I have seen the future. Yes, I have. It was sitting behind us on a beach in Mykonos. A woman, must have been in her late sixties, mahogany tan, white hair down to her bottom, wearing just the bottom half of a string bikini, fluorescent- orange nail polish and macramé bracelets totem-poled up each ankle. Face like a prune, yes, but body still pretty much holding up. Plus a confidence about her that was positively Kate Moss-ian. Now if that’s not the way I want to be in 20 years’ time, I don’t know what the hell is.
It’s funny, this cutoff-point business, this magic moment in life when one is supposed to stop wearing string bikinis, miniskirts and ankle bracelets and get rid of the long hair. It’s like this magic moment when one is supposed to become a less superficial person, stop caring so much about one’s appearance and be a bit more spiritual. Why is it funny? Because, like every other pathetic boundary human beings erect to make up for the fact that, actually, there is no such thing as the Beginning or the End, it doesn’t exist. And yah boo sucks to those who think it does. Like, for example, those magazines that run stories about how, once you hit 40, you should dress differently from the way you dressed at 30; that once you hit 50, you should dress differently from the way you dressed at 40; and so on. When I think about that beach lady, or my heroine, Carine Roitfeld, the 50-year-old editor of French Vogue, who was photographed this summer looking so fab in a T-shirt and panties, or, indeed, all those lamb-dressed-as- mutton matrons in their knee-to-neck bathing suits on the Isle of Wight, I can’t help but feel that the old chestnut “you’re only as old as you feel” is actually true, and that, if you have the body for it, then whatever your age, you should be allowed to go for it.
But then I may still be in holiday mode. You know: that slightly resentful, sun- struck state of mind where being back at work seems so stark, and the fantasy about quitting the job and opening a whitewashed, bougainvillea-covered yoga studio on a Greek island hasn’t yet evaporated.
That said, I’ve made enough mistakes in the past on the autumn-clothes front to know that it simply doesn’t pay to buy clothes to grow into. Spending all those thousands of pounds on the perfect little black boardroom suit (what bloody boardroom?) for the person I think I ought to be. In other words, if other people think I dress a little young for my age, let them.