Flats have fought a battle with heels, their arch nemesis, for centuries. They just about weathered the two-inch boost given to Catherine de Medici on her wedding day, which gave a boost to heels for some time after. They came back into style when Marie Antoinette sported heels on the way to the guillotine in perhaps the greatest public relations disaster in footwear history. It was the inimitable Audrey Hepburn, though, in the 1957 movie Funny Face, who ensured that ballet flats would become a staple of every girl’s wardrobe, and qualify in the process for inclusion in the Timeless 50.

Comfort is one reason they will stay there: tottering around on heels all day is not exactly a fun proposition.

But they can also look great with skinny jeans, leggings or a short skirt, whether you are talking the classic lines of dance-shoe specialist Bloch, the elegant originality of London Sole, or the daring of Christian Louboutin.

Flats will always have their defenders, including it would seem the UK’s Trades Unions Congress which was recently to be found debating a ban on high heels for the damage they cause to the suffering feet of Britain’s women.  Ballet flats, it would seem are not only timeless but the healthier option. Vote now for ballet flat’s inclusion in the Timeless 50.

For such a popular song, You’re Beautiful is pretty dark. The video ends with James Blunt killing himself, after a falsetto lament to seeing his ex-girlfriend with someone else. “It’s time to face the truth,” he cries. “I will never be with you.”

Blunt’s heartfelt delivery struck a chord with romantics everywhere, and his debut hit reached number one in 10 different countries. It’s still his biggest-selling track, but he’s not tired of it, yet. Though “if I had the radio on all the time,” he concedes, “and they kept playing that song then yes, I’d probably turn it off.”

Plenty of listeners do already. It’s one of those tunes you love or hate, and parodies appeared after it hogged the airwaves for much of 2005. According to “Weird Al” Yankovic, Blunt personally endorsed his version, called You’re Pitiful. But record label bosses intervened. Yankovic eventually gave it away for free on his website.

Vote now to make You’re Beautiful part of your Timeless 50?

Never mind Michelle Obama’s “perfectly toned” arms, her pearl necklace makes the look that will last.

Originally found in shallow rivers, pearls were the first real jewels that people wore. They formed in the shells of mollusks, and had the same calcium carbonate structure, in minute crystalline form. The best ones were spherical and smooth, but they were rare until the gem trade got started. Then Asian divers were sent into the seas, clutching rock holds to reach the bottom, bringing back their treasures to Bombay’s pearl market.

These days, most stones are cultured, which means they’re farmed by planting a nucleus of shell tissue into a mussel or an oyster, around which layers of pearl can grow. There are even high quality imitations, but experts still spot them fairly easily. Regular necklaces come in collar, choker or matinee lengths, with breastbone-hugging “opera” bands for the adventurous, and even longer “ropes” for wannabe flappers.

Celebs like Keira Knightley, Rihanna and Hillary Swank have recently helped make pearl necklaces a fashion statement once more but, as that uber arbiter of style, Audrey Hepburn, demonstrated way back in Breakfast at Tiffanys, pearls truly are timeless.

Does the pearl necklace make your Timeless 50? Let us know and vote for them on the main site.

Cool in 1929 and enduring to this day

Recognition may have come later than it should to Eileen Gray, but her status today as one of the 20th century’s great furniture designers owes a lot to her iconic glass coffee table.  This quietly ingenious piece with its adjustable side-table and minimalist symmetry is also familiar enough that you might hardly notice it. That is almost the definition of timelessness (and if you agree you can vote for it to be part of the Timeless 50).

It was designed in 1926 for a sister who liked breakfast in bed (a perfect motivation, no?). Dubbed the E-1027 table after the house Gray designed with her friend and collaborator Jean Badovici, it also suggests something of the craving for anonymity that would later transform her into a near-recluse. The name is code: E is for Eileen, 10 for Jean with J the 10th letter in the alphabet, 2 for Badovici (same reason) and 7 the G for Gray.

Ironically enough, it would also help push Eileen Gray back into the public eye. After a gushing 1968 article on Gray in Domus magazine reignited interest in her work, the table was one of several pieces that went back into production

Thankfully for her admirers, Eileeen Gray finally seems to have cracked the code for success, so much so that one of her chairs sold recently for a whopping $28m. Now that’s what you call a comeback.

Since then, though, renamed, reshaped and the title song to a big Hollywood movie, it has come good. Collins’ own version was a number one in the US and the UK, won a Grammy and was nominated for an Oscar. Then there are the cover versions by the likes of Mariah Carey and Westlife. But none carries the emotional charge of the song as delivered by Collins himself at the London Live Aid concert for Ethiopia in 1985, with the odd bum note only adding to the authenticity of the occasion.

By then, Collins had already lived through several artistic lives. As an actor, he was good enough to star as the Artful Dodger in a West End Production of the musical Oliver.  As a drummer – and he was very good indeed: he became the driving force behind the rock band Genesis, and eventually its lead singer.

His solo career has eclipsed all that, at least financially, and Against All Odds is now perhaps the highlight of his songbook. To give it the ultimate accolade, you can elect it to the Timeless 50.

If the measure of a great song is its influence on those who come after, then Good Times, the classic 1979 disco hit from Chic, is among the greatest of all time.

It was probably nothing to do with the lyrics. Nile Rodgers, who wrote the song with fellow band founder Bernard Edwards, described the title as ironic and the lyrics as a reflection on the late 1970s economic recession, but who knew?

Even when people thought they knew what Chic was saying, they often didn’t. Most famously, the line “Our new state of mind” somehow morphed in the popular imagination into “Are you straight or bi?”(Try and work out the lyrics on this clip with Jay Leno).

But it’s the sheer, joyous danceability of Good Times that sent it rocketing to number one and that still has the power to get the stiffest hips and most leaden feet moving, and the infectious grooviness of the base line that has seen it picked up and sampled countless times since. Queen lifted it for “Another One Bites the Dust”, the Sugarhill Gang purloined it for “Rapper’s Delight” and everyone from The Beastie Boys to Busta Rhymes, INXS to Blondie, have leaned on it to one extent or another over the years.

So while appropriation may be the surest sign of musical flattery it also ensures that Good Times lives on a a great song in its own right.  You can vote Good Times into the Timeless 50.

When men were men and made women mad

Centered around the smoke-filled boardroom of NYC’s Sterling Cooper agency, Mad Men captures the essence of the high-octane, cut-throat advertising industry of the 1960s and the emotionally vacant relationships behind money-hungry adman Don Draper, played by John Hamm.

It also explores the moral codes of the era, with smoking, sexism and adultery all portrayed liberally. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times claims Mad Men has found ‘a strange and lovely space between nostalgia and political correctness’.

Mad Men made Emmy-award history in 2008 with a record-breaking 16 nominations. The American Film Institute selected it as one of the 10 best television series of 2007, and it was named the best television show of that year by the Television Critics Association and several US newspapers.
Writer and executive producer Matthew Weiner (of The Sopranos fame) is the man behind the original 13-episode series. And he likes to keep his success in the “family”. His 11-year-old son, Marten, plays Glen Bishop.

Take a look at the show’s already iconic opening theme, A Beautiful Mine. It might just be enough to earn a place in the Timeless 50.

The fragrance that says style

What do Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve, Nicole Kidman and Audrey Tautou have in common? They have all been ‘spokesmodels’ for Chanel No 5.

Monroe splashing the famous perfume over her body was one of the most successful advertisement photos ever, while Kidman’s Baz Luhrman-directed walk up a flight of steps surrounded by paparazzi, with a diamond-studded ‘No 5’ hanging down her back, was so iconic it was parodied by the late Jade Goody for a reality TV show.

The ‘world’s most legendary fragrance’ was the first from Parisian couturier Gabrielle Coco Chanel and has been on sale continuously since its introduction in 1921. When Chanel commissioned perfumer Ernest Beaux, he tried to capture the scent of the extreme freshness of the Arctic Circle, having been stationed there during WWI. Presented with ten options, Chanel chose No 5. It sets the benchmark for elegance and desirability and a bottle is said to be sold every 30 seconds.

The fragrance’s latest ‘face’ is Tautou: but she also played the designer herself in the film Coco Before Chanel, released in September.

Does Chanel No. 5 make your Timeless 50?

King of the wild edibles frontier

For centuries German knives ruled the roost in the manufacture of chef’s knives – J. A. Henckel started making them in 1731, Wusthof in 1841.  But then along came the Japanese.  By transferring the skill involved in crafting Samurai swords – banned since the 16th century – the Asian chef knife, known as a Santoku, has become the most popular knife in today’s kitchen, led by its best-known brand, Global.  Such is the labor intensity of the process, leading Japanese knife masters make only a few blades a day … most of them right-handed.  And so precious are their carbon steels, forged only in Japan, that it’s forbidden to export them as a raw material. It’s a passionate subject – chefs will debate long and hard about forged versus stamped, full tang versus partial, scalloped versus smooth, beveled edge versus acute, … But in the end no-one wins outright, which means – like the knife itself – the debate will continue long into the future.

Is the chef’s knife part of your culinary Timeless 50? Vote now or it might not make the cut.

Clooney left but ER prospered

ER would never be the same without George Clooney, some viewers moaned, when he left to become a megastar. Rubbish, said the rest: it would get better, unlike many of the show’s stricken patients, who would sometimes fail to make it in spectacular fashion.

Over 15 series, America’s longest-running hospital drama racked up a decade of top ten ratings. It was based on a script by the novelist Michael Crichton, who worked in an emergency room as a student, long before his book Jurassic Park became an Oscar-winning movie. The director of that adaptation was Steven Spielberg, who also produced the first series of ER.

Eventually, it died of fatigue, but not without a final bow from Clooney, who returned for a cameo before the show vacated a primetime slot inherited from Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. Even these illustrious predecessors weren’t as popular as ER at its height, and its storybook circle of life is a tough act to follow.

Would ER make your prime Timeless 50?