Sensational Summer Modes Revealed «

Sensational Summer Modes Revealed

Wednesday 22nd January 2014

What doth summer presage for modes?

Today my main aim has been to continue to pot up my marmalade only in jars whose original labels have come off completely – from my collection of jars. It takes several years for some manufacturers’ labels to come off.

The light programme of engagements has continued. On Saturday Robert Nevil and I dined with Joshua Baring and Patrick Lockyer at the Baring family home (Lady Baring is a loose-cover and curtain specialist for TV stars. Her door knobs are utterly deliberate). The dinner introduced Peter Poppy who is a quantum mechanic. Joshua had met him in G.A.Y. when an unknown lurched up and said, ‘My friend wants someone intelligent to talk to… ‘ So Peter Poppy was brought forward and absorbed.

Peter had suffered a ‘red-shirt-in-a-white-wash’ crisis. Colour run. Odd for a scientist. He’s perfectly formed.

But really the occasion was a Memorial. I wanted elements of Mandela’s funeral. For Joshua boards for New York, initially for three months, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he never comes back and gets huge in TV in America. ‘Mama Grace and Mama Winnie are here. Their sorrow is our sorrow…the years of struggle… Goodbye Dadda…Goodbye…’ I uttered these words over the coffin.

So we must switch to Spring and Summer modes. Never was fashion more vital for renewal and the fight against Death.

Lord Arrowby is right: prints are huge for men this Spring. Dries is offering a blue plastic mac exploding with florals. Givenchy suggests strange horizontal shorts, pink flowers on a black ground. I know what the houses are up to. They’re trying to make clothes big again. They’re trying to bring back pleats in trousers.

They’ll get nowhere. We haven’t seen pleats in trousers for 20 years and never will again in my lifetime.

The spray-on jackette look is so flattering.

The great mercy is the Spring florals are hideous and no call to buy any of them. So everything can go into Glydnebourniana and Tuscany.