WHEN CORA WAS fourteen or fifteen she came upon a slim book, Etiquette for Ladies, which she read from cover to cover because she wanted to know how ‘ladies’ should behave. She wrote her name on the fly leaf and the date, 1944, but the book itself was of a considerably earlier vintage and charted a life unlikely to be hers – Afternoon Parties, Evening Receptions, Little Dinners, Presentation at Court …
The book’s first chapter dealt with that all-important subject, Dress. ‘The appearance is a continual letter of recommendation,’1 Cora was told, which is where the ‘perfect’ button comes in. The ‘perfect’ button is no such thing. This button is synthetic and nothing like mother-of-pearls with their individual markings, chips and flakes. This pearlised globe has no character but is known to women and girls who, in the mid-twentieth century, wore the machine-made white summer cardigans with ribbon facings which spoke of femininity and conformity.
The women of my great-aunt’s generation could take lessons from a music-hall song. Though performed with a saucy smile and a swish of frou-frou petticoats, it nonetheless put its point across: ‘I’m not too forward, not too bold, I’m not too young, I’m not too old, I’m not too hot, and I’m not too cold, I’m just the kind you’d like to hold …’2 and so on; Eva sang the song herself. By the 1930s, she was looking to her copy of Home Management which, in addition to advising on home cookery, decoration, engaging servants et al., contained a chapter on etiquette for women (with a short sub-section on everyday etiquette for men). Beginning with introductions, and progressing through the complicated gradations of acquaintanceship and friendship – ‘If … introduced to you at a dance or dinner-party, you are not bound to recognise him the next time you meet if you would rather not continue the acquaintance’3 – it detailed the appropriate way to leave visiting cards; though in Eva’s experience, visiting meant Sunday-afternoon get-togethers in the room behind the shop, where a knock on the back door immediately preceded its opening. When making conversation, Eva was advised to avoid mention of the weather, if possible, something even E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady is unable to accomplish: ‘we talk about the weather, Gandhi and French poodles. (Why? There are none in the room, and can trace no association of ideas whatsoever.)’4
How to dress, how to converse; all of these were lessons in how to get on, and also, ultimately, lessons in how to find a mate, requiring young women to learn how to behave and to absorb a prescribed femininity. As a young teenager in the 1950s, biographer Fiona MacCarthy ‘read avidly if anxiously’5 a manual called The Years of Grace compiled by novelist Noel Streatfeild which, as well as advising ‘how to behave at parties, how to train as a secretary, how to make yourself attractive to the opposite sex’, provided advice on sport, including the all-important instruction that, while ‘Every girl ought to love sport … if she wants to be nice and adorable and completely feminine, she will let men win ALWAYS.’ Etiquette for Ladies, The Etiquette of Today, The Years of Grace, the titles changed but the essential lessons did not. They introduced the myriad ways in which girls and young women are judged, and being judged, judge themselves.
Some of the greatest errors could be made without uttering a single word or lifting a tennis racquet. In Rose Macaulay’s novel Crewe Train (1926), Denham, a reluctant convert to urbane niceties, discovers that
life was like walking on a tight-rope. The things you mustn’t do, mustn’t wear. You must, for instance, spend a great deal of money on silk stockings, when, for much less you could have got artificial silk or lisle thread. Why? … Why did not anything do?
The same with gloves, with shoes, with frocks, with garments underneath frocks. In all these things people had set up a standard, and if you did not conform to it you were not right … You wore thick stockings and brogues in the country, thin stockings and high-heeled shoes in the town. You wore a hat if you gave a lunch party, a sleeveless dress in the evening. You had, somehow or other, to conform to a ritual, to be like the people you knew.6
No wonder readers of Woman’s Weekly appreciated some guidance on how to dress (though Denham would not have stooped to such a downmarket publication).
Wearing the wrong thing can afflict us all. Perhaps the most famous description of the Wrong Dress belongs to Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘The New Dress’. Poor Mabel does not even make it out of the cloakroom before having ‘her first serious suspicion that something was wrong’, a suspicion that grows as soon as she enters the party: ‘for oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking – “What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!” … She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into.’7 Virginia Woolf knew of what she wrote. She loved clothes but had a complicated relationship with them, feeling intimidated by shop assistants and cringing at taunts from Vita Sackville-West and Clive Bell. Woolf’s diary describes her ‘love of clothes … only it is not love; & what it is I must discover’; also, her ‘clothes complex’ and her ‘idiotic anguish … that wave of agony; about 2 in the morning’, over a dress for a dinner party. But the diary also conveys her ‘great joy’ in having the money to ‘give way to the temptation of 30/- dress’.8 Woolf was thrilled when Madge Garland, then fashion editor of Vogue, commissioned a dress and jacket for her, made by couturier Nicole Groult, Paul Poiret’s sister. With Madge Garland dressing her, Woolf said, she would have more time to write.
As Virginia Woolf knew all too well, observations from friends can be among the most lethal, though they are not necessarily spoken out loud. Julia Strachey pinioned novelist Edith Olivier in her diary by describing her arrival to dinner in a ‘suburban’9 evening dress (the worst sin in bohemian circles). Even Mildred in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women gives vent to her feelings while out shopping with a friend:
‘I’m not sure that it’s your colour,’ I said doubtfully …
‘Now you’re talking like a fashion magazine,’ said Dora, struggling with the zip-fastener. ‘I’ve always had a brown wool dress for every day.’
Yes, and look at you, I thought, with one of those sudden flashes of unkindness that attack us all sometimes.10
Humiliation could overwhelm women before they even left the shop. A Punch cartoon in which a woman begs a friend, ‘Oh, please don’t let her make me buy that,’ relies on an all too familiar recognition of the intimidating power of shop assistants, something to which Virginia Woolf was also susceptible, ‘being persuaded into a blue striped coat by an astute & human woman at Lewises’.11 Even a woman’s own dressmaker was not necessarily on side. May Smith finds Mrs W. ‘in Narky and Independent Vein’12; worse still is the fictional, bullying Mrs Form created by Storm Jameson:
Mrs Form’s position in the town was one of absolute authority. She told her clients what they must wear and refused to make them anything else. A lady who brought her a length of crimson satin to make into a dress was told to use it for curtains. Another, who fancied herself still young, left Mrs Form’s … in tears, with a roll of yellow muslin under her arm.13
Ageing is always a delicate subject, viz. Isabella and Evalie who, in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel The Sleeping Beauty, face middle age together. ‘They counted up calories, bought new corsets and tried new face-creams; cut paragraphs out of magazines for one another and went together to the Turkish baths. They remained the same – two rather larkish schoolgirls … “We haven’t changed enough,” Isabella once said. “We don’t any longer match our looks.”’ Sitting side-by-side in the steam-room, Evalie reflects, ‘“We look discarded, sitting here … As if we were waiting for a train which never comes.” ’ … ‘“I’m sure I’ve done everything I could think of,”’ Isabella says, ‘“those beauty articles … I could write them myself in my sleep … What I detest is the way our breasts go out sideways when we get older. They look as if they’re tired of one another’s company.”’14 On matters such as these, etiquette manuals were ill-equipped to advise, even if, like How to Dress Well, they included instruction on dress for a ‘Woman of 40’ quickly followed by the ‘Twilight Years’.
Size is an equally delicate topic. Aroon, Molly Keane’s self-deceiving protagonist in Good Behaviour, a substantial woman in all ways, discovers that her two evening dresses have ‘shrunken miserably in cleaning’.15 Seeking a remedy from the village dressmaker, she presents Mrs Harty with both the pink chiffon and the gold lace. Mrs Harty, a stuffed satin heart full of pins swinging between her breasts, faces a monumental challenge. Both are required to drape Aroon’s bulk. ‘Well, Miss Aroon,’ Mrs Harty searches for the correct response: ‘wouldn’t you make a massive statue?’
By the 1950s, those long white kid gloves favoured by Edwardian ladies had mutated into full-length cotton ones for eveningwear and cuff-length white gloves for daytime. ‘It was tough, in the fifties. Girls wore white gloves,’16 Angela Carter wrote, summing up the impossible conformity of that decade and her relief when the sixties arrived. Lorna Sage described receiving lessons in vulnerable femininity via instructions on how to wear the palest of pale ‘discreet mouse make-up’,17 in a lesson organised by her grammar-school headmistress who knew that, brains notwithstanding, young women had to look the part. Hence the immense relief generated by Katharine Whitehorn’s 1963 article ‘Sluts’ which exposed the pretence of perfect femininity and was ‘dedicated to all those who have ever changed their stockings in a taxi, brushed their hair with someone else’s nailbrush or safety-pinned a hem’18 (though the idealised mothers of Ladybird Books still wore white gloves to go shopping).
Then as now, most lessons began at home. ‘You’re not going out in that!’ is a long-standing refrain, as mothers tell their daughters what they can and cannot wear. ‘Inappropriate’ shoes were smuggled into schoolbags and sensible ones discarded at the garden gate; waistbands turned over and over, the greater rebellions possible once youth hit the high streets in the rock ’n’ roll years and the Swinging Sixties, and on through punk, new romantics, Goths …
Exploring the delights of vintage clothes in early-1980s London, I sometimes visited the American warehouse, Flip. There I found a snowy-white twinset, a short-sleeved jumper matched with a crew-necked cardigan, just like those crew-necked cardigans I wore in childhood. This one had the same synthetic pearl buttons and ribbon facings, but was over-stitched with silver thread and studded with pearl flowers, ready for its original owner to slip on her ballet pumps, shrug off conformity and rock around the clock.