I loved Dad’s old suede jacket. He’d had it for as long as I could remember, an artefact from his more rock’n’roll days, and it had been worn into buttery softness. When the lining finally disintegrated, and the suede thinned to imminent oblivion, he decided to retire it. But I couldn’t bear to see it go.
I tried it on and felt great – like a chip off the old block. It wasn’t at all heavy and the softness extended to the buttons that were covered in matching suede material. Sure, it had a patina of London grime and smelled of Old Holborn tobacco, but I thought it was cool. I was about 13 and couldn’t afford to buy a suede jacket in a million years, so I claimed it as my own, and set about bringing it back to life, like the singing mending mice in Bagpuss.
Mum and I picked out some blue fabric, which was incongruously bright, in hindsight. After she relined the jacket for me (a woman of many talents, she papered that wall behind me in the picture, too) it felt as good as new, if not better. What had been part of my dad’s identity became mine and I wore it until sections of suede had broken free and started dangling skankily into my tea – at which point it was unquestionably deceased.
I had a habit of nicking Dad’s clothes, and they often became some of my favourite adolescent looks. The threadbare checked shirt I used as a nightshirt (and decorated by sewing tiny novelty buttons all over it – toadstools, pineapples and what-have-you); the suit jacket I took when I got a bit older, and wore as a coat (it wasn’t very warm, but who cares when you’re a teenager?); the pleated, heavy-wool kilt from when he was a small boy that I wore as a miniskirt.
I was a big fan of badges and a Playboy bunny one was my favourite at the time. With its combination of cute rabbit and the naughty, sexy, adult world it signified – plus the sense that I was being subversive by wearing it – that bunny caught my imagination as womanhood loomed
The hat must be mentioned, too. Everyone was wearing bowler hats or wide-brimmed variations in the 80s – Bananarama, Debbie Gibson, Madonna – but my hat inspiration came from the 1985 cover of Face magazine with Felix Howard who, at 13, had starred in Madonna’s Open Your Heart video. For this iconic shot, he was styled in a black felt hat with a strip of newsprint reading “Killer” tucked into the ribbon.
Also of note: the Chinese lucky dolls I’d hung from the top button of the jacket. These were from one of my all-time favourite childhood shops, the late Neal Street East emporium in London’s Covent Garden. It was full of treasures from China, Japan and beyond – and had a “basement bazaar” of thrillingly affordable nicknacks, such as the fan you can just about see on the wall behind me in the hat picture. It was a magical place and everything I ever bought there felt magical, too.
