When I see drably dressed chanel price
list women wearing cardigans like ironed porridge, or wrinkled, beige,
calf-length linen skirts, I wonder what was going through their minds when they
picked their clothes off the rail in a shop and tried them on. Did they really
think: “This is lovely. I’ll take it”? Despite the cutting-edge eccentricity of
British street style, despite the British designers Alexander McQueen and John
Galliano running notable Parisian fashion houses, despite, back at home, having
Vivienne Westwood and the quieter pleasures of Nicole Farhi and Betty Jackson to
choose from, many British women—unlike their French and Italian
counterparts—dress like frumps. Of course, British men dress even more badly,
but being men, they are not on the receiving end of endless finger-wagging from
the fashion pages chanel price
list .
The word frump is always applied to chanel price
list women; there does not seem to be a male equivalent.The frump’s wardrobe
is one that changes only imperceptibly as decades pass. In the 1990s, it would
have embraced a navy suit, a dress with a pleated skirt that fell to just above
the ankles, and a white cardigan. Ten years on little has altered other than the
colours: typically, beige, grey and stone have replaced navy and white, perhaps
because such non-colours are even more invisible than the originals. It’s as if
such women don’t want to be seen.Since the debut of the BBC’s “What Not to Wear”
in 2001, a proliferation of makeover shows has attempted to teach women how to
dress, while personal shoppers have become almost ubiquitous in department
stores. Books such as “Style chanel price
list” by Paula Reed, or Nina Garcia’s “The Little Black Book of Style” have
laid down rules and regulations for how to conceal your hips (a-line dresses),
or what colours to choose to suit your hair and skin tone.Yet for many women
this vast re-education project has failed to take. Still they look a dull, badly
co-ordinated mess. Is it that these women do not care what they wear or what
they look like? It seems unlikely—for if they did, their choice of clothes would
be more truly random: they would buy the first thing they saw when they walked
into the shop, or wear what they already owned until it fell to pieces.
Yet I often see women trying on outfits that make them look chanel price
list ten years older, that drown their shapes, in shades that draw all
colour from their now-lifeless skin. They gaze intently at their reflection.
They ask a friend or husband for their opinion. Does it suit me, they ask? Do
you think it’s too short? Do they have it in another colour? Should I get the
next size up?On occasion I have even been bold enough to intervene, and begged
them not to buy something so unflattering. Sometimes this works, and they put
the shapeless beige sack back.What business is it of mine what people wear? The
answer is, it’s everyone’s business. Other people’s clothes are part of the
background music of our lives. As we walk about we can hardly avoid the sight of
others; and just as it is a pleasure to gaze upon a good-looking chanel price
list man or woman (however unfair that may be to the rest of us), so it is a
delight to see a really stylish man or woman. You don’t have to be young, thin
or rich to be stylish; merely to care about what you look like, to take an
interest, to regard dress as part of aesthetics, like architecture and
landscape.Earlier this year, Marks & Spencer introduced a particularly
risible a-line calf-length denim skirt. It disappeared at once from their stores
nationwide. Hopes were briefly raised that irate fashionistas had torn the skirt
from the rails in an act of sartorial revolution, but no, it was shoppers who
loved it so much that it sold out at once. Here at last was the ideal frumpy
item: a skirt not out of date but never fashionable in the first place.Why did
so many women buy the thing? Perhaps it’s simply that they like chanel price
list dowdy clothes, clothes with a straightforward lack of noticeability
that chimes with their own personalities. Just as Coco Chanel always wore black
or Victoria Beckham invariably carries a matching handbag, frumpy garments,
hideous as they might seem to others, are a valid expression of the wearers’
character. They may actively wish to resemble a mid-1970s geography teacher,
fondly remembering her reassuring neutrality. In a world of style aggressively
attaching itself to the humblest of objects, from pastel Smeg fridges to Cath
Kidston dog beds, there is comfort to be gained from heading in the opposite
direction.Dowdy dressers have the same right to be provided for by the retail
trade as fashion victims who crave leather leggings, and everyone else in
between. But I suspect that many chanel price
list women’s apparent desire to dress invisibly conceals a rats’ nest of
insecurities. Wanting people not to look at you can be caused by anxiety about
your size; or your shape; or your age. It might even be caused by uncertainty
about your actual identity. If you don’t know who you are—or? don’t like what
you are—how can you accurately express or define yourself through clothes? So
wince, if you must, as a badly dressed woman passes by; but remember that the
prompts for her choices were, probably, chanel price
list entirely sartorial.
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