Counter Revolution
You know, like, Geiger counters, and how they measure radiation and everything? And those step-counter pedometer things that totally count how many steps you’ve, er, stepped, yeah?
I want someone to invent a wear-ometer. This would be a small portable device you could run over an item just before purchase and, depending on the urgency of the beeps, you’d know how many times you were likely to wear it in this lifetime.
Slow, gentle beeping would signal the purchase as a one-time wear, when you’d have a really bad night, so you’d never want to wear it again in case it was cursed.
Mid-level bleeping would indicate that you might wear it a few times, but that it wouldn’t play a large part in your forthcoming autobiography.
Frantic, hysterical bleeps would immediately tell you that it’s destined to be your life-saving new best friend of a garment, guaranteed to get you out of a tight corner on a fat day and to make you feel glamorous on demand, even when you don’t have time to wash your hair and you’ve lost your eyelash curler.
The minute you heard that noise, you’d crash-tackle the nearest assistant and demand to be given every last one of the precious new find in your size and to have an APB sent out to other stores for further supplies.
Had this apparatus been available, I would have known, for example, to have bought more than one of my favourite Helmut Lang T-shirts. They were stupidly expensive for what is basically a fine-rib, long-sleeve, cotton jersey top, so I bought only one and felt mighty guilty about it to boot.
What a wasted sleepless night that was. That thing turned out to be a bargain. Because while I liked it well enough at the time of purchase, I hadn’t realised it was actually a T-shirt that takes five kilos off the wearer, goes with everything and creates a smooth line under all jackets.
By the time I did realise I’d discovered the Holy Grail of under-tailoring comfort wear and returned to the source, the former towering piles of Ts had been reduced to nothing.
If I’d had my wear-ometer in my handbag, I would also have been able to discover, shortly after this disappointment, that six cheap, black, long-sleeve T-shirts don’t actually add up to one incredibly expensive one.
I would have run it over those ₤15 tops that I thought would fill the gap on the days the Helmut Lang T-shirt required a rest in the laundry basket (once I realised its true worth, it had to be hand-washed only), and slow, unexcited beeps would have told me to put them back on the shelf and retreat.
But while the wear-ometer would have saved me from many such folly purchases, it is as the indicator of future all-time favourites that I would most value it.
The money wasted on a bright red handbag too small for a lipstick and keys, or designer shoes bought one size too big after a long day on the hoof can at least be recouped in part at the consignment store, but a lost opportunity to buy more than one of a best-friend garment can never be regained.
Of course, if you’re married to a Greek shipping magnate, you cover all bases by buying multiples of everything that takes your fancy right off. Although I have learnt that buying that special purchase in every colour is not the answer. I did buy two pairs of my best-ever smart-but-comfy sandals – except one of the pairs was white, so I never wore them.
If only I’d had a wear-ometer, I would have known to buy two black pairs instead. And I wouldn’t have spent the past three weeks trawling overpriced and pretentious shops in London, Milan and Paris trying to find something to replace my favourite Martin Margiela top.
Anna in Oxford
I saw Anna Wintour in Oxford. It was so strange. Like seeing a unicorn in a shopping centre. A creature from another world, suddenly dropped down here among the humdrum mortals.
Not that Oxford is quite the real world. In winter, without the roaming herds of American tourists and despite the ordinariness of its chainstore shopping strip and ugly traffic system, it still maintains its extraordinary Hogwarts magic.
I was strolling about with my brother Nick, who lives there on his bespoke tour of ‘Oxford’s back passages’. En route to one of the obscure little vistas he has discovered we came round the corner from the Bodleian Library going towards the Radcliffe Camera and there she was admiring a building. Miss Wintour. It was so odd.
Not because I have never seen the international-fashion-legend editor of American Vogue in the flesh before. Quite the opposite. I used to spend about four weeks a year seeing her every day at the Milan and Paris fashion shows. I have even stood behind her in the loo queue at the Milan exhibition centre. It was seeing her completely outside that fashion context that was so strange. It made me feel quite unusual.
Enjoying a family outing on a wintry English Sunday, I was definitely in civilian mode (jeans, trainers, pea coat, Greek fisherman’s cap), but she seemed still very much on duty, as immaculately dressed as ever in a boxy fur jacket (Prada), a neat burgundy tailored skirt and very high-heeled boots. Her bobbed hair was as sleek as ever, her legs were still pin thin, she was wearing her signature black sunnies. And she wasn’t carrying a handbag.
She never seems to carry one at the shows. Rather as the Queen never carries money. Everyone else is either lugging around their entire life in a shoulder-breaking fashionista tote (notebooks, mascara, mineral water, mobile phones etc), or sporting this season’s prestige bag in a small size that indicates the limo waiting outside. Anna just saunters in holding a leather-bound notebook.
The chauffeur-driven girls are making the statement that they have all their other gear in the car – Anna probably has a hair and make-up artist, a private secretary and a juice bar in hers.
Anyway, I felt quite discombobulated seeing her there in Oxford, just on the street like that, not surrounded by a milling hubbub of fashion folk. I felt strangely caught out and found myself doing a mental check of my outfit, which I decided just passed muster – they were the right trainers – although strictly speaking the Greek fisherman’s cap was very Celine three seasons ago.
I also felt strangely excited. As though we had come round the corner smack into Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow or some other real superceleb. Anna is just as world famous to a silly fashion head like me.* But seeing her there seemed so extraordinary I wanted to rush up and ask for her autograph, or her blessing, or a job ha ha ha.
But mostly I wanted to trail her for the rest of the day to find out what she was doing there. There were certainly no fashion shows in the vicinity. She was just walking along with a tall distinguished-looking man, who may or may not have been her ex-husband, the psychologist. He was wearing a tweed jacket and certainly looked very much the handsome academic.
If it was him, maybe they are considering sending one of their children to study there and were checking out the colleges. It certainly looked like a private visit. Had it been anything to do with work, there is no way it would just have been her and one chap. She would have been surrounded by a coven of skeletal fawning harpies in black clothes and talon heels.
And that was what was so weird for me about the Oxford visitation. Miss Wintour stood out so boldly in the context of ‘real life’, it made me realise just how insane the microcosm of the fashion show season really is. Because through that looking glass she looks quite normal.
The Compact Contract
Compacter’s Log, Week One.
(To explain: I have committed to one month of being a Compacter, inspired by the San Francisco-based movement whose members don’t buy anything new except food, essential drugs and toiletries, and dull underpants.)
Do you think Compacters are allowed to buy songs on iTunes? They are virtual, so they are totally carbon neutral and the things I buy off there aren’t exactly new (I’ve got a lot of Glen Campbell on my playlists … ) but it is still consuming, so I have decided NO, Compacters are not allowed to download music.
Instead I will spend the time I would have devoted to buying all the tracks from George Michael’s personal play-list to uploading every CD I already ow
n to my music library and then filing them into fiddly little playlists of my own.
This feels like consuming in an odd way so maybe it’s not in the spirit, but I need a hobby now I can’t go out shopping.
It is fascinating deciding just how far you are prepared to take this. Original Compact blogger Rachel Kesel has written recently about the problem of her completely ragged windcheater, which she won’t let herself replace.
I think that is going too far. She rides a bicycle everywhere (I rather suspect this is not a woman I am going be having cocktails with at the Bulgari Hotel in Milan any time soon) so surely an adequate windcheater is an essential rather than a pointless bit of tat?
It’s hardly on a par with a heart-shaped, sugar-pink fun fur cushion that purrs when you lean against it, is it? I think that level of self-sacrifice is taking it too far. A sort of David Blaine see-me-suffer-hear-me-roar level of compacting, like those chaps in India who walk around in the nuddy and never eat and do frightful things to themselves with bits of stick to show how non-attached they are.
I think the hardest thing for me to un-attach from will be buying new books. This is definitely not something I could keep up indefinitely, largely for professional reasons. I know true Compacters are great users of libraries, but I have tried my local one and the waiting lists for anything popular are impossible.
But I already have loads of wonderful unread books in leaning towers by my bed, so I am going to read all those. That should keep me going for a couple of years.
In similar mode I am relishing the divine and as yet unworn men’s dinner shirt I bought on sale in December. I’m so glad I saved it as it will feel like having something new when I eventually put it on.
Gee, it’s going to be hard to miss out on all those gorgeous shift and trapeze dresses which are about to hit the shops, though. I don’t suppose I can ask a friend to buy one for me and then put it away until I stop Compacting? No, I can’t. Dammit.
I thought magazines – another professional must – would be a problem, but then it occurred to me I can get my journo best pal to pass hers on to me. It’s never the same when you’re not the first to crack the glossy pages, but if I’m going to do this nutty thing I’d better do it properly. And I suppose I could read my daily paper online.
But I love my paper! My big rustly newsprint-smelling paper. Don’t take my paper away from me! What am I going to read on the train?
I suppose I can listen to things on my iPod. But what about the crossword? I can’t listen to that. And there’s not much of a market in secondhand crossword books, so I guess that is something I will really have to do without. I can play backgammon on my Palm Pilot instead.
Thank heavens I stocked up on dreadful consumer durables while I could.
Camp Older
It was buying spectacles which revealed to me that I have achieved a new level of development. I have finally made it up to Camp Older.
In earlier years all revelations of the sweet bird’s passing (youth, I mean) were exquisitely painful. The first grey hair, the first crow’s foot were profound traumas. Sagging knees, in particular, were a personal catastrophe.
But it was precisely because I was excited by achieving this next stage, rather than appalled, that I knew I was there. Camp Older is a club you just can’t get into until it’s your time and suddenly, I’m a member. But darling, I’m your Auntie Mame!
I needed new specs because I’d trodden on the others. I’ve sent an old pair off to be re-jigged, but that will take a while and I needed something right here, right now. All of which, I now see, were signs of my new status in themselves. Thrusting young women don’t tread on their spectacles. Or put things in the post. Or get anything fixed.
Anyway, so I was standing in an interesting shop I have discovered which specialises in quirky spectacle frames. The owner isn’t an optometrist, he just deals in the hardware and has a pretty amazing range. Yet nothing was speaking my language.
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ he asked, as I scanned the racks trying hard to hide my disappointment.
‘Something really, marvellously … camp,’ I replied.
He immediately produced a pair of fluoro pink-and-lime cats’ eyes which had the most amazing 3D glitter finish inside the arms. They were wonderful, but not for me. They were for an ultra-femme 23-year-old.
I tried again.
‘I want to look like a Hitchcock secretary or an egomaniacal old architect. Or Buddy Holly.’
He found several pairs of exquisite frames in these genres for me to put on and some of them were very lovely, but still too tasteful.
‘I think I want something a bit more fearless,’ I said.
He puzzled some more and then an idea struck and he disappeared off into the store room, to emerge polishing the dust off a set of frames.
It reminded me of that scene in the first Harry Potter film, where John Hurt is the proprietor of the ancient wand shop and has to find Harry his wand.
After trying several unsuccessfully (and Harry nearly blowing up the shop in the process), he pulls a box down from a top shelf and with a thoughtful look on his face says, ‘I wonder …’
Harry got the twin of He Who Must Not Be Named’s old wand – I got a pair of vintage Paul Smith tortoiseshell, well, goggles is the only name for them. They are outrageously thick and hilariously round. David Hockney would happily wear them. I fell immediately in love, gazing at myself in them. Then it hit me: ‘I look like Iris Apfel!’
Fashion devotees will know she is an über-extravagantly dressed New Yorker – now in her late eighties – and the patron saint of the Camp Older persona. She defines sartorial fearlessness and always wears goggle glasses. (If you don’t know her, hop on the interweb, or get your library to order the glorious book Iris Apfel: Rare Bird of Fashion.)
I did buy some sunglasses in a similar shape a few months ago, but they are less demanding; you can fool about with sunnies. Everyday eyewear is a much more serious identity statement, like a hairstyle.
Of course, anyone young and beautiful could look great in goggle glasses but they would clearly be an affectation. They really do look better on someone old and bonkers. Hurrah.
Even a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have had the confidence to wear them – I would have worried about looking a twit – but suddenly I feel I can, because I am old enough to do Camp Older. And I find it is defined by a most amazing don’t-give-a-flying-fandago freedom, which is as thrilling as when you first start buying your own clothes.
So it looks like late middle age will be far easier to dress than the past ten years. Who knew?
Shoe Sure
Recently, while raving on about something else, I mentioned my lapse of confidence several years ago when I stumbled upon a shop in Milan which specialised in classic ballerina flats, as worn by Audrey Hepburn et al, not then available in every chain store on the planet.
This funny little shop (which I could never find again and may have been an annexe of Narnia) had them in every colour and I loved them on sight – especially the silver – but I didn’t trust my taste and shyly bought only plain black. I then watched in fascination as the style became an ongoing global fashion phenomenon, with silver ones particularly a ‘thing’. I bring it up again as I’ve just had an almost identical experience.
About a year ago I was in Belgrade visiting my Serbian mother-in-law. We were in a pharmacy buying something to put on mozzie bites when my eye was caught by a display of shoes. Remember – it was a pharmacy.
They were slip-on mules, with cork soles and a buckle on the cross-foot strap, which was perforated in a pleasing design. I found myself greatly attracted to them and seriously considered asking to try a pair on, before mentally slapping down this outrageous idea.
Is this how bad my shopping addiction is? I asked myself. That in lieu of any other alluring consumer items, I would entertain the idea of buying pharmacy footwear? I felt thoroughly ashamed.
I didn’t think abo
ut those shoes again until a few days ago – when I saw exactly the same ones in a terrifyingly cool shoe shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. A neighbourhood which could be described as currently the epicentre of the hip universe. I asked the young friend I was visiting there about them.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Lily. ‘Worishofers are so cool. Everyone here wears them.’
Worishofers, indeed. It turns out those funny shoes I saw in the Serbian pharmacy are so cool they are a known brand. I couldn’t believe it – but then again, I could. The reason I’d been attracted to them in the chemist shop wasn’t just that I am a hopeless shopping addict and shoe fetishist, but because there was something intrinsically pleasing about them. And the fact that they look like naff retro American maids’ shoes was all part of the appeal. There is a wrongness to them that makes them right.
Of course, I immediately bought a pair – London-bus red – and have been stoating about downtown Manhattan in them ever since feeling very much the go and also very comfortable, even in the punishing New York summer heat and humidity, and atop that city’s particularly hard paving stones.
This is because they are fundamentally health shoes (hence the pharmacy setting in which I first saw them). They share with Birkenstocks both a German heritage and a cork sole designed to absorb the shock of one’s entire bodyweight impacting via foot on adamantine pavements.
‘Darauf kommit es an gesunde’ as it says on the Worishofer box, which my German-speaking friend Catherine tells me means, ‘In this respect it is essential for health.’ So true.
Where they improve on the Birkenstock, however, is that there is a slight rise to the wedge sole, imparting a more feminine feeling to the girly wearer, plus the cork footbed is covered in leather so you don’t have the painful breaking-in period, or ongoing heel chafing.
But even beyond all these health benefits what my Worishofers (and I do love saying that name) have finally enabled me to understand is that if their particular package of aesthetics and associations worked for me in that Belgrade pharmacy, why wouldn’t it work for all the 22-year-old animated-film makers and guerilla café owners who reside in Billburg?
Style Notes Page 6