I’m mad about the mixing of prints. I liked the layering of florals over a simple black sweater in this editorial and this is pretty fabulous, too. She’s bold. But for best inspiration I look to Matisse’s models –– the original mix and matchers. Here is Odalisque in red Jacket, and she is utterly divine.

I look ever so slightly ridiculous wearing one, but I do love my Dollar Store rain bonnet. It was a gift from our nanny, Marilyn and I’ve worn it for years. It’s the top knot that sends the whole look over the edge, but it keeps my hair dry-ish, so I really don’t care. For a year or so, my great friend Stephanie and I had an idea (My Mum’s idea, actually) of starting up our own line of whimsical bonnets in clear plastic with high wattage piping. We had a name, and everything –– Deluge –– and we envisioned them everywhere, from chic hair salons to the cash at your local supermarket. But between babies, work, travel etc… Deluge never made the splash we hoped. An idea means very little if you don’t see it through, and to this day, I wince when I see a bonnet on the runway, on a magazine cover or on a celebrity’s noggin’. Steph and I had fun dreaming Deluge up, and maybe one day we’ll find a Deluge part deux? In the meantime, I have at least a dozen samples in rotation for rainy days. The pink neon is my favourite (the bonnet came with a chic little pouch that matched the piping) but I’m still faithful to my original.

I don’t wear bracelets very often, but this bourbon-coloured, thick plexi glass cuff by Lizzie Fortunato would get me to. I love the chunkiness and the colour. And while we’re here, let’s all look at the model’s rust sparkly socks. This palette is gorgeous, and not just because it conjures Fall. It’s just as pretty with your summer whites.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at Marcel Duchamp’s New York apartment as artists, critics and collectors flocked to party and drink and exchange in pithy repartee. The Arensbergs were there, so was the writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim were there, too. In fact, all the coolest aesthetes were. I watched a lecture given by Dada scholar, Francis Naumann today, and forget being a fly, it made me want to whisk myself back to the 1920s and score an invitation to one of Duchamp’s shindigs. The lecture was on artist and potter, Beatrice Wood, and she alone would have been reason enough to join that milieu.  Daring and groundbreaking, funny and smart, Wood was one of a kind. She lived to 105, if you can believe it, and broke with all the staid and stuffy traditions she’d been raised. She wore saris, ate Hershey’s chocolate bars, and made pottery that is as beautiful and bizarre as she seems to have been. Wood’s autobiography, I Shock Myself is top of my reading list. “My life is full of mistakes. They’re like pebbles that make a good road.”

I find this bridal collection, by Nadia Manzato, utterly charming. The dresses are ethereal and romantic. I’m a sucker for puffed sleeves, ribbon and lace, and the backs on these frocks are both sexy and demure. Take a look at her most recent collection; I kind of want to buy one to wear to parties, or around the house.

I was sad to read that Orla Kiely has closed her shops. Her King’s Road location was always a go-to on my London visits. Over the years, I’ve bought five or six sweaters there, all of which have made winter a happier experience for me. There was the one cardi that got away –– I left it in a New York taxi –– but the others all sit stacked in my cupboard like a chunk of rainbow. Of course, my very favourite is a bobbled pink cardigan that I bought freshly pregnant with my third baby. I felt lousy at the time, and that pink cheered me up no end. I’m convinced it was the pompom pink cardi that made people think I was carrying a girl. There’s another one, yellow like a daffodil, that has shrunk from too many washes, but still remains sunshine on a rainy day. And a nudie pink one, with hearts as buttons, that I wore over a trusty black dress to my wonderful friend, Polly’s memorial. Oh Orla, I wish I’d bought more of your gorgeous jumpers. No one does knitwear like you.

This dress, by Iris van Herpen, looks like a harp to me. It’s called ‘Aeolian,’ which in musical terms refers to a diatonic scale called the natural minor scale. It also references the winds, and Aeolus, the Greek God of wind and patriarch of the Greeks. We spent our honeymoon in the Aeolian Islands. This is just the sort of dream dress a new bride should toss in her valise for warm nights under the bougainvillea and stars.