Has Melbourne lost its elegance?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 21, 2012

Ah Spring. The sun is beginning to shine, we start to shed our heavy clothes and move into the best fashion season. Spring is still cool enough that you can wear an outfit mixing several fabrics in a layered style. We've just had the Fashion Festival to remind us that here's the time to check out the wardrobe and smarten up.

But recently, leafing through the photographs of my late mother-in-law, I saw something we don't get so much of any more. Elegance.

The shots are of a trio of beautiful young businesswomen, she and her friends, on a conquest of the City's fashion shops. Then coffee in the famous Paris End of Collins Street where you could imagine you were in a boulevard, surrounded by nineteenth century buildings. This was until architect I.M. Pei and the development barbarians turned it into the Chicago End.

In the 50s, a beautiful woman had to be elegant, too.

Their clothes followed the fashion dictates inspired by the Paris masters like Dior and Chanel. The length of the skirt? The shape of the toe? The rake of the hat? The smart young women ensured that although nature put them two seasons behind Paris and Rome, the garments were ready at the turn of the season.

Since then we have had a Cultural Revolution and such dictates would never be tolerated any more. But while freedom was won, what was lost?

You no longer see elegance among the young women of our city centres. Most seem to wear uniform black or jeans or dreary colourless clothing. But it has been strongly pointed out to me that women choose to dress this way.

Style advisor Pam Abeling of Always in Style has no doubt. "If you're looking for elegance you need to find older women. For young women today it's more about sexy."

The grand fashion and slinky hats wait for the Racing Carnival, then all the finery comes out. But it never makes it to the workday. "You love wearing it to the races, but you wouldn't be seen dead dressed like that for the office," said Pam.

So where did elegance go? It just did not fit with the new liberated times, and got pushed aside.

"I always hated gloves because I'd always lose one," Pam recalled the last attempts by the posh schools to keep their young ladies "elegant". "I was fitted for a girdle at 15, though I was as thin as a rake." And there was one particular hate: "Wearing a hat every day was a pain in the arse!"

So now history spins and we come to the slutty era. The likes of Madonna, Lady Gaga and other pop divas have been accused of thrusting it upon us and last month even Target came under attack for their "slutty" children's range, complained some parents.

But wait there is one ray of light for the faded term "elegance". "You're seeing it used more describing men's fashion," noted Pam.

Elegant men? Well if you flip through GQ magazine or Esquire you'll see handsome male models leaning on Parisian lamp-posts or emerging from the latest Lamborghini, in $3000 suits and silk shirts.

Men are increasingly doing their own fashion shopping - men's retail is growing almost twice as fast as women's - and they have deep pockets if there is something they like.

So perhaps elegance is coming back to Collins Street. Not draped on our liberated girls with their jeans and bare midriffs, but on all those cashed-up traders in their Armani suits and Gucci shoes.

ray@ebeatty.com

Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com