019 Skirt off sick
On being a complex woman without mystery!
Bridget Jones forever (Image via Universal)
‘If I’d known you were coming I would have worn a tinier nightie,’ Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, craggier, grumpier, still would) tells Bridget Jones in the new movie when she comes to visit him in the hospital.
He’s only reflex flirting though - an eternal lothario, which is a trope practically and sadly obsolete these days! Actually, it’s a quite sad scene in a quite sad film. He’s realised that his life, hanging out with models in the kind of bar when he probably asks them to turn the music down so that he can read the menu (with his phone torch!) is just a touch short of tragic. I still want his recipe for a perfect Filthy Bitch though.
Ageing, the way life batters you and you have to keep going is at the centre of the new Bridget Jones film and I think it’s Bridget Jones at her best.
Mostly, because she’s still exactly as she is. The difference is that in her ‘50s and having experienced true, shattering loss, she’s more confident. Less shapewear, more lacy thongs, less sticking it out at a terrible party and more ditching it for her real friends (real friends don’t make you feel bad unless you really deserve it!) and not putting up with less than she deserves.
Which isn’t to say that she isn’t terrified of the scary school mums who seem to be put together in every way. It’s just that probably she realises that everybody has their own stuff going on. Usually the meaner someone is, the unhappier they are.
It sort of feels like Bridget’s triumphant return. She’s always been the patron saint for messy women who are visibly trying (effortlessness afterall remains the ultimate and impossible mantra for how a woman should be!).
Then she got a bit out of step with culture because she dared to say out loud that she didn’t like her body. The bossy edict was that we had to love our bodies no matter what. A sham ultimately exposed by the take-up of ozempic (definitely feel that Bridget Jones would absolutely have had a dodgy doctor to supply her but then ultimately give it up because she’s a woman of appetite!).
Now she feels right again. Or maybe it’s that the women who grew up with her, and the Gen Z women who have discovered her, have realised that muddling through is really the best we can hope for.
This s/s ‘24 Miu Miu show was Bridget Jones coded right down to forgetting to put on trousers before leaving the house - relatable!
It’s why that Miu Miu show with the models racing down the runway with completely overstuffed handbags and little cardigans slightly askew resonated so deeply. This is me, I thought when I first saw those pictures. Then when I see Bridget with her battered Mulberry bag and messy ponytail, trying to do her best at home, at work, with her friends, I think this is me too.
Much has been written about the “frazzled English woman” aesthetic (a term coined by my brilliant colleague Ella!) with its nubby cardigans and hastily assembled and slightly eccentric ensembles.
"She's a whole mood, Bridget," the show’s costume designer Molly Emma Rowe told Instyle. "She's quite eclectic. She puts things together that she likes, and it doesn't always work, but she doesn't care. But as chaotic as Bridget is, I think there's something so confident. She doesn't care what people think.”
What freedom!
I don’t think Bridget thinks about her clothes too much - the movie’s costume designer says as much. Most of the clothes were sourced in Hampstead Heath vintage shops and then washed over and again to look well-worn. Bridget really wears her clothes, she doesn’t spend a lot of money on them apart from a few pieces. The movie is full of special little fashion Easter eggs (the Tiffany & co. silver heart, now with an added D charm, the coat she wore to the curry buffet dinner in the first film, her son wearing Mark Darcy’s terrible Christmas jumper at the holiday part - sob!).
But I think she’s less about an aesthetic and more an accumulation of a life. When you do this, you’re comfortable in your skin. Is this just getting dressed or is it true personal style?
Lately I’ve been thinking about mystery. Bridget Jones may have her complexities, like we all do, but she also has absolutely no mystique. Remember when her mantra is to be a “poised ice queen” but she’s too warm for that!
Bridget wears her heart on her sleeve and is famously verbally incontinent. I too have no mystery. I long to be the kind of woman who keeps her cards close to her chest, and doesn’t feel the need to fill a gap in a conversation. To be inscrutable and chic and to never post on Instagram.
The other week one of the Vogue fashion assistants complimented me on my skirt. I cannot underscore what it means to have a Vogue fashion assistant (the coolest fashion girls on earth!) compliment a geriatric millennial mother-of-two on her outfit! By the end of the day I’d sent her a link to the skirt - it’s on sale! I wrote - and considered tagging her in an IG story. Too much, Annie, I eventually thought.
But I’ll never be the kind of person who doesn’t immediately tell someone that something is on sale!
I loved that Bridget Jones ultimately finds peace and that it includes all the parts that are heart breaking and embarrassing and wrong. That in all this her outfits are always a little bit skewiff.
That’s just life. It’s better to be comfortable with yourself, just as you are.
Anti-depressant fashion
Loved this line - antidepressant fashion - in one of Sarah Shapiro’s dispatches for Puck this week. She described it as a shift in American consumers desiring comfort and practicality to fashion that reflects how life is strange right now. Clothes should either reflect or offer respite from this. What this is, writes Shapiro, is tension.
Most recently at New York Fashion Week I think we’re seeing this - feeling this maybe even more - in bulbous and fantastical shapes at Marc Jacobs, and the sense of prim coming undone into fun at Altuzarra. Maybe in Kendrick Lamar’s bootcut jeans too? Can’t wait to see the shows later this month. What is Mrs Prada thinking about!
To borrow from the Normcore guy, I think a vibe shift is happening. It has to be, life is too unsettling for it not to be.
Books
Currently I am dipping in and out of several books at once (I’m feeling unsettled!).
This is what I have on the go:
A gentleman of style! This year I’m reading and re-reading classics and the sentences in this are perfect and I wouldn’t be the only woman who can relate to Isabel Archer, wanting more for her life but not able to pin down exactly what this is.
This is a fascinating, no-nonsense book written by Elizabeth Hawes, who was a stylist, copyist (the story of the once boom industry of American department stores copying Paris designs is fascinating and integral to understanding how fashion works) and Depression-era fashion designer.
I devoured this one. The follies of lust and beauty! This sensuous book is over 100 years old and yet is right on the zeitgeist for the current mode for ‘age-gap’ or ‘May- December’ relationships and the unpicking of power and the exchange inherent in them.
Annie xx