Handbag Heaven

by Alderson, Maggie

  For the 1997 pic, she has raided my wardrobe. This picture has four Barbies dressed in my clothes. Black jersey pants and T-shirts, black turtlenecks and tight skirts, with black opaque tights and feature handbags (one is a camel-coloured leather hand-held, just like mine). The only things I’m not very keen on are the belts, but then Barbie has always over-accessorised.

  But really it’s not surprising that Barbs and I should be dressing alike. We’ve been friends for an awfully long time. We’re practically the same age for one thing (well, she is a little bit older actually, if you have a good watch) and we share all the same interests. We even have the same favourite colour (pink).

  I can’t remember when I got my first Barbie, but I have adored her ever since. I had a whole commune of them living in an old hatbox, plus a couple of less glamorous Pommie chicks called Sindy, a Patch with one leg longer than the other who was a real waste of pocket money (no high heels), and a weird Ken with moulded hair. He was a total wimp.

  My preferred Barbie boyfriend was my brother’s Action Man because he had a much better body and wore uniforms. Plus he had a scar on his face which I thought was dreamy. Barbie liked it when he took his clothes off and one day I pulled off one of his legs in my eagerness to remove a boot. That took a bit of explaining, but my brother thought it was quite good for realistic battle scenes.

  My Barbies had a pink-and-white plastic wardrobe complete with curly hangers, a dining table and sideboard with all requisite cutlery, china and candelabra, a second-hand horse, an outfit for every occasion, a white Scotty dog and a black poodle. I made a whole apartment for her (based on Mary Tyler Moore’s – I had never seen an apartment in 1967) under my dressing-table, where extremely complex sitcoms and romantic encounters took place (one of them leading to that severed limb). It was a whole world under there.

  I think Barbie was good for me. Of course I know all the feminist arguments against gender stereotyping and her ridiculously unattainable Hugh Hefner fantasy physique. But while I’m not sure which way she is less correct – anatomically or politically – I still think she helped to shape me in a positive way.

  Sure, I spent hours mixing and matching her outfits and doing her hair, but I also spun great imaginative fantasies about her life in that apartment with Ken, Action Man and all her girlfriends. My Barbie had a pretty good life. Not that different from the one I lead today actually (especially if Ken turned out to be gay). I never felt I was supposed to look like her, just as I never expected to be rescued from a tower by a prince on a white horse or to meet a mouse who talked in a high-pitched voice. Barbie is a fantasy. And if she gives children an interest in co-ordinating their clothes, she’s all right by me.

  Just don’t take her advice on accessories.

  Doggie style

  I don’t want to wear clothes any more. I’m sick of them. I want fur. Not a fur coat, yucky yucky, but my own fur. Attached. And a tail. I can’t think of anything more stylish than having a tail. You could wag it if you were pleased to see someone – wouldn’t that be nice? And I’ve always thought I would like to be able to express my displeasure by snatching my tail out last as I left a room, in an animal version of giving the finger. The lady cats in ‘Tom and Jerry’ used to do things like that, and sometimes they would make their tails into beckoning fingers around doorways, which always got Tom hot and bothered.

  I once asked the late fashion designer Franco Moschino if he would make me a jacket with a remote-control tail. I suggested the handset could be concealed in a pocket, so I could swish it like a cat when impatient, thump it like a dog when excited and perform the exit described previously when in a snit. I also suggested I could curl it over my arm at cocktail parties. He thought it was a top idea and I think he might have made it for me if he hadn’t been so cruelly taken from us.

  A remote-control tail would be something, but I think I would just actually like to be a dog. They are so marvellous. Dogs are some of the most chic people I know. Lucy, who lives in the fashionable Gotham City building in Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, knows everybody. She is greeted wherever she goes. And if she likes you, you get her special toothy smile. She loves parties and always puts on her pearls when people are coming over. She walks differently when she’s wearing them.

  Suzy rides around Woollahra in her own stroller. She’s a little bad-tempered (she has a sign warning she might bite you), but she has quite a regal air in her chariot. Horace, who also lives in Woollahra, clearly has aristocratic blood, too. The chihuahua side of the family has given him the most finely boned legs since Princess Di. His barrel body comes from the Jack Russell side, which no-one likes to mention.

  Miss Emerald, a poodle of the ’hood, sits outside all the shops and waits patiently. She has such decorum. Perhaps she is hoping Freddie will walk by. Freddie is a golden retriever so handsome he could star in Ralph Lauren advertisements. He is the male supermodel of the dog world. He looks like a rower.

  Flea lives nearby, too. She’s rather reclusive in her old age and fond of lying on the bed all day in her furry negligee. But put on a disco hit and she’s straight onto the dance floor.

  Those are the local dogs. Out bush is Zambia, a large black standard poodle, but very feminine. She sleeps in an old Mary Poppins pram. You couldn’t expect her to sleep on the ground with her son Juica. He’s more of your stubbies-and-Blundstones type. He’d be happy sleeping in the back of a panel van.

  Overseas there is Scarpia, an opera-loving pug with his own Hermès collar. He can’t wait for the annual Pug Picnic, where all the pugs meet up so their humans can play together. Scarpia thinks they all look so sweet. You’d almost think they were dogs, the way they carry on.

  But so far, for canine style there has been no-one to match the mighty Olympia, a black labrador of great refinement. A party girl like Lucy, she used to wear a tutu to her soirees.

  Olympia is no longer with us. She was claimed in London by a council truck, but I often think of her glossy head and the weekend we spent together in Wales, where we all played dress-ups. Olympia wasn’t sure how good she looked in the headscarf, but was prepared to wear it for the photo. Now I like to think of her up in heaven, happily gnawing on one of Franco Moschino’s shoes.

  Cheap tricks

  Beware hidden charges. Clothing convenience can go down as well as up. Just as you would minutely scrutinise a mortgage or insurance policy, always read the small print on any garment you are considering buying. And I don’t just mean the actual small print on the laundry label (although, of course, you may want to rethink the purchase of a white shirt that has Dry Clean Only status), but also the metaphorical small print, in terms of the hidden cost of your new purchase. They can really sneak up on you.

  While the prospect of a lifetime of dry cleaning (it’s the pain of it, as much as the price, isn’t it?) is an obvious deterrent to buying a white cashmere trouser suit, it can also catch you out on something as reliable looking as a pair of black pants. If they have stretch in the fabric they can go baggy at the knees after two wears, requiring dry cleaning to snap them back into shape. In the same group there are skirts that get impossibly creased after one wear, and beaded tops that require special service hand cleaning.

  Then there are alterations and maintenance to consider. My favourite vintage (read stinky op-shop) fake fur jacket was such a bargain: just $30 for something that looks like it came straight out of Fendi’s last show (except only nylons died for it). Little did I realise that the initial $30 was barely more than a deposit.

  The first hidden cost was the NASA dry cleaning required to get the terrible stench out of it. To remove the frightful pong (eau de damp bedsit), it had to go into a special ozone chamber which cost three times as much as normal cleaning.

  It smelled much better when it came out, but the lining hung in shreds where the ozone had eaten it, so I had to buy new lining fabric and pay a tailor to put it in. Then I decided the cheap plastic buttons needed to be replaced to do justice to the splendid bishop p
urple silk lining. And if time is money, I spent plenty finding the perfect woven leather fasteners to set off the sheen of the luxuriant fake fur. When I had finished fooling around with it, that $30 jacket would have cost me nearly five times as much. Fortunately, I adore it, but I would have thought much harder about splashing out on a novelty fun fur car coat if I had known it was going to turn into a $150 novelty fun fur car coat.

  Speaking of cars, this aspect of fashion shopping is very similar to the experience of buying a new car. You get all excited about the price – ‘Look, darling, it’s only $18 000 drive-away!’ – and rush off to the showroom. Then, after swaggering around a bit because you’re not just looking, you are actually going to buy a car, you sit down with someone young enough to date your best friend’s children to discuss terms and go through the choice of ‘extras’.

  The car comes, of course, with the standard cardboard wheels, he tells you, sitting up straight in his high chair. But for just $3 000 more, you can have metal wheels. For an additional $10 000, you can have the ones in the picture of the car that brought you here.

  The last time I bought a new car (okay, the only time), I felt triumphant when I screwed the saleschild down on the mats.

  I got my mats for nothing. Boy, was I gloating when I left that showroom, until I realised he had sold me a set of black numberplates for an additional $100. Every time I see one of Mickey’s cousins (sorry, that’s the tragic name I use for all cars the same colour and model as mine) with perfectly functional regular numberplates, I hang my head in shame.

  That $100 would have paid for the renovations on my car coat.

  Dirty looks

  In early adolescence, my brother Nick developed an unhealthy obsession with bikies. It was inspired by an unpleasant little paperback called Hell’s Angel, which he read with great fascination. My mother said she was just glad to see him reading.

  As a prissy nine-year-old swotty squit, I was appalled by the book (which I read as soon as I could lay my fat little hands on it) and the magazines that followed it into the house. They were called something like Hog and featured a loathsome cartoon character called Spider, and Spider’s Ol’ Lady, who was his girlfriend.

  Horrid things happened to Spider’s Ol’ Lady, which were meant to be hilarious but which I always found very upsetting – but it didn’t stop me making secret forays into Nick’s bedroom to read the latest issue when it arrived. Hog also featured pages of photos of recent bikie social gatherings, which included lots of real-life ‘ol’ ladies’ sitting on the back of chopped hogs (motorbikes) wearing leather shorts and no tops and smiling at the camera over a can of beer. They all wore rings on their forefingers, I noted. I found them fascinating, like the bike equivalent of Tatler’s social pages.

  But the worst aspect of Nick’s bike period – even worse than when he ‘chopped’ my bicycle for me, adding ape hanger handlebars and removing girlie extras like mudguards and ting-a-ling bells – was his ‘Originals’.

  ‘Originals’ are jeans and denim jackets that bikies get when they first become bikies. Part of the initiation into the ‘chapter’ (according to Hell’s Angel) is for all the other bikies to stand in a lovely fairy ring and urinate on them. You never ever wash your Originals.

  The stinkier the better. And you have to wear them every day.

  Nick’s Originals comprised a saggy denim jacket from which he removed the sleeves and then lined the armholes with pieces of rabbit fur taken off his ex-army parka. Buttons were wrenched out and replaced with crude thongs. His ‘chapter’ details were stencilled on the back in felt pen.

  I don’t quite think he went through the full initiation ritual, but by the time a thirteen-year-old boy has worn an outfit every day for several months (putting it on straight after school each night and cycling at great speed on his ‘chopped hog’), it does acquire a certain hum. He never allowed his bikie gear to get washed and, not wishing to quash creative outpouring of any kind, our mother left him to it.

  I was outraged by every aspect of Nick’s Originals. I had to look at them across the table every teatime and I had to sit next to them on car journeys. But what made me really furious was that he was allowed to wear his Originals to the Rum Hole on my birthday. (The Rum Hole was the nearest proper restaurant to our beach house in Wales and, with prawn cocktail in little aluminium cups, steak Diane, black forest gateau and plenty of doilies, it was the acme of sophistication to me. How could we be seen there with Nick in his Originals?)

  I can remember speaking to my mother in outraged indignation about it: ‘You’re not going to let Nick wear his Originals to the Rum Hole are you?’ But it didn’t have any effect. Nick and his Originals were not to be parted until girls became more interesting to him than motorbikes.

  So I can’t remember what I wore to my tenth birthday dinner, but I clearly recall shaggy-haired Nick in his Originals, with a shrunken brown T-shirt and horrid jeans that hung around his hips. I insisted on walking in separately.

  All of which is a long way of telling you that I won’t be embracing the ‘dirty denim’ trend which is upon us. I don’t care if Chanel do make them. They all look like Nick’s Originals to me.

  Ms Alderson regrets

  Nine outfits I wish I had never worn (or: Why didn’t I listen to my mother?).

  1 A buttercup-yellow skivvy. A tomato-red Laura Ashley smock pinafore. Yellow bell bottoms. Red-and-yellow 10-centimetre platform clogs with anchor motif. Yellow-and-red stripy socks. I am not making this up. I wish I was. 1973.

  2 A plastic carrier bag worn as a boob tube. It was a great look. Until someone in the mosh pit (not that we called them that then – they were more like pogo pits) decided to tear it off. I managed to salvage enough of it to stay to the end of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers’ set, but I wasn’t jumping up and down, let me tell you. Or was it the Boomtown Rats? 1977.

  3 Original land girl corduroy jodhpurs. Leather riding boots to the knee. A boy’s tweed sports jacket. A viyella shirt. A yellow V-neck jumper. A cravat with a fox motif. A yellow silk pocket handkerchief. A tweed shooting cap. It was my first day at a secretarial college for young ladies in Wolverhampton and I wanted to make an impression. I did. Nobody talked to me. 1977.

  4 A fuchsia-pink spandex tube skirt (homemade). A nylon fuchsia leotard. Fuchsia-pink stiletto mules with marabou pompoms. Fuchsia blusher as eyeshadow. Permed hair. Actually, I don’t regret that one. It was fabulous. 1977.

  5 Old Levi’s with rips in the knees. A not-very-nice motorcycle jacket in leather as stiff as cardboard which I had liberated from my boyfriend. A stripy Breton fisherman’s jumper. Bleached hair with roots growing back. I did not look like Bananarama. I looked like Spider’s Ol’ Lady and the local chapter of ‘greasers’ (bikers lite) was awfully pleased to see me. I was awfully pleased to see my bus coming. 1980.

  6 Old men’s brown cord trousers held up with a Scout belt – and red clip-on braces. A collarless shirt. A red bandanna. Sensible lace-ups. I was young and lissom, what was I doing? Trying to look like Benny Hill in country bumpkin mode? I didn’t even like Dexy’s Midnight Runners. 1981.

  7 A cheap black polyester lace corset. Some black-and-white plaid polyester taffeta ruched into a homemade interpretation of Lacroix’s puffball skirt. Hair with a bright pink rinse through it. Cheap diamanté jewels. Nylon opera gloves. I don’t dare to remember what the shoes were. It was a gorgeous Scottish ball and I was surprised that the fresh-faced boys in their dashing kilts would rather dance with the equally fresh-faced girls in their floral Laura Ashley ball dresses than me. Thank heavens for darling James, who would rather have danced with the fresh-faced boys himself but reeled me expertly around the floor all night. 1981.

  8 A fluorescent lime-green thick-knit acrylic jumper. It was one of those high-fashion trends that could be knocked off instantly by the chain stores and I was sucked right in. What a vile object. The only up side of the experience was that I wasn’t taken in by the lime and orange debacle of a few sum
mers ago. 1983.

  9 My friend E. Jane Dickson’s black jersey dress, with the skirt pinned up into a bizarre Austrian-blind effect with hidden safety pins, because she is 180 centimetres and I am 157 centimetres. It was my first big black-tie fragrance launch. I had no idea what to wear. I must have looked insane, but I had an awfully nice time. There was champagne and everything. 1985.

  Throwaway lines

  How do we feel about disposable clothes? A very space-age notion, isn’t it? It’s what we all expected to be wearing in the year 2000. Zip-up jumpsuits made from paper fibres that heat up and cool down automatically according to climatic conditions. One size adjusting to fit all. Colour changes according to thought patterns (pink = ‘You’re sweet’; green = ‘Not so close, death-breath’). Built-in video-phone wristwatches. A little velcro pocket for your lunch capsules and integral straps to attach you to your solar-powered Toyota flight pack. Throw it away every night and get another from the pod’s supply in the morning.

  We never thought we would still be catching the bus in dresses and raincoats, did we? Or hand washing cashmere jumpers and best undies on Sunday nights, just like our mothers and their mothers before them? But while women’s clothes are fundamentally the same as they have been for eighty years (more than 100 years for men), there are signs that disposable fashion is upon us.

  Not disposable fashion in the sense that the It shoe of the season will, without fail, become the Twit shoe of next season, but clothes that are bought in the full knowledge that they will only be good for one or two wears before they hit the charity bin or the duster drawer.