Clothes Panics for Young Women


Yesterday I did a post on Alibi Innings by Barbara Worsley-Gough, an enjoyable 1954 village mystery revolving round a cricket match.

Early in the book, the hideous hostess, Elizabeth Elliot, talks to a young woman who has come to be part of the houseparty for the cricket weekend. There was much to discuss in the social interactions and murder plot, but this was one of the most striking moments for me:
‘Rosebay,’ said Mrs Elliot, who never said ‘Good Clothes Panics 1morning’ or ‘Good night,’ which was one of the reasons for her unpopularity in the village, ‘it’s time you dressed for this tiresome party. Go and change. You can’t appear in that thing.’ 
‘Oh Aunt Elizabeth, won’t it do?’ Rosebay had made her frilled gingham dress, with infinite pains, for this occasion. She had another dress upstairs, but she was saving that for Sunday.
‘It’s ridiculous – all bunchy, like a child’s pinafore. Haven’t you brought something more presentable?’
You don’t have to have been a young woman ever – let alone one who goes to houseparties – to realize the absolute terror of this moment, the panic-stricken thoughts that would be going through anyone’s head. It is not a spoiler to say that the foul Mrs Elliot deserves her fate.

I haven’t done a good clothes panics entry in a long time – they used to be quite the feature on the blog. They tend to involve a young woman’s absolute agony and horror at finding she is wearing the wrong thing, or just doesn’t have the right thing.

Noel Streatfeild is the queen of clothes panics and how to solve them – one of my all-time favourites of hers is here in the book known both as Curtain Up and Theatre Shoes. Sorrel has to dress up for a theatrical first night, and has nothing nice. The otherwise kindly Alice, looking at her only available frock, says
‘Well there’s a war on and you’re at least covered and I suppose we mustn’t expect more.’ Which the more you thought about it, became the less encouraging.
-a moment which has lived with me forever, more than far worse (theoretically) things happening to various people in many more serious books. I remembered Alice’s words - not meant as cruel just observational – over 30 years, though I didn’t remember the details of the dress that eventually saved Sorrel’s night. I gave her this one on the blog, and was jolly pleased with it:


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The whole of Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes is one long clothes panic, and in another of her masterpieces, Wintle’s Wonders, the scene where Rachel is mocked and laughed at for her awful baby-frilled audition dress is still a killer. Her sister Hilary (they are unloved and unwanted orphans) had tried to make her ‘look as if more trouble had been taken over her than any of the others’ which makes for even more of a dreadful, painful moment. So, when Hilary slaps the mean mocking girl, readers everywhere cheer loudly.

In Jane Gardam’s A Long Way From Verona, teenage Jessica has brought her gold Three Kings costume with turban to a party (‘you thought it was fancy dress…?’),
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but ends up in Viyella like everyone else, after a scene of exquisite awkwardness. The kindly hostess mother tries to save the situation by suggesting they all wear costumes, but the other girls are grumpy and want to wear their nice frocks. Not helped by Jessica being annoyingly unfriendly: the book is YA, and when I re-read it as an adult I was surprised to see how un-endearing she was.


One of my favourite characters in all children’s lit is Antonia Forest’s Nicola Marlow, and in this entry on Peter’s Room she realizes that she is not a white net-and-frills person, but there is no choice of dress and she ends up being the only sister who looks dreadful at an important party. She gets her revenge, but it is a whole year coming (this is an annual Twelfth Night party), though I got my revenge for her by finding the most horrible party dresses I could find for the sisters for the blogpost. Look:


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Nancy Mitford is, of course, very good on young women and clothes. Think of Fanny in Love in a Cold Climate, and the planning with Aunt Emily for a country house weekend: ‘Now we shall have to think about your clothes Fanny. Sonia’s parties are always so dreadfully smart. I suppose they’ll be sure to change for tea? Perhaps if we dyed your Ascot dress a nice dark shade of red that would do?’

And when Fanny is a young-married in Pursuit of Love, she sadly compares herself with other women when she comes up to London from Oxford for the day:
My clothes, so nice and suitable for the George, so much admired by the other dons’ wives (‘My dear, where did you get that lovely tweed?’) were, I now realized, almost bizarre in their dowdiness… I passionately longed to have a tiny fur hat, or a tiny ostrich hat, like the two ladies at the next table. I longed for a neat black dress, diamond clips and a dark mink coat, shoes like surgical boots, long crinkly black suede gloves, and smoothly polished hair.
I think this is how she wanted to look:


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Incidentally, in case you were worried, Rosebay from the opening story does eventually get some validation for her bunchy gingham dress:
He smiled at Rosebay approvingly. ‘What a pretty dress, if an old man may be allowed to say so’, he remarked. Rosebay blushed, partly at the compliment and partly because she remembered that this was the bunchy dress which her aunt had told her not to wear, and she felt a pang of remorse which added to her usual state of emotional confusion.



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Now, I am sure that some of my readers have even better examples of clothes panics from favourite books – I have barely skimmed the surface. And men must have clothes panics too. Please tell me your best ones…. I’d love to do another post on readers’ suggestions.

Drawing of gingham dress from the Ladies Home Journal.




















Comments

  1. I really enjoyed this post, Moira. I think a lot of people have those clothes panic moments. I know I have. Once, I was out of the country to give a presentation at a conference. I opened my suitcase, only to discover that I didn't have the skirt to the suit I was planning to wear to give my talk. So I had to think of a solution - quickly. I didn't know the shops in the area where I was, but I finally found something presentable and it was all OK. Still!

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    1. Thanks Margot - and you reminded me of a few non-fictional panics of my own! But we always cope don't we....

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  2. Poor Nicola Marlow. White net and frills sounds like old-fashioned net curtains and I can't imagine anyone looking good in it. No modern teenager would be as stoic as Nicola, would they? They'd probably refuse to go at all rather than go looking dreadful.

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    1. Yes you're right, we would never be able to impose clothes on the later generations. And yes, it did sound dire. That was pretty much all the description in the book, but the reader could summon up her own picture of the horror...

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  3. Can I recommend Bond Street Story by Norman Collins, which I've recently read. Poor Irene, who's only 17 and quite self-conscious, starts her day with no outfit for the staff social and ends up with 3. A scarf/sash thing and handbag she bought to jazz up her old black dress, a posh frock which a colleague saves from stock and marks down for her because of a lipstick mark - and which she can't really afford but knows she just has to have because it's gorgeous and a real bargain, and a dress she gets home that night to find her mother making for her.

    I don't know if you've read Bond Street Story, but if not I would really, really recommend it. It's a bit of a doorstop but it's set in a department store in the late 50s (published 1959 I think), and the whole business of selling and ordering and modelling the clothes and fabrics is fascinating. It's just when young people are starting to buy factory as opposed to wearing home made clothes, and there are nuances about men's hats and ties and soft shirts that I probably wouldn't have picked up on before I started reading this blog.

    Of course clothes are strange things really and panics can go both ways. I remember when I was at university as a mature student some of the other women who were a little bit older than me and married with grown up children were talking about how they'd bought clothes before they started the course, thinking they'd be casual and work well for their student life, and then got there and realised they were much too flash. Benetton and Gap, as opposed to Primark and H&M. I suppose it's mostly about fitting in.

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    1. Thanks for the kind words, and also for the recommendation. I have this book on my Kindle and must read it. I absolutely loved his London Belongs to Me, which also had great clothes moments. Along with great sociology - it contains this newspaper headline: TROUSERED BLONDE DEAD BY STOLEN CAR. She is also described as having "coloured toenails and extensive head injuries" – clearly asking for it. I built a whole Guardian article on women in trousers inspired by that...

      When I went back to work after having children and working from home I bought a little wardrobe of new outfits - all completely wrong. My new colleagues had a quite different style. Is the way life goes...

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  4. Just off the top of my head, the plotting and contriving done by Jo and Meg March when they are invited to a party given by a wealthy friend of Meg's. Among other things, they only have one presentable pair of gloves between them, and wonder if they can get away with each wearing one nice glove and casually carrying a stained, torn one crushed in the other hand.

    The only men's clothes panic I can remember is in 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith. I believe his thoroughly rotten bounder Bruce comes a cropper involving a kilt at a formal event but don't remember the details.

    (My own most memorable personal panic occurred just before a reception for a visiting foreign flag officer when I realized that someone had hit me square in the backside of my dress whites with what appeared to have been a cheese canape. I found a tall, broad buddy and spent the evening backed up to him).

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    1. Oh yes, the shared gloves. We ended up doing that at school: you had to show your gloves on your way in to a nun, to prove you'd worn them on the journey to school. So you shared with a friend if you had one pair between you... (Luckily they abandoned this ludicrous rule shortly after I joined the school).

      A kilt disaster sounds exactly what I'm looking for, will investigate.


      White clothes at formal affairs (whether uniform or ball dress) are always asking for trouble. I once spilt red wine down a white top moments after arriving at quite a proper dinner party. Another guest won my heart forever by going into the garden, cutting a flower, and pinning it to my top to hide the stain. (He also happened to be an absolute dreamboat, handsome as all get out.)

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    2. Dress whites are an awful uniform. My roommate in Virginia was African American and she hated wearing them; said they made her look like someone's housekeeper (which at that time and in that place was quite true).

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    3. I do love handsome, helpful men, don't you?

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    4. Well yes I do. They make life so much easier...

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  5. Moira: I sometimes forget the anxiety women experience over the "right" clothing. You provided some vivid examples.

    In reading above about you exacting a bit of revenge for a character through the photo of party dresses I wondered if you had been reminded of a personal situation where someone was cruel towards you.

    I am grateful there is less concern in the male world over "right" clothing.

    As for example I thought of Another Margaret by Janice MacDonald where her casually attired sleuth, Randy (Miranda) is on her way to a high end boutique to as part of the investigation when she asks her friend Denise if she is properly dressed for the store:

    Denise raked a clinical eye over my ensemble, which consisted of red jeans, red Birkenstock rubber clogs, and a white and red striped T-shirt …. She nodded, and said that I looked as if I’d been hauled away from my prize-winning perennial garden and had a sort of Katherine Hepburn disregard for fashion.

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    1. Thanks Bill - I am trying not to think of past slights and problems! I had a very dear friend who (many many years ago) would say to me 'what are you wearing for the party on Saturday?' as young schoolgirls do. When I told her, all enthusiastic, 'oh my blue dress' as it might be, she would say 'oh. Are you?' in THE most dispiriting way. A very mean thing to do, but it hardened me up for the future... I think no-one can bother you in this area in the way your teenage friends did.

      I very much enjoyed Another Margaret on your recommendation, and have another book by her on my Kindle, also on your reco. That is an absolutely brilliant clothes description!

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  6. Susanna Tayler23 June 2018 at 14:09

    Anna Lacey has a clothes dilemma before her first Parents Association meeting in Fresh From the Country by Miss Read: "She was weighing the merits of her tartan frock (loathsomely familiar to her, no shoes to go with it and decidedly spotted about the skirt) against her blue silk suit (too tight across the back, the blouse which looked best with it languishing at home in Essex, and probably much too conspicuous in any case for such an occasion), when the bell put a stop to her speculations."

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    1. Oh I love that book. And those are such realistic thoughts, I always like that in a book. The way women actually choose their outfits is not much reflected in Vogue, it is much more based on not having the right shoes, and what's in the wash.

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  7. Susanna Tayler23 June 2018 at 15:47

    I can think of two examples of men worrying about their clothes: Alan Bennett going for an interview at Cambridge but not owning a dressing gown ("Nobody'll mind if you just wear your raincoat," my mother reassuringly said. I wasn't reassured but there was a limit to what my parents could afford.) And Horatio Hornblower going to a dinner and feeling self-conscious that the buckles on his shoes were only pinchbeck.

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    1. Oh poor Alan Bennett, that's class coming into it too, which is terrible, and worrying about your parents. It's very noticeable when you look at books in a clothes manner - dressing gowns were SO important in packing and trips, because of the shared bathrooms. Now the pressure is gone with ensuites - and many hotels actually provide a dressing gown now.

      Have never read Hornblower, but can feel for him...

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  8. Admittedly not from a book, though definitely literary: During Charlotte and Anne Brontë’s unannounced visit to the publisher George Smith in London, they were appalled when Smith turned up at their lodgings in the evening to take them to the opera. ‘We had by no means understood that it was settled that we were to go to the Opera – and were not ready – Moreover we had no fine, elegant dresses either with us or in the world’, Charlotte wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey. ‘They must have thought us queer, quizzical-looking beings, especially me with my spectacles /---/ Fine ladies & gentlemen glanced at us with slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances’. The humiliation of the occasion was double – not only was Charlotte keenly aware of the oddity of her own small, plain and bespectacled person, but she also had to suffer the assumptions from ‘fine ladies and gentlemen’ that in what she described as their ‘plain – high-made, country garments’ the sisters were so rustic as not even to know how to dress properly for the opera.

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    1. Oh poor them, and the trouble is it must have stopped them enjoying the opera for worrying, it calls out to us down the years.
      On a frivolous note, I always loved that Charlotte's great friends were called Ellen Nussey and Amelia Ringrose - it was so obvious she had much the best name for being the world-famous writer, the other two didn't have a chance...

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  9. Not exactly the same thing, but I am thinking of Anne of Green Gables and the dull plain clothes that Marilla makes for her and her longing for puffed sleeves.

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    1. Of course! One of my favourite passages. I have been known to say that if you don't cry when Matthew produces the right dress, then you have a heart of stone...

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    2. And then there is the part near the end when Marilla tells Anne all that she means to her . . . oh dear . . . I seem to have something in my eye . ..

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    3. I don't. It's definitely hay fever. I cannot think of Matthew's death without getting hay fever.

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  10. Although at my age I don't worry about whether my clothing is acceptable (sad but true), I am sure growing up in the American South and being from a family with little money, I must have experienced some clothing panics. But what strikes me is how cruel people can be, at all ages. I just don't understand it.

    But I did finally remember the other book I read recently that featured cricket. It was The Bone Garden by Kate Ellis and the protagonist has finally been induced to play for the police cricket team. And the game, the setting, and the equipment do figure into the mystery.

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    1. Yes, I agree with you on all: you do stop worrying nearly so much, and also - why DO people say mean things? Weren't they taught that you just say something nice whatever? Harms no-one.

      It's ages since I read a Kate Ellis book, that does sound interesting. Did you enjoy it despite the cricket?

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    2. Even the cricket was somewhat interesting. I haven't decided yet how I feel about the Wesley Peterson series by Ellis. Somehow they don't grab me, but most readers rate them highly and really like following the character's lives. Someone said that Wesley's boss is a more interesting person and I think I agree with that. So, if they show up, I will probably try more of them.

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    3. Ah, now, I feel exactly that too: they are perfectly unobjectionable books, but I don't love them, though I know many people do. I'd read one if it were there in front of me...

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  11. Hello Moira, Love this post and am having a nice morning clicking through links here and reading all your Streatfeild posts. I find I like to save your blog up for when I need to hang about for a good spell. That Long Way From Verona panic is one of my favourites but there are a few quite good ones in Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet novels. In Marking Time, when Louise is taken out to the concert by her hosts there is a long debate over what her friend Stella Rose is to wear: "Stella said that if she wore the tussore silk Peter's friends would scream with laughter."

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    1. Just checked and you haven't posted on Howard or the Cazalets. I wonder if it's possible you haven't come across them or that you simply don't like? Seem very much up your street--lots of wonderful stuff about characters who care either too much or too little about what they wear and lots of home front make do and mend.

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    2. Sara, thanks for the kind words, nothing could make me happier than that you spent some blogtime like that!
      I read a lot of Elizabeth Jane Howard in the 1980s, and when the Cazalet novels started coming out I tried one but didn't take to it. But you are not the first person to make me think I must have been rash to dismiss them: I really need to try them again. Thanks for the nudge.

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  12. I suspected you must have read and not enjoyed if they weren't here, but they do feel like such a good fit for the blog. You know that Kate Atkinson's new novel is a home front story as well, I imagine. Also has a BBC connection. I really liked it once I let go of wanting to be back in the Life After Life universe.
    I need to find a copy of Aunt Clara now--have only very recently read my first of the Shoe books and need to hunt up the rest of them as well. Did watch the film yesterday and found Margaret Rutherford very charming. Marina has talked about Streatfeild for years but I'd somehow never got round to her.

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    1. I'm surprised you didn't discover Streatfeild before, but lucky you to have pleasures to come...
      I received a review copy of the Kate Atkinson this week and am dying to get going on it.
      And I WILL try a Cazalet book!

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