There is something truly revolting about asking someone who their clothes are made by. But then, fashion is a devil that can take over your life. It prompts you to do things that go against your better nature: wearing heels at impractical moments is one, not securing a comfortable dotage is another.
I stalled badly while negotiating a move to a two-bedroom flat recently. Thinking about the mortgage repayments, I whimpered: “I don’t want a bigger flat, I want more shoes.” Pathetic. And yet walking into a room with a sharp look on makes me feel superior and powerful. Fashion is the female version of the penis-extending fast car; it’s the higher-brow version of a boob job: it’s using material goods to cover up personal insecurity, or enhance a raging ego.
I’ve always liked clothes. For years, I have been stealing granny’s kid gloves and cashmere. Finding a vintage Gucci tennis kit in my grandfather’s wardrobe recently sent me into hot sweats of excitement. But something has happened in the past two years that has taken the sweet cheap-date inventiveness in my wardrobe to a much more menacing and competitive level. These days, I am not so much a fashion victim as a label whore. I have started referring to clothes by their designers. It is not a jacket, it is a Chloé jacket; it is not an overcoat, it’s Jil Sander. It’s not a minuscule scrap of faded black cotton, it’s my Preen skirt — which, incidentally, looks great with the Gucci boots I bought while a taxi waited outside en route to a lunch. I arrived late, carrying a huge bag, unable to whimper any excuse other than my crippling shopping habit.
Last winter, I bought some black driving gloves from Agent Provocateur. Those gloves make my bottom feel round, firm and wiggly, and they work really well with my porno-schoolmarm look. (Porno-schoolmarm look? For God’s sake, woman, it’s a tweed skirt and a polo neck with a pair of boots. The amateur fashionista in me is so embarrassing.) But now, as winter approaches again, I fret that the old tweed isn’t going to be quite right. Those £85 gloves demand one of the new season tweed pieces from Balenciaga or Roland Mouret. Do you think that buying a skirt to go with a pair of gloves is weird? In a dream world, my tweed moment would actually not be a skirt, but a pair of Paule Ka shorts, and that would mean paying my personal trainer for extra lessons in thigh exercises. Hell, those gloves could end up costing me in excess of £2,000. Oh, God, what’s happened to me? Even my friend Prada Elaine, the woman who has acquired so many handbags that she was burgled specifically for them, thinks I have a problem.
Looking at Pop magazine the other day, I stopped at a Phil Poynter fashion shoot and felt the slow, sickening churn in the gut that was unequivocally lust. I wonder if it is a substitute for something? I started obsessing about my wardrobe after a miserable split from a man two years ago. Every week, as my misery manifested itself in a shrinking body that men would find ugly but fashion requires, I would treat myself to a little something (that wasn’t too expensive) from Marc Jacobs, or a £100 Earl Jean miniskirt. It really cheered me up. But by the time I really did feel better, the habit had stuck: after my next relationship broke down, I started shopping for big things, and the rubbish was put out in the biggest bags from Selfridges and Bond Street.
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Fashion has not made me a sweet, nice person. I am competitive and bitchy with other women, judging even my dearest friends on how our outfits, our “looks”, compare. Neither is this obsession particularly sexy: I once went to meet a man wearing little more than underwear and heels under a coat, and as we consummated the inevitable upshot of this action, I remember peering over his shoulder at my legs and thinking, “Knee-length boots and stockings. Oh, God, what have I done? No, no, no, no, no!”
Relaying this to a friend recently — she was wearing YSL boots, a Chloé jacket and what looked like a Costume National shirt — she said: “Kate, men don’t know if the corset is Topshop or Agent Provocateur. Men couldn’t give a toss what you wear, as long as it’s sexy.” But I care. I have in my head this perfect image of what I want to look like, but like the obsessive dieter who thinks, “One more pound and I’ll be perfect,” the look will never be completed because I’m a fashion junkie, probably quite stupid and certainly quite skint. I have really bad circles under my eyes, which used to bug me, but now I just work them into my look.
Devouring fashion has provided a uniquely unimportant and frivolous thing to direct all my worry towards. It removes the need to fret about world peace and work. I am less stressed by my career these days, what with the fretting about what to “team” with the Agent P gloves and the search for the hairdresser who can cut the alpha fringe.
I met a girl who works for Alexander McQueen the other day. “Nice fringe,” was the first thing I said to her. The second, “Nice dress.” Then, “What’s your name?” Unlike the yummy mummy in Dries Van Noten, I think she knew where I was coming from.