Thou shalt not covet ...

Once upon a time pearls stood for everything I disliked and rejected. They were polite, conventional, middle-class and, whatever the age of the wearer, middle-aged. Less an adornment than a marker of respectability.
Before the 70s struck, though, girls my own age of a certain type wore them to university with twinsets, camel coats and pigskin handbags. Just writing that makes my flesh crawl, not because I hated those accoutrements but because I so badly coveted them in order to be one of these girls. No chance. I lacked the money, the private school vowels and the breezy confidence.
When this mode of dress finally went out the window, I was for the first time in my sartorial element. And I would no more of dreamed of donning pearls than reverting to a suspender belt.

Queen Elizabeth II

But the times change and so, Queenie aside, do we.
I've never been much impressed by precious stones, always being more attracted to opals, amethysts, moonstones and so. But I've noticed how even a string of cheap faux pearls reflect their soft glow on skin that isn't as young as it used to be, so that the lovely old-fashioned word becoming comes to mind.
My appreciation was cranked up a notch by reading the new Coco Chanel biography last year, and admiring portrait after portrait of her dressed in black and long strings of pearls.



Coco Chanel















Once a certain level of appreciation is attained, covetousness, I'm afraid, isn't far behind.
Even so, I surprised myself last week on Lambton Quay when, bent on some mundane mission or other, I stopped dead in front of a jeweller's window to admire a long double rope of big irregularly shaped pearls.
I never look in jeweller's windows; their array of gold and silver bores me rigid. But this ... it hung from a plaster neck, heavy, gleaming and quietly gorgeous.
I only looked for a moment, then found myself marching into the shop and asking if I could see it. The young assistant (I think she was French and therefore understood these things) reached into the window. I said I had no intention of buying it and she smiled indulgently and handed it to me. I promptly slipped it over my neck.
They were south sea pearls, said the assistant. That was why they were so big.
"How much?" I asked, fingering the lovely weighty shapes.
She reached for the price tag at the back of my neck.
"$31,775." 
I handed them back, said thank you and left the shop.

The soundly shod feminist

Checking out Linda Grant's The Thoughtful Dresser yesterday, what should I find but this smashing image. It's a Clarks, for god's sake! My mother would have loved the style (for herself, not her teenage daughter, needless to say), and might even have allowed the colour - if buying for a special occasion and if it "went with" her outfit. I left an appeal on Grant's site for an image of those infernal brown sandals, suffering as I am from the compulsion to see them again and make you see them too.

Grant says the shocking-pink Clarks are sold (in the UK) with little gel pads for the balls of the feet - something I've been advised to hunt down for my tango shoes. The more I look at these beauties, the more I feel the need to see them on my feet. Not so long ago that would have seemed preposterous. Which brings me to why I voluntarily shunned high-heels for so many decades. The short answer is the 70s, or, more accurately, the 70s plus feminism.

Even before I left home, stiletto heels had gone the way of beehive hairdos, stiff petticoats, and stockings and suspenders. (Down, boy! Suspender belts were the most uncomfortable garment known to woman, right up there with the chastity belt, but having the opposite effect on men). Those gorgeous little low-heeled blue shoes I brought out from England in 1964 were the shape of things to come. During the decade and a half that followed, I was lucky enough to find fashion coinciding with ideology. Never again would women allow themselves to be crippled by footwear they couldn't move freely in!

My dismay when the damn things came back in the 80s was just about visceral. And complicated by having a daughter who wanted to wear them. Hadn't women learned anything? Hadn't they heard a word we'd been saying? What sort of man wanted to see us tottering rather than striding?