Tina Fey Having just read Tina Fey\'s book, I was interested in her suggestion that you should never wear what designers tell you to wear, but what they wear themselves. Is that true? Sara, I would be the last person on the planet to argue you out of your love for the Fey – although, having said that, I do wish that she\'d knock off the self-deprecation schtick. And quit portraying single women as hapless losers. And maybe also stop insisting on 30 Rock that Liz Lemon (ie, Tina Fey) is fat and ugly when she is patently the opposite.
OK, so maybe I wouldn\'t be the last person to query your Fey love. Maybe the fifth to last person. Anyway, I am sure Fey would not take offence if I said that she is not a fashion guru, and that is in no way a slur against her. Having seen Fey in person at her book launch the other week, I can state with first-hand authority that Fey\'s oft-professed claims to unfashionability are both untrue and unfounded – Fey is a nippy dresser, even when she is five months pregnant, which is known to obstetricians as the middle of the can\'tbebotheredanymore trimester, before then entering the yeahi\'mgonna-wearatentforthenextthreemonthssothehellwhat final stage. But her lack of fashion nous is made most apparent by her belief that one should look to what designers wear for guidance. My God, has she never been to a Karl Lagerfeld show? A Donna Karan show? A – whisper it, head bowed awkwardly – John Galliano show? Designers dress like crazy people! Lagerfeld looks more like Keyser Söze than the man behind the label that epitomises French chic, Karan resembles a walking pile of carpets and Galliano – well, let\'s just say that dressing like an extra in Pirates of the Caribbean does not a fashion statement make and leave it at that.
It is often believed that most fashion designers studied at well-known schools such as St Martins in London or FIT in New York. But actually, the one that nearly all of them graduated from is the University of Do As I Say, Not as I Do. This is why so few of them are thin, why they wear the same styles for ever as opposed to changing their entire wardrobe every six months as they advocate of others, and why so many of them dress so very, very badly.
I\'m sure there are easy jokes to be made out there about how this proves how fashion designers actually hate women and are generally the spawn of Satan. Actually, I think it proves that fashion designers are smarter than Picasso. Well, Julien Macdonald excepted, perhaps.
Just as Picasso knew how to make classical paintings but preferred to whack out paintings of women with heads like Rubik\'s Cubes and their eyes all askew (to quote Ernst Gombrich\'s description of the Spaniard\'s style. Maybe), so designers prefer tocreate a – shall we say – less conventional aesthetic than the masses like. But unlike Picasso, most designers know that relative conventionality sells a lot more than extreme experimentalism. So while Lagerfeld might spend at least three hours every morning squeezing his person into his leather garb, frilled cuffs just so, he then forces himself to design yet another identikit tweed suit and quilted bag, and another and another and another, because he knows it\'s what the people want. Really, you have to admire the self-sacrifice of these people. Admire them but don\'t, contrary to what Tina says, copy them.
I got myself knocked up but I don\'t want Isabel Oliver/Seraphine/other overpriced maternity-yawn wear. I am thinking gold lamé tube dress and something else for day to day. Please help clothe my behumped torso.
Nell, London
Well, hell\'s bells, Nell, my gel! Do you really want your future offspring – current inhabitant of aforementioned hump – to know that his or her mother described their immaculate conception as \"getting knocked up\"? Just book your kid a place on Jeremy Kyle now: \"My mother humiliated me – WHILE I WAS STILL IN UTERO.\"
And if that wasn\'t bad enough, your question is ridiculous. Thanks to my innate talents as a fashion-advice columnist, my God-given psychic abilities and the fact that you are my sister, I can perceive that you are not so pregnant as to be in desperate need of maternity clothes yet. Thus, you are asking what you should wear in the future and images of the very pregnant MIA at the Grammy awards in 2009 or Neneh Cherry on Top of the Pops in 1988 are dancing through your mind. Well, Nell, stop and desist. By the time you get that pregnant it will be late August and it will be a miracle if you bother getting dressed at all, lamé tube my ass.