Christmas wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for womankind. It’s modern women’s keenness to pressurise ourselves into exhausting over-achievement that make possible the festive season as we know it.

Perfect gifts, imaginative wrapping, tasteful trees, beautiful decorations, impeccable food, happy families, a glamorous outfit and thoughtfully annotated Christmas cards are just a few of the goals women set out to achieve.

Few men are stressing about whether they can find a Nordmann fir that’s the right shape for their bay window, while manically clipping stuffing recipes from newspapers and making interminable lists of presents.

However, I do know many women who are doing all that.

Christmas, with its emphasis on consumerism and domesticity, brings out the worst of the self-induced competitiveness that is a woman’s permanent condition.

Last week, my son and my boyfriend watched in silence as I fussed over strands of fairy lights. They cast exasperated looks between them when I became entangled in the electric flex.

It was then that I realised I was running late for an 8.30am breakfast meeting but, even as the minutes ticked by, I felt I simply had to check the lights were working and the correct length.

More…

* Help! My man’s a party-pooper: Can your relationship survive the party season?
* You shouldn’t have, darling – REALLY, you shouldn’t: Why can’t husbands ever buy the right Christmas presents?

For me, the knowledge that this particular chore has been done is a pleasing achievement. My vision of our seasonal hallway is on the way to being completed and one task on a monumental action list (buy new fairy lights) can be ticked off.

This might conform in a predictable way to sexual stereotypes, but the truth is that I care about this and they simply don’t.

A twinkling garland in the hallway will add nothing to their pleasure, but for me it sums up a slightly insane number of things that matter: my ability to be a competent housewife while working fulltime, my inventiveness, my organisational skills and my pretty home. Ludicrous, eh?

The point is that many of the demands that women feel compelled to fulfil are placed on us by ourselves. The reality is that as more of us are balancing the schizophrenic lives of career women and carers, wage slaves and employers, that list has grown accordingly.

We may well be able to have it all, but increasingly the question is becoming: can we actually do it all? Shouldn’t we slow down and look at alternative options? Women have always worked, whether they were paid for it or not. They kept house, looked after the children and tended the sick.

Nowadays, for many of us lucky ones, the options have expanded and our employment has branched into areas of interest and reward.

Even if the financial returns are not huge, the widening of our world and the more buoyant sense of self this brings are desirable.

For others – probably the majority employment is not particularly rewarding or life-enhancing; it just brings in a salary.

But whichever category we fit into, most women will be juggling the demands of the home and the workplace.

In Natasha Walters’s forthcoming book Living Doll, an exploration of sexism today, she writes that ‘home is the centre of a life well lived.

Yet the insistence that this haven must be created and protected by women because of our unique aptitudes rests on a shaky assumption’.

The assumption that women naturally want to create that home rather than it being a task imposed on them is open to debate, but for many women, no matter how exhausting it may be to attempt to be a domestic goddess, no matter how much we might complain about our lot, we don’t want to hand it over to our male partner.

If both are working long hours, it makes sense that the cooking and cleaning, childcare, travel arrangements and home decoration should be joint enterprises, but I’m sure I’m not alone in having discovered that while this sounds like common sense, it is hard to achieve.

When my son was small, my then husband (who wasn’t working) and I decided to redo our garden. I was so tired from sleepless nights and long working days that I woke up aching in the morning, but was I able to give in and let him organise the project? No.

I wanted to be in charge of the kind of trellis and whether we would plant climbing roses near the house or further away. A decade later, I would do it differently. I’ve learned some things.

Let’s not decide to narrow our horizons and shrink our expectations back into the kitchen, but attempt some pragmatic downsizing. Our children don’t need every new gadget, but they do need us to love them.

Our husbands don’t need a size 10 trophy wife, but they do need a pleasant companion. Our houses don’t have to be catalogue perfect, but they should be a home. And chestnut stuffing doesn’t need to be homemade. Shop bought will do.

Or will it? Really?

As I walked through the residential streets toward the shops, the world appeared surreally quiet.

There were women with pushchairs, the odd gang of teenagers, old men puffing cigarettes outside pubs – but to one used to the momentum of a bustling office at 3pm, it seemed both strange and stifling in its implacable ordinariness.

It reminded me of how alone I felt during my maternity leave when I was one of those women pushing my baby home from the park as dusk began to draw in.

That stroll encapsulated the conflicted way so many women feel about their working life and their need to balance home and family.

I treasured what for me was stolen time to be a mother and homemaker, yet it also made me appreciate the liveliness and richness that my work brings.

It is also the very issue that drives a stream of women into my office to discuss their futures, their maternity leaves, four-day working weeks, possible job shares, all now encouraged by recent legislation.

Nobody can legislate a route through the conflict between work and motherhood.

Nobody can predict the visceral love you feel for your children, the fear you have when they are small that when you are not physically there, they might come to harm.

Neither can laws help the sickening exhaustion of endless, sleepless nights combined with working days and the seeming impossibility of achieving success as a worker, a mother, a wife, even at times as a human being.

But while a slew of government policies are aimed at helping working women achieve a more satisfactory existence, are they not losing sight of the real workplace picture?

And are they ignoring the evidence, not documented but heard in the beat of the tom-toms if you listen hard enough, that some of this legislation might even be harming women’s chances of employment?

I completely understand the decision of any woman to give up their job to stay at home with their children.

And it seems entirely reasonable that in many situations a woman who becomes a mother will want to trade in her role for something less demanding.

But what I don’t understand is the idea that you should be able to keep exactly the same job, with all the advantages that entails, and work less for it, regardless of how that affects the office or colleagues.

I don’t think I’m a monster. I currently employ a 90 per cent female staff on the editorial team at Vogue.

Of them, 98 per cent are of childbearing age. Babies, children, the possibility of children, the difficulties in conception, the problems once they arrive – that is the stuff of the water cooler debate around here.

I was in the same job when I had my one and only child in 1995. I took 18 weeks off. I remember when Sam was 12 weeks old, my boss called me to see ‘how I was getting along’. He hoped I’d be back soon. 

It was meant to be an encouraging phone call, but I, like so many other women in that situation, felt a bolt of panic. What if I didn’t get back soon? Would they still want me? Would I still be able to do the job?

Legally, I and the several of my staff who were also pregnant could have taken longer off, but we all took the same length of leave and were propelled back to work by financial necessity and the sense that that was what one did. 

To abandon our job for more time just didn’t seem the right thing to do. My mother – a journalist, too – had three children in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

She took two weeks off and had to pretend to her male employers that pregnancy was a bit like flu – inconvenient and not worth discussing.

Yes, it would keep her away from work, but only for a few days. She recalls sitting in her hospital bed, post-delivery, with her typewriter ‘tapping away on my slack stomach’ and that the men she worked for were horrified that she was returning to work at all and had simply assumed she would stop.

But she needed the money and, equally importantly, enjoyed her job. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from then. But have we gone too far in the other direction?

Nowadays, the majority of pregnant women I know take close to a year off, during which they are entitled to statutory maternity pay for up to 39 weeks. They return with the expectation and right to have their old job back after 52 weeks.

Except that, when they do return, many of them don’t want exactly their old job back. They want the same role but moulded into a time frame that suits family life better.

They want to investigate four-day weeks, flexitime, jobshares, and they often then have another baby and are entitled to take another year off. But is this realistic?

Can the diversity of circumstances and job requirements mean that one-size-fits-all legislation works? Criticism of the situation is very much the view that dares not speak its name. 

It’s barely acceptable to write this piece at all – and probably impossible for a man.

I met a woman last week who heads up a small company. ‘You’re not allowed to say it, but the reality is that the maternity situation is a nightmare.

‘Of course what happens is that the younger ones in the office step up to fill the gap – and,’ she whispered, ‘they’re cheaper.

‘At the end of a year, how much do I really need that person back?’

Successful fashion entrepreneur Anya Hindmarch, who has built her own business while bringing up five children, adds another dissident voice.

‘If we are not careful (and I speak as a mother and an employer), maternity leave and benefits will become too biased towards the mother and not considerate enough for the employer.

‘In which case, it can start to work against women as it becomes too complicated and expensive to employ them. To me, it shouts of shooting ourselves in the foot.’

My own experience is, I realise, substantially different to most women’s but, as all personal experiences do, it informs my opinions.

I had to work full-time. When I had my child I was the main breadwinner in the family, a family that broke down three years later, leaving me financing a London house and the three-year-old and a 14-year-old stepdaughter living there.

You might argue that the marriage broke down because I was working full-time in a high-profile job and my husband was not, but you would be wrong.

I employed a live-in nanny, and have continued to do so, because employing live-in help is cheaper than live-out and simply makes life easier if you work as I do.

I have never worked a shorter week, partially because I want the full salary to pay for the private education of my son, the help and the house we live in.

But it is also because I don’t, at root, think it would be the correct way to do this job.

I realise that most people are not in the same situation. They can’t afford childcare for their babies and their jobs neither pay so well nor are so fulfilling.

But it’s not the workers on the factory line, the bank clerks, the farm hands or the Tube drivers who are successfully negotiating part-time deals or who are able to take a year’s maternity leave and then return.

It’s the young professionals, women who are the people I was 20 years ago.

‘Flexible hours for full-time jobs’ trumpets the website working mums.co.uk. But, hang on a minute, for many of us a full-time job means working full-time.

It doesn’t mean being on the school run at 4pm on Friday when a work emergency breaks out, or making paper snowflakes with your four-year-old while a younger and undoubtedly worse paid and probably childless fellow employee is trying to solve a problem that needs to be dealt with now.

And how fair is it for a deputy to be promoted to cover a maternity leave only to be demoted back to their box on your return after a year?

It’s a situation that is increasingly encouraging small businesses, individuals, or employers in small rural communities who simply can’t work around an employee’s year off and who don’t have a pool of freelance cover, to look instead for women who won’t have more children – or indeed men.

Of course, as employers we should all do our best to help women, and men, with their childcare.

I think it vital to be understanding about sick children and there are always going to be childcare cover crises where parents just can’t get into work.

In my office, I can forget about getting anything much achieved during the nativity play season (and that includes the two dads) with sports days running a close second.

But while employers certainly should have a duty of care for their employees, shouldn’t employees in turn have a certain duty of responsibility to their job?

How cherished does one feel as a boss by someone who is only at work nine months out of three years, the rest being taken as maternity leave, or by someone who – when resources are already stretched – forces a flexi-time deal?

Women have increasingly broken through that old glass ceiling with determination and, to be honest, helpful employment legislation.

As a result, many are now employers themselves. Let’s not put that progress back by creating a world where the next generation of women workers becomes too inconvenient and awkward to employ and find themselves legislated back into the home.

This reasoning was partly to deal with the expected comment, when the news broke, that someone who hadn’t worked in fashion was getting the job.

I bought a black suit with an asymmetric zip fastening, a narrow skirt and serious shoulder pads. When I look back at pictures of me in that suit, I now think I looked pretty awful and, of course, terribly dated.

It was 16 years ago, though, and shoulder pads were soon to be retired from the scene in favour of a softer silhouette, with bias-cut slip dresses and fine woollen cardigans taking the lead.

Even if, as a working woman, you couldn’t get away with a slip dress, you could still wear the cardi and look as if you meant business.

Nobody with any fashion nous wore stiff, shoulder padded jackets, apart from the Blair Babe intake of women in Parliament, who obviously felt that since they were lucky enough to have broken into the male-dominated political arena, they weren’t about to take risks with any cardigan nonsense on the back bench.

But now, substantial shoulders are back in fashion.

Extreme shoulder pads and extreme fashion.

There’s been a continual under-the-radar shoulder movement for years, but it was usually to be found in the hands of more avant garde designers such as the Boudicca duo, who mixed theirs with gothic overtones and highly inventive skirt shapes — certainly not the kind of thing found in most offices.

But recently, like so many underground trends, the big shoulder look has emerged into the daylight of the High Street.

They’ve changed, of course.

Shoulder pads can be huge and sloped — as in the structured jackets shown on the last Balenciaga catwalk; or vast and angular like the ones dreamed up by maverick Goth Gareth Pugh, one of the British fashion industry’s most admired young bloods. Shoulders with Spocklike overtones are employed on 2008 very plain sculpted dresses this autumn, adding sharpness and detailing to an otherwise simple neckline.

But shoulder pads are more than just a fashion point. They make you feel different.

They endow you with a degree of emotional protection — your natural sloping shoulder line encased in a covering — although I draw the line at empowerment.

Any woman who feels empowered by a shoulder pad has got real confidence problems. BIG shoulders also change how your hair should be styled. Back in the Eighties, ambitious young women were caricatured by the combination of sharp suits, very short skirts and girlishly long hair.

This time around, a neat head is the way to go. A quick look at all the new fashion stories and advertising campaigns shows that slicked-back locks tied into a pony tail or cropped close to the head are the look of the moment.

It’s leaner and meaner, and can add a boyish touch to the fitted silhouettes and high heels that should accompany your shoulder pads.

Piqued by the Senator’s non-appearance, Anna points out that it’s a sorry state of affairs when powerful women are not confident enough to display their femininity.

Instead of publishing what would no doubt have been an intelligent and supportive interview with Hillary, she instead confines herself to the more frivolous activity of suggesting some outfits Clinton might wear during the campaign purple Carolina Herrera for Martin Luther King Day, and white silk Calvin Klein for campaigning in Florida. I’m in entire agreement with Anna’s point of view, but I’m amazed she finds Hillary’s behaviour surprising.

In this country, it’s very difficult to get any highprofile women to agree to be photographed looking glamorous Politicians go out of their way to appear sexless and uninterested in matters of style, and with some reason look at the flak Tessa Jowell got when she was pictured with a Chloe handbag, and the criticism Theresa May faced for showing a hint of cleavage.

Many writers, artists, businesswomen and lawyers are also concerned about appearing in a magazine where they might be photographed looking their very best, for fear that it will in some way make them appear lightweight.

It seems ridiculous that, in an age when many male party leaders are elected largely because of their telegenic ability, women feel this ambivalence about their appearance and how they are perceived.

It also means that the women most often featured in magazines are necessarily drawn from a small pool of celebrity. How much more interesting and inspiring to be able to feature a richer mix.

Sir Philip Green gave a dinner at Annabel’s to herald Kate Moss’s Christmas collection for Topshop, which followed on from the opening of Matthew Williamson’s ten-year retrospective at the Design Museum.

The following night we launched our Vogue Covers book with a party at the Chanel store, which spanned generations of Vogue personalities from Mary Quant and photographer Barry Lategan, through lous sight as the team transformed to Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and Bruce Oldfield, and new London stars such as designers Richard Nicoll and Giles Deacon.

An hour before party kick-off, the ladies’ loo at Vogue house was a marvel- lous sight as the team transformed themselves from daily workhorses (albeit rather fashionably dressed ones) into their cocktail-hour finery. The room was silent with concentration as make-up was applied, dresses tried and discarded, and heady perfumes dabbed.

It was excellent evidence that for most people the notion that you can adapt your day look for an evening out simply by a switch of earrings and a higher heel is an urban-style myth. This was serious stuff, involving time and a complete change of clothes.

I met a woman the other day who runs a major financial corporation and travels abroad at least once a week. She takes only carry-on luggage and relies upon jewellery and scarves (where would the scarf market be without women bankers?) to take her from the board meeting through to dinner.

But since she is often the only female in a room of men, whose change of dress for dinner would at most have been their shirt, it’s a different ball game.

If you are leaving work to go to a party with friends or attending some celebratory professional event, most of us want to up the glamour ante and shed our work skin. Sequins and glitter, the easy staples of evening dressing, are hard to put on without a major overhaul, so don’t use them when you’re trying to do a quick change in the office. It’s better to get your sheen from some heavy silk or satin.

This is where the tuxedo earns its points. A superbly cut black jacket with thin lapels and either narrow, or if you are supremely fashionable huge, boxy shoulders always adds an evening touch. It can be teamed with wide-legged or straight black trousers or a pencil skirt.

This season look for some great diamante brooch to pin on to it something really ostentatious. Underneath you can put a silk camisole (but only if you are small-busted) or take the opposite route and wear it with a strict high-necked, Victorian-style shirt.

It’s tempting to stick to black and white on these occasions, but everybody loves a spot of brilliant colour. Look out for rich grape mauves and bright pinks this autumn.

Something like an oversized V-neck sweater or one of the many long cardigans in a thin material, cinched with a wide patent belt, and a neat clutch bag can also do the trick.

Don’t carry large bags into the evening with large sweaters you risk looking too bulky. Make sure the clutch is big enough to take everything home that you need until the next day. I’m always finding I’ve left something crucial at work, such as door keys.

A change of shoes makes a huge difference more for comfort than appearance, and personally I find a fresh pair of tights helps you to feel renewed when you aren’t able to take a bath or shower.

You probably don’t want to wear incredibly high heels after a day at work, so look out for something that has a touch of glamour but is comfortable, too.

No matter how well-dressed you are, you won’t look good at a party if you look tired and are hobbling around the room..

STAYING WARM AT WINTER’S COOLEST PARTIES

An event that demanded a substantial amount more sprucing up than a quick stint in the ladies was Fashion Rocks at the Albert Hall.

When you’ve got 12 international designers all vying to have their guests look as glamorous as possible, as well as a rock music contingent, the bar is raised pretty high.

At evenings like this, the red carpet has debatably become the most important part of the evening for the designers. Timing is twotier.

One time is given for the slow parade up the red carpet, one for the event to start.

Armies of clipboard Nazis ensure that nobody who’s name is not on the list gets near the waiting hoard of television crew and paparazzi, whose images generate thousands of pounds’ worth of publicity for designers. Some celebrity guests have been known to do the red carpet and then instantly leave.

One of the great unsolvables is the problem of a cold night. You will notice that red carpet arrivals are rarely clad in a nice warm coat, since that would hide the gowns there to be displayed, and despite the nip in the air, Thursday evening was no exception.

I did my bit (sleeveless, turquoise Versace, since you ask) between Lady Gabriella Windsor and actress Noelle Reno, both in full-length gala gowns, with not a shawl between us, although the amount of flashbulbs and filming lights did take the chill off.

When I first saw the stiff, pleated skating skirts being stomped down the catwalk at last year’s Christopher Kane show, they seemed like wonderful fashion pieces that would never translate into real life. Wrong. Although they were an extreme version, the trapeze mini appears to be one of this season’s popular evening looks.

If you are thinking of adopting this, and there are versions that hover a few inches above the knee rather than upper thigh, it’s essential that the top you wear with it is tightly fitted, even corseted. As an alternative to a plunging bodice, think about something very high-necked, working on the basis that it’s best to expose either legs or bosoms but not both..

The quickest, cheapest fashion accessory of the moment is a fringe. The blunt cut heavy fringe is pretty easy to cut yourself word on the street is that the fringe Kate Moss revealed at her Topshop dinner was a DIY job.

On the catwalks, half the models sported fringes which owe more than a nod to the long fringes of the Sixties, and share the same dense appearance.

There’s nothing feathery about the fringe of the moment. The only requisite is that the rest of the head has to be smooth. This look doesn’t work with the tousled, Hollywood-babe locks of last summer, and it looks best on solid colour rather than rampant streaks..

I never thought I’d write this, but now is the time to consider the all-in-one. Back in my schooldays, the coolest girl in school arrived on her first day wearing striped OshKosh dungarees, but since then the all-in-one has been very far back on the style burner. More Greenham Common than Philip Green, they disappeared for some years, reappearing as a fleeting boilersuit trend in the Eighties.

But suddenly they are everywhere again. There are slinky, halterneck evening versions with flowing widelegged pants that pay homage to sleek Studio 54 glam, and short playsuits with showgirl chutzpah.

This winter you could team a boilersuit with high ankle boots. Looking forward, Stella McCartney’s spring collection showed joyous floral all-in-ones, while Mulberry’s spring offering has a tempting pair of denim dungarees with a rolled, cropped leg.

Women have always played their part in fashion’s Hall of Fame. Jeanne Lanvin, Madame Vionnet and, of course, the visionary Coco Chanel spearheaded French fashion in their day, but during the Forties and Fifties female designers dropped out of the limelight somewhat.

In the Sixties we had the wonderful Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba fame, but they were often overshadowed by the talented male stars of the day, such as Ossie Clark and Yves Saint Laurent. Now, though, women are steaming ahead again, both in the international league and heading up smaller, British brand names.

Of course, it makes sense that women should be first-rate designers as they know all about the issues of bras, hips and bosoms, wobbly arms and the other ‘defects’ we torment ourselves with.

They know about how we need to move in our clothes – female designers tend to be more generous with their armholes – and they understand that woman cannot live by ballgown alone. Party-girl designer Alice Temperley, for instance, always ensures that dancing is possible in her chiffon, silk and knit dresses.

When I look at my own wardrobe, I see that around 70 per cent of it is from female designers – Miuccia Prada, Alberta Ferretti, Consuelo Castiglioni and Donna Karan, for instance, but also a wealth of smaller brands headed up by women.

In the British fashion industry, there are a number of great companies which are female-led and owned and make the kind of clothes that make you feel you really can get your money’s worth out of them in terms of wearability.

The girls at Saltwater, Irishwoman Orla Kiely and Victoria Stapleton at Brora specialise in the colours, knitwear and simple shapes that are perfect wardrobe staples. Betty Jackson is known for comfortable clothes in gorgeous fabrics, and also for being a good bet if you are tall and not the slimmest of size 10s.

Margaret Howell is a longstanding British success story, with a palette of neutral colours and regularly updated classics. Her clothes have a vaguely utilitarian, even androgynous bent, and include everyday items such as shirtdresses and wide-legged pants.

Another good tip for everyday wear is Lindy Ross and Serena Bute’s collection, Ross & Bute, which you can buy online as well as in stores.

Male designers often start with a more rigid view of women – and are heavily influenced by the style of those women they admire. They will experiment with dramatic silhouettes, sometimes working on shapes that owe more to architectural design than they do to a woman’s body – but often, too, creating groundbreaking designs which totally change the way we dress.

Think of Christian Dior’s fullskirted New Look. It is, for instance, Alexander McQueen that we should probably thank – or blame – for a decade of low-slung hipster jeans, and Alber Elbaz at Lanvin for the puffy tulip skirt shapes around.

On the other hand, women are in general (and I know there are exceptions – Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garcons comes to mind) concerned with the feel of the garments. They veer towards more colour (why is it that male designers so enjoy seeing us in black?) and work with fabric to make it more flattering.

It’s interesting to note that the Versace range, now that Donatella has inherited it from her brother Gianni, employs more ruching and draping and use of heavy soft fabrics in the dresses. A clever drape and a successful ruche are brilliant devices for disguising unwanted bumps.

In this area, you could look at the Gharani Strok collection or Diane von Furstenberg’s range – Diane, of course, being mistress of the flattering dress.

Dressing up to please her man

Cooking for people is one of those double-edged swords. There’s something unbelievably satisfying in making a good meal for a large table of friends and family. However, it’s far from rewarding when your guests make you feel like the meal you are serving is a sophisticated instrument of torture.

At this time of year, when everyone’s feeling a bit blob-like and underexercised, I’ve noticed that almost every woman preludes the meal with several minutes of monologue along the lines of ‘Phew! I can’t get into any of my clothes (much patting of invisible stomach bulge); don’t tell me you’ve bought cheese? I think I’ll explode if I put one more thing in my mouth .. .’ When you’ve rushed home from work to whisk up a delicious feast (no time to bathe, no time to change, no time to wash the lettuce), I regard it as the height of bad manners for guests to say anything other than: ‘Can I have some more, please?’ It’s fascinating to see the way some women change their look to match their man.

Jemima Khan, the most high-profile example, has gone from a life of partial purdah – no bare skin, veils and a wardrobe of shalwar kameez – when she was married to Imran Khan, to skin-tight vamp now that she is with Hugh Grant.

Dressing to please your man is regarded by many as a bit of an old-fashioned notion, especially if you’re using your own credit card, and many men bemoan the waning of the old days.

But do men really try to dress to please their woman? Most of the couples I know have long ago come to a slightly disappointed compromise with each other’s sartorial habits – he wishing she’d ditch the smocks, she wishing he’d bury the leather blouson jacket.

My favourite film of the moment is Notes On A Scandal. There is a marvellously observed scene where schoolteacher Judi Dench is invited to the family home of her pash, Sheba (in the form of Cate Blanchett, looking incandescently beautiful). Dench, as the prudent spinster Barbara, puts on her best togs for Sunday lunch and is greeted by the posher Sheba and family tumbling around in jeans and old sweaters. So embarrassed is Barbara by her unsophisticated faux pas in overdressing that she pretends she has another engagement to attend later. It brilliantly illustrates the sometimes confusing, careless casualness of bohemian middle-class life and also captures perfectly that moment of horror when you know you have got your look so wrong.

Spring is the perfect time to pick a parka if you want to get a fashionable spring coat, you should check out the many parkas there are around.

Parkas don’t have very glamorous associations but, following on from their success in the winter season, there are some lovely lightweight ones to be found. The main appeal of a parka is its comfort level – nice deep pockets, lightweight yet warm, and nothing tight anywhere. It’s like walking around in a lowtog rated duvet – though hopefully a touch more flattering.

Many of the ones you will find in the stores now have drawstring hems, which create a trendy but rather more bulky shape and they look better unzipped. Roll the sleeves up a bit and let them float above a pair of narrow pants or a slim skirt.

If you are very slim, you can belt them.

Marks & Spencer and Gap have some excellent ones.

For something more extravagant, you could look at the silk versions I’ve seen by Belgian designer Dries Van Noten. Incidentally, Dries has opened a store on the Left Bank in Paris which, even if you don’t like his clothes (cropped pants, box pleat skirts, apron dresses in exotic fabrics), is worth a visit for its interior design.

Beautiful silk walls, huge sofas, Fifties photographs of French socialites and oriental carpets combine to make a shop that’s more comfortable than most people’s homes.