Handbag Heaven

by Alderson, Maggie

  So that’s all over. No more elastic waists to work, it’s hopeless for productivity. I’m going back to wearing jackets to the office. Jackets, with tailored skirts or pants. Oh! I remember those things – we used to wear them in the twentieth century and we called them ‘suits’. Quaint though it seems, there was something about wearing a suit to work that used to make me sit up straighter. Because I felt smart – I felt, you know, smart. I think my IQ drops about ten points when I come to work in a T-shirt.

  I blame America for this. It was American corporations that started the wretched notion of Casual Friday. Or was it American law firms? Who cares, either way it was a very sorry day when some fat-bellied Yank came up with the idea of wearing golf clothes to work on Friday to make the segue to Connecticut weekend wear that little bit smoother.

  That’s one theory for how it started. The other is that, like everything else since 1995, it began in Silicon Valley, where both arms of the IT brotherhood – the hip cat swinger skateboarding techno dudes and the never-been-kissed drip-dry nerds – insisted on wearing their tribal colours to work. That’s shorts and gnarly sandshoes for one lot and easy-care DriCel pull-on separates for the other.

  Terrified of being left behind, the dinosaurish old corporations relaxed their workplace dress codes to match, hoping to entice thrusting young dot coms to come to work for them. And as the rest of the world copies America as unthinkingly as a toddler helping Daddy fill the supermarket trolley, now we’re all wearing weekend wear to work, too.

  And because human beings are fundamentally lazy carcasses, Casual Friday has turned into Slobby Every Day. The offices where I work are beginning to look more like a day at the seaside than a day at the corporate coalface. My colleagues in the fourth estate are wearing Birkenstock sandals, combat pants, Hawaiian shirts, skimpy summer dresses and even rubber thongs to work. I fear winter – who will be first to turn up in fleecy trackie daks and ug boots? You couldn’t get into a Kings Cross nightclub in half these outfits, but suddenly it’s okay to wear them to work at a leading newspaper.

  Well, it’s not okay. Apart from the fact that it’s like being surrounded by superannuated adolescents in I’m-not-combing-my-hair-for-granny outfits, Slobby Every Day cuts out the crucial signalling function of work clothes. How was I to know that the fellow in shorts and combat boots was… well, quite important on the paper? To me he looked like a resting actor bringing around one of those sandwich baskets, and I really didn’t appreciate his butting in on our meeting.

  And there is another reason why I am revolting against the relaxation of corporate dress codes: treading the sartorial highwire between relaxed executive and functioning derelict makes getting dressed in the morning a total nightmare. Everyone knows ‘smart casual’ is the hardest look to do. Why on earth would you want to inflict it upon yourself every day of your working life?

  So for all these reasons, I’m going back to the Maoist pragmatism of suits. Three suits, five shirts, two pairs of shoes and that will be my working wardrobe worked out. All I’ve got to do now is find three suits comfortable enough to sit down in all day.

  Hobgoblin heels

  Quite by chance I have stumbled on the key to an international mystery. It came upon me in a shoe shop in rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris, centre of the shoe universe. I was looking at the pale pink patent pumps with toes like platypus bills, and red shorty ankle boots with ultra-flat splayed circular heels, and heard myself say: ‘These are the shoes hobgoblins wear to parties. And this is the dance they do in them…’

  As I assumed the correct stance to demonstrate the Hobgoblin Stomp, I saw that my friend Victoria had simultaneously put herself into exactly the same position. She Just Knew. Suddenly the whole thing became clear – hobgoblins have taken over world shoe manufacture and that’s why shops are currently full of things only they would want to wear.

  Anyway, here’s how you do the dance: bend your knees into an inelegant crouch, then raise your legs alternately, with feet turned harshly up – the better to show off your lime green ponyskin clogs. Arms are held out to the side, mean fists raised, and you slide your eyes slowly from side to side as you do it. Hobgoblins have such flat faces that this is the only way they can see who is coming up on the outside – which is important, as they get blind on mead at their hoedowns and any dance-floor collisions lead to ugly fights.

  Coalmining and blacksmithing were the traditional hobgoblin trades until a consultant from McKinsey’s told them they needed to diversify – and that’s when they started producing these terrible shoes. Mind you, when you consider what else hobgoblins wear, the shoes start to make sense. All hobgoblins – male and female – wear skirts and, although their body shape makes Danny DeVito look willowy, they favour the dirndl, the more sticky-out the better. The fashionable young hobettes were very excited about the ski wear in a recent Chanel show – thickly padded bell-shaped skirts.

  Hobgoblins’ hair is multicoloured and worn tied up in plaits above their ears, which have very pendulous lobes. Slobodan Milosevic is a hobgoblin who came up from the caverns below Belgrade, cut off his plaits and had surgery on his ear lobes – and so is Madeleine Albright. Although they don’t get on in their human guises, you may see them by the light of the waning moon, dancing the Hobgoblin Stomp, with red and turquoise platform cowboy boots on their stumpy hobgoblin feet.

  But as well as these ghastly hobs, there is one benign force also at work in the world producing shoes – the Shoe Fairy. She is responsible for all the pink and mauve mules currently on sale. If you see a shoe with an impossibly waisted heel and an ickle pretty bow on the toe, she made it. She’s a ditz. Her shoes are all divine, but – along with her close relative Manolo Blahnik – she doesn’t have much of a grip on reality. She has wings, so her calfskin soles never actually touch the ground; she just floats along 2 millimetres above it and if she ever needs to get anywhere in a hurry, she just grabs hold of a passing butterfly. Thus she has no idea of the pain and suffering her adorable shoes cause their human wearers.

  So that explains the two extremes of shoes currently on sale, but there is one part of the mystery yet to be solved: what have the horrible hobgobs done with the kindly old shoemaker who used to oversee the elves who made all the practical, yet attractive, shoes we used to be able to buy? I suspect they are holding him captive in an underground cell, while the elves (a sweet but undisciplined lot) sit idle without his guidance.

  Any information leading to his return gratefully received.

  All strung out

  There is something worse than the Visible Panty Line – the Visible G-String Line. I suppose we should call it a VGSL. (Funny coincidence how it reads like an acronym for some kind of genital ointment, isn’t it? Especially as you feel as if you need something soothing down there after wearing one.) Anyway, a VGSL is like having a billboard plastered across your arse saying, ‘I didn’t want to have a visible panty line under this form-fitting cotton Lycra dress so I’m wearing a G-string. I’M WEARING A G-STRING. GOT IT?’ This look is particularly grotesque under tight white trousers. The sight of such a posterior wiggling along the street brings to mind all too clearly images of what my friend V. calls ‘chewing cloth’. And surely I don’t need to remind you what they call G-strings in Brazil… Oh, all right then. Dental floss.

  G-strings are awful. Women who say they are ‘more comfortable’ than proper knickers are the same brand of gender traitors who used to say they wore stockings and suspenders because they were ‘more comfortable’.

  Oh, please, how could having your legs attached to your hips by snapping elastic possibly be comfortable? You feel like a puppet. Dance, Pinocchio, dance. Suspender belts are vile contraptions. They’re not underclothing, they’re apparatus. They are equipment. I only know how uncomfortable they are because, in my youth, I had a boyfriend who thought stockings and suspenders were heaven (he had a 1940s fixation generally, but he also played the saxophone and dressed like Robert de Niro in New York, New York, so you
can see why I thought it was worth it). I’m happy to say I haven’t met a man my age since who went ga-ga for garter belts. Apart from pervy types who enjoy the readers’ wives section of Penthouse magazine, it seems to be a fetish that has run its course. Good riddance.

  In fact, most guys I know actively dislike stockings. ‘Sluttish’ was a word that came up when I canvassed opinion among some red-blooded chaps of my acquaintance. Some of them even said they find tights (which I have always thought were a fairly effective contraceptive) sexy, probably because that is what they found the first time they put their hand up a girl’s skirt at the pictures. And do you know what else these fellows said they find a big turn-off? That’s right, G-strings. They appear to make men almost as uncomfortable as they make us. There’s some kind of Cleo-reading multiple-orgasm expectation implicit in them that makes blokes want to go home and watch go-kart racing. (Although one of my sources did add that G-strings can be acceptable on ‘a perfect Coppertone bottom’, which was big-hearted of him.)

  I know there are men out there who get the Victoria’s Secret catalogues air-freighted over from the States and someone must be keeping La Perla in business, but the undergarment genre the sophisticated men-about-town I talked to professed to like best are simple white Cottontail knickers. Elvis lives. And, one of them added, unprompted, ‘The line of them over the hip under a pair of tight trousers is gorgeous.’ Hang on – isn’t he describing a VPL? So there you have it. All those chicks pretending they like walking around with a cheese wire up their clacker because they thought G-strings were supposed to be sexy and it turns out men liked VPLs all the time.

  Of course the choice of underscunder is not entirely about dressing (or undressing) for men. There is the fine line of your Easton Pearson evening dress to think about, too. But if you are still worried about your knickers showing under your clothes, there is one simple and comfortable solution. Don’t wear any. (Ask any Scotsman.)

  Crowning glory

  Could we be hats? It’s just a thought, but the whole accessories thing is just getting bigger and bigger and it seems like the obvious progression. I am now as fully obsessed with handbags as I have always been with shoes. A lingering fetish for scarves is fast turning into a fullblown mania, and suddenly it seems – hats, I want them.

  Not just sunhats to keep off the UV rays (incidentally, have you seen a recent photo of the sun-loving Princess Stephanie? You could make a leather Akubra out of her forehead) or once-a-year hats for the races, but dress hats for lunch, cocktail hats for cocktails and charming little hatty confections to wear out to dinner. In other words, glamour hats for every day – like women used to wear, up until some point in the 1960s when we threw the notion to the four winds, along with our toques, berets, cloches, pillboxes, bowlers, boaters and bonnets. I want mine back.

  My great friend B., who was editor of the British equivalent of The Australian Women’s Weekly in the late 1950s, tells me they all wore hats – and gloves – to work every day back then. It would have been unthinkable not to, she says. That could be a teensy-weensy little bit of a bore (ever tried typing in gloves?), but when I asked a group of friends at a smart dinner recently if they wished we were all sitting there in darling little hats, they squealed with delight at the prospect. So what’s stopping us?

  Even high fashion has given the notion a bit of a nod. In one of my favourite ever collections for Miu Miu, which was so atmospheric it was more like a short story than a fashion show, Miuccia Prada finished the look for her mournful young woman, circa 1950, with a wonderfully characterful hat (and a suitcase).

  One look at that hat and I had the whole story: forced to work as a maid after losing her family in the war, Marie-Louise was heading for the station to seek her fortune in Paris. That beaten-up old thing was the only hat she had – a last crumpled piece of dignity on her beautiful young head. (In my fevered imagination, she went on to become the toast of le tout Paris for the magnificent chapeaux she created for her hat salon, Maison Marie-Louise, after finding a black ostrich feather on a street in Le Marais… It gets boring at fashion shows.)

  But high fashion aside, I know I’m not alone in this hat-fancying thing. Not long after that show I went to the charity auction of the spectacular wardrobe of retired Sydney socialite Betty Rose McInerney (vintage Givenchy for miles), expecting to romp home with swags of her exquisite Paris hats, only to find myself in a room full of women already wearing gorgeous headgear – on a Sunday afternoon – and clearly intent on adding to their collections.

  Bidding was furious on all ninety-two hats, and the two I particularly craved – a black velvet pillbox with a veil and an ostrich feather, and a very Audrey H. velvet coolie-style number – went for $240 and $950 respectively (not to me).

  As there are clearly plenty of other women out there who adore the idea of having a feather in their caps, all we need to do is have the guts to start wearing them again. Simple. There are so many reasons why it’s a good idea. Unlike other cult accessories, you can just have fun with hats without worrying about any dreary practical considerations, like walking, or having room for your Palm Pilot. If you’re wearing a hat, it doesn’t matter if your hair is as dirty as a biker’s denims. They involve such gorgeous notions as gossamer wisps of veil, saucy bunches of cherries and even tiny little birds. Hat pins.

  That’s settled then – the glamour cocktail hat is back. So you go first and I’ll follow, okay?

  Fashion eats itself

  ‘Stop the fashion system!’ absurdist fashion designer Franco Moschino used to implore. What a shame he didn’t live to see it happen, because fashion seems to have stopped itself. Nothing is out of fashion any more. Even hemlines, for so long the most fundamental of all fashion barometers, are no longer an issue.

  Look at any group of women and you are likely to see skirts stopping everywhere from the bottom of their shoes to the bottom of their bottoms. There isn’t even a hemline convention for trousers any more. It’s just, you know, whatever.

  This unfashion phenomenon really struck me when I was writing one of these columns the other week. I was trying to come up with an example of something really dated and sad to get a cheap laugh, and my mind was blank. There was nothing funny enough to poke fun at. In the 1980s you just had to whisper the word ‘flares’ to have everyone rolling around in embarrassed hilarity. ‘Oh no!’ we used to cry. ‘Seventies clothes! Agh! Body shirts! Slacks! White shoes! What we all looked like!’

  All those things look fine to me now. So does 1960s hippie gear – I’d love one of those Kashmiri mirrored dresses and an Afghan coat. And I adore my 50s fake leopard-skin coat and my flowery 40s dress. In the end, the best I could do was make fun of 80s shoulder pads (well, I did have them in my bras and nighties, which was a bit much). But I couldn’t think of anything from the 90s to make fun of. Now, that is weird.

  Think of the big trends of the past decade and rate their cringe value. Bootleg pants? I still wear them. Cardigans over petticoat dresses? Still looks cute to me. Pashmina shawls? I intend to die wrapped in one. Pedal pushers? Fine for hot/cold days. Cargo pants? Wearing ’em right now, buddy. Grunge? People wear cargo pants to the office… Prada? Gimme gimme.

  I might not be in a great rush to buy any more of those across-the-body ergonomic handbags with special pockets for your mobile phone and your bike padlock, but the thought of them doesn’t reduce me instantly to the quivering dead-fly position. I don’t nudge my friends and point at people in the street who are wearing them. And when I go to New York in winter, I’m still going to wear my thick-soled pod shoes to survive in the freezing weather. None of it’s madly ‘in’ or madly ‘out’. It’s all just stuff.

  You know how this happened? Fashion ate itself. The 90s was the revivals decade and the reviving has just got faster and faster, until we have reached the point where things are revived so quickly they don’t have a chance to fully go out before they come in again.

  It took the whole of the 1970s for flares to go out
completely, which is why we found them so universally risible by 1980. When they came back in about 1994, they were already going out with the early uptake fashion victims before the majority of the population had even got their heads around the idea of wearing them again.

  As a result, they’ve been left suspended in fashion limbo, not particularly in, but not spectacularly out either.

  The same thing is happening now with black trouser suits. While they were already totally O-V-E-R in high-fashion circles (where women were dressing like Latvian shepherdesses on strong pharmaceuticals), the sharp black suit, white T-shirt and open shoes thing was just gaining real currency with the masses. Then it started to come back in again from the big designers…

  And so we have ended up in Moschino’s fashion-free nirvana – where you can wear whatever you damn well please. Although I can think of one thing that’s really, really OUT: In and Out lists.

  The small print

  Wouldn’t it be great if clothes came with instructions? I don’t just mean washing instructions – they’re mostly a waste of space, erring so strongly on the unsueable side of caution that I have seen underpants bearing labels saying ‘Dry clean only’. And they never say anything useful, like ‘Fabric will develop unattractive bobbles on first wearing’, or ‘Liable to cause body odour in the excitable’.

  Despite these failings, washing instructions do have their uses. Just this morning I had reached the till with a very cosy polar fleece bathrobe when I noticed the words ‘Hand wash only in cold water’ on the care label. As if. The thing was the size of Barry White’s fat-day kaftan. I’d have to hand wash it in Sydney Harbour and get it airlifted into the spinner. So those washing instructions saved me from a long whiffy winter in an unwashed bathrobe.