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Jayne Dawson: Get ahead, get a body
There are some things you never expect to come back into mainstream life. Here are three: hats, washing lines, bodies.
Don't know what a body is? Thinking it would be a strange thing if bodies per se went out of fashion, even bodies that belong to Beyonce and Kate Moss and other heavenly creatures? My, oh my, where have you been? You clearly weren't alive during the 80s-slash-early 90s.
Anyone who was a living, breathing, sentient creature at that time knows that a body is a top, but with a leotard bottom. With press studs. Got it? Good. I don't want to have to explain that again.
Anyway, bodies are back. They are back in Marks & Spencer, and you don't get much more mainstream than that. For many years they were in the hostile wastelands of a derided decade but now they have found the path back to the warm cosy hearth of fashion acceptance.
Because that whole 80s thing is back – the shoulders, the jackets, the shoulders, the fingerless gloves, and did I mention the shoulders?
Just when we had all assembled a nice collection of cardigans, some short, some long and in every colour we ever wear, it's over for cardigans and structured, pointy, and all over sharp is the look.
Where does the body fit in? Well, it's your base layer, stupid, all smooth and taut with no homely wrinkles. A body is the Spanx pants of the T-shirt world. They're really quite ugly: I'm buying two.
And hats. They're back too. Want to know how I know? I'll tell you. Just recently I attended a hat-wearing event. It was Ladies Day at York Races, if you must know.
And there I saw every style of hat ever created by the fertile imagination of every milliner ever born.
The place looked like an aviary full of exotic birds, and it sounded like one too in those bars, full of noisy twittering from gangs of plumaged women, some of whom were no doubt Tweeting as well.
There were birds of paradise, birds of prey, and a few budgies and sparrows too. It was all very feathery and beautiful.
But I know what you're thinking, your thinking that these are Special Occasion hats, not transferable into the real world, where the only acceptable hat is one that is worn during bouts of temperature extremes, to either keep your head warm on a winter's day or your skin protected on a summer's day.
But I'm not so sure. On our way back from the races me and my gang stopped off for a drink in a Leeds city centre bar, which I shall call Restaurant, Bar and Grill.
That bar was pretty crowded and no-one else was wearing a hat, or headpiece of any kind – except us.
But here's the thing; we didn't feel wrong. Not really, not majorly. No one laughed and pointed, we pretty much blended in with those things on our heads.
OK, a perfect stranger did ask who had won the 1.45, without bothering to even go through the motions of checking where we had been, but we felt OK in our headwear and – here's a little tip from the fashion front line – fascinators, aka those little feathery bits and pieces you clip into your hair, they are mega for winter.
So hats are back, which just leaves washing lines.
They're making a comeback, you know. As we all become increasingly panicked by our electricity bills, as our increasing awareness of energy waste makes it seem wrong to switch on the tumble dryer on a hot summer's day, the lines are appearing in gardens all over Leeds.
It takes me right back. Back to the days when the dustbin men used to have to ask us to move the washing strung across our street, so they could get the wagon down it.
I never saw an ambulance attempt the same manoeuvre, but I'm guessing in an emergency they would have just blasted right through, and then driven to Leeds General Infirmary trailing a selection of sheets, towels and Y-fronts.
Actually, I'm not convinced by this one. People tell me they're back, but I have my doubts. Hanging your washing on the line belongs to a different era, an era when there was always somebody at home to rush out with a crazed expression and drag everything back into the kitchen at the first sign of rain.
And if next door happened to be out doing the daily shop, you had to vault the fence and bring theirs in too.
It's all a bit too… community, if you know what I'm saying.
One thing is for sure, no body of mine will ever appear on a washing line, these are not garments shown to their best advantage when flapping in the breeze.
If my tumble dryer ever gets confiscated though, you might just find me pegging out my most respectable whites in a rather stylish hat.
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Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 10 C to 25 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: East
