Will freedom turn us all back into fashion slaves?
UNDER normal circumstances I wouldn’t start a column by mentioning Sex And The City but owing to recent images of Carrie and the girls looking even more outlandish than normal – who thought that was possible – I’d ask your indulgence on this occasion. For it certainly seemed ironic that the cast that once prided itself in holding up a mirror to the messy reality of girls’ lives look now more like flamboyant drag queens than flesh-and-blood women.
Their super high-maintenance style of towering Manolo Blahniks, full make-up and Carrie’s clutching not one designer handbag but two seemed like a throwback to a pre-pandemic age of frivolity and vanity where fiftysomething glamazons suffered nothing more pressing than having their roots and fillers done.
We know very little about this new SATC reboot other than Samantha’s absence, but it must either be set far in the future, when Covid is but a distant memory or in a fantasy land where it never struck.
For even now when the worst (we hope) is over and events and restaurants begin to reopen, there is no sign of women being in any haste to enslave themselves once again to the decorative demands of society, let alone the impossible standards of the beauty industry.
Even the stars are unyielding with Andie McDowell sporting a head of grey hair on the red carpet in Cannes – an act that would have been punishable by death two years ago.
THE actress said that when her roots started growing out during the pandemic, her daughters told her not to touch them. They ‘kept telling me I looked badass’, explained McDowell. ‘So, I went for it and I’m enjoying it… It’s not that I’m letting myself go; I don’t think of it that way.’
Gillian Anderson is another convert to going au naturel, after dispensing with her bra during lockdown. ‘I don’t care if my breasts reach my belly button. I’m not wearing a bra anymore. It’s just too f ****** uncomfortable,’ she says.
Meanwhile, sales show that stilettos and skyscraper heels are teetering on the edge of extinction as women, their backs turned on the idea that beauty has to mean torture, remain wedded to their trainers and ballet pumps.
It seems that the pandemic has succeeded where second-wave feminism failed. While women nodded sagely at Germaine Greer and Naomi Wolf’s trenchant deconstruction of misogynistic consumer culture or their exposing of the beauty myth as a con, we still clambered over each other to get the new season’s Itbag or skyscraper heels.
Not only that, but the marketers managed to rebrand high heels, which cripple women literally and financially, as a means of female empowerment.
Many women swore that killer heels gave them a polish and confidence that no other item of footwear or clothing could, while Anna Wintour’s helmet hairstyle – necessitating a blowdry every single morning of her life – became known as a power bob. It was as if the more agonising, laborious or expensive the style, the greater the dividends in terms of female confidence.
DURING Covid though, as our contact with the outside world shrunk to the size of a screen, our sartorial norms changed, and many women discovered what parts of personal grooming were key to their welfare and what were detrimental.
Many realised how good it is to run around in our sensible shoes rather than hobble in heels, or to pour our belongings into a cotton tote rather than worrying about pens leaking in our best designer bag. And last but not least be spared the ordeal of one morning a month in the stifling hairdressers, having our colour ‘done’.
It remains to be seen if our preference for comfort and convenience over labels and glamour is permanent or superficial; it may well be that it doesn’t survive the wholescale reopening of society. That once our ‘Freedom Day’ comes, we will be back to our bad old ways, of hobbling around in four-inch heels while fooling ourselves that the sound of them striking the floors speaks volumes for our steely character.