Shoe Money Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Shoe Money

  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, were bestsellers in Australia and the UK, and have been translated into many languages. She is a 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 is married and has one daughter.

  with illustrations by the author

  Maggie Alderson

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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

  First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1998

  Copyright © Maggie Alderson, 1998

  Illustrations copyright © Maggie Alderson, 1998

  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.

  www.penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228447-7

  This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Peg Mackay, and my mother, Peggy Alderson. Two very stylish girls.

  CONTENTS

  Shoe me the money

  Tantric shampooing

  The clothes I love so much I can’t wear them

  Hats off to hats

  In the name of Rose

  The great fashion myths

  Blonde faith

  Shopping with Kate Moss

  Boys of summer

  Emotional baggage

  Carry on packing

  Learning from the lovable eccentrics

  Fat chance

  Teen queens

  The virus

  Smart casual

  Why men hate pantaloons

  Swimwear and tear

  Tied to the clothes rails

  Princess ballerina

  Fash mag slag off

  The secret language of handbags

  A small (but perfectly formed) history of bosoms

  Anarchy in the UK

  As good as it gets

  Clothes zones

  Basic black

  For the love of sewing

  Trainers stink

  Stay young and hideous if you want to be loved

  Quality blondes

  The cardigans

  Higher purchases

  Fancy this?

  The thrill of the till

  The X-ray sex

  New shoes blues

  Cracking the dress code

  Goodbye Elton’s wig

  Last in best dressed

  The joy of specs

  Oh solo me, oh

  Why don’t you go and get dressed?

  Lost style icons

  The fashion victim diet

  A great vintage

  Travelling lite

  The power of one packing system

  Feeling crumby

  Beyond the pale

  If the shoe fits …

  Secret clothes

  Too easy pieces

  Platform shoes

  In a lather

  Mad aunt disease

  Acknowledgments

  Shoe me the money

  Isn’t it funny how some dollars are worth more than others? It works like dog years. Dollars spent on shoes are worth about twenty cents, whereas in household-appliance money, $1 is equal to $50. We’ll call it Shoe Money.

  This is why I think nothing of spitting out $150 for a pair of sandals, but resent every cent of the $40 a new toaster is going to cost me. I’ll shop around for weeks, consulting consumer guides and making toast over a candle, before I shell out for a toaster, but I’ll buy those sandals entirely by accident when I really went out for some asparagus.

  This is because, when you do your conversions, the sandals cost only $30 in Shoe Money, whereas that silly old toaster – which I can’t even wear – is going to cost $2000 in real terms.

  No matter that I will use the toaster every day of my life for the next twenty years and will wear the sandals twice, getting hideous blisters and shin splints on both occasions. Toasters are boring. They should be free.

  Unless you have one of those very pretentious chrome American diner things, your toaster isn’t going to impress anyone, and those things cost the equivalent of about two pairs of stilettos. And that’s without putting it into Shoe Money.

  Mind you, not all household items are boring. Saucepans are clothes – saucepans are fashion. If you buy well, they’re shiny and have status value. Cheap aluminium pans say as much about a person’s self-esteem as cheap shoes. Low. And cheap shoes don’t even give you Alzheimer’s. For all these reasons, I was happy to divert quite a few shoe dollars towards a beautiful trio of stainless-steel pans. I was also able to justify it to myself using the argument that I would Always Have Them, so they were Worth It.

  You can use a similar argument for spending half the national debt on one jacket. It’s called the Cost Per Wear system. By this logic (dreamed up, no doubt, by a collective of international designers), a $1200 jacket that you wear 1200 times really costs you $1, whereas a $200 jacket worn twice costs $100. See? Armani is cheap. You’re dumb if you don’t buy it. Buy two, save more.

  Then there is the Appropriate Attire System. Working to this philosophy, you are quite entitled to buy new clothes for any upcoming event because you don’t have anything suitable to wear. It doesn’t matter that it could be fifteen years before you next go to a point-to-point in Scotland, you were correctly dressed that one time and it would have been rude not to be. It also doesn’t matter how much the outfit costs, because you had to be suitably dressed and they just don’t happen to sell Barbour jackets at Dotti. In other words, it wasn’t your fault – the dress code made you do it.

  All evening wear works according to this principle, and it really is the biggest rip-off of all time. I suggest you team and tone some simple black separates and dress them up with that chrome toaster you were foolish enough to buy.

  Then you can spend what you save on shoes.

  Tantric shampooing

  Next time you are having your hair washed at the salon and a teenage boy is confusing your head with a football as he administers the ‘relaxing’ head massage, take your mind off the pain by considering this true story.

  At a hairdresser’s I used to go to in London there was an eighte
en-year-old apprentice called Agidio. Aaaaaaaah, Agidio. Just the sound of his name brings back the sensation of bands of fairies having group sex on my scalp.

  I don’t know what it was about Agidio. With your eyes open he was rather a skinny specimen, but close them and he was the Casanova of conditioner. Ah ah ah Agidio … This was tantric shampooing.

  The lightest touch of his fingers had the hairdresser’s normally poised Knightsbridge clientele quivering and moaning as he lathered them up at the backwash. According to salon legend, one woman actually had a fully fledged headgasm right there in the middle of the wash ’n’ blow-dry area.

  Certainly I have it on good authority that I came round from my first Agidio shampoo scarlet to the ear tips. After having the same experience the week before, my best friend was so astonished she came in specially to watch me – she wanted to make sure it wasn’t just her.

  She needn’t have worried. It quickly became apparent that the shampoo Svengali of SW1 worked the same magic on everyone. We became a kind of unspoken sisterhood, and total strangers would nudge each other and wink as another unknowing initiate was led to Agidio’s basin.

  I could never decide whether this callow youth actually knew the effect he was having on us all, but I suspect he did. Surely no-one could do this by accident. For when Agidio touched your head, choirs of seraphim sang the Hallelujah chorus and golden lambs gambolled through your follicles. For an all-too-brief interlude, his fingers and your scalp felt like one. He was Keith Richards, you were the guitar string. He was Miles Davis, you were the trumpet. He was Neil Perry, you were the onion.

  He must have been doing it on purpose. But after the conditioner was washed out it was hard to look him in the eye. You knew you were just another notch on his nozzle.

  He was Italian, after all.

  Word about Agidio quickly got round the thrill-hungry career-shopping set, and women of all ages used to request him particularly when they rang up to book their hairdos. (I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.)You could see the receptionist stifling her giggles when yet another client called up, saying, ‘I don’t care who cuts it, sweetie, but I’d like that nice Italian boy to wash it, please.’ By the end of each day his jeans were bulging with tips. And quite a few phone numbers.

  But, sadly, it was our bankable gratitude which spelled the end of bubbly bliss in Beauchamp Place. One summer Agidio spent the loot on a plane ticket to the Amalfi coast and never came back.

  Rumour has it there is a wealthy Italian widow living somewhere near Positano with a big smile on her face and very clean hair.

  The clothes I love so much I can’t wear them

  You should see my new coat. It’s a beauty. Wool and cashmere, camel-coloured, just to the knee and tailored like something Prince Charles wore when he was four, but without the velvet collar.

  Well, it’s not that new any more actually. I’ve had it six months, but it’s still new to me because I haven’t exactly worn it yet. Well, not out of the house anyway.

  Every time I put my new coat on I feel like an heiress. I feel like a princess. I feel like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. I feel like that for a bit and then I take it straight off and put it back in the cupboard on my best padded hanger. It’s too nice to wear. If I wore it, it would get spoiled. Then I wouldn’t have my Beautiful New Coat any more. It would just be another coat.

  The problem is that you can’t wear your beautiful new clothes and have them.

  I was going to wear BNC the other day; I had the whole outfit worked out, with my delicious blue suede knee-boots (which I’ve never worn outside either) and some nifty scarf action. I felt pretty special. But when I got outside it looked like rain, and I was only going to work, so I went back home and put on my old raincoat and some nasty old shoes. I couldn’t waste camel coat’s maiden voyage on such a banal occasion.

  Of course, I can remember when old raincoat was beautiful new raincoat, with its luxuriant fake-fur collar and thrilling swing cut. Now it’s just That Old Thing. And you know how that happened. I wore it.

  Sometimes I wear Supercoat around the house, just so I can swish past a few mirrors and accidentally notice myself. What a beautiful coat you’re wearing. Why, thank you. It’s French. I bought it in London. How marvellous. You must be so proud. Yes, we’re very happy.

  I was going to wear it one night when I was going out for dinner with some very chic people, but I realised at my front door that the restaurant wouldn’t have a padded hanger to put it on. The thought of BNC being dangled from a distorting peg, or thrown over a chair with other coats that it hadn’t been introduced to, was too awful. So I wore a slightly sad leather jacket instead, which has never been the same since it got caught in a rainstorm at the zoo.

  Of course, some things get better with wear. Fortunes have been made making new clothes look like a teenage boy took them camping and then Grandma washed them on the whites cycle.

  And no English aristocrat would set brogue on the grouse moors in tweeds that hadn’t been in the family for several generations. I went to university in Scotland with boys called Hamish and Angus who swaggered around in their great-grandfathers’ kilts. Nobody ever laughed at them, but oh how we snickered at American exchange students attempting the reel of the Fifty-first Division in recently minted plaid.

  Which is all very well, but the hard bit is getting your gear from gorgeous new to dear old friend. There is a ghastly stage in the middle, rather like adolescence, where the clothes don’t look new, or delightfully weathered. They just look sullen and spotty.

  But not my camel coat. BNC is staying safely at home until we can guarantee an occasion where it will be fully appreciated and can be worn for several hours in a standing position.

  Probably some time next June.

  Hats off to hats

  Hats are great. They hide your hair on the days it goes on strike. They keep the cruel fingernails of UV off your forehead. They make short people taller. They add character to the plainest attire. They break the ice at parties.

  It’s just a shame you feel such a git wearing one.

  I’ve got acres of hats. I’ve got so many I use a pile of hatboxes as a bedside table. I’ve had impromptu hat parties for thirty people without having to phone out for supplies.

  My hall coat stand is covered with hats. Covered with hats covered with dust. I mean to wear them, I really do, but every time I put one on and go to walk out the door I feel overcome by shame.

  It’s like parading around with a banner saying, ‘Hey, I’m kooky and fun to be with!’ and, ‘You don’t have to be boring to wear this hat, but it helps!’

  Hats are like bow ties, only bigger.

  It’s not just that I would like to see some return on the hundreds of dollars, drachmas, bahts, francs and punts I’ve spent on the stupid, goofy things. In this climate we really need hats.

  But while most of us happily slip and slop, we just can’t seem to get into the slap. It’s damned foolish, because hats are the nearest thing we have to an ozone layer in this country. But check out a city street on a sunny day and you’ll find it largely a hat-free zone. The only place you’ll see large gatherings of headgear here is at the Melbourne Cup or a dermatologists’ convention.

  Of course, it’s different out in the bush. Everybody wears hats out there. Even people from Sydney. I felt quite normal strutting around Darwin and Katherine and Byron Bay in my straw stetson, and I’ve worn a hat in Noosa and on Bondi Beach without blushing, but there’s still something impossibly cringey about wearing one in the CBD.

  And by the way, baseball caps aren’t hats. They’re clothes; they’re head T-shirts; they’re just stuff. They’re so ubiquitous we don’t see them any more. That’s the stage we need to reach with proper hats. Things with crowns and wide brims need to look as normal as a polyester suit in Pitt Street mall.

  The only way this is going to happen is if we all start wearing the things. Every day and everywhere. All of us. But until you all join in, I guess I’ll carry
on walking around holding a newspaper to my forehead.

  Now that looks daft.

  In the name of Rose

  This is the story of a silk stocking. Once upon a time there was a young journalist who lived in a rent-controlled flat in the London neighbourhood of Covent Garden. (All right, it was me, I’m just trying to get you in the mood.)

  The flat was in a Queen Anne revival building in a paved courtyard lined with trees, right opposite the Royal Opera House. The old Bow Street police station was on the corner and Eliza Doolittle’s market buildings were just down the road. It was a very special place, but the best part about it was my next-door neighbour.

  Rose was eighty-one years old and she had lived in that apartment since she was one. Before that, she lived in a flat on the ground floor of the building, which was built just before she was born. She was a Covent Garden gal and she found the sudden changes to the area bewildering.

  She couldn’t understand why, in 1986, it was so hard to find a packet of caustic soda nearby. Why weren’t there any grocers any more?

  A tiny slip of a person, Rose was very pretty. She wore her hair in a flapper bob and she never went out without a hat, a coat, gloves and lipstick, her handbag over her arm. She had cornflower-blue eyes. And whenever I introduced her to friends of the young, handsome male variety, she would noticeably twinkle. They all fell immediately in love.

  Rose had lived alone since her sister died and I would go and watch Dynasty with her to give her a bit of company. It was her favourite programme because of ‘the gowns’. Rose knew about quality. She had been a manicurist in the grand hotels of London from the 1920s onwards and she would tell me about all the fine ladies who came to her. Film stars and everything.

  Of course, you didn’t speak to your betters in those days, Rose explained. But they used to speak to her. Oh, the things they told her!

  Occasionally, an elegantly dressed older gentleman would come to the flat for a manicure. I think he really came because he liked seeing Rose, but she still enjoyed getting her orange stick out. She had beautiful nails herself and she told me that the secret was to rub a little bit of grease into your cuticles every night. That was all you had to do. I still do it.