- Is it OK to wear a bikini after forty?
- What about peacock-blue toenail polish with bright-white hair and a faceful of slap?
- If you don't bother with make-up, bosom upholstery and foot facials are you letting yourself go, or just letting go?
- Just what are the rules for older women, and who on earth makes them?
With her trademark wit and insight, much-loved novelist and journalist Maggie Alderson takes an honest look at ageing and asks the hard questions, such as who invented the 'natural-look' nipple concealer, and why? She tackles issues of gravity - the knees like fallen souffles, the ruched mummy tummy - and offers sage advice on what to do if you find yourself in a yoga class with a supermodel. She bemoans the passing of youth, but revels in the opportunities that age offers to be clearer, smarter, wiser and bossier (in the best possible way). If you've had it up to here with being told it's all downhill after forty, this is the book for you.
Maggie Alderson was born in London, brought up in Staffordshire and educated at the University of St Andrews. She has worked on nine magazines - editing four of them, including British ELLE - and has been going to fashion shows for 20 years. She is currently a fashion columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald, for which she covers the fashion shows in Milan and Paris twice a year.
Her previous novels, Pants on Fire and Mad About the Boy, were bestsellers in Australia and the UK, and she was a co-editor of the charity anthology Big Night Out, in aid of War Child. She has also published two collections of non-fiction: Shoe Money and Handbag Heaven. She is married and has a daughter and 12 pairs of Prada shoes. Maggie lives in Sydney, Australia.
'At last we've found her, the female Seinfeld. Warm, witty, wise and well-dressed, Alderson is the haute couture of humour.' - Kathy Lette
Extract from "Gravity Sucks"
Fade to Grey
It all started with a very bad haircut. I had to do something, because I had some kind of weird post-baby hair regrowth mutation, but the cut just made it worse. I ended up with triangular hair.
It looked seriously frumpy and no matter how many new products and styling tricks I tried on it - leave until just damp before blow-drying, blow-dry from wet with vicious strokes, scrunch dry, scrape back in Alice band, borrow wig from Joan Collins, etc - it stayed that way.
That hairdo had about as much style and allure as a bowl of cold tofu.
In the end it was making me so unhappy I went back for another cut, with a more senior stylist, at the same rug joint (my usual). It was a calculated risk. Losing more hair meant waiting even longer until I could grow it back into what I felt was my customary style - long, sleek layers with a hint of old slapper - but I couldn't carry on as Emma Thompson. Natalie - the stylist - took one look at my hair and sucked her teeth. She couldn't badmouth her colleague in front of me, but her face said it all: the cut was a total Barry Crocker.
She said it was a pity there wasn't a little more length to play with, but that we could sort it out by taking out some of the volume in the sides ... Yes! Lose the isosceles - and cut out the disastrous razored layers, which bouffed up like a prize meringue no matter how hard I tried to plaster them down.
Razoring traumatises the whole hair shaft, apparently. Which is fine if you want to look like the lead singer from The Darkness, or one of his armpits, but not if Jennifer Aniston is more your hairdo role model.
`Oh, that explains it, then,' I said, greatly relieved. `I haven't been able to do a thing with all those weird flyaway bits, and I've always had such obedient hair.'
And that was when Natalie launched her Scud missile. She pulled up a strand of wayward hair and rolled it between her elegant fingers, announcing: `Oh, no, that's all the grey. It has a different texture. Grey hair is really wiry.'
Wiry. Now there's a word to conjure with in the thatch department. So my hair's not just going greyer than John Howard's pubes, it's the same texture too. I felt quite cast down.
I can still remember the day a hairdresser first told me I had grey hairs. The slow decay started round the back, so I hadn't noticed until she kindly pointed it out.
It was sixteen years ago, and the date is fixed in my memory because that very morning there had been a blockage in the pipe between my flat and the mains sewer. My entire floor - beechwood parquet - had been covered in an inch of raw sewage. I had run away from that catastrophe to the sanctuary of my salon, only to be told I was going grey. I shed tears.
It's funny how the grey hair thing really gets to me, because other signs of ageing don't bother me at all. I've got perma-wrinkles round my eyes, a forehead like a saltwater croc, my breasts are sledging fast to the South Pole and the backs of my hands look like old treasure maps, and none of it bothers me. But the hair gets me down.
I suppose it's not the worst outcome. Surgery isn't necessary to hide it and I've got a whole battery of defences against the encroaching grey army. A very full head of highlights. Omega-3 fish oil tablets twice a day. Conditioner so rich you could pass it off as foie gras. Straightening irons. And best of all, Natalie, a brilliant cutter.
If only she was colourblind.
Bikini Babylon
`Bikinis after forty -good or bad idea?' This was a recent coverline on one of my favourite weekly sleb trivia trash mags and I turned immediately to check it out. It's a subject that's been on my mind for a while and I wanted to see what they had to say about it. There were pictures of Elle, Madonna and Sadie (Frost - Jude's ex) who are all over forty, all multiple mums, and all cavorting happily in bikinis. Elle was running in hers, but then, she would, wouldn't she? If I had her body, I'd never wear anything but a bikini. A string.
They all looked great and the magazine decreed that if you looked as good as they did - with fitness regimes which basically are their jobs, as opposed to needing to be fitted in around real life, like the rest of us - it was fine to wear a bikini. But real-life, normal, pudgy over-forty gals? No way.
Then I read something else on the subject, in an interview with Liz Hurley, the owner of the body beautiful which inhabited That Versace Dress, and who has recently launched a swimwear label -and modelled for her own publicity wearing it. `I'm never again going to sit eating lunch on a boat in just a skimpy bikini,' she said. `I don't feel comfortable doing that any more. I know that sounds bizarre coming from a woman who's photographed half-naked in bikinis, but I feel self-conscious posing for those pictures, and they're all retouched anyway.' I was gobsmacked. Impressed by her honesty about the retouching, but really astonished that she feels self-conscious in a bikini. The thing is, you see, at well over forty, I've recently started wearing them again.
The last time I wore one because I meant it was over fifteen years ago. Since then, I've been surfside in a series of dispiriting one-pieces. Apart from one in snakeskin print, which laced up the front rather saucily, I never felt remotely excited about putting them on. They were just something to wear to avoid arrest while swimming in public places. They did the job and that was it.
The move back towards the two-piece began with the marvellous tankini. What a brilliant invention. Tummy covered to walk about, but if you want to shine some rays on it (through sunblock, of course), you can just pull it up - after you have lain down flat. Brilliant. I even made my own. I bought a great leopard-print bikini bottom and then wore it with a plain black T-shirt bra, with a lightweight black singlet over the top. After a couple of summers in that rig-out, without really thinking about it, I started taking the singlet fully off to sunbake (in the shade), and then one day I found myself in the ocean without it on. My tummy hadn't felt the caress of sea water for years and it was wonderful.
So it was a relatively short step from that to buying an actual bikini again. And then another. And another. And mixing them up, like Kate Moss, except with saggy bosoms and flabby thighs. But the thing is, I don't care any more. I'm over forty, I'm a mum, I've got a mummy tummy and I don't give a damn. There is nothing more gorgeous than feeling the air, the sun and the sea on your skin and I don't see why I should miss out on that just because I don't confirm to our society's ideal of beauty, ie Elle McP.
So if anyone finds the sight of me repulsive in my weird bikini combos (it's not just copying Kate - I've yet to find one that fits properly in both the top and the bottom), I have one piece of advice for them: get darker sunnies.
Knicker elastic
When I was a child, I was often confused by references in books to knicker elastic and the breaking thereof. This was an event that led to terribly embarrassing moments featuring said knickers around ankles. I could see that it wouldn't be a good look, but I didn't really understand the mechanism of how it happened.
My own undies must have had elastic in them somewhere, I reckoned, but not the kind that could break. They just sort of got baggier over time. An equally mystifying concept was that of putting one's hankie up one's knicker leg. I tried it a few times and it just fell out again as soon as I walked. It wasn't until much later that I realised that the school knickers in question were more like brushed cotton pantaloons with elastic around the legs, as well as around the waist. It must have made a nice little storage area.
But forget knicker legs - by the time my own daughter is reading (I hope) Noel Streatfeild and Elizabeth Enright and E Nesbit and all the authors I adored as a youngster, I think even the idea of a handkerchief will be weird.
We have already come upon them, actually, in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, one of our favourites in the Beatrix Potter canon (she's very keen on the idea of a talking hedgehog). I don't think she has any idea what little Lucie's lost `pockethandkins' are, so it's not an issue at this point, but I'm sure it will be one day. I can imagine the conversation:
Peggy: `What's a handkin?'
Me: `It's short for handkerchief, which was a small piece of cotton that people used to carry around to blow their noses on.
P: `Like a tissue?'
M: `Yes, except we used to wash them and iron them after we'd used them, and then use them again:
P:`Yuckyl'
I do wonder if anyone uses a proper hankie any more. Everyone did when I was a child; I used to iron my father's, making sure the embroidered `D' was always on top when I put them away in the drawer.
I still have loads of my own - they were considered a suitable present for a child in the 1960s. Can you imagine the reaction if you gave a twenty-first-century kid a box of initialled hankies for their birthday? They'd probably beat you to death with their games console. I've still got my hankies - in special little embroidered pochettes that my grandmother gave me - and I look at them occasionally, but I don't ever use them.
All this makes me wonder what other items that have seemed everyday in my lifetime will become - or already are - as archaic as a crinoline.
I can think of at least two things from my own youth that, for my daughter's sake, I am very glad have already gone the way of the dodo: itchy wool and Bri-Nylon. Both of them created garments like mobile torture chambers for children. There was a particular family holiday which was blighted for my brother Nick by a pair of ferociously itchy wool trousers. Just reminding my mother of it can reduce her to tears of laughter. He still doesn't find it amusing.
In my own case, I can remember a red-and-white deckchair-stripe summer dress made from 100 per cent BriNylon. It was so completely impermeable it might as well have been made from PVC and my mother was thrilled - it was a homemade number - because the fabric didn't fray. You could just cut it like a plastic bin liner. On a hot summer day, it was like wearing one, too.
So while I certainly don't mourn the passing of such items from everyday life into a footnote in the history of costume, it is unsettling to realise that my own childhood is fast becoming what I used to call `the olden days'.
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