Do Clothes Make the Woman?

Readers seem to want to read something about personal style, which makes me tremble as all my life I have loved the beautiful clothes in fashion magazines and worn hand-me-downs. I'm a freelance writer with a husband in the heritage industry, which means I still wear hand-me-downs, albeit from vintage or, as they are known in the UK, charity shops.

Yes, I have my luxury clothing dreams, but it is my belief that you can develop a pleasing style of your own without spending as much money as you might think you would have to. You don't. You just have to be willing to flip through racks and racks of rags to find what will look good on you. 

Most of the time, what looks good on you is colour. Advertisers use a lot of red because it is the colour the human eye first perceives. Therefore, I do not understand why girls on the prowl for boys do so in drab colours, e.g. black tights, blue denim shorts, tight black tops with their breasts all squished up. This overemphasis on the bottom suggests the girls think men are monkeys, and the overemphasis on the squished up breasts suggests that the girls think deep down all men want to bring a stripper home to mother. 

We can wail all day long about how it isn't nice to judge, but the truth is that everybody judges everybody by our clothes. Whole cities can get reputations for style or dowdiness based on the fashion choices of their women.  Paris has a good reputation for well-dressed women. Newcastle (aka Geordie Shore) does not. And what you wear does "send a message" whether you mean it or not, and although the message may not be "I am a loose broad," it may be "I don't belong here" or "I couldn't care less about myself" or "I hate people."

 "I don't belong here" clothes can be as dangerous as "I am a loose broad" clothes, and the best thing I ever did, sartorially-speaking, was refuse to wear my best pale blue acrylic Sunday dress to my first high school dance. Instead I borrowed grey cords and a purple sweater from a friend, which made my mother cry, but at least I did not stick out like a pale blue acrylic thumb. 

Shortly thereafter, the 1960s made a comeback, and so I saw my mother's 1960s clothes in a whole new light. Hitherto, I had worn them glumly because that's what there was, and Mum never threw anything out. But suddenly 1960s minis were in fashion, and Mum's 1960s minis were no longer knee-length on me, so I began to wear them with aplomb. I bought the 1960s revivalist message-- the pale pink lipstick, the black turtlenecks, the black or patterned tights, the big chunky earrings. (In hindsight, I should have gone with the hair, too: grown mine out and ironed it flat.) What I could not raid from my mother, I bought at Le Chateau with my allowance or birthday gift certificates or Christmas money or any money I could get my hands on, really, and Le Chateau was a great shop for teens because it copied the latest fashions and flogged them at a fraction of what the originals much have cost. 

It was all a wonderful exercise in creative experimentation, which is what your teenage years should be about: learning about stuff, experimenting with stuff, training your eye, thinking critically, asking for good advice, taking good advice. And although those grey cords were my badge of fashion freedom, I discovered that I much preferred skirts. I am a girly girl: I like skirts. I like anything that emphasizes that I am not a boy, and nothing says girl like "skirt." There is no reason to display your round bottom, breasts or thighs to get the "I'm a girl" message across. All you need is a nice skirt. Shoes with heels of any height also send the "I'm a girl" message, for men don't usually wear shoes with heels higher than an inch.  

I wore mini-skirts until I was about 30, and then I stopped.  This was mostly because I hated how they rode up when I sat down, but it was also because for years I had preferred the Victoriana side of Goth fashion and also gypsy-look stuff. Both Victorian ladies and gypsy ladies were very modest about legs, and my favourite skirt was (and is) a black velvet maxi-skirt Morticia Adams would have liked. 

In recent years, I have developed an intense boredom for women's legs. Calves are okay if they are bracketed by pretty shoes and the froth of a knee-length hem, but the constant tide of blue-denim and black-stretch bipeds that flows up and down the streets of Edinburgh depresses me. Women used to float; now we scissor. Left, right, left, right, left, right.  Zzzzzz.  It should go without saying that the only place for sweatpants or yoga pants is the gym or yoga studio.

When developing your style, it is helpful to look at fashion magazines and fashion books (e.g. about the history of Yves St Laurent) and take notice of what you like and don't like. Then ponder why you like or don't like them. (What messages have you learned about clothes, and are they valid or invalid, based on your lived experience?) Pay attention to your feelings. It is also helpful to go to galleries and look at paintings, but also to look at what the artists are wearing. (I love looking at artists' outfits at openings.)  

Also, keep your ears open. Do people tell you that you have a strong resemblance to Audrey Hepburn or some other public woman? If so, have a look to see how you resemble her (whether in colouring or shape or both) ,note what she wears or wore, and pull together versions of her looks according to your income. (To the charity shops we go!)

I suppose I should say something about modesty, perennial obsession of the Catholic blogosphere. Modesty is relative to your surroundings, and I had a reader who was targeted for rape because she was wearing an unsually modest outfit at the party. (Predators prey on those who look weak, including uncomfortable.) Remember: looking like you don't belong can be more dangerous than looking "immodest".  In the West, hemlines rose to over the knee in the 1920s, and nothing was the same again. The conservative 1940s, which were war-torn and interested in conserving cloth but also morals and morale, were okay with knee-length skirts and elbow length sleeves. Therefore, I shall make the pronouncement that if you are wearing a shirt or blouse that shows no cleavage or upper arm and skirts or walking shorts that go to your knees (or trousers that do not scream "Look at my bum!"), and perhaps a beret, hat or scarf in neighbourhoods where religious men are nasty to bare-headed women, then you are modestly dressed by any standard, and anyone who says you're not can go soak his head.

If you are at any doubt as to whether or not your outfit is immodest, go directly to the internet and look up "Duchess of Cambridge" or "Kate Middleton." Yes, she lived with her boyfriend for years before marrying him. Yes, yes, yes. Don't do that. But DO have a look at what she is wearing today because she is the most scrutinized woman in the country with the cruelest media (bar none), and she has to represent her husband, his family and the UK every public moment. As a result, she wears clothes that are classy, appropriate and modest. In terms of modest yet stylish dress, keep your eye on Kate and you can't go wrong.  Her look says "Elegant Young Princess," and frankly I think Woman's Lot would be vastly improved if we all dressed like elegant young princesses until we were forty, and then dressed like the Frenchwomen our age.

Of course, the Duchess of Cambridge is tall and very thin, so the actual clothes she wears, even when they are affordable, will not suit many of us. Just keep an eye on her hemlines and what sort of clothes she chooses to wear to whichever occasion. For advice on which clothes best suit your frame, I recommend finding old copies of the Trinny and Susannah books, which you can find very cheaply in charity shops (in the UK) and no doubt online, everywhere else. T & S are rather brash and Broken Britain in their tone, but they do have good advice. As Christians, you may prefer to keep your cleavage a little more covered up than they suggest. 

A word about British fashion: the middle- and high-end shops of Edinburgh are full of beautiful, glorious, feminine clothes. Why do so few British women seem to wear them?!?!?! If I had the money, I would frolic through the department stores like a lamb among the daffodils of spring. As it is, my purse confines me to three looks: the Racy 1930s Woman Novelist (hats, gloves, cocktails, the rarely-used cigarette holder), the Pre-Raphaelite Painting (velvet skirts and a lot of hair) and (default) the "Gypsy Witch," which is not my expression but that of a young man who dresses like a Damned Foreign Johnny of 1938.

Gypsy Witch wears long wool skirts, paisley, bright necklaces and shawls of all kinds, advises young girls on their love lives, reads young men's minds and feeds them delicious soups. Oh dear, I would terribly like to be an elegant Frenchwoman my age, but I seem to have become Gypsy Witch.

If everyone buys my Greene Tribute Novel, maybe I will be able to make the transition to elegant Frenchwoman. Everyone go pre-order! Vite! Vite!  (Here's Amazon for those in the UK, and a Polish site for those in Poland, although October seems rather late. The book comes out in the USA in July!)