Key word "disappointed"

Boob tube, boobs, male sauna, sauna men, men sauna, legs ... these, so I'm told, are top of the list of key words that have led punters to my blog over the last 15 months. And I can only imagine their disgust when they got there and failed to find the kind of the action they were looking for.
A bit further down the list, though, come chanel, little black dress, divine dress code, danielle steele ... oh, and look, plain janeandnononsense.
Still, a blogger never got anywhere by refusing to cater to the lowest common denominator, so those of a sensitive disposition, please avert your eyes now.
Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.

Boob-tube debut

I dislike the word boob - it's so pantomime-y - but its alliterative effect when combined with tube is too compelling to ignore. Besides what else are you going to call this thing? Deborah in Madison Rose, where I bought mine this week, flourished bustier, which sounds classier but is, I think, inaccurate. A bustier is structured, often boned. Like this. 

Hmn, classier, did I say? This one from Victoria's Secret makes a liar of me. But compare it to this - your classic boob tube.

An item owing its existence entirely to the invention of lycra (which some might regard as the pinnacle of human achievement; and surely of more benefit to more people than, say, getting a bloke on the moon).
As you can see, your classic boob tube is structured entirely by the body inside it. And my point - yes, I've finally reached it - is that right up to two days ago, I'd always assumed my body simply wasn't up to the job. Well, two jobs really: 1. looking nice, and 2. keeping the tube in place. Both doubts stemming from the one root cause - a marked lack of what Sarah charmingly refers to as "boobage".
So what changed? The proximate cause was that, on Thursday in Madison Rose, I actually tried one on, although not as an end in itself. I was lured into the changing room by a delicious little black dress - Saba this time. I'm not going to describe it because in a couple of days it will be mine, all mine, and I'll photograph it. The essential point here is that it has one of those blouson tops that hangs open to the waist, and requires something appropriate to be worn underneath. Deborah handed me a small black sequined stretchy item, saying it wasn't exactly right but it would give me an idea. It certainly did. I loved it, both under the dress and on its own. 

No, I'm not modelling it, having no wish to let myself in for invidious comparisons with the pink shape above. Admittedly this one is rather more constructed than the pink one. That powerful band of swathing has both a bolstering and a flattening effect, which cancel each other out, but it does maintain a reassuringly tight grip on the torso. Still, I was a bit worried about how it would stand up, so to speak, to tango.
I wore it that evening and lived, unembarrassed, to tell the tale. I worked very hard at not hauling at it nervously on the dancefloor, mid-tanda. And, when the moment came that I couldn't stand another minute without doing so, I ducked out of sight into the kitchen and tugged away unglamorously.
All in all, I enjoyed wearing it. Shoulders are nice, even on women of a certain age, and I felt daringly Becky Sharpish.
And this revolutionary wardrobe step's less proximate cause? Tango, of course. Tango offers the excuse, the occasion, the confidence and the culture for such personal reassessments. I'm looking forward to more shoulderless evenings.

Black is still the new black

Although I won't be wearing black to The Wedding, I agree with Coco Chanel when she said, "Black wipes out everything else around." Or do I? Perhaps what I really mean is that - despite all sorts of pressure to abandon it - I feel great in black. Which might be quite different to looking great.

Back in the 80s, when I had a good deal less confidence and money than  I have now, I attended a formal dinner wearing a white shirt with a black jacket and trousers and a black tie. I felt pretty cool. Until my neighbouring guest informed me helpfully over the entree that these weren't "my colours".  She'd had hers done (thank god that dogma has had its day), and, because her colouring was similar to mine, I should have been wearing pastels. She was sporting something ladylike in apricot. I wouldn't have been seen dead in it.

Then there's the omniscient and all-knowing Trinny and Susannah. They've repeatedly denounced black. For us lot, anyway, although T herself doesn't seem averse. Here she is out shopping in London a couple of years ago, head to toe in black and, it has to be said, looking great.

Do you remember back when they (whoever they are) announced that brown was the new black. God knows, they tried. All you could buy for a year or two in the way of jackets, shoes and skirts was brown, brown and more brown. What a recipe for visual depression. Black-lovers simply rode out the brown fad, and sure enough, it passed.

T and S seem to assume that women wear black because it's slimming (which they deny). But that's not it. Black - there's no other way to put this - has power.  I don't feel like my own woman in pastels. Don't feel like anybody's woman, in fact.

E - a snappy dresser from way back - says Chanel is right about black, "but you do need a good night's sleep, which at my advanced age, you don't always have: 

You put me in mind of the first ever Trelise Cooper dress I had way back in the 1980s when she had a small shop in High Street, Auckland, and no one had heard of her. It was black with long sleeves and a swirly skirt and HUGE shoulder pads and I used to wear it with a wide gold belt. It was super and stupidly I seem to have offloaded it on the way – probably when shoulder pads became a no-no.

Shoulder pads had a lot to answer for.

Here's one of CC's ground-breaking little black dresses from 1927, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

It represents, says MoMA, "one of Chanel's most popular and enduring contributions to women's fashion:

In all of its layered details, a simple material, wool jersey, becomes elegant through superior tailoring technique. Couture details such as seam binding, carefully arranged pleats, the finely finished hem of the skirt, and hand-sewn belt make this ensemble an example of Chanel's characteristic poverty de luxe, an expensive interpretation of a simple design made of modest materials. Chanel appropriated tailoring details from riding habits, men's wear, and service uniforms in her quest to reduce and refine women's clothing to its simplest and most elegant.

Amen to that.