From timesonline uk
of yourself, dressed in clothes that you might quite like to wear.
Until one’s thirties, the problem in this context is one of pure excess – so many of them, you don’t know what to choose. But after that, the desert: dreary little features called things like “Generation Fashion”, showing how to make a look work in your twenties and thirties, followed by the comfy version for the overforties and fifties. Than which the only thing more depressing is that unspeakable poem beginning, “When I am old I shall wear purple/ With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me”. All very well for Anna Piaggi, but hopeless for the rest of us who would quite like to intimidate (or, better still, disturb) the men in the office . . .
It is traditional at some point in this sort of discussion to recite a list of hot peri- or postmenopausal chicks: Jerry Hall, Tilda Swinton, Joanna Lumley, Chrissie Hynde, Helen Mirren, Jane Birkin, Loulou de la Falaise. And so on. They are, indeed, lovely and I cling to the thought of them as to a spar in a wreck. But it is only too noticeable that in the media, they are invariably described as being marvellous for their age. Fab, indeed, at 40, 50 or 60. Their place is no longer the fashion pages but the features pages (where, like as not, they are represented by an unflattering photograph pointing out that they are either in need or, or have had, some form of cosmetic surgery to turn them into a grim simulacrum of their 20-year-old selves).
Small wonder, really, that so many women past the age of fertility (but not the age of energy, creativity or seduction) find themselves in a muddle when it comes to clothes, retreating into grim knitwear and harsh highlights (as Twigs herself and her fellow model, Laura Bailey, tend to in the M&S adverts, looking respectively mumsy and brassy, while lustrous Noémie Lenoir and Erin O’Connor, who could lend a haunting resonance to a pair of Crimplene slacks, are styled to far greater advantage), and falling easy prey to the TV bodysnatchers – grim queens of the makeover show, including Channel 4’s Nicky Hambleton-Jones (a barely animated shop dummy, like something off Dr Who), and the terrifying What Not to Wear duo of Lisa Butcher and Mica Paris, who appear to have in common with Hambleton-Jones a mission to humiliate as many middle-aged women as possible in the time available. Extraordinary to think that in the heyday of couture – which is to say, in the century between about 1860 and 1960 – the middle-aged client was the darling of the ateliers, for her sophistication and her spending power.
Perhaps Twigs has some amazing secret up her pastel-pink swing cardi sleeve when it comes to the renaissance of middle-aged style in the 21st century. Let’s hope so, for I find myself mourning my lost pleasure in clothes as I climb into my grimly chic daytime uniform of Gap jodhs and discreet cashmere sweater each morning. I don’t want to look 20 again. My taste is more developed, my experience richer, my skin and haircut better, my figure holding up nicely. Above all, I am happier, and (crucial point, this, when it comes to the swing of the fashion pendulum) richer. I’d like some clothes to wear, and some fashion pages to read, that reflect that, instead of lumping me in an undifferentiated mass of invisible old girls past the magic age of 35. Any chance, do you think?
Alas, it really is too late
My colleague Hugo Rifkind, writing about the appearance of Alison Steadman and Sebastian Faulks this Sunday in One Hour More, a fundraiser for Camden, City, Islington and Westminster Bereavement Services, notes with the mildest of satirical tweaks something a bit dim and worthy about the enterprise – which lacks, it is true, the dazzling aspirational chic of, say, breast cancer or HIV fundraising. But there’s nothing like personal experience for making something a bit dim seem vivid and urgent. I find myself attending, separated by only a couple of weeks, the funerals of friends for whose steadfast kindness when I was in dire need I never properly said thank you. “Of course they knew how much they meant to you,” says everyone to whom I’ve told my regret. Well, I hope they did. But it doesn’t stop me wishing that I’d taken that hour to make it plain, while there was still time. When you’re young and unafraid of death (especially other people’s), there is a certain romantic dying fall about the phrase “too late”. But when the regret becomes personal, it’s amazing how the dying fall of “too late” loses its power to intrigue.
Alarm bells ring
Normally I’m resigned to the cycle of the seasons and even relish the spiders’ webs, bare twigs and louring skies over the Thames that signal my urban autumn. This year, having had so little sunshine, I find myself approaching the coming winter with grim apprehension, as though I was sickening for something. Still, it hadn’t struck me that I might need counselling on how to deal with the changing of the clocks at the weekend. But in Another Paper I find the trauma addressed, so I hasten to pass on its advice. Caution: “You may find yourself wide awake before the alarm clock goes off.” Take care, now.