In the ninth volume of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaire triplets disguise themselves as circus freaks. One of their chief tormentors, a fashion victim called Esme Squalor, exclaims that, for freaks, they are actually rather stylish. "Just because we're freaks," Violet Beaudelaire points out, "doesn't mean we don't care about fashion."
A sentiment that may be familiar to quite a few women over the age of 35. Or thereabouts. Just because fashion doesn't care about us, doesn't mean we don't care about fashion. Just because we will never again wear a pair of tweed shorts, or not in this lifetime anyway, doesn't mean we are content, like those ladies in the freak-friendly Boden catalogue, to dedicate ourselves, henceforth, to the uses of the decorated cardigan: dress it up! dress it down! team it with a pair of velvet slacks or a swishy skirt!
The most cautious freak still relishes the occasional challenge, even when, like tweed shorts, it arrives in a shape so ghastly that the more suspicious wonder if it could have been created by Michael Buerk. And if not Buerk, who masterminded this summer's long tiered skirt in which, thousands of women were led to believe, they would resemble Sienna Miller? When they actually looked like the old washerwoman from the Wind in the Willows.
Half the pleasure of clothes lies in conspicuous avoidance. Can the thrill, for women who put their names on waiting lists, of being the first to own some coveted bag or other, compare with the excitement of being the first person to take a supposedly desirable piece of clothing back to the shop? How sweet it was, a few months ago, to return, still in its tissue paper, a delightful and for this reason utterly misguided tea-dress, which was said to have been mobbed in every branch of Jigsaw. Every day that passed without an invitation to a regatta only added to the pleasure of having possessed it for a single night.
In the weeks to come I intend to explore, in this column, many more important issues, including the satisfaction to be had from returning a pencil skirt. It promises to be the key non-piece of the season.
