Wonky clothes aren’t sexy clothes. An hourglass dress, a sweetheart neckline, a plunging V-neck: this is how sexy works. The rules of attraction are fundamentally simple, ancient and unchanging, and asymmetry cuts right across them.
Which is exactly why, when you do put nakedness and asymmetry together, things get interesting. It’s a subversive, unsettling combination. It is why Bianca Jagger in a draped, scarlet one-shoulder Halston dress – the asymmetry accentuated by a white fox fur draped over one shoulder, and a large drink in the other hand – is the quintessential image of Studio 54, a place that was all about sex and, at the same time, about so much more besides.
If the asymmetric hemline is the skirt length that suits the current turbulent state of world affairs, then the asymmetric neckline is the eveningwear top for an era when the rules of how much flesh to show are all over the place. Flesh exposure used to be a simple formula. You covered up from clavicle downward until wine o’clock, at which point you got some cleavage out. Now neither of those rules holds true. It is normal to see an off-the-shoulder top in the queue as you buy your morning coffee – and what’s more, in the currently ubiquitous pale, frilly incarnation, the off-the-shoulder top, for all its bareness and saucy bralessness, is strangely chaste. Meanwhile, dressed-up, after-dark glamour, right now, is as likely to be a high neck and a full sleeve as a low-cut top.
A top like the one I am wearing, which covers one arm and leaves the other bare, takes the asymmetric look to maximum quirkiness. Not least because there is literally no room temperature in which you will not feel some degree of awkwardness, thanks either to a goosebumpy arm or a sweaty one. It’s probably best, if your top is as off-kilter as this one, to keep the bottom half reasonably straight-up-and-down. Either an elegant pair of wide trousers, or a skintight pair of jeans, will take the top almost anywhere. Unless you are intending to hit Studio 54, you are good to go.
• Jess wears top, £185, by Beaufille, from avenue32.com. Trousers, £89, by No 1 Jenny Packham, from debenhams.com. Velvet heels, £75, dunelondon.com. Jewellery, Jess’s own.
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management
