I keep seeing women wearing shoes with red soles. Is this all about some new trend?
Charlotte, north London
Kind of. What it actually is about is the rise of a fancy-pants shoe label, Christian Louboutin, which is part of the Manolo Blahnik/Jimmy Choo/Christian Louboutin holy shoe triptych (or Bermuda triangle, depending on how much horror the concept of paying over £400 for a pair of shoes inspires in your breast, Charlotte).
Here's the sitch: Louboutins are sexier than Manolos without being quite as trashy as Choos (nor as downright slutty as Gina, but not as artistic as Nicholas Kirkwood, nor as elegant as Rupert Sanderson, and not as flattering as Jonathan Kelsey). So as you can see, there was a niche that needed filling, and that niche was sexy-but-not-slutty-shoes-that-cost-almost-if-not-more-than-half-a-grand-that-you-can-barely-walk-in.
And I can bring you EXCLUSIVE news that in the upcoming and pretty-much-guaranteed-to-be-awful Sex and the City movie, Carrie has jettisoned her famous "Manolos" in favour of "Louboutins". You know it, folks: " Ask Hadley: First with the international news stories." Eat my DUST, Christiane Amanpour!
This kind of endorsement will, as Mr Blahnik will no doubt verify, only make Monsieur Louboutin more successful than he already is. Who needs to spend money on advertising when you can get celebrity endorsements for free?
Which brings us neatly to the next point – the frequency with which you see the red sole. You see, Charlotte, the red sole is Mr Louboutin's signature detail, which not only ups the shoe's sexiness quotient (I have no idea, nor interest in psychoanalysing, how a glance of a red sole on a lady's shoe is sexy; it just is), but it also works as branding without stooping to anything as obvious as declasse as a logo.
However. Some cheeky monkeys on both the high street and (gasp!) up in Designer Land have noticed this and have started slapping red soles on their shoes. (Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, meanwhile, classy to the hem of her min-kilt, once advised painting one's high-street shoes' soles with red nail polish to get Louboutin on the cheap. The thought of Tara staying in on a Friday night and nail polishing her shoes brings sunshine to my heart sometimes, it truly does.) Louboutin has done his best to stop this rot, filing for copyright and what have you, but it's all gone a bit stable door, horse bolted. And if that horse should flash some red on the bottom of his hoofs as he canters into the distance, Christian, I'd take it up with TP-T.
Should I get a wrap dress? My mum tells me that all grown women should have one and I recently turned 21.
N Dollis, by email
Bless you and your mother's well-intentioned hearts. Your mother is semi-correct: all grown women should have a wrap dress, if these grown women take all their life guidance from women's magazines.
Along with "a classic trench" and "black court shoes", the wrap dress is one of those things that women's magazines always insist it is essential to have in one's wardrobe. And like the shoes and even the trench, the appeal of the wrap has always passed me by. Yes, it can, as is often said, "Fit anyone". True, but so would a burlap sack, and a sack, unlike a wrap dress, will not flap open in the wind and reveal to all and sundry whether you have waxed your bikini line in the past four years. Moreover, it looks best on those who have a perfect hourglass figure, which is what the magazines mean when they say it "works well on curvy figures", ie as long as those "curvy figures" have a flat stomach and a teeny waist.
So to sum up, if you have a figure like Barbie and live in a city that is totally devoid of wind, then the wrap is for you. For anyone else, not so much.