Why men hate pantaloons
Men don’t like women in culottes. They also loathe knickerbockers, pantaloons and, unless they are on a belly dancer, harem pants.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that men dislike these particular garments – they are silly, contrived novelty items that women hate, too. Well, we hate them most of the time, except when fashion designers get desperate for a new idea and put them up on a catwalk. Then we realise we’ve loved them all along. And six months later we run with them to a clothing bin. At night. In false beards.
All it takes is for Karl Lagerfeld to put, say, jodhpurs in a Chanel show and in a few months’ time we’ll all be wanting a pair. They wouldn’t even have to be sexy, form-fitting, showjumper jodhpurs – we’d even embrace big balloony Cecil B. de Mille jodhpurs if they style them right.
And men will be wondering all over again why we can’t stop wasting money and just wear leather miniskirts and high heels all the time.
It’s not just jodhpurs and baggy trousers and leggings that men detest. They don’t really like any of the clothes women wear. They’re suspicious of any kind of geometric print because they remind them of caravan holidays and aunties. Any loud design or over-fussy details make them nervous.
They’re not wild about the opaque tights that all women love because we think they make our legs look thin. Men think they make us look like Greek widows. And they absolutely detest those stretch leggings which we think make us look streamlined in comfort.
If we’re really honest, men don’t really like any form of trouser on a woman, apart from the right jeans on the right girl, or hipsters on anyone with a flat brown stomach. And they hate them for the same reason they hate culottes. Access. Lack of.
It’s a conceptual thing rather than a practical consideration. We’re not suggesting that men really expect instant access to women’s crotchular regions at all times. But they sure like thinking about it. That is why they particulary hate culottes. A woman bowling along in culottes looks as if she’s wearing a skirt. Then you realise she is wearing culottes. An unskirt. It doubles the insult.
Possibly the only thing worse is a new invention from America which even has a horrible name – a ‘skort’. This is a pair of shorts with a skirt flap over the front of it. My thirteen-year-old niece thinks they’re great for hanging upside down on the jungle gym, but her thirteen-year-old boy pals already know they should hate them.
So what do men like? They like dresses and they like skirts (which they call dresses). Generally, short skirts, although long wafty skirts are sometimes acceptable. Especially if they have a tendency to cling or become see-through with the light behind them. But most of all they like short skirts and bare legs.
Not that we care. Women dress for each other, anyway. You should see my new jodhpurs.
Swimwear and tear
Now is the time for all good women to go and buy swimsuits. Good morning and welcome to hell.
I have it on good authority that even women with great bodies hate buying swimmers. They are such small objects that even a millimetre of fabric here, and not there, can make the difference between Pamela Anderson and Pam Ayres. And although they be ever so small, they are very important and meaningful garments, because each swimsuit defines a summer.
Yet consider the circumstances in which we are forced to buy them. Go swimwear shopping in some groovy surf-side bikini-tique and you will be expected to strip off behind a flimsy curtain and then walk into the centre of the shop to look in the mirror. Who came up with that one? Dr No?
Look for swimsuit sanctuary at the other end of the market and you will find that our best department stores have special changing rooms for trying on ‘resort wear’ (which actually means overpriced swimsuits). These cubicles are known in the trade as ‘torture chambers’.
The first thing you will notice about these Room 101s (apart from the fact they make you immediately want to go to the toilet) is the lighting. I know it is oafish and cheap to look tanned these days, but I don’t want to look like something from the Sydney Fish Markets either. Perhaps I’ll ring up Tetsuya and see if he has any witty ideas for my thighs. He could use them instead of abalone in a wobbly little entree.
Then there are the helpful assistants who barge in unannounced just as your arms are pinioned like Houdini by an impossibly small piece of Lycra that you can’t get on and you certainly can’t get off. This is a bikini. That red thing coming out of the top of it is your face. That thing coming out of the bottom of it is your body. Hello, gorgeous, want to come to my yacht for a dry martini?
But the really unforgettable feature of the torture chambers are the cunningly angled mirrors to show you exactly what you look like from behind in your potential new bathers.
Watch my hips: I do not want to know what I look like from behind in a swimsuit. If I knew the truth about my rear view I would have to walk backwards into the water for the rest of my life. Which is out of the question, because then everyone on the beach would see my front.
And don’t come out with that old ‘No-one will be looking at you …’ line. I’ve been hearing it my whole life from my mother and I know it’s not true on the beach. Because there is nothing more fascinating than looking at all the other women and comparing them with yourself. This is why I’ve never understood the concept of a great book for the beach. I’m always too busy checking out the chicks.
Then, if you’re sur la plage for a relaxing day with your partner, you can quickly drive him insane asking questions like this:
‘Am I as fat as her?’
‘Which woman on this beach do you think has the best figure?’
‘Which woman on this beach has a body most similar to mine?’
Which will take both of your minds off the fact that he is lying there quite happily, with his hirsute stomach standing proud of baggy ten-year-old laddered Speedos. And absolutely no idea what he looks like from behind.
Tied to the clothes rails
I can’t believe I’m back to clothes rails. I thought that like trainer wheels, cider and Eurorail, they were something you grew out of – as in over, not likely, never again.
Yet here I am once more with my all clothes on wobbly racks, covered in Balinese sarongs in a hope it will protect them from moth maggots and make them look kind of arty and bohemian. As opposed to just plain tragic. Welcome to my bedsit.
I feel like such an amateur. Rolling clothes rails from K-Mart, while functional, if not downright indispensable during the student and first job stage of life, are like a provisional licence, before you get to drive the built-in wardrobe and, ultimately, the Volvo Estate of clothes storage – the walk-in closet.
Actually, I am writing this in a walk-in closet. Only normally it would be called a ‘spare room used as study’. Sure there is a desk, a computer, a printer, a fax, lots of unopened bank statements and other officey things, but there are also three clothes rails and a wall of stacking wire storage baskets which looks like London Transport’s lost property depot.
It’s not a conceptual art installation called The Randomness of Umbrellas Part II. This is my new home. Because I have accidentally moved into an apartment with no cupboards.
When I say none, I mean there are cupboards in the kitchen and one long, thin one in the bathroom, which would be good for hanging salami, but nothing where you could put a spare handbag or twelve, your collection of souvenir scarves, or forty pairs of shoes. Not even a shelf for bangles, or a hook for a baseball cap. But, hey, I shouldn’t complain. There are plenty of doorknobs to hang beads on. And I’m lucky – I’ve got clothes rails. I could have all my clothes hanging from the curtain rails on wire hangers.
I didn’t do it on purpose; I didn’t choose a unit with less storage space than a Formula One car for the challenge. It was just that I was so in love with the cleanness of the bathroom and the treeness of the view that I didn’t notice the notness of the cupboards until after I had signed the lease.
But there is one th
ing that makes me less unhappy about the prospect of all future visitors sleeping on the sofa (and as I seem to be regressing to age twenty-two, they will probably bring their own sleeping bags): at least there are no clothes and shoes in my bedroom.
I grew up in a house where the major bedrooms had dressing rooms, and I still think it is rather vile to sleep amid smokey jackets and warm shoes. We didn’t have dressing rooms because we were disgustingly rich, I should point out. The house had them because it was old – Georgian houses had dressing rooms because they had to have somewhere to keep their wigs. After that we moved to a Victorian house which had a ‘box room’, because they had to have somewhere to keep their trunks and Gladstone bags. Wasn’t that sensible?
Now we buy more clothes in a month than a Georgian gentleman farmer or a Victorian explorer would own in a lifetime, and yet people are allowed to build units without so much as an airing cupboard, let alone a wig room. And lady journalists are forced to compose prose in the linen press. A pox on’t.
Princess ballerina
Sophie is wearing her pink ballet leotard and matching cardigan, a net tutu specially stitched by House of Grandma, birthday wings from a fairy shop and a piece of old glittery advent calender as a head ornament. This is daywear.
She’s playing with her favourite doll, Lady Samantha (actually a small plastic horse with a luxuriant pink nylon mane), who is wearing an equine wedding dress. Sophie is in the process of creating a four-poster bed for Lady Samantha from an old chiffon scarf, several coloured pencils and Blu-Tack. Going into her bedroom barefoot is very unwise at the moment, as tiny hard plastic hairbrushes, earrings and crowns belonging to this horse are likely to become embedded in your feet.
Sophie is four and going through the Princess Ballerina phase of female childhood development. At this stage, no matter how many agnès b. enfant black cardigans – just like Mummy’s! – or organic cotton whale-print T-shirts – just like Daddy’s! – are dangled in front of her, Sophie will dress only in pink Lycra and net. She spits on natural fibres. They don’t sparkle.
Where does it come from? asks her mother, a tax lawyer, who bought Sophie a carpentry set for her fourth birthday, causing an emotional outburst so extreme she was forced to exchange it for a pair of play high heels and a pink plastic Keepers Kastle.
Mum’s fantasy garments are a grey flannel Ralph Lauren pants-suit with concealed buttons and a pair of black patent J.P. Tod’s. Sophie’s are a fuschia lurex one-shoulder gown with satin frills and a concealed crinoline, and a pair of matching stiletto mules with fluffy pompoms. She’s recently drawn this ensemble with fluorescent felt-tips and attached it to the fridge with a Barbie magazine fridge magnet (she’s a subscriber).
‘That girl,’ says Mummy’s special friend Colin, the one who smokes long cigarettes and lets Sophie have a look at his nipple rings, ‘that girl is camper than Lily Savage.’ With memories of his own fourth birthday still vivid (he tried to make high heels out of the Meccano and was severely punished), he bought her a tiara for her birthday. Sophie loves Colin.
‘Mummy, when can I have nipple rings, diamond ones? And I want to have my ears pierced, like Colin’s, Mummy, please can I, please?’ says Sophie.
Somehow Freud omitted the Princess Ballerina stage from his model of human emotional development, but it is just as clearly defined as the oral and anal phases and just as crucial for a normal transition into adult clothing choices. Parents who attempt to suppress the natural expression of the phase with compulsory tasteful wooden toys, or non-pastel clothing, risk permanently damaging their child’s taste. Deprive the girl of pink Lycra and she will wear it for life.
If left to act it out naturally, most young girls emerge spontaneously around eight years old, with a sudden burning desire to wear black polo necks and have sailing lessons, but fully grown women who never consolidated this stage – Barbara Cartland, Anna Nicole Smith, Baby Spice, etc. – are compelled to act it out for the rest of their lives. The predominant symptoms are a continued obsession with the colour pink, a large collection of cuddly toys and a love of fluffy white dogs. In extreme cases, they call their husbands or lovers ‘Daddy’.
Sophie’s mother agrees that allowing her child access to sexually stereotyped dolls with abnormally large breasts is better than that fate. Looks like Sophie’s dead-set for Barbie’s Dream Home, next birthday.
Fash mag slag off
I hate my life. I’m so ugly. I have no clothes. My home looks like the Ikea sale area. I used to think my ankles were slim and now I realise they are chunky. All my shoes are horrible.
I am so fat. I want everything. In every colour. I want to go everywhere. It’s not fair, why can’t I have a beach house on St Barts? Why aren’t all my friends film stars? I feel so left out.
I don’t normally feel like this, but I’ve just read a fashion magazine. If it’s a good fashion magazine that is how it makes you feel. The worse you feel, the better you know the magazine is. I spent a blissful hour this afternoon lying on the sofa looking at British Vogue and now I feel like the Elephant Man’s less attractive sister. Except even she has better clothes than me.
What a great magazine it is. It has made me feel so bad. Exquisite torture, that is what the glossies offer us every month. I’ve never been able to get enough of it myself.
This the the way it works. Every time you read a fashion magazine you realise you won’t be allowed to join the groovy gang unless you lose twenty-five kilos, buy an entirely new wardrobe, get a famous husband and property on Long Island. And by the time you get back with the carrier bags, the engagement ring and the title deeds they will have compiled a new ‘out’ list with everything you’ve just bought on it.
‘Southampton OUT South Carolina IN,’ it will say.
What is the area code for Charleston anyway?
The funny thing is that even if you have all the kit, I’m not sure that anyone is actually a member of the fash mag club. I’ve edited two of them myself and even then I didn’t feel like a member. And I knew it was all lies.
Well, it’s not all lies. When they say that rubbing a very expensive petroleum-based goo into your face will make you look like Elizabeth Hurley, that’s all true of course. And it’s also true that you can’t possibly get through to next spring without buying six new pairs of shoes and one of the new Fendi handbags. That’s gospel.
Where the lying comes in is the impression glossy mags give that there are people somewhere – somewhere you are never going to be invited because your legs are too short and you can’t do smart casual – who really lead the perfect lives they appear to lead in fashion magazines.
You know the place: a heavenly house full of unique little touches, darling children with French haircuts, simple yet elegant food with an original twist, a couple beaming contentedly at each other over the home-made quince paste, surrounded by glamorous friends, feeling completely relaxed.
Nobody’s waistband feeling a little tight.
This place doesn’t exist. Some people are pretty fabulous, but nobody is totally completely utterly fabulous, the way they appear in fashion magazines. It just isn’t possible.
I’ve seen people I know featured in glossy mags sharing their recipes for green tea salad and radish risotto with all of the rest of us sad drongos, as they entertain fifteen of their effortlessly chic friends in their perfect weekender.
I nearly fell off the sofa laughing. I know these people; they are hopelessly neurotic sods who spend the whole weekend drunk or hungover, and having sex with inappropriate people. (That’s why I like them, actually.)
But even though I knew that particular story was total codswallop (‘Briony likes to grow rare species of Belgian lettuce and Robert has a large collection of antique watering cans picked up at garage sales and swap meets’), it didn’t stop me from being completely taken in by every other story in the mag. I knew my friends were frauds, but everyone else in there was perfect.
They must be, they were in a glossy magazine.
The secret language of handbags
Your handbag is not a silent partner. Wherever you go it is speaking volumes about you. You may think it’s just a bit of dead cow hanging off your shoulder when actually, it’s like a personal Reuters screen, broadcasting exactly how highly you value your personal stock.
If it’s a neat leather shoulder bag which complements your general attire and can still remember the last time a soft cloth was passed over it, your SP (Selling Price) is pretty high. Likewise if it’s a classic bag, old and worn in, but clearly loved and looked after. But if it’s a scuffed and sagging satchel, with a broken fastening, a fraying strap and things falling out of the sides, your Reuters screen is flashing SELL SELL.
The reason handbags are such articulate self-signifiers is that they are the whole of our lives in microcosm. The stuff in your handbag is what you feel you cannot get through the day without. It’s an instant indicator of your priorities – and our priorities define us. Which is why that women’s magazine classic, ‘Five Famous Women Show What They Keep In Their Handbags’, is always so gripping.
I know women (and they are not war photographers) who carry their passports in their handbags at all times; others who have enough photos to fill a family album; gals whose bags contain alarm clocks, a pharmacy, the David Jones cosmetics hall, an entire lolly shop, five paperbacks, dog biscuits in case they meet a hungry stray, rooting powder in case they want to pinch a plant cutting and all their bank statements. Other handbags are devoted variously to breath freshening, hairdo maintenance, family planning and in-flight entertainment. Some are tiny and contain only keys, credit card and a condom.
The contents of every handbag are as individual as the woman hauling it around. And as the state of the outside indicates how you feel about the stuff inside, are you really happy to carry your entire identity in a scruffy old sack?
Shoe Money Page 4
