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.

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.

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.