How should we all dress in this post-Brexit world?
Michael, by email
Apologies, dear readers. As much as I would like to continue normal service, I fear things have just gone too strange. For almost a decade, you have been Asking Hadley, and Hadley has answered. But look! Things have taken such a strange turn that not only am I referring to myself in the third person (number one on the list of signs for incipient insanity), but I feel as if I don’t have any answers at all. It’s hard to believe you understand anything any more, now that this country feels like a rejected script for Black Mirror. Am I dreaming? Did I drink some dodgy tea at Glastonbury? (Obviously, but possibly not relevant here.) Jesus, remember when the news in this country was just about the weather? Can someone please send over some Valium, stat, because this comedown is a goddamn killer.
So what to wear for Brexit? Layers, first and foremost, so outfits can be changed to suit shifting conditions at a second’s notice; thick-soled shoes to protect your feet from the bones of the dead politicians littering the ground, all knived in both the back and front; a hazmat suit to protect oneself from the openly toxic national atmosphere. And, finally, a seatbelt. Buckle up, people – this is going to be a bumpy ride.
I’m going to a very glamorous wedding this summer. What should I wear?
Sarah, by email
What indeed, Sarah, what indeed. Weddings are difficult enough, but a “glamorous” one, you say? Well, this might tax even my world-renowned expertise. Also, given that, as Michael Gove said so recently that “Britain has had enough of experts”, perhaps I am not the one for this anyway. So let us turn instead to a self-professed amateur, one with a bit of practice on the subject of attending “glamorous weddings”. I speak of none other than our future overlord, Sarah Vine.
Perhaps you think of Vine as a political wife. Or maybe you consider her the person affixed to the giant hand upon which sits the little puppet that is known as Michael Gove. “Be STRONG, Michael! Be your BEST! You can DO this!” she shouts at him like a cut-price Lady Macbeth, were the Macbeths a couple from Croydon into House of Cards cosplay.
But I think of Vine first and foremost as a columnist, one whose writings in the Daily Mail are the only reason I wake up on Wednesdays, now that Channel 4 no longer shows reruns of Ally McBeal. I’ve learned a lot from Vine over the years, from one Polly Filler to another. I’ve learned, for example, that getting caught kitting out your kitchen on expenses – to the point where you have to pay back £7,000 of taxpayers’ money after spending it on such crucial items as “elephant lamps” – should be no bar to mocking other people’s dining areas. In Vine’s case, it was Ed Miliband’s kitchen that was deemed wanting in her column – proof, in fact, that he and his wife are “aliens”. And no wonder Vine found it so bewildering: it didn’t seem to have a single £750 “Loire table”, just one of the many items that the Goves tried to put on the public’s credit card. I mean, what kind of human doesn’t try to chivvy the public purse strings, for at least a £238.50 birdcage coffee table?
More pertinent to our question today are Vine’s thoughts on “glamorous wedding wear.” As it happens, Vine and Gove were invited to Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall’s wedding earlier this year. “I was thrilled, of course (not to mention a little surprised),” Sarah wrote, with exquisitely casual parenthetical afterthought **side eyes to camera**. But what does one wear to the marriage of a southern belle to Beelzebub? Truly, ’tis quite the fashion quandary. Sadly, Vine declined to dress up as Jennifer Lopez, as she did in 2013. Instead, after rejecting several £1,800 hats some designer offered to loan her (Vine apparently likes paying for hats about as much as she and her husband enjoy spending on their kitchen), she opted for a self-described “panto” look, with gold coat and culottes, which, honestly, is no better or worse than what most people wear to weddings. “I felt happy and comfortable,” Vine writes, and good for her. “And by the time Marsha Hunt took to the podium to give a black power salute, I couldn’t have cared less what I was wearing.” Um, you what now? A black power salute? At Rupert Murdoch’s wedding? Now, I don’t think we can learn much about dressing for weddings from Vine’s column. But one thing it definitely does teach us is that the dream of 60s revolution is dead, co-opted instead by middle-aged rich white people for their own individual entertainment. Suddenly, I’m beginning to understand why absolutely everything has fallen apart and everyone’s so freaking furious. Suddenly Brexit makes total sense. Thanks, Sarah!
Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com.
