How to Be a Woman

  By the time the reception kicks in, 80 per cent of the women are barefoot or in tights – the edges of the marquee marked with a tide-line of discarded stilettos, wedges and kitten heels. Women spend more time shopping for shoes for a wedding than they actually spend wearing them at the wedding.

  But, bafflingly, we totally accept the uselessness of heels. We accept it limply, shruggingly. We are indifferent to the thousands of pounds, over a lifetime, we spend on shoes we only wear once, and in great pain. Indeed, we’re oddly proud of it. Women buy shoes and gigglingly say, ‘Of course, they’re agony – I’m just going to have to sit on a barstool all night, and be helped to the toilet by friends, or passers-by,’ despite it sounding as OUTRIGHT INSANE as going, ‘I’ve just bought a house – it doesn’t have a roof, of course, so I’m just going to sit in the front room with an umbrella up.’

  So why do we believe that wearing heels is an intrinsic part of being a woman, despite knowing it doesn’t work? Why do we fetishise these things that almost universally make us walk like mad ducks? Was Germaine Greer right? Is the heel just to catch the eyes of men, and get laid?

  The answer is, of course, no. Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner, ENDOV. They think that by effectively walking on tip-toes, they’re slimming their legs down from a size 14 to a size 10. But they aren’t, of course. There is a precedent for a big fat leg dwindling away into a point – and it’s on a pig.

  And most men distrust, and even dislike, a heel. They often view them with Feud Eyes. This is because:

  a) A chick in heels makes a man feel shorter. In man terms, this is like making a lady feel fatter. They don’t like it.

  b) A woman in heels stands a statistical likelihood of ending up her evening with her shoes in her handbag, barefoot, and demanding a piggyback to the taxi rank in order to ‘keep her tights clean’. Men are invariably the pig whose back is called for. On this basis alone, men fear a woman tottering towards them at the beginning of an evening, already gimlet-eyed with toe pain, and sitting down to eat with an old-lady sigh.

  At 35, I’ve jacked it in. I’ve finally given up on heels – apart from one pair of yellow tap shoes that are inexplicably comfortable, and something from the 1930s in green velvet that I can dance in. Indeed, I’ve pretty much given up on women’s shoes altogether. Even women’s flats seem insubstantial and sloppily made, compared to men’s. I’ve got men’s riding boots, men’s biker boots, men’s brogues, some Doc Martens – all beautifully made, comfortable, cheaper than the ones in the women’s section, and a pleasingly contrary end to a leg one expects to terminate in a spindly, painful point.

  I’ve decided I’m now essentially on strike when it comes to women’s shoes. I’m going to sit out the entire world of chick footwear until designers make some that it’s possible to walk in, for more than an hour, with the easy gait of Gene Kelly about to break into a routine, and no day-long pain afterwards. I fully realise my demands viz footwear are wholly a minority interest at the moment – who knows how long the after-effects of Sex and the City’s decade-long Blahnik-wank will continue to rumble through society – but I’m pretty determined about this. After all, I’ve seen those pictures of Victoria Beckham’s bare, bebunioned feet. I don’t want toes that look like thalidomide pasties. If I’m going to spunk £500 on a pair of designer shoes, it’s going to be a pair that I can a) dance to ‘Bad Romance’ in, and b) will allow me to run away from a murderer, should one suddenly decide to give chase. That’s the minimum I ask from my footwear. To be able to dance in it, and for it not to get me murdered.

  Handbags

  Of course, the other fashion item women are supposed to go mad for is the handbag. We’ve long known why – apart from shoes, a handbag is the only other item you’re never too fat to fit into. No one ever got dysmorphic and weeping in a changing room trying on a tote.

  By the age of 35, I’ve had two children, paid off half my mortgage, got drunk with Lady Gaga, make my own guacamole, can do 30 seconds of the easy bit of the ‘Single Ladies’ dance, have two contrary opinions about globalisation, know the Heimlich manoeuvre and once scored 420 in Scrabble.

  But I’m also still dipping into those women’s magazines, and they are making me feel genuinely bad about my life achievements. Because I don’t yet have an ‘investment handbag’.

  My stance on ‘investment handbags’ has always been that if I were going to make a £600 investment, it would probably be in Post Office bonds – and not something that, by and large, lives on the floor in pubs, or which I sometimes use to carry 5lb of potatoes home. But I am becoming aware that I am in a handbag minority. Normal women, says Grazia, do not buy one handbag every five years for £45 from Topshop – my personal ‘handbag routine’. Normal women have dozens of handbags: small ones, potato-less ones, £600 investment ones such as a Mulberry tote.

  With mounting concern, I learnt that having a £600 handbag is like having a crush on The Joker in Batman. You MUST do it. It is an irreducible fact of being a woman.

  Things were brought to a head in the now-defunct Observer Woman magazine. Lorraine Candy, Elle’s editor-in-chief, tried to go a week with just high street gear. On the Wednesday she writes: ‘I’ve failed. Today, I know that I cannot brave that front row with its cool bags and sexy ankle boots without the one thing that makes my outfit work: my new Chloé bag. I feel ashamed.’

  I had a flush of horror as I read this: no one had ever passed judgement on my cheap handbag to my face. But then, this is a reserved country. I don’t know how they would react to my £45 handbag somewhere more demonstrative – Portugal, say, or Texas. They might leap on to their chairs screaming ‘MAH GAHD!’, trying to hit my cheap handbag with a broom, as if it were vermin.

  That night, I made a decision. One of the modern wisdoms of womanhood is that eBay has fake designer handbags that you can’t tell from the real thing. But despite typing ‘great fake £600 handbags for £100’ into the ‘Search’ field, nothing came up.

  Genuinely intrigued, I searched for £600 handbags for £600. Vuitton, Prada, Chloé; £300, £467, £582.

  God, they were horrible. Like Guernica, in pony skin. I tried to find one I liked. I really did. Tanned, tasselled and oddly shapeless, many resembled Tom Jones’s knackers, with handles. Others were covered in straps, buckles and brasses, like some S&M horse.

  There was a whole shelf of leather clutches with gigantic gold clasps that looked a bit as if someone melted Grace Jones in 1988, leaving behind only her blouson leather jacket and huge earrings.

  On page 14 of my search results I finally saw one I liked, by Marc Jacobs. It was bright, acid-house yellow, with a picture of Debbie Harry on it. But my joy in finding a £600 bag I liked was mitigated when, on closer inspection, it proved to be a canvas tote, for £17; basically, the only designer item I was attracted to was a Marc Jacobs carrier bag.

  I am not wholly unfashionable. I have learnt some things about style over the years. A bright yellow shoe is surprisingly versatile; patterned tights are never a good idea. And if – through chaos, fate and backed-up laundry – you end up in an outfit of alarming randomness (socks, Crocs, tuxedo jacket and tricorn hat), you just look people in the eye and say, with crocodilian self-assurance: ‘I don’t like to be too … matchy-matchy.’

  But if I cannot connect with the finer things in life, and all I can emotionally connect with is a jumped-up carrier bag, it’s just further confirmation that I am resolutely of the underclass.

  If I’m honest, the handbag I would probably like most is a big, hollowed-out potato with handles on it. A giant King Edward with satchel straps. Then, in times of crisis, I could bake and eat the handbag, and survive the winter. That is the way of my people.

  And yet, despite all this, my handbag psychology denial rumbled on. Yes, those £600 handbags might be visually unappealing, I thought to myself. But maybe if you touch them, they have some manner of £600 magic that makes it all worthwhile.

  ‘They wi
ll all be made of butter-soft leather,’ I told myself, not really knowing what that meant. ‘You can always tell the difference close up. I should go and touch the quality.’

  I went to Liberty and walked around, touching the handbags, waiting for the enchantment to overwhelm me. They all just felt like handbags. I did, however, see a silvery purse that I liked. For £225.

  I am classy after all!, I thought, running to the till, immediately incurring a £40 overdraft fine and a rumbling schism in my marriage. ‘Maybe I have a secret uncle who’s an earl! True breeding will out! Finally I crave expensive designer items! I’m normal! Thank you, Grazia!’

  Five days later the silver purse was pickpocketed on Gower Street. It turns out that thieves read Grazia, too. They can spot expensive accessories from 500 yards away.

  It also turns out that husbands do not read Grazia, and no matter how magnificent or loving they may be, they can’t help themselves from sporadically saying ‘£225! For a purse! JESUS CHRIST’, as if you’ve just stabbed them quite violently in the balls with a fork, left the fork there, and then hung your coat on it, while you go and have a bath.

  My current purse cost £25 from the cobblers in Crouch End. I doubt I will be ‘upgrading’ it any time soon.

  Anyway, let’s face it: the actual handbag is neither here nor there – it’s what you keep in it that’s the most important thing. I have – after years of extensive study on the subject – come up with the definitive list of what you ACTUALLY need in your handbag:

  1) Something that can absorb huge quantities of liquid

  2) Eyeliner

  3) Safety pin

  4) Biscuit

  This covers all eventualities. You will need nothing else.

  Clothes

  So that’s my feet, and what I’m keeping my fags in. But what am I wearing, now? As a strident feminist, how am I dressed?

  Women know clothes are important. It’s not just because our brains are full of ribbons and bustles and cocktail frocks – although I believe brain scans will finally prove that at some future point. It’s because, when a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible – they have never felt that uncomfortable moment where someone assesses what you’re wearing, and then starts talking down to you, or start perving you, or presumes you won’t ‘understand’ the conversation – be it about work, parenting or culture – simply because of what you put on that day.

  ‘Wait!’ you often feel like saying. ‘If I were wearing my collegiate corduroy jacket, instead of this school-run dress, you would include me in your conversation about Jung! If you could see my “politically engaged” shoes, no way would you talk about Tony Benn like that to me! Look! I can show you a picture of it, on my iPhone! I HAVE AN OUTFIT FOR THIS OCCASION – JUST NOT ON ME!’

  Of course, those instances are merely vexatious – classed in with ‘wrong’ outfits that make you feel demoralised the first time you catch your reflection in a shop window, and lead to you making subsequent bad ‘I am fat’ decisions – like panic-buying harem pants, or a disappointing ‘slimline’ sandwich.

  In the worst-case scenario, however, a wrong outfit can ruin your life. It can lead to a judge dismissing your rape case, as evidenced in the 2008 ‘Skinny Jeans’ case (where it was claimed a woman wearing skinny jeans couldn’t have been raped, because no man could take a woman’s skinny jeans off unaided); or Amnesty International’s survey, which found that 25 per cent of people believe a woman is still to blame for being raped if she dresses ‘provocatively’.

  Women know that a woman dressed in a relaxed, casual or even scruffy manner in the workplace is likely to be considered far less serious about their work than a male peer, dressed in exactly the same way. Chicks in jeans and trainers don’t get promoted. Men in jeans and trainers do. How women look is considered generally interchangeable with who we are – and, therefore, often goes on to dictate what will happen to us next.

  So when women fret over what to wear in the morning, it’s not because we want to be an international style icon. We’re not trying to be Victoria Beckham – not least because there’s an absolutely gigantic pile of toast downstairs with our name on it, and we’ve cracked a smile in the last fortnight.

  No – what we’re trying to do is work out if everyone that day will ‘understand’ what we’re wearing; if we’re ‘saying’ the right thing, in a very nuanced conversation. For fashion is merely suggested dialogue – like those Best Man’s speeches you can download off the internet. Women are supposed to come up with their own, personalised version of this. We’re supposed to speak from the heart in what we wear. We have to find capsule wardrobes, things that are ‘us’, things we can ‘dress up and dress down’, ‘classic pieces’ and ‘jackets – with a twist’. It’s one of the presumed Skills Of A Woman – along with being ‘better’ at doing laundry, naturally suited to being at home all day with a baby, and not really minding that men are considered to be funnier.

  Woman are just supposed to be Good At Clothes, and to look down at those who aren’t – who screw up even one outfit, as evidenced by all those ‘Circle Of Shame’/’What Are You Wearing?’ spreads in every magazine, and every tabloid newspaper, every week. Prominent female politicians are lambasted for a single pair of ‘wrong’ shoes. You’re not allowed to say that this makes you grumpy, or angry, or despairing – that you personally don’t give a toss what Angelina Jolie wears to step off a plane, or that Susan Sarandon is stepping into her sizzling sixties in a beret. At its best – and I love a nice frock – fashion is a game. But for women, it’s a compulsory game, like netball. And you can’t get out of it by faking a period. I know. I’ve tried.

  And so, for a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated $900 billion a year. No wonder every woman’s first thought is, for nearly every event in her life – be it work, snow or birth – the semi-despairing cry, ‘But what will I wear?’

  When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.’

  Because it’s not easy to find clothes you’re happy in. ‘There’s nothing here for me!’ is the cry on the high street, three hours into a shopping trip, having bought only a pair of tights, a foldable chopping board and school cardigans for the kids. ‘Everything is two inches too short, two tones too bright, and there’s NO SLEEVES. WHY ARE THERE NO SLEEVES? IF EVERY WOMAN IN THIS COUNTRY WERE ALLOWED TO COVER HER UPPER ARMS, AS GOD INTENDED, PRESCRIPTIONS OF XANAX WOULD HALVE IN A FORTNIGHT. WHY ISN’T THERE ANYTHING FOR ME IN THIS GIGANTIC, OVER-LIT SHOP?’

  But, of course, there isn’t anything there for you – specifically for you. Before the high street, women would make their own clothes, or see a dressmaker, so that everything we wore was an honest expression of who we were, and what we were comfortable with – within the constraints of fashion at the time, anyway.

  With the advent of mass fashion, however, not a single item of clothing sold is ‘for’ the woman who buys it. Everything we see in Topshop and Zara and Mango and Urban Outfitters and Next and Peacocks and New Look is made for a wholly imaginary woman – an idea in the designer’s head – and we buy it if we like it, say, 70 per cent. That’s about as good as it gets. We rarely, if ever, find something that is 100 per cent ‘us’, and that we truly desire – although we never admit this to ourselves. Most women are walking around in things they’re imagining to be that little bit better. An inch longer here. Without that braiding. In a slightly darker blue. It’s the first thing we say to each other: ‘I wish they’d had it without the collar!’

  Because if you know I don’t like the collar, then you’ll know who I’m really trying to be.

  And, of course, be
cause it’s all made for an imaginary woman, often, none of it works for a real woman. We can all recall seasons where whole, mad ranges – neon, peach, body-con, bustles – sat, sadly, unbought, on the hangers from May to September, waiting for the imaginary women they were designed for to come and buy them.

  Often, a woman is apt to stare at what is approaching on the incoming tide of fashion – one-sleeved dresses, jumpsuits, chintzy florals, ‘daytime’ fetish-wear knickerbockers with poppers on the arse – and exclaim ‘But why don’t fashion designers start from considering what would make a woman look nice? I don’t want to have to “sell” this outfit! I want it to sell me! For £79.99, I want it to be doing me a favour! I WANT THE CLOTHES TO BE ON MY SIDE!’

  I’d never really realised how much fashion isn’t ‘on my side’ until I did a fashion shoot for The Times. The idea was to get a ‘normal woman’ to wear the upcoming season’s trends: pastels, safari, op-art prints, corsets as outerwear, and decorated leggings.

  ‘We’ll make you look gorgeous,’ the editor promised. ‘We’ve got an amazing stylist and photographer. We’ll take care of you.’

  The following eight hours were the worst of my life that haven’t ended in an episiotomy. Previously, I’d always thought that all that lay between me and looking like Kate Winslet on the red carpet was £10,000’s worth of clothes, hair, make-up, stylist and good photographer. And, sure enough, in resulting photos, I looked pretty good. They got some frames of me looking pretty hot in a corset, silk combat trousers and four-inch heels. To be honest, if I’d seen the picture of me in a magazine in that outfit, I would have thought, I will try that outfit! That looks good on her! And she has an arse a lot like mine, although a little bigger, hahaha!