Everyone is one wrong purchase away from disaster. Which is to say, everyone has a wardrobe, and everyone’s wardrobe has a limit. Everyone has one item— or class of item— that would test that limit.
Everyone is teetering on the edge of something; and this one item would tip you so hard into that something that you would look like one of those Social Stereotypes that used to be in the Telegraph in the nineties. It would, as Kate and I are fond of saying, be too literal.
What’s crucial is that this item is something you long to purchase; the kind of thing you look at and know in your heart that it is your style. You must be drawn to items of this kind over and over again. It isn’t that you wouldn’t look outstanding in this item. It isn’t that it wouldn’t work. It’s that it would work too well. You would become the living embodiment of the idea.
Most women, for instance, are one pair of jaunty tights away from teaching art at the gnome school. Rich, who loves black jeans and ancient band t-shirts, is teetering on Mall Goth if he wears the wrong shoes. My friend Sam cannot wear a polo shirt lest he become Head Boy Here To Help. My sister Floss, an incredibly elegant and stylish person, is nonetheless frequently but a humble flatcap away from “being Eminem”; and my dad is one wrong Panama hat away from looking like a colonial overseer. (The man loves a linen suit!)
My personal version of this is the Ageing China Doll.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with china dolls. (Add this to the “miniature orange juice” from last week, and a picture emerges, doesn’t it?)
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