My couturier of choice 

These days my couturier of choice is K-Mart; if I lived closer to Warringah Mall I might add Target and Best and Less.

I’ve worn a skirt once in four years as the life I now lead leans towards trousers. The trousers are topped by very large shirts as there is rather more of me than there used to be. Often the net worth of my entire outfit, shoes included, is less than the cost of the scarf I might be wearing.

Sometimes I think back to the Olden Days and what was required then in the clothes department. For example, there was never a time when I didn’t have at least three long dresses in the wardrobe because they were worn to weddings and other formal parties. They often had a stole (Olden Days speak for a wrap) or a bolero (Olden Days speak for short jacket} which only covered the back and arms. This was because the Olden Days rules said you had to have your arms covered while dining; the stole or bolero came off at the end of the meal ready for dancing. We also had cocktail dresses – short dresses in some evening-ish material often also with jackets of varying sorts. Other styles of dress were for other occasions and woe betide if you wore the wrong type of garment for the occasion – utter humiliation!

In my young teenage, we wore very full skirts held out by several petticoats, some of them ribbed. You can see them in videos of the Rock ‘n Roll era. Then there was a vogue for very tight trousers made of flowered furnishing material. I was thin in those days but I still had to lie on the floor to zip these trousers up. The same happened with the advent of jeans which in the Olden Days were not made of stretch material.

The era of short skirts was ushered in by the appearance of British model Jean Shrimpton at the 1956 Melbourne Cup with a dress a modest few inches above the knee. It was considered scandalous but inevitably ushered in the mini skirt era, followed inexorably by the maxi skirt and somewhere in there were the midi skirts. I still have somewhere packed away the outfit I wore for my 21^st; the skirt was so short I’m surprised I didn’t have matching undies. And there were hot pants, the shortest of short shorts.

Shoes at sometime in my late teenage were corked heel wedges which curiously have woven in and out of fashion since the 1930s. As I grew older and a tad more elegant, I began to wear stilettos which got higher and higher over the decades. Regrettably, because they make your posture look nice and your legs shapely, I can’t go above a two-inch heel these days, if that. Mostly it’s sneakers or sandals.

As my working life extended to outrageous hours and required lots of bits and bobs to carry around, the size of my handbags increased and I now have quite a collection of bags-which-are-never-used but I can’t bear to throw out. As I now don’t have to carry packets of cigarettes and lighters around, a set of makeup and all the debris of a working mother’s life my bags have become smaller and smaller.

In the Olden Days, you wore a slip (petticoat) under your dress and had to be certain your Sunday wasn’t longer than your Monday – or your slip was showing below your dress hem. We were admonished by our mothers never to leave the house with a safety pin holding the elastic of our knickers (undies) together, just in case we got run over and the ambulance men would see. We also wore “step-ins”, extremely tight elasticised tummy squashers which I think had gizmos hanging down in four places to attach your stockings, long before stocking-tights.

When I see the pregnant women these days stuffing their bumps into tight dresses or t-shirts I recall the maternity clothes of the 1970s, large shapeless sacks with blouses or jumpers underneath.

And a word about hats. I’ve always adored hats and in my teenage years this was on the shopping list for going to synagogue on the High Holydays. However I always wanted a great big wheel of a straw hat which I was never permitted to buy; as I was/am fairly short, my mother said I would look like a mushroom. Happily the last decade-plus of my working life was spent at The Great Synagogues so hats became de rigueur and I was at last able to build up a collection.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British novelist Anita Brookner in a letter to The Times: “I am forty six and have been for some years past”.