The right to write

Once upon a time, all a writer had to do to get started was bang off a good article to a local newspaper or magazine, and if the Editor thought it had a bit of something, you’d be asked to write more. They’d even pay you for it. That’s what happened to me with Record Mirror. In the flush of invincible youth, I took it upon myself to interview Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy, simply because I fancied him, and then sent the article around to see who would take it. Thankfully, RM’s Editor at the time, thought it was good enough to print, and paid me £50 for it. Otherwise I might have had some explaining to do to Stephen, who had promised to deflower me when he got back off tour (note: he reneged)…

However, since the advent of the internet, and with so much good copy available for nothing but a subscription to an ISP, writing has become more of a hobby – even for formerly paid journalists like myself. There are some pretty good, and indeed, pretty well-known writers out there blogging because they can’t get published, and more often than not, that’s because they’ve never been on reality television.

Indeed, it seems that unless you’re a former topless ‘model’ or Big Brother contestant, you can forget ever actually being engaged to write a column for a publication.

Without celebrity though, what would it take to get a salaried job on a newsstand publication now?

Possibly moving back to London, banging on doors, sleeping rough with a four-pack of Sainsbury’s Basics lager outside Vogue House, making a nuisance of myself - not choosing instead to live in the New Forest, just so I can hang out with feral ponies.

It would probably also take at least a red-brick degree in ‘Meejah’ Studies (as opposed to a dog-eared and completely useless Diploma in Law), along with a willingness to intern for a local rag, whilst living at home with martyred parents paying all the bills (not an option – they’re long dead, and as we were always struggling to make the rent, I never got off paying my share anyway).

You also need a fairly fervent belief that the world not only needs your opinion, but that it should give a toss about it.

It comforts me just a little that some of the best writers on the New Musical Express when I was reading it back in the day had absolutely none of the above. That if all these had been the criteria back in the 1970s and early 1980s, we’d never have heard of Nick Kent, Julie Burchill, or Chrissie Hynde. As a matter of interest, Julie Burchill started her career at just 17, responding to an advert in the NME for “hip young gunslingers” to write about what was then the newly emerging Punk scene. She clinched it just with a review of Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ album. Nice one. Chrissie Hynde got her job on the paper just by hanging out with Nick Kent. Even nicer one. 

Julie Burchill Raven and Tony Parsons - just after they joined the New Musical Express

It’s true that most of the old hacks we love and revere, and who do still make a living without going into the Jungle on television to eat bugs for plastic stars, or getting their norks out for the lads, do have Oxbridge degrees, but they’re not degrees in Social Studies or Media, they’re usually in Politics, English, or Art.

Mostly Art.

The angry Art School dropout with a WHSmith typewriter, a packet of Woodbines, a box of Swan Vestas, and a load of multisyllabic opinions to challenge the reader to try harder and wish they’d paid more attention in comprehension, seems all but extinct.

At least with blogging, one is not subject to the red pen of the Sub-Editor, and whilst you won’t get paid for your work, at least you can rest safe in the knowledge that it is your work. Every word of it. I still flinch reliving the misunderstandings that arose from various subs taking a chainsaw to my finely crafted masterpieces, and destroying relationships I had built with cranky interviewees on whom I had worked off my crushed velvet butt to win over.

These days, it seems the best, and indeed, only avenue for the ambitious unknown is to get a book published. Preferably about teen witches or bondage. I did hope to try the latter, announcing to my mother at the age of 23 that I was going to write a book “just like what Jackie Collins writes…”

“But darling, you’d have to write about sex.” She said, uncertainly.

“Yeah? So?” I rejoined defiantly.

“But you don’t know enough about it.”

She hit her mark like an Agincourt long-bowman. I never did write a raunchy book. I am, however, currently writing a time-slip novel about ghosts, which has a beginning and an ending, but no middle quite yet.

While I try to think of one, as I was briefly a celebrity when I was a kid, I am available for any planned “Where Are They Now?” Shows on Sky…

Bernard Hill as Yosser Hughes in 'The Boys from the Black Stuff' (1982): "Gissa job..."

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2016

Quiet please... Fashion is sleeping

Belatedly, I would like to congratulate whoever was tasked with marketing the Fat Face brand. Whoever they are, they’re worth every penny of their undoubted 6-figure salary.

To start with, we have a truly awful name for a clothing line, with the kind of negative connotations of jeering, playground catcalling ridicule that overweight people battle all their lives.

Then we have the clothes themselves, which, at least in the early days, were quite amazingly dull. As the new kid on the block some 25 years ago, fashion mags were full of Fat Face features in the late 1980s. Winsome young people were pictured standing about against outdoorsy backdrops in limp attire with the shagged-out look of a hundred muddy music festivals, and just as many hot wash and spin cycles. The girls wore dresses and skirts in stagnant pond colours, whilst the boys leaned on their hips in devoid-of-personality hoodie tops, and jeans that had no more individuality than any other brand, and both sported bags, boots, and other accessories that had equally little new or special to say.

Fat Face flip-flops. The ultimate in slob chic

The founders’ original (ground-breaking) idea of a range of sweatshirts in which to go yomping about in the French Alps were faithfully presented in tee-shirt cotton of muted browns, greens and blues that might just as well have been passed down by an ageing ex-hippy parent who’d put them in the recycling after years of faithful use in the garden digging the vegetable patch.

The best achievement for Fat Face was the price of this stuff: £extortionate. What’s more, they somehow convinced people to pay for it. In droves.

Young shoppers clamoured to pay for this dreary, overpriced clothing in their millions, and Fat Face after Fat Face opened up the length and breadth of the land.

But Fat Face just happens to be the first of many such lines that have sprung up in this depressing vein.

‘Crew’ offer a nautical slant to more or less the same model, and charge even more for their clothing. Fork out for one of their £40 stripey tee shirts, pull your hair into a ponytail, add a blazer, and Robert is your father’s brother - you’re the Duchess of Cambridge at a charity Volley Ball match.  

Then you have ‘The White Company’. With a suitably ostentatiously underplayed (tasteful) name and presentation, they too offer uninspiring wool and cotton draperies for silly money. Catalogues stuffed into upmarket magazines convince the Yummy Mummy brigade that a draggy jumper devoid of all feature but for its label and £80+ price tag is the absolute must-have for the school run.

But for Joe Brown’s who present a fabulously quirky and timeless range for reasonable prices, fashion really seems to have lost its way.

A typically untypical Joe Brown's coat.

Spending as much time as I do attending charity 1940s events, I have come to mourn the loss of style and tailoring in what passes for modern fashion. Surrounded by nipped-in waists, tailoring, hairstyles, and dapper gents, I am minded of earlier times when couturiers studied and followed the shape of the human body, draping their textiles to flatter and enhance it.

The last war of course, was the ultimate time of austerity, and ‘Fashion on the Ration’. Even the Queen had to use coupons to get the fabric for her wedding dress - well, at least for the sake of appearances… (with a handful of other residences to which they could retreat, her mother had set the pace by pretending that a bit of bomb damage to one wing of Buckingham Palace somehow set the Royals on a par with the flattening of the East End and the homelessness that ensued).

This kind of chic was everyday style for women of the 1940s.

The ‘Utility’ label, so hated at the time, has come to mean quality, style, and durability, the like of which has rarely been seen since. If you can find anything with a CC41 label in it now, and are underfed enough to fit into it, you’ll still look like a £million. It’s no wonder there is a growing army of semi-professional 1940s reenactors who spend their lives recreating this look, even to the extent of fitting out their homes in 1940s style.  

The reviled CC41 Utility label...

...and the sort of garment in which you would find one. A CC41 Utility red wool coat - circa 1941

I recently went looking for a simple blue jersey dress with a three-quarter length sleeve to wear for job interviews and early evening outings. No chance. In nearly every store dress department I tried, I was assailed by rail after rail of hideous, splashy flower shower curtain prints on ghastly floor-sweeping maxi dresses (a trend that appears to have lasted several years now, instead of for just one, embarrassing season), or crass sleeveless mini dresses. Anything approaching the classics, and you’re talking big money.

I just received the Adini catalogue through the door. Some years ago, in the days when their prices reflected their humble Carnaby Street Indian Hippy Shop beginnings, I bought a flattering tunic top from them in a gloriously muted watermelon pink. The top has been used as a nightdress for some time, but I’ve been sent their catalogue every season since, just in case they can tempt me to buy something else. Not likely, unless they drop the tiresome ‘delicate’ florals, and stop charging upwards of £50 for what amounts to a tee-shirt.

I was born in the 1960s. Dressed exclusively at Biba as a toddler by my groovy mother, I became a punk at school, then a mod, then a skin’ead, then a ‘Rude Girl’ in time for the ‘Two-Tone’ Rock against Racism years. I dressed in bold checks and block coloured shift dresses with pointed shoes from Shelly’s. As a young music journalist, I went to Antony Price Fashion shows at the Camden Palace in the company of the late Paula Yates, and lived through the excitement of Haysi Fantayzee, Boy George and Marilyn.

Antony Price 'Bronze Goddess' gown. Circa 1983

Then along came Madonna, with her leather jackets and lace gloves, footless tights, miniskirts, and an old drum case for a handbag. I was lucky enough to be one of the first British journalists to interview her, and she inspired me to use an old vanity case as a briefcase, which meant I had a mirror on the inside lid in which to check my liquid liner every time I reached inside for my notebook.

Who do we have for inspiration now? If you aspire to look like Wallis Simpson, Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly, you’re a ‘vintage’ nut-job. We literally no longer seem to have any sort of style identity. Look around. Can you tell what year this is just from people’s dress? Mmm… not really.

‘Mmm… not really’ seems to sum up fashion on the High Street. It’s all been done before. It’s the same old, same old. Hoodies, fleeces, tee-shirts, flowery blouses, garish knitwear, jeans, parkas, and droopy, drapey, ‘boyfriend’ cardis. Year after year. Only the colours change. Slightly.

If you want to rock the classics though, it’s still possible to achieve a smart-casual effortless chic look for not much outlay, but you do have to go off-piste. By off-piste, I mean wearing dark glasses and through the doors of such shops as the Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

I kid you not. Need a dress for a smart garden party? You’ll find it there. Same goes for neat little jackets, gloves and hats. I found a fabulous giraffe print stretch pencil skirt in there last year. Every time I wore it, friends would exclaim: “where did you get that amazing skirt?” When I told them, they refused to believe me.

The author in a £12 sale red jersey dress from Roman at M&Co - 2014 (pine cones: model's own...)

In these faceless times, more than ever, one needs to acquire the art of rummaging. Phase Eight do a classic little black dress with every season, but you have to walk through to the back of their shops to find it, M&Co have teamed up with Roman who offer a handful of reasonably priced classics, but they’re nestling on the rails in amongst some spangled frights fit only for cruise ship Shirley Bassey impersonators.

“Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform. Don’t kid yourself” said Frank Zappa in 1970.

Seems we still are. And a very dull one it is too.  

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2016