As you read this, it’s London Fashion Week. Or it probably is. As I write, it’s still a week away, and there’s always a frisson about committing to the future in print. Maybe Alexander McQueen is being held hostage until burqas are made compulsory on catwalks. Maybe Vidal Sassoon has exploded in the Lakeside shopping centre. Maybe there has been an outbreak of bird flu among models and they’ve all had to be culled and tipped into lime pits in Hyde Park as part of the Diana memorial fountain.
Anyway, let’s assume that Fashion Week is unfolding, unbuttoning and unzipping around you and that, as ever, you have limited interest beyond looking at the breasts and wondering whether models are marginally more frightening than erotic. Just to keep you informed, to give you the simulacrum of, for once, being inside the golden ring, I went to the heart of Fashion Week. In Milan, it’s Bice. In Paris, it’s the bar at the Ritz. In London, it’s ... well, London has never quite known where its “it” is. London knows it’s got an it, but it moves about, like sciatica. I’m assured that this week it is residing in Claridge’s, and that anyone who wants to partake of it, to be part of it, or just hang around hoping it will rub off on them, will be having tea in The Foyer.
I tipped up at teatime and approached a girl at a lectern who was wearing grey and a smile (the girl, not the lectern) which implied that, although she was grey on the outside, on the inside she was a skimpy promise of coral pink with bows. “Hello, sir,” said a voice behind me. “You’ve come in disguise.” I turned round and there was a doorman, dressed in a green 18th-century coachman’s coat with enough buttons to pull a pearly queen and extra frogging. You think I’m in disguise? A man dressed up like the white rabbit thinks I’m pretending to be someone else? He tapped his nose and said, “Look after him” to the grey girl with peek-a-boo underwear.
I was wearing camel with a sneeze of sun-kissed taupe: brushed cotton trousers from Rome, and a belt with an ivory buckle donated by an elephant in Kenya; a Liberty-print floral shirt from Liberty; a cashmere tweed jacket from Zegna; a chiffon square from Dolce & Gabbana; chocolate suede slip-ons from Fratelli Rossetti, Roma; sunglasses from Cutler and Gross; and a tinker’s tan from Africa by way of Provence and a touch of the tarbrush. The Blonde was wearing a Domitilla Getty Miss Italy peasant dress, Juicy Couture T-shirt and flat Fendis.
The room was wearing mostly green, with an art deco motif, rococo accessories and photographs of the great and the good — and the Duke of Windsor, who was the worst-dressed man ever to inflict his shrivelled taste on hapless tailors. Apart from him, the lobby at Claridge’s is rather beautiful and calm — elegant’s the word, I expect. It has an unironic violinist. The first rule of dressing, as I’m sure you know, is to pause just before you leave the house, take a last look in the mirror and remove one thing. Claridge’s should remove the bow from the fiddler.
Advertisement
We were having tea with Isabella Blow. “How late do you think fashionably late is?” asked the Blonde after 10 minutes. You know, that’s a very interesting question. I’ve always wanted to know exactly how late fashionably late is. And Issy is undoubtedly the final arbiter, the couture stopwatch of soignée lateness. So I can now inform you, absolutely, without risking contradiction, that fashionably late is 35 minutes precisely. A moment after is rude, a minute before, tasteless.
If you don’t know Issy, you should. She is spectacular, a lightning rod of style, a Salvation Army for designers, a one-woman Enlightenment. She also has the musky and morbid sense of someone who is her own tricoteuse, knitting her own legend. She was wearing a tailored black-and-white tweed suit by McQueen and a Philip Treacy hatband of dollar signs cut out of feathers, which, she has explained to me before, are a political statement about the war in Iraq. Whenever Issy walks into a room, or down the street, people turn round. And, when they do, they always smile and sigh, and there’s a silent mime of applause.
Tea is one of those small, half-hour acts that happen in the gap between memory and expectation. Its success is all in the details. Anyone can tip their spout over your upturned cup, but memorable tea is all in the bone china and the raised pinkie; the Blonde waxed for some time over the perfect aesthetics of Claridge’s cups. People can talk a lot of bilge about tea.
The rules are: no tea bags, milk in last, hot water on the side — and Claridge’s scores full marks on all that. The finger sandwiches were pretty perfect, but there’s only a limited amount you can expect from a finger sandwich. The tea-infused jam was excellent, the scones fresh, the cream clotted. But the cakes were outré mouse-millinery: too much and not enough. This room simply screams for a gateau trolley, screams until it’s fuchsia in the gob. Just shy of £100 for the three of us is really beyond rational, but Claridge’s tea is lovely. And in Fashion Week it will be packed with journalists, PRs and style pseuds who will all look like shit in a sack. Why is this? I ask Issy. She just rolls her calf eyes. Okay then, so what will I mostly be wearing this season?
From the Sybil’s mouth, here’s the gen. White is not the new black, it’s the absence of black — black is mort. You need tweed and tweed and yet more tweed, and on top of your tweed, fur — whole menageries of fur, extinctions of fur — and short skirts. Thongs are so over; camiknickers are on. Sex in silk underwear is de rigueur. It’s all about hard and soft: chiffon and tweed, and big bosoms — and almost no pubic hair. Designers are all off as well. Fashion, like pop music, is being done in your bedroom and nicked off the web. Everybody, it seems, has a range of underwear.
Advertisement
But how do I look, Issy? “Divine, darling. But, you know, women are ambivalent about beards. Rough on the thighs.”
As we left, she kissed the white-rabbit doorman. “You be nice to her,” he said. “She’s a national treasure.”
Claridge’s, Brook Street, W1; 020 7629 8860. Afternoon tea is served from 3pm to 5.30pm