STYLE

Sweet sixteen, goes to church just to see the boys
Laughs and screams and giggles at every little noise
Turns her face a little and turns her head awhile
But everybody knows she's only putting on the style

[Chorus:] Yeah - putting on the agony, putting on the style
That's what all the young folks are doing all the while
And as I look around me, I'm sometimes apt to smile
Seeing all the young folks putting on the style

Young man in the hot-rod car, driving like he's mad
With a pair of yellow gloves he's borrowed from his dad
He makes it roar so lively just to see his girlfriend smile
But she knows he's only putting on the style

Style and fashion are not the same thing, there is a crossover in meanings. Fashion is an ephemeral and cyclical occurrence dictated by various means:  through movies, music and what celebrities wear, say, do and think. Though there are other forces at work dictating what you should and should not be wearing at any given time.

Style, on the other hand, can define the type of person you are, outwith any temporary convention of sartorial choice. 

Of course, style and fashion do not necessarily relate to what people wear but can reflect modes of speech, types of cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, tea or even the way we walk, talk and in some instances, make love. 

Style  breaks boundaries and fashion exists safely within the confines of what we should and shouldn’t wear, eat, say and do.

But let’s stick with clothes, specifically trousers.  Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the latest wear in trousers is to have holes, but only at the knees, as if the person wearing them has a job that requires them to be scrubbing floors by hand while kneeling on a rough, Hessian mat.  Drainpipes are back. Trousers can also be slack, parallel, bootlegged, flared, pleated, tapered, cropped and tailored.  They can be made with denim, leather, flannel, cotton, chino, Harris tweed, khaki drill, worsted wool or the reconstituted inner pulp of the giant Nepalese nettle Girardinia diversifolia from the North Eastern district of Sankhuwasabha.

 

You’ve probably heard this before: Women dress for women, not for men.  Dressing for men, women would wear a sun-visor and nothing else.  I think Marx said that, Groucho.

I knew two students in a relationship, both were women.  This was in the early 70s and to have such an open relationship as they did, was uncommon.  In this partnership they had a baby, but I could never figure out whose baby it was as they both mothered the child with equal alacrity. Both dressed like men and had short, cropped hair and wore those muddy shades of grey associated with unwashed beggars in the street or pavements in Glasgow on a dreich winter’s evening.

One of them, either tweedle dum or dee, I can’t recall, was studying in the psychology department at uni.  This was a time of bra burning and both of them were less than keen on men; in fact, they disliked men all together and only suffered a male lodger they had because he was an artist  of the flakiest kind and always accompanied his speech with a raised hand at the end of a bent wrist.

TD, that’s Tweedledee, decided to do an experiment for her thesis to show that women dressed for men.  Traipsing around Stirling town centre with a clip board, she observed both men and women at bus stops with a caustic eye.

Result!  She told us in shocked tones that women most always turned to look at other women as they passed whereas men only looked at other women, and only if they looked attractive.  Surprise surprise!  This is the kind of conclusion we get at the end of an expensive piece of research about something we know about anyway.

Why are women’s shelves in stores packed full of mags depicting methods of losing weight, of keeping in shape after parturition, and how to keep/discard with your man?

One other aspect of style that played a big part in my early life, smoking.

I had my first cigarette when I was eight, hanging our of a third story window being forced to smoke by my sister who is five years older than me.  From then on I graduated to rolling my own in a little machine in the toilets of my secondary school which required the purchase of all the accoutrements that a smoker collects: the zippo lighter; the filter tips; the tobacco tin.

Then I graduated to San Toy cheroots, Sobrani Cocktail and the oval Passing Clouds.

It was certainly the fashion to smoke in those days, in fact, it was de rigueur, obligatory if you wanted to be in part of the in-crowd. You started a conversation by sharing a cigarette and for some reason which evades me, tapping it end-on on the packet.  I remember a billboard across from my house depicting a black cat and the words, Cravena is good for your throat.  Doctors recommend it.  And You’re never alone with a Strand. My father had a silver cigarette case filled with Churchill or Senior Service cigarettes and with a monogram of his initials inscribed on the front.  Watching a movie through a fug of smoke was acceptable.

Now, it’s stylish not to smoke, especially if you’re into sports. 

As Coco Chanel said,”Fashion changes but style endures”