The Thoughtful Dresser

Clothes matter. How we choose to dress ourselves defines our identity. The former editor of Cosmopolitan talks to Linda Grant, who has shown us that clothes can be a serious intellectual topic, and to Catherine Hill, who has proved that elegance and femininity can be life and death issues. Beware, this talk may change your perspective on black, the small matter of accessories and other fundamental facets of femininity?

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She is the author of Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution; The Cast Iron Shore, Remind Me Who I am Again, an account of her mother's decline into dementia and the role that memory plays in creating family history, When I Lived in Modern Times, set in Tel Aviv in the last years of the British Mandate (winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction); Still Here and The Clothes On Their Backs, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her non-fiction work, The People On The Street:A Writer's View of Israel, won the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage and now The Thoughtful Dresser.

Catherine Hill was the Joan Burstein of Toronto, starting her boutique, Chez Catherine, in 1972. She was the first to bring designers like Gianfranco Ferre, Armani and Versace to the very conservative women of the city and for three decades was the queen of the fashion scene. But she had arrived in Canada after the war, as a friendless refugee, not yet 20. Aged 17 in 1944 she and her family were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. Her mother did not survive the first selection, her father died a few weeks later of typhoid. Incredibly, Catherine survived.

Linda Kelsey is a former editor of Cosmopolitan and SHE, and was twice awarded Editor of the Year. She was also launch editor of Wedding Day and Executive Editor on the launch of In Style. She is now a freelance journalist and author whose work appears regularly in a variety of magazines and newspapers ranging from Good Housekeeping and Saga to the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and Jewish Chronicle. She is the author of Was It Good For You, Too? 30 Years of Cosmopolitan, and two novels, Fifty is not a Four-Letter Word and The Secret Lives of Sisters.          

Sponsored by Hilda and Marc Worth