I’VE NEVER considered spending much more than a reluctant £10 on an umbrella — it seems as pointless as buying Gucci flippers (yes, they do exist).
However, during the rainy summer it dawned on me that it doesn’t matter how devastatingly chic your outfit is if, at the first sign of a light drizzle, your shoddy, garage-bought umbrella flips inside out, morphs into a Venus fly-trap and leaves you struggling to escape its swaths of black nylon. Despite having blow-dried your hair and applied two coats of mascara, you’re left looking like Alice Cooper.
Enter the Pucci umbrella. The Italian label’s kaleidoscopic print can look like a Bridget Riley canvas when applied to clothes, so I thought it safer to stick to accessories. I’d always associated long umbrellas with golf but, with its groovy pattern and luxurious leather handle, this felt like something Catherine Deneuve’s character might have sold from her shop in the musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. There is something about stylish umbrellas that makes me want to hang dreamily from lampposts singing show tunes in the rain.
You can tell a lot about someone by their choice of umbrella (it’s rather like dogs that share the characteristics of their owners). Clear plastic domes are favoured by elderly women who resemble Barbara Cartland; ladies who lunch buy their cherub-print brollies from art gallery gift shops; and my collapsible wreck spells “chaotic”, marking me out as the kind of person who starts running a bath, nips out for some milk, then realises she has locked herself out of the house.
In contrast, the Pucci says “organised and expensive, yet bohemian” — just the image I want to project.
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Quite apart from the admiring glances it attracts, sheltering under it is like being beneath my own psychedelic pagoda, entirely cocooned from the grey swamp of London. I am always disappointed when a shower passes and I have to close it, but carrying an open umbrella when it’s not raining is akin to wearing sunglasses indoors.
Who needs an Indian summer? Bring on the monsoon.
Pucci umbrella, £225 (020-7201 8171).