Getting Dressed Brigid Keenan
‘I hate fashion... but I have lots of unusual and bizarre clothes’
Chrissie Messenger does not like talking to journalists – which is entirely understandable when you know that she is the younger sister of the iconic Sixties model Jean Shrimpton, and the one-time girlfriend of Mick Jagger, and spent a large part of the Sixties being pursued by the press. She only really agreed to this interview because she loved the idea of being in The Oldie in a dressing-gown.
I first saw her on a visit to Jaipur in India a couple of years ago where she was attending a stitching workshop and I was at the Literature Festival and we somehow ended up at the same lunch party. I noticed her because she is tall and has red hair and looked stunning in a bright orange scarf over a loose brown and beige checked wool coat with a cord belt. I said to my husband, ‘Look at that amazing-looking woman’s outfit, if it didn’t look so chic I would say that that coat is a dressing-gown.’ In the end, I went up and asked her and sure enough, her coat was a dressing-gown bought in the local khadi (hand-loomed textiles) shop. It was the second one she had bought in India; the first some years before when she had travelled to Delhi from the south and it being winter she had to find something warm but cheap to wear.
This is typical of Messenger, who doesn’t buy clothes in a conventional way. ‘I hate fashion’, she says, quickly adding, ‘No it’s not that I hate it, in the early years it was fun but then my sister and I became so involved in that world and in the end it felt blighted and I just wanted to escape from it all – which doesn’t mean that I don’t like clothes, I have lots of unusual and bizarre clothes … I find them in second-hand shops and unlikely places – for instance the other day I went to the V&A for an exhibition called The Cloakroom which displayed all kinds of coats made of different materials: a “carpenter’s coat” made of wood, a “sculptor’s coat” made out of marble, and so on, and to go round the exhibition you had to wear the “oil-rigger’s coat” made of heavy industrial rubber. I ended up buying the one I wore and I’ll use it as a raincoat for walks on the Common.’
Messenger lives in a terraced house in Wandsworth which is as cheery and unusual as her clothes: floors covered in canvas to look like Indian tiles (carolscreativeworkshops.net), orange walls, pink sofas, and everywhere her own beautiful, bright, machine-embroidered pictures (they will be exhibited next year, for details go to www.lucygoffintextiles.co.uk). Messenger is now a yoga teacher as well as an artist, and the back half of her colourful sitting room, looking over the garden, is her studio, empty with bare boards.
‘My life changed completely at fifty. Someone said to me, “You are entering the last third of your existence and a third of that third you will probably spend in an old people’s home, so make sure you use what is left in a way you really want.” So I gave up the shop I’d had for years, moved house, learned to teach yoga and embarked on a new career making my pictures – I had done a foundation course in fine art some time before which helped with that.’ (Earlier, in her thirties, after two marriages and when her four children were small, Messenger did a degree in sociology.) She is seventy now, stands tall and straight and has a good figure. ‘I recommend yoga for old age; it’s much more than exercises – I hate exercises – but yoga has given me a better state of mind and has stopped my figure from getting worse as I get older, and of course, it keeps you mobile.’
Messenger has enviably thick golden-red hair which she wears coiled up like two ears on top of her head when she has just washed it, or loose as in our photograph. ‘My hair is on the way to white, which I don’t want – it changes
people completely – so obviously I dye it. I used to have that done professionally but it was so expensive and so time- consuming that I started to do it myself. I use Nice ’N Easy dye and I mix two colours together because as you get older I think you need to go a bit paler. The plus side is that the dye seems to make it thicker.’
Any tips for looking good in old age? I asked. ‘Look after your teeth – better teeth is one of the great things that has happened in the past fifty years. Small shiny earrings are good, they reflect the light around your face – and of course yoga so you can walk and move without pain.’
Messenger has seven grandchildren, ‘And I am happier than at any other time of my life, I get happier every year.’ She looks back at the Sixties with a faint smile: ‘Fame is not desirable, really, if you are a private person like Jean and me. We didn’t want to be famous, we never looked for it, but weirdly it was a time when everyone we knew seemed to become famous: Mick Jagger was a student at the LSE when I met him, and Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton were just hanging around. I thought becoming famous must be something that happened to everyone.’
In our picture Chrissie is wearing a tartan waistcoat she found in a secondhand shop a decade ago: ‘It fits me and is comfortable and I wear it all the time.’ Her jeans are from Primark and her shoes are second-hand men’s lace-ups but she has replaced the laces with pink ribbons. Her coat is from the khadi market shop in MI Road, Jaipur.