Come to think of it, perhaps it isn’t surprising that I associate cardigans with security, Doctor. You were right all along. They allow me to re-express childhood neediness and unresolved father issues.
And I thought it was because they were handy for keeping the draughts off.
Higher purchases
In just under two years Sydney will host the 2000 Olympics. Well, that will be lovely, I’m sure, especially if you fancy a T-shirt with an echidna on it. A much more significant event, as far as I am concerned, will be my Serious Shopping Silver Jubilee.
In July 2000 it will be twenty-five years since I first purchased a fashion garment solo. I’m going to print up some T-shirts asking ‘Do you do refunds?’ to celebrate the sunny day in 1975 when I walked into Miss Selfridge in Birmingham, England, and bought an item of clothing which I had chosen and saved up for all on my own. No parental presence or approval necessary.
We’ll gloss over the fact that it was a short-sleeved, wide-legged denim jumpsuit. The point is that it was the first garment I owned entirely as a result of my own decision-making. I have been making bad decisions of this kind ever since.
But after a quarter of a century studying the science of retail therapy I have discovered that among the fake fur, the leg warmers and the fluoros, there are certain items that I will never regret buying.
Here I am happy to share with you my assiduously researched, elite group of perfect garments, shoes and accessories which never fail and, with any luck, will never change.
1. Bonds T-shirts
How do they get that cling without Lycra? The short raglan sleeves show off gym-plumped biceps to perfection. They look great under a business suit too.
Buy them: By the brace from all good gentlemen’s outfitters.
2. The agnès b. V-neck cardigan with faggoting
I’ve never met a woman who owns just one of these. In fact, I recently met one who owns seventeen … Many have imitated, none have matched them. Flattering, comfortable and in different colours (especially black) every season, they are the essence of Paris in soft knitted cotton.
Buy them: Paris, London, New York, Melbourne (Daimaru).
3. The original shrink-to-fit Levi’s 501s
Only these jeans are dark enough and you must sit in the bath in them to shrink them to fit, just like the advert. In truth it is completely unnecessary, but it is the L-A-W.
Buy them: America. They just aren’t the same anywhere else.
4. R.M. Williams boots
One piece of leather. A perfect boot. A miracle on your foot for the rest of your life.
Buy them: Australia.
5. Gap cotton ‘crew’ socks
Just thick enough, just thin enough, don’t garrotte your ankles, cheap, great colours. They used to be a good enough reason in themselves to go to America – now we can get them here.
Buy them: Just about anywhere, including the Rocks and Sydney Airport International Terminal.
6. Suede sandshoes by Fila, style number 4EC507
A sandshoe which doesn’t make you feel like a superannuated skateboarder. Wide enough for the more mature foot, chic enough to wear all the way from the East Village to the Upper East Side.
Buy them: I bought my black, navy and pale blue pairs at Office Shoes in London. Ask your local Fila stockist.
7. Black Saba sharkskin jackets
These are jackets you can tie around your waist at a rave and wear to work the next morning. There’s a subtly different cut and button configuration every season.
Buy them: Sydney, Melbourne, New York.
8. Gucci loafers
Not platform, not silver-snaffled, wannabe style, fake, or with socks – just the original Gucci snaffle loafer, in suede, for men and women.
Buy them: Duty free before you jet out, or Bond Street, Madison Avenue, Rodeo Drive, etc.
9. Hermès scarves
Jackie Onassis, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, that girl you’ve never forgotten in a St Germain cafe …
Buy them: As above, but so much nicer to buy at the main joint in rue Faubourg St Honoré in Paris.
10. House of Cashmere 100 per cent cashmere polo-necks
Not itchy, not too long, not too wide, not too tight, with arms the same length as yours. Not ridiculously expensive either.
Buy them: House of Cashmere, 12–14 O’Connell Street, Sydney (for other stockists, look up www.house-of-cashmere.com.au).
NB: It is quite permissible to buy all of the above in several colours. In fact, it would be rude not to.
Fancy this?
Well, the party season’s over for another year. Did you have fun? Do you miss it?
I’m a bit sad I might not be slipping into my best little black dress for a while (bias-cut, shoestring straps, embroidered with flowers, practically dances the mambo on its own), but there are two things I won’t miss: 1. Hangovers. 2. Dress themes.
I’m not talking about full-frontal Fancy Dress here, which can be the most fun in the world if everyone joins in, like the Cointreau Ball, but ‘dress themes’ for private parties which are much more vague.
When an otherwise chic invitation has a small line near RSVP saying something fey like, ‘Dress: Disco Biscuit’, or your host says, ‘I thought it might be fun if everyone came as disco biscuits …’ beware.
Because it can be mildly embarrassing if Birthday Boy has had the entire house rebuilt to resemble Studio 54 and raised Halston from the dead to design his outfit and you have just interpreted the ‘theme’ as a willingness to dance to ‘YMCA’ with arm movements, in your favourite Zimmerman frock.
But that kind of small faux pas is usually forgotten after the first chorus of ‘It’s Raining Men’. The other possibility is so much worse – and I speak from vile and terrible experience.
A ‘friend’ of mine once wound me and my (then) partner up into a frenzy of excitement with her plans to make her forthcoming birthday bash a ‘Palm Springs party’. What a hoot it would be. We discussed the decorations and theme food for hours and several bottles of wine. She’d serve bowls of Miracle Whip, baskets of Wonderloaf, Ritz crackers with cream cheese from a tube, garnished with peanuts, and play Herb Albert and his Tijuana Brass all evening.
For a week, Geoff and I agonised over possible outfits before deciding to go as a cocaine dealer and his trashy girlfriend. I wore skin-tight denims with high heels, teased hair, frosted lipstick and false nails so long he had to come into the loo with me.
Geoff greased back his hair and slipped into a grotesque Hawaiian shirt under a white suit, with some white shoes he had found in an op shop, along with one of those hideous little men’s handbags. He ran all the way home with it, he was so excited. He even grew an evil little moustache and practised sniffing, God bless him.
We were the only ones in costume. Phyllis had accidentally forgotten to mention the theme to anyone else and she was wearing an Azzedine Alaïa dress herself, I remember. Nobody talked to us all night. I felt like one of those albino crows which get pecked to death because they are feathered differently from the rest of the crowd.
But at least we had each other. My best friend Josephine was once invited to a garden gnome party. At least, she swears that is what they told her, but when she got to the barbecue in a belted yellow smock, with a pillow stuffed up it, scarlet leggings, Wellington boots, bright red cheeks, a Wee Willie Winkie hat, a white false beard and her brother’s fishing rod, complete with rubber fish, there wasn’t another garden gnome in sight. Not even a toadstool.
But being a game girl, and absolutely furious with her host (she had travelled to the venue on the London Underground), Josephine stayed resolutely in costume and character, dispensing gnomey wisdom and granting wishes with her magic fishing rod. You know what? She was the hit of the party.
The thrill of the till
Shopping for clothes has a lot in common with blood sports, mainly in that it is the chase (or, as they say in French, la chasse) rather than the kill that counts. Pos
session of the object of desire is not nearly as satisfying as the pursuit of it.
Just as huntsmen don’t actually want to eat the fox, you don’t necessarily intend to wear what you buy. You just want the fun of killing it. As Oscar Wilde might have said, shopping is the unspeakable in pursuit of the unwearable.
It’s lovely going around lots of shops fingering all the really expensive fabrics. Trying on clothes you could never buy is thrilling. Especially if the shop assistants are snooty. It’s like taking a Maserati for a test drive and then saying you won’t take it, thank you, because you don’t like the ashtrays. It’s just the pockets on that Donna Karan suit you don’t quite fancy.
A friend of mine once spent a whole afternoon trying on Chanel at Bergdorf Goodman in New York, inventing a new persona as someone about to marry a banker. John Galliano was making her wedding dress. Todd was on his way back to NYC on the Concorde.
She tried the lot on, with accessories, before sweeping off to a phantom lunch appointment having bought nothing. (She was wearing good underwear, so she knew she could get away with it.)
But fooling around aside, there is nothing like that moment when you decide, yes, that totally transparent $300 slip dress must be yours. Even though you know you will have to buy something specially to wear under it, or over it, to avoid arrest. Even though you will need new shoes, and possibly new legs, to set it off. Even though you’ll have to have it altered and dyed a different colour, have your hair cut, lose five kilos and have liposuction to get away with it – you Must Have It.
It’s not like you even went out looking for a slip dress. You were looking for saucepans. It doesn’t make a gnat of difference that you’ve got three sheer slip dresses at home already, you haven’t got this one.
The truth be told, you could probably make it right through to your seventy-fifth birthday without buying one more garment and never appear nude in public. But what you do need is to buy something, anything. Now.
It’s probably a latent genetic urge that comes from our no longer having to scavenge for berries or track mammoths to stay alive that produces the irresistible need to shop. Some people ride around on horses in pursuit of an innocent furry mammal to satisfy this drive. Most of us head for the shops.
The moment of monetary exchange is triumphant (your spear has hit its mark, the mammoth is down), you beam as they wrap your conquest in tissue paper (they strap it onto a pole), and swinging down the avenue in a stiff paper carrier bag (toting it back to the cave) is pure bliss.
But wait until you get it home. Back in the reality of the pile of bills, the truthful mirror and the other three slip dresses, you are suddenly consumed with Post-Buying Depression. Your new dress is suddenly about as appealing as a bit of dismembered fox.
So put it away with the others and don’t think about it. And next time you get the scent of blood in your nostrils, leave your credit cards at home.
Or only buy things you can eat.
The X - ray sex
Of course we grown-up girls don’t dress for men. We dress for ourselves, to express our personalities, define our identities and boost our self-esteems. That is, the ten per cent of the time we are not dressing for men.
Oh come on, we do. Why else then am I so fond of this navy jersey shirt which showcases the bosomular area (discreetly, mind), while giving the cunning suggestion of a waist and artfully concealing any unwelcome activity in the stomachorial region?
Yes, it is also comforty and machine washable, but if I were really dressing for myself I’d be wearing pyjamas. Stretch pyjamas. With a kitten print. And fossil evidence that large groups of Vegemite toasts once lived in the area.
But the joke – as well as the flattering longer-line jacket – is on us. All men have X-ray vision. Not just Superman but any man can discern the exact shape of our bodies through all our beautiful tailoring and slenderising one-colour outfits. When you nip out for milk in that oversized T-shirt and leggings, you might as well be naked. The long shirt over jeans manoeuvre? Gauze.
And just as they can see saddlebags through silk palazzo pants and spare tyres through tunic-over-stovepipe trouser combos, men can also spot insect waists and ice-cream scoop buttocks beneath mustard polyester.
Which is why some, well, plain women, with bad-hair lives and personalities as compelling as tofu are unaccountably popular with the chaps. Because underneath that made-in-India floral print viscose sack dress (the kind you and I wear on holiday, but some women wear to work), they can detect a body Sarah O’Hare wouldn’t sit next to on the beach.
I once had the desk opposite a woman so drab she was fascinating. I was obsessed with her. Her job was to type out all the readers’ letters to the editor. Her daily office look was a lot less interesting: a beige polyester A-line skirt to just below the knee (known as the Stumpy Line), a cream polyester blouse and a fawn V-neck nubbly lambs-wool jumper. This ensemble was set off with American Tan tights and cheap beige low-heel court shoes. And remember, this was a long time before Prada.
But although she was the sartorial equivalent of white noise, Ann always had a jaunty air about her (and if I’d been wearing those tights I’d have been suicidal by morning tea). The other notable thing about her (and believe me, I was noting) was that every lunchtime she disappeared for one hour and came back smiling to herself.
Eventually I found out why – Mrs Beige was the long-term mistress of the most highly paid man on the newspaper. Every day they had each other for lunch at an apartment kept entirely for that purpose. Large quantities of slinky underwear were involved, apparently, and regular gifts of the small sparkling variety.
It explained the post-prandial grin – a femme fatale in 15-deniers was harder to figure out. But figure was the word. The next time I looked at Ann I put aside my pride and prejudice about man-made fibres and realised she had more dangerous curves than a Formula One circuit and legs longer than the Channel tunnel. Attributes that had been entirely visible to Mr Moneybags at first sight.
And we’re supposed to believe it’s personality that counts.
New shoes blues
Shooooooooes, I need new shooooes. When I moved to Australia five years ago I had a vast collection. Now I realise that my assortment of footwear, built over twenty years and embracing everything from handmade man-style brogues to stiletto mules with marabou pompoms and leopardskin cowboy boots, is getting smaller.
The problem is that I am wearing shoes out and I can’t replace them. I am using up my cobbler’s capital. I hate to criticise my adopted homeland, but I am afraid it is a tough fact. It is hard to find good shoes in Australia.
There, I’ve said it and I’ve probably let myself in for a lashing of anti-Pom racism, but it’s not an opinion inspired by some kind of ‘Blighty’s better’ sentiment – I have canvassed my Australian-born friends and they feel the same way. The response was unanimous: Australia is the best country in the world (that’s why I live here), but the shoes are shithouse.
I don’t understand it. We do everything else so well. I love my weekend casuals from Witchery, my urban chic gear from Scanlan & Theodore and my best frocks from Collette Dinnigan. But where am I supposed to get the shoes to go with them?
I love and adore my all-Australian R.M. Williams boots (which inspired wonder at the shoemenders when I had them re-heeled in England last year), so I know that Australians are perfectly capable of making top toecovers, but RMs don’t really go so well with lace shifts or sundresses.
I’ve still got some evening shoes in relatively good shape from my past life, but I am literally running out of shoes to wear to work and I’ve looked everywhere from the big stores, to the chain stores, the discount dives and the designer dens. Nothing.
In Paris, Milan and even London, you can’t leave home without tripping over shoes so enticing you’d swear they could change your life. And not all in name-dropper boutiques, just in ‘ordinary’ shoe shops. We don’t seem to have ordinary shoe shops here.
There is one
chain that does affordable shoes which look great, but when you try them on they appear to have been designed by someone who has never seen the human foot. And to be honest, I don’t want to walk around in shameless copies of the latest hot shoe from Gucci or Prada, I would like a style with its own integrity. An interpretation of the new trend, not a blatant rip-off.
In both Melbourne and Sydney there are serious shoe booteeks which import the elite of the overseas labels, but I couldn’t afford those for everyday wear when I lived in Europe and they cost about one hundred per cent more here.
Price aside – and I’ve become so desperate I’ve even considered sandals for $500 – the specific styles they bring in are all a bit too tricksy for my tastes anyway. It’s like they have to justify the outrageous price with a big flag waving over the toe saying, ‘These are Dee-Zyner shoes.’
I don’t want designer shoes. I just want something simple and well-made. Shoes that won’t strangulate my toes, won’t curl up at the end after two months and don’t have linings that adhere to the soles of the feet like sticky-back plastic.
When, in desperation, I told the assistant at one of the high-price salons (who was shifting from foot to throbbing foot on her designer heels), ‘I’m just looking for something really plain and comfortable with a medium heel, but well-made and not frumpy …’ she replied, ‘Yes, so is everyone else who comes in here … So am I actually …’
So why on earth doesn’t somebody sell them?
Shoe Money Page 7