It’s always interesting to see what the street vendors of Venice happen to be selling in any one year. Always, it’s fold-up brollies when the rain comes. At night, for a few years now, it’s been curious objects that one can fling into the air and return to earth in a shower of fluorescent light (very annoying they are, too). When I was there a couple of weeks ago it was the selfie stick. Cue much harrumphing and what-has-the-world-come-to from me.
The very next week, however, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of this august publication, shamelessly produced a selfie stick in order to take a group photograph, causing panicked thoughts to run through my head that a loss of reason might well be accompanying the imminent abdication of his gubernatorial role. However, it turns out that a selfie stick may be judged by its results. It allows for a group photo to be taken at a kindly angle, that is from above, meaning the utter eradication of the hated second, and indeed third, chin.
Red carpet blues
For nine years I covered the Cannes film festival. I miss very much settling down into the comfortable seats of the Theatre Lumière to be in the first audience for the latest Lars von Trier or Ken Loach or Paolo Sorrentino. I don’t miss one bit the endless patting-downs and security checks, the queueing and elbowing and bad-tempered crushes that were all part of attempting to get into a Cannes press conference.
Nor do I miss the weird bifurcation between on the one hand, the seriousness of intent of the festival and, on the other, the accursed antics of the red carpet, this year encapsulated in the story of women allegedly being barred from it for wearing flat shoes. However, when I chatted to a French friend about it – knowing that she had in her time ascended that very tapis rouge – I forgot that she herself was in the fortunate position (in this particular context, at least) of always wearing heels, and very nifty she is on them, too.
She took quite another view, arguing that the real zone of female oppression was not the red carpet at Cannes but the heavily and deeply gravelled driveway of the Élysée Palace. To arrive at the residence of the president of the French Republic (as one is so often called upon to do) as a wearer of heels is to arrive as if walking through an ankle-deep slick of treacle, with all the loss of dignity that that implies.
Pining for pockets
My holiday reading this spring was Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (she of The Yellow Wallpaper). The story is about three American explorers who stumble on a remote society where there are no men (the women having cleverly evolved parthenogenesis). There is no question of these women wearing heels. Perkins Gilman sets great store by the practicality of their clothing – as well as the excellence of the polity and care with which they treat the environment. (It’s best if we pass quickly over the soupçon of eugenics that has helped them ascend to such a happy state.)
The question of pockets chimed particularly with me. The women’s clothes were “fairly quilted with pockets … most ingeniously arranged, so as to be convenient to the hand and not inconvenient to the body”. Precisely a century after Herland’s book was published, there are still insufficient pockets in women’s clothing, and it remains a surprising joy to thrust my hands into those few dresses and skirts of mine that have them. So my sartorial cry of the week is: more pockets, lower heels!
