If anyone can rock a dowdy brooch . . .
After less than a month of Liberal guidance, Canada has become a different country, big ideas (that’s new), glorious (renewal), popular with the other countries (totally new). Canada is now being asked to dance even by boys she does not wish to dance with, which is nice, and so very different from the Harper years.
I have a list of 15 wonderful changes the Canadian government has wrought or is about to wreak under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but first things first.
For the wonderful Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau was accused by oik journalists of wearing a Wham-Osized maple leaf brooch when she and her husband met the Queen at Buckingham Palace this week, i.e., a diamond one costing seven grand, isn’t she fancy?
Alarms went off in my head. I have a small siren system installed for sexism against Grégoire-Trudeau.
It’s nobody’s business if GrégoireTrudeau buys expensive jewelry, and if her husband had bought it for her, she was wearing it out of a loyalty to the marriage that I myself understand. For the thing is hideous. I couldn’t see it on her when she arrived at the palace because it was blocked in photos by a guardsman’s head.
So fine, it’s a maple leaf the size of a human head, and she took one for the team, she wore it. Imagine the look on her face when Trudeau gave it to her, and when he took it back to the store, they must have said they didn’t do returns on sale items. Someone was giggling in the back.
As it turns out, the thing was lent to the couple by Birks, presumably because they couldn’t stand it either. What better way to unload it than to offer it to Grégoire-Trudeau for an occasion that demands, let’s admit it, a certain level of dowdy.
The Queen carries a black leather handbag indoors — does she not have servants or indeed pockets? — and a purple brooch like grapes, or a bruise. Grégoire-Trudeau wears a brooch the size of a bread plate; they’re even.
On Remembrance Day, GrégoireTrudeau wore a grey bandeau cloche hat that I will not soon forget, though I don’t wear hats. The woman can work a hat. But for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Malta, it looked like some kind of pink net projectile had smashed into the side of her head.
This was her brilliant compromise. If she had to wear a hat — and note that Samantha Cameron wasn’t forced to wear one to Kate Middleton’s wedding — she would wear it so that if you looked at her from at least one side, you couldn’t see it. It’s called a 25-per-cent win. Or a 75per-cent loss. Whatever, she looked quite detached from her frothy Frisbee, and the overall effect was terrific.
Grégoire-Trudeau gets it right. She wears Erdem, by Erdem Moralioglu, a young Montrealer whose work was recognized from the start as unusual in that it made women “prettier,” imagine that. She also wears Moose Knuckles and Sentaler coats. Her sense of style doesn’t diminish her career and her parenting of three children; it just enhances her life. She and her husband are Québécois. They dress as well as journalists dress badly. This is fine. We’re all making statements of self.
Back to the brooch. I own only costume jewelry, but every woman owns hideous stuff, pavé (like pavement) or paste ( junk), that she vainly hopes will come back in style. The Dick Van Dyke Show once had an episode, “The Curse of the Petries,” where Laura Petrie was given a garish gold brooch in the shape of the continental U.S.A. with diamonds where every (male) Petrie was born. She accidentally mashed it in the garbage disposal. Hilarity ensued. (It was 1966.)
If Birks will just take the brooch back and shut up about it, GrégoireTrudeau won’t have to back over it in the driveway or lose it in a drain, should a drain that large exist. A storm drain, that could work.
I know why I’m writing this. It’s so pleasant not to have to talk about Stephen Harper’s hair anymore. Where dwells that hard, dry material? Does it grow long now or just snap off at the ends like a biscuit? I care not. Hadrian Trudeau, 1, was wearing a fabulous bomber jacket the other day. I’ll get back to you. hmallick@thestar.ca