Postcards from Japan

Apparently, if you visit Japan, it's very easy to get very caught up in the wild atmosphere of buying things – which I suppose is what we all do here in December – the Japanese just keep that intensity up over the whole year, which sounds quite stressful.

So say our friends who came back from Japan a few weeks ago, anyway. Benjamin and I looked after their wild cat who chases her own tail while they were away, and they brought these things back for us. Faced with shops full of such sweet things, I'm not sure I could control myself at all in Japan.

The little puss paperweight at the top is so characterful. I could take photographs of him all day. The book is amazing – I'm easily seduced by Japanese book bindings. It's almost better that I can't understand the captions.

White

Despite a birthday at the beginning and Christmas at the end, and a real, serious frugality the rest of the year, in December, I buy things. Luckily, so does everyone else, so my wild coveting is disguised as Christmas spirit. Even I'm fooled by it.

Here are a couple of things that have been collecting in my little covetables folder all year – things I could never really justify buying for myself, but would really enjoy buying as gifts! People give to others what they like to receive themselves, after all.

1. Penguin Classic Hardbacks 2. Saint James Breton Top

These redesigned hardbacks are so unusual, and I like the way publishing is turning to fancy bindings and design to keep readers buying the classics. A set of Fitzgeralds and Hemingways would be perfect reading to prepare for a year full of 1920s influences. My current copies are so scrawled on and full of post-its that I think it might be time to buy a copy I can actually read without cringing at my terrible schoolgirl literary criticism.

1. Anthropologie dress 2. Victorian candle holder 3. Caribou Snow boots

I'm quite pleased with how incongruous clumpy snow boots are in this selection - but could there be anything more useful? Last winter I slid around on pavements, fell over six times on my way to the dentist, and swore I'd save up for these. I forgot all about it in the summer though, of course. The Victorian candle holder reminds me of dark Christmas power cuts when I was little, and of wispy Victorian gentlemen asleep in their nightcaps.

1. New Year's Shine & Sparkle Dress 2. Bialetti Espresso Pot

This is such a pretty dress if you have a New Year party to go to, in a great shape and at such a good price. I'll be secretly devastated if somebody buys it before me. I could probably console myself with the prospect of making affogatos with the espresso from an espresso pot though.

Clevedon

An old English Victorian seaside town out of season, Clevedon in December is far more beautiful than it is in July. No tourists with ice cream cones buying expensive lunches in seafront locations and fighting over the outside seats – in December the sea is calm, the anglers are watchful and the sea mist swirls around and makes an atmosphere out of it all.

The pier is Clevedon's jewel. John Betjeman called it 'the most beautiful pier in England' and it must be – its long spindly legs create such delicate arches. The wet beams are recycled railway sleepers, paid for by tiny brass plaques inset into the wood and engraved with the names of the people who bought them. The glorious pavilion at the end is quiet now, but becomes a seaside cafe in the summer. I realised when I was there, that this is the pier that is used in the publicity posters for 'Never Let Me Go', the new Keira Knightley film.

When Ben and I strolled along it, the pier was completely deserted bar the quiet anglers with their bowed heads. It was pouring with rain and the mist was rolling in. I felt like my 1940s coat deserved an attempt at 1940s hair, which I quite like I think – It's nice to have a fringe break now and again. The coat I bought in a charity shop – it's heavy and the cut is perfect for me – it feels very grand.

Coat: Vintage 1940s
Leather gloves: Vintage
Tights: H&M
Shoes: Topshop

Broguing

My grandfather always used to wear brown brogues, I'm told. Brown ones. I've had a bit of a thing for them ever since finding that out. Brown brogues, a tweed suit and dark rimmed glasses. He was someone I never met, but I think following in his shoe choice footsteps is a nice option. If Benjamin does the same, then so much the better.

I know mine aren't brogues, more tasseled loafers (loafers has such a horribly sleazy business connotation, doesn't it? – what kind of a man wears tasseled shoes?), but they're as far as I am willing to go into what Hadley Freeman calls the age when 'it became acceptable to wear your dad's shoes'. They're a happy medium.

Details are precious in menswear – you can have a interestingly cut cuff, or a vintage tie clip, or roll your jeans, but there are far fewer particulars. Brogues are full of subtle details.

In America, they call them wingtips, after the wing shape leather on the toe. They appeared first in Scotland – the holes were to drain the water accumulated by tramping through long wet grass. The broguing (the little holes punched into the leather) come minimalist (the austerity wingtip), or over the top (the British long wing). I think Ben's might be British long wing. My favourite bits are the long thin laces – perfect for sophisticated bows.

With all this talk of the importance of 'Heritage' recently, it seems some kind of crossed line to wear a brogue inspired girl's shoe, especially as I'm quite late to the loafer party and bought mine at the decidedly anti-heritage Topshop. I'm quite pleased with them, though, regardless.

My loafers: Topshop
Ben's brogues: (the infinitelty more respectable) Osborne Gentleman's Attire

Going Gatsby

Stills from 'The Great Gatsby' (1974)

Hemingway's Garden of Eden (from the Paris Review)

In a recession, we look to the past. Nostalgia keeps us going. In fashion, nostalgia keeps a whole industry going, and not only in a recession. This year, the early 1960s were the years to look to for escape – to a simpler time when everyone dressed well and life was simpler. It was to be the bringer of a 'new womanly' style – a move away from boom-induced frivolity, and a nod to being grown up, and sexily sensible.

Fashion can't stay so sensible for long – it seems to be gradually embracing this perfect opportunity to go Gatsby.

1. Dress: Alice + Olivia 2. Shoes: Repetto 3. Headband: Topshop

Carey Mulligan will be making her leap from An Education's British 1960s to the bright young world of the American 1920s as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's take on The Great Gatsby next year. Later this year, Mena Suvari plays Catherine, an American newlywed traveling Europe with her husband in an adaptation of Hemingway's unfinished novel Garden of Eden, set in the twenties, one war just finished, another just brewing.

The 1920s have much in common with the 1960s. Both were, at least in America, inter-war years, both were shocked by the relative emancipation of their women and both were boom decades building towards an inevitable crash and recession. In 2010, in the middle of our own recession, we ignore the end of the story and pick out the glamour, the freedom and the excitement of those years, and wear styles which evoke that atmosphere for us.

1. Lace top: Lover 2. Fedora: French Connection 3. Russian Red Lipstick: Mac

1. White Dress: French Connection 2. Dropwaist Blue Dress: ASOS

'With the influence of her dress her personality had also undergone a change' says Nick Carraway of Daisy Buchanan, and, if clothes really can create optimism, the 1920s are already quietly appearing just for that purpose, in innocent white fabrics, dropped waists and jaunty hats.

Craft Fair

Among the fiddly porcelain, shelves of teapots, and precariously balanced jewelery there was not a great deal of room for a video camera and a tripod, but last weekend Benjamin and I ploughed in regardless. We were very much in the way.

Benjamin was filming one of his interviewees for a project at Hereford Craft Fair. The interviewee was a potter named Jewels, who makes tiny sea-inspired pottery sets after just doing an evening class at the local college. Late learning is in the family – her 75-year-old mother is studying for a PhD in older people's attitudes to death. She sounds fascinating – I'd love to meet her.

As I hate being in the way above all things, I drifted around with the crowd, taking photographs and chatting to some of the stall holders. It was surprisingly busy. It's amazing and brilliant that the most popular designs were the simplest and the most old fashioned, and that people were still snapping them up despite the modern age of austerity, and the availability of cheap china from the east, and Ikea.

I got talking to a potter who looked more like a 1960s bank manager than an artist. He had in fact spent the 1960s studying pottery, which he left for large scale manufacturing. He only came back to potting a few years ago, and had just sold an entire £1,500 dinner set on commission: 'The woman who bought it didn't even blink at the price', he told me.

This weekend, in the middle of another fruitless Bristol shopping trip, I cheered myself up with this fantastically long wool scarf from Zara. I love how thick the wool is, and how many times I can wrap it around. If you add a topknot (my hair's default setting at the moment) it is a really satisfying one too.

Scarf: Zara
Cardigan: H&M
Skirt: Zara
Boots & Bag: Vintage

Le Petit Prince

'On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.'

It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.

I spotted Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's SS11 collection on The Cherry Blossom Girl, and was at first excited by it, and then, a little dismayed. Should fashion be allowed to so blatantly hijack such a beloved piece of literature?

The collection obviously draws on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's illustrations for his book, Le Petit Prince. Essentially a children's book, Le Petit Prince, nearly 70 years after it was first published, remains hugely popular, especially in France – the tale of an intergalactic boy prince, discovered by an airman in the desert.

I came across it at school, when an amazing French teacher decided it would be a good addition to our lessons. I loved deciphering the French, and then, deciphering the insights contained within the English.

The book has many layers. The collection has many too, although these more physical than metaphorical. Aptly enough, given fashion's typical temporality, this collection takes it on its most superficial level – a simple tale of a lost pilot who finds a travelling little boy from a foreign planet in the desert. In an interview with Dazed Digital, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac explained: '... it was my purpose to approach Africa through the desert. Petit Prince was my ambassador to go on the planet on the desert. I went to the desert and then to the jungle.'

In terms of the narrative of the collection, he has certainly followed this path. Stars and Space, and prints of Saint-Exupéry's illustrations give way to safari-style dresses with wild top hats the same shape as the narrator's drawing of an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor, and mistaken by narrow-minded grown-ups for a hat.

Images from Le Petit Prince, The Cherry Blossom Girl, New York Magazine

But it seems curious that a book essentially about love and loneliness, the importance of small things in the vastness of the universe, and even the perils of judging people on their aesthetics should ever be allied with an industry selling aesthetics.

But then, Le Petit Prince can also be read as a comment on the narrow-mindedness of grown-ups who refuse to see past what they see with their eyes – and perhaps there is nothing more contradictory to that than questioning this brief appearance of Le Petit Prince in fashion.

'But he would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.'