Like all things sartorial, it’s not just about money. A reasonably priced handbag that is properly looked after can do more for you than the latest Gucci classic, scratched and overfilled. One well-maintained designer bag for a lifetime is better than a faddish parade of the latest styles. Especially if it is a Kelly bag from Hermès.
These handmade handheld bags with the distinctive brass padlock closure (the tiny key hangs off the handle in a little leather slip cover, couldn’t you just die?), as designed for Princess Grace of Monaco when she was still just Miss Grace Kelly, are the ultimate statement of handbag self-esteem. They are in such demand worldwide, you have to go on a waiting list for a black one. They cost upwards of $6500 each.
Yes, it’s a ridiculous amount of money, but not all the women buying these bags are millionairesses. It is a rite of passage for young middle-class Parisiennes to save up for one, and to see a woman in her fifties carrying a Kelly she has had since she was twenty, and which she paid for herself, is to see someone who knows exactly where she is in the world.
Which is why I reckon we need to take that formula for buying engagement rings – which says that the man should spend the equivalent of three months’ salary on it – and apply it to handbags. Perhaps something like four times the price of the last pair of shoes you bought. Or five times as much as you ever thought you could spend on a handbag.
Help me out here, guys, I need to find some serious justification for the fact that I spent $800 on one last week.
A small (but perfectly formed) history of bosoms
I’m so glad I wasn’t young in the 1950s. Well, I would have liked some of the shoes and the little bags and cocktail hats, but I would have looked awful in the clothes. All those cinched waists and pointy bosoms are so not me. I found one of those circle-stitched bras in a market once and bought it for fun. When I tried it on I couldn’t figure out where my breasts were meant to go in the nose cones.
I would have been a hopeless flapper as well. The dancing looks like a heap of fun, but I would have had to have worn one of those breast flatteners, which is a pretty depressing thought. Now, 1940s gear I do like. My mum looked great in her uniform and we’re exactly the same shape, but world war is a high price to pay for flattering tailoring.
I’ve always considered crinolines an insult to womankind, but late-Edwardian gear I think really is my favourite. All those divine white voile dresses for floating around eating strawberry tarts. And the hats! Heaven. I’ve got all the equipment for a monobosom too, so I would have been laughing. Plus I could have been a suffragette and done something worthwhile with my life.
The early 60s would have been moi. I’ve always wanted a twist dress and I am loving all those kinky boots and minis and the marvellous hairdos, but it was all over so fast, the Nancy Sinatra era. And while I adored the late 60s and early 70s on other people, I know I was just never coltish enough to carry it off.
It was illegal to have a bust in the early 70s. That is why I so envy the young gels of today who wear their bra straps as part of their look with singlets. When I was fifteen, a visible bra strap was social death. You were meant to have two pert mosquito bites which didn’t need any harnessing. More than a mouthful was a waste apparently. Well, for those of us with a couple of platefuls that was hard to take. It was so bad I once resorted to a stick-on bra. Taking it off was like having your breasts waxed, but to have that no-bra effect without that braless look, I thought it was worth it.
That’s the way it is with bosoms. At any time half the female population is either flattening them or padding them in the name of fashion. Which is why some of the mosquito-bite clan started having foreign objects inserted in their bodies, to create just-add-water cleavages, while bouncing platefuls are having their breasts half sawn off to look more sportif. I don’t think either of these options is a good idea, I really don’t.
Okay, fine, if a Band-Aid is an adequate bra for you, or you can’t reach the supermarket trolley for the blighters, I can see that you might be tempted to take drastic action. But if they’re just a little bigger, or a little smaller, than you and Mr Armani would like, please learn to love them anyway.
All bosoms are marvellous. They’re miraculous, they feed people. And as so many women these days don’t have any choice about saying goodbye to a beloved breast, it seems cavalier to mess around with a perfectly healthy one just because it’s not this season’s model, don’t you think?
Your breasts are not accessories. They are part of you, not separate objects to be reduced or added to like a plasticine model. Even if fashion designers and Picture magazine do seem to see them that way.
In the 1970s I hated my breasts. In the 1980s I flaunted them. And now we just live quietly together. Me and my boozies. We’re old mates and I wouldn’t have them any other way. And I don’t give a flying Wonderbra whether they’re in fashion or not.
Anarchy in the UK
People often trivialise fashion as a silly subject not worthy of serious attention, but believe me, fashion can be very serious indeed. I have been taken into police custody and charged for making a fashion statement.
It was the summer of 1977. Me and my best friend Paula had left our squat and proceeded down Clapham High Street in a southerly direction to our favourite greasy spoon.
Heaped plates of chips, beans and fried eggs had just been put in front of us when two rozzers and a policewoman burst into Nick’s Caff and said, ‘You two, out.’ I looked around for the Kray twins before realising they meant us. ‘But we haven’t eaten our breakfasts and we’ve paid for them …’ didn’t wash with what I now realise was the Fashion Police.
They bundled us into a waiting panda car and took us to the station. ‘What are we supposed to have done?’ I asked, wondering whether the entire squat was being busted because a lot of the people living in it happened to be from Northern Ireland.
Maybe it was the Anti-Nazi League marches we’d been on, those small incidents involving asking for child’s fares on buses, or the enormous amount of amphetamines consumed by some of our friends.
It turned out to be our T-shirts.
‘We’ve had complaints,’ said WPC Poeface, ‘about the offensive nature of your attire.’
The garments in question featured a print by an artist I now know as Tom of Finland, depicting two magnificently endowed cowboys who had accidentally forgotten to wear their trousers and underpants. Underneath the drawing was the scandalous dialogue, ‘Been out much?’ ‘No, it’s been pretty quiet.’
We’d bought them at Seditionaries, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s boutique in the King’s Road, where we bought all the clothes we didn’t make ourselves. We’d starved ourselves to have them. We’d actually begged money off tourists at Sloane Square station to buy them.
They were the dernier cri, especially teamed with our bondage trousers, monkey boots, leather jackets and studded belts. The news hadn’t quite reached the quiet folk of Clapham.
So we were charged with offensive behaviour, had our T-shirts confiscated and were booked into Lavender Hill Magistrates Court. ‘I’ll look forward to seeing you then, girls,’ sneered PC Sleazy. ‘You’ll be in nice dresses with your hair all combed. I know you middle-class girls.’
Needless to say, when I stood in the dock a couple of weeks later, my hair had never been spikier, my lips had never been blacker and I’d put extra studs in my leathers.
I guess we were lucky with the magistrate. He listened patiently to my defence that what was on our T-shirts was art. Would we have been arrested for wearing shirts printed with a picture of Michelangelo’s David, I asked him. You can see far more offensive things on the top shelf of any paper shop, I told him, and they are photographs, not drawings. He seemed to agree, sentencing us to just six months’ good behaviour bond. He even let us have our shirts back as long as we promised not to wear them.
I’ve still got my Tom of Finland Cowboys T-shirt and you know what? It’s worth a fortune. Clothes from Seditiona
ries – the early work of one of Britain’s most creative designers, the epitome of punk rock style – are now regarded as cultural icons. In short, my T-shirt is recognised as a work of art. I could sell it at Sotheby’s.
Well, God Save the Queen. Although, come to think of it, it’s probably a good job I wasn’t wearing that Seditionaries T-shirt, the one with a safety pin through her conk. We could have ended up in the Tower.
As good as it gets
Is it just me, or do other people sometimes refuse at the final fence of fabulousness too? I don’t know what goes on in my head, but from time to time I put together a look that is so right, so buff, I just can’t leave the house in it. Someone might see me.
Take my new party dress. It is such a sassy little thing. Completely sheer, bias-cut, hand-printed red silk georgette. Hot diggity dog, this dress has an M rating. It positively sulks if you don’t take it out dancing on a Saturday night and then it refuses to go back on the hanger before dawn.
Then there are my new shoes (the ones I bought when I was looking for something sensible for work). Leopardskin stiletto sandals. And that’s furry leopardskin, mind you. They are the Eartha Kitt of footwear. So sexy they growl.
You can imagine how they get on together, shoesies and dressy. They adore each other. Every time I close my boudoir door I’m convinced they’re having a secret dance party in there. They probably sneak out while I’m at work and lie around on the sofa drinking Campari and listening to Peggy Lee. If I came home one day and found an ashtray full of lipstick-tipped cigarette butts I wouldn’t be remotely surprised. In fact I’m sure I heard a stifled giggle as I put my key in the door the other night and caught a whiff of Mitsouko in the hall.
That dress and those shoes are made for each other, it’s plain. But can I get of the house wearing them together? Can I heck. I’m too shy. The whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts I just don’t feel up to it. My clothes are better looking than I am.
I’ve worn the shoes with a very plain black pants-suit and then felt sad that no-one could see how marvellous they are. I wanted people to cross Oxford Street just to be introduced to them. And I’ve worn the dress with plain black shoes which really weren’t up to the gig, and I could tell by the end of the evening they weren’t talking to each other. Red dress was hissing, How could you let me be seen in public with these frumpy old things? While black sandals were mumbling, After all we’ve done for you, all those long plane journeys when we let you put us back on at the other end without a struggle, all those endless shopping days when we slid on and off without protest and didn’t pinch you once, all those business meetings where our open toes allowed you to feel a bit frisky on the sly and how do you thank us? Make us go out with a trollop of a dress …
I’ll get them together one day, I promise. I am working on it. I’ve been practising at home. You know: standing up, sitting down, walking, just being normal in an outfit so fierce it gets invited to parties without me. I’m in training for a forthcoming trip to Melbourne when I’m hoping the freedom of being interstate will give me the confidence to go out looking as good as I possibly can.
If you promise not to look.
Clothes zones
You know how the world has time zones? Cities have clothes zones. In Sydney this becomes harshly apparent at the point where the Darling Harbour bridge vomits packs of tourists into Market Street at the junction with Sussex Street – in other words, haute CBD.
Suddenly, from being in tourist la-la land, where members of the male species feel they can wander freely without shirts and young women mill around in obscenely short shorts, they are in serious City territory. This is a work zone where men wear jackets and ties on the hottest days and women attempt to dress for success whatever the weather.
In this context, tourists in their dress-for-excess outfits, which are fine for watching waterski displays and eating fatty snacks, look grotesque. They have passed through too many clothes zones without a change. They have clothes lag.
It can happen to locals too. I’ve had clothes lag in Sydney between a swim at Bondi and a coffee in Victoria Street; and in Melbourne, going straight from a chic inner-city lunch at Il Bacaro to a Brunswick Street fact-finding mission.
But the first time I remember experiencing serious clothes lag was one hot, stinky summer in New York City. I was staying in the funky downtown East Village and Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ was the song floating out of every doorway, which should fix the era for you.
Remember how she used to dress? That was normal in the East Village that summer. If it was falling apart, didn’t go together and didn’t suit you, it was perfect. Especially if it was made from egg yolk yellow cotton jersey. In fact, Madonna’s character from Desperately Seeking Susan (er, Susan?) would have looked nattily overdressed hanging out on the block where I was staying.
So I spent a morning tooling around 8th Street and 2nd Avenue looking at second-hand books and clothes, buying candles in a groovy spooky witch shop and gnawing on an organic tofu donut with a wheatgrass juice on the side. I was wearing old army shorts, a 1950s bowling shirt, foul sneakers and artfully ‘uncombed’ (it took hours), tousled hair. Look, at least I wasn’t wearing a bit of plaited T-shirt around my head.
Then I remembered I wanted something from Macy’s discreet wear department (that’s what they call undies), so I jumped the subway a few stops uptown.
Nothing seemed out of place at Herald Square, where there were enough weirdos and desperadoes around for me not to realise I had crossed two crucial clothes zones. It wasn’t until the assistant at the knicker counter gave me a very hard look when I handed her my credit card that I realised she probably thought I’d stolen it.
For on that subway ride I had unwittingly gone from East Village grunge, right through Chelsea’s chic downtown zone, to the Midtown business zone, where secretaries are forced to wear American Tan 20-denier pantyhose on the sweatiest days of summer. Shorts and old sneakers just didn’t fit. In a distance you could walk, I had gone from hep-cat local to low-life alien.
I’ve experienced it the other way too, catching a cab from a meeting at the Estée Lauder company’s office overlooking Central Park straight downtown and realising when I got there that my pale yellow Giorgio Armani jacket might as well have had ‘Mug Me’ stencilled on the back. No wonder they all ride around Manhattan in stretch limos. They need somewhere to change.
Basic black
I’ve got a new dress. It’s not black!!! It’s not even navy blue, which is just black with a suntan. My new dress is some kind of a light brown colour I don’t even have a name for (okay, mushroom) and it’s not plain either, my new dress. It’s got a really pretty pattern on it, like swirling mauve gum leaves. And another thing it’s not is jersey. So it’s not black, it’s not plain, it’s not jersey and it doesn’t have a collar. Those are all the things it isn’t. What it is, is a miracle.
It’s a miracle that I ever tried it on, a miracle that I even noticed it, because everything I buy is black jersey and when I enter a shop my eye automatically filters out all other figurations. But something about this flippy little dress just leaped out and said, Why not take me into the changing room and see what happens?
So I did and discovered that silky fabric cut on the bias is very flattering to a girl and that a round neck is a possibility as long as the garment goes in slightly at the waist. And I also discovered that wearing colours other than black makes you feel differently about yourself. It’s high summer, the light is bright and beautiful and I realise I am sick of walking around looking like a Sicilian widow.
So now I am making a huge effort not to wear black all the time. In the effort to shift from film noir to techni-colour I have now also bought a heavenly cream chiffon bias-cut skirt embroidered with pale lilac flowers and a silvery grey silk jersey V-neck top. They are gorgeous things and I have been caught standing by the hangers stroking them because it is so long since I have owned anything so, well, pretty.
/> They make me feel rather super when I wear them, too. You feel sort of light and flirty, and – whether it matters to you or not – I think colours other than black make heterosexual men look upon you more warmly. It may be because your flowery frock and pink cardigan remind them of their grannies, but they get a smiley look in their eyes, rather than the usual ‘Is this warrior woman going to hunt me down and Bobbit me?’ expression that all-black ensembles inspire.
I am on day five. There was a mishap yesterday because it rained and I had to wear rain shoes. Dark brown acid-jazz trainers don’t look good with a flowery dress (unless you are twenty and live in Fitzroy or Newtown), so I did accidentally revert to an all-black pant and jersey shirt ensemble, but I’m back on the programme today.
But the problem is that, unless I do the dress option, I’m finding it really hard to keep both ends burning. The silver top doesn’t really go with anything I own apart from black trousers and skirts, but I reckon as long as I keep light colours near my face, it’s not cheating. However, the only thing I own that really goes with the cream chiffon skirt is a cream cardigan, and when I put that on this morning it had strange brown stains on it, so it had to be a black cardie. I’m so hot.
I did try working the silver top back with the cream (as we say in fashion hep-talk), but there was an incident with noodle soup at BBQ King earlier in the week and it is amazing how small splashes of chicken broth show up on pale grey silk jersey. And now the cream skirt has biro on it from when I was addressing thankyou letters in a cab and we stopped suddenly.
I couldn’t help thinking that neither soup nor ink would have shown on a black top, or a black skirt.
Also there is the underwear issue. The cream chiffon skirt is completely, illegally, sheer, so I am now the proud owner of a 100 per cent nylon, flesh-coloured half-slip which is as glamorous as a plaster cast. And about as comfortable in hot weather.
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