An excellent question, thank you for asking. It has been my observation that most people who are truly fabulous have had a gifted mentor; someone who has lead by example, and shared of their encyclopaedic knowledge of fanciness.
For me, that person was my Great Aunt Jean – stylish, witty, adventurous, and unwavering in her love for me.
What follows is an excerpt from an article that I wrote for a fashion advice website several years ago. The subject (and title) was ‘What Makes a Style Icon?’
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What makes a style icon? Is it simply how they dress, how they carry themselves, or is it something a little more indefinable?
…..Quick roundup of my particular style pets, including Isadora Duncan, (more about her another time), Cate Blanchett, David Bowie, and Snow White. Yes, Snow White. When all the other Disney heroines were blonde, and the general fashion was for tanned skin – it was the 70’s, after all – Snow White was proudly raven-haired, fair skinned, and red-lipped. She remains my personal celebrity favourite to this day, as my hair colour, fear of a sun-kissed face, and perennial lipstick choice will attest….
And then it follows on….
But what of the style icons that are closer to our hearts, the ones who we get to experience close up. The people that really shape our ideas about what it is to be stylish and fashionable. The style icons who we truly know and love.
Let me tell you about mine.
The most enduring and far reaching of all my personal style icons was somebody who was not famous, nor did she ever hope to be, but she taught me more about style and personal glamour than anybody else ever could. My great aunt, Miss Dorothy Jean Baker.
God, how I loved her. She was my father’s spinster aunt, and she was a true lady. She never left the house without red lipstick (the old-fashioned, wax based kind – I can smell it now), and the scent of Cyclax Milk of Roses eddying around her. We used to watch the ballroom dancing on TV, because it reminded her of the innumerable wartime dance competitions that she participated in, and she would complain about the modern trend for dancers to look over their partner’s shoulders. “In my day” she’d say, “you had to look into your partners eyes, or you lost points.” She was also sorry that modern dancers no longer had their heels chalked, to ensure that they never scraped the floor.
She had been an ultra fashionable young woman, and I used to spend hours poring over pictures of her at her 21st birthday party, dressed as a powder puff. But then, I would also have to say that, well dressed though she was, it was far more than her clothes which made her stylish.
Jean gave me my very first chiffon scarf when I was nine, as a get well present during one of my everlasting bouts of childhood asthma. A relic from the 1920’s, she pulled it out of an old cardboard box that, to my childish nose, smelled of the mysterious adventures of her girlhood. Every Christmas she presented me with an enamel pendant and a Yardley gift pack, first Lily Of The Valley (because that was an appropriate scent for little girls), then I graduated up to Violet, and ultimately when I was about eleven, the Holy Grail of the Yardley line – Rose. And I was in heaven, because I smelled like her. She taught me the importance of matching your handbag to your shoes, and the difference between being graceful and gracious, and how one won’t do without the other.
Today is Jean’s birthday, and I miss her with a longing so fierce that it is almost unbearable. Though she passed away in 1990 (over half my lifetime ago), her legacy lives on every time I put on my red lipstick, adorn myself with floral chiffon or silk flowers, or even smell a rose.
A style icon indeed.
Miss Fancy Says 