Deciding what to wear can involve torment, as well as delight. When desire and desirability are also at play, writes Carol Dyhouse, the bedroom floor can be strewn with evidence of indecision …
I often find myself pondering Miuccia Prada’s remark, to the effect that sometimes she found herself wondering whether the obsession with fashion was “just about the desperation of being sexy”. Interviewed for a profile in the New York Times, she observed that her young assistants tended to come to work wearing “amazing things. Very provocative,” but that they were always alone. “And I tell them that the more they dress for sex, the less sex they will have. It is so basic, but they don’t seem to understand me.”
It isn’t hard to find evidence of the ways in which women desperately seeking partners, or finding themselves in unsatisfactory love affairs, turn to buying clothes. When Rebecca West was marooned as a single mother on the Essex coast, and pining for the presence of the married HG Wells, she sought solace in impulse buying, including extravagant “silk evening knickers” and other luxuries from expensive shops.
Nobel-prize winning French author Annie Ernaux has published two books documenting her obsessive and painful affair in mid-life with a younger married man. In Getting Lost, Ernaux writes of “the constant interplay between love and the desire for clothes, insatiable, though I suspect futile with regard to desire in general”. She compares her experience in this respect with that during an earlier affair, “when I continually bought skirts, jumpers, dresses, etc never looking at the price – spending as if there were no tomorrow”. Ernaux confesses to spending much of her time, when alone, daydreaming about clothes and jewellery, trying them on in front of a mirror, striving for perfection – even though her encounters with her lover were of short duration, and these clothes would be glimpsed only briefly before they were torn off and consigned to a heap on the floor.
In Viv Albertine’s 2018 memoir, To Throw Away Unopened, she describes a brief trip to a hotel in Rye with a male companion (hardly lover, but she hoped for some potential there). The trip required serious planning and packing. Appointments with hairdresser and beautician. Threading, plucking, pedicure. An overnight bag laden with carefully selected clothing, underwear, footwear choices and cosmetics. Viv – who had styled herself as a rebel when a young guitarist in the punk band, The Slits, details all this meticulous preparation with wry humour and a certain amount of feminist indignation: “Not one man I know, have known, or have dated in the last 45 years has ever, or would ever, put the amount of effort into himself that I put into that date – just to feel comfortable.” The date wasn’t a success. She decided not to repeat the experience: she just “couldn’t be arsed” to put the effort in for so little reward.
I’ve been seriously “in love” some five times during the course of my life, and looking back, it was these involvements, whether troubled or particularly happy, that led me to buy too many clothes. When I met my first serious boyfriend, at university, I made many outfits, trying to look trendy and desirable. Later, when I became involved with the man I married, I delighted in buying fashionable stuff from boutiques, in bright colours. What I bought reflected happiness and a lack of sophistication at that time. I was uncertain about personal style, somewhere between career woman academic and dollybird. It makes me cringe a bit now.
I often find myself pondering Miuccia Prada’s remark, to the effect that sometimes she found herself wondering whether the obsession with fashion was “just about the desperation of being sexy”. Interviewed for a profile in the New York Times, she observed that her young assistants tended to come to work wearing “amazing things. Very provocative,” but that they were always alone. “And I tell them that the more they dress for sex, the less sex they will have. It is so basic, but they don’t seem to understand me.”
It isn’t hard to find evidence of the ways in which women desperately seeking partners, or finding themselves in unsatisfactory love affairs, turn to buying clothes. When Rebecca West was marooned as a single mother on the Essex coast, and pining for the presence of the married HG Wells, she sought solace in impulse buying, including extravagant “silk evening knickers” and other luxuries from expensive shops.
Nobel-prize winning French author Annie Ernaux has published two books documenting her obsessive and painful affair in mid-life with a younger married man. In Getting Lost, Ernaux writes of “the constant interplay between love and the desire for clothes, insatiable, though I suspect futile with regard to desire in general”. She compares her experience in this respect with that during an earlier affair, “when I continually bought skirts, jumpers, dresses, etc never looking at the price – spending as if there were no tomorrow”. Ernaux confesses to spending much of her time, when alone, daydreaming about clothes and jewellery, trying them on in front of a mirror, striving for perfection – even though her encounters with her lover were of short duration, and these clothes would be glimpsed only briefly before they were torn off and consigned to a heap on the floor.
As I got older, I turned to black. It felt safe. A later love affair had me buying lots of underwear, often impractical, in cream silk and satin. It was a point in my life when I rediscovered – or maybe started to learn about – sexuality. Driven by powerful desire and longing, I tried desperately not to let these derail the rest of my life; my roles as mother, teacher, scholarly researcher. But I remember clothes that were shrill with body awareness: stretchy burgundy velvet, a clingy sweater dress in raspberry pink fluffy angora. There was a red woollen sweater dress which required much clenching of stomach muscles. I tried too hard at that stage, I find myself reflecting, ruefully. I hope now to have arrived at a greater self-awareness. Although I still buy too many clothes.
Miuccia Prada has been described as “a fashion intellectual”: she is sharply intelligent as well as a highly successful designer. When she spoke of “the desperation of being sexy” and suggested that too much attention to sexiness and perfection in one’s presentation of self could be counter-productive in terms of attracting others, she meant more than just the kind of view expressed by the poet Ovid, when he observed that “Too rich a dress may sometimes check desire.” An obsessive concern with the way one looks can certainly signal untouchability, a kind of brittle self- absorption. But more than this, Prada has effectively revolutionised what we may think of as “sexy” and is often credited with making ugliness sexy. Prada outfits play on the theme of contradictions, liminality, the knife-edge borderline between frumpiness and an exquisite chic. Fashion writer Daniel Rodgers drew attention to the way in which Prada brought wrinkled socks and big knickers into high fashion. Miuccia Prada, he declared, “knows that true eroticism is transgressive”.
To dress to look desirable, then, is never straightforward. It is easy to get it wrong. But dressing to look desirable, and dressing for the sake of one’s own ease and pleasure, aren’t after all poles apart. Sensuous fabrics, soft shoes, creamy cosmetics: all these can offer comfort as well as pleasure.
In 1917, a young Rebecca West wrote to her friend Sylvia Lynd, confessing that she had used the cheque representing the earnings from her first novel to buy an expensive hat: the most expensive hat that she had ever bought in her life. The hat was to cheer herself up, unsettled as she was by news of military events in Italy: “the hat was a direct consequence of the Italian disaster. All these war horrors, instead of making me ascetic, make me turn furiously to sensuous delights.” At such times, she thought there was an impulse to reassure oneself that life was worth living, through the enjoyment of simple pleasures. During air raids, she observed, “I don’t pray or speculate on the world state, but drench myself in scent and eat chocolates.” Most of us will know exactly what she meant.
Appearances: Memory, History, Clothes by Carol Dyhouse, is published by Unicorn in March.
