Retroactive

RETROACTIVE

The Guardian website is showing me the latest trends I need to update my wardrobe. Among other things, I am required to have retro trainers, a chequered frock, a frilly frock, a cagoule, something bright red, and a pair of black brogues costing six hundred quid. Oh, and a £195 pink shrimp handbag charm.

I am ahead of the game on the red thing, my beloved traffic-light hued coat having done duty through six winters and been rewarded by a compliment from the actress Tracy-Ann Oberman. Last year the daughter and I went to see her in The Merchant of Venice when it came to York, and we stayed to have a drink in the theatre bar afterwards. The rest of the cast emerged, smiling vaguely, their eyes fixed on the quickest route to the outside terrace for a drink and a vape. Then in came Tracy-Ann, beautiful and glamorous, just as we were getting ready to leave. She stopped to chat with pretty much everyone in the bar, including us, and as she left she said, “By the way, love the coat,” and I mentioned that to everyone I came across for at least the next six months. I’m over it now, obviously.

I suppose I might run to a cheap cagoule from Primark, if they sell such a thing, but I haven’t worn a frilly frock since my sixth birthday party and anything with squares, given I measure five foot both lengthways and widthways, does not seem particularly advisable.  I feel no need to indulge in faux leopard-skin trainers, you can stuff your posh brogues onto the feet of someone with more money than sense, and who the hell needs a shrimp for their handbag?

Anyway, I don’t do handbags now. I used to, in retro times. I was one of those who had to have the bag and shoes to match every outfit, even if the whole lot came from C&A. These days I have a thing called an Art Sac, which is a fabric shoulder or across the body bag and has enough separate compartments of varying sizes to thrill even me, who is very demanding on the pouch-for-every-conceivable-item front. I carry my life in my bag. Purse, diary (a proper, A5 week to a double page diary, none of your flimsy slimline jobs, and certainly not your tech nonsense), writing notebook, small ‘shove your email address on here’ notebook, at least three pens, a mini-hairbrush, lip balm, spectacle cleaning wipes, tissues, paracetamol and a couple of plasters for emergencies, phone, keys, ongoing shopping list, the odd receipt (although I try and avoid them these days) and a mini umbrella. And possibly a book. An osteopath once advised me to make a wise choice and put the welfare of my bones, and therefore my posture, over being prepared for the end of the world every time I step out of the front door, but honestly, when the end of the world comes spectacle wipes and lip balm are going to be far more use than posture. Or a dangly shrimp.

These days I have what I think they call a capsule wardrobe. Assorted trousers/jeans in dark colours plus assorted colourful linen tops, a couple of each earmarked for ‘smart’. Several cardigans which can be jessied up with one of the many, many brooches my mother left me. My mother was a woman of the 1950s, when a nice brooch was a requirement for a coat, a jacket, a blouse, a cardigan, a jumper, all of life really. Some of her brooches are lovely, and I enjoy wearing them both because they’re lovely and because they’re so much a part of who she was. I shouldn’t think any of them are worth anything, although if retro is a thing I suppose 1950s brooches might add a few quid to the offsprings’ inheritance.  

I do have a couple of smaller bags for the rare occasions I go to a proper ‘do’ - you know, a wedding or a significant birthday party, something with a buffet. Being away from my Art Sac makes me feel insecure, though. Then, if there’s dancing, I feel silly with this titchy bag flopping around on its shoulder strap (I definitely don’t do actual handbags), or I’m anxiously checking every five minutes to see if the person I asked to mind my bag is themself dancing or has sloped off to the bar or the loo. The offspring say I overthink things.

I suppose I am bang on trend though, in that pretty much everything I have is ‘retro’. I buy to last. I rarely pass things on to charity shops because I literally wear everything until it falls apart. Before it falls part, it gets reassigned to light duties. When it’s too shabby for even me to wear in public, it retreats into private life, visible only to myself, the cat, and anyone else in my block of flats who’s checking their mailbox or visiting the communal bins the same time as me. Buttons get replaced, the odd patch is put on, frayed cuffs are trimmed and oversewn, until finally it gives up the ghost and I thank it for its service. No, I really do. It’s been a friend. We’ve been through a lot together. I shall miss it. There is a period of mourning before I can replace it.

Not the bras, though. Because I also wear my bras until they fall apart and, as any female reader will know, a disintegrating bra is your enemy. You are locked in that final death struggle, where you can’t afford to replace it until the month after next because decent bras are a shocking bloody price, and it just wants to spend its dotage letting its hooks and wires run free. You part with nothing but hatred on both sides.

Of course, ‘retro’ for me is a little different from ‘retro’ for young persons. During the early 1970s, when I was first tasting the fruits of living away from home ie finding there was always more month than money, the 1930s were the retro thing, because of the film Bonnie and Clyde. With some birthday money, I went to Miss Selfridge and bought a chequered jumper and cardigan twinset. Squares were OK then, because although I was five foot lengthways, the rest of me was a rather fetching size 12, if I say so myself. The twinnie was to be matched with a flared skirt, strappy shoes and a clutch bag. And a stupid beret. Size 12 I might have been. Faye Dunaway I was not. She looked glam in a beret. I hadn’t worn a beret since I used to spend a chunk of time at school laboriously writing ‘I must not throw my beret in the duck pond. Or from the school bus. Or onto the bonfire on November 5^th.’ I kidded myself my rebellion was in the cause of FREEDOM, STICKING IT TO THE HEADMASTER, SHOWING HIM I WAS NOT A NUMBER, I WAS A FREE PUPIL. In fact, as I had forgotten by the time I was spending birthday money plus the next two weeks’ food budget in Miss Selfridge, it was because I LOOKED STUPID IN A BERET.

Every decade has its own ‘retro’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s everyone went bonkers for 1940s style stuff, especially enormous coats. Really enormous coats. Bigger than they ever were in the 1940s themselves. The greatest mystery in The X Files is how David Duchovny was never lost for all time in his own coat.

These days, apparently, trends are not so clear cut. For women, there’s Comfortcore, which sounds great, Cottagecore, which sounds flowery, and Coastal Grandmother, which sounds…well, maybe they don’t mean Bournemouth. Anyway, darling, that itself is pretty retro now, because we women should all be in Balletcore. Or, judging from photos of the Brit Awards, Drape A Fancy Black Net Curtain Over Your (presumably not on its last legs) Bra And Pants core. As for the blokes – you can either be preppy, I gather, or mean, moody and magnificent in anything black. Beards are out, carefully manicured stubble is in. Or you could go for Eclectic Grandpa (think comfy cardigans and Easy Listening), and buddy up with Coastal Grandmother for a stroll along the pier and a stop for a retro 99 cornet ie one that doesn’t cost the equivalent of a month’s rent in Grandpa and Grandmother’s day. Or a strawberry Mivvi.  

I don’t actually care what people wear. You want net curtains and underwear – fine. You want to look like my Dad did on a weekend – that’s also fine but really, it doesn’t count unless you’ve got the sports coat and you’re driving a Ford Zephyr with a big metal AA badge attached to the front. Ford Zephyrs would normally have been a bit posh for us, but it was about fourth hand and there was a mate who worked at the car dealer’s. I’d lay odds a similar deal was done on the sports coat.

I think, in this day and age, people are pretty relaxed about who wears what where. In retro times it mattered more, of course. My mother was by no means a fanatic about etiquette, but fifty or sixty years ago she’d have had apoplexy if a woman turned up to a wedding or a funeral in trousers. My Dad definitely left that beloved sports jacket and all it represented far behind him when he went to the office. They moved with the times, though, and neither would have given a stuff that I wore trousers at both their funerals.

They’d have probably clucked a bit at the sight of a senior, if unelected, member of any government attending a cabinet meeting dressed in a t-shirt and baseball cap, but context is all and they would have appreciated him not turning up with his chainsaw as well. Having seen Churchill in a boiler suit (well, a siren suit I think they called it) at a White House meeting with Eisenhower, they’d not have seen anything wrong with a wartime leader turning up in a (very on-trend, as it happens) black top and trousers for a meeting with a man who thinks an overlong red tie makes him look appropriately bigly. They’d have been impressed that a foreign wartime leader could handle a press conference in English, especially when he must be exhausted, stressed, and scared to death at the thought of what might happen to his country.

Neither my Mum nor my Dad were formally well-educated, but they were avid readers of both books and newspapers, and passionately interested in current affairs. They’d have understood at once the retro context of a situation where the hosts of the press conference start screaming at the visitor about his clothes and the fact he hasn’t said ‘thank you’ enough times. They would have recognised Orwell’s ‘Two Minute Hate’, Mao’s ‘thought examinations’ and the Stalinist denunciations of those deemed not ideologically sound, which are gathering pace again in Putin’s Russia. They would have understood that if a gathering of powerful men can do this, in front of the world’s media, to a guest who is desperate for help to save his people, then these men, or those they empower, can and will do the same to anyone. Be grateful to us or be our enemy.

The governments of other countries, our own here in the UK included, watched with horror. Partly because it was appalling and partly because it confirmed what they had been hoping was not true. The leader of the free world couldn’t lead the way out of David Duchovny’s overcoat. The leader of the free world thinks only in terms of deals and, apparently, card games. We are all in the shit.

However, before we in the UK get too holier than thou, we must remember that at the height of the British Empire this is what it was like for other countries when the British decided they wanted something. We would have done it with more aplomb. The stiletto rather than the cosh. Or, the cosh as a last resort when the victim refused to succumb to the stiletto. We tend to forget that the British Empire was forged initially by and because of trade. We got into Africa via the slave trade. We got into India via the East India Company. The gunboats came later. We were very, very good at the art of the deal, especially when we were the ones holding all the gunboat-shaped cards. Bigly Man is not actually doing anything new.

I suppose, though, that however immoral we were, we weren’t completely stupid.  The Empire lasted as long as it did because we didn’t hand the keys of the shop to our competitors. Not until Suez, and it was more or less all over by then anyway. I’m not sure that being intelligently immoral is anything to boast about, and maybe we should all be grateful that Bigly Man and his mates don’t stand a fucking chance of being intelligently anything. Still, he might have benefited from a quick scan of the retro times. The ways empires fall tell you even more than the ways they rise.

Calling Bigly a Fascist or a Nazi offers us a way of defining and therefore mentally, if not physically, containing him, but perhaps we need to beware of the resonances attached to those words. We (or our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents) have seen Nazis and Fascists before. We know what to expect and, crucially, we know they can be defeated. But this, now, is not the same as retro authoritarianism. This is new. There has never been a theoligarchy quite like this before. There has never been quite such an accumulation of technological know-how, sheer economic power and shared mindset in a brotherhood (and it is mainly men, although women in some countries are trying very hard to catch up) that transcends national boundaries and offers a view of things in purely transactional terms. There is no ideology, as we normally understand it, among the people who control things. There is just naked, unabashed greed. And that’s something new, at least in recent history. Retro times didn’t have this. Hitler was a maniac and definitely had designs on the wealth of the British Empire, but for the greater glory of the Reich. I’m not saying he didn’t help himself to generous expenses, but that wasn’t the main impetus. The British Empire was founded on greed, yes, but also a strong delusion that Our Way Was the Right Way, The Good Way, The Christian Way. Our current theoligarchs aren’t worrying about any good or any glory but their own.

This requires a new counter strategy, but no-one has any idea what it is yet. Retro times may provide ideas, but they will need putting together in a new way. I have confidence it will happen, but it will take a long time and cost a lot more than money.

In the meantime, I suppose we must just keep shouting loud enough to drown out the Two Minute Hates wherever they crop up, because they are everywhere. National borders do not stop them.

As I myself am more than a little retro these days, I find I can’t help but return to old music when I think about politics. Totally unbidden, a song by Buffalo Springfield (whom I want to say I liked for their politics, but it was actually because I fancied the pants off Stephen Stills) lodged itself in my mind and won’t let go. I don’t want young people to turn to old music, dear God no, they must have stuff that speaks to them, but it still says something to me. There’s a link below, but don’t expect anything too profound. For one thing it’s full of late1960s ‘hip’ language, which should stay firmly back in the retro times. It’s not entirely irrelevant, though.

Still, life must go on, so I return once more to the Guardian’s advice on updating my capsule. Perhaps I really should look into a faux leopard on my feet. And a shrimp to prove I am not defined by my bus pass, whatever my taste in music. That and a nice 1950s brooch. Definitely not the net curtain and the underwear, though. Not until I’ve replaced that bra.

Song: Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth (Official Audio) - YouTube

Picture by Engravings on Wood., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Mnemosyne_-_the_Gree...