GO ON, I DARE YOU | August 21st 2008

Gina

Sometimes you need to wear a tulle puffball skirt with black bondage straps. Judith Watt explains why we can all afford to let a little bad taste into our wardrobes; Mary Fellowes shows us how ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

The great, late fashion editor Diana Vreeland once said that, while good taste is innate, "vulgarity is a very important ingredient... as long as it's got vitality." Almost 20 years after Vreeland's death, designers are still listening: earlier this year, Rei Kawakubo announced that the autumn-winter collection for her influential, intellectual label Comme des Garçons would "do" bad taste. She was as good as her word. Comme's ready-to-wear show was rich with tulle puffball skirts in shocking pink, animal-print faux-fur hats, satin bondage-style garter straps, huge, appliquéd lovehearts and lips, and layers of clothing that played with the line of the body--a clever, poetic, outrageous take both on the Surrealist aesthetic of the inter-war designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and the jumbled neon-meets-vintage individuality of London's nu-rave club kids. Highly researched, spiced with wit, this was true fashion at its most experimental. Vreeland would have loved it.

Bad taste, it seems, can save your sartorial life. Kawakubo's message--that to be glamorous, you should be yourself--is enormously liberating. It breaks conventional rules of being well-dressed, rules that have changed little since 1879, when the British style arbiter Mrs Haweis wrote "The Art of Dress". "Taste", she said, "...is the faculty of distinguishing between the agreeable and the disagreeable; its function is to arrange and display what gives agreeable impressions [and] suppress what gives disagreeable ones." In her opinion, a woman was well-dressed when each detail was considered and her overall look "harmonious". She was right, of course--but perhaps, over a century later, might we be allowed some freedom of opinion as to what counts as "disagreeable"?

The London designer Christopher Kane--who, in his 2006 masters graduation show, showed dresses that combined brass rings with ruched lace--consistently creates the kind of harmonious whole Mrs Haweis would have approved of, while at the same time questioning the notion of "taste". "If something doesn't have a ‘bad' quality, I won't see anything good in it," he says. "It depends on who's wearing it, of course, but a beautiful vintage dress worn with 20 cheap gold chains could look amazing."

A survey of the great tastemakers of the past illustrates his point. The matriarch of Edwardian interior decoration, Elsie de Wolfe, preferred a "witty exhibitionist to a dull duke". Coco Chanel seldom wore the famous Romanov pearls she was given by her lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri, preferring to have them copied and then wear the imitations; "good taste", she said, "ruins certain real values of the spirit: taste itself, for instance." Despite this, the Spanish designer Cristobal Balenciaga, a contemporary of Chanel's, said that Coco had very little taste--but all of it was good. Meanwhile Schiaparelli--whom he described as "the only true artist in couture"--had "lots of taste", but it was "all bad".

Some of the most influential clothes-wearers--as opposed to clothes-makers--tended to have that same witty ability to play with notions of taste. The beautiful Phyllis Boyd, descended from William IV and his mistress Mrs Jordan, is scarcely remembered today, but in the 1920s--when she married into French aristocracy, and became the muse of Jean Patou--she was known as the best-dressed woman in France. Boyd was the first Western woman in centuries to wear short skirts that revealed the legs, and the first to wear long-waisted jumpers; she would put a baby's cap over her shingled hair, and stepped out in red shoes with impossibly high heels and straps around her ankles that looked like bracelets. To all of this she would add a touch of something cheap--what we would call "kitsch"--from Woolworths or a street market, just in case she looked too oppressively well-dressed.

At about the same time, Daisy Fellowes, heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune and Schiaparelli's most favoured client, would wear simple linen dresses to dinner, while everyone else tried to outshine each other in the latest mode. Like Chanel, Fellowes eschewed the vulgarity of her many impressive sets of matching jewellery, opting instead for a necklace made from champagne corks, or getting her emeralds ground down by the jeweller so they could be worn like cheap glass beads; "she would appear", said Schiaparelli, "wearing the oddest monstrosity just to annoy everybody and show she was not dependent on dictated taste." In a similar vein, the society beauty Lady Diana Cooper would top off an outfit with a set of imitation gold bangles, while the heiress and innovator Millicent Rogers, a great patron of the American designer Charles James, would downplay this maestro's work by wearing it with "barbaric" Navajo jewellery.

What of now? Plenty of other labels have joined Comme's exploration of the border country between subversive originality and out-and-out vulgarity. Prada's autumn-winter collection completely reinvented lace, turning it from frothy knicker-trim into cool-eyed, hard-edged outerwear, while the London-based designer Erdem Moralioglu showed sweeping skirts of double duchesse satin printed with clashing florals, and covered the bodice of an empire-line dress with huge, irregularly cut Swarovski crystals. "‘Good taste' to me equals boredom," Moralioglu explains. "It's bourgeois, it's polite. There is something majestic and lovely about a bit of bad taste; it has pageantry to it." Meanwhile Roksanda Ilincic--a practised hand at the art of combining unlikely colours with a playful proportion and precise, geometric cutting--showed a continued ability to push things further, with trademark raw edges on cartridge-pleat flounces in a clashing palette of fuschias, vivid greens, petrol blue and black. "I want to challenge ideas of what is kitsch", she says, "and what is ‘nice', to create a new idea of chic."

Not every designer, of course, can manage the necessary combination of self-awareness and sly humour. Some go too far, stretching the joke until it snaps and their customers end up wearing top-to-toe gold-plated leopard-skin. This is not clever; it's just showing off. "Comme only gets away with bad taste because it does it in a cerebral way," says the fashion writer Kay Barron. "Flashy, on the other hand, is not good. It means you have no style of your own." Moralioglu agrees. "Top-to-toe designerwear--it's too much of a uniform... There has got to be a bit of joie de vivre in life." He feels, too, that the brain needs to be engaged for bad taste to work: you do have to think about it. "Good designers imagine," he says. "They dream. "

So, there you have it: the secret to being well-dressed, this year or any, is to be individual and courageous. Bad taste? In Vreeland's words: "I think we could use more of it."

HOW TO WEAR IT: BAD TASTE

Revel in the unexpected, don’t take yourself too seriously, but always, always maintain an elegant line—the late Isabella Blow, Anna Piaggi and my own ancestor Daisy Fellowes are all entertaining examples of how to wear the opposite of what would be considered “right”. Take them as inspiration, but don’t pile it all on at once—you can have too much of a good (bad) thing.

Metalheads You can wear sequins during the day—ideally a bolero or drop-waisted dress from the 1920s—as long as they are old and tarnished-looking, and are dressed down with plimsolls. Or layer mixed gold chains over slim, monochrome tailoring, as at Givenchy.

Second skin Wolford’s high-gloss Satin De Luxe black tights make even very short skirts more wearable, as well as elongating the legs.

See spots Invest in a pair of leopard-print or glitter shoes, but only in the most modern, clean shapes—-Gina (above) and Miu Miu both excel at this. Wear them with pieces that are structured or tailored, never with anything too vampish or girly. And if you are over 20, don’t buy vintage shoes—-they instantly date an outfit.

Uniform Wear one loud colour, such as violet, top-to-toe for evening-—as seen at Christian Dior and Moschino-—but then balance it with bare legs and arms.

Lanvin’s way Taking inspiration from Alber Elbaz, pile layers of paste and pearl necklaces and brooches on top of anything plain or sporty—-even a T-shirt, tank top or jeans. More playful still are Sonia Rykiel’s “jewels”, concocted from diamanté and coloured plastic.

Cheap laughs Have some fun—-express your sense of humour with glittery, flower-motif hairclips, skull-print flip flops, or comical plastic rings from market stalls. But try to wear them with precious fabrics such as silk, satin and cashmere. ~ MARY FELLOWES

(Judith Watt lectures on fashion at Central St Martin's. Mary Fellowes is fashion editor of Intelligent Life.)

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