Then there is VNL to consider. This stands for Visible Nipple Line. It’s something to do with physics – the refraction of light? fractions? – but every topographical detail of the aureole stands out in perfect bas-relief through a white bra and top. I have tried on exactly the same bra and exactly the same top in black. Mosque modest. I don’t get it and I don’t like it.
And don’t even start me on what colour shoes and handbag I am supposed to wear with a mushroom and mauve dress. I have just been going the usual black but it does rather detract from the summery look I am trying to achieve.
I’m beginning to think there were a lot of good reasons I used to wear head-to-toe black every day, and I hereby declare: Black Is The New Black.
For the love of sewing
You know how food is love? I think sewing is love too. To make something for someone, with your own hands, whether it is a cake or a cape, is to spend all the time it takes to make it thinking about them.
When I was a kid most of my clothes were made for me by my mother, who actually hates sewing, so I knew it was a labour of love for her, or sometimes by my very giving big sister, who would make glorious things for me just because she felt like it.
Once she made me a pair of mauve and white gingham hot pants in two hours, so I could wear them to my first disco. She measured me in the school playground with her ruler and by 6.30 pm they were ready to go out dancing. She totally understood that in 1972 I could not go to that disco unless I was wearing hotpants.
Another day I came home and found her surrounded by skeins of glorious red and white mohair, with something wonderfully fluffy and stripey emerging from oversized wooden knitting needles. Who is that for? I asked. You, was the reply.
But the things that were most special to me were made by my gifted grandmother, who was a kind of House of Eliott dressmaker in London in the 1920s, making clothes for ladies in high society. She was seriously good at sewing. She did some of the fine embroidery on the Queen Mother’s wedding dress.
My mother still remembers going with her to the House of Lords as a very small girl, when granny had fittings with Mrs Keppel, great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles. The butler would bring her a glass of milk and a piece of fruit cake and she would sit very quietly on a stool watching the dress come to life beneath my grandmother’s fingers.
On one occasion there was great debate about where a beaded panel should sit on a draped crepe evening gown. At waist level, or just below? Or perhaps just beneath the bust? My mother, age three, watched as it was pinned, unpinned, moved and pinned again, before piping up from her corner, ‘On the side.’
Both women turned to look at her, looked back at each other and then tried it on the right hip. It was perfect. Peggy says she can still remember the look Mrs Keppel gave her.
Many years later when I stood fidgeting on a chair as Granny pinned a hem on something for me, I didn’t realise quite what skilfull hands I was in, but I did know Granny could make anything.
I knew that she could take three patterns out of the big sewing cupboard and turn them into one unique garment. A collar from one, a lapel from another, pockets from the third. I also knew that she could sew perfect buttonholes by hand and that she could take a piece of fabric that was slightly too small for the job and make the pattern fit on it. And she always had the nap going the right way.
But what I especially loved about Granny making things for me was that she always involved me in the process of choosing the pattern and the fabric and the trimmings, so that when it was finished the garment was really mine. I would spend hours on the floor with the button box choosing the buttons while she cut and pinned and tacked and hemmed.
One outfit I particularly remember was a tailored culottes dress she made me when I was about seven. I chose a dark purple wool crepe and Granny suggested it would look nice with a contrasting braid to edge it. What colour would I like? I knew straight away it had to be green and saw Granny smiling to herself as she said she thought that was a very good idea.
It wasn’t until years later that it struck me why. Long after all those trips to Westminster with her tape measure and pins, she still remembered the suffragette colours very fondly.
Trainers stink
Trainers aren’t comfortable. They’re not. I’ve just fooled myself into buying a new pair and they’re not comfortable. They are the right size, but somehow it seems to take more effort to lift my feet in them than it does in ordinary shoes. I feel like I’m wearing seven league boots but I’m going nowhere fast.
And talk about hot foot. It feels like I’ve been dipped into the La Brea tar pits and I’ve only had them on for two hours. And it’s winter. I think there might be little elves stoking boilers in the soles. Talk about big foot. I’m tiny in the trotter department and these things are so big they look like I’ve forgotten to take them out of the box.
No wonder they call them cross trainers. I’m really bloody cross that I bought them.
And another thing. They are absolutely bloody hideous. They look like someone was fooling around with a bit of old rubber in a jaffle iron in their garage and made the resulting mess into a pair of shoes as a joke. Hang on – isn’t that how Nikes were actually invented?
It wasn’t a cheap joke either. These heavy, hot, hideous hoof covers cost me $129. What was I thinking of?
I was thinking of fashion, as usual. Because really really ugly trainers, the ones we all stopped wearing when tasteful Vans came into fashion a few years back, are all the go in London and New York right now.
I first noticed it as a trend when English friends, who are so fashionable they meet themselves coming back, turned up at my place wearing these dayglo split-level high-rise expresso bongo trainers on their feet. They were so ugly they glowed. Gee whiz, I thought, if Andrew and Vanessa are wearing them they must be groovy. They live in Notting Hill. Vanessa was wearing them with a skirt.
But the real obsession set in last October when I was in Paris and I met this woman of about fifty who was wearing them. She wasn’t a bag lady trudging around in something she’d found in a rubbish tin, she was a fashion person (which is another kind of bag lady – hers was Prada, as a matter of fact). She looked so great, I vowed to copy her outfit immediately.
She was wearing a pair of pinstripe pants in a lightweight fabric, which I could see from twenty paces were from agnès b., a tunic-shaped stomach-covering chenille sweater with a stand-up neck and trainers which resembled the Pompidou Centre. She looked fantastic. And what really appealed to me was that she also looked comfortable.
Comfort and fashion so rarely go hand in foot, that I am always ready to embrace an opportunity to look like a woman and walk like a man when it comes along. Even if it means wearing trainers that resemble prototypes for the latest Mazda.
I already had the pants, tick that box; I managed to find the perfect chenille sweater after a three-month search and then today I bought the trainers. They don’t make me feel like a chic Parisienne, they make me feel like a troll.
I’m going to customise them, blacking out all the brand tags with a texta and then I’ll try various species of sock, perhaps some inserts and heel lifts. Then, if they’re still really uncomfortable, I suppose I can always wear them to the gym.
Stay young and hideous if you want to be loved
I love the fact that I hate what the Young are wearing. I’ve been hanging out at a bar frequented by hordes of eighteen-year-old backpackers recently (as you do) and I can’t get over how hideous they look. As I heard myself remarking to another old person, ‘Don’t you remember when we were young, how beautiful all our friends were? Look at this lot. They look like they need a good wash.’
At the time I was serious. I could see how attractive all the girls would be if they just had a nice bob haircut and did their nails and wore some fitted clothes instead of army surplus trousers nine sizes too big, acrylic jumpers and ski hats. And toe rings with dirty toenails. Shudder. Haven’t they heard of Revlon?
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But later when I was watching the new Run-DMC video and marvelling at how awful all the beautiful young folk looked breakdancing in their baggy clothes and bobble hats I realised that was the whole point. If I didn’t hate what people younger than me were wearing they wouldn’t be doing their job right.
I first felt a flicker of the generation gap when that piercing thing was big. I thought it was disgusting. But I was thrilled to be Horrified of Hunters Hill, at last, because I was beginning to think there was nothing the Youth of Today could do to disgust an old punk rocker like me.
We were pretty vile in our day. My boyfriend pierced his nose with a darning needle in 1979. The difference between having a pierced nose then and now is that he had to take it out because it got us barred from every pub in Dundee. He practically got arrested. And in my King’s Road days I had a friend who gloried in the name of Tampax, because she always had one hanging from a hole in her ear. (Unused; we weren’t that disgusting.)
For a long time the generation younger than me didn’t seem able to find their ugly feet. It was like they knew they had missed out on punk and couldn’t top it. The post-punk gang were like the early 70s crew who didn’t know what to do after the glory of the hippy thing. Until someone invented D-I-S-C-O and it all got interesting again.
Funnily enough, the first stuff I couldn’t understand because I was too old was dance music also. It still thrills me how much I hate techno. I really don’t get all that hero DJ stuff either. I thought they were people you hired to play records, now they seem to be stars in their own right. And why won’t any of them play ‘Car Wash’?
I knew Nirvana couldn’t really be any good because I loved their music the first time I heard it. The Prodigy must be good though, because I absolutely hate them. Not with the total contempt I feel for the Spice Twits and anyone who buys their records, but with an awful fear that they represent the end of the world as I know it. I would hate one of my nieces to bring that awful Keith home.
The values expressed in the Prodigy’s lyrics (‘Smack My Bitch Up’? Charmed I’m sure, care for a lamington, Keith dear?) appal me the way the Sex Pistols appalled my parents, so they must be okay. I absolutely detest what Keith wears, I hate his stupid pointy hair and his yukky tongue. I don’t think he’s doing anything new and at least Sid Vicious was beautiful. Well, I thought he was. I thought he looked like a wasted poet in plastic trousers. My father thought he looked like a good candidate for target practice.
But then my ageing memory plays funny tricks. In my reveries, all my young cronies looked like people in a Ralph Lauren ad, or extras from Brideshead Revisited. Well, some of the time we did look like that. Most of the time we looked like rejects from a Run-DMC video.
Quality blondes
How many blondes does it take to change a light bulb?
How do you expect me to know? I’m a blonde.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Although we all get branded with the same ignorant prejudices (see above), there is actually more than one kind of blonde. There is Pamela Anderson and her tarty tribe, there are brunettes in blonde bodies like me, and then there is another kind of blonde. More of your Diana Windsor than your Barbara Windsor.
She’s the Quality Blonde, the kind of girl who makes a pair of jeans, flat J.P. Tod’s shoes and a man’s shirt look ineffably chic. She can sling a little knit around her shoulders without looking contrived. She can wear the tiniest slip dress with high heels without looking cheap. She always has a good watch and a good bag.
She usually has a rich boyfriend too. Not because she’s a gold-digger – the QB usually has plenty of dough of her own – but because, like a Patek Philippe or a Maserati, a genuine QB is a luxury item, as rare as a champion racehorse and usually with as clear a picture of her bloodline.
It’s incredibly annoying, but QBs just seem to come from the deep end of the gene pool. For centuries the richest blokes have married the prettiest gels and the result is an unbroken line of Quality Blondes traceable back to 1066. Many of the daughters of the great English houses have this look (that’s the ones who aren’t walking around in bobble hats and combat trousers …). Girls like Lady Helen Windsor and Lord Mountbatten’s grand daughter India Hicks. They’re blonde, they’re rich, they make you sick.
But with Diana gone, the American Miller sisters, whose megabucks father owns the DFS duty-free shops around the world, are the reigning Quality Blondes of this era. Their blonde hair is always perfectly straight. The only thing straighter than their hair is their teeth. The only thing whiter than their teeth is their pearls. They all married princes, except the one who had to make do with a Getty, poor little love.
The other Queen QB du jour is Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, who married the closest thing America will ever have to Prince William. But before them all, there was Grace Kelly, the all-time Quality Blonde, another American who married a prince. In fact all Hitchcock’s heroines were QBs. They were cool, but hell were they sexy. The QB has a chilly allure like diamonds and champagne, things they wear well and drink copiously. QBs never get pissed and throw up in the roses. They have good deportment.
Like I said, everything about Quality Blondes is annoying. You’ll find them at polo matches and at grands prix, looking perfect in smart casual. Nobody does smart casual like a QB. That’s why Ralph Lauren married one. In fact QBs find it easy to dress well in any style, because they are always very slim and have tiny ankles. They have trouble finding shoes narrow enough. They have skin which goes golden without burning and they never seem to need a leg wax. They have small pert breasts which are perfect for jumping on and off yachts in bikinis, but from which they can somehow produce a cleavage when they need one. Drives you mad. I think Quality Blondes are what made Christina Onassis’s life so miserable.
Although you will find plenty of them at places where she used to hang out like St Moritz and Gstaad, QBs are not to be confused with their cousin the Chalet Girl Blonde, who is altogether a more robust and sturdy species, although both types wear chains on the same wrist as their Cartier watches. Camilla Parker Bowles is more your CGB. Her clothes never look quite right. Poor old Kanga was a CGB too, although Australia (particularly Adelaide) does produce its fair share of top QBs, always out in force at Flemington on Derby Day. QBs are very big on racing. They look marvellous in hats and know instinctively how to walk so their heels don’t sink into the turf.
Somebody once described me in print as a ‘refrigerator blonde’, which I secretly hoped meant the writer saw me as an ice maiden QB, although I never asked for fear he was thinking more of the American football quarterback nicknamed The Refrigerator, who wasn’t blond at all. But actually I’m not sure I really want to be a QB. Like I said, they are so annoying, other women can’t stand to be near them.
Oh, who do I think I’m kidding? Pass the peroxide, Pamela.
The cardigans
Good morning, Doctor, I know we’ve discussed it before, but I’m afraid I have more issues around packing. I know I’ve also brought up my problem with smart casual several times, but that’s getting worse too. It gets really serious when the two are combined – as in Packing for a Weekend in the Country with Chic Friends.
I try to stay calm and remember that breathing technique you showed me, but really, what are you supposed to throw into your stylish little grip when you are going to one of those Vogue Entertaining houses where you know the salads will be better dressed than you?
Last weekend, as well as two pairs of boots, two pairs of suede shoes and one pair of sandals, I ended up taking five cardigans with me. I know this is not normal. I’m really worried that my cardigan fetish is getting out of hand, but they make me secure in a way no other garment can. Cotton, cashmere, silk jersey, short-sleeved, ribbed, hip-length with pockets; more like a T-shirt, more like a jacket, it makes no difference. I love them all.
When did I start to have these feelings? Well, the first garment I can remember deeply coveting on someone else was a pink angora b
olero worn by the girl in front of me at my Year One Christmas carol singsong. I spent the whole of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ picking bits of fluff off it, until she noticed and told on me.
Actually, it started even earlier than that. My version of Linus’s comfort blanket was a pea-green Granny-knitted V-necked cardigan. I took it everywhere. Why? To sniff, of course Doctor, what do you think I did with it? Wore it? You must be joking; even at three I knew that was an unbecoming colour. It wasn’t a garment, it was my Sniffer.
My Sniffer was essential to the well-being of the whole family, and when I accidentally left it on a Spanish beach, my parents practically called in the SAS to help with the search. It was never found, but I soon replaced it with another home-knitted cardigan (speckled fawn, shawl collar, zip front) which I didn’t lose. In fact, it went with me to university.
I never wore that one either. It was hideous. But mmmmmm, it smelled delicious.
I don’t sniff my cardigans any more, but I do wear one most days to work. I usually have one to hand after six too, to sling round the shoulders of a little black dress. A cardigan and jeans is the only smart casual solution I’ve ever really been happy with. One of my favourite evening combos is a black cashmere cardie unbuttoned to reveal a hint of lace, with long skirt in a rich fabric.
And my neverfail gambit for those Martha Stewart country winter weekend fireside dinners is a navy-blue, long-line, man’s cashmere cardigan, just sliding over a long jersey skirt, or pants. A red cashmere sock in a Gucci loafer and Nancy Cunard bangles complete the look.
Actually, that’s not just any cardigan, Doctor. I inherited my navy cashmere cardigan, along with an identical one in grey, from my father when he died. He was a cardigan man of great distinction. Always cashmere and sometimes buttoned over a John Smedley cotton polo-neck, for a bit of a Roger Moore golf moment, but also to great effect after work, over a Brooks Brothers striped shirt and an Italian knitted silk tie.
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