Jeans can stand the test of time just as well as designer threads. I have revived my beloved heavy denim Yanüks for this season of wider-legged jeans after a couple of years in retirement. If I can lose enough weight I will also be wearing a pair of vintage cream Levis, which I dyed lilac in about 1990. Right on trend, they are again.
Actually, winter clothes generally last better. If you can persuade the bloody insects that your cashmere jumpers are not an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, they will come back each autumn as good as new. I’ve had my black twinset nearly twenty years and it looks better than ever. Constant washing seems to have softened and smoothed the fibres over time.
On the summer side of things, sarongs can fade and soften in a most pleasing way after a season of sun and salt, but cheap T-shirts look as sad as dressed salad left overnight in the fridge. You know how you always think you will eat it for lunch the next day, only to be greeted by a bowl of lank slime? Into the bin it goes – and into my duster bag go the sad old T-shirts.
And of course the garments that overwinter least well of all are swimmers. I can never believe the limp rags of snagged and saggy lycra I pull out each year. I wore that? Yet it takes a lot for me to throw a cozzie away. It would mean going out to find another one – and anything is better than that.
Pump up the Jam
In my brief career (two Saturdays) working in my friend’s vintage boutique/consignment shop (meaning that she sells on people’s unwanted designer gear and then splits the profits with them) I made an interesting observation.
Well, I made quite a few because I found the whole experience grippingly thrilling (this is the third column springing directly from it, to give you an idea), but this one concerned the shoe selection.
When I wasn’t stroking 1950s tulle-skirted prom dresses in sorbet shades, swooning over willowy twenty-year-olds trying on bias cuts, or making sneaky mental notes of stuff I could use in my next novel (which is why I was in there snooping in the first place), I found myself frequently drifting over to the shoe area.
Largely by placing my foot in them all, I became very familiar with what we retail experts call the ‘offer’ and in a blinding flash realised that there was a unifying feature.
Apart from a few gorgeous pairs which would have been snug on Cinderella and some of extreme ugliness, but featuring big-name designer tags, there was one style which dominated. And I happen to know the correct name for it: the d’Orsay Pump.
I know this because about ten years ago Prada had them in their collection. I came out of the show in Milan with my best fashion boy pal Mark Connolly, saying, ‘Ooh, I loved those shoes with the pointy toes and then a kind of gap at the sides and then a closed heel …’
‘You mean the d’Orsay pumps?’ he replied.
Mark knows these things because he trained in the BBC Costume Department, where you have to learn the difference between a stomacher and a farthingale pretty sharpish, or Elizabeth the First might go out on screen wearing an anachronism and it would be all your fault.
I confess I later checked it out in my Fairchild Dictionary of Fashion, the Escoffier of that world, and discovered he was spot on. As a further exercise, I just ran it past Google and a site called About.com told me this:
‘A d’Orsay-style pump is a woman’s shoe in which the vamp of the shoe is cut away very close to the toe box, and the sides are cut away, revealing the arch of the foot.’
I really couldn’t think of a better way to describe it – but then I already know what they look like. If you still can’t picture it, imagine taking a classic pump and then cutting away the middle bit between your toes and your heel with a razor blade, on both sides of the shoe, right down to the sole. So you have one little cap for the toes and a little cup for the heel, with nothing in between – saucy!
Something about revealing the inner arch, but covering the toes like that, is very alluring and ankle-flattering – which is presumably why so many designer shoes are made in this style. It also makes it practically impossible to walk in them. I know because I bought a pair of the Prada ones.
The problem with the d’Orsay pump is there’s nothing to keep it on your feet. The toe cap is generally lower than on a simple mule (a shoe with no back at all), so they keep sliding off the front and you can’t even shuffle along in that sloppy flip-flap thongs way, because your heel keeps coming in and out of the heel cup. Which can also make an embarrassing noise.
This means you have to use the Koala Toe Grip to keep the bastards on your feet and you don’t want to walk very far like that. It leads swiftly to shin splints.
So seeing the array of fabulous d’Orsay pumps in my friend’s shop – all top-end designers, all with barely worn soles – confirmed my own experience. This is a style to avoid, however gorgeous they are.
Your Best Duds
As a self-consciously eco-aware citizen, rabid detester of property developers and general free-thinker, I am aware that I should greatly admire the work of Henry David Thoreau.
He was the nineteenth-century American naturalist, philosopher, poet and writer who many hold up as the founding father of the ecology movement, as he was famously in favour of living in concert with nature, not despite it as we now do.
He was also an inspiration in his political ideas (tax resistance and other forms of non-violent civil disobedience) to such admirable men as Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. And in various ways he influenced Frank Lloyd Wright, Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust, so he was quite a guy.
But I must admit I was put off him at an early age by the following quote: ‘Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes.’
What an old party pooper. I’m sorry, but that’s the only way I can look at that sentence. It sums up a kind of hair-shirt attitude to life that I cannot bear. I may loathe the encroachment of block-filling concrete houses in once-leafy suburbs, not to mention uranium mines hacked from the virgin earth, as much as he would have, but does that really mean I can’t have a new frock for a party?
But when I think about it a little more, while I still consider Thoreau’s famous quote a joy-crusher, I must admit I am somewhat suspicious of occasions that require the buying of a new dress for my own reasons. Mainly because I know from bitter experience that the combination frequently leads to disappointment.
In the first instance there is the fundamental shopping mistake of heading out on an expedition looking for a particular item. Even in shops where you normally (ie no money in hand, no justification to purchase) want to buy everything in sight, there will be nothing you like. Or at least not in your size.
So you will carry on trudging from one possible source to the next, your standards getting lower (and upper price limits getting higher) as desperation takes hold. Add to the quest the further stress of a deadline – the party’s tonight! – and you will be guaranteed failure. Or at best, turning up at the party in something you would never have bought under normal circs, and will never wear again.
Even if you manage to escape these long-understood shopping pitfalls, possibly by buying something far in advance of the big event, there is another risk in the ‘new set of clothes’, as Thoreau has it, for the specific enterprise – you won’t know in advance whether it’s a happy dress or not.
And if you wear the new frock to a long-anticipated party and have a crappy time, the dress will henceforth be considered an unlucky one and you won’t ever want to wear it again.
I have a couple of gorgeous classic LBDs in permanent retirement in my wardrobe for exactly that reason. I get them out and stroke them from time to time, but I’m just not game to risk jinxing a jolly by wearing one of them.
For all these reasons I advise a strategy that sidesteps all the risk factors: buy party dresses you love, as and when you find them. Not because you need one for a specific event, but simply because you like the dress. Then wear them, as soon as possible, to a low-key event to test out the happy dress factor.
That way i
t will not be a new dress for a ‘special occasion’ – which puts a terrible strain on both the dress and the occasion – but something nice, with a proven track record, that you just decided to wear that night.
In this way Mr Thoreau could have spared himself the angst about excursions requiring new duds – and all of us a sense of guilt for buying them – with just a little forward planning. Particularly during the sales season.
Heels Up
Quick! Someone call Dan Brown – I’ve found the Holy Grail. Well, not the drinking vessel from the Last Supper exactly, but something rather more useful to most women.
I have found a pair of shoes with a reasonable heel – enough so I don’t feel like a Tellytubby – which look good with a skirt and that I can also walk in for more than the distance between a stretch limo and a red carpet.
This is not a scenario that figures frequently in my life, but it seems to be the main image in shoe designers’ imaginations when they sit down to work. (Apart from the folk at Birkenstock and Crocs, of course, and we won’t go there again just at the moment, figuratively or actually.)
As a result, it’s almost impossible to find a relatively glamorous shoe which doesn’t require the bulky in-handbag transportation (and humiliating public changing into) of a substitute pair of flatties in order to walk safely down to a station platform, or even hail a taxi.
Boy, are the world’s shoe designers missing a trick. Anyway, yesterday I found something I think will work.
The shoe in question has an elegant elongated almond toe and is cut from black patent leather, the fashionable material du jour. They are very nice – but please don’t email to ask where I got them, because that’s not the point. Even if I told you, they’d probably be sold out, which would be most vexing.
Far more usefully, this precious find has enabled me to analyse exactly what makes a walkable heeled shoe (WHS). Since getting them home, I’ve been at it like a NASA scientist, breaking them down into component factors.
I’ve measured the heel and it is a neat six centimetres high; not so lofty as to create a feeling of terrifying teeterment, but enough to make a difference to one’s apparent leg length and gait, which is the whole point of high heels.
But the more crucial measurements are the 2.5 by 3.5-centimetre dimensions of the flat bottom of the heel, meaning there is a reasonable platform for the weight of the back of your foot – and ergo your whole body – to rest upon. This is cruelly lacking in your classic stiletto and kitten heel arrangements, which just push all the weight to the ball of the foot. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
The other critical factor in this shoe is a Mary Jane-style strap across the instep. This means you don’t have to exercise an exhausting Koala Toe Grip to keep them on your foot when you walk, which always gives me shocking shin splints when I wear court shoes.
But a key design point in this pair is that the strap is positioned a little down the foot, rather than at the ankle, preventing the dreadful leg-shortening effect of the average Mary Jane.
My new shoes have two other critical details that made me run to the till with them. Firstly, they have moulded-on rubber soles. Not tractor treads, like Doc Marten boots, but sleek stylish ones, which I first saw on Prada shoes.
This means that they won’t be ruined if you are ever caught in a rain shower (while your limo is inexplicably tied up in traffic), and you won’t go bob sledding across polished floors – yet another factor that makes the average leather-soled high heel treacherous for real life. And the final all-important property: they do have an element of style about them. They are not so practical they are plain.
So there we have it, the anatomy of the perfect WHS: a heel of sensible dimensions combined with some strategically placed strapology to hold it on to your foot, put together with flair.
There is only one problem with the ones I have on my feet right now. I seem to have bought them a half size too small.
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2011
Text copyright © Maggie Alderson 2011
Internal illustrations copyright © Maggie Alderson 2011
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All of these stories first appeared in Good Weekend.
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ISBN: 978-0-14-356578-9
* This was written before The September Issue came out. She is now probably as well-known as they are.
* She did – by a nose.
Style Notes Page 16
