System addict
Christa D’Souza finds that the wardrobe fights back What does one want at this time of year? Apart from £10,000 for the tax man, that is? If you are me the answer is a fabulously well-organised wardrobe. By that I don’t merely mean one where everything pretty much has its own hanger, I mean one which is custom-designed especially for you, with your cashmere arranged from forest green to hunter green to chartreuse to mint to eau de nil and so on and so forth. A wardrobe like a spoiled princess’s, that is. Although as my friend Kate Reardon, the utterly fabulous founder of toptipsforgirls.com, assures me, ‘It’s not spoiled princessy at all! It is something that initially appears to be an indulgent luxury, but which on closer inspection turns out to be an eminently practical organising device that stops you wasting money on new clothes you don’t need.’ Hurrah! So that’s what’s standing between me and world domination!
But where to get one from? And who to do it? Say hello to Miss Julia Dee of Total Wardrobe Care, who arrives on my Baron’s Court doorstep one morning with an assistant, two clothes rails, three boxes of plumvelvet, custom-made hangers, and a vial of special ‘protection oil’ to ward off any ‘negative energy’ which a client’s wardrobe might give out. Hmm. Used as Miss Julia is to enfilade upon enfilade of closet space filled with priceless couture, all bagged and labelled with Polaroids of what it looks like on (as she would be with clients such as Jemima Khan and Elle Macpherson), I wonder what she will make of my wardrobe. Like my friend Sarah (whose ruthlessly tidy sister keeps threatening to come round and give her wardrobe an ‘ethnic cleansing’), I let my wardrobe have a life of its own. As with Amy Winehouse’s beehive, you never know exactly what you are going to find in there. Nice Miss Julia says not to worry, compared to some lady clients of hers I am the beacon of cleanliness and hygiene. Honestly, I wouldn’t believe the ‘organically stained’ ladies trews she’s witnessed in her time. On the other hand, she admits, this job is by no means going to be a walk-through.
A good six hours in, and all my shoes are piled up in a pyre in the middle of the room, all my clothes out on the clothes rails. Kate is right. I had no idea. That I owned 42 cardys, all of which are ravaged by moths. Or that I only had three skirts. None of which are wearable. Or that I had, well, so little that’s wearable really. How come, when I spend such a vast proportion of my earnings on obscenely expensive clothes, I don’t have that much to show for it? Where’ve they all gone? My last cleaning lady’s house?
At last. Ten hours in, they are done and Miss Julia, looking a little beaten it has to be said, swings open the doors to my closet. Oh my God! I too have a wardrobe that looks like a Prada shop! Quick, quick — I must float a gerbera in the loo and get a magazine to photograph it before it all goes to pot.... And that’s the thing. For the first few days it is as princess-perfect as Miss Julia left it, my holey trackie bottoms, a sea of colour-graded velour, my poor battered shoes all lined up like soldiers and stretched within an inch of their lives by frilly plumvelvet shoehorns. But this is only because I don’t dare touch it. The moment I start ‘interacting’ with it, I find myself going back to my old ways, piling ten shirts on the one hanger, putting things back with toothpaste stains down the front, and so on. Two weeks on, and it’s not quite the way it was before, but slowly, inexorably, it is getting there. In a way, that’s a relief.
See, I had a ‘system’. Okay, as with my non-alphabetised address book it was a system to which only I was privy, but it was a ‘system’ nonetheless. I worry, too, about becoming the sort of person who colourcodes their sweaters. Is it not true that the sort of people who do this do so because they have OCD or because they have nothing better to do with their time? Miss Julia is a godsend, but I fear my untidiness may be too ingrained, like the coffee stains on my keyboard, to ‘cure’. But then perhaps I have got it quite wrong. Perhaps behind every truly fabulous woman lies a slob.
TOTAL WARDROBE CARE
Miss Julia Dee, 220a Queenstown Road, Battersea, London SW8 Tel: 020 7498 4360
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