Handbag Heaven Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Handbag Heaven

  Maggie Alderson was born in London, brought up in Staffordshire and educated at the University of St Andrews. She has worked on nine magazines and two newspapers. Her novels, Pants on Fire, Mad About the Boy, Handbags and Gladrags and Cents and Sensibility, are bestsellers in Australia and the UK, and have been translated into many languages. She is co-editor of two charity anthologies: Big Night Out, for War Child; and Girls’ Night In 4, in aid of War Child and No Strings. She has also published two collections of journalism: Shoe Money and Handbag Heaven, taken from her column in Good Weekend magazine. She is married and has one daughter.

  IN PRAISE OF SHOE MONEY

  Maggie Alderson undercuts her fashion addiction

  with sly wit and bracing good sense.

  Helen Garner

  If you’re in the mood for something short, cute and fluffy,

  this will look gorgeous on you.

  The Age

  It’s only fair to warn you: this book is wickedly funny.

  Not sly smile or knowing grin funny, but public menace,

  weep with laughter, embarrass yourself on buses funny…

  Buy several copies and give them to your favourite female friends.

  But read it on the bus at your peril.

  Sydney Morning Herald

  Compulsory reading for any girl who’d rather buy a new pair of

  shoes than a toaster, hates shopping for swimsuits, and wears far

  too much black. Alderson’s book – which is a collection of her

  regular newspaper columns – makes hilarious reading.

  Cosmopolitan

  A firm follower of the does-it-make-my-bum-look-big? school

  of shopping, Alderson toddles you along past perfect handbags,

  pondering that nothing seems as faultless as something you wore

  and loved when young, and asking, ‘Where are the flattering

  mirrors, please?’… Fortunately, although she knows the address

  of Frock-Heaven, a what’s-all-this-then? attitude and a pair

  of large pearl earrings makes it all endurable – like a good talk

  on the telephone with someone funny.

  Harper’s Bazaar & Mode

  Alderson has plenty to say and a handbag (preferably Hermès)

  full of jokes and one-liners. If you love fashion but baulk

  at the pretentiousness that can surround it,

  then Shoe Money is the book for you.

  Cleo

  The editor of this magazine laughed so much when reading

  Maggie Alderson’s new book while on an interstate flight, that the

  man in the next seat leaned over and begged to know its name.

  Shoe Money will have every female reader laughing and saying

  ‘Yes!’, and every male reader laughing and learning a lot.

  Australian Gourmet Traveller

  Maggie Alderson

  Handbag

  Heaven

  with illustrations by the author

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

  250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada)

  90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada ON M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England

  Penguin Ireland

  25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd

  11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ)

  67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd

  24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Books Australia 2001

  Copyright © Maggie Alderson, 2001

  Illustrations copyright © Maggie Alderson, 2001

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part

  of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or

  transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both

  the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74228-102-5

  For Mary

  Contents

  The divine Miss N

  Just desserts

  Size matters

  Not so smart casual

  Hobgoblin heels

  All strung out

  Crowning glory

  Fashion eats itself

  The small print

  The beauty myth

  A good sort

  Hee Bee Gee Bees

  And that was Hat…

  If I were a chic man

  The wrong trousers

  The meaning of like

  Beautiful strangers

  Accidental coutur-ist

  GSOH

  Hairdos and don’ts

  Laundry mates

  House musing

  Elegance lost

  Bad buys

  Watertight solutions

  The real thing

  Martha knows best

  Sales pitch

  Get wiggy with it

  Crashing symbols

  Hair raising

  Sitting pretty

  Animal attraction

  A Clutterbug’s Life

  The big heave-ho

  Chain reaction

  Fateful attraction

  Women’s wear daily

  News of the shoes

  The untouchables

  Fashion senses

  You beauty

  The slippery slope

  Woolly thinking

  A friend like Ben

  Barbie’s my kind of girl

  Doggie style

  Cheap tricks

  Dirty looks

  Ms Alderson regrets

  Throwaway lines

  Fashion survivor

  Down and dirty

  Seeing stars

  Tying one on

  Turning Japanese

  Making excuses

  The golden fleece

  Acknowledgements

  The divine Miss N

  ‘I also have Rita Hayworth’s nightdress…’ What do you say to a remark like that? I just nodded. Sitting next to Naomi Campbell on a small sofa, I could barely speak anyway, I was so in awe of her beauty. Okay, she looks pretty good in pictures, does our Nomes, and I’ve seen her strutting along catwalks about a million times, but nothing prepares you for her at close hand. Her eyes could silence a multitude. Her profile could cause earthquakes. Her slightest smile could melt a glacier. And she had the most fabulous pair of shoes on…

  ‘I’m wearing Gucci today,’ she said, looking down at her tottering-heeled, brown kid court shoes and waggling her ankles like a three-year-old with new sandals. ‘I have loads of shoes, because at the end of a show if you say, “Like these shoes”, they say, “Take ’em”, and you walk out with a bag f
ull. I normally wear Manolos.’

  Well, why wouldn’t you? If Mr Blahnik were pressing them upon you at every turn and the nearest you ever got to public transport was a stretch limo, why wouldn’t you wear Manolos every day? And if I were Naomi Campbell, I’d collect Hermès Kelly bags, too.

  ‘I like Jamin Puech bags,’ she said, with all the grace of Martina Hingis saying she enjoyed the odd game of ping-pong. ‘They’re really cute, but you can’t fit much in them.’

  And she certainly seems to carry a lot around with her. At her feet was a huge, baby blue Hermès Birkin bag, which weighed a tonne when she let me pet it on my lap for a moment. Can’t imagine what she keeps in it, apart from her Nokia mobile phone, which she whipped out to show me like the good little spokesmodel that she is.

  ‘It’s like a lipstick,’ she said, flipping it open and reeling off its technical attributes. Ker-ching, Naomi earned her fee. Great. With that over we could get on to more stuff about handbags and shoes.

  ‘I love Fendi bags. I’ve got my favourite baguette next door. Wanna see?’ Too bloody right. A flunky brought it in. I stroked it. ‘I collect old Kellys,’ she continued, meaning the handbags, not elderly Irish people. ‘I’ve got one from the 1920s which is grey leather with platinum fittings. I got it at Didier Ludot’s shop in the Palais Royal in Paris.’ I nodded furiously. I bought a handbag there myself once.

  We were practically related.

  ‘I collect vintage clothes, too,’ she said. ‘There’s a shop in LA called Rita & Lily where I got a leopard-skin coat and turban. I wore the coat in Paris once and a sixty-nine-year-old couturier at Dior said,“That’s my coat. I made it. Do you know who that belonged to?” Then he showed me the name inside – Ann-Margret.’

  And talking about all that led on to the remark about Rita Hayworth’s nightie, as well as details of a red Balenciaga dress that Audrey Hepburn wore in Funny Face.

  And it’s not just vintage dresses of impeccable provenance that fill Naomi’s closets: ‘I have dresses from Versace and Alaïa and YSL and Chanel which are unique. They have to be numbered and catalogued in case they ever want them for a museum.’

  Crikey. But with such riches to choose from, how does she decide what to wear every morning? ‘I walk around in nothing, saying,“What will I wear?” It might be anything from a sari to a hippie look. Anything I feel comfortable in. I don’t like looking like other people.’

  That, my dear, is never going to be a problem.

  P.S. After the interview, Naomi sent me a personal card to thank me. Her name was printed on it in pink ink and the envelope was lined with pink tissue. We are definitely related.

  Just desserts

  Somebody recently asked me the oblique question,‘What is your fashion mantra?’ I realise now she was actually asking me for predigested ‘fashion tips’ along the lines of ‘Never wear a G-string under tight white pants’, or ‘Try not to weigh more than your IQ’, but at the time I thought she meant a small phrase that you repeat over and over again in your head when meditating on fashion.

  Either way, I have since worked out what my fashion mantra is. It’s ‘If I just…’ It must be, because that’s what I repeat to myself endlessly when contemplating the great unanswerable ‘om’ of my wardrobe.

  ‘If I just… If I just… If I just had a Helmut Lang suit, I would always have something to wear to work and then out to glamour cocktails without changing. If I just had a black Longchamp tote, I would have room for all my workday junk, without looking like a nomad. If I just found the right pair of shoes, I’d be able to stride around all day in comfort without feeling like a Teletubby. If I just lost five kilos, everything really nice in my wardrobe would fit me again.’

  But it’s becoming clear to me that there is something fundamentally wrong with my fashion mantra, because far from bringing me peace, non-attachment and general sartorial nirvana, it has become a self-perpetuating cycle of unfulfillable desire.

  Take Jamin Puech bags. For nearly a year my chant was, ‘If I just… If I just… If I just had a Jamin Puech bag, it wouldn’t matter what else I wore, because the bag would be so unique and special and characterful.’

  For so long I resisted this urge to spend an unjustifiably large sum of money on an impractically small handbag. I was steely in my determination, even when I was staying in a Paris hotel right opposite a boutique which had the perfect little beaded baglet hanging in the window. I fingered them in Paddington, I stroked them in London, I patted them in Milan, but still I didn’t give in to temptation. Until New Year’s Eve 1999, when it seemed likely the world was going to end at midnight anyway and I thought I might as well go with a Jamin Puech in my hand.

  For a few weeks my life did feel complete. I swung that little bag around like an altar boy with a censer, gathering compliments with the same ease as I attract pet hairs, and then I went back to the European fashion shows in March. All the little beaded bags had gone. Even the girl from US Vogue who had impressed me so much last time by carrying two Jamin Puechs every day (she couldn’t fit her stuff into one she told me, so she carried two) was now carrying a Louis Vuitton monogrammed bag. (I think it was a Trocadero, but I’m still learning the names.)

  Now I have the perfect little evening bag and the perfect in-flight bag (‘If I just had a Prada messenger bag…’), but my life is still incomplete because I don’t have the perfect chic workday bag. So when I give in to temptation, as I inevitably will, what ‘If I just…’ will it be after that? Whatever Louis Vuitton, Tod’s, Fendi and all the rest of them decide to serve up. You’d think I’d know by now that the whole point of fashion is to make you feel you don’t just want stuff – you ‘need’ it. The day just one more thing does make my life complete is the day Miuccia Prada goes out of business.

  With that new wisdom, I think I’d better change my mantra to a contemplation of the words of someone who really knew a thing or two about meditation – Mr Buddha. ‘The root of all suffering is desire,’ he said. And judging by that remark, you’d think he knew something about fashion, too.

  Size matters

  What dress size are you? I’m a size 4. Well, that’s what it says on the label of my Donna Karan jacket, so I must be. But on my Zimmermann dress it says 14.

  I’ve got Collette Dinnigan garments in small, medium and large. My jeans are 30, my agnès b. skirts are 38 and my Giorgio Armani jacket is 44. I’m a size 10 trouser at David Lawrence, but a size 12 jacket. My Easton Pearson new best dress is a 10, but I can’t even fit into a size 14 in Scanlan & Theodore.

  So what size am I really? Damned if I know.

  It’s not just a matter of my ever-changing waistline. This does demand a certain range of size options across the wardrobe, but they are generally provided for by switching to all-jersey clothes and elastic waistbands for the two months after I have done my Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide reviews and gained about six kilos, until the Liver Cleansing Diet works its magic again.

  Sometimes I’ll wear the size 4 jacket and the size 14 dress on the same day and they’ll both appear to fit correctly. Even I can’t put on six kilos between lunch and dinner. So what gives with this sizing malarky? Of course, overseas sizing systems add hugely to the confusion. I have here a conversion chart which came with my new Hanro knickers (they’re Swiss, which explains why they’re so multi-lingual). It’s like a phrase book for the international language of dress sizes (‘Hello, do you speak frock?’).

  No wonder we’re bewildered. What we call a size 12 is called 40 in France, 42 in Italy, 38 in Germany – and ‘extra small’ in the United States. Don’t you love the idea of 12 being ‘extra small’? I always thought it was more like ‘biggest you can admit to’. Mind you, this chart is supposed to be underwear sizes, which are probably calculated by adding your glove size to your hat size and taking away your shoe size.

  Certainly I was always led to believe that American sizes were just one smaller than ours, so that what is really a 12 is labelled a 10. So how com
e my American clothes are 6s and 8s?

  Because Donna and Ralph and Calvin are really smart. This simple detail is why they are all so rich. There is nothing that wing-ding about their clothes really, but anything with a size 6 label which (a) does up and (b) looks half decent is going to be coming home with me. It’s genius. (And Donna Karan seems to know all about being a fat girl in the changing room, since her clothes seem to be the most creatively sized of them all.)

  I don’t know why more Australian designers don’t get wise to this scam. In fact, many of them, especially the groovy woovy ones on the Chapel Street/Oxford Street strips, seem to go the other way. It’s as if they want us to feel bad in their clothes.

  I love Alannah Hill’s fey-floozy clothes, for example, but they are so tiny I can’t even shoehorn myself into a 14. This does not make me feel like going back to her shop. Ever. And I couldn’t help noticing in a recent sale that all the Alannah Hill stuff that was left over was size 8. Ner ner, ner ner ner. Doesn’t she get it? Surely I am not the only woman with breasts in Australia who would like to wear a lace-edged 1940s-style afternoon dress.

  If I were a fashion designer I wouldn’t have sizes in my clothes at all. I’d call them ‘You Babe’ (16), ‘Foxy Lady’ (14), ‘Dream Machine’ (12), ‘Ooh La La!’ (10) and ‘You Bitch’ (8). So my customers wouldn’t feel at all shy about saying, ‘This is a bit tight on the wrists. Do you have it in a Foxy Lady? Great, I’ll take two.’

  And then I could have a beach house in the Hamptons right next to Donna’s.

  Not so smart casual

  I have made a measured and considered decision to stop wearing my pyjamas to the office. They’re not really pyjamas, of course, but they might as well be. The problem is that wearing stretch pants, jersey tops and slip-on shoes, however chic and designer and expensive, I feel as though I’m in pyjamas, which leads to a tendency to behave as though I’m in pyjamas. Zzzzzzzz…