Gravity Sucks

by Alderson, Maggie

  Just ask the original Cosmo girl, Helen Gurley Brown. She’s well over eighty and still wears her Diane von Furstenberg dresses slashed way up on the thigh. With high heels. Gets away with it, too.

  So if you were lucky enough to be born with a dainty ankle, or an elegant knee, now is your time to flaunt it. I just wish I felt able to take my own advice on this.

  Revenge Wear

  There’s daywear, there’s evening wear, there’s resort, formal, smart casual and suitable attire for the races, but my favourite clothing code of all is Revenge Wear.

  I was reminded of this oft-neglected category the other day when I saw a picture of Angelina Jolie accompanied by the – bold-face type – caption, ‘BRANGELINA – SHE MOVES OUT!!!’

  Apparently she and Brad just ain’t getting on – she wants to go and live in Africa full time, Brad’s not so keen, she knows he’s been talking to Jen and she’s moved out, so there. It’s probably all utter scuttlebutt, but, oh my, the picture was perfect to illustrate it.

  She’s wearing a tightly knotted trench coat and dark glasses, and her hair is scraped back. She looks slightly strained and wan – under her masterful no-make-up make-up – but achingly beautiful, with cheekbones standing out like flying buttresses. It’s one of the best Revenge Wear looks I have ever seen.

  As Angelina clearly understands, the key to it is to put over the idea that you have suffered and are still suffering, but to look absolutely gorgeous at the same time. So the man who has caused you all this angst will feel: a) terribly guilty for making you so sad and b) mad with desire for you.

  And if he has accidentally been having it away with someone else he will really regret it when he sees how beautiful you are and realise he has made a horrible mistake and he’ll never see her again and he’ll buy you a big diamond and move with you to Africa and the other woman will tragically fall off a cliff and that will be the end of her.

  That’s the way women can tend to think when they are in the frame of mind which leads to Revenge Wear being assumed. It’s not an entirely rational state – which makes it all the more fascinating

  Until the Brangelina pic the best revenge look I had seen was sported by a playwright I used to know. She had written a play, her partner was directing it and I was in it (I was a bit of an actorine back in the day). In a gap between the first staging of the production and its revival for the Edinburgh Festival, this golden couple split up. Which was very sad.

  The playwright took herself – and her pain – off to stay with her grandmother in Italy, returning just in time for the first rehearsal. We were in a tatty church hall in Leith when she made her entrance – which remains quite the best I have ever witnessed.

  She sort of fell through the door wearing a black trench coat – clearly the Revenge Wear classic – the belt knotted even more tightly than Angelina’s, showing off just quite how extraordinarily skinny she had become, huge black sunglasses revealing just enough of her face to show she had the most spectacular suntan. It was masterly and the director was lost for words – result!

  It was so stagy, hilariously steeped in French film noir and old Joan Crawford movies, but it worked. They got back together almost immediately and then she made him suffer, as only an Italian woman could.

  I had actually tried the Revenge Wear thing once myself, a few years before I witnessed that masterclass. I was eighteen, my so-cool looked-like-Bryan-Ferry saxophonist boyfriend had dumped me for some ghastly tart and I was heartbroken. I took to my bed and really couldn’t eat. I got brilliantly thin.

  Eventually I got up and the evening came around when it was time to go out again. I knew I would see him at a particular nightclub and boy did I work it, putting together an Antony Price tribute outfit (he used to dress Jerry Hall in the Roxy Music era…) that maximised my new skinniness. It had the desired effect – his eyes nearly came out on stalks, the new gf looked sick – but it didn’t work. He stuck with her.

  If only I’d known about the trench coat.

  Small is beautiful

  Fortunate as we are to live in a country where clean drinking water can be taken for granted – droughts willing and give or take the odd stray E coli – I am a great believer in making the most of the little pleasantnesses of life. We are so lucky to have them.

  Take for example, cotton wool balls. I know they are a stupidly expensive way of buying something you use only to take off eye make-up and then throw in the bin. They also take up a lot of storage space, but every time I open the little basket by my bathroom basin to remove said caked-on mascara, it gives me a mini-hit of pleasure to see them there.

  Sometimes I even buy the pastel-coloured ones that are supposed to be the last word in suburban naffness. I don’t care, I like them. They are fluffy and pretty and camp and they cheer me up. They are the Ziegfeld Follies of cotton wool. I have in lean times bought one of those brutal cotton wool bales like giant tampons, and have hated it afresh every time I came to use it.

  I feel the same way about sugar cubes. The very idea of them makes me smile. In fact, I like to have a quite a wardrobe of sugar styles at my disposal. As well as the obvious icing, golden castor, and castor in a jar with vanilla pods for baking, I have cubes to serve with tea (I’d love some tongs) and those sexy sugar crystals for after-dinner coffee. I have a secret hankering for some of those little sticks with sugar crystals encrusting the end, but that might be going a bit too far, even for me.

  Other fetishes I group under the pleasantness heading are nice soap, always changed before it becomes a slimy communion wafer, hot water bottle covers (mine are Toile de Jouy) and fresh cloth napkins for every dinner. I don’t understand people’s resistance to that little finesse. Really, how hard it is to throw a few napkins in the washer?

  I also confess that I love those tiny little paper napkins with lovely prints on them, such as old blue-and-white tea cups. Paper napkins are one of the ultimate ‘non-u’ items of that snobby English system of ‘u’ and ‘non-u’ (the ‘u’ denoted ‘upper class’) and I would never put them out for dinner, but for afternoon tea? I love them. And if you came to my house around Christmas, you would probably have one with a poinsettia print on it to go with your mince pie.

  These little luxuries are nothing to do with being posh or pretentious or rich – it’s not about having five different Sèvres dinner services and solid silver Christofle cutlery, although I would love to, of course. I don’t think I am in any way better than the next person because I have lavender bags in all my drawers that emit the most lovely waft every time I get out a pair of socks; it is just an enjoyment of tiny harmless details which make life just a little more delightful.

  Of course, this all comes under the terrible crime of being ‘genteel’ and bourgeois. In fact, I am probably bordering on the full Hyacinth Bucket, but I don’t care. These little gestures are my barricades against the hideous cruelty, injustice, deprivation and suffering that spews out at us every day from the front pages and the TV news.

  It doesn’t mean I don’t think about those things and rail against them. Pleasantness is not an ostrich option – it’s more a matter of acknowledging the good fortune to be on the outside of the ghastliness looking in.

  And so I live by this mantra: Do sweat the small stuff.

  Joan Collins Fan Club

  Want a bit of good news about getting older? Thought you might. Well, I can sum it up in two words: Joan Collins.

  I recently had an audience with Miss Collins and it was a revelation. It wasn’t just the two of us; there was Madame Lipgloss up on stage and a packed theatre of Dynasty fanatics, drag queens, general stalkers and the simply curious (that was me).

  Short of holding her down and carbon-dating her leg, I don’t think we are ever going to find out Miss C’s real age (although 1933 has been mentioned in regard to birth dates). But judging by what she was wearing in the adorable toddler photos with which she opened her autobiographical one-woman show, she can’t be too many eggs short of a basket of
eighty.

  Strutting about on a fine pair of heels, wearing the kind of internally engineered, body-hugging gown favoured by Marlene Dietrich in her later years, she looked divatastic.

  The wigs have always helped, of course, adding an element of artifice that is the very essence of true Hollywood glamour. Because when you know someone only via celluloid, cathode or Kodak, seeing them in natural real life can only disappoint without it. Unless there’s something properly phoney going on, you’re not quite convinced by them.

  Anyway, Joanie C looked amazing for her age, with the help of the rug and the NASA corsetry, plus her apparently undintable self-belief (and she fervently denies that she has ever had cosmetic surgery). But what really struck me as we progressed through her decades, with a slideshow to accompany her deliciously camp anecdotes, was the age at which she had been her most beautiful.

  It wasn’t when she was a ravishing RADA-graduate teen, like a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, with a bit of Gina Lollobrigida thrown in. It wasn’t even when she was a Rank starlet, or better still, a full-on Hollywood one, signed to Twentieth Century Fox and chatting casually to Marilyn Monroe at Bel Air parties. It was in her middle to late thirties, after she’d had her children. This cheered me up so much.

  There was one particular picture of Mrs Newley with the three kids (actually that would have made her Mrs Kass – whatever), wearing some kind of 1970s silk kaftan top, where she just looked drop-dead fabulous. Her face was all elegant angles and even her arms looked especially beautiful.

  Now, I believe that when some women have babies a specific metabolic change occurs, dissolving the last baby fat from their faces to reveal the structure beneath. So if you’ve got great bones like Joan, you start to look like a goddess. Not just pretty – properly beautiful. And this segue into a truly elegant womanhood is not restricted to mothers. I’ve also seen it in childless girlfriends who have finally found settled happiness in a relationship.

  Of course, a sense of romantic and domestic security can send some people off into a treacherous twin sofa/ trackie dak/pizza delivery downward spiral, but for those of a Joan Collins constitution it seems to bring out their true radiance, almost as though they finally feel safe enough to let their best selves shine out. It’s a mature form of beauty, which I think is much more fascinating than the poignant first bud kind.

  The really good news is that while Joan’s relationship situations were a bit patchy after that glowing yummy mummy stage, the mature beauty stuck around long enough to relaunch her as the TV superstar we so loved in the 1980s.

  And now, of course, she drinks deep of the ultimate elixir of youth – she has a much younger husband. We all have a lot to learn from Miss Collins.

  All buttoned up

  Do you have a button box? I only ask as I wonder, in this new world of disposable clothes, whether anybody keeps buttons any more.

  I have one, but it is more of a container for those little plastic bags of spare buttons that come with better clothes, rather than for ones thriftily snipped off old shirts before their conversion into silver-polishing cloths, as in days of ancient yore, ie my childhood.

  I always put those posh buttons carefully away, even though I’ve never actually used any of them. It’s just nice to know they’re there. In case. And apart from anything else, I was delighted to find a use for the lovely old Chanel box I keep them in, which was far too beautiful to throw away. It’s just the right size for buttons.

  My mum has button tins, rather than boxes: a Cadbury’s cocoa tin for shirt buttons and a larger toffee tin for buttons, general. The cocoa tin and contents were actually my grandmother’s, which means it could be over eighty years old and any of the buttons in it much older, which is quite a thought.

  In a nice link down the decades, my mum recently gave both tins to my sister, a serious needlewoman – a genetic inheritance from my master dressmaker grandmother which passed me and my mum right on by. We can both labour with a needle if we have to, but it makes us cross and itchy. My mum does a nice line in trousers shortened to two different leg lengths, while my specialty is sewing on buttons with threads that knot and tangle in mid-pull.

  In all honesty, just thinking about sewing gives me the screaming ab dabs, but I used to love playing with those button tins. On rainy afternoons I would take myself off to the cupboard on the landing where all my grandmother’s sewing stuff was kept and get the tins out.

  I can remember the sound of them, the smell of them and the feel of them. The rattle of the tins and then the small roar of the buttons onto the carpet. The combination of metal, plastic, mother-of-pearl, wood and bone created a unique scent. They felt slippery and cold running through my fingers and it was strangely satisfying just to stir them around in the tin.

  When I saw the film of Oscar and Lucinda I really related to the part where the stern clergyman father comments on Oscar’s activities with pebbles. ‘You have changed your taxonomy,’ he says, or words to that effect, continuing that they used to be sorted by size and now they were sorted by colour. That’s what I used to do with the buttons.

  First I’d match them up into groups of the same kind, then I’d mix them all up and put them into groups by colour. Later I might make a long line of them in ascending size. That was generally the mixed tin. Exploration of the shirt button tin was much more specialised as they were a myriad of tiny variations on a theme of small and white.

  It was much more of a challenge to sort them into types and I can remember getting quite mesmerised by the very fine ones made of real mother-of-pearl. I used to end up just staring at individual buttons and wondering where they came from.

  Next time I visit my sister I must have a look at those tins, as I’m sure I would still remember individual buttons. They’re a family heirloom, really, and I know I’m not the only person who feels that way.

  A friend of mine inherited the family button tin from a great-aunt and sewed them all over the front of a waistcoat, like a pearly king’s. It is a most magical garment.

  So if you don’t already have a button tin, perhaps you should consider starting one, for posterity. Or just for rainy afternoons.

  The wardrobe diet

  I have just discovered something absolutely terrible. Or absolutely great, depending how you look at it. To explain – I am writing from the fashion shows in Milan. This is a situation which normally inspires me to unburden my agonies about getting dressed when you are going to spend your day looking at the world’s most beautiful women, surrounded by the world’s chicest women.

  This season I have uncovered the key to it all and it is so simple it makes me want to weep: I have lost weight. That’s it; that was all I needed to do to make something terribly difficult terribly easy.

  And I haven’t even lost loads of weight – I’m not yet ready to sell my before-and-after pictures to a slimming club – but just four kilos is enough to make putting together an outfit a pleasure rather than the problem it had become.

  Now it is a matter of choosing what I want to wear, rather than desperately scrabbling to find some wretched thing I can wear without feeling hopelessly less-than when faced with an audience of 1,854 slim, elegant fashion editors and buyers (the other 146 are the chubby ones).

  In fact, I was nearly late this morning because I had almost too much choice for what to put on. Should I wear the grey flannel pencil skirt with my cashmere twinset and pearls for a bit of a Louis Vuitton ice-maiden moment? Or should I go with the hipster Chloé pants and studded belt for more of a rock-chick thing?

  I went for the pencil skirt and not only did I feel pleasantly dressed, I was completely comfortable, with nothing digging in, pulling or tourniqueting my waist. I also felt a lot calmer than I used to after a session fighting an outfit together. In fact, I wasn’t remotely close to tears at any time. Hallelujah.

  What I find so terrifying is that such a small weight loss could make such a huge difference. I probably don’t even look that differen
t to anyone else, but inside me the shift is exponential. Of course I am thrilled to be less porky, but what breaks my heart is to think that I could have saved myself so much angst and aggro if only I had given up alcohol, sugar and simple carbohydrates years earlier.

  But as a lifelong proselytiser against the fat fascists of the fashion world, it is also hard to accept that while I still passionately believe that any woman should have the right to feel good about herself whatever size or shape she is, I feel so much better the closer I get to the ‘accepted’ size.

  I’ve seen all too many times the damage that eating disorders can do to women who get obsessed with the unachievable catwalk and celluloid image, and I rail against the value system that imposes it upon us. But while I still loudly protest against that impossible, ultra-thin child-woman ‘ideal’, I now realise that in condemning that, we shouldn’t confuse it with a desire to be a healthy weight for your height.

  Starving yourself to try and look like a genetically freakish supermodel is dangerous; eating moderately to stay your own ideal weight is not, and I think for a long time I allowed myself to confuse the two. Which was a very convenient mindset when approaching a large piece of orange cake.

  In that spirit, I threw away my bathroom scales years ago in order not to be morbidly obsessed by weight. Now I’ve bought a new pair and I intend to use them once every week, to keep myself at a more comfortable poundage than the one I had crept up to in blissful ignorance of the truth.

  And I have a specific reason I really can’t afford to put on any weight – if I do, my new Chloé pants won’t fit me.

  Southbound breasts