The wear and tear of it all
Vicki Woods
MY MOTHER’S WEDDING DRESS by Justine Picardie Picador, £12.99, pp. 331, ISBN 0330413066 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Her mother’s wedding dress was a black two-piece cocktail outfit; short, French, silk-lined, chic, and outrageously expensive. When the teenager Justine Picardie found it, tried it on and wore it endlessly (until she lost it) she asked, ‘Why black?’ Her mother said, ‘Why not?’ The wedding was at Hampstead registrer office in 1960. Her mother was a 21-year-old convent girl, newly arrived from Capetown. Her father was Jewish, a political radical and member of the ANC who had left South Africa to come to Oxford. On their wedding day, they had known each other for 12 weeks and the bride was pregnant (with Justine). The marriage was fraught from the first and eventually fractured altogether.
Picardie uses the Vogue-model wedding dress as a starting point for stories about her family, her life in fashion and the meaning of dress. The book is subtitled ‘The Fabric of Our Lives’ and the age-old cliché lives and breathes as she remembers clothes once loved and now lost, from childhood onwards: the fairy dress with silver wings, an orange dress with tiny mirrors from the Apple shop (‘Look, that’s the Beatles,’ said her mother as the rainbow-painted limo passed). When Picardie was 18 (her parents separated by now) she took the glamorous black wedding dress to Cambridge and wore it on graduation day. It made her feel closer to her unhappy mother.
I found this book intensely interesting. Disclosure: I’ve had what’s best described as a warm acquaintanceship with Justine Picardie for a long time and I like the way she writes, therefore I come to it with a) bias and b) slight knowledge of her history: it’s interesting to fill the gaps. So her mother went to live in a bender at Greenham Common? Goodness! Yellow Gate Peace Camp is just up the road from me. Maybe we even met — I used to take mincepies up to the freezing camp at Christmas. She was one of the peace women actually arrested and (briefly) jailed? How amazing. And amazing, too, that when 21-year-old Picardie — daughter of a Marxist father and radical antinuclear peacenik mother — visited her in Holloway, she had just won the Vogue Talent Competition, and been offered a job on the fashion glossy. She couldn’t tell her mother about the ‘inflammatory’ job. ‘Vogue was not on her agenda.’ Most women I know are material girls, but many deny it. Still, since we can’t go into the world naked, we must buy wardrobes, and even my high-minded friends who eschew the fashion magazines for their unseriousness and scorn the diktats of designers at least have to make basic choices as to cut, colour, fit and price. There isn’t a woman in the world who can’t recall a too expensive purchase, an embarrassing dress that was all wrong on the night, or what she wore during rites of passage or in moments of glory or romance or grief.
Ah, yes — grief. The vital presence throughout Picardie’s book is (in her life) an aching absence. Her sister Ruth, two years younger than Justine, was the constant bolster in their difficult household. Their father was a depressive and had dreadful breakdowns (he also grew a greenhouse full of cannabis plants that their mother set fire to and danced naked on the table at a party). ‘Anyway, we had each other.’ But in 1997 Ruth Picardie died of a viciously swift form of breast cancer, leaving twin babies behind, and a sister almost transparent with the enormity of her loss. Justine Picardie wrote If the Spirit Moves You in 2001, a wonderful book, a slow coming to terms with the bafflement and disbelief of death. And in My Mother’s Wedding Dress she describes shopping with her dying sister at Ghost, of all plangently named boutiques, and Ruth angry at the ‘fucking cancer’ that made her look pregnant, and making Justine buy a mermaid-green dress, because ‘you can wear it anywhere’.
Picardie works the threads of her tapestry with engaging care, but her book is loosely structured, sometimes a little perilously. Family memoir is jumpcut with wide-ranging studies of the semiotics of clothes as she contemplates the fabric of the Brontës’ lives, and of Zelda Fitzgerald’s (who wrote to Scott, from her asylum, ‘Have you ever been so lonely that you felt eternally guilty — as if you’d left off part of your clothes?’). Discussing Rebecca (which is, of course, all about the clothes), Picardie digs into Daphne du Maurier’s style credentials and finds she ‘was besotted by belts — from Dunhill, from Hermes — if she had one, she had fifty’.) She writes punchily about some of the crazy king-emperors of the global fashion industry (Karl Lagerfeld, Donatella Versace, Helmut Lang, Claude Montana). She had already interviewed these lumi naries (for Vogue and elsewhere), but where magazine writers must self-censor the bits the advertisers won’t like, authors can put them in. As a fashion professional, she understands the barking lunacy of high-end professional fashion: a short interview with the British supermodel Erin O’Connor is quite sick-making, but it made me laugh. O’Connor was wearing the boss dress in Alexander McQueen’s notorious ‘asylum’ show. It was covered in razor-shells which took months to stitch on, and the designer told O’Connor to ‘go crazy’ on the catwalk and ‘rip the dress’. She tried hard to do so, but the razorshells ripped her hands to pieces, and she was dripping blood by the time she got backstage. Instead of ministering to her with plasters and TCP, the dressers and make-up artists screamed with delight, ‘Oh, major!’ ‘Wipe your hands on your headdress’, she was told, ‘because your next dress is blood-red, and it’ll look perfect.’ Picardie frets (as do most Voguettes, lifelong) about her own wardrobe and What Not to Wear, so her book is dotted with magaziny lists of hints and tips about dressing, e.g. the middle-aged woman is always flattered by something soft around the neck. ‘Something feathery or furry, perhaps,’ writes Picardie, ‘but not real fur. Please.’ And again: while ‘gold snakeskin heels’ will give a kick of youthfulness to the elderly leg, she hopes the snake ‘would be fake’. Hmm. I’ve no patience at all with this tenderly urban delicacy. Partly because you only ever look as old as you are and partly because I’m well hard, me, and getting harder by the year. Don’t mind pigs being slaughtered for my pleasure in bacon, or pythons for my golden heels, or (if I could only afford it) bright-eyed little minks for coats and bedcovers.
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