I can still remember some of my best-ever hauls, like the Salvation Army jumble sale where I scored a never-worn 1950s school mac in navy blue gaberdine and three pairs of ladies’ shoes from the 1920s – in my size. At another, I found a bias-cut crêpe dress from the 1930s which could have been tailored for me, and in a charity shop, a Harris tweed sportscoat which had hand-made fishing flies pinned behind the collar.
But although it thrills me that I can now find a perfect agnès b. ‘inspired’ cardigan at Country Road (rather than trying to make one out of a pair of long johns), this eat-as-much-as-you-like smorgasbord of fashion shopping has taken some of the fun out of the chase. If it’s that easy, you just don’t want it so much.
Platform shoes
‘Oh darling, please wear your highest platform shoes, you know how I love you in them …’
No-one has ever said this. It is one of the few fashion pronouncements that men, small children and mothers actually get right – high platform shoes are hideously ugly.
Yet every few years – the 1940s, the 1970s, the early 1990s, the early mid-1990s, the late mid-1990s – they come back into vogue and even relatively normal women feel left out unless they victim around in them for a bit.
Then one day we look in the mirror and realise we are wearing surgical boots. Op shops fill with mini-Stone-henges of monolithic shoes. The madness has passed for a while.
Right now they aren’t strictly speaking in fashion (whatever that is), or at least they weren’t last week, yet the streets are still full of girls clomping around looking like they have bricks attached to their feet. Why?
Well, there are the fashion throwbacks of course. Just as you still see men who have worn brothel creepers continuously since 1959, their faces now as crepey as their soles, there are women who have clung to their platforms as a boho statement ever since David Bowie bit them on the bum in 1972. Ziggy plays guitarrrr. He also wore stupid shoes and some people are determined to preserve the moment. If you really want to dress like a fossil there are always obscure outlets where you can get this stuff.
But what about people young enough to know better? There is the because-they-make-me-look-taller argument, which works brilliantly as long as you stand behind a bar all day. Otherwise it takes just one downward glance to reveal you are just a short person wearing tall shoes. Men have been known to flee at such moments of revelation, with the same sense of shock experienced by Julie Christie when the red duffle coat turned round in Don’t Look Now. Like Venice in winter, big platforms are really spooky.
Of course very high heels – which are hugely in fashion now, or they were yesterday – are scary too, especially when worn with leather miniskirts, but at least they lengthen your calves and tip your hips into a fatty-bum-bum tilt, which is rumoured to be alluring. Because as you teeter you wiggle. That’s it. It’s painful, it’s stupid, but it is sexy. Platforms just make you walk like Herman Munster.
If Marilyn Monroe had been wearing platforms rather than deliberately mismatched stilettoes (apparently she had the heels sawn to different heights specially to give her that walk) when she shimmied down to the jetty in Some Like It Hot, she would have caused a tidal wave. Rather than nuclear fission.
Platform shoes are also dangerous. Footwear that can bring such a catwalk veteran as Naomi Campbell crashing down to earth should be issued with a Government Health Warning. Something along the lines of: Man, these shoes is mean.
And if that still isn’t enough to put you off being a career clompasaurus, just consider the rollcall of people famously associated with platform shoes. Elton John, in his novelty spectacles period. KISS. Gary Glitter. Princess Margaret. The Spice Girls.
Baby Spice twisted her ankle falling off her high-rise shoes at Royal Ascot and made the front page of The Times. Now don’t those ten-centimetre spike heels suddenly look attractive?
In a lather
Thank you for asking me, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to come out for the next few weeks. I’m rather busy as a little white stranger was delivered this morning. It is five years since I have heard the patter of a tiny spin cycle in my own home and I’m staying in to bond with Ben.
Ben Dix the washing machine, that is. He is my new pride and joy and I won’t be happy until every garment, towel, sheet and table cloth I own has passed through his porthole door and come out clean and fresh and smelling of the free fabric conditioner he brought with him.
When my parents first got an automatic washing machine, in about 1970, they pulled up chairs to watch it go round, washing and rinsing and spinning all by itself. They thought it was miraculous (no more mangle!). I thought they were nuts, but now I’m trying to figure out how I can get the sofa into the bathroom so I can watch Ben perform the cold wash in comfort. And I can’t wait for that climactic moment when he switches from spinning to drying. Because Ben is a combined unit. He can wash and dry all on his own.
That’s why he cost the price of a one bedroom unit in Perth.
Apart from his technical wizardry (he heats up his own water and judges the minimum amount he can use for each load completely unaided, because he cares deeply about the environment), Ben represents a return to adulthood for me, after half a decade living in units that simply could not accommodate any white goods beyond a fridge and a toaster.
For that time my Saturdays have been a trudge of humungous bags in and out of lifts to communal laundries, only to find all the machines were already full. Or having got up at 7.00 am to secure one, of going back an hour later to find my pile of precious clothes suppurating on top of the dryer while someone else’s gear purred smugly inside.
In one building where we had a rooftop washing line, I came back to check on my non-fast darks load, to find a woman moving my damp whites out of the sunshine into a dank corner in favour of her own, because hers was ‘wetter’. I went back later and threw a pair of her knickers off the roof. After that I stopped hanging my stuff out to dry for fear of reprisals, so it was a choice of festooning it around the flat, like the rags at the site of a recent vision of the Virgin Mary, or nuking it in the communal driers.
They certainly do the job (John Olsen could fire pots in them), but the process involves first taking the pubic lint out of the dryer after someone else’s turn, which makes me feel sick. Irrational I know, because it is all freshly washed (otherwise it wouldn’t be in the dryer, would it?). But I don’t want to touch other people’s sock fluff and underscunder plunder at any stage of the wash cycle.
Mind you, at least the apartment buildings here have laundries. In London you have to go to a public laundrette. The horror, the horror. The last time I ever used one I saw a man inspect a pair of trousers he was about to wash, then take off the ones he was wearing and put them in a machine instead. And believe me, he looked nothing like the bronzed love god in the Levi’s commercial.
Mad aunt disease
I have on occasion in this book made reference to a type called a ‘mad aunt’. I wish to make it clear that this is in no way a derogatory term. In fact, it is one of my dearest ambitions. It is a nirvanic state I have been working up to for some years and hope to realise fully around my sixty-second birthday.
Once I am officially a Mad Aunt, I won’t have to worry about smart casual or having the right shoes ever again. I’ll be able to wear kaftans, smocks and Dalai Lama robes every day. Bold artisanal jewellery will be my signature and I’ll wear espadrilles to drinks parties.
I never had a Mad Aunt of my own, but the nearest would have been a tiny Austrian lady called Lottie who was a friend of my parents. I was very impressed with her because she had once lived in a cave, and although I didn’t meet her many times she was a crucial formative influence through the clothes she passed on to me for dress-ups.
Her empire-line bottle-green velvet cocktail dress and ebony cigarette holder were the basis of my Cruella De Vil outfit, using a bottle of Quink ink to dye one side of my hair black.
Even better was a 1950s palm tree print ju
mpsuit with clambaker legs (just below the knee, with turn-ups), a cinched-in waist and a Miami designer label. I loved to imagine on what kind of occasions Lottie would have worn it, because there certainly wasn’t much call for it in rural England. I could see her in a cartwheel hat, cat’s-eye sun-nies and mules, clip-clopping around pink Art Deco hotels carrying a lavish cocktail. Mad Aunts always have a glamorous past.
They also have a significant place in literature, first catching my attention in a book called Auntie Robbo. The character of the aunt, as described by her eight-year-old nephew, is in her seventies, and considers it quite normal to travel around Scotland in a gypsy caravan wearing a Sherlock Holmes coat and deerstalker hat at all times. She is also fearless and very good at catching robbers. I thought she was heaven.
Of course, the great Mad Aunts of the modern era are the Two Fat Ladies of the TV cooking show. So what if the food is vile, I would much rather watch them than those anorexic neurotics on Friends. In The One Where They Cook for Boy Scouts and Go Camping, we see Jennifer Paterson throw a piece of used kitchen paper on the ground. She seems a bit surprised herself and then explains, ‘I’m throwing it on the ground because it’s there.’
Satisfied, she continues making her frittata, a dish with more animal fats than the Royal Easter Show. She doesn’t care; she always wears capacious sailing smocks in bright colours and stretch trousers. That’s it, that’s what she wears. Whether she is cooking for Ghurkhas, attending a cocktail party in Belgravia, or riding round London on her motorbike, that’s what Jennifer wears.
Another jewel of a moment in the same episode is a sudden cut to a close-up of her currant-bun face, which is swathed in a tight black hood, while she sips on a restorative cocktail. ‘It’s my motorcycle helmet bag,’ she says happily. ‘Got to keep away these blasted midges.’
This total lack of concern for her appearance is quintessentially Mad Aunt – especially when combined with her always beautifully painted nails, dyed black hair and permanent red lipstick. Which show she obviously does care about her appearance, it’s just that she has her own rules for it.
I can hardly wait.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At last I get to write my Oscar acceptance speech …
Of course I want to thank everybody I have ever met and all of Rabbit’s friends and relations, but as this book is a collection of journalism I would particularly like to acknowledge all the wonderful people I have met through my profession.
Firstly, Fenella Souter, editor of Good Weekend, who made this book possible by asking me to write a column called Style Notes for her magazine, which forms the basis of this book. And Jane Wheatley, deputy editor of the same magazine, who understands, far better than most, the importance of a single word to a writer.
One of the great privileges of my life generally has been the extraordinary mentors I have had. Without them, I wouldn’t be writing this. To my great sadness, two of the most crucial ones are no longer here to read it.
Les Daly gave me my big break by offering me work experience on Options magazine when I had just left university. No one could write coverlines like Les, one of the few journos to have worked on both The Sunday Times and The Sun. What’s more, he was utterly respected at both (possibly because he had the most acid wit ever to come south from Scotland). I have even forgiven him for making me write an article called ‘Who’s Got the Best Bum In Britain?’. Thank you, Les. We all still miss you.
The other late, lamented mentor is John Leese, a truly great editor I worked with at You magazine and the Evening Standard. I don’t think he ever got enough credit in his lifetime, but then, he never went looking for it. John was much more interested in talking to his own journalists than power-lunching the great and the good. He hired other people to do that and took us lot out to Scribes.
John understood brilliantly the dynamics of a team, gave original writers total freedom, paid people what they deserved and so believed in safeguarding editorial integrity that he didn’t allow advertising reps to talk to his journos. Like all great editors, he was also very quirky and surrounded himself with eccentrics. The odder the group of people in morning conference, the happier he was. He adored dogs and hated men with beards. He gave me the opportunity to work on Fleet Street when it still was Fleet Street, which was pretty special. What an honour to have known and worked for such a man.
I would also like to thank the following mentors, protégés, friends and colleagues:
Josephine Fairley, for always having total faith in me and being a wonderful friend, editor, contributor and careers advisor. She gave me my first proper job on a magazine and, later, the one I had dreamed of since I was fourteen – features editor of Honey.
Alastair Fairley, for taking one look at me and recruiting me for the St Andrews University newspaper. For introducing me to his sister. And for giving the dinner party where I met Les Daly.
Genevieve Cooper, who taught me more about writing than anybody, by making me understand what makes an original voice and how to spot a cliché at twenty yards (Genevieve would put her blue pencil straight through that phrase, for example).
Barbie Boxall, the ultimate sticky bud, who was a great editor herself, but who met me as an equal when I was just a beginner and taught me so much. And thank you, Barbie, for sharing Rose with me.
Ruby Millington (sticky bud two) and Caris Davis, for the most fun I ever had at work, when we were doing Metropolis at the Evening Standard. ‘Michael plans a few meet ‘n’ greets with local residents before the Wembley shows’ etc. still does it for me.
Fay Maschler, for taking me to The Connaught for lunch (among other places) and remaining a friend long after I left the Standard.
My best friends: Karen Moline, E. Jane Dickson and Josephine Fairley (again), who are all wonderful writers, and Victoria Killay, who isn’t published – yet – but who is actually funnier than any of us.
Geoff Laurence, who can write volumes with one stroke of his brush and draw perfect circles without looking.
Jane de Teliga, Wendy Squires and Mia Freedman, my new journo best friends in Australia. And dearest William, who wasn’t a journalist when I met him, but certainly is now.
Lisa Wilkinson and Richard Walsh, for bringing me to this beautiful country. Kathy Lette for opening up her platinum-plated address book and being a great mate, no matter how inter-continent we are.
Anthony Dennis, for having the excellent idea I might like to work at The Sydney Morning Herald (and being so great to work with). And John Alexander, another exceptional newspaper editor, for giving me the job, making me feel appreciated and for being so very good to me when my mother was ill.
Three more great editors: Jane Proctor and Dee Nolan for immense loyalty through illness and continental shifts. And my treasured friend Tyler Brûlé who came to see me in hospital when I had hardly any hair and still asked me to write for the grooviest magazine on the planet.
And some non-journos who deserve special mention:
Peter and Judy Howarth, for lending me their beautiful home, Wombramurra, complete with Zambia and Juica and Jake the kangaroo, where this book became one as opposed to several.
Darling Spikey Carr, for the gallery and all those years at Versailles. And Christian McCulloch, because I just love him.
At Penguin Books, Julie Gibbs, for believing in my squiggles as well as my doodads; Bob Sessions, for a wonderful tea at the Windsor Hotel; and Clare Forster, for being a New Romantic in Townsville, as well as for her dedicated professional attention.
And to my darling Popi for his neverfailing smile and support. Even when I was being a pizza.
All these pieces appeared first in Good Weekend, except ‘Hats Off to Hats’, ‘Fat Chance’, ‘Shopping with Kate Moss’, ‘Oh Solo Me, Oh’ and ‘The Virus’, which were published in The Sydney Morning Herald and are published with permission.
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