Perfect skirts for work
When it comes to our wardrobes, mothers – and grandmothers – know best. Our editors share the familial tips they dress by
Lisa Armstrong – Two words: classic and quality
My mother’s the least vain woman I know. She’d rather have good food in the fridge than fashion statements in her wardrobe. My three sisters take after her. But I loved clothes from the get-go.
The more I trawl through old family photos, the more I appreciate her style, part Natalie Wood part Ali Macgraw. There’s the photograph of her with my second sister, aged a few months, and me, aged around two (right). My mother’s in a navy bouclé dress, with a top-handled bag… we’re by the swings and she’s dressed like Jackie Kennedy.
She’s never been one for gazing in the mirror or agonising over what to put on. I begged her to wear make-up like other school mothers but it wasn’t her thing. She was, however, scrupulous about looking after her skin.
For my 12th birthday, uncharacteristically, she gave me a Boots cleanser, toner and moisturiser – a lifelong morning and evening ritual was born.
Perhaps the Seventies, my father’s wildly fluctuating finances and moving to deepest Dorset got in the way of my mother and the wardrobe she’d have liked. Not that she complained. But when she remarried, it was in Yves Saint Laurent. That’s quite telling. And then there was the Christian Dior teal dress. Unfathomably, it had a CD monogram on the breast pocket – we teased her because it made her look as though she worked for a bank. One time she wore it to nip into the one and only local department store and she was mistaken for the manager. We never let her live it down. Showy dressing wasn’t part of the family pact.
Maybe that’s why she has a tendency to grab the collar of whatever I’m wearing to peer at the label – a habit that used to drive me mad (I probably felt guilty about my extravagance) but I now find funny.
Her fashion splurges occurred once a decade – and I’d always borrow them. She has classic taste, an eye for quality and heightened antennae when it comes to the ridiculous. I often think of my mother when I’m watching a particularly “challenging” catwalk show, which is handy, because she’s a
Daily Telegraph reader.
Charlie Gowans-eglinton – Only buy what you love
Many mornings, on opening my wardrobe, I envy those women with a personal uniform. I long to be someone with a rotating wardrobe of navy, grey and white staples in cashmere and silk, all of which go together and can be made into stylish, understated outfits in a few minutes.
Instead, a shantung silk Mao jacket jostles for space on the rail between a leopard print ponyskin coat and a pink brocade duster. There are lots of silk blouses, but red, pink and yellow ones, covered with flowers, spots and stripes. None of them much go with any of the bottom halves on the shelf below.
“Do you love it?” my mother (left) has always asked me on shopping trips. Not “What does it go with?” or “Where will you wear it?” or “Do you really need it?” Just, invariably: “Do you love it?”
As a 10-year-old on Australia’s east coast, Mum rebelled against the strictures of an all-girls convent school uniform with magazine dress patterns and her sewing machine: she’d rush home and change into a muumuu she’d made from a bedsheet, dyed pink, and tie raffia daisies around her ankles. At university in the Seventies, she’d go to lectures barefoot: perhaps she just couldn’t find shoes she really loved. These days, meeting up for a walk on the heath at the weekend could mean a pink leather jacket, a polka dot blouse, small round sunglasses or gobstopper-sized amber and turquoise rings.
Her advice is the reason my column in these pages is called The Passion Shopper. Sometimes it’s a short-lived fling, though not because I fall out of love – beloved summer dresses literally come apart at the seams; a pair of Camilla Elphick silver ankle boots peeled free of their sole after nearconstant wear through snow and sleet. Joy-bringing pieces liven up my day more than a classic ever could, so I live in them until they fall to pieces.
I inherited my mum’s face, love of red wine, and tendency to come home with yellow shoes when I went out to buy black. The black pair might be more useful – but would I really love them?
Krissy Turner – Invest in classics
My mother and I have dressed similarly for as far back as I can remember; we recently turned up for a shopping trip in chunky knits, identical Topshop jeans and Zara ankle boots. But my grandmother (pictured opposite, top
right) has a ladylike look that is the antithesis of our laidback vibe, which is why I’ve always been obsessed with it. She’d regularly pick me up from primary school with a fresh auburn curly perm and immaculate nails (as a result,
I always have painted nails).
I’d then sit in her living room leafing through dozens of her catalogues, being careful not to move the slips of paper she’d left next to the pieces she planned to buy while I’d stick Post-it notes on the things I liked.
Fast-forward 15 years and when I bought my first designer handbag, she cooed alongside me, reassuring me that I’d wear it all the time and confirming it was a wise buy.
While she’s dismayed when I throw an expensive pair of jeans into our regular family charity collection (“They weren’t worth the money in the first place”), she stands by the investments I’ve made in accessories. She nodded in approval when I showcased a pair of Jimmy Choo patent flats I’d bought at a sample sale – “Look at the sole, they’re very well made and your feet stopped growing years ago so you can wear them forever.”
She was the first woman I know to speak of a “Fashion formula”. Rather than waste time and money on clothes she’s not comfortable in, she sticks to a modest aesthetic – “My teachers in Ireland were nuns” – pairing coloured jersey T-shirts with expertly matched printed skirts, worn with sandals for the warmer months then cashmere and boots for winter.
Evenings out call for a few outfit enhancers; she’ll simply throw on some pearls, her favourite pinky-beige lipstick and a smart wool coat, the lapels peppered with gold brooches.
Caroline Leaper – Don’t wear silly shoes
Most of the fashion advice that my mother (right) has given over the years has had a practical slant: “Always check the composition label before buying something” or “It’s fine to machine-wash most things if you do it cold and in a pillowcase”, etc. Her absolute favourite, though (best dispensed as I’d totter precariously out the door as a teenager) has always been “don’t wear silly shoes”.
In my mind, unfortunately, this particular gem conflicts with another piece of style advice that I have always liked better; to pick things that are different to the norm, that catch your eye, and that make your heart sing. My sum of these parts (or the way I had always added them up, at least) means that I have forever been someone who will defiantly suffer on in killer heels – neon, jewel encrusted, ankle-strapped, you name it – on the understanding that, at some point, looking at their exciting colours and textures when they were inanimate objects in the box had made me happy.
After years of twisted ankles, crushed toes, grass sinkings and so on, I have finally concluded that my mother does know best on this one. I obviously needed to learn it the hard way, but now I’m consciously retiring the skyscrapers in favour of my new kitten heels and fancy flats that are just as occasion-worthy.
Her point, I understand now, is that when you feel comfortable, you look comfortable. This summer, I won’t be standing on the sidelines tending to blisters, or doing a naff shoe change into flip flops – I’ll be joining her on the dance floor and having a better time for it.
Emily Cronin – Don’t save things for best
Whenever I read about a woman whose mother raised her not to leave the house without matching her handbag to her shoes, I think of the spectrum of fashion messages I absorbed from my family.
First, my mother: a make-upeschewing, short-haired, sensible psychologist, alternately bemused and horrified by her daughter’s insistence on wearing only dresses, even on muddy-play day at nursery. That I would “grow up” to be a fashion journalist still strikes her as a cosmic joke. Fretting over what to wear to an interview early in my career, she would say, “Emily, they won’t be looking at you. Just wear black.” A useful reminder, maybe, but sometimes you want to be noticed – for the right reasons.
Then there’s my maternal grandmother (above, with Emily), whose walk-in wardrobe in Miami was a cave of sequins and boas – which she was happy to share for ice cream runs and other outings. There was no such thing as being overdressed in Marsha’s colourful world – and if you were, then everyone else should try harder, shouldn’t they?
Finally, my most stylish aunt: a high-powered advertising executive who introduced me to the concept of pointed stilettos. Working in her office one summer, she sent me to a nearby boutique to pick up a £500 suit. It was cream with black pinstripes, fitted, with flared trousers. She told me: “Just have them throw it in the shopping bag,” and I was horrified, certain she should wait for the tissue paper.
Her point was that clothes – whether expensive, utilitarian or fantastical
– are for wearing. Not for cosseting in tissue and saving for best. It’s something I think about whenever I wear a printed silk midi-dress or gold tasselled shoes to work on an average Wednesday. I might get some looks on the Tube, but at least they’re looking. If you ask me, it’s for all the right reasons.