Inside Style by Annmarie O'Connor - as featured in The Dubliner magazine - September 2nd
“All fur coat; no knickers,” that’s what my mother would christen the fancy yet impractical. Never once I’m sure did she think it would extend to her own offspring. Not that I have anything against pants, but I do love a snugly fur...or three. Look closely inside my wardrobe and you’ll see a cross-section of fashion’s fripperies from beaded vintage dresses and Moroccan gilded robes to Japanese silk kimonos and vertiginous glam rock boots with the odd sequin bra for luck. Granted, not a capsule wardrobe as such but, golly, it’s fun to get dressed!
That was until the other morning. After my 7 a.m. cup of coffee, I opened the doors to my double-breasted closet only to divest its forty-five minutes later into a prodigious pile that resembled a drag queen mash-up. “Jesus, I really don’t have anything to wear!” I declared, aware of the ironic dilemma this poses as a stylist.
The real issue however wasn’t so much the garb itself (I spent good money on that tat!) but the harsh glare it fixed on my shopping habits. Nested in all that glitter was some errant DNA; an evolutionary bent towards the shiny and showy. Much like a magpie, my brain seems to be wired towards amassing ostentatious objects. Was this an emotionally-rooted predilection, I wondered? “If you feel dread and indecision each time you get dressed, then yes,” advised a psychiatrist friend of mine.
Seemingly, such wardrobe choices were a direct reflection of my own feelings; an attempt, if you will, to dickey up my inner drabness. I wanted a second opinion. My inner child is nothing but fierce!
“Well, why then do you have such an allergy to basics?” enquired my non-charging shrink. Silence. “You baffle me,” she retorted and with that I was left to question my own motives. I’m assuming she would have elaborated a bit more had I slipped eighty quid that hour instead of a glass of wine, but hey.
It was time to get real. The excuse that I would be leaving an arabesque legacy for my future children was a pile of codswallop. Nippers scare me. Neither could I claim that my Liza Minnelli homage an ‘investment’. See: ‘no returns after twenty-eight days’. Instead, a serious wing-clipping was in order; just not before I buy those gold Dries Van Noten shoes. They’re lifers!
