The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Can clothes tell the story of a life?
Alexandra Shulman, former editor of ‘Vogue’ , uses her wardrobe to give snapshots of lost eras. By Nell Frizzell
CLOTHES… AND OTHER THINGS THAT MATTER by Alexandra Shulman 352pp, Cassell, £16.99, ebook £10.99
Internalised misogyny is like a loose underwire – pushing into your chest, causing you discomfort, the pain perhaps making you act and think irrationally. It is because of internalised misogyny that an entire book about clothes, one woman’s life, and how the two are intertwined seems so much easier to dismiss than, say, one man’s life and the football team he supports. And yet, there is no reason for this to be the case.
In the introduction to her latest book, Clothes… and Other Things
That Matter, former Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman lists all the clothes that were in her wardrobe during the winter of 2018. These items – the jackets, the T-shirts, the dressing gowns, the trainers, along with a few wild cards, are the seams that hold the memoir together. Each item represents a chapter, in which Shulman reflects on her life, her career as one of the most famous and most enduring editors in print media, and her family.
You’ll have noticed that in true internalised misogynistic style, I have picked out the most genderneutral examples: jackets, T-shirts and trainers. Am I, even here, worried about making a review of a book about one woman’s clothes too, well, focused on one woman’s clothes? Would a mention of her skirts and nightdresses instantly put off too many people? Would it make the book seem silly, frivolous, niche?
Within the story of what we wear and why, there are, of course, many other stories of sex, power, money, ancestry, work, art, business and parenting. In writing about her love of sloppy, oversized sweaters, Shulman describes how, as a teenager, she was picked up (her phrase, not mine) by an older man and taken with a friend to Paris for the weekend to visit another man, with the approval of her parents. “They did not say, why on earth is some wealthy guy you haven’t even met taking you two 17-year-olds out to a wildly expensive restaurant in Paris?” writes Shulman, with that strange mix of outrage and humour that falls just short of blame.
The encounter is just one of many in which Shulman sparingly captures an era and, in many cases, a lifestyle that will seem foreign to many of her readers. Grand, fleeting, glamorous, sometimes seedy, often unfair. Another is her description of being bought her first suit – “a pale grey Cerutti number with a fine pale blue stripe” – by an American aunt who was the first businesswoman
Shulman had ever met and who made a habit of staying at the Berkeley hotel in Knightsbridge. Another is the Nineties heyday of Cool Britannia, Kate Moss and slip dresses, when Shulman felt that all her friends were getting married and having children: “with every announcement I heard the noisy, frightening ticking of that clock – Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock – which no amount of career success could silence.”
Shulman portrays herself as a fashion outsider, an unlikely hero, someone dressing up as “the kind of person who looked like the kind of person who was in charge”. She didn’t wear a bra from when she was 17 until she had her son 20 years later (despite the “unavoidable issue of nipples”), she loves pulling on a “Geography Teacher dress,” she occasionally cycles to buy the paper in her dressing gown and she would be more excited about wearing a Leonard Cohen-esque collection of rags and feathers than the floorlength bespoke gowns she later donned to host fashion events. She subtly criticises a world in which
and the emotions that his encounters provoke. His motive is not pornographic sensationalism: sex for Greenwell is simply the area in which one is most aware, most alive, most vulnerable, and there’s nothing comfortable about the exposure it entails. He is drawn as much to mine the “shame and anxiety and fear” it involves as to its momentary pleasures and elusive rewards.
Two sadomasochistic hookups are described in giddying extended close-up that most of us will recoil from, but what impels one to read on isn’t the exhaustive charting of every physical manoeuvre so much as the Proustian ability to analyse ambivalences. “We can never be sure of what we want,” he insists. “I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.”
Running away from a violent situation, bloodied and humiliated, he reflects: “I knew that having been shown it I would come back to it, when the pain had faded and the fear, maybe not to this man but to others like him; I would desire it, though I didn’t desire it now, and for a time I would resist my desire but only for a time.”
That sentence gives an idea of the almost incantatory rhythm that informs Greenwell’s writing, the punctuation used with wonderful sensitivity to create a sense of restless ruminative intelligence. He also has a poet’s gift for the sharply illuminating image: a wind “worrying every loose edge”; cigarette smoke as “abrasive as sand”; Venice full of “capillary water and sinking stone”. This never becomes floridly decorative or vacuously pretentious: the honed economy of the language is as striking as its psychological richness. Greenwell’s readiness to be candid comes with a melancholy tenderness too – the temperature is more warmly intimate than it is in Hollinghurst’s majestically contrived novels.
At the collection’s centre, running over four of the nine stories, is an account of his loving relationship with a Portuguese exchange student identified only as R (Greenwell has a slightly irritating penchant for withholding people’s names). Here he finds the “cleanness” that gives its title to the collection in a brief episode of joyous romantic fulfilment. Of course, it doesn’t last: circumstances force the pair to separate geographically and the relationship crumbles. Did Greenwell ever altogether believe in it? “I wanted to go back to what R had lifted me out of,” he admits. “I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.”
You may be disturbed by what Greenwell has to tell us, but there is no denying that he deals in the truth about what Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity”, expressed in prose of chaste beauty and elegance.
He has a poet’s gift: a wind ‘worrying every loose edge’, smoke as ‘abrasive as sand’