Blue Period

I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who has a signature colour.

Of course, all my ANU homies (Haydon-to-the-Allen: REPRESENT) know what happens when you take a signature colour too far: you become Yellow Girl (FYI, I saw her undies one day while shopping at Dickson Woolies: they were black, and I felt vaguely let down).

Yellow Girl notwithstanding, I’ve always thought a signature would be kind of nice. A colour that exemplifies Peggyness: a colour that people would see and go, ahh, yes, that’s Peggy.

The problem is: which colour?

At various times, I’ve worn a lot of red: a lot of brown: a lot of green. I’ve accessorised extensively in pink. I’m the proud owner of more than one yellow dress. Purple tights and gloves, orange handbags, turquoise suede ballet flats. My love affair with neutrals will last a lifetime, and Back in Black isn’t just an ACDC song, it’s a way of life. You name the colour, and I bet I’ve got it somewhere in my wardrobe, in my accessories drawers, or in my jewellery box.

And yet, almost every outfit I’ve worn in the last few months has been built on blue.

I didn’t really notice my wardrobe was entering a blue period. Around this time last year, I bought some blue and white ceramic jewellery from Mrs Peterson’s Pottery. That winter, I found two amazing second hand blue skirts: the navy Veronika Maine pencil and the vintage ultramarine wool pleated mid-calf soon made their way into my high rotation wardrobe. Feeling my workday skirt-blouse-cardigan groove as spring arrived, I dug up an old cornflour blue silk blouse, unearthed a David Lawrence white and petrol blue abstract print shirt, and made myself a navy and white pleated shell top. Blue plastic sunglasses were brought back from Malaysia by PapaK. Christmas came, along with a swag of blue gifts: more of Mrs Peterson’s blue ceramic earrings, a multicoloured resin bangle with a glorious streak of sky blue.

Some days I wake up and look at the outfit I laid out the previous night: it’s blue-on-blue. Other days, blue creeps into my ensemble through my massive cobalt shades or my blue porcelain earrings. If any of you were wondering how far this goes, I’ve found French navy to be a pleasing stand in for black lingerie.

Picasso’s blue period lasted about four years, according to my five minute trawl of the internet. Perhaps I have found my signature colour, for the time being, at least?

Yet, the other day, dressing for work, I found myself sprucing up an otherwise neutral outfit with a dash of red; my garnet ring, my scarlet sunglasses, and those silly red knickers I keep in the drawer for a giggle.

Perhaps there’s some inherent wisdom, then, in my reluctance to fully commit to a signature colour. Some days, you just have to wear a little red.

Blue periods notwithstanding.

Cherry Lips

Songs get stuck in heads for particular reasons. These reasons may not be immediately apparent: I am still pondering why Love Shack by the B52’s is my head’s default stuck setting (suggested reasons are, of course, welcomed). But, there is always a reason.

This week’s sticky song – Loon Lake’s Cherry Lips – was stuck in my head for a particularly good reason.

It was a sign that I needed to wear red lips, after a two year hiatus.

And, on Tuesday night, as I joined a couple of lovely friends for Laksa at our local noodle house, I put my cherry on my lips. It felt exactly right.

The thing about a red lip is that it can’t be forced. If you try to force it, you’ll be wiping it off with a tissue in the car before you’ve driven two blocks. And we all know, ladies and gentlemen, that red lipstick brands like nothing else. Everyone will know you tried, and failed, at a red lip, by the tell tale pink stains around your mouth. For shame.

When the mood is right, though, nothing short of big, red, full and smiling-with-a-big-toothsome-grin will do. We could discuss at length, here, the socio-political-aesthetic assumptions about red lips, and, indeed, about the colour red – both potent symbols.

But we’re not going to discuss it, because, for me, a red lip has always been nothing more or less than a mood that comes over me, an impulse, indeed, an inspiration. It defies categorisation. A red lip just is.

You can consult, if you like, with Marie Claire, Cleo and Cosmo for application tips. At the end of the day, though, it’s make up, not rocket science or world peace. You just need to open the tube, and apply.

So, put your cherry on your lips, as Loon Lake would say, and get yourself to that dinner, or those drinks, that day at the office, or that just-because thing. And, to paraphrase another song that gets stuck in my head – this time Garbage’s Cherry Lips:

Go, baby, go go.

Note to Self

Dear Peggy,

When you are not feeling up to tip-top standard, and have a lot of things to do, DON'T try for wardrobe brilliance.

Because, if you spend the better part of an hour trying on, taking off, trying on again with a differnet cardigain, takign off again in a huff, you will not only miss three buses, you will be forced to come home to a room covered in fashion excriment. Complete with rejects, naked coathangers, discarded shoes, and a herniated wardrobe. (There were supposed to be pictures this week, but, unfortunately, my camera is not working - maybe it was offended?)

Instead, put on the most comfotable, most easy, and most black outfit of all (Johnny Cash, who faced his share of days that weren't at tip top standard, was onto something).

You might not get complimented. You might not get looked at. But at least you will get to work on time.

Which will mean you can come home early for a cup of tea and some of Jackie O's biography before heading out to job number two.

Cheers and lotsalove,

Peggy x

Bedroom Advice for Young Ladies – Top Five Handy Hints for Better Bedroom Experiences.

Hint #5: Size Does Matter.

I wish somebody had given me this sage advice when I bought my first ‘grown up’ bed 7 years ago, but size does matter.

(What did you think I was going to be talking about in this post? Clearly, the title could be about nothing other than interior decorating. Minds out of gutters, people…)

You see, should you want to be sharing your bed with a Someone, a Someone who is potentially rather tall, you might want to consider splashing out and going for the queen size, as opposed to double, option. Or be totally extravagant and go for a king.

Either way, remember spooning all night is delightful in the realms of imagination, but, in reality, it’s pretty annoying. And nothing kills passion like waking up cranky.

My key problem with my bed is that it has a foot on it – see picture. Whilst my bed looks lovely, like something that a Scandinavian lady-of-the-manor would indulge in romantic trysts on, it means that my Someone, who is a rather tall fellow, cannot lie straight in my bed. Instead, he lies diagonally across it, leaving me with two triangles of mattress with which to rest my weary bones. Which makes for lots of squishing, and a cranky Peggy first thing in the morning.



So, the moral to the story is, if you are at all interested in sharing a bed with a Someone, be considerate of their size. Opt for the next size up, or at least, pick a double bed frame without a foot, so that the Someone’s feet can poke over their edge till their heart’s content.


Hint #4: A Restful Colour Palette for a Good Night’s Sleep.

Your bedroom is for sleeping. Sleeping is very important. Studies vary in their recommendations, but I’ll tell you this for free – a bad night’s sleep is sure to mess up your day.

Colour, lots of it, is fabulous, and the rest of my home, and indeed most spaces I inhabit, are a veritable rainbow. But, the one place I make an exception is the bedroom. Just as certain fast food restaurants (*cough* MacDonald’s *cough* *cough*) use bright and clashing colours to stimulate appetites and encourage you to EAT THEN LEAVE, choosing restful colors, preferably from the same colour family or an analogous grouping, is a simple way to make sure that your bedroom visually cues yourself into being calm, rested, and serene. Even if you’re the latte-chugging-hurry-sick-mobile-phone-irradiated self you are during your business hours (*cough* Me! *cough* *cough*), a room that’s got a monochromatic scheme, or a subtle range of colours, is going to have some sort of a calming effect. Think shades of blue with greens, a mix of creams and wood tones, or even the classic white on white. All are excellent bedroom choices for a young lady.



Total mastery of the bedroom colour scheme isn’t easy to do in a rental property, or in other situations where you can’t paint. But, all is not lost.

One way around this is to go with whatever colour your walls happen to be, and roll with that as the theme. Luckily, the last three rooms I’ve had have been white or off white, which has meant that I’ve built up a collection of bedroom furnishings and furniture around a neutrals/white/black/wood palette.

Also, don’t underestimate the power of soft furnishings – soft in texture, but strong on impact, if used correctly. A fugly chair can quickly be turned into something much more attractive by the artful draping of a throw or two in a chosen colour – and the textural interest a throw provides can break up the potential monotony of monochrome. You can also choose to match YOURSELF to the monochromatic scheme, but I think that’s crossing the border between restful/serene, and padded walls. But everybody’s line is different…


Hint #3: Be Flexible.

As mentioned above, I’m renting, and anticipate being a renter for quite some time. Which means, regrettably, moving quite a lot more than I would like.

Moving a lot necessitates a high degree of flexibility in the bedroom. When selecting bedroom furniture, it’s imperative that it’s flexible in two ways: firstly, it’s easy to transport – it comes apart, or is lightweight, or, at very least, has ample gripping points for the brothers, dads, and friends enlisted to the task of moving to grab onto.

Secondly, you want, as far as possible, any furniture you buy to be up to radical multi-tasking, as, in the process of changing house, your room size and layout is likely to change radically as well. One of the things I loathed about working in furniture stores as an undergrad was that the ranges were targeted very specifically towards certain rooms, and to having a single use. To me, this is a really inefficient way of thinking about placing furniture in a space

My bed, with all its faults as outlined above, is fantastically flexible – it comes apart and can be put back together in ten minutes, and none of its component parts weigh more than five kilos. It can be stored virtually flat (thanks IKEA!). Because it’s a frame and mattress, rather then an ensemble, it’s also a multi tasker, in that the under bed space can be used for storage. This almost, but not quite, makes up for its other shortcomings.



Another piece of flexible bedroom furniture is my great grandfather’s fold out desk. Aside from being a lovely thing to have, with its ink stains and faint smell of pipe tobacco, it’s a truly flexible marvel.




Point A: the desk can be lowered or raised as needed, opening up a compact space when the desk it not in use. Point B: It’s actually quite roomy – and lockable – and is thus a perfect repository for various important documents and other secret things. Finally, Point C: Although it now makes its home in my bedroom, it is not bedroom specific – it’s flexible enough to be used, in other future houses, as a telephone table in an entrance way, as a desk in a study, a funky book display in a lounge room, or even as a hutch to store kitchen palaver. With flexible pieces, you are only limited by your imagination (and there I go, lapsing back into furniture salesgirl mode…)

Hint # 2: Put That Thing Back Where it Came From.

There is nothing worse than trying to relax when you are surrounded by a sea of moving bedroom debris. Hence, my very simple piece of advice: put things back where they came from.


As my pics suggest, you don’t necessarily have to put the things back neatly – they just have to go back. In their place. Leaving the important surfaces (bed, desk, reading chair) sans clutter.



So, you get your favorite yellow cardigan out to wear with your new skirt. It doesn’t work.

What do you do?

You put it back where it came from, on the hanger, in the wardrobe.

Simple.

Hint #1: You’ve Got The Love.

All of this is sounding a little didactic, but, at the end of the day, this is your room, so it should be personal – it should reflect, probably more than any other space in your home, your loves and your passions. And not in the l’amore, l’amore sense, but in the sense of who and what really matters to you, the people and things you want with you when you are dreaming.

A Manifesto for Recessionistas: Painting the Town Red.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the best buys, clothing wise, are neutrals you can supposedly wear with everything. According to any piece I’ve read about financially sensible dressing for the cash-strapped, you ought to pick one or two neutrals – say, beige/black, navy/grey, chocolate/cream – and build your entire wardrobe from pieces in these colours, the idea being that you’ll wear an individual item more if it’s in a colour that goes with everything else in your wardrobe.

Well, that’s how it works in theory anyway.

Here’s how it goes in practice: you decide on the above mentioned combination of neutrals. You buy a white shirt, a black skirt, a beige bag and a charcoal sweater. You go home feeling smug, elegant and austere. A week later you are so bored that eating your own head sounds like fun and, like a yo-yo dieter, you race out to buy the first thing you see made from pink polyester with a sequin trim. And faux fur. With feather detailing.

Does this sound as tragic to you as it does to me? I hope so. Nothing upsets me more than the idea that colour, and colourful clothes, are the country bumpkin cousins to the cool and sophisticated neutrals. Not that I don’t like neutrals – far from it. It’s the idea that, if your finances are precarious, you should cut out colour, which bothers me. Just like someone going on a crash diet and cutting out all carbs, cutting out all colour from your tightly budgeted wardrobe will leave you crabby, irritable, and no better off than when you started out. Likewise, if you wear only colours, your wardrobe will end up bloated and flabby, like you will if you live exclusively on pasta.

Neither situation is where we want to end up in these financially troubled times. What we want is a happy medium, and here are my tips for how to achieve that…

Painting The Town Red: when the global economy is in the red, nothing speaks more about your fabulousness than colour – so paint the town red. By some sort of strange symbiotic inversion, the abovementioned tendency for people to choose neutrals in times of economic trouble actually means that adorning yourself with colour makes you look more Recessionista Regal and less Depression Drab. Wearing, say, a pair of red shoes instead of a pair of black ones conveys the message that you have enough money to not care that your shoes aren’t a ‘neutral’ that will ‘go with everything’. Even if those red flats are the only decent shoes you own this season, they won’t look like they were bought with that mindset, like their black or tan cousins would. Red flats, for their very supposed impracticality, suggest that you have dozens of shoes and bought these ones for purely aesthetic reasons, whereas black or tan flats look like you brought them for primarily practical reasons.

Same goes for all the other ‘big ticket’ items in your wardrobe – coats, dresses, boots, everyday bags, skirt and pants. In fact, the more money you spend on an item, and the more you wear it, the more I’d be inclined to argue that it should be brought in a colour, rather than a neutral. It’s all about tricking people to think you are on a bigger budget than you actually are by a few careful manipulations – or, rather, making your clothes look so fabulous that people wouldn’t think that money was a consideration in their purchase. Perhaps this is quite materialistic, and I’m happy to wear that title to a certain extent, but it’s quite nice when people mistake the pauper student for the well paid professional and vice versa.

There are some sage words I’d like to impart about colours, however. As fabulous as dressing colourfully can be, it can also go horribly wrong when you don’t think it through properly. The primary consideration here should, of course and at all times, be about what colours you actually like. If you hate pink, there is no point wearing it, even if makes look a vision of loveliness. It’s also worth pointing out here that certain colours work better on certain complexions – but that, within limits, you can change your complexion with a bit of tweaking. For instance, I don’t look at all good in yellow without my make up on – but with a bit of peachy blush it makes me look and feel great in the summertime, especially if I’ve picked up a bit of a tan.

Fashion gurus – Tinny and Susannah, I’m taking to you here – often delight in grouping people’s complexions into colour categories and prescribing a list of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ colours. I wouldn’t set any stock in these at all. Aside from the fact that no description of a colouring ‘type’ matches what I look like naturally - pale skin, rosy cheeks, dark blonde hair and almost black eyes, if you were wondering, although the hair colour is a law onto itself – they fail to take into account the fact that we can tweak our complexions with make up and that different textures and fabrics can make the exact same shade look totally different. Peach is hideous on me when it’s in a heavy block of fabric, but in sheers it’s lovely. I’m sure you’ve found similar.

So now that we’ve chucked the rules about who can wear what colours out the window, how are we to go about picking what colours work for us? The simple answer, my friends, is a tale of trial, error, and the triumph of instinct over instruction. Try clothes on. Hold colours up to your face. Choose colours you like – there’s probably a good reason why you’re drawn to particular colours, and you shouldn’t fight the feeling. I had an inexplicable attraction to acid green in my early adolescence. When I finally got to wear some, in the form of my very first pashmina, the inexplicable attraction became apparent – it’s one of the best shades for my mixed-up colouring.

Once you let yourself loose to experiment with colour, you’ll gradually find yourself noticing some trends in what looks good on you, and it’s from here that you should go about establishing what ‘does’ and ‘doesn’t’ suit you. In my case, I find that I suit mid-to-bright strength colours, with an emphasis on all the berry tones – the reds, the pinks, and the purples, along with yellows, greens, and greeny blues. You’ll probably find something completely different and idiosyncratic to suit the undoubtedly lovely colouring that the goddess gave you too, so don’t panic if nothing seems to work at first.

And here’s where you really start to feel the hip pocket benefits: once you’ve worked out what colours you look good in, like, and will wear, you can buy those big ticket items in outrageous colours with clarity and confidence that you will actually wear them and look fabulous. Furthermore, you’ll be able to coordinate the colour palette of your wardrobe with much more freshness and vitality than if you had a monochromatic closet. Once you’ve opened your eyes to colour and refined your sense of colour awareness, you’ll realise that colours work brilliantly in the most unexpected partnerships – my favourite combinations, the ones that draw the most compliments, are the ones that you never really see anywhere else – thus eliminating the worry about whether or not that acid green coat will work with your mulberry coloured skirt (it will). Having a closet full of colours, you quickly realise that ‘matching’ isn’t as important as we’ve been taught to believe – because that amazing green bag not only has good feng suei, but goes with everything on account of its merits as a stand alone piece. When your pieces are beautiful enough in their own right, who cares if your bag matches your shoes which match your dress which matches your scarf and coat?

The other thing about colour that makes it fabulous for the budget conscious Recessionista? It lifts your mood like nothing else can, and, in troubled economic times, when every front page of newspaper brings more bad news, we could all use a bit of a lift. Before you pop a Prozac, try popping on a purple dress, and feel the difference – I promise you you’ll almost always feel better immediately. Embrace the rainbow, and no one will be any the wiser that your pot of gold at the end of it is on the smaller side.

LBD vs Let's Be Different

I have a confession to make.

Not only do I regularly go panty-less, I don't like little black dresses.

Let me tell you the story of me and the Little Black Dress. I bought my first LBD the week before my twenty first birthday. It is the archetypal little black cocktail dress - sleeveless, with wide set shoulder straps, a ‘v’ neckline, shaped waist and tulip skirt that finished just above the knee. Silk, no embellishments, on sale, perfect fit. I thought I'd found the fashion pot of (black) gold at the end of the rainbow. I anticipated that I would wear it constantly.

A funny thing happened, though, when I put it on before going out for dinner on my birthday. Rather than feel elegant, timeless and sophisticated - what I'd hoped to feel on my 21st - I felt flat. Uninspired. Boring. I tried in vain to jolly myself into the party mood, but couldn't. I simply didn't feel like me. Or, rather, I felt like me, but on mute.

I had a hunch this might have something to do with the dress. Everything else about the evening was perfect. In the interests of being a benevolent wardrobe dictator, however, I decided to give the dress a couple more chances to prove itself. Both times it failed miserably - again, I had that curious mute feeling I'd had at my birthday. Something was definitely amiss with that LBD. Months of puzzling over the problem of the LBD later, I came up with the reason why I never felt quite as fabulous as I normally do when wearing that LBD. Finally, it dawned on me and all the pieces fell into place.

As I said in my first post, writers write, sculptors sculpt, but as fashionistas, we wear our art. Being the ultimate fashion cliché, my LBD was blocking my ability to express myself clearly. Try and imagine how Iain McEwan would have felt if he ended 'Atonement' with something as trite as 'better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all'. Or Donna Tart's 'The Secret History' finished with the words 'boys will be boys'. I admit to taking some liberties here, but I can't imagine that Iain and Donna would feel particularly great about those words on the last page of their novels. In fact, I think they'd feel like they'd copped out - that they'd resorted to a cliché when they could have expected something more original, more creative, more fabulous, of themselves. That's exactly how I felt about the LBD - that I'd failed to express myself completely because I threw in the creative towel and resorted to the hackneyed and the cliché.

Like all great clichés, the LBD was initially a stroke of creative genius. When the LBD-bomb was first dropped by Coco Chanel in the 1920s, it was nothing short of a revolution. It 'freed' women from having to worry so much what to wear to the numerous social occasions a gal-about-town would be - and still is - expected to go to. An LBD, back when it was a fresh new concept, would have said a lot about the wearer; about how modern, how carefree, how liberated and devil-may-care she was.

The trouble with the LBD now, though, is that it's become a fallback position women adopt when they don't feel confident enough in their creativity, in their own look, to wear something truly fantastic and truly expressive of themselves. It's fashion's missionary. And because it's been so heavily promoted, and reincarnated in every decade since the 1920s, there are just so darn many of them around that to wear an LBD actually makes you pretty much a part of the fashion wallpaper. Dull, dreary, black wallpaper, that is.

This isn't to malign the black dress in general - indeed, I have a couple of other black dresses, both jersey, one clingy and the other floaty, which I love. In both cases, though, the black dresses I love have something a bit different going on - one of them is a print, the other has a daring and unique v-back construction. Both of them have something that sets them apart from the pack. My critique of the LBD is restricted to the heavily promoted 'classic' version - see the description of mine above, or the Portmans window next time you're in a shopping mall. It's the cliché of the black cocktail length dress in a plain fabric with minimal detailing that my vitriol is reserved for.

For me, the fatal flaw of the LBD concept, aside from being overused to the point of cliché, is the idea that a single dress can reflect how you feel at a cocktail party with your girlfriends, on a romantic date, at a work dinner or at a family wedding. All of those events, for me, have a different emotional tone – joy, excitement, loyalty and dread respectively. For all its supposed universality, the LBD doesn't resonate with all of these tones. Before defenders of the LBD will bring out the accessory defense - you can change the tone of the outfit with accessorisation - this in and of itself reflects a sad truth about the LBD: at its very best it's merely a blank canvas for fabulous accessories. Think about the LBD Audrey Hepburn wore in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’. Now take away the necklace and the cigarette holder. What have you got left? Not a whole lot of fabulous, that's for sure.

My clothes ought - no, need - to be more than blank canvases, just as a writer needs his or her words to be more than just text on a page. Whilst it's necessary to have some pieces in your wardrobe that whisper rather than shout ‘fabulous’ from the rooftops, I feel that the LBD doesn’t even belong in the category of whisperers. Every piece in your wardrobe - even if it's a workhorse item like jeans or a black vee neck - must be more than just a blank canvas, and must have something to say. Most of us don't have the money, or hanging space, for clothes that don't say anything at all, and can ill afford to surrender our individuality to clichés in an increasingly homogenized world.

Throwing down a gauntlet, I challenge you, dear reader, to abandon the LBD. Instead, Let's Be Different. To wrangle some ee cummings here, I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

So Let's Be Different.