Importance of keeping up appearances
The lockdowns continue. Much like load-shedding, the talk now is of stages in the response to containing Covid-19. Scores of beggared booksellers must be wondering at what stage they will be permitted to reopen for business; will it be before or after liquor is on sale, and will people still be able to read?
More importantly, when and if normal life resumes will we be able to dress for the occasion? Being housebound has had a noticeable effect on the cut of one’s jib, as it were.
Over the weeks, there has been a marked deterioration in appearance, for example, of television presenters and other talking heads. Many of them are broadcasting from their studies at home via Skype.
Other than a reshuffle of the books on the shelves behind them (out with the Stephen Kings and in with the Soren Kierkegaards), little thought is given to “appearances” and “smartening up” for the occasion. Hair is unruly. Beards unshaven. Open collars. Tshirts.
Those that do make it to the studios find that the make-up and wardrobe departments are not deemed essential personnel and are presumably slobbing at home in their pyjamas. In much the same way we’ve all been (sniffs manky food-stained top) for some time now.
It’s for this reason that critics have welcomed Alexandra Shulman’s new book,
Clothes ... and Other Things That Matter (Cassell).
“Obviously,” Rachel Cooke writes in The Observer, “lots of other things are immeasurably more important. But when it comes to morale, there’s a great deal to be said for pulling on a favourite dress or shirt; for taking the trouble to wear a pair of fancy earrings, even if they’ll be seen by almost no-one.”
Clothes are Shulman’s thing. A former editor of British Vogue, a magazine she ran successfully for 25 years before stepping down in 2017, she is the go-to person, Clarke says, when it comes to “handbags, white shirts and little black dresses”.
But, she writes, this is also the source of the book’s flaws: “Personally, I’m inclined to be indulgent of some of the more fashion-y elements of the book, mainly because they make me laugh: like many of her industry colleagues, for instance, she likes to refer to jeans as ‘the jean’ and trousers as ‘the trouser’. It’s also quietly funny — side eye, as the young people say — when she describes an outfit worn by Sarah Brown, the then prime minister’s wife, as ‘a pleasant royal blue knitted twopiece from a mid-range label’ (my italics).”
Clarke’s big beef, though, is the book’s lack of gossip; she complains that Shulman is coy to the point of “dreariness”. While she happily spills the beans on herself, she is tightlipped on other people, “as if she still depended on them for patronage in the form of advertising, or fears bumping into them at some swanky sponsored dinner”.
When characters like Anna Wintour or Karl Lagerfeld do appear in the memoir, hopes rise in vain that the reader will be told what these titans of taster were really like. “Maybe Shulman thinks it’s crass to dish,” Clarke writes. “But I’m afraid that I’m with Diana Vreeland, the editor of American Vogue in the 60s: in life, a dash of vulgarity is an important ingredient, and it’s very much what’s missing here.”
Other critics have been, well, less picky. Hannah Betts, in The Times, describes the book as “the perfect isolation read — clever, emotionally intelligent, revelling in style without making us yearn to shop”. (And what, I hear the cry, is the point of that, Hannah?)
“She has written about her clothes,” Emily Bearn says in The Spectator, “and given us some scintillating reading.”
There have, of course, also been celebrity endorsements. Leading the pack here is the actress Helena Bonham Carter, whose shout-out for Shulman is unintentionally funny in the manner of Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner: “She’s brilliant at observing everyday feelings in a joy-sparking turn of phrase — but better still she has made me feel so much better about owning too many clothes. Instead of doing a ruthless edit I find myself curating my own private exhibition — inside my wardrobe hang not just clothes, not just stories but my own autobiography.”