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| Inside the clothes market by William Conor |
Woman's page editor wasn't how I imagined myself when I started on the local daily paper. It was in the reign of Margaret Thatcher (milk snatcher) and Keith Joseph, who began the obsession with cutting taxes and public spending. My hair was purple, cropped to an inch. I wore badges and DMs.
Memory works oddly. The woman's page relied on fashion pics supplied by upmarket brands and one week, a batch came from Jaeger's PR company.
I've been buying secondhand since I was a student in Portsmouth - I lived by a road packed with pawn shops. The city was poor. At jumble sales you could pick up an armful of clothes for a few pence but when I moved to Surrey, jumble sales became treasure hunts. Oh, that long herringbone tweed coat I bought and gave away.
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| Handmade - my daughter's wedding dress, my red dress blue coat |
What prompted my meander through Portsmouth and Guildford, via successive wardrobes, was de-influencers - people now telling us not to buy new. Yes, they give me hope and deliver this morning's memory. Those Jaeger pics promoted a classic 80's look - box jacket, tapered baggy trousers, men's shirts, wide collared, loose coats. But it wasn't hard to copy - designers borrow endlessly from the past. And so I wrote something like, you can create the same from jumble sales. It was an off the cuff remark.
I might have been, but wasn't, disciplined. None of us could afford Jaeger, but anyway few of us bought new regularly. My immediate boss made her own clothes - she was a fabulous tailor. My next boss bought almost everything secondhand and restored antique clothes, I made my own or dressed from jumbles, another colleague was an impressive seamstress and I still have a waistcoat knitted by one of the sub-editors.
Coincidentally, a short story arrived in my inbox this morning by Jamaica Kincaid, a must-read: Biography of a Dress. There's so much more to sewing.
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