japanese designer, whom for years I thought was an African woman (shows you all I know - he’s a Japanese man), and whom I discovered on the designer floor at Liberty many moons ago. Weird, wonderful, wacky clothes, way out of my price range, but I would give my eye teeth for this super blouse. I might just have to run up something similar myself instead. (more…)

Deconstructed clothing is a way for women over 40 to make a real fashion statement

Those of us over 40 can sometimes feel slightly desperate about the current state of fashion. Skimpy tops, voluminous cuts, tiny skirts - fashion clothes are often aimed at teenage girls rather than grown-up ones. That’s where fashion alternatives come in. I’ve written before about vintage fashion, but deconstructed clothing is a different string to your bow.

(more…)

This bookazine from Yours magazine is a good, meaty read

The UK’s Yours magazine, aimed at women over 50, has published a ‘bookazine’ called 5o Years of Everyday Fashion (£4.99 from newstands and bookshops).

(more…)

Wealth of Nations was one of my go-to brands for many years for basic, well-made clothing but the company went out of business last year. Now it’s relaunched itself as Fashion Union.

The new company aims to supply a ‘brand new, fun, affordable casual clothing range for both men & women’ online, and its range looks good, fun and cheap, with vest tops starting at £6 and even a trenchcoat costing only £30.

I’m guessing that the demographic is younger, judging by the girly gingham dresses, but the tops (£9-10), jackets (£20) and jeans (£22-23) would make good staple items for any wardrobe. They have a ’skinny flare’ jean called Vancouver that looks interesting - narrow through the leg than a normal flare but with some weight at the ankle to balance your hips, and 1 per cent stretch.

For spring the colour range is beach-bright shades of yellow, pink, peach, etc, and most items seem to come in five or more shades.

The range may not offer anything you couldn’t find elsewhere except for one particular - sizes go up to a UK 16-18, so they’re somewhat more generous than the high street and at least with mail-order you get to try on in the privacy of your own home.

Fashion Union can be found at www.fashionunion.co.uk