FIONNUALA: ONE night last summer, I was having dinner with a woman friend in the Hong Kong Club. The temperature always seems to hover around freezing in there, as if the exhaled breath of all those dead colonisers is blowing down one's spine, and I was wearing a sleeveless dress. (Isaac Mizrahi, from the Joyce sale, wildly expensive but I thought I was the bee's knees in it.) So I casually but very stylishly slung on a pale blue, cashmere wrap ... OK, it was a cardigan, but it was a nice cardigan and my teeth were beginning to rattle.
My friend glanced over and said: 'You know, you really should try and look more ... available. Look at you, that's the sort of thing grannies wear. And that dress does nothing for you except make you look older. Sorry to be the one to say this, but it's true. You've got to make more of an effort to be trendy, and not look quite so ... old-fashioned.' Then she told me that her children had head lice and as I'd been in contact with them a few days previously, we had to do a quick head inspection in the Hong Kong Club loos, and what with one thing and another it was definitely the sort of night I won't forget in a hurry.
About a week later (I remember because I was still at the stage where I was obliged to smear my scalp with preventative green chemicals from the Adventist), the editor of this esteemed magazine rang up in some excitement. She'd seen an advertisement in Dollarsaver placed by a woman who promised to change people's images by overhauling their wardrobes, thereby turning them into 'living human treasures'. 'It's perfect for you,' she commanded. 'Go and check it out.' WELL, you know how it is. I was still licking my wounds over the 'old-fashioned' remark, and feeling a little raw. Weeks passed. Eventually, the editorial edict thundered forth again, and thus it came to pass that Linda Smart, wardrobe overhauler and image consultant, came to call on me.
Naturally I live in a flat the size of a microdot, which means that each morning in order to open my wardrobe door I have to stand on the bed. I thought this might not look too cool in front of Linda, but she immediately kicked off her shoes, climbed onto the duvet with me and we peered into the depths companionably.
'Hmmm, hmmm,' she said. 'A lot of beige. And black. Most people have a neutral foundation and they build around that. Which are your favourites? Do you wear this when you're doing interviews or when you're going out in the evening? What's the goal here?' I said that I thought maybe I'd like to try and look a bit more, cough, cough, available. Linda nodded kindly and said 'Drop-dead gorgeous. OK. You've got to have a focus when you go out shopping. You should never buy something unless you've got something to wear it with. For instance, what do you wear all these skirts with?' Good question. I have a terrible habit of buying skirts as separates and then puzzling over what on earth I can wear with them - shirts leave a lumpy line when you tuck them in, I hate the idea of body-suits and there's a limit to the number of jackets a girl can own. So when I wear a skirt it's always as part of a suit, of which I have enough to last me until the millennium.
Linda threatened to become ruthless. 'If you've got things hanging up here after six months, you should liberate them,' she declared. 'Throw them out! If you haven't worn it, it's for a reason.' But those skirts cost a fortune, I said feebly, and I like them. We compromised by agreeing that when we went out shopping, we'd look for some matching tops.