Look smart
If you’d told me, when I started this blog two and a half years ago (time flies!), that one day I would be writing a piece on body confidence, I would most certainly have laughed at you. This is partly because, two and a half years ago, I didn’t really have any. Indeed, it’s only recently that I seem to have developed a particular kind of don’t-give-a-damn-what-you-think-of-how-I-look attitude. So buckle up. It’s time to talk about dressing to impress.
Musicians are required to look good when they perform. Exactly how one defines ‘good’ is tricky, but we can probably agree that they should look like they’ve washed recently, brushed their hair, and are wearing clothes free from soup stains and ideally giving the impression of having been acquainted at some point in the recent past with an iron. If the shoes aren’t caked in mud or grime, that’s helpful. If they match, better still. Concert clothing is taken as a mark of respect towards the audience, that it’s worth looking smart to deliver something special. And above and beyond all of this, they have to look like they feel good. Like they’re confident, and happy with themselves physically. It seems that only when grown-ups are packed into a darkened auditorium do they regain the ability that all young children seem to have: to know instinctively and instantaneously when someone is scared or uncomfortable.
I too am required to look the part when I give public talks, and last week I took the chance to hit Oxford Street with a pot of unspent birthday money, on the hunt for a new suit and smart clothes. Personally I’m not really one for dresses or skirts – I’m more about the trouser suits and waistcoats. The current vogue for brogues is right up my street. I don’t wear make-up unless someone is waving a camera at me (and not always even then), and it’s impossible to put bows and ribbons in my hair because it’s not long enough to do so. (Besides, even after a decade of having short hair, I’m still not over how much fun it is to apply wax and make it all stand up so I can laugh at myself in the bathroom mirror.) So that’s my style: suit, waistcoat – tie too, if you’re extremely lucky – shiny shoes, cufflinks, short hair, and a face that looks exactly as it is. And I can look pretty bloomin’ good in all of that, if I do say so myself.
But clothes shopping. Ah, clothes shopping. For presenters like me, and singers, and instrumentalists, and all those who are required to put on something smart and special to entertain the public, clothes shopping is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bloody nightmare. It’s not only that they might not have what you’re looking for; but that the very act of looking for it can become a judgement upon the seeker.
A year ago, the shopping trip I tried to take on Monday would have left me weeping in a corner somewhere, full of self-loathing and convinced I should probably never eat anything ever again. In the space of about half a square mile, across various big-name clothes shops, I turned out to be six different sizes of women’s clothes. Yes, you read that right: six. Medium, Large, 12, 14, 16, and far-too-big-to-fit-into-anything-in-this-shop. Plus, for what it’s worth, two different sizes of men’s clothes (Small and Medium). Is it any wonder that so many people – not just women – have a rock-bottom opinion of their bodies when this kind of astonishing nonsense is going on? And that’s before we even get to the bit where women are only allowed black suits at the moment, in a very particular kind of style which, based on its cut, I can only assume will give you the most flattering fit if you are roughly the dimensions of an anorexic emu.
I am the size that I am. (Actually I’m a bit slimmer than I was when I last bought a suit.) My ribcage is not in fact collapsible. My legs don’t go any shorter. It is completely ridiculous that it has taken me until my thirty-fourth year to decide that these things are fact and I don’t have to be ashamed of them. Also, my style is not a style that a lot of shops really cater for, and increasingly I tend to find myself looking in the men’s section, or saving money to get the odd thing really, properly tailored to fit me. And yet these kind of formal clothes are a necessity if you want to be ‘in the public eye’. We must be smart, must be stylish, must look good. They are an investment we must make, to that end. The trick, I have finally discovered, is to remember that they are an investment to make in yourself – what you want to wear, and what makes you feel good – rather than an investment in an idea of what you think other people expect you to look like. Be healthy, sure. Take care of yourself. But don’t let ‘fashion’ shops dictate what you’re supposed to be wearing, or whether you’re the ‘right’ shape. It’s all just nonsense.
I had a little chat with my undergrads a few weeks ago about what they considered the standard characteristics of the contemporary concert experience to be. Smartness was a thing raised by nearly all of them: not just the smartness of the people on the stage, but also the fact that they felt they ought to dress up to go and hear live classical music. I was completely taken aback and ordered them to go to their next concert in jeans, to wear whatever they pleased as they sat there in the dark listening to something they wanted to hear. Why not? Maybe I’m becoming a bit of a rebel in my old age…
