How To Be A Woman

Chapter 11




I Get Into Fashion!




‘I bought a dress today!’ I say, as my husband walks through the door. ‘A NEW DRESS! NEW DRESS NEW DRESS NEW DRESS!’

It is a brown, cheesecloth, peasant-y dress – ‘TWELVE POUNDS, Pete – TWELVE POUNDS!’– which I bought from the market – ‘IT’S FROM THE MARKET, LOVE!’ – on Seven Sisters Road earlier that day. The purchase has excited me hugely – it is the first new item of clothing I’ve bought for nearly two years.

At the age of 24, I am still not really used to buying clothes. Not only are the clothes I covet at the time – crinolines, tippets, bonnets, red flannel petticoats, button-up black patent booties, damask ballgowns, shagreen gloves, fox-fur muffs and calico nightdresses – not that readily available on Holloway Road – but I have also been stony-ass broke for some time.

Although I had been earning a decent wage as a journalist, it turns out I had made another one of the big miscalculations of my life: believing that Income Tax is, like menstruation, optional. I haven’t paid a penny of tax for the first four years of my working life.

‘I thought they’d ring you up if they wanted it!’ I wail, to the accountant I’d just hired. ‘Or that they’d send you a letter, saying “Guess what – it’s Tax O’Clock!” or something. But they never said anything. The Inland Revenue have not been chatty.’

My accountant went on to explain how the burden of disclosure rests with the individual, rather than the Revenue, and that I would need to supply all my bank statements, wage slips and expense claims since 1994 – but I wasn’t really listening.

In part, this was because I know a great many of my bank statements, wage slips and expense claims got left in a skip in Camden in 1996, along with an armchair I now regretted, in retrospect, discarding – but it’s also because I was calculating just how poor I was going to be for the foreseeable future.

Even with my shonky maths, I estimated that I was going to have to put every penny of my income into paying off my back-tax for at least two years, and that I would have to beg Pete to support me financially in exchange for bread-and-butter pudding, jokes and sex.

‘Yesthat’sfine,’ Pete said, moving me into his house, giving me his spare front-door key. ‘Thatsoundsabsolutelyfine.’

For the next 24 months, I am as poor as a church mouse, but I do get a lot of opportunity to work on my stand-up routines.


Two years later, and I’m still going on about the dress. I’m twirling around in it like Scarlett O’Hara in her ballgown.

‘It was only 12 pounds!’ I say, guiltily. ‘Twelve pounds! Although it felt lovely to buy something new, I won’t need another dress for years now! I can dress it up and dress it down with accessories! It really will be value for money. That’s my celebratory spending-spree finished.’

‘You know,’ Pete says, polishing off his 914th bread-and-butter pudding, ‘all other women buy a lot more clothes than you. A lot. Every lunchtime, all the women in my office come back with something new in a bag. Now you’ve paid off that tax, I think you could buy more clothes, to be honest. If you want. I mean, I don’t care what you wear. You can wear nothing at all if you want. Can I have some more bread-and-butter pudding, please?’


The next day, while Pete’s at work, I think about what he said. All the other women buy lots more clothes, I think. They have lots more clothes than me. They are doing things differently. I’m not doing what the women do.

I go upstairs to the bedroom, and look in my wardrobe. Here is the sum total of my clothing, at the age of 24: a black velvet floor-length goth dress, which I bought when I was 17, and now has pile-less, bald patches on the elbow, from ‘wear’. Two pairs of trousers – one black, one navy. A free promotional T-shirt by the band Salad, which has the word ‘Salad’ on it, which I like to wear whilst preparing, or eating, sausages. A green chenille cardigan from Marks & Spencer, which is so nice I’ve twice had to steal it back off my sister Col when she comes for a visit. A Victorian-style nightie, which I often style out as daywear. And my swimming costume.

I’m not being a proper woman, I think, staring at my wardrobe. All the other women are ‘putting together outfits’ and ‘working on their looks’. I am just ‘putting together the cleanest things’. Now I’ve got some money again, I should sort this out.

It seems that being a woman is very expensive and time-consuming. My innocence about this is incongruous, given my age, but total. I come from grunge, and then Britpop – scenes where you boast about how little you spent on an outfit (‘Three quid! From a jumble sale!’ ‘Ooooh, pricey – I found this jacket in a skip. On a dead man. Under a fox carcass’) and taking pride in ‘getting ready to go out’ consists of little more than washing your face, putting on your Doc Martens/trainers, and applying black Barry M nail varnish, ￡1, on the bus into town.

But now it seems you find ‘the dress’ – but then ‘the dress’ must have ‘the belt’, and a complementary but not overly matching bag must be found, which works with not only the correct hosiery but also something to ‘throw over’, if you become chilly. It’s like f*cking Dragon’s Quest – an endless list of things you’ve got to run around and try and find; possibly in a cave, or under a sage. The thing you ‘throw over’ can’t be an anorak, or a picnic rug, salvaged from under the stairs, by the way, but a deconstructed cardigan, hacking-style jacket, ￡200 pashmina, or a ‘shrug’, which unfamiliar item seems, to my untrained eyes, to be a shrunken cardigan made by a fool. It all looks bloody knackering. It’s going to cut into my bread-and-butter-pudding-making time severely.

All of this comes to a head in shoes – specifically, heels. I’ve spent my whole life in trainers, or boots, but it’s very clear that, if I am to properly make a go of my twenties, I will just have to go out and get some heels. The women’s magazines I read are all unequivocal about heels: they are a non-negotiable part of being a woman, along with the potential to lactate, and the XX chromosome. Women are supposed to adore heels more than they adore their own bodies, or thoughts. They’re also supposed to have a great many more shoes than body, or thoughts. Unlike your arse, or thoughts of revolution, you just can’t have too many shoes!!!!!!!!!!!

‘No one messes with a woman in heels,’ one feature in Elle concludes. ‘They are your greatest weapons in the style wars.’ This shit sounds serious.



The next day, I go out – determined to give being a grown-up woman a try – and purchase my first pair of high heels. I still haven’t quite got it – the heels I finally, triumphantly, purchase are sky-blue jelly sandals with a block heel from Barratts, ￡9.99. They make my feet sweat so much I squeak slightly as I walk – like I’ve used mice as insoles, and they’re all slowly being crushed to death. They’re also quite painful in both the toe and heel area – but no matter! I am in heels! I am a woman!

That night, trying to negotiate a staircase in them at a gig, I stumble, and fall right on top of Graham Coxon from Blur, spilling my whisky and coke all down his leg.

‘ARGH!’ Graham shouts.

‘These are my great weapons in the style wars,’ I say, sadly. ‘No one messes with a woman in heels. I am a woman.’

‘ARGH!’ Graham says again, staring at his wet leg. ‘You f*cking idiot.’


I do not give in easily, though. Thirteen years on and I now have both a great many more pairs of high heels and, indeed, a great many more anecdotes about how wearing them has ended badly for me. In fact, I have a whole box full of such shoes under my bed. Each pair was bought as a down payment on a new life I had seen in a magazine, and subsequently thought I would attain, now I had the ‘right’ shoes. Here they are. Here are all the shoes I don’t wear:



1) Silver, ankle-strap wedges from Kurt Geiger. I wore them: once, at an awards ceremony. I got three compliments – YES – but also noticed that my gait in them was slightly less feminine and confident than that of Dame Edna Everage, 82, who was also at the event.

2) Red velvet court shoes, Topshop. Worn them: once, to a birthday dinner in Soho. Despite the fact I was sitting down all evening, the shoes were so tight and painful that I had to ease my feet out of them. Subsequently, things got a bit ‘interesting’ and, when I woke up in the morning, I was only wearing one of them. The other, I vaguely remembered putting on top of a toilet cistern ‘to be safe’, in that all-night Spanish bar round the back of the HMV Megastore on Oxford Street.

3) Grey velvet court, exactly the same as the red velvet court, save the colour. ‘Good to have this versatile shoe in a neutral colour, as well!’, I thought. Man, I’m good at buying shoes!

4) Peacock-blue three-inch heels with ruffle on the front. At the party I wore them to, I ended up talking to Noddy Holder from Slade – someone who, as Wolverhampton Royalty, I’ve spent my whole life waiting to meet. Alas, however enthusiastically I tried to immerse myself in Noddytopia, it was an undeniable fact that, by now, my feet were hurting so badly I was standing alternately on one, then the other, with tears in my eyes. Eventually I had to excuse myself from talking to my idol, and sit in a corridor, massaging the balls of my feet, and wincing.

5) Same again, but in white. ‘Good to have this versatile shoe in a neutral colour, as well!’ I thought. Man, I’m good at buying shoes!

6) A pair of curly-toed Turkish slippers in silver-grey and berry-red. Like 90 per cent of purchases women make of unwearably batshit gear, in my head, I thought, The kind of thing Kate Moss would slip into, when popping out for fags, as I handed over my debit card. And, like 90 per cent of women after they have done this, I had to subsequently admit that what has a reptilian, boho edge on Kate Moss looks like that game where you have to put on a hat, gloves and scarf before eating a bar of chocolate with a knife and fork, on me. But in a bad way.


There are another six pairs – gold gladiator sandals that work by way of a toe tourniquet; brown ankle boots that, overnight, went from ‘grungey’ to ‘looking like something an uptight woman called Barbara would wear’; those Doc Marten T-bar shoes that were so heavy, I genuinely thought I was developing ME the first – and, subsequently, last – time I wore them.

And yet, my understanding is that my collection of Shoes I Don’t Wear – lined up neatly in a box under my bed, looking like a Terracotta Army, Size 6 – is a fairly modest one, within the spectrum of Women’s Unworn Shoe Collections. I have one friend who has 27 pairs of heels she can’t bear to part with – and yet has worn only once, twice or not at all. All women have one of these caches of shoes hidden, somewhere, in the house.

Why are all these shoes unworn? Ladies, I’m going to put it on the line. I’m going to say what, over the 13 years, I have gradually realised, and what we all secretly knew anyway, the first time we put heels on: that there’s only ten people in the world, tops, who should actually wear heels. And six of those are drag queens. The rest of us just need to … give up. Surrender. Finally acquiesce to what nature is telling us. We can’t walk in them. WE CANNOT WALK IN THE DAMN THINGS. We might just as well be stepping out in anti-gravity boots, or roller skates.

The unwearability of high heels is self-evidently all around us – coming to a head at the average wedding reception, a uniformly high-heeled occasion. In our minds, we see it as a serene and elegant gathering of women in their finest. One of the big chances of the year to pretend you’re at the Oscars, in your stilettos. In actuality, of course, it looks like the annual AGM of the Tina Turner Impressionist union   – women staggering around in unaccustomed verticality; foot-flesh spilling out over tight, unkind satin; toes going numb for days afterwards.

The very few who can walk elegantly in them look amazing, of course – walking in heels is a skill as impressive as being able to tightrope walk, or blow smoke rings. I admire them. I wish them well. I wish I could be them. But they are a tiny minority. For everyone else – the vast majority – we look as inversely elegant as we think we will when we purchase them. We waddle, we go over on our ankles, we can’t dance, and we wince incessantly, whilst hissing, ‘These SODDING shoes. My feet are killing me.’

By the time the reception kicks in, 80 per cent of the women are barefoot or in tights – the edges of the marquee marked with a tide-line of discarded stilettos, wedges and kitten heels. Women spend more time shopping for shoes for a wedding than they actually spend wearing them at the wedding.

But, bafflingly, we totally accept the uselessness of heels. We accept it limply, shruggingly. We are indifferent to the thousands of pounds, over a lifetime, we spend on shoes we only wear once, and in great pain. Indeed, we’re oddly proud of it. Women buy shoes and gigglingly say, ‘Of course, they’re agony – I’m just going to have to sit on a barstool all night, and be helped to the toilet by friends, or passers-by,’ despite it sounding as OUTRIGHT INSANE as going, ‘I’ve just bought a house – it doesn’t have a roof, of course, so I’m just going to sit in the front room with an umbrella up.’


So why do we believe that wearing heels is an intrinsic part of being a woman, despite knowing it doesn’t work? Why do we fetishise these things that almost universally make us walk like mad ducks? Was Germaine Greer right? Is the heel just to catch the eyes of men, and get laid?

The answer is, of course, no. Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner, ENDOV. They think that by effectively walking on tip-toes, they’re slimming their legs down from a size 14 to a size 10. But they aren’t, of course. There is a precedent for a big fat leg dwindling away into a point – and it’s on a pig.


And most men distrust, and even dislike, a heel. They often view them with Feud Eyes. This is because:



a) A chick in heels makes a man feel shorter. In man terms, this is like making a lady feel fatter. They don’t like it.

b) A woman in heels stands a statistical likelihood of ending up her evening with her shoes in her handbag, barefoot, and demanding a piggyback to the taxi rank in order to ‘keep her tights clean’. Men are invariably the pig whose back is called for. On this basis alone, men fear a woman tottering towards them at the beginning of an evening, already gimlet-eyed with toe pain, and sitting down to eat with an old-lady sigh.


At 35, I’ve jacked it in. I’ve finally given up on heels – apart from one pair of yellow tap shoes that are inexplicably comfortable, and something from the 1930s in green velvet that I can dance in. Indeed, I’ve pretty much given up on women’s shoes altogether. Even women’s flats seem insubstantial and sloppily made, compared to men’s. I’ve got men’s riding boots, men’s biker boots, men’s brogues, some Doc Martens – all beautifully made, comfortable, cheaper than the ones in the women’s section, and a pleasingly contrary end to a leg one expects to terminate in a spindly, painful point.

I’ve decided I’m now essentially on strike when it comes to women’s shoes. I’m going to sit out the entire world of chick footwear until designers make some that it’s possible to walk in, for more than an hour, with the easy gait of Gene Kelly about to break into a routine, and no day-long pain afterwards. I fully realise my demands viz footwear are wholly a minority interest at the moment – who knows how long the after-effects of Sex and the City’s decade-long Blahnik-wank will continue to rumble through society – but I’m pretty determined about this. After all, I’ve seen those pictures of Victoria Beckham’s bare, bebunion  ed feet. I don’t want toes that look like thalidomide pasties. If I’m going to spunk ￡500 on a pair of designer shoes, it’s going to be a pair that I can a) dance to ‘Bad Romance’ in, and b) will allow me to run away from a murderer, should one suddenly decide to give chase. That’s the minimum I ask from my footwear. To be able to dance in it, and for it not to get me murdered.




Handbags

Of course, the other fashion item women are supposed to go mad for is the handbag. We’ve long known why – apart from shoes, a handbag is the only other item you’re never too fat to fit into. No one ever got dysmorphic and weeping in a changing room trying on a tote.

By the age of 35, I’ve had two children, paid off half my mortgage, got drunk with Lady Gaga, make my own guacamole, can do 30 seconds of the easy bit of the ‘Single Ladies’ dance, have two contrary opinions about globalisation, know the Heimlich manoeuvre and once scored 420 in Scrabble.

But I’m also still dipping into those women’s magazines, and they are making me feel genuinely bad about my life achievements. Because I don’t yet have an ‘investment handbag’.

My stance on ‘investment handbags’ has always been that if I were going to make a ￡600 investment, it would probably be in Post Office bonds – and not something that, by and large, lives on the floor in pubs, or which I sometimes use to carry 5lb of potatoes home. But I am becoming aware that I am in a handbag minority. Normal women, says Grazia, do not buy one handbag every five years for ￡45 from Topshop – my personal ‘handbag routine’. Normal women have dozens of handbags: small ones, potato-less ones, ￡600 investment ones such as a Mulberry tote.

With mounting concern, I learnt that having a ￡600 handbag is like having a crush on The Joker in Batman. You MUST do it. It is an irreducible fact of being a woman.

Things were brought to a head in the now-defunct Observer Woman magazine. Lorraine Candy, Elle’s editor-in-chief, tried to go a week with just high street gear. On the Wednesday she writes: ‘I’ve failed. Today, I know that I cannot brave that front row with its cool bags and sexy ankle boots without the one thing that makes my outfit work: my new Chloé bag. I feel ashamed.’

I had a flush of horror as I read this: no one had ever passed judgement on my cheap handbag to my face. But then, this is a reserved country. I don’t know how they would react to my ￡45 handbag somewhere more demonstrative – Portugal, say, or Texas. They might leap on to their chairs screaming ‘MAH GAHD!’, trying to hit my cheap handbag with a broom, as if it were vermin.

That night, I made a decision. One of the modern wisdoms of womanhood is that eBay has fake designer handbags that you can’t tell from the real thing. But despite typing ‘great fake ￡600 handbags for ￡100’ into the ‘Search’ field, nothing came up.

Genuinely intrigued, I searched for ￡600 handbags for ￡600. Vuitton, Prada, Chloé; ￡300, ￡467, ￡582.

God, they were horrible. Like Guernica, in pony skin. I tried to find one I liked. I really did. Tanned, tasselled and oddly shapeless, many resembled Tom Jones’s knackers, with handles. Others were covered in straps, buckles and brasses, like some S&M horse.

There was a whole shelf of leather clutches with gigantic gold clasps that looked a bit as if someone melted Grace Jones in 1988, leaving behind only her blouson leather jacket and huge earrings.

On page 14 of my search results I finally saw one I liked, by Marc Jacobs. It was bright, acid-house yellow, with a picture of Debbie Harry on it. But my joy in finding a ￡600 bag I liked was mitigated when, on closer inspection, it proved to be a canvas tote, for ￡17; basically, the only designer item I was attracted to was a Marc Jacobs carrier bag.

I am not wholly unfashionable. I have learnt some things about style over the years. A bright yellow shoe is surprisingly versatile; patterned tights are never a good idea. And if – through chaos, fate and backed-up laundry – you end up in an outfit of alarming randomness (socks, Crocs, tuxedo jacket and tricorn hat), you just look people in the eye and say, with crocodilian self-assurance: ‘I don’t like to be too … matchy-matchy.’

But if I cannot connect with the finer things in life, and all I can emotionally connect with is a jumped-up carrier bag, it’s just further confirmation that I am resolutely of the underclass.

If I’m honest, the handbag I would probably like most is a big, hollowed-out potato with handles on it. A giant King Edward with satchel straps. Then, in times of crisis, I could bake and eat the handbag, and survive the winter. That is the way of my people.

And yet, despite all this, my handbag psychology denial rumbled on. Yes, those ￡600 handbags might be visually unappealing, I thought to myself. But maybe if you touch them, they have some manner of ￡600 magic that makes it all worthwhile.

‘They will all be made of butter-soft leather,’ I told myself, not really knowing what that meant. ‘You can always tell the difference close up. I should go and touch the quality.’

I went to Liberty and walked around, touching the handbags, waiting for the enchantment to overwhelm me. They all just felt like handbags. I did, however, see a silvery purse that I liked. For ￡225.

I am classy after all!, I thought, running to the till, immediately incurring a ￡40 overdraft fine and a rumbling schism in my marriage. ‘Maybe I have a secret uncle who’s an earl! True breeding will out! Finally I crave expensive designer items! I’m normal! Thank you, Grazia!’


Five days later the silver purse was pickpocketed on Gower Street. It turns out that thieves read Grazia, too. They can spot expensive accessories from 500 yards away.

It also turns out that husbands do not read Grazia, and no matter how magnificent or loving they may be, they can’t help themselves from sporadically saying ‘￡225! For a purse! JESUS CHRIST’, as if you’ve just stabbed them quite violently in the balls with a fork, left the fork there, and then hung your coat on it, while you go and have a bath.

My current purse cost ￡25 from the cobblers in Crouch End. I doubt I will be ‘upgrading’ it any time soon.

Anyway, let’s face it: the actual handbag is neither here nor there – it’s what you keep in it that’s the most important thing. I have – after years of extensive study on the subject – come up with the definitive list of what you ACTUALLY need in your handbag:



1) Something that can absorb huge quantities of liquid

2) Eyeliner

3) Safety pin

4) Biscuit


This covers all eventualities. You will need nothing else.




Clothes

So that’s my feet, and what I’m keeping my fags in. But what am I wearing, now? As a strident feminist, how am I dressed?

Women know clothes are important. It’s not just because our brains are full of ribbons and bustles and cocktail frocks – although I believe brain scans will finally prove that at some future point. It’s because, when a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible – they have never felt that uncomfortable moment where someone assesses what you’re wearing, and then starts talking down to you, or start perving you, or presumes you won’t ‘understand’ the conversation – be it about work, parenting or culture – simply because of what you put on that day.

‘Wait!’ you often feel like saying. ‘If I were wearing my collegiate corduroy jacket, instead of this school-run dress, you would include me in your conversation about Jung! If you could see my “politically engaged” shoes, no way would you talk about Tony Benn like that to me! Look! I can show you a picture of it, on my iPhone! I HAVE AN OUTFIT FOR THIS OCCASION – JUST NOT ON ME!’

Of course, those instances are merely vexatious – classed in with ‘wrong’ outfits that make you feel demoralised the first time you catch your reflection in a shop window, and lead to you making subsequent bad ‘I am fat’ decisions – like panic-buying harem pants, or a disappointing ‘slimline’ sandwich.

In the worst-case scenario, however, a wrong outfit can ruin your life. It can lead to a judge dismissing your rape case, as evidenced in the 2008 ‘Skinny Jeans’ case (where it was claimed a woman wearing skinny jeans couldn’t have been raped, because no man could take a woman’s skinny jeans off unaided); or Amnesty International’s survey, which found that 25 per cent of people believe a woman is still to blame for being raped if she dresses ‘provocatively’.

Women know that a woman dressed in a relaxed, casual or even scruffy manner in the workplace is likely to be considered far less serious about their work than a male peer, dressed in exactly the same way. Chicks in jeans and trainers don’t get promoted. Men in jeans and trainers do. How women look is considered generally interchangeable with who we are – and, therefore, often goes on to dictate what will happen to us next.

So when women fret over what to wear in the morning, it’s not because we want to be an international style icon. We’re not trying to be Victoria Beckham – not least because there’s an absolutely gigantic pile of toast downstairs with our name on it, and we’ve cracked a smile in the last fortnight.

No – what we’re trying to do is work out if everyone that day will ‘understand’ what we’re wearing; if we’re ‘saying’ the right thing, in a very nuanced conversation. For fashion is merely suggested dialogue – like those Best Man’s speeches you can download off the internet. Women are supposed to come up with their own, personalised version of this. We’re supposed to speak from the heart in what we wear. We have to find capsule wardrobes, things that are ‘us’, things we can ‘dress up and dress down’, ‘classic pieces’ and ‘jackets – with a twist’. It’s one of the presumed Skills Of A Woman – along with being ‘better’ at doing laundry, naturally suited to being at home all day with a baby, and not really minding that men are considered to be funnier.

Woman are just supposed to be Good At Clothes, and to look down at those who aren’t – who screw up even one outfit, as evidenced by all those ‘Circle Of Shame’/’What Are You Wearing?’ spreads in every magazine, and every tabloid newspaper, every week. Prominent female politicians are lambasted for a single pair of ‘wrong’ shoes. You’re not allowed to say that this makes you grumpy, or angry, or despairing – that you personally don’t give a toss what Angelina Jolie wears to step off a plane, or that Susan Sarandon is stepping into her sizzling sixties in a beret. At its best – and I love a nice frock – fashion is a game. But for women, it’s a compulsory game, like netball. And you can’t get out of it by faking a period. I know. I’ve tried.

And so, for a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated $900 billion a year. No wonder every woman’s first thought is, for nearly every event in her life – be it work, snow or birth – the semi-despairing cry, ‘But what will I wear?’

When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.’

Because it’s not easy to find clothes you’re happy in. ‘There’s nothing here for me!’ is the cry on the high street, three hours into a shopping trip, having bought only a pair of tights, a foldable chopping board and school cardigans for the kids. ‘Everything is two inches too short, two tones too bright, and there’s NO SLEEVES. WHY ARE THERE NO SLEEVES? IF EVERY WOMAN IN THIS COUNTRY WERE ALLOWED TO COVER HER UPPER ARMS, AS GOD INTENDED, PRESCRIPTIONS OF XANAX WOULD HALVE IN A FORTNIGHT. WHY ISN’T THERE ANYTHING FOR ME IN THIS GIGANTIC, OVER-LIT SHOP?’

But, of course, there isn’t anything there for you – specifically for you. Before the high street, women would make their own clothes, or see a dressmaker, so that everything we wore was an honest expression of who we were, and what we were comfortable with – within the constraints of fashion at the time, anyway.

With the advent of mass fashion, however, not a single item of clothing sold is ‘for’ the woman who buys it. Everything we see in Topshop and Zara and Mango and Urban Outfitters and Next and Peacocks and New Look is made for a wholly imaginary woman – an idea in the designer’s head – and we buy it if we like it, say, 70 per cent. That’s about as good as it gets. We rarely, if ever, find something that is 100 per cent ‘us’, and that we truly desire – although we never admit this to ourselves. Most women are walking around in things they’re imagining to be that little bit better. An inch longer here. Without that braiding. In a slightly darker blue. It’s the first thing we say to each other: ‘I wish they’d had it without the collar!’


Because if you know I don’t like the collar, then you’ll know who I’m really trying to be.


And, of course, because it’s all made for an imaginary woman, often, none of it works for a real woman. We can all recall seasons where whole, mad ranges – neon, peach, body-con, bustles – sat, sadly, unbought, on the hangers from May to September, waiting for the imaginary women they were designed for to come and buy them.

Often, a woman is apt to stare at what is approaching on the incoming tide of fashion – one-sleeved dresses, jumpsuits, chintzy florals, ‘daytime’ fetish-wear knickerbockers with poppers on the arse – and exclaim ‘But why don’t fashion designers start from considering what would make a woman look nice? I don’t want to have to “sell” this outfit! I want it to sell me! For ￡79.99, I want it to be doing me a favour! I WANT THE CLOTHES TO BE ON MY SIDE!’

I’d never really realised how much fashion isn’t ‘on my side’ until I did a fashion shoot for The Times. The idea was to get a ‘normal woman’ to wear the upcoming season’s trends: pastels, safari, op-art prints, corsets as outerwear, and decorated leggings.

‘We’ll make you look gorgeous,’ the editor promised. ‘We’ve got an amazing stylist and photographer. We’ll take care of you.’

The following eight hours were the worst of my life that haven’t ended in an episiotomy. Previously, I’d always thought that all that lay between me and looking like Kate Winslet on the red carpet was ￡10,000’s worth of clothes, hair, make-up, stylist and good photographer. And, sure enough, in resulting photos, I looked pretty good. They got some frames of me looking pretty hot in a corset, silk combat trousers and four-inch heels. To be honest, if I’d seen the picture of me in a magazine in that outfit, I would have thought, I will try that outfit! That looks good on her! And she has an arse a lot like mine, although a little bigger, hahaha!

That was just the frames, though: the one position it worked in. It took us 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour to find that one position the outfits looked good in. The rest of the time, it was dealing with the camel-toe here, the upper-arm fat there, the muffin-top bulge the other. The clothes were stretched, pegged, tied on with string – the lighting changed, the hair arranged; hats brought in, in an emergency, to balance cruelly proportioned shoulders. I felt like a pig. A clumpy, awkward pig out of her league. I was supposed to be selling these clothes by finding the ‘best’ angle for them, fronting them, working them – but my tits were wrong, and my arse too big, and my arms helpless, heavy and exposed. I left that studio, eight hours later, sweaty and in tears. It was the ugliest I’d ever felt. Without even the aid of being able to smile – ‘Look mysterious, and sexy. Kind of … vague’ – I was reduced entirely down to the clothes on my back, and how my body looked in them. And in these styles, rather than the ones I’ve carefully collected as being ‘helpful’ to me, I was a total failure.

I’m not stupid – I’d always known the difference between models and normal women is that normal women buy clothes to make them look good; whereas the fashion industry buys models to make the clothes look good. Most clothes are helpless without models. They were certainly helpless on me. I could do nothing for this shit. I couldn’t even stay upright in the heels.

‘I’m so sorry – I bet all the models can do this for hours,’ I said, gloomily, scrambling to my feet again, having keeled over sideways, ungainly, like a horse on its hind legs.

‘Oh no,’ the stylist said, cheerfully. ‘They fall over in them all the time, too. They’re impossible to walk in. No one can walk in them. Hahaha!’

I thought again about my years of despair at not being able to walk in heels, despite ‘everyone’ wearing them. Quite a lot of the ‘everyone’, I now reflected, were in fashion shoots, or on a red carpet. i.e. they weren’t really wearing them as ‘shoes’, to walk around in all day. They were just wearing them for the photographs. They know it’s just for photographs. We – the customers – are the only ones who are buying this stuff, and then trying to walk around in it all day; move in it; live in it.

So much of this stuff is just for tableaux – not real life, I finally realised. Although we use it as our major study aid, fashion does not, ultimately, help us get dressed in the morning. Not if we want to wear something we can walk around in without constantly having the hem ride up, or picking the seam out of our crotches. Fashion is for standing still and being photographed. Clothes, on the other hand, are for our actual lives. And life is really the only place you can learn the most important lessons about how to get dressed and feel happy.

Here, then, is what I have learned about clothes – ignoring magazines and advertising campaigns, and picking up the knowledge where it matters: a) crying in a changing room in Topshop, whilst stuck in a pair of PVC leggings, b) running down the street after someone who looks amazing, and saying ‘Where did you get that?’1 or c) my sister Weena coming into the bedroom, seeing what I’m wearing, going ‘No’ and walking out of the room again—



1) Leopardskin is a neutral.

2) You can get away with nearly anything if you wear the thing with black opaque tights and boots.

3) Contrary to popular opinion, a belt is often not a good friend to a lady. Indeed in many circumstances, it acts merely as a visual aid to help the onlooker settle the question: ‘Which half is fatter – the bottom or the top?’

4) Bright red is a neutral.

5) Sellotape is NOT strong enough to mend a hole in the crotch of a pair of tights.

6) You should NOT buy an outfit if you have to strike a sexy pose in the changing-room mirror to make it look good. On the other hand, if you immediately start dancing the minute you put it on, buy it, however much it costs; unless it’s lots, in which case, you can’t, so don’t. Fashion magazines will never say, ‘Actually, don’t buy it if you can’t afford it.’ Neither will your friends. I am probably the only person who will EVER say it to you. You’re welcome.

7) You should never describe your look as being ‘a mixture of high street and vintage’. Remember how angry it makes you when Fearne Cotton says it. Don’t let the abused become the abuser.

8) You are very, very unlikely to look bad in an above-the-knee, fitted, 1950s-style dress with sleeves and a cardigan. Have you seen what Christina Hendricks – the stacked, hot Joan Holloway in Mad Men, the woman Vanity Fair recently christened ‘The Body’ – looks like in modern combat trousers and a top? Awful. There’s a lesson for us all there.

9) The most flattering trousers you’ll ever have are some black running trousers with a fiercely high Lycra content. They make your thighs and arse look tiny. You spend over two years trying to pluck up the courage to wear them out with a pair of knee-high boots and a jacket, but always bottle it at the last minute. It is a source of lasting regret.

10) Silver lamé is a neutral.

11) Ditto gold sequin.

12) Instead of buying something that says ‘Dry clean only’, just put ￡50 in the garment’s pocket, and walk out of the shop, leaving both on the hanger. In the long run it will save you money, time, and the unedifying spectacle of you squirting Sure Extra onto the armpits, in an emergency, on a train on the way to a meeting.


13) Everything from Per Una at Marks & Spencer makes you look a little bit mental. I don’t know why this should be so, but it is true.


And this is what I have learned about fashion.

1Sadly, the answer is almost always, ‘An amazing vintage shop in Rotterdam, four years ago, that has now sadly burned down in a fire, and which you wouldn’t have been allowed in anyway,’ but I still haven’t lost hope they might just point to M&S and say, ‘There. Ten minutes ago.’