Handbag Heaven

by Alderson, Maggie

  But what I’d really like to see are wearing instructions. They could start by telling you which part of your body the garment is meant to cover and have arrows to show which way is up. The more ‘creative’ the designer, the harder this generally is to figure out. A built-in compass could be useful. Or those illuminated emergency arrows they have on the floor of aeroplanes.

  In a sad attempt to wear more ‘interesting’ clothes, I once tried on something by Comme des Garçons. It looked like a little cardigan and a long skirt on the hanger, but when I got it into the changing room it had shape shifted, like a sorceress, into something tailor made for a very slim dromedary.

  Once I had it on, the cardigan appeared to be wider than it was high and I wasn’t even sure I had my head through the right hole. Fastening the skirt required the assistance of a civil engineer, or a master of origami. Even getting it back on the hanger was an aptitude test. Running out of the shop was easy, though.

  That was my last attempt with ‘art’ clothing. Now I stick to garments I could make myself with paper and crayons for a cut-out doll. (Does anyone else remember cut-out dolls, incidentally?)

  If I don’t know the name for it – skirt, shirt, trousers, vest, poncho, tabard etc. – I don’t even consider it. My other guideline is: ‘Have to tie it? Don’t buy it.’ Those are my shopping rules and they have made life much easier than trying on clothes more physically demanding than a game of Twister.

  But even my cut-out dolly clothes could be improved with some simple instructions stitched into the lining. The red trackpants I am wearing as I write could say, for example: ‘Not to be worn out of the house.’ My lovely bias-cut scarf-silk skirt could have a little label in the seam saying:‘Won’t go with any other garment ever made.’ And my black jersey DKNY pants would be doing everyone a favour if they had a label warning:‘Not to be worn more than seven times a week.’

  I could even do with some more instructive help from my beautiful dark red ostrich-leather-style coat (couldn’t possibly afford the real thing and suspect it may be illegal anyway). It is my most favourite thing in the world at the moment, but so far I’ve only managed to wear it once, because how many occasions can you think of where you can keep your coat on indoors without making people nervous?

  A label explaining ‘Only suitable for Paris fashion shows or a day at the races with limousine transfer’ might have made me think twice about sinking my life savings into a useless piece of spotty leather. Or it could be something even simpler (and the same label would have worked with that polar fleece bathrobe, which would cut costs for manufacturers): ‘You’ll regret it’ would work for about 50 per cent of my wardrobe.

  The beauty myth

  Stressed out, worn out, feeling plain? A little bit spotty, a little bit lumpy and hairy in all the wrong places? Is your nose veinous? Is your chin grey? Go on, treat yourself! You deserve it! Indulge in our top-to-toe package of luxurious beauty treatments and you will emerge feeling… suicidal, actually.

  Pampering is a myth. It doesn’t work. Well, it does work, as long as you are feeling great to begin with. A deep-cleansing facial would be the umbrella in the pina colada if you and your lithe, hairless body have just spent a week lying on the beach reading books by Dominick Dunne (‘As a matter of fact,’ said Laetitia, her hand gripping the Christofle letter opener, ‘he’s not my butler. He’s my father’) and Jilly Cooper (‘Gosh,’ gasped Hattie, her soft cheeks turning a darker shade of beetroot.‘I think you touched my fetlock’).

  But if you’ve had a normal week – drivers who pull out in front of you without indicating and then immediately turn off, a ringing mobile lost in the bottom of your handbag, your favourite pedal pushers back from the dry cleaners with creases in them – a spot of pampering could be just the thing to tip you over from normal urban angst into full-scale millennium psychosis.

  It starts the moment you walk, scowling, into the subtly lit Oasis du Beauté. The first thing someone does is be nice to you. Don’t they know how annoying that is? And why is everybody whispering?

  From there it just gets worse. As the coltish nymphette with perfect nails and glowing skin lisps a patronising greeting, she slips another Enya CD into the sound system and pours a fresh litre of essential oils into the infuser. Reeling from the aromatherapeutic effects of rose, geranium and tangelo (nausea, stinging eyes and instant asthma), you are asked to take off all your clothes, put them on a wire hanger and lie motionless for two hours in a very cold room while various unpleasant things are done to you.

  Pampering involves having your blackheads squeezed, stinging dye applied to your eyelashes, ingrowing hairs lanced with scalpels, scalding steam directed up your nose, dry skin lathed from the soles of your feet with terrifying blades, cuticles cut despite all protests, delicate eye areas roughly handled and your eyebrows pulled out by the roots. What is relaxing about any of that?

  Often the worst part is the complimentary neck and shoulder massage you have been fantasising about all day. A disappointing neck rub is even more frustrating than blah sex, because you can’t finish it off for yourself. And if you are feeling a little bit sad and the massage is quite good, the tender touch of a stranger can make you burst into tears. Not pampering, but whimpering.

  After all this, you emerge not the airbrushed vision you’d imagined, but a red-eyed turnip having a bad hair day. That’s $150, please.

  So this is my advice to the overworked, overweight and overwrought: leave the pampering for when your self-esteem is up to it. The rest of the time, just eat chocolate.

  A good sort

  My mother calls it ‘filing’. Whenever she’s feeling a bit out of sorts and humphy she goes off and tidies a drawer, rearranges her jumper cupboard or, as in a recent humungous effort, entirely sorts out The Untidy Room. This is a small room in her house (briefly called ‘the study’) where we all put things we don’t know what to do with. Sometimes I just open the door, throw in the offending item and close it very quickly. (Please don’t tell her.)

  There is also a shed in the garden next to the greenhouse which is full of my books and boxes of mystery objects. Every time I go home I perform the Ancient Ceremony of the Shed, which involves the Finding of the Key, followed by the solemn Opening of the Door, the Realisation of the Horror (too many rakes, staves and broken garden chairs between me and Winnie the Pooh) and then the Closing of the Door.

  There are other boxes in the garage and some of my furniture, but this is all so shrouded with cobwebs, we just pretend it isn’t there. Miss Haversham would think it needed a bit of a spring clean. But it works for us. My mother has hung a strawberry punnet from the roof on a piece of string so you know where to stop the car just before driving into my chest of drawers.

  Then there is the attic, which is full of suitcases and boxes of Christmas decorations. There is something very poignant about dusty hat boxes and ancient plastic bags full of tinsel. About once every two years I brave it up there, opening my trunk of vintage clothes, sighing over it all and closing it again. I usually find one thing I can throw away.

  Last time it was a pinstripe suit jacket I bought at a jumble sale that had been made by a Savile Row tailor. For the Michelin Man. It was enormous, but so beautiful. I used to wear it in the early 80s with an arrangement of kilt pins and thought it looked terribly Japanese. Probably looked bonkers, but it was still hard to throw it out.

  Sometimes I also remove some treasure like a pair of flared Wrangler jeans with embroidered back pockets (size: mini me), or brown platform brogues from Sacha circa 1975, and give them to whichever niece happens to be downstairs.

  Now I am establishing my own system in my latest home. This place is a warren of interesting storage possibilities. There is a big dusty cupboard under the stairs that makes me feel completely at home. Then there are two big cupboards in the roof cavity in the bedroom which were just meant for suitcases, hat boxes and storing winter clothes. I have had such a jolly time filing winter shoes into wire baskets and
zipping cashmere jumpers into mothproof bags. Adding to my joy, I’ve had special shelves built along the bottom of one wardrobe, just the right size for shoe boxes.

  All this activity was made even more satisfying by the discovery of a shop that sells nothing but gadgets to aid efficient storage – all American, of course. I am now the proud owner of a bra sorter, which is a plastic box that enables you to arrange them in neat horizontal lines, so you can select the one you want without disturbing the others, rather than go rifling through the drawer like a cat in a litter tray.

  Small things, I know, but having a bra sorter somehow makes the mad mungo chaos of the rest of life easier to deal with. The news is full of catastrophe, but at least I can find my best burgundy bra when I need it.

  And now I’m off to tidy a drawer.

  Hee Bee Gee Bees

  I don’t need drink and drugs to get me in the party mood. Oh no. Just put me in front of a Bee Gees video and I’ll be happy for hours. It was Barry Gibb’s trousers that did it. White flares. Python tight around the upper thigh with perfect testicular definition. Lift and separate. Do you think he ever appeared in public in them, or were they only allowed out for video clips?

  Those pervy pants would have been bad enough in any colour, but the amazing petrochemical whiteness of them made it all so much more startling. The only thing whiter than those pants were his alarming teeth, which would appear suddenly, snapping on like an outdoor security light, whenever he trilled a particularly testing vibrato aaaaaaaah, as in ‘Stayin’ alive… aaaaaaaah!’ The connection between those tourniquet trews and his castrato singing style is so apparent it hardly needs to be pointed out. Aaaaaaaah!

  I may have found them risible, but Barry clearly thought he looked terrific in those trousers because he wore a similar pair in the clip for ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’. Well, that’s not a question you’d need to ask Barry, is it? One look at them pants and you know exactly how deep his love is.

  Another feature of both the Bee Gees videos I was lucky enough to see the other night was a back view of the three brothers walking away, so that everyone could see Barry’s bum in the white pants and the other two Gibbs could see how much shorter than him they were. And how much flatter their hair was. Oh the hair! In 1978 each Gibb brother had one of the three tonsorial looks I most fear on bad hair days: bouffy, pancake and bald.

  Barry’s hilarious hair is shown to particular effect in the clip for ‘How Big Is Your Do?’. The opening shot is a fullscreen close-up of his goaty head, and bouffant hardly describes it. It’s had more coats of lacquer than a vintage Rolls Royce. He could have used it as a crash helmet. A percussion instrument. A nut cracker. The extraordinary thing is he looks very pleased with the whole arrangement, but I suppose when you take in the unfortunate brothers it puts it all into perspective. In the land of the ug, the boufhead man is king.

  Anyway, straight after the Bee Gees – it was a 1978 video theme night – came a clip for a disco funk band (name forgotten) singing ‘Dance – Dance Dance Dance’, which includes the memorable passage ‘yowser yowser yowser, I wanna boogie wid you…’ Their outfits weren’t crash hot either. The men wore those 1970s/1930s revival gangster suits with thigh huggin’ pants nastily tailored in 100 per cent man-mades, worn too long. Yowser yowser yowser, where d’ya get dem trouser? I was moved to wonder. The gals wore spandex cat suits of unforgiving cut.

  All of which made me reflect that either 1978 was a particularly tragic year for pop videos, or 70s clothes are actually far worse than we remember them now. This is all very confusing because I spent most of the 80s laughing at the clothes people used to wear in the 70s and then most of the 90s wearing revivals of them. I couldn’t wait to get back into flares, platforms and body shirts in 1994. Mad for them.

  But after watching those videos last night I have realised that our idea of what people actually wore in the 70s has become rosy with time. The constant revivals of 70s looks actually have as much to do with real 70s clothes as those frightful double-breasted Yowser Yowser suits had to do with the 1930s, or the costumes for Grease had to do with what people actually looked like in the 1950s. Not a lot.

  And funnily enough Grease was also made in 1978. So maybe it was just a dud year.

  And that was Hat…

  I lost my hat. Not metaphorically, at the racetrack, but really. A gust of wind blew my beloved straw stetson off my head when I was standing on a high bluff looking over Kings Canyon in the Northern Territory.

  It was a fine way for it to go. I wasn’t standing, actually. I was lying on the ground composing a pretentious art photo and my old hat thought, Sod this for a game of soldiers, can’t be doing with this arty-farty claptrap, I’m off. And away it went, up and out, high on a breeze, to land who knows where. Running after it was never an option, being about 99 centimetres from the edge of a major cliff at the time. It really picked its moment.

  And it didn’t half give my fellow hikers a surprise as it flew past them where they were standing in an obedient group, not taking art photos, around the corner. In no time, the guide had whipped out his binocs and found Hat’s resting place under a tree halfway down the canyon. It looked quite at home there.

  I think they all expected me to weep and wail and demand a helicopter rescue, but I just blew old Hat a kiss and carried on walking. It’s what Hat would have wanted.

  Of course, I was sad to say goodbye. That hat was the first thing I bought when I moved to Australia in 1993. I bought it from Vic Cooper Hats, ‘Sydney’s Oldest Hat Shop’, in the Royal Arcade, in full intention of it being a Hat For Life.

  From then on it was a feature of every weekend away, every trip to the beach and most outdoor activities. It enjoyed picnics, polo and poolside parties over five Sydney summers and went round the world with me several times, too. We were laughed at on a Bali beach, went to a party in the Daintree rainforest and spent a glorious week lounging around on a white coral island in the Philippines. I don’t think many other stetsons have been scuba diving.

  But while Hat didn’t mind the high life, our favourite trips together were up to the tiny village of Nundle in the NSW north country where we yee-hawed at the rodeo, nudging each other and sneaking sideways looks at all the gorgeous cowboys and their hats. I don’t have many holiday snaps from the 1990s that don’t feature Hat.

  A hat like that, with all the dents and dints of shared experience, is much more than an accessory, it’s more like a friend. But you also have to accept that it’s not just an object that you can possess. It has a life of its own and it was time for it to move on.

  I hope a family of echidnas sets up house under that sheltering crown. I hope whole tribes of ants march over the top of it on their busy anty business. I hope a brown snake curls itself around the brim and has a snooze in the sun. I just hope a passing wallaroo doesn’t land on it hard and squash it to bits. And if it blows down to a more accessible place and some passing walker picks it up and wears it, I hope they will have as much fun together as we did.

  The funny thing is I think I must have known it was going to go because, just minutes before lift-off, I noticed what a fine silhouette Hat’s shadow made against the rock and stopped to take a photo of our shadows together.

  When I got the prints back, it looked as if I was waving goodbye.

  If I were a chic man

  Sometimes I really wish I were a man. I wish this particularly when I can’t get dressed in the morning because my bosoms are getting in the way and there are just too many choices and I think of all the blokes at work who just wear suits and ties every day. It’s so easy for them. No-one ever missed the bus agonising over which tie to wear.

  And I love men’s clothes. All the thrilling different shirtings you can get in five-million-ways-with-a-stripe and those tiny little differences in the shape of collars that make such a big difference to your image.

  I would wear cutaway collars if I were a bloke. And handmade striped shirts which Juanita, my maid, would iron for me.
And only ever Hermès ties. And those wonderful tailor-made Richard James suits, which are secretly lined with fuchsia silk and have two back vents which swish up when you walk quickly. I would always walk quickly.

  I’d have gold cufflinks with my monogram on them and a signet ring on the little finger of my left hand and those really heavy Church’s brogues. In black. (I’d also be 190 centimetres tall and a millionaire, so let me dream.)

  At the weekend I would wear flat-front chinos, with round-neck T-shirts and cashmere V-neck jumpers with no welt at the bottom, so they would just hang down straight with little side slits. I’d wear Gucci loafers with no socks to show off my hairy brown ankles. I’d have a fierce pair of brown suede cowboy boots tucked away somewhere, too.

  Sometimes I would just wear really old Levi’s with an old polo shirt, collar up. And I’d have a really, really good watch. I’d have a gorgeous leather jacket in a reefer style and a big heavy silver key ring with the keys to my old Jag on it.

  On really cold days I’d wear a knitted watch cap, like Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, and a yellow cashmere scarf. I’d drink single malts. And I might have a dog like the one in The Thin Man. I’d definitely have a dressinggown like the man in The Thin Man.

  I would sleep in the nude and wear white Y-fronts and sometimes striped cotton boxer shorts. I’d play soccer and poker and be really, really good at pinball.

  I’d shave, using a badger brush and a blade, with a very white towel wrapped around my waist. I’d have a tattoo. Somewhere. And my old girlfriends would swoon any time they caught a whiff of Guerlain’s Vetiver because it would remind them of me.