The only outfit a girl needs? Armour-plated confidence
SHE was so ‘brave’ and ‘self-effacing’, agreed the sisterhood. ‘Why was this not our September cover?’ joked one Vogue fashionista. Certainly, the picture that ex-Vogue editor Alex Shulman posted of herself, below, in a Boden bikini while on holiday in Greece would have made a change from an airbrushed Kate Moss as the magazine’s cover girl (again and again).
It confirmed, in the flesh, what Shulman declared on camera for a TV documentary last year: she’s not conventionally gorgeous, but a 59-year-old mum who hates the gym and loves sandwiches. Despite 25 years of rubbing up against the hip-bones of supermodels, she has emerged unscathed. You can’t count her ribs, or see a gap at the top of her thighs.
Look, she’s saying, I’m still normal! I don’t care that my tummy has the consistency of porridge and that my thighs meet like long-lost friends!
Well, forgive me if I don’t quite fall for the humble bragging. Shulman may be wearing next to nothing, but by sharing her photo she revealed she has something far more precious in her wardrobe – an armour of self-confidence that, to most women her age, remains as elusive and elitist as any designer gown featured in the pages of the fashion bible she used to edit.
Contrast her selfie with my own exposure in a bikini, for a newspaper feature a few years ago. Marie Helvin, now past 60, had just posed in a two-piece, so it was thought it might be fun for me to do so, too.
But, unlike Shulman, I am not immune to the forces of fashion. My 30 years in the business had made me ashamed of my body to the point of insanity.
For the photo, I had as a rider in my contract a make-up artist, body make-up artist, hairdresser, and a sculpting airbrush fake tan. Flattering lighting. A female photographer. A closed set. I didn’t take on water, Victoria’s Secret-fashion, for 24 hours beforehand.
The resulting piece told how I had at last found the confidence to wear a bikini. For one day only. I’d never, ever wear a bikini in real life: are you insane? I wouldn’t walk across a beach in the darn thing. I wouldn’t let anyone see me from behind, or in sunlight, or upright.
NEVER mind her belly or thighs, what Shulman’s selfie showed was this: there are some women who have so much confidence – thanks to privileged childhoods, successful parents, a West London upbringing, friends in all the right places – that it acts like a bubble. Nothing can touch their self-esteem.
They remind me of a posh girl on a gap year I came across once in the Himalayas: all flip-flops, sunnies and great teeth. She was teaching Indian women how to cook rice. Such women are resilient to the point of being colonial. And they have absolutely no idea how vulnerable the rest of us are. They see Cara Delevingne with the new Mulberry bag, or Gisele’s thighs, or Keira Knightley’s flat chest, and they think: Bleugh. Such silly girls. Pretty, like ornaments, but not seductive. Whereas I see Cara or Keira and I feel ashamed I’m not like them. I want to be them. That desire, that feeling we don’t measure up, is exactly what keeps us buying stuff. Enshrined on her throne at the pinnacle of the fashion business, Shulman’s job didn’t just come with perks and a town car and a front-row seat at couture. It came with responsibility. To come out now, after 25 years of peddling perfection, and to let it all hang out, a smirk on her face as if to say, ‘Look, I’m normal. I don’t need all that stuff to be happy!’ isn’t a courageous stand on behalf of normal women. It insults them. may not need the crutch of a new outfit to enable her to leave the house. Most of us do. The world was and is her oyster while we, her readers, are left with our noses pressed up against the window of an unobtainable illusion: the life we hunger for, but will never attain.