So we’ll wear dresses for special occasions like high school formals and weddings (as long as we are the bride) and skimpy little numbers to parties, but that’s dressing up, not getting dressed. When was the last time you wore a dress to work? And I don’t mean that skirt and top your ten-year-old son once described as ‘a nice dress’, I mean one garment, worn on its own, or with perhaps the small addition of a cardigan in case of draughts.
If you want to be reminded what a good idea dresses can be, get Breakfast at Tiffany’s out on video again. Do you remember the scene where Holly Golightly is getting ready to go to prison-visiting? She puts on a black sleeveless shift dress, puts on her high heels, puts on her hat and walks out the door. Dressed.
That’s what I reckon we should all do. Make getting dressed mean just that again. Okay, so in Holly’s case it was a Givenchy dress (when that was still a good thing for a dress to be) and about as fine a pair of high heels as you could ever hope to meet, and she was actually Audrey Hepburn, not just you or me off to work, but the principle is the same.
Getting dressed with a dress is a much simpler prospect than mixing and matching all manner of unrelated garments, which involves more decisions of the colour co-ordination and tucking in or hanging out variety than I am capable of making on a Monday morning.
Dresses bring it down to three decisions. Which dress? Which shoes? Which handbag? And maybe a fourth – which cardigan?
This all came back to me just the other week when I was trying to figure out what you wore to a very chichi birthday party that started at 4 pm on a Sunday afternoon. Hopping around the house at 4.37 pm with a skirt on one leg, trousers on the other and four potential tops thrown on the floor it came to me in a flash. I’ll stop trying to create a look and just get dressed. On went the simple bias-cut frock and a pair of strappy sandals, a quick moment with an eyelash curler and there I was, dressed.
I think getting dressed the dress way again could be quite liberating. All men have to think about when they get dressed for work is which suit, which shirt, which tie. Why shouldn’t we make it that easy for ourselves? So go on, girls, go and get dressed.
Lost style icons
I hate to introduce a sad note, but there are some people I miss and I want to talk about them.
I miss the Princess. No matter what you think of the whole notion of inherited privilege, don’t you miss the splash of her glamour across the news? It was always such a pleasant burst of light relief from the pain, lies and misery of the general news to see the beautiful Princess in her latest gorgeous outfit, just dancing with someone, sporting a new haircut or smiling at an old lady. All she had to do to cheer me up was get a new handbag.
It wasn’t until it was taken away that I realised what a tonic she had been all those years. She even knew how to do smart casual in a war zone – remember the Ralph Lauren chambray shirt and jeans in Angola and Bosnia? Which is not to trivialise the impact she made on the landmines issue with those visits, but she just happened to look good while she was doing it. And that was exactly what made those heartbreaking images of limbless children flash around the world so fast. Her glamour helped inspire interest in the cause.
The Princess was a great comfort to all us ageing babes, too. The closer she got to forty, the better she looked. On one of her last public appearances, in that tomato-red shift dress, she looked her best ever, glowing in her maturity. I miss that. When fashion magazines are full of malnourished fourteen-year-old girls, sometimes you need reminding just how beautiful grown women with real baby mama tummies are.
Of course, she didn’t always look great. Remember that ghastly, twee sailor collar she wore the first time she came to Australia? But in the last few years of her life, she really developed her own style. Funny to think that, in years to come, fashion magazines will do the ‘Princess Di look’ in retro photo spreads just as they do with Jackie Onassis.
I miss Jackie O, too. She was wearing Oleg Cassini when I was wearing stretch towelling and it gave me something to aspire to. I don’t remember where I was when President Kennedy died, but I can recall precisely where I was when I first shrugged a cashmere cardigan around my shoulders, looped on a big rope of (fake, in my case) pearls and pushed a huge pair of dark glasses on my face. I was late for work. She was one of several reasons I once dyed my hair black. And is still a great excuse to buy shoes in more than one colour.
And I miss Michael Hutchence, too. He had such natural, throwaway, rock-god style. He didn’t try to look cool; it just happened. The last time I saw him, at Collette Dinnigan’s fashion show in Paris, he was wearing a tight Gucci pinstripe suit with a big tear in one knee. He wore that $4000 suit with the insouciance most men would wear jeans and he made it look as sexy as leather trousers. What a beautiful man he was.
So, with these great gaps in our pantheon of style icons, who do we rush to look at new pictures of now? I couldn’t give a flying fig leaf what Sophie Rhys-Jones wore to the Really Useful Company party; Hillary Clinton could have her head shaved and not attract my interest (although I wouldn’t mind talking to her about politics); and I don’t even know what the lead singer of Savage Garden looks like.
We might have to wait for Prince William to start choosing his own clothes and get married before the real thing comes along again.
The fashion victim diet
I’m wearing a big badge on my shirt today, it says: ‘Expand your wardrobe without spending a cent – stop and ask me how.’
It’s true, punters, there is an incredibly simple way to double the size of your wardrobe in just four weeks without spending any money. Yes, without entering a single designer boutique, you will have twice the choice of outfits each morning. How?
You just have to lose five kilos.
Instantly you will discover a whole world of clothes which haven’t fit you (fat you?) for three years, since the time you got that nasty food poisoning in Katmandu. As well as long-lamented trousers two sizes too small, keyhole bathing suits and tight Lycra dresses, a whole new repertoire of clothing combinations will become available to you. Nifty manoeuvres like tucked-in shirts and belted outfits, which were off limits while you had to keep up constant stomach, thigh and butt censorship, will once more be part of your world. Getting dressed will become fun again.
All you have to do is lose those pesky little five kilos – which are of course additional to your ‘real’ weight anyway (which is whatever you weighed at your high school formal). Make this small effort, my friends, and once again you will be able to wear tops which stop dead at the waist, without going on to apologise for your hips.
Now I know it’s not easy to lose weight. You keep trying to leave it places, but somehow it always finds its way home. And because I know how hard it is, and because I care deeply about your wardrobes, I have written a diet book which will make losing weight so simple and easy. The Fashion Victim Diet is only one page long. Because all diet books boil down to one page. Page 139.
The first 138 pages explain the amazing new discovery that makes this the best diet ever invented, so easy to follow and guaranteed to make superfluous adipose melt like a Paddle-pop in the sun. It might be about the miraculous enzymes in gherkins which cause love handles to wither on impact, a doctoral thesis on liver function with diagrams, or a detailed explanation of why you should eat like a Cameroonian pigmy, because they are never overweight and never suffer from scrotal cancer. They might tell how you can chant yourself thin, or why goose fat makes you gorgeous while chicken fat makes you gross.
Whatever those first chapters say, you will believe it with the zeal felt only by someone who now knows there is a way they’ll be back in a bikini by New Year’s Day. Then you reach page 139 where it says, You cannot eat peanut butter or drink pinot noir and lose weight on this miracle diet, pigface. Because all diets, whatever their revolutionary secret, boil down to the same thing – you can’t get slim and eat and drink the good stuff.
So you can accept that, suffer and regain th
e full promise of your wardrobe, or you have two other alternatives. You can go and lick pavements in Nepal in the hope of another dose of dalai belly. Or you can go shopping.
See you in Georges.
A great vintage
I miss the old blokes. It was Anzac Day that triggered this off. On the corner of Hunter Street I saw this wonderful old guy. He was wearing the most beautiful grey suit, a regimental tie, a green-and-white polka dot silk handkerchief, polished shoes and a grey felt hat. And, of course, medals. He was carrying a rolled umbrella and standing up straight. No hands had ever been caught lounging in the pockets of that suit. He was so smart. I wanted to shake his hand.
Maybe it was the years in the army that did it, but I really miss the standards of grooming and deportment of my father’s generation. They were never scruffy. Even in sailing gear – which in Doug’s case (Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers) was Levi’s, a Guernsey sweater, canvas deck shoes and a Greek fisherman’s cap – they were relaxed, but there was always a standard. His friend Max Savage (Merchant Navy) had wonderful old brick-red sailing trousers and a sailing smock. These were ancient garments, but they weren’t tacky. They were one’s sailing clothes. No socks of course, but clean fingernails.
They had a sense of style without being gimmicky, that generation. It was like they decided at a certain point what they were going to wear, had the suits made by their tailor, stocked up on shirts and sweaters as necessary and that was it. Clothes were done. Although there was always room for a bit of fun with silk handkerchiefs and racy ties.
Doug’s great friend Don Munro (Royal Engineers, Burma) used to buy him saucy ties as a joke. I remember one involving something called the White Anchor sailing club which they thought was hilarious (something about W. Anchor which I didn’t understand in 1970). Don had a great look. A navy suit with a special longer-line jacket, handmade shirts, various ties and dark brown suede chukka boots. I think he used to wear red cashmere socks as well, but it was the boots that did it for me. So cool.
Walter Dean (Royal Engineers) was another one. Always immaculate. Beautiful suits, hair always cut and groomed. He would no more have let his hair grow to his collar than fail to stand up when a lady entered the room. You know that gorgeous thing when they bob up from the chair every time you get up? I don’t care how old-fashioned it is, it makes me feel good.
They haven’t all gone of course. Spencer Copeland (Cavalry, Royal Engineers) is always perfectly turned out. When I visited his house in Cornwall last year he was wearing a lovely grey suit to show people around his china collection, and when they had gone he disappeared for a moment and then came back wearing a burgundy cashmere cardigan instead of the jacket, so he could be more comfortable for tea. I swooned. He’s seventy-something. He still skis.
I think it must have been partly a result of the rather extreme level of discipline at school in their day, combined with the compulsory army experience, that gave the WWII generation the standards of attire they stuck to for life, but that’s not to say these guys were all stitched-up old fascists. They were all charming and twinkly (Spencer still is) and, certainly in the case of Don and Doug, could tend towards the wild if they felt like it.
Doug was a petrol-head at Brooklands in the 1930s. Don used to sail to America for fun. They both had sports cars way past the age they said they would and they loved a boys’ trip to Cardiff Arms Park or Murrayfield for the rugby (they once drank an Edinburgh hotel dry of Dom Perignon, but that’s another story). So they certainly weren’t stuffy. But they never hung up a tie still knotted and they never, ever wore unpolished shoes.
Travelling lite
As you know, I’m the kind of twit who packs five cardigans and six pairs of shoes for a weekend in the country, but there have been occasions when I have travelled light, honestly there have. On more than one trip I have heard the blissful words, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ in relation to my luggage, as opposed to the more usual, ‘What have you got in here? Dead bodies?’
Obviously if you’re going island-hopping around Greece, or backpacking in Vietnam, it makes sense to leave four of the cardigans at home, but there’s more to travelling light than just taking less than you want to. It’s a state of mind and it’s one which you can apply just as easily to a visit to New York, London or Paris as two weeks on the beach in Bali. Some people are born with it, but you can learn it.
The secret is this: only take one of any garment type. One shirt, one short, one pant, one cardie, one pair of shoes, that’s it. For the city trips you’ll substitute a cashmere shawl for your sarong and a tailored jacket for your favourite old linen shirt, but the theory is the same.
It may sound impossible, if not insanitary (One T-shirt? Is she kidding?), but don’t you find that you end up wearing the same thing every day on holiday anyway? To travel light, that’s all you take. The things you wear every day. You don’t take the ones you normally leave in the suitcase, get it?
And if you can force yourself to do it, minimalist packing has bonuses way beyond the practical considerations of hopping on and off boats and planes and trains and buses with three suitbags, a hatbox and a Louis Vuitton shoe trunk. It gives you an incredible lightness of being along with the incredible lightness of luggage, because it frees you from the worry of wondering what you should wear.
You can’t worry about it because you don’t have any choice. For anyone who regularly re-carpets their bedroom floor with clothes in the search for something to leave the house in, that is very liberating. It also makes you very creative with what you do have.
On a trip around Turkey with my boyfriend and one very small bag, we drove from banana plantations and camels on the southern coast to the central city of Konya in one day. It was dusk when we got to Konya. It was also snowing. I soon figured out why the city’s famous Whirling Dervishes wear trousers underneath their skirts. To keep warm.
After five minutes as a styling Dervish in my hotel room I emerged ready to explore Konya by night, wearing: Birkenstock sandals, socks, leggings, a swimsuit, a T-shirt, a sundress, a shirt, a cotton cardigan, a bandana tied round my head like Willie Nelson and a sarong wittily draped as a shawl. Gee, was I cosy. The only garment left lying on the bed was my shorts.
And the funny thing was that, while I wouldn’t want to wear that particular outfit strolling along Boulevard St Germain, it didn’t look as bag-lady nuts as it could have, because everything was navy, with red and white accents in the bandana and sarong. I also kept telling myself (and anyone else who would listen) that Dries Van Noten had recently had a big moment with pants under dresses, so it was quite a valid look that season anyway.
Which is more than can be said for the socks-tucked-into-baseball-cap ear-warmer ensemble dreamed up by the BF the same evening. He got some very funny glances, but as he said, with the assurance of one of life’s natural light packers, at least he had warm ears.
The power of one packing system
Okay, having established that it is possible even for a cardigan-fixated, shoe-obsessed twit like me occasionally to travel light, let’s break this down a bit. I’m going to share with you my packing master list for casual, hot weather holidays.
This is designed according to my previously explained Power of One Packing System, which is based on the understanding that you can only take one example of any garment type (this includes cardigans) and that your whole travelling wardrobe should be one colour, with bright accents.
I worked this out by keeping notes of what I actually wore on trips and anything I bitterly regretted leaving at home on the bed, and then referring to these notes when packing for the next holiday. For a while this meant I was always perfectly equipped for the previous expedition, but after a few years of refinement (and borrowing clothes from other people on holiday) I came up with the master list. It works for me.
The Master List
One pair of shoes – either sandals or trainers
One pair of shorts
One T-shirt
One sarong
One pair of light pants or leggings
One shirt
One jumper or one cardigan
One hat
One swimsuit
One sundress (optional for men, who can substitute a second shirt or T-shirt)
One pair of socks
One set of undies
One bandana
One feature necklace
One shoulder bag
Just for fun, put that little pile on your bed and thrill at how tiny it is. Then consider that when you get on the plane you will be wearing the pants, T-shirt and shirt, with the trainers or sandals on your feet, the jumper around your shoulders, the necklace around your neck, the undies on your bottom, the hat on your head and the bandana around that. So your little bag will contain only the shorts, the sundress, the socks and the sarong. Wow. And a bumper-sized tube of Travelwash.
You will be amazed how many different outfits you can get out of this micro-wardrobe. Especially if you think outside the square when you choose the items. The sundress doesn’t have to be a flowery thigh flipper, it can just as easily be a bias-cut ankle-length column that is comfortable to wear drifting around ruins in the day and perfect for lounging around in with an ouzo at night. With the shirt knotted over it, it will be very chic; with the cardigan, quite cosy.
The bandana and the sarong/shawl are two of your key items – don’t think of them as mere accessories, they are survival kits. They can be used as towels, picnic rugs, beach mats, tablecloths, turbans, bandages, tents, fan belts and so on. I couldn’t conceive of going away without my red bandanna; it is totemic. It brightens up my favourite navy linen shirt and trouser ensemble and looks just as good tied round my straw stetson as it does around my neck. When I’m feeling really up myself I knot it around the handle of my shoulder bag. Ça c’est bon, monsieur. Fwa fwa fwa.
Shoe Money Page 9
