Shoe Money

by Alderson, Maggie

  When it comes to the travelling shoe, if you are going to be doing major bushwalking you would tend towards the trainer, and my friend Seb says he has also found them very effective as a security wallet. He travelled all round South-East Asia with his parents’ American Express card sewn into the inner sole of his Nikes, for emergencies. Even in the roughest backpacker accommodation he knew it was safe, because no-one with normal nasal functioning would deliberately approach one of his trainers.

  For exactly that reason I’m a great fan of the holiday Birkenstock. No matter that they used to be worn only by vegans (they remind them of lunch) and chiropractors, they are still a backless shoe, which makes them a mule in my book. Perfectly painted red toenails spark them up a treat. Away from home I’ll even wear them with socks. See if I care.

  About your holiday hat. Packing purists would take only a rollable Panama straw or cotton sunhat, but I go the other route, which is the hat you wear all the time. As I am quite prepared to wear it in public at Mascot airport, this means my trusty straw stetson can come everywhere with me. Nothing beats it for keeping off the sun, and it is also handy for carrying fruit and giving water to a thirsty horse.

  If you are going to a location where there could be a sudden drop in the temperature, try packing a pair of 15-denier tights. They take up no room and can provide an amazing layer of warmth under the pants. But please don’t wear them with your shorts.

  As for your choice of colour theme, I have always found navy ideal. My bandana, as mentioned, is red; my sarong is red, white and blue stripes; and sometimes I go crazee and take a red cardigan. It just works. I do advise against choosing white as your main colour, and I consider two weeks not wearing black a holiday in itself. The only place I deviate from this colour code is my sundress, which is a long sage-green slip by Ghost which looks gorgeous with navy. My Birkenstocks, regrettably, are the same colour as Weet-Bix. I am currently on a global search for a pair of red ones.

  Feeling crumby

  I am not a monkey. Can we please be clear about that? I am not a monkey, so please don’t groom me. Well, maybe if we are curled up on the sofa on a chilly Sunday afternoon watching an old movie and eating shortbread biscuits you can groom me a bit. But not in public, OK?

  So if you see me at a cocktail party and I have a blonde hair on the shoulder of my black jacket, can you please leave it there? It’s my hair and I want it. I’ve got plans for it. And if I have a little crumb of sourdough bread on my other shoulder I probably put it there specially and I don’t need you to invade my personal space and brush it off. OK?

  And that biro mark you have just noticed on my new cream skirt, please don’t prod me on the leg and tell me about it. Nobody knows about it more than me. I don’t need reminding that I dropped a nasty blue ballpoint pen on my favourite skirt. It is as indelibly inscribed on my heart as it is on the double layer chiffon.

  I’m not sure why I object to these pickings and pokings so much, but they make me feel completely invaded. Maybe I’m turning into Howard Hughes, because I am quite fussy about who touches me, but some people seem to think it’s open slather. I don’t kiss my work mates good morning, for example, and I could get arrested if I touched one of them on their bottom in the office, because it is not considered appropriate behaviour. But apparently it is perfectly acceptable to touch someone’s chest in any situation, as long as there is a stray bit of cornflake resting on it.

  Well, it’s not OK with me and I suspect it’s not OK with most of you either.

  In fact I think flicking someone else’s scurf off the shoulders of their jacket, or pointing out a little soiling in their attire is about the rudest thing you can do. It’s got such a know-all air to it and implies with a bright smile and a brush of a hand, ‘You really aren’t very well groomed, are you?’ Well, I’m sick of being patrolled by the self-appointed grooming police and on behalf of all of us natural-born filth packets, I am asking them to stop it.

  They don’t restrict themselves to remarking on temporary specks either; some of them will happily pass comment on the fundamental state of your garments. Such a woman once pointed out to me that the fabric was worn away on the front of one of my Patrick Cox satin loafers.

  I already knew it was worn away, it was from driving, but I couldn’t bear to stop wearing them because they were so nice when I bought them. It was none of her business if they were old and crappy and now, because buying shoes is like a marriage. Long after they have become crumpled and scuffed, you still see them the way they were when you first met.

  She wouldn’t have come up and told me, ‘Your partner is looking a bit lined, isn’t he?’ But she felt it was perfectly fine to insult my shoes.

  And what makes these bossy people assume that we aspire to their compulsive obsessive standards of personal care anyway? If they want to spend half their income on drycleaning and several hours a day holding a lint roller, that is their choice. I’d rather read a good book. Preferably one covered in fly splats and coffee rings.

  I simply don’t aspire to look like the kind of woman who has so much time on her hands she can spend all morning sponging her outfit before venturing forth to the manicure parlour. I’m happy to look like I work for a living. Dammit, I’m proud of it.

  So the next time someone picks a bit of fluff from my sleeve I’m going to pick it right up and put it back. Or better still, I will howl and gibber like a crazed baboon. That should stop them.

  Beyond the pale

  We are all damaged goods. Sun-damaged goods. How can you avoid it in this solar-powered country? Even hands that have lived here only a few years tell the story: wrinkles, crinkles and brown spots. After just three Australian summers, the backs of my hands looked older than my sister’s. She’s seven years my senior. And big on gardening. The difference is that she lives in England, where they still have an ozone layer, and I live here, where we don’t.

  Sun damage is so endemic in Australia that it’s become part of life. It affects our perception. Here, where it’s normal for teenagers to have crow’s feet, people who have grown up in darker corners of the world find themselves judged much younger than their passports admit.

  I arrived from gloomy old Eeyore Britain with skin that rainy summers had left relatively unscarred. But now the relentless fingers of UV have left their indelible marks across my forehead.

  And I’m not talking about skin damage that is the just dessert of days baking at Bondi or sizzling at Sorrento. If I go anywhere near a beach, I’m swathed like Lawrence of Arabia, coated in unguent like the dead girl in Goldfinger, wearing a broad-brimmed stetson and sitting under an umbrella (oh, the joys of the open-air life).

  The new lines on my face are merely the result of the morning walk, the few minutes at lunchtime getting a sandwich, waiting for a taxi, driving the car, walking up Oxford Street on Saturday. Incidental sun exposure. And this is a brow that never leaves the house without sunblock. Factor 15 at least, even on cloudy days (UV this fierce laughs at cloud cover), despite derision from some of my Aussie friends, who consider the use of daily sun protection on a par with drinking decaffeinated coffee and low-alcohol wine. They don’t seem to mind that people occasionally mistake them for frill-necked lizards.

  But those of us who do attempt to protect our skin from this unnatural assault should pray to the high, hot heavens that the expensive sunblock we smear on daily is doing a better job at protecting us from skin cancer’s deadly creep than it is at protecting us from wrinkles.

  Apparently, one of the problems is that it wears off, so even if you have plastered it on in the morning, by lunchtime you’re as ready for a grilling as a piece of John Dory at Doyles. You’ve got to apply and reapply the stuff, the beauty editors now tell us.

  But before you even start to grapple with the tricky details of application, you’ve got to find a sunblock that doesn’t make you look as if you’re auditioning for Marcel Marceau. Some of them go on as pure chalk, others pure grease. Just ask my flatmate. At tw
enty-three, he’s fair-skinned and smooth-browed, and he wants to stay that way. So, every morning he leaves the house looking as though he’s trying out to be the next man in the moon. Shiny.

  He’s got beautiful skin as a result, except when it’s covered in spots caused by hopelessly clogged pores. No wonder they call it sunblock, he says.

  If the shoe fits …

  I once knew a man who had only one pair of shoes. Tom wasn’t poor, that was just the way he did shoes, because he hated loathed detested shopping. So every year on October 1, he would go and buy a new pair of black Doc Martens. He would walk out of the shop in them, leaving the old pair behind, and then he’d wear them every single day, without polishing, without mending, without even replacing broken shoelaces, until annual shoe day came around again.

  Even with this fail-safe system – same shoe, same size, same shop – he still dreaded it. About the middle of September he would start grumbling about having to buy new shoes and how hideous it was going to be. He hated shopping that much.

  Troubled by his distress (and the terrible state of his shoes from August onwards), I wasted a great deal of breath trying to explain to Tom that if he bought two identical pairs of shoes next October 1 and wore them on alternate days, putting shoetrees in on the rest day, he wouldn’t need to buy any new shoes until two-and-a-half, possibly three years later.

  All shoes need a day off after they have been worn, I told him. They need to breathe and rest their leather generally have a little lie down. They will last more than twice as long if you give it to them. I even offered to buy him the shoetrees, but he couldn’t handle the concept of having more than one pair of shoes in the house. Imagine that.

  A lady I met in Sydney told me about a similar system she developed as a bright young gal in the 1950s, struggling to make her way in life on a salesgirl’s meagre wage. Rather like Tom, Isabella would buy the same pair of shoes each year. The difference was that hers were Bally stilettos and she had to save up like mad to have them.

  Each spring she would buy a pair in white. She’d wear them to work every day, walking into the city from Edge-cliff because the saving on the bus fare went towards the shoe fund. When autumn rolled around and they began to look a bit scuzzy, she dyed them black and carried on wearing them every day until she had saved up enough shoe money from bus fares and missed dinners for the next pair. She polished them every night and when they got wet she stuffed them with newspaper to keep them in shape.

  I am happy to say that Isabella is now a woman of means and has a glorious shoe closet devoted to beautiful stilettos in every colour and pattern which she has bought all over the world. Some of them she has hardly ever worn, but, after all those years of scrimping, she still appreciates every pair and is very generous about passing them on to the less footwear-privileged.

  Isabella deserved to get on in life, because she knew it was better to save up for one good pair of shoes a year than hoof around in three or four different ones of inferior quality. But if only she could have had two pairs of shoes. They could have lasted her so much longer.

  My art collector friend, Amanda, has two pairs of shoes. Just the two. Not because she has to scratch the cash together for them, but because she hates clutter. She doesn’t really have furniture either; it’s so messy and gets in the way of the art.

  So she has two pairs of shoes on a revolving system, although in her case there’s no particular calendar to the changing of the guard. Instead, it works like this – when she finds a new pair of shoes she likes enough to buy, one of the other pairs has to go. Outski. Bang.

  It works for her, just as Tom’s and Isabella’s shoe systems worked for them. But I think I’ll just stick to my own footwear philosophy. As many as possible, until death do us part.

  Secret clothes

  I was once invited to a dinner party where you had to bring your secret food fetish. Around that table there were dog biscuits, uncooked cake mix, maraschino cherries, strawberry jam and stilton cheese, dry cereal, baked beans (eaten out of the tin), condensed milk (sucked from the tube) and advocaat.

  How much more fun it would have been if the dress code had matched the menu. Imagine if you had to wear in public the magnificently hideous garment you secretly love slipping into, but would be horrified if anyone saw you wearing. The kind of garment my native NewYorker friend Karen calls a schmatte. Which is Yiddish for rag.

  We all know what Cherie Blair’s is. What’s yours?

  Well, I’m prepared to admit it. I would have been sucking on my condensed milk in my pink Mexican dress. It is basically a bright fuschia embroidered kaftan – but not nearly as nice as that makes it sound.

  It is made of cotton which hasn’t softened with wash and wear, and age has not wearied the hardness of the colour. It stops mid-calf, has sticky-out short sleeves, an unflattering boatish neckline and a yoke above the bust, a cut guaranteed to make Jodie Kidd look bulbous. It’s a Hattie Jacques of a dress. Plus it’s way too big for me, but it was the only pink one in Merida and I had to have it. I love that dress. I shrug it on at the weekend and immediately feel like someone’s mad aunt. It’s very freeing. I’d die if anyone saw me in it. I’m wearing it now.

  Well, that’s me. To find out what the truly chic wear off duty, I rang some of Australia’s fashion authorities and asked what they wear when we’re not looking.

  Deborah Thomas, editor of Cleo magazine, previously a Paris catwalk model and former editor of Elle and Mode: ‘A bright turquoise chenille dressing-gown with giant daisies all over it. I saw it in the window of a shop in Melbourne and what clinched it is that Fran Drescher has a similar one in The Nanny. Of course, when I have visitors I wear the tasteful blue-and-white striped one …’

  Belinda Seper, eponymous boutique owner and chief womenswear buyer for Georges, Melbourne, and a fixture on Best Dressed Lists: ‘My mother just looks at me aghast. Is this the woman who is supposed to be among Sydney’s best dressed? I have old sweatshirt pants from agnès b. from ten years ago which are well past their use-by date, but they are so much a part of my emotional wardrobe, I can’t part with them. Then, of course, there are the famous old red cashmere socks with holes in them that you wear when you think nobody loves you.’

  Collette Dinnigan, fashion designer of international repute: ‘I’ve got a big old white nightdress with pintucks and embroidery. It’s quite short. I wore it down to the beach once.’

  Jane Roarty, former fashion director of marie claire magazine, now editor of marie claire maison: ‘A huge red stripey kaftan I bought on the island of Zanzibar. It hides every conceivable sin and I can roll around the house in it. You have to totally live the part. It’s exotic, it’s totally comfortable and I also feel it’s historic. I see myself as Madame Guggenheim.’

  Karin Upton Baker, the always immaculate editor of Harper’s Bazaar & Mode: ‘It’s too awful. It’s so shocking I’m not even sure I can speak. For years I have bought my slippers at White Ivy in Double Bay. Quilted white satin. Well, they wore out and I just haven’t had time, so I have resorted to a pair of clear plastic thongs that I bought to wear in the showers at a health spa. There is kind of a sparkle through them and they did have large daisies on them, which I had my husband remove with pliers. They are hideous. Every time I put them on I think I must do something about them … but I’ve been wearing them for six months.’

  Too easy pieces

  The young have it so easy these days. Eee by gum when I were a lass we had to whittle our own clogs. We had to knit party dresses out of sacks. We shared one pair of socks between sixteen of us. And we were lucky. We had socks.

  Well, it wasn’t really that bad, but we didn’t have any of this Portmans and Witchery luxury that young groovers have today. What we had was op shops, jumble sales, army disposal and the occasional miracle find in a cheap chain store, because in those days they only sold trendy clothes in trendy shops and trendy shops were incredibly expensive. So if you wanted to be fashionable you had to be creative. Or
rich.

  My fashion bible was a book called Cheap Chic, which was all about dying nurses’ uniforms purple and sewing rickrack onto old cardigans. Even Vogue had a special section called ‘More Dash Than Cash’, devoted to looking fabulous in army shorts and grandpa’s spencer. Now, all you need to look fashionable on a budget is full command of the words, ‘I’ll take it.’ In the 70s you had to work for style (and I don’t mean a paper round).

  Take something as prosaic as a pair of Doc Martens. When I was twenty, they didn’t make them in women’s sizes and I really wanted some to go with my black jeans (home dyed; you couldn’t get black jeans), cast-off cardigan (embroidered with pearls by moi) and op-shop old man’s jacket (I couldn’t afford a new tailored jacket).

  Eventually, I did find some miniature Docs in a dusty old school outfitters, but that was after I had been to every shoe shop and disposal store in Dundee. You had to be tenacious to be trendy in 1979. Now you can get Doc Martens for babies. You can get J.P. Tod’s for toddlers.

  These days, the buyers do all the legwork for us and you don’t even need to make it to a proper fashion store to be in style. If you hit Coles on the right day, you can find something really tasty, like a pale pink, stretch towelling dress shaped like an elongated polo shirt, which is the best possible thing to wear over your cossie all summer. It will cost you about $30. You really couldn’t find anything better to wear to the beach at Versace or Gucci.

  Mind you, if you are really stuck on the latest designer styles, you can just run into Sportsgirl and pick up the most terrific ‘interpretations’ – sometimes before the real thing has even arrived at the import boutiques – for about one per cent of the designer price.

  Twenty years ago, this would have been a fantasy. So Saturdays were a ritual of jumble sales and trawls through my favourite charity shops. It was a challenge. You had to have a real eye for it and when you found something great for fifty cents hidden among a big pile of cack, it was incredibly thrilling.