Dressing down the sartorial naysayers

The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant (published by Virago)

Novelist Linda Grant doesn’t claim to be a stylist or even a fashion buff. What she enjoys, she explains, are good clothes. And shoes. And handbags.

So what she has set out to do in her new book is to explore why clothes are important – and why making an effort to think about how we dress is not wasted time.

This accessible – and in places very, very funny – book is not what you’d call a work of scholarly rigour, but Grant still manages to get across a number of messages with enjoyable ease.

She illustrates, with just a cursory look at the distant past, how humans have always cared about how they look – about how they present themselves, from the earliest adornments and tattoos. Which, as she points out, makes a nonsense of the view that fashion is only a product of capitalism and consumerism, and that shallow women are just manipulated into contemplating matters sartorial.

She also illustrates the inherent misogyny in the view that thinking or talking about clothes is an indicator of vapidity. Men base so many of their responses to women on how women look, and criticise them if they don’t look ‘good’, but also criticise the time they spend achieving that look.

As Grant points out, we have to wear clothes: a man begging on the street might have plenty of people pass by and ignore him. But if he’s naked, the police will turn up pretty quickly and take him away. Clothes, in our society, are not an option. It might sound howlingly obvious, but if that’s the case, why do some people consider it to be an indicator of a weak mind – or a capitalist plot – when people enjoy thinking about clothes, shopping and dressing?

Why, for instance, is shopping derided more than, say, watching football or playing dangerous sports or playing shoot-em-ups on a computer – or any other predominantly male form of pleasure?

Grant rails against clothing being limited to the strictly utilitarian, and peppers the book with anecdotes about her own mother – the daughter of immigrants – who understood the way clothing could be used to help fit in. And there is a series of interviews with Canadian style doyen Catherine Hill, an Auschwitz survivor whose teenage life was possibly saved by a moment of old-fashioned, female vanity.

The point that, in the 19th century, department stores were a new and liberating place for women, where they could go unchaperoned, is made too (see Zola's The Ladies' Paradise). And how new designs (by designers, thus stressing the importance of designers) for shoes and dresses also helped in the process of liberating women (from corsets etc).

We read how Coco Chanel created the timeless little black dress as long ago as 1926, and how, in the aftermath of WWII, women swooned for Christian Dior’s beautiful New Look.

Grant is quite clear that fashion – in terms of the catwalks etc – is not ‘real’ clothing, but a form of art, and every bit as valid as a painting or a piece of music. However, she also believes that our innate desire to look aesthetically good – to be attractive – is “irrational”.

But that begs the question of whether art in general is irrational – indeed, whether it’s irrational to consider aesthetics in anything that could be strictly utilitarian (architecture, for instance). And unless you think it is, then it’s difficult to conclude that clothing should adhere to a different ethos.

Grant ends with the story of a single red, high-heeled, patent shoe that she spotted on the top of a display of shoes at Auschwitz, where they’d been stolen from owners who were mostly destined for the gas chamber.

She dares us to denigrate the unknown victim of the Holocaust who had worn or carried with her on that final journey, shoes that she loved.

And she leaves us with a challenge – to live and to make the most of it. Including in the enjoyment of what we wear.

This feels a little like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion: as he was eventually provoked by fundamentalists into writing, so Grant has been poked with a stick by those (including women) who pour derision on others for taking care over what they wear.

And while it doesn’t have quite the force of Dawkins’s work, it’s an enjoyable, interesting and welcome rebuttal to a particular attitude and critique.

I'll let you into a little secret

The Other Half is out of town this weekend – well actually, he's out of the country.

So, having arrived in the office very early this morning, I took a slightly extended lunch and popped down to Oxford Street to look at the Russell & Bromley bag I mentioned yesterday.

I shall be able to take it home without any questions this evening – without any questions or raised eyebrows and, by the time he sees it, it'll be 'too late'.

It is a thing of beauty – a mix of matte and patent black leather, with chains and studs (oh what a kinky minx I am).

And as if that weren't enough, it's actually very roomy – thus practical too.

I'll take a snap this weekend, when I embark on a spring clean of my wardrobe – possibly accompanied (or followed) by one of Irene's cocktails and certainly by my own music.

Doubtless the Queen B will be around to help, as is her feline wont. Or at least to sit and watch in the way that cats do, with an expression that you know means that you're doing it wrong.

And I'll relax – possibly with a suitably girlie movie or even a few episodes of Sex in the City, which I only managed to 'discover' at the end of last year.

Reports will follow, I promise.

A handbag?

Are you channelling Edith Evans yet?

Having spent years shaking her head as if in grief, asking: “When are you going to grow up” as I walked through the door in a football shirt, my mother is now aghast to hear of my lecherous adoration of handbags.

In my early teens, she forced me to carry a suede creation (this was the 1970s) to church (and put some slap on every Sunday morning). But I complied under protest. I wanted to be a boy – or at least to be allowed to play football and not have to worry about matters girlie.

And once I was free of the every-day authority of my mother, I dumped handbags.

Well into my 30s, a battered men’s tweed jacket, bought in a charity shop, remained preferable, blessed as it was with countless pockets. Who needed handbags?

And that was the situation as it existed when I met The Other Half.

But in the last decade, I have changed. And the changes have included the discovery of handbags.

The Other Half is only just coming to terms with this. I’ve spent the last few years arranging for female colleagues to explain to him, slowly and patiently, that there really is no such thing as too many handbags.

He has worked out that the correct answer to: ‘I need a new handbag’ is not: ‘you need no such thing’, but simply: ‘yes dear’. A quiet life is worth some adjustments to one’s thinking on matters materialistic.

Indeed, Miss Piggy had the right approach: "I find that it is vital to have at least one handbag for each of the 10 types of social occasion: very formal, not so formal, just a teensy bit formal, informal but not that informal, every day, every other day, day travel, night travel, theatre and fling."

Three years ago, I was able to afford my first designer bag – an Osprey, purchased in Liberty after a number of reconnaissance missions to a number of rather upmarket stores.

It was with me when I joined The Other Half in his staff bar a short while later to take part in a quiz night. The rest of the team he was on was female. All the women drooled over the bag and, when realising it was an Osprey, nearly wet their collective knickers.

The Other Half said later that it was only then that he had realised exactly what status symbols handbags are – like cars for men.

Well, I have quite a few these days, including a couple in the BMW class. But one day, when I have the money, I shall step up to the Ferrari class – and I shall buy a Dior bag. Until then, the glossies provide handbag porn for lusting over.

In the meantime, my current day-to-day bag is looking rather tired, so I’ll just have to brave the West End crowds and head for the shops. Russell & Bromley have a nice one in their new spring collection.

Now what was it dear old Oscar said about dealing with such a situation?

Ah yes: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

And just think – I’ll be doing the economy a favour too.

A designer-clad foot in the fashion door

London Fashion Week is almost upon us, with the opening catwalk show slated for Friday.

Now this might not seem particularly newsworthy – except for the fact that I know that it’s happening. And when. And in advance.

This is the girl who spent much of her childhood wanting to be a boy – or at least wanting to be allowed to play football, which was pretty much the same thing at the time; a girl who disappointed her mother with a worrying lack of interest in clothes, handbags or make-up – the very things that it is assumed all girls naturally like.

My mother, who was determined to rectify such shortcomings (regardless of my thoughts on the matter) escorted me to Boots with some Christmas money shortly after my 13th birthday. There she selected what she considered the appropriate make-up. Blue eyeshadow (this was the 1970s), a compact of powder and a medium purple lipstick: the latter was a small thing and I eventually threw it out around 10 years ago. Which tells you something of how much – or how little – I used to do make-up. There was cleanser and toner and moisturiser too.

This had to be applied for church going at the least. God presumably thinks a touch of slap essential for worship, although on the basis of what was excluded from that shopping trip, mascara is just a tad too tarty in divine circles.

But here we are, some 30 odd years later, and I know when London Fashion Week starts.

All due, of course, to a newfound dedication to the glossies. Not that they’re for reading, but for ogling: porn for apprentice fashionistas.

So I really know what this season’s caged boot is, and I know that it comes from Yves Saint Laurent.

Kinky, eh? And probably a darned good thing that I’m not good in heels and designers don’t make things to fit me.

Let’s be quite clear – I’m not a shoe slut: but only because my feet are such an obscurely awkward size.

To be frank, with size three tootsies (wide fitting) and a bra size of 40H, I feel like a cross between a Geisha and Dolly Parton. It’s nothing short of a miracle that I don’t fall flat on my face more often.

So shoes are out.

Or were, until I happened upon a pair of patent pink Marc Jacobs pumps in Harvey Nicks, Bristol, while working in that city in January. A photo will follow shortly for Irene. But they were an historic find: designer shoes that fitted. And suitably credit crunched by around 50% in the sale. A rarity – and the exception that proves the rule.

Still, there are always handbags.

Lovely, lovely handbags.

But that’s a story for another day.