Why does camila batmanghelidjh dress

Well known for her charismatic approach and distinctive dress sense Camila Batmanghelidjh is one of the UK's most instantly recognisable figures - one magazine profile put it like this: "Ignoring Camila Batmanghelidjh is not easy: not her neon clothes and ready roar of laughter; nor her rocklike certainty gained through experience, academic research and compassion.

The charity has had an array of high profile donors and supporters, including children's author JK Rowling and was chaired by the BBC's creative director, Alan Yentob. And Ms Batmanghelidjh had influential contacts in politics too. The charity has received millions in government grants going back a number of years. One source involved in talks over grants says David Cameron appeared "mesmerised" by the Kids Company boss. Officials and ministers at the Department for Education had repeatedly expressed opposition to continued funding for the charity because of concerns about its performance and management but, the source said: "She was a good news story for the Conservative Party.

It was a case of glamour over substance. He said that there was a "cult of personality" surrounding Camila Batmanghelidjh and that the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown intervened personally to safeguard funding for the charity. At the time Ms Batmanghelidjh claimed that government briefing was "attempting to discredit me" and distract focus from the charity's lobbying to improve services for troubled children and youths.

The charity long list of celebrity patrons included billioniare businessman Sir Richard Branson. Numbers may, of course, not be her strong point. But neither, given her extreme dyslexia, is reading. Which is interesting, given that she has on several occasions also told interviewers that, at the tender age of nine, she enrolled her mother in Iran's child psychology association, because 'they would not accept membership from children' and she wanted to read the organisation's journals.

In , she told the Telegraph that the scientific publication — aimed, remember, at literate adults — came 'every month' for her to read. Yet, in Shattered Lives, she wrote: 'It used to come every Wednesday.

Whatever the finer details, Ms Batmanghelidjh soon left Iran — thanks to another strange, even surreal, episode. Shortly afterwards she was sent to school in Switzerland, and then at Sherborne, the boarding establishment in Dorset. She was there in , when the Iranian revolution broke out. In the ensuing chaos, her family's land and property was confiscated, and her relatives were forced to flee the country, with the exception of her father, who was imprisoned.

Understandably, she says she applied for asylum in the UK. It is not clear when this was granted, but she has said she has 'refugee status'.

Confusion also surrounds how her expensive boarding fees at Sherborne were paid. In , she told the Evening Standard she was indebted to 'a kindly bank manager' who she wanted to meet and thank. Three years later, she explained further, saying he paid the bill with 'his own money'. It's a sweet story. But it is also at odds with a Guardian article which said 'the bank manager managed to get into her father's bank accounts', releasing funds frozen by the new Tehran regime.

Whatever really happened, the Iranian revolution was clearly a formative experience. Ms Batmanghelidjh said it left her 'down to my last 50p and thinking I can either buy bread or catch the Tube. Suddenly it hit me: this is what poverty means: no choice'.

Again, a compelling story. But one which again appears to vary with some other points of view. While this didn't make them rich, it did make the family comfortably off. Two years earlier, her student sister, Lila, committed suicide. At around the same time, Ms Batmanghelidjh says she was hospitalised with a pituitary gland disorder which left her close to death.

After she recovered from that scare, Ms Batmanghelidjh enrolled at Warwick University in There, she learned her father had managed to get out of Iran.

The offices of the charity in London which was shut for good in July over concerns about the Kids Company's finances. Another dramatic story. However, a cynic might wonder how a man might 'swim to freedom' from Iran to Turkey when there is no coastline, or sea, between the two nations.

In any case, her father ended up in America, where in he wrote a best-selling self-help book called Your Body's Many Cries For Water. It described how many medical conditions, some regarded as incurable, could be treated by drinking large amounts of water.

They included, according to his obituary in the Washington Post, 'depression, asthma, arthritis, back pain, migraines, high blood pressure, multiple sclerosis'.

Not everyone agreed. Quackwatch website, which sets out to expose what it regards as bogus medical cures, described his claims as 'absolute nonsense'. To help sell the book, Fereydoon claimed to have studied under penicillin pioneer Sir Alexander Fleming at St Mary's Hospital medical school in Paddington, London, from to A spokesman for St Mary's says this was unlikely, given that Sir Alexander retired in For her part, Ms Batmanghelidjh helped set up a charity called Place2Be, and told Glamour she 'founded' it at the age of 24, which would have been in Strangely, however, Place2Be, which now counts the Duchess of Cambridge as a patron, was not formally registered as a charity until She left the organisation, and founded Kids Company in Ostensibly a gander at the wardrobes of formidable female figures from Joan of Arc and Elizabeth I to Coco Chanel and Margaret Thatcher, the show in fact pursues the thread between professional success and an unflinchingly individual persona.

Batmanghelidjh, who collages her muu-muus, turbans and fingerless gloves from bits of fabric collected by her charges from neighbourhood Dumpsters, was the among the most valued "gets" by Design Museum curator Donna Lovejoy. The smart ones realize I'm just having a bit of fun.

Organized by Lovejoy and fashion journalist Colin McDowell, Women Fashion Power began as a trawl through clothing archives and decades of best-dressed lists. The first section of the exhibition illustrates with mesmerizing photography how women have projected authority through dress.

A timeline snaking around the second gallery looks at key moments of emancipation: the evolution of the corset throughout the 19th century, Edwardian riding habits and swimming costumes, the suffragette's blouse-hat combo. By the time you reach the powderblue Mansfield suit worn by Margaret Thatcher on the day she was elected leader of Britain's Conservative Party in , you get the sense that the men'sclub look is nearing an ominous peak.

The shoulders go, the trousers come in. The pivotal design in Women Fashion Power, however, is the wrap dress. Lovejoy and McDowell secured one of Diane von Furstenberg's earliest versions from the mids. W hen I look in the mirror, I say to myself, "Good morning, which of my medical peculiarities has come to visit? Ah, lymph glands, swollen again, I see. Six sizes bigger than when I went to bed. I am happy to report that being big has its delights; I gobble up exotic fabrics, sofa trimmings and patchwork quilts, and turn them into the outfit of the day in minutes.