Braids and Vogue «

Braids and Vogue

Tuesday 6th December 2016

I needed a faux brass button and some upholstery braid, known as gimp. My Zara Limited Edition Hussar jacket (doing very well this season although a fluff-collector so sticky-rolled every hour: in line for Christmas Day outfit) was found to be absent one cuff button after the Cornish visit. Gimp required for 19th century Gustavian stool bought in Gloucestershire for a fortune, but needing horrible bandage-like ‘raw linen’ cover replaced. The sellers of the stool were something else. So luxury shower gel, mohair bed throw, pale grey vintage home-hotel.

So I set off for the West End, Barnet Lawson then Button Queen in Marylebone. Barnet Lawson is a braid and trimming dungeon in Little Portland Street, last visited by me at least 18 years ago. Would it still be there? Surely such a important outlet was turned into flats years ago? I rounded the corner of Little Portland Street. A barren sense of no trimmings pervaded. Once, 18 years ago, I entered sideways between soaring shelves in the Barnet Lawson vault and wondered if braid and trimmings might not subsume me in a kind of Indian finality, like a pyre. It would have been a good Fate for one such as me.

I went the length and breadth of Little Portland… no sign of Barnet Lawson, only Polish builders unloading. Had they demolished BL just that minute? Then – sudden flash – through the boiler suits of the Poles – there it was! Still there. Just not as remembered, hence not recognised. Oh the mercy! Barnet Lawson still there. And within the same terrifying Cockney crows, rasping away, repelling all braid-seekers, unless deeply serious. But I managed to match and order.

So on to Button Queen. What would have become of that? Also swep away, turned into flattis or a cup cake outlet? But no, still there, even with a strip light and dingy scuffed paint work. And one brass button a near-enough match for the Zara – the right size at least.

Altogether an important morning.

Later Genevieve Suzy read out from the memoir of Alexandra Shulman at dinner. You think of Anna Wintour, her matching pair. But A. Shulman’s boiler breaks down, the pipes in Harry’s room don’t work; her family aren’t wild about her sausage casserole; she goes shopping to cheer herself up (a bad idea, she says) and buys three cotton print frocks the same or similar, dreaming of summer in winter, and has a philosophical passage on the meaning of shopping , which is that the imagination is in play at purchase, imagining exactly the weather, place, time of year where the item will flourish . I like Alexandra on the page, where she is best.When I sat next to her at dinner, she was weary. She had on a satin puff-ball skirt which had evidently been day-wear. It was marked. Racelette Boyish, we hear, has been asked to review A.Shulman’s memoir but says she can’t because it isn’t as good as her own.