Things That Are Oddly Disturbing: a man who wears a suit and has his hair tied back in a ponytail. A mobile phone attached to a belt. Rings that are worn on the forefinger. Hair that is longer than a certain length. All-white outfits. The look and sound of false nails on a computer keyboard.
Things That Always Delight: a folded cotton T-shirt that has not yet been worn. The smell of a shirt that has been worn for one day by a man you love. The small horizontal crease that appears above the upper lip of some people when they smile broadly. A child aged about two-and-a-half with very pink cheeks, who is wearing a hat.
Things That Are Highly Irritating: when one is trying on a garment and a salesperson comes into the changing room. The garment is half on and half off. One’s face is red. The salesperson smiles. This is most annoying and humiliating. Or when the shoe one has been searching for is found, but not in the right size. A very expensive face cream which brings out red splotches on the cheeks.
Things That Are Always Unappealing: the thought of wearing pantyhose underneath trousers. Pantyhose worn with open shoes. An outfit that is too obviously new. A leather suit. The sight of acid-washed jeans worn with a brown belt.
Things That Are Strangely Attractive: men whose legs are slightly bandy. Women whose teeth are not quite perfect. A scar in a young man’s eyebrow. A short-sleeved T-shirt worn over a long-sleeved T-shirt. Strong male bodies that have gone slightly to seed.
Sometimes the most unattractive person has a beautiful smile which makes you forget their less fortunate qualities. This induces a warm feeling.
Making excuses
How do you justify your love? My mother used to say, ‘I can always wear it for gardening’ whenever she had bought some dubious garment on a whim. Now she says, ‘I have to buy things that are comfortable.’ I remember her once coming home with a pair of high-heeled sandals in yellow polka dot fabric. ‘They are a bit loud,’ she said that time. ‘But I’m sick of being matronly.’ There was no arguing with it.
My friend Giovanna has turned shopping justification into an art form. We can hardly wait for her to buy something else she doesn’t need, so we can hear what she comes up with to make it seem that she would have been foolish, rude or even insane not to have bought it.
Just before she went off to live in London, when she was saving every cent she could – in case she wants to have the odd cup of coffee while she’s there – she came to Sydney on a farewell trip and turned up to meet me clutching a Marcs carrier bag.
‘It was on sale…’ she started, showing me a nice little jumper.
‘It was reduced by 70 per cent and I thought I should be waving the flag for Australian designers in London…’
Here she demonstrates two advanced techniques of profligacy justification – the Unmissable Bargain tactic and the altruistic it-would-have-been-churlish-not-to manoeuvre. Two in the one sentence. Brilliant. The chick is a master.
One method I have always found particularly useful is the My Difficult Body routine. This is a sound justification for buying something expensive in several colours, and consists simply of an explanatory sentence along the lines of, ‘Well, it’s so difficult for me to find shoes for my wide feet, I thought I had better get three pairs.’
This works equally well for big boobs, short waists, fat tummies, stumpy legs, skinny butts, long slippery feet, ski-slope shoulders, butcher’s arms, carthorse ankles, barge arses and any other figure flaw you are prepared to lay public claim to.
I ‘needed’ it is another good one. I needed some new evening wear. I needed something bright for summer. I needed some more clothes that weren’t black. I needed something that said This Season. I needed another pair of black jersey trousers just like the other three pairs. I needed to waste $100 on a hat. I needed another pair of shoes I can’t walk in. I needed a good bloody talking to, that’s what I needed.
A particular favourite of mine in this group is ‘I needed something to wear to work.’ Can you see how cunning that is? Your work ethic made you do it.
A new one I am hoping to work up in this department is ‘It’s tax deductible’, because I reckon I really deserve some recompense in that department. Do you know that even though I have to go to fashion shows and fashion parties as part of my work, none of my clothes are tax deductible? Workmen who have to buy steel toecap boots and overalls to protect them from injury can claim them against tax, but fashionistas who have to buy Prada bags and Jil Sander suits to protect them from sniggery can’t.
It’s outrageous. But I’m hoping that the Giorgio Armani shirt I bought to wear promoting my book and have worn on four TV shows will be. And it was the most amazing bargain as well. I think the tax department should reward me for being a canny shopper.
The golden fleece
Will polar fleeces one day be considered quaint? I had that thought on the Paris Métro, when I looked at the arm of the woman clinging onto the pole next to me and saw that she was wearing a red polar fleece jacket.
Despite numerous visits for work I am still starry-eyed enough about the French capital to find a ride on the Métro thrilling, and seeing polar fleeces there – on a Frenchwoman (although probably not a Parisienne, in truth) – made me realise just how ubiquitous the fabric has become.
When I got over to England a couple of weeks later, my mother was wearing a polar fleece pants and gilet outfit around the house – so soft, so warm, so cosy – and while I was there, a smart chocolate brown polar fleece throw rug arrived in the post.
From being a slightly mad professor invention (isn’t it made from old plastic bottles or something?) worn only by Arctic explorers and white-water rafters, the polar fleece has become the universal fabric of the epoch. The stuff that we all wear. It’s like jeans – everybody has at least one polar fleece item. (I have three: a grey hooded sweat top object, a red zip-front jacket object and a red ski hat object.)
And that was what made me wonder what kind of place polar fleeces would take in history, because while it seems like the most banal unfashion fabric now, anything that has been so universally adopted will not be forgotten.
With its environmentally aware fabrication, technological pragmatism (unbelievably light and warm – and water repellent), it will come to be associated very particularly with this era and will therefore become quaint, because time seems to invest everything with charm. Even tea towels.
For Christmas last year two of my best (and most aesthetically developed) girlfriends gave me tea towels. Not just any old tea towels, but old ones, found in French markets, with my initials serendipitously embroidered on them. One of them is about eighty years old, the other could be from 1800, or even earlier. You can tell by the irregularities in the fabric that the unbleached linen has been handwoven and the initials are rendered in a red cross stitch, redolent of early American colonial samplers.
As you can imagine, I was thrilled with my tea towels and the really old one has the special status of being the bathroom hand towel I never actually use – it’s just there to look beautiful and impress friends. I wouldn’t dream of using either of them to dry dishes.
But I wonder what the women who embroidered those tea towels so long ago would think of their workaday wash cloths being treated as antique treasures. They’d probably think I was nuts. Just as my mother shuddered in horror when she saw I had an old painted meat safe in my sitting room as a fabulous ‘distressed’ cabinet. To her, it was such a reminder of the meat surrounded by a cloud of flies from the days before there was a fridge in every home, she could hardly bear to look at it. Whereas for me, brought up in the whitegoods-for-all 1960s, it is an object of great charm and character.
I can only assume that in years to come, people will look back on polar fleece garments with a winsome smile. Certainly Oscar-winning costume designers of the twenty-second century will have to learn to re-create the exact pilling effects for films set in the late twentieth century, just as Catherine Martin must have learned to be a whiz with a can-can knicker for Mo
ulin Rouge.
It’s hard to imagine a future style maven chancing upon my old grey polar fleece sweat top with a shriek of discovery in a market in the year 2100, but it could happen.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the following wonderful women. Fenella Souter. Jane Wheatley. Susan Skelly. Cindy McDonald. Roz Gatwood. Helen Long. Sally Treffry. Lucy Tumanow-West. Deborah Cooke. Lenny Ann Low. Julie Gibbs. Sophie Ambrose. Debra Billson. Fiona Inglis. Miuccia Prada. The Fendi sisters. Coco Chanel.
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