Cracking the dress code
Proust schmoost, yeah yeah, done that. Door knob, madeleine, Odette. Bit of a pervey weirdo. Nice gloves. Next?
War and Peace. Soap-opera simple, darl. Peace. War. Gorgeous snooty Prince bloke dies. Ghastly Pierre lives. Peculiar Freemasons stuff. Snow. Pages of boring war stuff.
The Classics? The Gauls attacked the ditches. The girls sang on the beaches. And these things having been achieved, everyone else pashed their mother, murdered their father and got turned into an olive tree. This is too easy.
Kabbala? Year Seven. I want a challenge. Okay, I’ll look at these Christmas party invitations.
‘Jacket. Tie optional.’
Well, that’s helpful. Are trousers optional too? And what kind of jacket did you have in mind precisely? A Schott Perfecto leather biker’s jacket? A pink hunting coat? A taxi driver’s seven-year-old car coat? And pray, what is she supposed to wear while he’s getting down to ‘Jail Break’, his suit jacket around his waist, his old school tie around his head? A straitjacket? A jacket potato? More information necessary. And by the way, I’m busy that Thursday.
‘Lounge suit.’
Does this mean it is made from upholstery fabric, Von Trapp-style, or are we going to be clicking our fingers to ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ while sipping on a Sea Breeze, daddy-o? Maybe you’ll be lying on the lounge in the lounge in your lounge suit, sweetheart, but I’ll be at home lying on my sofa in the drawing room in a tracksuit. Goodbye.
‘Cocktails. Black tie.’
Well, fine. As long as you’re serving them. Next question.
‘Black tie. 6 pm.’
Uh? Perhaps you could factor in the phone box we’re supposed to change in, along with the preposterous dress code. And do tell, what exactly is going to happen at 8 pm, the hour when invitations traditionally start to involve dinner? Are we all going to turn into pumpkins? Miss Alderson regrets. (The only black tie engagement anyone should accept before 7.30 pm is for the Oscars and I have it on good authority that you’ll have much more fun watching them at home, dress code: old cardie, than anywhere near the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.)
‘Medieval Mayhem.’
Hello? I’ll have two Quattro Formaggios, large, a green salad and an extra-large bottle of Diet Coke. Thank you. What do you mean it will take forty minutes?
‘Up.’
Mmmmmm … that’s more like it. I think I get this. High heels, low front, small dress, big attitude. The only way is …
‘White tie.’
Mwa, mwa, mwa. At last you speaky my language. He wore: a stiff white bib, a white tie, cutaway tails, decorations, a smug expression. She wore: low on the top, long on the bottom, expensive in between, big hairdo, big jewels, big smile, long white gloves. The consequences were: They could have danced all night.
Goodbye Elton’s wig
‘What’s that on your head?’
This is the opening line from ‘Wigs On Fire’ by the B52s, one of the best pop songs ever written. The second line is ‘A wig’, followed closely by a gleeful chorus of ‘wig wig wig wig …’
It came to mind because I was watching the music channel on pay-the-rich-bloke TV and Sir Elton was on. And all I could think was, What’s That On Your Head?
I mean, why would you? If you had all the money in the world and were going to buy a wig, why would you buy a ginger one? It was clearly real hair and a beautiful piece of work, but nothing he was saying, not even the really bitchy stuff about Madonna and the funny stuff about performing nude, could take my mind off the rug on top of his nut.
Because it was a-top. It was a hair hat, with those telltale features of an edge-hiding fringe and an unnaturally high crown. Even a wig this expensive was still obviously a flying head carpet and I started to obsess on what he would look like if I had a magic fishing rod and could cast my line into the TV set and hoik the wretched thing off.
Well, I regret to say that Elton without his pelt on would look very much like a fish-and-chip shop owner from Northern England, although that is more to do with the jade tracksuit and large crucifix earring than the visualised Teflon head. The difference is, those things are changeable, whereas it seems that, despite his many and varied efforts, the chrome dome really is not.
I can understand how he feels. I was actually half-bald for a while myself and it wasn’t very nice. I had to have radiation beamed at my head for medical reasons and my hair fell out completely, from my neck to just above my ear. Egg.
It was very peculiar and rather chilly and I was greatly relieved when it grew back in wispy little ringlets, although I did have some fun in the meantime frightening children and wearing a lot of hats, in case a gust of wind blew my curtain of hair up to reveal the Empty Quarter beneath.
That experience gave me a great deal of respect for fellow travellers who lose their barnet to radio- and chemotherapy, and if they choose to wear a wig to get them through it, I raise my hairpiece to them.
But while I understand that, like life-threatening tumours, male pattern baldness is very hard to deal with, I really don’t believe rugs, weaves, implants, toupees or comb-overs are the answer.
Why can’t Sir Elton of John just shave his head and have henna tattoos stencilled onto it? That’s what Madonna would do if she started losing it in the thatch department. He could stick purple glittery stars on it to match his suits. He could get his team of florists to create special laurel wreaths for him. It worked for Caligula, it could work for him.
Why can’t he see that shaved heads are really sexy? I reckon that singer from Hot Chocolate wrote ‘You Sexy Thing’ after looking in the mirror when he shaved off the last of his hair. He would never have made it with hair.
Or if Elton really can’t bear the thought of a stripped scalp, why can’t he just wear a funky spunky hat like his old friend Milly Molly Meldrum, country singer Dwight Yoakam and many others of the famous and follicularly challenged fraternity?
The girls in the B52s wore wigs at all times of course. Teased, pigtailed, high on the crown, bouffant all the way in the most unlikely colours, but that was different. They were irono-wigs like drag queens wear and that’s the cruel truth, Dorothy. You just can’t afford to be seen in an Irish jig you wouldn’t take off for a dollar dare.
Last in best dressed
There are well-dressed people, there are stylishly dressed people and then there are Best Dressed people. This elite crew, the ones who appear on Best Dressed Lists (BDL), live in a parallel universe. They are not like the rest of us.
To maintain the standards of grooming and attire it takes to get on a BDL, whether it be the ‘official’ one from New York, or Harper’s Bazaar & Mode’s annual Aussie version, requires a level of commitment and self-discipline equal to that of an Iron Man, or a shaolin monk.
In other words, you have to be a little nuts.
In the heady Halston days of Studio 54, Best Dressed babe Bianca Jagger used to take a whole day to get ready to go out. She would take Polaroids of herself from different angles to see how she looked. And this wasn’t for a special occasion. We’re not talking Inaugural Ball, this was every night with the same bunch of drugged-out neurotics she always went out with.
But while Bianca was in those days, like many BDs, married to a walking charge card, being Best Dressed is only partly about money. It’s true you’ll never make the list in polyester tailoring, but it’s as much a matter of priorities as spending power.
It is the enormous proportion of their income they are prepared to spend on their wardrobes that marks out a BD. They’ll go into debt to stay well-heeled if they have to and do without little luxuries like owning a car, an apartment, or having children, in order to have their Kelly bags, their Pacific pearl earrings and each season’s new Prada shoe.
But another thing that makes BDs different from the rest of us is that they are actually quite happy to have very few clothes – as long as they’re the right ones – and they’re not sentiment
al about them. They’ll wear a Chanel suit or an Armani evening ensemble constantly for one season and then, chop, get rid of it. Which was why, twice a year, the thrift shops of New York’s Upper East Side used suddenly to be full of size six designer clothes. Jackie Onassis was having her new season tax deductible throw-out.
And unlike the rest of us – who treat shopping like an Easter egg hunt, setting off blindly optimistic that we will stumble over something we like, that fits us in our price range – BDs plan their seasonal spends with military precision. They have personal relationships with the managers of the best shops, who ring them when the new stock comes in and put choice pieces aside.
‘Mrs Kellogg,’ they say. ‘We’ve just received this aqua palazzo pants-suit which we think would be perfect for St Barts. We only have one size four and we’re holding it for you.’ Then the BDs bowl over and carefully select exactly what they ‘need’ for business day, casual day, after six, resort and formal evening wear.
And it doesn’t end there. Once chosen, it all has to be altered to fit exactly by the special seamstress the BD has cultivated over several years. Not just taking up the sleeves or shortening legs, mind you; the BD will have an entire jacket rebuilt in order to get the perfect line across the shoulder, the precise flatness of a lapel. She’ll spend another couple of hundred dollars on a jacket that already cost her $2000.
Then they look after it all like Lord Montagu of Beaulieu looks after his cars. The Turin shroud doesn’t get better attention than a BD’s wardrobe. One Best Dressed Sydney woman, who is also a mother in full-time work, drives forty-five minutes on Saturdays to and from the only drycleaner in the metropolis she deems capable of properly looking after her clothes. New York BD Nan Kempner sends her gear to Paris for pressing.
On a day-to-day basis, it’s pure Duntroon. They plan and press what they’re going to wear the night before and check it for the stains, loose buttons and dropped hems we all notice on the way to work. They buy imported pantyhose in bulk and keep them in special little embroidered bags. They wash their French lingerie by hand, polish their leather handbags each week and have shoes re-heeled before they quite need it. Legendary New York magazine editor Diana Vreeland (Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue) used to have the soles of her shoes polished, because she said it was so ‘ordinary’ not to.
There is nothing ordinary about being a BD. It’s a full-time occupation. They have to fit breathing and feeding themselves around checking hems, steaming jackets and filing spare buttons. Mind you, they’re on a permanent starvation diet anyway, to maintain the Duchess of Windsor figure that is an essential part of being a human coat-hanger. (That or plastic surgery.)
All of which makes shaving your head and hanging upside down seem like a perfectly sensible thing to do. As long as you have the new season’s saffron robes to do it in, of course.
The joy of specs
Men probably don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, Dorothy was right. But they often promote them or marry them. It works like the brunette thing. They get taken more seriously.
Mind you, it was different in Dot’s day. Girls who wore glasses then wore glasses. If they didn’t wear them, they would have fallen down holes or ended up sitting next to Mr Magoo on the express train, next stop Fort Apache, the Bronx.
The point being, they didn’t have bright blue contact lenses as an alternative back in the 1930s. These days, when a gal wears goggles, it’s a style decision. They represent an unmissable opportunity to pay and display yet another designer accessory. No wonder people who don’t really need specs ponce around in Armani frames.
People like movie stars, for instance. When it comes to image, nothing they do is just for practicality. People who think that having ribs removed and silicone implants put in their calves are valid tax deductions are not going to baulk at putting a little sliver of plastic in their eyes for instant better eyesight without glasses.
So I reckon when you see a big star in specs, it’s all contrived and they have sussed out that glasses can not only enhance your perceived intelligence, they can make you look terribly attractive as well. They can turn a guy from bozo babe magnet into thinking woman’s crumpet in one trip to the optometrist.
I don’t think Liam Neeson is a twit – he probably really needs his little round horn-rims – but either way, they make him even more dreamy than he is normally. I interviewed him once and blushed like a radish every time he said my name. I still force friends to listen to the tape at dinner parties. He was wearing the glasses. Anyway, whether he needs them or not, those specs make Mr Neeson look like the chemistry teacher who has no idea how gorgeous he is.
But when it comes to others, I’m not so sure. I’m not at all convinced, for example, that Kevin Costner has a rare form of astigmatism that makes spectacles the only thing between him and the wheels of a bus, but I reckon he is smart enough to know how much they suit him. They really set off a dinner jacket and those attractive smiley lines he got around his eyes when he spent all that time out in full sunlight disco-dancing with wolves.
It starts getting really suspect with people like Sylvester Stallone, who would probably say he needs them when he’s painting (ha!). We might let Speccy Schwarzenegger off the hook because he is married to a Kennedy, so you might trip over the odd book (or copy of George magazine) in that house, but I’m certain Bruce ‘Four Eyes’ Willis hasn’t strained his peepers reading much recently, unless it was balance sheets for Planet Hollywood, or Demi’s Amex bill.
Come to think of it, I think I’ve even seen Ms Moore in black-framed geek glasses, trying to make like Jodie Foster (after a lobotomy). Jodie gives good specs. Mind you, she has a big desk, too, and her own production company, so she’s allowed to wear them. She actually is intelligent.
But she’d probably find it harder to make people believe it if she wore contacts, being pretty and blonde and that.
Oh solo me, oh
I never could see the point of butterknives, and I’m quite happy not to wear gloves to work, but there is one social convention I would really like to reinstate.
My mother used to call them Spare Men. I really can’t think of anything handier. She always had a list of them in her head, and if she didn’t have one for a dinner party she would phone around madly until she bagged one. She had Spare Women, too. The idea was – and how quaint it seems – that it was the hostess’s responsibility to make sure everyone at a lunch or dinner party had a potential partner to flirt with. Or at least talk to.
No single woman ever sat at my mother’s table wondering if there was a single man left anywhere in the world, because there would be at least one sitting next to her. It didn’t matter if he looked like a warthog and she loathed him on sight. It just mattered that he was there.
Just at the moment I’m single, okay? Like Noël Coward, I travel alone. And when I arrive at your house for dinner in a carefully planned outfit and a no-make-up make-up look that took thirty minutes to do, wearing my best scent and carrying an expensive bottle of wine, I would really love it if you had provided a single male for me to sit next to. Preferably one I haven’t met.
I’m not saying I want you to lay on some inter-course intercourse, but it would be really nice, just occasionally, to feel I had the chance of meeting a man at a civilised social engagement. As opposed to a mosh pit.
Let me give you an example. One Christmas I was invited to a lovely lunch at Palm Beach. There were three heterosexual couples, three gay couples, about six single gay men. And me. A partridge in a pear tree would have been welcome.
I think it’s rude and I think it’s lazy, but it happens all the time.
As a reaction, there is a trend among Sydney’s solos for singles-only dinners.
They are hideous. Everyone arrives with such tense expectations that the whole thing dissolves almost immediately into vile debauchery brought on by fear-drinking. There is usually a lot of nude disco-dancing and no true social contact.
These Mr Goodbar bacchanals
wouldn’t be necessary if couples reached out of their comfy smugness for a moment and provided opportunities for spinsters and bachelors to meet with propriety.
In Jane Austen’s time, couples seemed to enjoy it. It gave them something to do apart from arguing. Her novels are entirely about the importance of Spare Men. Every social engagement in those days was designed around getting single people together.
Please can we bring that convention back? I can live without calico bonnets, but I sure would love to meet the Duke of Right at dinner.
Why don’t you go and get dressed?
It is very easy to underestimate the value of the dress as a garment. I reckon that we women have been so caught up in the excitement of wearing trousers and the this-goes-with-that possibilities of separates that we have forgotten all about dresses. Which is a waste.
But ever since the first suffragette rode her penny-farthing in shocking pantaloons, dresses have seemed too girly, too pappy, too easy. There was almost something shameful to the sisterhood about wearing dresses.
They came to represent a time when we weren’t allowed to wear anything else and we wanted to break out and wear our zouave pants and boilersuits and bellbottoms and knickerbockers and culottes, to prove that we could. Not to forget gauchos, harem pants and that strange garment Olivia Newton-John wore to sing ‘Xanadu’, half-skirt, half-trouser, fully terrifying. Just watch one re-run of Rhoda and you’ll see what a bad idea all of those things were.
Even now, when we’ve calmed down a bit and most of us can wear trousers to work, even air hostesses and nurses (listen, this is all pretty recent, I remember when lady policepersons had to wear skirts), we’re still not quite sure about the semiotics of dresses. I think we’re still slightly concerned that they might give out Stepford Wife signals, because, let’s face it, none of those gingham-clad Martha Stewart clones wore bootleg pants.
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