Clothes Maketh the Woman

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: What to wear, what to wear? Never in my life--well maybe in high school, maybe in my 20s, well, never mind –– never in my life has any question been so fraught as right now: Deciding what to wear back in real life. I have no idea. I have spent the last two years in leggings and black T-shirts. I have now moved to black t-shirts and black floaty skirts. That’s it. I look at the clothes in my closet and think… What are those things?

Another tough decision is deciding what my characters wear. (Thinking back, a lot of them seem to wear all black. Oh well. Let’s move on.)

We welcome today our darling fabulous dear and beloved friend Catriona McPherson. Who has the perfect style of her own. And today, Reds and Readers, some thoughts about the fashion decisions her characters make ––and equally intriguingly, why.

Clothes Maketh the Woman
    by Catriona McPherson


I can’t remember who was once asked, “What did the sixties look like?” and answered, after a pause, “They looked like the fifties”, but I’ve never forgotten it. Of course! The sixties in real life looked like our idea of the fifties, since that idea came from Hollywood (or Pinewood). By the time ordinary people had saved up for their bubblegum-pink appliances and atomic-print curtains, it was the seventies, Hollywood was all brown and orange, and real life looked like the sixties.

I was determined to bear this in mind as I clothed the people – oh all right, the women! – in my new book. In 1948, Myrna Loy was helping Cary Grant build his dreamhouse, Judy Garland was wearing an Easter bonnet chosen by Fred Astaire, and James Stewart was at a very awkward Manhattan dinner party featuring a length of . . . Rope.

But my book is set in Edinburgh, more specifically the tenements of the Fountainbridge district, where the dairies, breweries, distilleries and abattoirs scent the air and employ the populace. My heroine Helen Crowther might go to the pictures twice a week with her mother and her wee sister but none of them can dash out to buy the clothes they see on screen. (Or the clothes they hear about on the news. Truly. On the day the book opens, the Royal family was in Edinburgh and the bulletins all mentioned that little Princess Margaret Rose wore a pink coat to church.)

Even the characters who do have a lavish wardrobe allowance are subject to their own kind of time-lag. It’s another truth about fashion that I remember switching on a like a lightbulb in my head when it hit me: people don’t age in to the style of the generation before them. When I’m old – no heckling, please! – I won’t be wearing what women in their eighties wear now (i.e. old-lady clothes). No, I’ll be wearing what I wear today and that will make my clothes old-lady clothes, because I’m wearing them. Like when the dowagers in Jane Austen adaptations are still wearing yards of satin and tight stays, while the girls float around in hankies. This point seems to be beyond all those irritating articles about what “No Woman Over __ Should Be Wearing”. Grrrrrrrrr.

Personal time-lag meant that forties’ fashion was completely irrelevant for one of my favorite characters in the book. Helen’s benefactor, Mrs Sinclair, is in her fifties, has found her style, and is sticking with it. She dresses to be impressive rather than attractive: a high neck, a cameo brooch, box pleats, a fox-fur even in the summer, and a system of undergarments that creak like ship’s rigging whenever she’s moved by high emotion. Usually umbrage. I was born in 1965, and I can just about remember elderly versions of Mrs Sinclair, buttoned and buttressed, undoubtedly impressive. I definitely remember the creaking.

Helen has no ambition to be grand, and she’s on a tight budget too. Besides, there’s yet another factor she needs to consider: she must dress the part for a new role that is nothing like her past life. She’s about to start work as an almoner at a doctor’s surgery – sort of a proto-type medical social worker, I suppose you’d say – and we meet her as she’s steeling herself to put on Sunday clothes on a Monday morning: nylon stockings with a seam instead of hard-wearing lisle, shoes with tipped heels instead of the clogs that keep her mother’s feet up off the bottling-hall floor; a serge skirt and a poplin shirt instead of wool and a pinny; and strangest of all . . . a hat. She has never worn a hat on a Monday.

Of course, then as now, the rules can be ignored. You might pay a price for the decision (and be turned away from a swanky club, for instance) or, if you’ve got clout, you might get away with it. One character in the book whom I dressed just about from living memory – although my God it makes me feel old to consult my childhood for historical material! – is the free-thinking, devil-may-care lady doctor (doctor = clout), who wears a cotton dress and sandals with – gasp – bare brown legs. It wasn’t a doctor who rocked the village where I was born, mind you. It was the minister’s wife. She attended Sunday service in this shocking ensemble: bare legs, brown leather sandals, toes on show to the entire parish. And, once, a love bite! (Actually, I think the parishioners who took the vapours might have had a bit of a point there.)

So, all in all, the clothes in the book are very little to do with the fashion of the day and a lot to do with power, expectations, and tribal loyalties. I could never understand why make-over shows don’t get that. Even Queer Eye, which I love, tends to dress a shape, not a life. Still, the Fab Five are nothing like the dreaded Trinny and Susannah from What Not To Wear, who blithely turned every woman they got their mitts on into what one critic called “a newly divorced travel agent on her way to the PTA”. Ouch.

So, Reds, I’m assuming there is nothing you’ll be scolded into not wearing by some random opinion piece that thinks it’s the boss of you. Let’s celebrate! I’ll start: I’m never giving up pictorial prints. I plan to die in a dress covered with . . . let’s say . . . beach huts, and might even rock a jean jacket in my coffin. How about you?


HANK: Good question, you all! (I also love watching Say Yes to the Dress, where half the time I’m yelling at the screen---no no no!) I cannot think about what I will wear in my coffin, yeesh, but I WILL say I will NEVER wear ruching, or cutouts, or those cold-shoulder things. Asymmetrical hems. Gaucho pants. (I know, but if they DO come back, just saying.) High platform sandals. Anything with tricky lacings or fluttery sleeves. I’ll stop now. 

But I love what you said, Catriona, about power, expectation, and loyalties. That is a key lesson!

Reds and readers—how about you? What items will you NEVER give up? Or...wear?


Catriona McPherson (she/her) writes preposterous 1930s detective stories about an aristocratic sleuth, darker (not difficult) contemporary psychological thrillers, and comedies set in the Last Ditch Motel in fictional (yeah, sure) California, She has just introduced a fresh character in June’s 1948-set IN PLACE OF FEAR, which finally marries her love of historicals with her own working-class roots.

Catriona is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime. 


IN PLACE OF FEAR

Edinburgh, 1948. Helen Crowther leaves a crowded tenement home for her very own office in a doctor's surgery. Upstart, ungrateful, out of your depth - the words of disapproval come at her from everywhere but she's determined to take her chance and play her part.

She’s barely begun when she stumbles over a murder and learns that, in this most respectable of cities, no one will fight for justice at the risk of scandal. As Helen resolves to find a killer, she’s propelled into a darker world than she knew existed, hardscrabble as her own can be. Disapproval is the least of her worries now.