2011. The Year of The Sequin

I have just made the startling revelation that 2011 is The Year of the Sequin. Much overlooked and long forgotten to me until my friend reminded me that I must unleash my inner glitter.
I realise she is right, not only have I lost my shimmer, I feel that the world has gone a bit sensible with all these austerity measures and make do and mend programmes. At least during the 1930s they tried to counterbalance all the grey with a little sparkle and jazz, martinis and champagne. I'm being ridiculous but I would love to believe that even those who recycled wool to transform socks into scarves craved something with a little more sophistication, instead of pretending it was a moral choice. The trouble is that tree huggers, of whom I would be a paid up member if I could be bothered to get my hands dirty, or live in sensible shoes, with our 'Good life', hens in the garden, organic allotment, chemical-free lives, have forgotten the importance of frivolity, and worse still, the inherent ugliness of plastic shoes for conscientious vegans. Now I think about it, I suppose even plastic must be outlawed if we are to genuinely blameless. I would be unsurprised if some of the specimens I've caught sight of were made from recycled car tyres.

We take ourselves to the past, as if we are trying to make sense of how they did it then, without experiencing the humour, the camaradarie or the hidden sequins of the everyday. I often meet people with children from my own Home Counties tribe, who seem to have picked names for their offspring from the local Rest Home for the Elderly. The trouble is that if you do decide to call your child Gertie or Albert, or something floral and better suited to a specimen of livestock, you are either being ironic or you don't find it funny, the latter being even more concerning than the former. If you haven't chosen from the list of residents of Sunny View Court in Wolverhampton, the chances are you've turned to that quaint obsolete tome they gave you for your Sunday school prize, blown off the dust and picked out something with 'Epic' proportions like Noah, Moses or Barnabus for your little cutie, steering clear of anything too controversial like Abraham or Jesus, just in case you cause offence.
With our next generation named for nostalgia's sake, we sip our Fairtrade tea from our 'Make do and Mend' or 'Keep Calm and Carry On' designer mugs with their War time theme and take up knitting. Those of us who haven't evolved beyond the eating of meat join chefs with overlong names and overblown egos who order us to roast the unspeakable body parts of pigs and anything smothered in its own jelly. Then we pretend to enjoy our hand-knitted itchy sweaters, convince ourselves there is in some way an appropriateness to our affinity with all things Union Jack and home-made and the endless stuff about Nazis. But if you are clutching your Aga with your Cath Kidston retro apron on sipping rooibush anti-oxidant tea in an Emma Bridgewater mug, can't you afford some sequins?
I just think we should all stop pretending that plastic clogs with holes in them to drain out the ubiquitous British rain are a) cool, b)lovely c)comfortable, not least because none of these things will ever be or could ever have been true. When I think about it, even my 'Fit Flops' aren't really forgivable. I can't really justify their lack of glamour and pazzazz with some spurious nonsense about working off my cellulite. They're just plain ugly, and practical and boring. I feel bored by all this self-righteousness. While I'm on my high horse about reducing my meat intake and upping my soya intake, while one of us has a lactose intolerance, and another is dedicated to gluten free everything someone, somewhere would eat anything, rather than nothing. But let's not assume that people living in poverty or hunger or any horrifying human situation don't appreciate style, beauty, elegance and self-respect. Its too easy to think that these things don't matter. They do matter and they always did. There is something about 'being well turned out' which has stayed with me from my family's legacy. My Mum's Mum was a seamstress and she raised eight children in the East End of London during the Blitz with her husband at sea earning peanuts shovelling coal into a furnace. I remember that Mum told me they were all, always 'beautifully turned out' and immaculately clean. In their relative poverty they still appreciated finely made clothes, haute couture, silk stockings and the Screen Goddesses of their age. They enjoyed a little respite from the mundanity of it all. This is still true about people who live in poverty and I think we de-humanise people if we forget the other, less serious side to human nature, the sequin gene, the sparkle lobe, the glitter chromosome. I watched a programme about the Slums of Calcutta, where people lived in conditions I cannot even imagine sitting in my lovely flat writing about things I don't really understand like how it feels to live in poverty. One thing that stood out for me apart from the obvious and heart breaking injustice and suffering was first and foremost the capacity these people had to laugh and have fun. But more relevant to my scrawl about the sequin revolution was that the presenter commented upon the beautiful laundered jewel-coloured saris and the impeccable presentation of these communities. In a place of open sewers and communal washing in filthy, disease infested water people cared about the clothes they wore and had an instinctive appreciation of elegance, music and even escapist movies. In other words, a love of beauty and of the fun things in life, of the aspects of human life generally assumed to be unneccessary to survival, but which lift us beyond existence into the enjoyment of it.
I'm tired of people being so sensible and earnest, most of all myself. Being pious, ethical, or simply moral, shouldn't mean being scruffy or tasteless or lacking in glitz. I'm all for Ethical clothing, but you can keep your Birkenstocks from now on in, I'm puttin' on the Ritz.