I came across this when I was in Paris recently, having a minibreak as a tourist in my erstwhile life, covering the fashion shows. I was just there for kicks, staying with a pal who was doing it for real, so I had plenty of time to look around and notice things while he was frantically making notes, chasing missing invites and juggling appointments.
I first spotted this new trend when we went to a show in an old garage – a perfectly normal venue for a smaller label in Paris – which you entered by one of those steep, curving slip road thingies made of poured concrete.
The problem came as we exited. I watched in horrified fascination as a very elegant woman made her descent clinging to the wall, because she just couldn’t walk down the slope in her über-fashionable shoes.
Eventually a man came to her rescue and she made it to level ground, very slowly, on his arm. But even on the flat, a tiny stretch of cobbles – not exactly uncommon in European cities – nearly undid her all over again.
Negotiating the (rough estimate, but not exaggerating) 15-centimetre heels and 6-centimetre wooden platforms of those shoes on even the smallest gradient or uneven surface was deadly. In the end, the man had to escort her all the way to her waiting limo, while I watched avidly.
Later that day, I was waiting for a taxi outside the Meurice hotel on the rue de Rivoli, when I witnessed a similar incident. An American fashion editor (not a famous one) had to cling on to her colleague’s arm to make it from her limo up the Matterhorn of the curb and then the K2 steps into the lobby.
I wondered how she would manage the Gibson Desert stretch of marble floor from the revolving door to the bar, where she is pretty much a fixture when not in a limo, at a show, or shopping.
Once she was there, settled in her favourite seat, a champagne cocktail in her hand, the shoes would come into their own. ‘Everyone’ – ie a load of other fashion vampires – could notice and admire them and she could feel so clever for having the It shoe of the season.
But what could possibly be chic about a pair of shoes it is impossible to walk in?
We have become shamefully accustomed to seeing models – from Miss Naomi Campbell down – come a cropper on the catwalk in such stupid shoes, but never before have I seen them adopted by real people in supposedly real life.
This is fashion at its most ridiculous – and sinister. It’s the same human weakness that saw women in the time of Marie Antoinette wearing hats so enormous they could hardly hold up their heads. Or, in Victorian times, fainting from having their corsets pulled in excessively tightly.
I really believe such fashion extremes are deceptively frivolous traps to keep women down. Don’t go there, girls.
Alexandre de Paris
When I was a little girl my mother used to frequent a hairdressers which had the words ‘Haute Coiffure’ beneath its name on the sign, which always seemed impossibly glamorous to me.
In fact, visits to Maison Jacqueline with its pod hairdryers, frothy coffee in perspex cups and ranks of ladies being backcombed and sprayed – holding a face shield – into helmet-headed glamazons were character-forming highlights of my early years.
One man was responsible for everything which defined that experience, from the Frenchified name (the owner was probably really called Doreen), to the complex up-dos and the very idea that a visit to the salon should be an empowering moment for a woman to savour.
He was known as Alexandre de Paris and he died on 12 January 2008, aged eighty-five. I don’t think it would be overstating the case to say he was the most important hairdresser of the twentieth century.
Louis Alexandre Raimon was born in St Tropez in 1922, and just as Jean Paul Gaultier – who used him for fashion shows and called him ‘Alexandre the Great’ – played with his grandmother’s corsets as a child, the young Alexandre would style his grandmother’s waist-length hair. And that of any dolls he could get his hands on.
At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to the leading society hairdresser in Cannes and just eight years later, after moving with him to Paris, he got his big break: he styled the hair of the wife of the Aga Khan for a ball to celebrate her marriage.
The guests included the Duchess of Windsor, who clearly knew a good hairdo when she saw one. The next day she summoned Alexandre to the villa near the Bois de Boulogne and told him at great length exactly what to do to her hair.
In his own words, from an interview he gave in 1998: ‘I did exactly the opposite.’ But in the morning the duchess called him again.
‘It’s wonderful!’ she said. ‘For the first time in my life, I woke up with my hair exactly as it was when I went to sleep. From now on, you will stay by my side.’
His reputation secured, he quickly became coiffurier to the most glamorous women in the world – which in some cases seemed to make him the most important man in their lives.
When Elizabeth Taylor took ill during the filming of Cleopatra and was asked who she wanted to see her in hospital, ‘Send me Alexandre,’ she replied.
And while she lay in her hospital bed, held up by three nurses, he created the famous ‘artichoke’ cut, which she wore in the film (and is really the best thing about it).
Other famous heads he tended – and from which he would, with permission, keep a lock of hair to be preserved in perspex – included Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, Jackie Kennedy, Maria Callas, Liza Minnelli, Shirley MacLaine and Romy Schneider. Plus royals and aristos too numerous too list.
He also did men’s hair, as witnessed by Lady Iris Hayter, the wife of a British ambassador to Moscow during the Cold War years, when she went for a private session with him in 1955 to have her hair rescued from the stresses of ‘Soviet hairdressing’.
‘I found myself climbing Alexandre’s stairs in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and ringing the bell of his closed salon. As I walked in, a shadowy figure in a blue hairnet stood up and kissed my hand. It was Jean Cocteau.’
For those not fortunate enough to be able to command the personal touch of the man credited with inventing the chignon, Alexandre had some simple haircare advice:
‘First, they should change their brand of shampoo every two months. Like bodies and minds, hair thrives on variety. Secondly, women should brush their hair at least one hundred times before going to bed.’
And for hairdressers wanting to emulate his success, a more difficult prescription: ‘Never disappoint a woman.’
I just wonder what will happen to those locks of legendary hair.
Pretty Beautiful
‘She’s pretty. She’s really pretty. She’s beautiful …’
Today I listened astonished to these words coming from the mouth of my six-year-old daughter. We were going through a pile of pictures torn from magazines, which we are using to complete the collage on her playroom wall.
It’s all full-page shots, mainly of animals – her abiding passion – with a few flowers and fruits for variety. The rest of the pictures are of children and babies.
Full-page animal pictures are quite hard to find, so it’s been a labour of love over several years. Pictures of children are much easier to come by: you just buy a ‘parenting’ magazine aimed at parents who think the best you can do for your children is to buy them Burberry clothes.
The latest crop of great shots was from one such magazine called Milk, which I bought in France, entirely because the cover gift was an inflatable frisbee – designed by John Galliano, featuring his signature newspaper print.
The bumper crop of beautiful full-page pics of kids inside was an added bonus and I shredded them out for the wall, along with a very amusing picture of a rabbit wearing children’s shoes.
Although I would have preferred more rabbits, the kiddie pics were perfect for the collage as there was page after page of close-ups of faces. These were the girls Peggy was rating this afternoon.
I was shocked that she already thought in those terms – and surprised that I reluctantly (and silently) agreed with her rating
s of the girls in question. They were all gorgeous, in a typically French non-saccharine way, but the one she picked as ‘beautiful’, as opposed to merely ‘pretty’ did have the outstanding face.
I’m looking at them again now and that particular child is like Natalia Vodianova’s mini-me. Ridiculously perfectly beautiful. I’d actually much rather go camping with the less exquisite girls on the other pages; they look a lot more fun, but what fascinated me was how my daughter knew not only what was pretty in terms of a face, but such subtle gradations of it.
I am familiar with the studies which show that even tiny babies react more positively to adult faces which are symmetrical, suggesting there must be some kind of survival instinct element to it. Facial symmetry is linked to youth and health, and therefore more likely to be found on the face of the caveperson best equipped to bring you food.
But beyond that atavistic connection, I am afraid this is a learned understanding. It horrifies me to realise that in the six and a half years she has been mastering walking, talking, sphincter control, reading, writing, Bart Simpson catchphrases, cartwheels and disco dancing, she has also been sucking in our cultural stereotypes of beauty to such a sophisticated – and judgemental – extent.
I am already aware that the greatest insult among her peer group at school – girls and boys – is to call someone ‘fat’. But interestingly, the word seems to have become detached from its original meaning.
To Peggy’s classmates ‘fat’ seems to be a term that collects together all possible elements of being a loser into one neat little word. In some ways I find it slightly less offensive used that way rather than just referring to body shape, but I’m still mulling it over. It’s complex.
Meanwhile, I am much more concerned that she should be so hyperaware of female beauty – and so impressed by it. Already, she seems to be putting a higher value on it than the characteristics I would prefer her to appreciate, such as kindness and intelligence.
But I did grasp one small fragment of hope from this exchange. She also pointed out that a little boy in a Ralph Lauren ad I had torn out of the magazine was a dead ringer for President Obama. But not so handsome. So at least her precocious overemphasis on the superficial applies equally to both sexes.
Best Dressed Stress
I’ve always liked the idea of ‘planning’ a wardrobe, which is what the women who make it on to the official Best Dressed lists allegedly do. People like Aerin Lauder, her late grandmother Estée and Nan Kempner.
These ladies (and I do think of them as ‘ladies’, rather than, say, chicks or sheilas) aren’t like Hollywood stars who hire stylists to give them the right ‘look’ on an event-by-event basis: An Outfit for the Golden Globes, An Outfit for the MTV Awards, An Outfit for the Celebrity Charity Pie Bake-off – all to be documented by InStyle and Hello! magazines. Best Dressed Ladies (BDLs) plan by season, thinking more about what their rival hostesses will be wearing than of catching a picture editor’s eye. It’s all very Palm Beach, Florida.
Apparently BDLs assess their closets at the start of each fashion season to work out in which areas they need reinforcements, study the fashion magazines to get a grip on major trends and then head out to shop – or to the couture shows – with a list in mind (or perhaps written with a Mont Blanc pen in an Hermès notebook).
I like to imagine those lists: Cocktail: two – one pant, one dress. Formal: three – one black, one pink, one maddeningly gorgeous. Suits for races, natty: five. Hats for races, enormous: five. Hats for beach, fetching: three. Bikinis: six. Shoes, flat, city: three. Shoes, flat, weekend: three. Shoes, flat, beach: three. Shoes, stupid: twenty-three.
The BDLs of my imagination are also telephoned around the same time by the assistants at their favourite boutiques to be told that the particular suit they said they loved from the Chanel show has just arrived in a size 6 and is being held until Thursday, despite a great deal of interest from other ladies.
I could go on at length, as I have idled away plenty of time imagining their entire Best Dressed lives. I’m even interested in the dog-grooming routines they probably follow and the little Smythson birthday book they keep just for staff: 31 August – Conchita, rose soap and talc. 12 September – Mr Cockleheimer, whisky tumblers. We are talking gift-wrapping rooms here.
Thinking about such ordered lives gives me the same secure, cosy feeling I get from reading Martha Stewart Living (take down storm windows, weed pumpkin patch, etc) and hearing my mother’s descriptions of laundry days in 1920s Scotland. But while I am very taken with speculating on the activities of such well-dressed paragons, I have never had any success with wardrobe planning for myself.
In fact, I learned long ago that the surefire way to avoid spending any money is to save up and then go out with a very specific idea of what you ‘need’ to buy. Go looking for A Light Raincoat, A Dress for a Friend’s Wedding or Shoes for Work and you are guaranteed to come back empty-handed.
But go out to help a friend find the above, swearing that – as a terrifyingly broke new homeowner – you are not going to buy a thing, and you’ll find a cocktail dress that makes you feel like Audrey Hepburn in the very first shop. With 30 per cent off.
Now hear this: you must buy that dress. If you don’t, it will haunt you for months to come as you go out with hard-saved cash in search of a much-needed party dress and find nothing that doesn’t make you look like a kilo of oranges in a long sock.
And that’s another way – apart from being too rich and too thin – that Best Dressed people are different from the rest of us. They are not subject to Sod’s Law of Shopping.
Busy Doing Nothing
I’ve ironed the napkins and folded and rolled the beach towels. Eight of each. I’ve created a receptacle for the paper recycling out of a cardboard wine crate. I’ve located the WD40 and oiled the pool lock. It was a bit sticky. The bed’s made, just going to organise the closet and then I can get on with the real business of the day, which is being on holiday.
I am writing from a beach house on the North Fork of Long Island, New York. It’s absolutely gorgeous and we’re here with some of our best friends, who moved to Brooklyn three years ago. They have a son the same age as Peggy and the two of them are already in the pool. Hilary is on a sun lounger reading a book with one eye on them, her husband is having a nap and mine is out for a run. Me? I’m tidying.
I’m pretty much always tidying, re-tidying, or planning some tidying, so the question that has been exercising me ever since we got here is this: would I want to go on a villa holiday with me?
That has long been my benchmark for how I feel about people. I might enjoy their company over dinner, or at a cocktail party, but would I like to share a house – and most specifically a kitchen – with them on equal terms for several days?
I’m starting to wonder if Hilary is thinking I’m not the most relaxing person to be around on vacation (to use the local argot), but I can’t help it, I just like to be organised. Not obsessively John Pawson, nothing-visible-on-surfaces tidy, but sensibly organised.
She affectionately rolled her eyes when she caught me filing the fridge yesterday, but did admit that once I had finished we could actually see what food we have, making it less likely we would buy another jar of mayo to add to the three already in there.
But she did also say that it wasn’t a priority for her, while on a hard-earned break, to have all the grog on the bottom shelf, fruit and veg strictly in crispers, cooked and uncooked meat separated, a designated dairy area and all jarred goods top back. It is for me, though.
Mostly because it makes life flow a little more easily. But also I have come to understand that I really can’t feel quite happy if things around me aren’t reasonably ordered.
I think my brain is in such a permanent ferment of neurotic excitability, with actual craziness never far from the surface, I need to have my environment relatively serene. The chaos within demands order without.
Conversely, I once shared an office with another good fr
iend, who is the untidiest person I have ever known – also the most successful. I had to erect an imaginary Berlin wall in that room over which her cack was not allowed to venture. If it did, the agreement was I’d throw it back at her. I developed quite a top spin.
Yet out of this swirling vortex of disorder – knee-deep in places – she was amazingly productive. Her brain is so incredibly focused it doesn’t affect her. I am differently wired.
The thing about bringing my OCD on holiday, though, is that I don’t want it to put Hilary and Al off me. I don’t want them to like me less because I take the wine bottles they have put in the recycling bin out to rinse them. So Hils and I have been doing what girls do – talking and laughing about it.
Most comfortingly, she told me about an article in the New York Times describing a couple so obsessed with their pristine home they have a washing machine in the hallway. They remove all their clothes on arrival and wear only white shorts and T-shirts around the apartment.
I definitely won’t be going on a villa holiday with them any time soon.
It’s a Man’s World
I’m very excited about Second Life. I read this fascinating article about severely disabled people who lead whole other lives as able-bodied superheroes in it, and immediately jumped on to the internet to have a look.
In case you don’t know what I am ranting about, Second Life is a website which is like a total virtual universe. You join up and build yourself an ‘avatar’, which is geek-ese for an identity, who then lives your second – virtual – life online.
The new (improved) you can then do just about anything there that you would in the real world – you can even buy real estate – but you do it as your avatar. Which in my case is one hell of a strutting dude by the name of Montgomery Nagy. God, I’m handsome.
Style Notes Page 4
