“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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Adventuress Undressed 