Style Notes

by Alderson, Maggie

  So the next time I stumble upon a clothing item of great appeal outside a specifically fashion context, I will trust my taste. I’ll buy it. And possibly shares in the company.

  Getting Shirty

  As the years advance and the ‘age between’ box you tick on forms gets nearer to the end of the available choices, it gets rarer to be introduced to an entirely new concept.

  But this thrilling event happened to me yesterday when I went to buy a plain white shirt for my husband and discovered the following: shopping for men’s clothes is actually much harder than shopping for women’s. Who knew? Well, presumably the entire male population, but I had no idea.

  As previously mentioned, what he had casually asked me to pick up for him – as I was going to be in London department store Selfridges, which has an unusually good menswear department – was a plain white shirt. How hard could that be? Very.

  When he said PWS (plain white shirt), he went on to add the following qualifiers: smooth poplin, no textured weave. No button-down collars, as worn by Americans. Absolutely not a horrid cutaway collar as worn by a certain kind of Englishman. Simple button cuffs, not pretentious double ones requiring fiddly cufflinks. Collar should have quite long and quite pointy points. Preferably a plain buttonhole front, without a placket. Closer rather than looser fit. The right shade of white.

  Just to be sure I got the finer points, in the week prior to my mission every time a man came on TV, or appeared in a photograph wearing the wrong or right kind of PWS – particularly in the collar area – he got all excited. There! That’s just the kind of collar I mean! Or… Dont get me a shirt like that!

  So I travelled up to the first floor of Selfridges – an area the size of about three football pitches entirely covered with men’s clothing – quite confident I would be able to despatch my mission in short order. Wrong.

  Half an hour later, I was still bogged down in the one-arm novelty shirts in Men’s Designer Labels after coming dangerously close to buying a very expensive Paul Smith number, only to discover floral-print lawn inside the cuffs. (That was another spec – no funny business.)

  I was beginning to despair when a nice lady in Ralph Lauren Polo, after telling me she only had shirts with button-down collars, showed me through to the last football field, Men’s Formalwear, which was entirely devoted to shirts and ties.

  Oh yes, that was the other thing he wanted: a plain black silk tie. Not too wide, not too shiny and not too black. The point where charcoal very nearly embraces full black, but not quite.

  I looked at every white shirt and every plain black tie they had in that aircraft hangar of men’s clothing and not one of them was quite right. Some shirt brands with quite large concessions sold only cutaway collars and the assistants were noticeably sniffy when I asked if they didn’t have anything more pointy. Then there were acres of other apparently PWS which turned out to be made of fabric with tricky weaves.

  In the equally generous tie offer there were plenty of black ties, which were all too shiny, too black, too kipper, or too skinny. Or too bloody expensive. And that was when I realised how mind-boggling shopping for menswear is.

  The choice of garment groups is so limited, it comes down to tiny calibrations of difference within each one. A couple of millimetres in the length of a collar point, or the precise degree of its triangularity, renders one shirt perfect, the other foul flash Harry. It takes chess grandmaster concentration to find the perfect thing in these conditions.

  How different from my own experience of clothes shopping, when I am making choices between the generic styles of shirt, blouse, T-shirt, smock, jumper, cardigan or dress to clothe my upper body, rather than minute details within one narrow garment genus.

  This, I realise, is probably why men hate shopping. And I can’t say I blame them.

  By a Nose

  All my adult life I have felt a slight kinship to Cyrano de Bergerac. As in being a bit over-endowed in the snout department. I say adult life, because as a child I had a tiny little nose.

  Right on the wall next to my desk here I have a picture of myself aged five and there it is, an eensy-weensy little button mushroom. My daughter has one just like it. A little cartoon character’s joke of a nose. Then I hit puberty and the family conk just grew, like Pinocchio telling a particularly ripe porkie.

  And I say family conk because it is very much inherited from my father’s side. One of my brothers and my sister have it too, while my elder brother has a Mackay nose, from my mother, whose nasal bone structure could be used as a model by plastic surgeons. It’s a very straight nose, of just the right length and width.

  As a teenager I used to rage against the fates which decided I should get the Alderson nose, rather than that lovely neat Mackay one. (But I could at least console myself that I got her hair – his, God rest his blessed soul, was a frightful frizzy mat.)

  So I’m aware of it being there, my schnozz, I’ve been teased about it from time to time and a photo from the wrong side (the right) can make me strongly resemble a parrot, but I’ve never really suffered with it. Certainly not to the point where I have ever considered having it lopped; it’s just not something I would add to my list of good points, if I were forced to make one.

  But I’m beginning to wonder. It’s seeing Nicole Kidman wearing that prosthetic beak to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours. I think she looks better in it.

  Of course Ms Kidman is a preternaturally lovely human being any way you look at her, but I think she looks more beautiful with that big bony nose than with her own little retrousse number.

  It gives her a dignity and elegance that, added to her height and grace, is really quite striking. And it makes her look more intelligent. In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen one of those movie transformations that made an actress look so much better.

  As I write, the Oscars are just about to be announced and whether Nicole wins or not* (Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! etc) I reckon that nose gave her a much better chance than she had for Moulin Rouge. She looks more like co-star Meryl Streep with it. Much more serious. Much more worthy of an Academy Award than a ringlet-headed, snub-nosed dolly girl. That snap-on hooter gives her the kind of gravitas that going brunette can give a blonde.

  And although it is not something we are meant to mention in these more enlightened times and especially not in this egalitarian country, but it makes her appear grander – more ‘aristocratic.’ Which is exactly how she needed to look to play the part of an over-privileged, early-twentieth-century upper-class English intellectual.

  But while we may no longer aspire to look like ‘our betters’, I still think Nicole looks more glorious with the schnozzle. It’s more balanced with her height and frame somehow than that cutesy toy shop nose. I reckon she should keep it.

  Which has got me thinking, what other stars would benefit from conking up like Kidman? Renee Zelwegger could take on more serious roles with a more patrician nose. It would be a novelty to see Pamela Anderson Lee with another facial feature larger than her lips. And models like Elle would surely find that tricky move into acting much easier if they lost their nasal perfection.

  Perhaps the day will come, when it is not breast enlargements that young starlets book in for, but nose augmentation. And I’m liking my own better all the time.

  Itchy and Scratchy

  I know it’s bad manners to talk about your dreams – nearly as bad as explaining dental work in detail, with your ’ingers in your ’ouf, but I have to share this, I really do.

  Last night I dreamed I was in the glamorous bar at Claridges Hotel in London, and I bumped into Hamish Bowles – of US Vogue fame. I knew Hamish a little, back in the day, he’s a lovely person, and we were having a very jolly chat (in my dream … ).

  The only problem was I was wearing a bedspread. A nanna-style candlewick bedspread. Dirty poodle white with a purple trim (it had to be mauve for Hamish, didn’t it? It’s his special colour). And that was all I was wearing. No shoes, no undies. A bedspread. Toga stylee
.

  I kept hoping Hamish wouldn’t notice and as I got more and more anxious about it, my conversational flow began to break up and I couldn’t remember names or places or, in the end, even words. It was awful.

  I didn’t remember the dream until this afternoon when I was telling a friend I have absolutely nothing to wear at the moment and it brought the memory flooding back. I couldn’t tell him about it for ages for laughing, it’s such a hilariously obvious anxiety dream, which relates so unsubtly to my current situation.

  The reason I have nothing to wear is that I’ve been rather unwell. Not a nasty life-threatener – I have got my condition in perspective – but a great inconveniencer. I’ve had ‘post-viral fatigue’, which is similar to what people get after glandular fever, or shingles, when the symptoms of the virus clear up but your system is left utterly depleted. I believe the correct medical term is ‘knackered’.

  In short, I have spent the past ten weeks mostly in bed. I’ve been up and out a few times, but any such activity leads to extreme exhaustion the next day. I get palpitations if I overdo it and a weird rushing sound in my ears. Sometimes I have to lie with the curtains closed and something over my eyes.

  So I’m very fortunate that I can work in bed and have come to understand why writers as eminent as Marcel Proust and Marian Keyes have chosen to do so. From the galleon of your mattress you can set sail into an imagined world with a very particular sense of detachment from the real one. Being in your nightie also helps. Untrammelled by the constricting trappings of your own everyday life, you feel liberated to make up other people’s.

  But the nightie is a big part of the problem which led to my bedspread dream. I’ve got so used to spending the day in a lovely loose cotton nightie I’ve forgotten how to dress. Well, not so much how to dress, I can still put a look together when required, but how to endure wearing clothes.

  When you stop pushing yourself into them on a daily basis, clothes become unbearable. Itchy and scratchy don’t come near it. And that’s just the underwear. Now I understand why toddlers take everything off at the first possible opportunity. Clothes are terrible.

  Of course, it doesn’t help that my body has spread while I’ve been immobile. I haven’t put on much weight, thank heavens, but that’s mainly because fat weighs less than muscle. I’ve lost all my hard-earned yoga muscle tone and my torso feels like it has a bin liner of cold dahl strapped to it. Add slightly tight garments to that mix and you have a very ugly scenario on your hands.

  The friend I was talking to when I remembered my dream is a gym bunny and he reassured me that my muscle memory would put me right very quickly, once I get back in motion.

  In the meantime, I will need to invest in some dresses that strongly resemble my nighties. Or it will just have to be the bedspread toga.

  Tails It Is

  Have you ever seen that episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa meet a mad professor and they can see into the future? Bart as a teenager with a big belly in development is pretty funny, but the moment that made me shout with laughter was one of those little passing vignettes the legendary show is so good at.

  The scene pans over a futurist streetscape and as it reaches a shop hoarding saying ‘Plastic Surgery’, Selma – or it could have been Patty; one of Marge’s dreadful sisters anyway – walks out of the building. She is sporting a fine, bushy tail. I shrieked. Mainly because I’ve always wanted a tail, and what a brave new world it would be which had such plastic surgery in it.

  I mean, why not? I think a tail would be not only devilishly attractive, but awfully useful. Monkeys use their tails as a fifth limb, but you can also be very expressive with one, as any pet owner knows.

  My sister’s dog Paddy practically takes off wagging his when pack members like myself arrive at the house. We often comment that it’s a shame we couldn’t harness his tail-wagging energy for the national grid.

  In a similar vein, my god-dog (like a godson, but canine), Figaro, is a young black pug with that breed’s hilarious coiled tail, which curls and uncurls to great effect depending on his mood.

  But it’s probably cats which take the language of tails to the highest level. I adore it when a cat stalks into a room with its tail held aloft at a perfect right angle to its butt, anus fully revealed. It’s so incredibly snobby and most felines seem to do it when there are visitors. You may briefly inhabit my sitting room, oh pitiful unknown human. I will allow it. But you must admire me. And my butt.

  My own furry lump, Matchki, conveys irritation very eloquently with tail twitching, developing into full swishing, when I groom her (she finds it very insulting). Once the tail starts to whack slowly from side to side, I know I have only a few seconds before serious injury. Ouch.

  Tails are also put to excellent use in animal cartoons. I was very impressed at an early age by the lady cats on Tom and Jerry and Top Cat, which have always seemed the very acme of ultra-femme allure. They did marvellous things with their tails, like leaving them behind when they walked through a door, then snatching them out of sight at the last minute. Sometimes coquettishly, sometimes crossly.

  In more risqué episodes the tail would sometimes turn into a beckoning finger, causing Tom, or whichever of TC’s dopey crew had fallen in love that week, to follow like an enthralled zombie. A question mark was another option. How handy.

  I once suggested to the lovely late Franco Moschino that he did a collection featuring tails – some sleek, some brushy fox stylee, maybe stripes – which you could move using a remote control in your pocket. I outlined some of the scenarios above and he thought it was pretty funny. I was deadly serious and I like to think that one day he might have done it, may he rest in peace.

  But after that Simpsons episode my aspirations are set higher. Perhaps a working tail could be permanently attached one day. There is that extraordinary man in America who has had ridiculous amounts of plastic surgery and tattooing so he looks like a tiger. He’s had his lip split like a cat, teeth filed, holes for plastic ‘whiskers’ across his face; it’s all utterly grotesque, but what about the tail?

  I’ve read a report that he has a sort of tail hanging down at the back of his clothes, but nothing about it moving. He says he wants to have real tiger fur grafted on to his own skin – gross-out on so many levels – but if the tail don’t twitch he ain’t no Tigger.

  It’s one of the things that makes animals superior to humans.

  Isabella Blow

  This morning I fired up my computer to find that fashion legend Isabella Blow has died, at just forty-eight – and, even worse, by suicide. She had been suffering from ovarian cancer and, for many years, from depression.

  It’s very sad and in the strange world of high fashion, especially poignant because one of its most twinkling lights has gone out. For Ms Blow was the only person you could rely on to look more rarefied in the audience than almost anything that went past on the catwalk.

  She absolutely always wore a hat. Headpieces of extraordinary sculptural originality by British milliner Philip Treacy, whom she met before he graduated from the Royal College of Art, and promptly housed so he could further his business. (She said several years ago that she will be buried in his ‘pheasant’ hat.)

  But wild hats were just the start of each outfit. When it came to the pointiest end of fashion Isabella Blow really walked the walk – although sometimes she could barely walk at all, in outfits so conceptual they had clearly not been designed with real life in mind. Not even the short stroll from a limo to a front row seat.

  But such practical considerations were nothing to Issy, as her friends called her. She didn’t live in real life. For reasons both born and subsequently bred, she really did dwell in a realm beyond the common experience.

  Born wealthy, to an aristocratic English family, with the added glamour of a celebrated high society scandal – her grandfather, Lord Erroll, was accused and acquitted of the Happy Valley murder portrayed in the film White Mischief – Issy’s early life was free of the
mundane constraints which anchor most of us drearily to the earth.

  Put into that context innate intellectual curiosity and a refined aesthetic sense, and you have the rare conditions that make it possible for a true original to develop unfettered. Thus she was a true English eccentric, in the grand manner. A very rare creature. Of a type now possibly extinct.

  Even more interestingly, she was later disinherited, when her father died after marrying again, and had to graft to survive, like the rest of us – she claimed to have worked in a bakery (she called it a ‘scone shop’) and as a cleaner. Although characteristically she wore a scarf tied on her head in the manner of an Ealing comedy charlady while engaged in the latter occupation.

  I knew her a little, when we were both in our twenties, and particularly remember the time when we spent so long in the ladies loo at a London bar that a gossip columnist from Private Eye barged in to see what we were up to.

  He was disappointed. Far from being locked in a Sapphic embrace or embroiled in a drug-taking frenzy, we were involved in that most ordinary female occupation: talking about boys. Or rather, Issy was talking about the particular boy she was in love with, who was our mutual friend, and I was listening and trying to make the odd helpful comment.

  She wasn’t Isabella Blow then, of course. She hadn’t yet discovered designers Alexander McQueen (she bought his entire degree show collection) and Hussein Chalayan or the models Stella Tennant and Sophie Dahl, or married her second husband, the equally well-born and exquisite Detmar Blow – she was still Issy Broughton.

  But while she was not yet, beyond her family fame, a legend, I can remember being very impressed, as we chatted, by her top. It was a white pique thing, halfway between a man’s dress shirt and a blouse and I knew it was by Chanel.