Stuff ‘n Nonsense – The Woolworth Heiress & the Cathedral of Commerce

 I was walking past the soon to be defunct Brixton branch of Woolies last month watching people snap themselves in front of the shop shutters, shutting for the last time and I got to thinking about stuff.

Inside the shelves were as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, save for a few things you’d have to pay people to buy and I thought of the stuff infesting my pre-purged room. Stuff waiting to be adapted, adorned and updated, mostly with other stuff I’d buy from Woolworths on the way home from work. Stuff which I enjoy mending and making into more stuff I will enjoy wearing, but which I suspect may actually be the stuff of procrastination.

Oh, the path of procrastination, how familiar is its meandering terrain…  I used to procrastinate by way of creating the perfect capsule wardrobe. Now I am creating an ethically sound and spiritually up-lifting wardrobe and I have to stop and ask myself, is this more stuff ‘n’ nonsense? Am I seeking a material solution to my immaterial desires?

Because if there was ever a cautionary tale concerning the trappings of excess – or stuff – then it is that of Barbara Hutton. Babs and I first met on the cover of Tatler. Well, actually, it was a modern-day zebra-striped, fur-clad, jewel-dripping, forties-style faux Babs; perched neatly in the white tuxedo-ed arms of a Gillette-the-best-a-man-can-get guy in wayfarers; their perfect smiles glinting against the painted desert backdrop. The strap line read ‘Too Rich to Walk’.

Barbara was the granddaughter of Frank Woolworth, founder of the Woolworth discount stores, known more familiarly as Woolies in the UK. And she was the Woolworth Heiress  life-couldn’t-get-better-than-this American dream princess.

Cathedral of commerce

When Barbara was a little girl she found her mother dead, like a discarded doll, on the bathroom floor – broken spirited, broken hearted. Her daddy deserted her. Her aunts passed her around like a mis-addressed parcel. While her grandfather, Frank, was ever busy with business and building his ‘Cathedral of Commerce’ – a Neo-Gothic tower of Babel, the tallest building to grace the golden streets of the Big Apple, the tallest building in the world, poking up through the clouds, like a finger held up at heaven.  Only to be trumped, in a New York Minute, by the futuristic, crystalline Cathedral of Cars, the Chrysler building.

Eventually over-shadowed by the World Trade Center the Woolworth Tower was relegated to making cameo appearances in feature films like Cloverfield, where it played itself crushed under foot by the Godzilla-gargoyle-esque creature as if in some sort of hubristic retribution only mildly worse than the American-based stores becoming Foot Locker.

More recently the building has found its acting niche, playing the headquarters of Mode magazine in the US TV series Ugly Betty. What with frivolous fashion being shorthand for crass consumerism the building seems fated for such a role. And I cannot help but imagine the tormented ghost of the Marie-Antoinette-esque Millionaire Heiress haunting its [s]hallowed halls.

Dubbed the Poor Little Rich Girl by the mock sympathetic press, Babs sought solace in upmarket candy stores Cartier, Asprey and Van Cleef buying the love she’d been deprived of as a child, marrying numerous husbands including silver screen Prince Charming Cary Grant, who said:

‘Barbara surrounded herself with a consortium of fawning parasites – European titles, broken-down Hollywood types, a maharajah or two, a sheikh, the military, several English peers and a few tennis bums. If one more phoney earl had entered the house, I’d have suffocated.’

Being an American Dream Princess is not enough when you feel worthless.

And so Babs did not live happily after, dying pretty much penniless. Her Regent’s Park pad, in some curious homage to the American Dream, becoming the U.S. Ambassador’s London residence.

I guess the stuff of dreams, the immaterial, best-things-in-life-are-free stuff we truly yearn for, is often mistakenly believed to be the material stuff we convince ourselves our [American] dreams are made of – a bit like the rubbish dump the short-sighted mole has mistaken for a fairytale castle in an animation I saw some years ago. Stuff in itself isn’t bad, but it can be a glaring distraction that can tempt you to over-look the wardrobe for the clothes.

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I AM the Fairest One of All – Loving Yourself Warts ‘n’ All

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted…” as the inimitable Mae West once said.  Actually I wasn’t purposely Snow White – although I love the whole hair black as night, skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood thing… very Vampira – I was actually more… off-white… cream, in fact.  Head to foot in cream, with a hood and everything.  This prompted a loud-mouth youth in Southend High Street to bawl out, “Oi, Snow White!” And I shrunk, tortoise-like, into the cavernous depths of my hood, horrified. That was the point of most my clothes then, they were a disguise – though not always so literally.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall..."

I never had a style as such, more like a theatrical costume – or props department – a character for every occasion.  One day, when I was about 11, I had looked in the mirror of our sauna-style bathroom – what was with that look? – and watched myself submerge into its silvery depths, like a mermaid, and reappear Laura Palmer blue – I didn’t recognise me any more. And for a long time after I played at being anybody else but me – except one of them people in the Body Shock documentaries.

It wasn’t until the day I got married, in a dress I felt all wrong in, my scalp singed and my hair pulled into a knot by a mad Italian hairdresser, that I realised becoming Mrs Somebody was not the answer to eliminating Little Miss Nobody – she looked at me from the mirror with her ‘I told you so…’ expression and I knew I had some facing up to do. 

Where had my fairytale gone tits up? When searching through the evidence, photos bore testament to the fact that no matter how much real jewellery, designer scarves, or Thomas Pink shirts I layered on, I was fake.  I’d adopted – voluntarily I admit – someone else’s idea of me.  And I could hear my mother saying, “You used to love colour!  If I see you in another shade of beige, I’ll scream!  You look like death!”  I later realised I had been suffering from a severe case of Beige Zombosis.

At its worst, this disease manifested itself as a desire to create the perfect capsule wardrobe.  In itself this holy grail of sartorial zendom is not a bad objective.  I mean, even Einstein, had a capsule wardrobe of sorts, apparently comprising of seven versions of the same outfit.  Sounds pretty dull, but he had that crazy ass hair-style thing going on, so he didn’t want to go overboard, and he knew what he felt most cosy in when doing all them formulas, so voila!  Ultimately if the point of clothes is to do a job, then the capsule wardrobe is like an elite task force.

Albert Einstein Style

This whole capsule wardrobe thing had me going for a while.  In fact I spent the time I was meant to be writing my novel, trawling the length and breadth of London searching for the pieces which would create this seemingly elusive ideal.  It was when I was packing for my honeymoon and I filled the entire flat with various ensembles for every conceivable occasion, but still felt as if I had ‘simply nothing to wear’, that I realised something had gone horribly wrong.  Dun, dun, dah!  Half finished chapters of my novel flew up and slapped me in the face; French vocab stickers I had studiously ignored in my attempt to learn the language of lurve mocked me at every turn; and playing cards flew through the air… oh no, wrong story.  Basically, I was starting but I wasn’t finishing – anything, ever…

So right now although I have moved on somewhat, I am still standing in the fall out of this unhappy episode, wondering how to pick my way through the debris.  And I may be itching to get the hell outta here, but rule number one when changing anything is:  Learn to love yourself the way you are and where you are NOW.  Stand in the midst of the disarray that is your wardrobe, look into your make-up smeared mirror and say, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?” and accept the reply, “You, my queen, are fairest of all.” without cracking up.

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Introduction – Piles: a Pain in the Ass

Confusion and uncertainty reigns not just in the worlds’ banks but also in my wardrobe – Is my wardrobe a physical manifestation of worldwide fiscal turmoil; personal confusion; or just a plain mess? ‘As within, so without’ as they say…

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

I’ve lost my black elastic belt, the one I got to replace the other one, which pinged off as I was talking to my manager. I could have left it in any number of places, but it’s hard to tell, given the state of my wardrobe, which is almost literally bulging at the seams – ahem. And it wouldn’t be so annoying, except that this particular belt is the vital component of many of my outfits; it kinda holds everything together; and I am forced to make do with the unreliable belt I had thrown on the ‘for charity, Freecycle, potential swap or sell’ pile. This pile has migrated from the bedroom to the living room corner to make way for the ‘mending’, ‘adapting’, ‘too small’, ‘too formal’, ‘out of season’ and ‘just not sure’ piles.

The ‘pile’ situation, masquerading as organisation in progress, is getting out of hand with many garments apparently missing in action. This results in a certain amount of uncertainty when getting dressed in the morning; and I often leave the house feeling harassed, slightly dishevelled, and precariously held together by my capricious, ready-to-spring-off-at-any-time belt.

I can’t help but think all this confusion is a physical manifestation of the inner workings of my mind… eeerrrgh, it’s a mess. Can I feng shui my wardrobe? Is there such a thing? Cos I think it [and by extension, I guess, my mind] has some sort of energy block. Will organising my external world help my inner and spiritual well-being and vice versa?

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