Lace is every designer’s new protégé. On the front of every magazine is a slogan such as “How to wear lace now” (Vogue, Jan ’10) or “Everyone’s wearing...black lace” (www.elleuk.com, Feb ’10)) but ask yourselves ladies, have you ever actually seen any celebrities, or ordinary women for that matter, look particularly pretty in lace? Just think for a minute. Lady Gaga, Taylor Momsen and Courtney Love all covet lace and they also have one thing in common, a shared identity - they’re the bad girls of the celebrity world, the exhibitionists that we hate to love.
The designers also have something to answer for, as they are the ones who conditioned us to think that lace makes us instantaneously sexy and desirable and so we do not stop to ponder the usual clientele of these great fashion icons who are pouring lace trousers, blouses and skirts down our brocade-lined throats. Alexander McQueen is the first to spring to mind. Isn’t he the one who trussed up the models for his Autumn/Winter ’09 collection as white faced clowns from the dead dressed in frumpy dogtooth-patterned sacks? Yeah, that’s the one. Now he, along with Miuccia Prada, Vivienne Westwood and Dolce & Gabbana is telling us to wear lace and like idiots, we all flock to the shops intent on Gaga-fying ourselves and becoming sexy, beautiful and mysterious with a touch of this magic lace against our newly marbled skin (because tans are so last season).
But here’s what they don’t tell you; lace is not your friend, in fact, it is quite the opposite. The only people I ever see wearing traditional black lace in the street are the 12 year old Goth-babies living at the bottom of my road. Lace is to be experimented with when young and skinny and life is not yet bitchy, and it is an experiment that usually ends quite disastrously, with us all looking like little rat-bag vampires. Or sometimes, if we carry this stage on to our early twenties, we just look like sluts, not unlike the poor women we see and feel sorry for at the nightclub who are under the influence of the “sexy-codicil” where they think that the clothes they wear are acceptable as they are alluring to men, because flashing the flesh is exactly what men want. Lace is supposed to be a women’s secret little twist on that theory, so she can act like she is being incredibly daring, whilst actually not showing off her body at all. Well, no, she’s not, because lace actually makes us all look just a little bit on the frumpy side. Take Taylor Momsen for example, who is actually a size O, when put in a lace dress not dissimilar to something I would imagine your crazy great-aunt would wear to Sunday lunch, actually looks more like a size 12.
And peachy coloured lace is no better. The other day I was just about to leave for a night on the town with the girls when my boyfriend stopped me, looked at me very hard as if I had slightly lost my mind and said “ Now Adrienne, I know that I don’t understand fashion, but why are you leaving the house in a nightie?”. What I was actually wearing was a peach/baby-pink lace skirt that had been a steal from H&M the previous week at just £14.99, not a night-dress at all. However, the amount of accidentally-wearing-nightwear-to-work etc jokes that I was the brunt of that night would seem to testify to the fact that my boyfriend is not the only person to hold that opinion.
Therefore, if you really still want to wear lace this season, I suggest that you organise a fancy dress party and go as either Morticia Adams or Elaine Carmody – who ever knew that following high-end fashion would get you banned from Tesco’s, eh?
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