In days of yore

For the past few days I have been doing this newfangled thingy called a 'wardrobe edit.' I hauled everything I wasn't actually wearing at the moment into a rail in the spare room at which it was revealed that I actually had far more clothes than I thought I did because I could actually see them. The envisaged scenario is that at the end of summer I'll do another edit and rotate some things back in again.

It seems that our dear Princess Anne has also just done a wardrobe edit, observing this summer's trend for florals:

Let's not for one minute suggest that Princess Anne's decision to dig out the dress she wore to her brother's first wedding in 1981 for another family wedding 27 years later was remotely connected to thriftiness. Anyone who can afford a designer dress, and has the space to store decades worth of posh clothes in palatial wardrobes, isn't too concerned about her bank balance. No, Anne's decision to recycle - or, to use the appropriate fashion parlance for this phenomenon, to repeat - a floral print piecrust-edged wrap dress is actually a common fashion practice.

However, as Imogen Fox points out in the Guardian, if you wear what you wore last time this fashion was around, you have to do it with a leetle bit of a modern twist if you are not to look in the miror and recoil with shock and disgust at how old the neck has got above the collar.

In 1981 she wore the dress with a yellow floral and net hat, and accessorised with pearls. Fast-forward to this weekend and she's wearing the same hat and yet another pearl choker. This isn't just a sartorial aberration either - the princess has form in repeating outfits without imagination. A blue-and-white dress worn to a film premiere in 1986 was trundled out again with the same white gloves 14 years later. A bonnet was worn twice 17 years apart, each time without irony.

Excuse me, you're on a hiding to nothing if you're looking for irony from a member of the Royal Family. Particularly Princess Anne. Isn't irony what they put on the horses' feet?

Anyhow, what with the Goth look coming back this Autumn, we're all warned against hauling out the gear from our early Eighties Madonna phase. Imagine that stuff on Madonna herself, with her weird reptile face and creepy arms. No, what we do is gesture to the look, gesture. I hope that's straight now.