Handbag Heaven

by Alderson, Maggie

  For all his golden skin, floppy hair, Ninja turtle tummy and lithe thighs, if Ricky (RICKY!!!) had been po-faced about the lissome luvlies who were sexually harassing him in that video, I wouldn’t have fancied him at all, but he clearly thought it was the funniest thing ever. And that is why I would fly to Taipei to see him if he were playing there tonight.

  So next time you’re feeling as sexy as a sack of turnips, stop obsessing about how imperfect you are and think of something funny. If you’ve got a twinkle in your eye, you’re the most gorgeous thing going.

  Hairdos and don’ts

  Have you noticed how people don’t really have hairstyles any more? After undertaking my usual in-depth research on the topic (watching people go by in Pitt Street Mall), I have concluded that there are three styles of hair for women these days: long and unlayered, medium and layered, and short and layered. The only other differentials are fringe/no fringe and straight/curly. They are really just generic hair, not hairstyles, or hairdos. And none of them have names.

  But not so long ago it was all about getting a particular haircut – and they all had names. It was key. You’d go in and say you wanted a ‘Purdey’, a ‘Shag’, a ‘Bowie’, a ‘Wedge’, a ‘Mary Quant’, an ‘Eton crop’ or – one I was obsessed with – a ‘Coupe Sauvage’ (it was a looser shag, invented in Paris where they know all about shagging, let’s face it).

  Now you just go to the hairdresser praying that you will come out looking as if you haven’t had a haircut. You want to look exactly the same, but better.

  Back in the days when haircuts were haircuts and had proper names, they carried tremendous weight. Starting with shingled hair in the 1920s and proceeding in a direct line through long hair for men in the 1960s, and skinhead cuts and Afros in the 70s, your hair was a potent statement about who you were, which tribal group you belonged to and what your values were. A person’s haircut was a fairly reliable indicator of how they would vote.

  Landmark haircuts were also a big part of growing up. My first rite of passage hairdo happened by accident when I was thirteen. For some reason (probably something ghastly to do with hormones), a lot of my hair fell out. I didn’t go bald, it just got thinner and when it grew back I gradually had two distinct lengths of hair all over my head. I didn’t really think about it until one of the tough girls at school said to me:‘Have you had a Feather Cut?’

  I lied and said I had, because this immediately gained me approval from her tribe – the glamorous fast set who smoked and chewed gum and had electrician boyfriends who hitched up to Wigan Casino at weekends to dance to Northern Soul and take amphetamines. Ace.

  When the new layer of hair grew long, I went back to my usual straight, middle-parting thing, and that was the look I had at sixteen when the next landmark haircut took place. After hearing ‘Anarchy in the UK’ for the first time and studying pictures of the Sex Pistols in New Musical Express, I had my Eagles fan hair chopped off into a spiky punk rock crop. I looked pretty vacant and I loved it.

  Everywhere I went my hair marked me as a true punk. I made friends with total strangers in the street because it was clear from our hair that we belonged to the same tribe. We also shared our contempt for weekend punks – the ones at a Clash gig in all the right T-shirts and pants, who still had long hair. They didn’t show the commitment to have their hair chopped and they weren’t the real thing. We gobbed on them.

  Now haircuts have lost their meaning, they’re just personal style statements. You see guys in the street with a Mohawk and no-one gives them a second look. Likewise, the Skinhead – a Number One – used to be a frightening signal of right-wing politics and a violent disposition. Now every balding man I know has one. My boss has one.

  The only haircut left with any sinister semiotic power is the Mullet. That’s a style that still says: I’m outside all of society’s norms and happy about it. I’d avoid taking a seat next to a Mullet on the train. And if you see an entire family of them, run for it.

  I rather miss the badging quality of old-style haircuts but, speaking for myself, the one advantage of not having a particular hair do, is you are less likely to get a hair don’t.

  Laundry mates

  Have just had the most satisfactory conversation. So much common ground, exchanged points of view and cunning tips gratefully gleaned that I can hardly wait to put into practice. You know the kind of conversation where no-one interrupts, no-one disagrees and you just keep looking around at each other like happy dogs, because you’re so pleased you’ve met other people as nuts as you are. The subject? The hierarchy of hand washing.

  Ruth, Helen and I spent a good thirty minutes discussing this topic to great mutual enjoyment. We’re not exactly the types you’d expect to see nodding at soap powder ads and making mental notes to look out for polyenzymic, low-foaming suds next time we’re in aisle one, but entirely by accident we discovered a mutual passion for laundry.

  It started out as a discussion of the superiority of agnès b. knitted cotton tops over all others and the surprise revelation that we all shared a ranking system for washing them, whereby middle-aged tops would be thrown in the washing machine (on cold, mind) and even tumble dried, while a Best New Top would be hand washed, rolled in a towel to remove excess moisture and then laid flat to dry – on a fresh towel – like a crusader’s tomb.

  Then there were subcategories of worn in, but not out, items that would be machine washed and spun, then removed for flat drying, in an attempt to arrest decay. Another stratum of slightly newer ones might be hand washed, spun, then flat dried.

  Ruth told a sad tale of a very old top on which she had inflicted several years of brutal mechanical washing and drying, before realising that it was the best top she had ever found, which had deserved the five-star hand treatment all along. Although it has long been charcoal rather than your true black and is fast approaching transparency, she reckons she has wrung – sorry, sponged and rolled – a few more years out of it by returning it to the laundry A list.

  Having established perfect communion on this topic we then moved on to more general wash-day matters. There was an earnest comparison of top loader versus front loader washers. The ‘you’ve had enough, out you come’ and ‘in goes the dropped sock’ advantage of the top loader was beyond dispute, but we were in total consensus that the round and round wheel motion of the front loader was far superior, in terms of clothes care, to the brutal churning action of the top loader. There was also the question of the water bill, which could be dramatically reduced with a front loader, although the direct chucking of powder into the top loader’s drum for pre-wash dissolving appealed to us all enormously, compared to the messy powder drawer.

  On the subject of drying there was more variety of views. Helen favours the fluffing effect of tumble drying towels, while Ruth reckons you end up with half your Fieldcrest pile in the filter, drastically shortening towel life span. She also made a claim for the loofah effect of the board-like line-dried towel, which was not entirely convincing.

  The next area was ironing: do you? Margaret (that’s me) is entirely of the iron everything, or better still pay someone else to do it, school and cannot sleep on sheets which have not felt the kiss of the steam iron, or put out monogrammed hand towels which haven’t been blessed with a little starch. An unironed tea towel is to her a thing of horror.

  But Ruth and Helen rejoined that if you know your pegging, line drying can negate the need to iron. The secret is in the full-tension pegging action at very specific non-marking points. For non-perfect drying days, both have developed a system of rigorous pegging on indoor clothes airers which produces the same results. A top tip.

  The only area we didn’t get onto was preferred brands of wool wash, pre-soakers, general detergents, fabric conditioners and the new glamour lavender rinses. Dammit. Wonder when they’re free for tea.

  House musing

  Your house is not a handbag. Just thought I’d mention that as people seem to be confusing homes with fashion accessori
es these days. You know, something you change every couple of months when you feel like a little bit of a lift. As in, I’m feeling a bit flat. I know! I’ll redecorate the entire house. That’s better. Now where did I put that credit card…

  It is true, of course, that just like your clothes, where you live is a very clear reflection of who you are, who you think you are and how you feel about all that. People who let piles of old newspapers form into snow drifts and never clean the grouting in the bathroom probably have levels of self-esteem best expressed by twenty-four-hour Kmart trackie daks. While those who have gold-plated plaster lions at their gate are liable to be fond of a spot of Versace before breakfast.

  But it’s not as simple as that. Depending on the angle of the moon (and the consequent angle of my stomach) I might, from one day to the next, feel only up to shuffling around the house in foul trackpants and unwashed hair, while the very next morning, I might feel like sliding into something Liz Hurley would consider racy and heading for Panthers of Penrith. This doesn’t mean I am going to redecorate from trailer park to Miami mansion to go with it. My house is somewhere in the middle and goes with all my outfits.

  We never were supposed to change the look of our houses to reflect every little shift of mood. Apart from keeping the rain off, that is what clothes are for. You can take them on and off all on your own, without waiting for a tradesman to come and do it for you. So from nine till five you can be a cool and collected corporate chick in a neat little suit and a dazzlingly white T-shirt and after six you can re-emerge as Fifi la Jolie Bon Bon in a flowery skirt, a tight cardigan and strappy sandals. Or, if you’re a bloke, be Dylan McDermott on Friday and Marilyn Manson on Saturday.

  The whole fabulous fun of clothes is that we can use them to showcase all the fascinating little facets of our personalities. This is not the point of houses. Your home is meant to represent the solid, stable part of your life, yet we are under increasing pressure to switch from Martha Stewart beach house to Dr No helipad at the drop of an interiors magazine.

  You know why, of course. They want our money. Now that they’ve fooled us all into buying more clothes than we can possibly ever wear out, it is no coincidence that the big fashion designers like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan are moving heavily into home-wares. Witchery is doing cushions and candles, for heaven’s sake. And because fashion houses are used to changing from Mongolian Warrior Woman to Lost In Space from one season to the next, it should be no surprise that they are trying to get us to take the same attitude with our home decor.

  The terrible thing is that you can get sucked in without meaning to, because just as with clothes, whatever is now decreed the ‘new’ interiors look is flogged to such a degree and copied so mercilessly down the retail food chain that you become sick of it before you’ve even paid for it. If I see another celadon plate (with matching team and tone chopstick rest), or anything made of bamboo, I will spew interestingly textured beige and dark brown vomit all over it.

  Some people are even making the equivalent of fashion-based plastic surgery decisions, entirely renovating dear little terrace houses to rubble and rebuilding them so they resemble recently scrubbed operating theatres. That house might make it into Belle, but in ten years’ time I reckon it is going to look as dated as 1970s sauna-style pine cladding or 80s chintz swagging does now. And it will be even more tiresome and expensive to put right than Pamela Anderson’s boob job.

  They’d do much better just to buy a new handbag and get over it.

  Elegance lost

  I know where the Dutch artist Bosch got the inspiration for his gruesome paintings of sinners writhing in hell. He went to a Gucci sample sale.‘Up to 80 per cent off!!’ screamed the posters.‘We must clear our warehouse!’ And we must have all the stuff in it, we agreed, and ran into Sydney Town Hall like a plague of rabid rats with credit cards.

  The scenes within displayed human nature in all its raw ugliness. Heaving crushes of bodies clawing at piles of wallets and key pouches. Racks of innocent clothes being ruthlessly raped and pillaged. High-status handbags tossed around like footballs, and scrums of tiny women shouldering through tightly packed crowds with a level of aggression the most fearsome rugby prop would run away from. Harsh cries of ‘That’s mine!’ as someone else dares to touch a viciously won prize. Mothers using strollers as deadly weapons. Tiny toddlers left to be trampled by a herd with the scent of polished calf in its nostrils.

  All this in the pursuit of elegance.

  I was lucky: without committing too much GBH on anyone, I garnered a pair of suede ankle boots with foxy little heels and toes so sharp you could drill teeth with them; the kind of thing Chrissie Hynde would wear to pick up the kids from school. They would have started life around $900 and they were mine for $190. Bargain! Then I found a lovely pair of all-leather slip-ons for my significant other. $220, down from around $800. Cheeeap. Gimme. Gimme more. I want more. More bigger now quick. Faster pussycat kill kill.

  That was when sanity departed. Dragging my booty behind me in the standard issue polythene sack, I was round that room like a Viking recently landed in York. My elbows flailing like Boadicea’s deadly wheels, I charged through rails of ready to wear and off again, hacking down all before me until I reached the ultimate challenge – small leather goods.

  For some reason this slag heap of well-fingered purses, credit card holders, make-up bags and wallets, long since parted from their boxes, was the focus for the fiercest hand to hand combat. One woman was particularly shameless: heavily pregnant, she barged her way between fellow scavengers with a bump of her lump, taking advantage of their surprise to insert her grasping hand like the mechanical grabber in one of those pick-a-toy fairground attractions.

  Suddenly it was all too much. A swathe of handsome silk ties and scarves was beckoning but, battle weary, I went to pay. The queue for the tills went right around the room, nearly meeting itself coming back. I stood in it for ten minutes before sense began to seep back.

  In a quiet corner (nothing for sale) I took the boots out of the bag and had another look. They were gorgeous. They were a bargain. They were not worth standing in a queue for an hour for, surrounded by people behaving like they were auditioning for Quentin Tarantino. I put them – and the slip-ons – back and left.

  I’m still a bit sad about those boots, but the disco inferno in Sydney Town Hall taught me something about designer shopping. What you actually go home with is only part of it. The process is as important as the product. What you are paying for (apart from the name and superior styling) is the experience of going into one of those swishy snooty boutiques, being served with some respect (possibly sitting down) and coming out with a stonking great carrier bag which, for the remainder of your shopping day, acts like a passport into all the other shops you are normally too shy to enter.

  That is all part of the magic of paying too much for designer accessories. A rematch between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman is not. Even at half the price.

  Bad buys

  First you have to find clothes you like, that also happen to suit you. Then you have to find your size in the right colour. Worst of all, you have to pay for them. But the trials of fashion don’t end even with the horror of the credit card statement. Here are Forty-six Things That Can Go Wrong With Clothing Purchases.

  1 The shop had a skinny mirror.

  2 The fabric picks up every bit of fluff in the universe.

  3 The fabric goes bobbly after two wears.

  4 Even after you’ve had the trousers narrowed, the waist let out and the collar altered, it’s still horrible and still doesn’t suit you.

  5 It’s so creased after one hour of wearing that you look as if you’ve been wrapped by Christo.

  6 You’ve ‘invested’ in the real thing and two days later every rip-off shop in Australia has an adequate version in the window.

  7 You’ve bought the rip-off version. So has everyone else.

  8 You’ve invested in the real thing and two month
s later it looks so two months ago.

  9 You never quite get round to dyeing it.

  10 Dry clean only.

  11 You don’t – only to find they meant it.

  12 Somehow you never do lose those five kilos.

  13 It’s purple.

  14 As you take it from the spinner, you see that the arms resemble the tentacles of a giant squid.

  15 It doesn’t go with anything you own. Even the things you bought specially to go with it.

  16 It’s almost what you were looking for.

  17 It looked amazing on your more attractive friend.

  18 It’s a yellow suit.

  19 It’s made of cream silk and you drop half your lunchtime laksa on it.

  20 You hand wash it. It was made of crepe.

  21 You’ve had the sleeves/legs shortened half a centimetre too much.

  22 It’s itchy.

  23 It’s hot.

  24 It’s full of static.

  25 It’s see-through (and not in a good way).

  26 It sticks where it hits.

  27 It makes you sweatier than Pat Rafter on a hot day.

  28 You have to iron it.

  29 You bought it in London in February and the last time it got cold enough to wear it here was in 1853.

  30 You bought it in Paris when you were feeling bohemian.

  31 You bought it in Goa.

  32 You bought it on a freak thin day after a severe stomach upset.

  33 You bought it two days before menstruation.

  34 You bought it the day after having the best sex of your life.

  35 You were still drunk.

  36 After one wearing, the trousers have bigger knees than Mike Tyson.

  37 You have it dry cleaned at [insert own hated clothes-destroyer dry cleaners].