LIFESTYLE / Fashion
Fashion in our hearts
(Theage.com.au)
Updated: 2007-07-14 15:50
Scenes from French designer Franck Sorbier's haute couture collection.[AP]
Janice Breen Burns wishes she was born in an era where good fashion was
once a civilised habit.
I was born in the wrong era. There is too much slack-bum denim,
puckered-nasty polyester and smelly people in this one for me. I sense
the 1950s was better. My natural decade. A time of rampant hypocrisy and
enmeshed misogyny; oh yes. With toxic levels of political and social
naivety rife among the middle classes; you bet. But - by gumbo - didn't
they all look nice?
The holy personal trinity of grooming and hygiene and careful dressing
was taught from birth in the 1950s. Out was anywhere beyond your front
door and social conditions demanded you dress for it in a clean, ironed
and mended jigsaw of good-quality components (because there weren't any
other kind) picked out of a small, orderly wardrobe. Sacrilege was a spot
on your frock, a scuffed shoe or curl out of place. I imagine people
smelled soapy in the 1950s, too - all the time, not just on special
occasions like now - and their shoes were polished, fingernails cleaned,
hair brushed glossy and Brylcreemed neat or tied back with ribbons.
In the '50s, I suspect fashion was a far fussier business than the
quick-job slob-fest that it's possible to be now. More undergarments,
more prickly materials, more discomfort; a blur of girdles, petticoats
and brassieres, Y-fronts, starched shirts and yet-to-be-worn-in shoes.
After all that work and complicated assembly, fashion must have duped you
into feeling puffed-up, a bit proud and very civilised; a cut above the
primitive fug of body odours, greasy hair, dental plaque and daily grime.
A proper citizen. And, fashion would have set the scene for myriad minor
acts of civility: polite conversation, nice manners and smiles, little
kindnesses. No cussing. How rude could you be in matching frock, heels,
hat and handbag?
Fashion in the 1950s strikes me as the ultimate anti-reality Band-Aid for
every woman and man, girl and boy: "Life sucks, young Beaver? Well, stand
up straight, wash your face, and pop on this nice clean, short-sleeved
checked shirt Father purchased for you at the store today. There. Better?"
In Paris last week, French designer Franck Sorbier presented an haute
couture collection in a series of framed vignettes (his model "family"
with even baby in black marabou is pictured) that reminded me how society
must once have been infused with fashion and all those civilising
niceties. Models posed in full-blown glamour get-ups for a day in the
city, or the snow, or at work, or on a sparkle-arkly evening out. The
fashionable message was not simply: "Wear this; look nice", but "Wear
this; BE nice."
Sorbier managed to convey the transformative power of good fashion: it
can change how we feel about ourselves and life in ways a cheap polyester
frock - however pretty - can't. How it can express something intangible
but compelling beyond a person's demographic and physical beauty (or lack
of it). And how its place in any cliched image of civilised society was
vital - once.
In reality, people immersed so fastidiously in fashion as Sorbier's model
citizens appeared to be (as opposed to the toe-dipping most of us do:
dressing up special for the odd occasion but dressing down for most) are
considered eccentric at best, or pitiable snobs with a constipated
inability to relax, at worst.
But there was a time - and I suspect it disintegrated soon after the
1950s - when everyone checked their posture and their frocks for spots
before they went "out". I wish I was back there.
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