Style Notes

by Alderson, Maggie

  Once-elegant rooms carved up with flimsy walls – sometimes bifurcating a window – lovely old cornicing ripped out in pursuit of a spurious modernity, the avocado bathroom suites of legend, and wood-effect wallpaper.

  Ah, there’s that term again, ‘wood effect’. How quickly we make the same mistakes again. Except this time around, taking up and replacing wood-effect laminate flooring (WELF) is a much bigger hassle than stripping off some sordid old wallpaper. And these days it’s not so much putting walls up that causes problems, as people tearing them down with perilous abandon.

  Lovely notion as it is to have one sprawling family area, with the youngest child doing homework at the kitchen table, while Dad cooks a stir-fry with the cricket on the radio, Mum reads the paper and two teenagers play a violent video game, the reality is an imperfect experience for everyone involved.

  But it doesn’t even take such a major structural ruinovation to wreck a place. I looked at a unit the other week and could have cried at the mess. It was almost exactly what I was looking for – the ground floor of a lovely big old house with a decent-sized backyard – but on the market at a premium because the current owners have ruinovated it.

  It would have cost me at least another $60 000 on top of their inflated asking price to put their bottom-dollar ruinovation right. Not to mention the heartbreaking hassle.

  Obviously, the WELF would have to go. The acid-stripped doors (why?) throughout would have to be restored and repainted, possibly replaced. The PVC French windows would have to go immediately or I would become unwell, and don’t even start me on the stunted rectangular bathroom sinks. If I had rectangular hands – or lived on a submarine – I might like them.

  As for the kitchen, I just don’t understand the notion of those one-size-fits-all building block units. The whole concept is against logic, because you have to take their stuff and make it fit into your unchangeable space, so the best you can hope for is a workable compromise. No wonder most people have a nervous breakdown buying them too.

  So much better, particularly in an older place, to hire a carpenter and tell him what you would like where, built from sustainable timber. The astonishing thing – and I’ve done this twice – is that it doesn’t come out much more expensive than the cheapest particle-board units. And it has a modicum of character.

  Home makeover and property ladder reality TV shows are largely to blame for the ruinovation epidemic, of course, as they have empowered anyone who can plug in an electric drill into thinking they can tart up a place themselves and add a casual $150 000 to the price when they sell it on.

  Maybe it’s just a question of taste. Perhaps I will have to hold out until I find a place renovated by someone who shares my fancy for reclamation-yard bathroom fittings. But I wouldn’t actually mind a contemporary makeover, if it had been done well.

  So what I’m hoping is there will soon be a consumer backlash against these gimcrack ruinovations on the market at premium prices. May the WELF boycott commence.

  High Hair

  Last night I backcombed my hair and put it up into a big beehive hairdo of Ab Fab Patsy splendour, although I was actually basing myself more on Miss Baltimore Crab – the character played so brilliantly by Michelle Pfeiffer in the recent remake of the marvellous musical Hairspray. And boy did I use a lot of that stuff.

  The secret is to turn your head upside down and spray the roots like mad, then backcomb the bejayzus out of it. Repeat, standing up occasionally to check hair – and to allow blood to drain from head.

  Once you stand up and your hair stands up with you like a reed bed, you mould it into the shape, as tall as possible, pleat the ends in and secure it. Shouldn’t take more than three hairpins. Then a lot more hairspray over the top. It should be crisp to the touch.

  My hair was basically my outfit. I was off to a black-tie dinner – not a serious thing, just forty friends getting together for fun, taking over a restaurant for the night – and the guy organising it decided we should all dress formally for larks.

  The problem was that after a crazy day and a crazy week, I had about ten minutes to get ready and not a moment before that even to think about what I might wear, so I threw on a trusty little long black dress and blinged it up. I needed the up-do for my rhinestone tiara to nest in.

  I had such a good time with that hairdo. Everybody laughed when they saw it and if you’re surrounded by people laughing and smiling you’re going to enjoy yourself. I also felt quite glam. I felt more of a woman for having a head rigid with sprayed-on glue.

  I think it must relate back to childhood Saturdays sitting in the hairdresser’s with my mum, watching with wide eyes as ladies put the hairspray screen over their faces, while Shirley let rip on the virgin ozone layer.

  I felt even better about my massively high hair when I got home. I took out the three pins and my do pretty much stayed where it was, rising a good 20 centimetres above my scalp. Only the unsprayed ends flopped down and I looked like Dusty Springfield in her 1960s big-hair prime.

  I love that look and think it’s incredibly flattering. Having a giant aurora of hair makes your face look dainty and gamine by comparison. It makes your cheekbones look higher. Obviously it adds to your overall height as well. All in all, I was quite keen on gazing at myself in the mirror after the party, which may have had something to do with a few glasses of sparkling wine, but mainly it was the hair.

  I decided there and then I was going to make it my everyday style. Ironed ‘modern’ hair looked so flat and dreary compared to my cranial meringue. It makes even attractive women look tired, dragging down their faces. No matter that I might look like one of those weird vintage fetishists who like to lead their whole lives as though it actually were still 1955; it’s the look for me, I vowed. And I planned to start that very day, wearing my morning-after hair with pride.

  But after a night when I kept being woken up by the toxic fumes emanating from my barnet and loud crackling noises when I rolled over, I leapt straight out of bed and into the shower, and washed my big hair down the drain.

  Unhappy Feet

  In news just in, a pedicurist has confirmed what I have recently come to suspect – Birkenstocks are a disaster for your feet. I currently have two pairs on the go, which are fortunately getting to the stage, after two summers of hard wearing, when they seriously need to be thrown out. My challenge then will be to resist buying any more.

  For so many years now, they have been my default footwear in any temperature above freezing. I even convinced myself for a delusional spell that it was fine – in fact, rather ironically chic – to wear them in the evening. At least my black patent ones. This clearly isn’t right.

  But apart from allowing comfort to triumph over decorum, let alone style, I have had to accept that these addictive German shoes have a catastrophic effect on feet. It took a while for me to make the connection between the wonderfully giving cork soles and my heels having fissures like Kings Canyon, but something had clearly changed.

  I’ve always been able to keep my feet in reasonable shape between pedis (which I don’t have as often as I should, because they make me feel guilty and self-indulgent) with a bit of chafing in the shower each morning and inclusion in general body lotion application, but suddenly I found myself lurking around the foot product area of pharmacies, searching for the ultimate cracked-heel ointment.

  I found it in the end – it’s got to have urea in it, apparently – and a few nights of that with socks on sorted me out fairly quickly. I rewarded myself with a pedicure and Jessica, who did it (not related to the nail care range, just a pleasingly coincidental name), confirmed my suspicion it was caused by the Birkos.

  She sees a lot more cracked heels than she used to and always asks clients if they wear the Birks. It’s the cork, she explained; it sucks the moisture out of your very skin. I haven’t worn mine since and she’s also warned me to take care with another favourite summer shoe: Havaianas.

  The problem with those marvellous Brazilian tho
ngs, which come in such a tempting array of colours and are so subtly raised towards the heel, she told me, is the textured nature of the sole. It took her a while to work it out, but clients kept presenting with a strange condition of spongy soles with little black dots all over them, and she was determined to solve the mystery.

  Practically every woman who sits in Jessica’s chair arrives wearing Havaianas – to protect their toenail varnish on the way home – but she soon made the connection that the ones worn by women with spongy sole syndrome were on the skanky side. If not downright filthy. So she believes that, particularly in hot summer weather, bacteria breeds in the little cracks and crevices on the rubber soles, which then infects your sweet feet. Nice, huh?

  Jessica’s advice is to buy a new pair each spring – great, more colours! – and give them a good scrub with dishwashing detergent and a brush once a week. Also, to throw them away at the end of the season, which I know I will find hard, but I don’t want the fashion version of trench foot so I will do it.

  The problem now is what else to wear on my feet in hot weather? Cork and rubber have both revealed inherent problems, so I reckon the answer is old-fashioned leather-soled sandals, as worn by Jackie Onassis on European holidays.

  Hers were famously from Melissinos in Athens, and the other fetish brand is K Jacques, from St Tropez. It would be much more fun to go to the actual shops but, more conveniently, both are available online.

  And so, Birkenstocks, auf wiedersehen.

  Love Yourself Slim

  Talk about a lightning bolt. After thirty years of yo-yo dieting and a body weight that’s more volatile than bank shares on the Dow Jones, I’ve had a blinding flash of inspiration about it all I will now attempt to share with you.

  The thing that I have never been able to understand is how for weeks I can be as disciplined as Madonna. In that mindset I can sit for an hour looking at my favourite cake and not eat a crumb of it, telling myself, quite reasonably, that I already know what it tastes like. I can happily enjoy a fruit salad for dessert while my girlfriends share the sticky toffee pudding, or – best of all – I can have one loving spoonful and leave it there.

  Eating like that, I lose the weight, so I feel great and everything in life from getting dressed for a cocktail party to walking upstairs with the laundry seems easier and more enjoyable. Then something goes snap in my head and that willpower deserts me. Or, maybe I should say, desserts me.

  It starts with a gentle slide into depravity, allowing myself to be a little more lax because I’m a thin person now, so I’ll have the pudding, and the extra three glasses of wine. Very quickly it’s open season and after a dangerously deluding delay – fat lag – this leads to weight gain.

  The day I go out a notch on my belt is the beginning of the end. I’m a fat bastard again, I might as well just stuff myself. So the next thing you know, it’s another belt notch, or if it’s really bad, a new belt, and the hardest thing is to switch from that mode back into Madonna head. This is the bit I’ve had a revelation about.

  What I have just understood is that when I’m in Pig Face mode, I don’t really like myself very much. My self-esteem tanks – and here’s the thing – and somewhere deep down inside I don’t think I deserve the joy of being slim me.

  So it’s not as simple as having no willpower – I’ve got it in spades – but when I’m in the Hate Myself swamp I don’t allow myself to use it. I’m a bad fat person and I don’t deserve to be happy. So overeating is not so much a comforting indulgence, but a subtle form of self-harm.

  Does that make any sense? It’s a powerful self-destruct mechanism and I’ve only just understood it in myself. Then in the synchronistic way of these things, I turn on the TV last night and there’s a programme about teen obesity and it comes to exactly the same conclusion: before you can start to lose weight you need to build up your self-esteem until you believe you deserve to be the slim you.

  It’s pretty twisted, but I really think this is the nub of it. So, armed with this new understanding, what are the practical steps you can take? Well, crash diets are hopeless, but a healthy eating programme that has a strict two-week starter plan really works.

  I did one where you ate exactly what it said on the leaflet for the first fortnight, then after that you could design your own menus on a much looser framework. I lost 1.5 kilos in the crucial first two weeks, which gave me the self-esteem boost to carry on freestyle.

  The teens in the TV show were given special slots in their local gym and pool exclusively for their age group and BMI range, so no-one felt like the fat kid – everyone was big.

  They all loved it, they all lost fat – and they all lost their phobia of the gym, a common self-defeating trait in overweight people. Above all, they gained self-esteem, which helped them to continue losing weight.

  So that’s my flash of insight. And now I’m off to see my friend the treadmill.

  Shopping Lies

  ‘But Jimmy Choos are so comfortable …’ Thus did a friend recently justify to me – or rather, to herself – yet another purchase of eye-wateringly overpriced high-heeled shoes.

  What she was really saying was: they are so outrageously expensive they simply must be better made and therefore somehow more comfortable than the average bound-foot stiletto shoe. A notion she manages to convince herself of to the mind-over-matter point where she really does find them more bearable to stagger about in. It’s a mental state similar to fire walking.

  I know that was her subconscious thought process because I have done exactly the same thing myself many times with regard to Manolo Blahnik shoes.

  I can hear myself now, bleating on: ‘Oh no, Manolos are much more comfortable than any other high heel, because of the way they’re balanced. He sculpts each heel himself, you know. And he test-drives them around the factory on his own two feet before they are allowed to go into production …’

  The last two facts – the sculpting and test driving – are true. Manolo told me that himself when I interviewed him once. And he is, may I add, quite one of the funniest, most charming, elegant and loveable people I have ever met. Which is another reason to convince myself that his towering heels are more bearable than average.

  Deep down inside, though, I know I have suffered just as much at the end of a long night on a marble floor in his shoes as I have in those designed by less charismatic people. It just felt more worth it.

  All of which has got me thinking about all the other Great Fashion Lies I have told over the years – some to others, but mostly to myself.

  Here is a selection:

  ‘This old thing? I’ve had it for ages.’

  ‘It was half-price in the sale.’

  ‘I got it in an op shop.’

  ‘No, really, you look lovely.’

  ‘They will fit perfectly when I just lose these last three kilos.’

  ‘They only feel tight because my feet are hot.’

  ‘No, it’s great. Very gamine. You look like Jean Seberg in Breathless.’

  ‘Really? I never even knew you had colour done.’

  ‘I can always have them stretched.’

  ‘Noooo, you’re never forty-six! I thought you were thirty-nine, max.’

  ‘It’s an investment. I’ll make it back on cost per wears.’

  ‘No, of course you’re not too old for mini-skirts.’

  ‘They’re so cheap I would be mad not to buy them.’

  ‘Purple shoes! Just what I need to brighten up all my black.’

  ‘$45? That’s amazing. I thought it was real Prada.’

  ‘You don’t look like you’ve put any weight on.’

  ‘I don’t look like I’ve put any weight on.’

  ‘It’s not quite what I wanted, but I’m sure it will be all right.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be OK if I hand-wash it.’

  ‘I’d never have guessed it was vinyl if you hadn’t told me.’

  ‘It’s not that tight.’

  ‘I didn’t even notice y
ou hadn’t had them waxed.’

  ‘What moustache?’

  ‘Seventy per cent off?! Bargain!’

  ‘Oh, thank you, I love it.’

  ‘No, of course I’m not offended you bought me a “large”.’

  ‘If it shows the dirt too much I can always dye it.’

  ‘You made it yourself? That’s amazing.’

  ‘I’ll be a size ten by then.’

  Going Girly

  I’ve been so lucky in vintage boutiques, consignment stores and junk shops recently, I went and bought myself a lottery ticket. My best find (although the Armani Jeans navy linen pea coat for $150 was a thriller) was something I have wanted for thirty years: a dressing table.

  It’s the real thing, strongly resembling the plastic Barbie dressing table I had when I was eight. Cream and old gold in the Frenchie-frou-frou style, with three adjustable oval mirrors – bevelled – so you can see your shampoo and set from every angle. With five drawers, so room for all make-up and other girly accoutrements to be neatly filed, as only someone with four planets in Virgo could desire.

  The paint is quite badly chipped along the front and it was never a ‘good’ piece of furniture. Really it’s what you might call gimcrack repro. I imagine it was bought from a cheap high-street furniture store in about 1962. Do I care? I do not. I’m in furniture love.

  I’ve had great fun lining the drawers with pink-and-white polka-dot wrapping paper and arranging my prettiest scent bottles on it, with a Limoges saucer I keep my earrings on at night, and my make-up brushes in a silver pot. A necklace is artlessly draped over one of the side mirrors. All it needs is a tub of talcum powder with a swansdown puff and maybe some silver-backed hairbrushes.

  I still can’t quite believe I have it and keep going upstairs to look again and marvel. But can it really be as fabulous as I think it is? Well, every woman I’ve shown it to so far feels exactly as I do. There’s a sort of melting sigh … how gorgeous. And I think I know why this is.