Pants for the Memories

Some purchases are so important you remember them all your life: the grown up shoes that first sent you teetering towards adulthood, the Fender Telecaster which might just make you a star. These sorts of purchases occur at moments in your life that are transitional, when you find yourself on the threshold or the brink. So closely linked are they to your personal development that they actually usher in a whole new phase, they facilitate or provoke it.

My first pair of High Heels was a rites of passage purchase; the square toed black suede Robert Clergerie courts instantly made a huge difference to the way I felt about the world and me in it. I didn't just feel instantly more confident and attractive, I felt more important, more serious, more note-worthy, just more in every way. The amazing thing was that people started treating me differently as a person of increased stature and I loved it. Why had no-one told me before?

The first ever handbag I bought was a black leather miniature doctor's bag from Anya Hindmarch's debut collection and was similarly life-enhancing. It was so charming and had so much presence that people used to stop me in the street and ask after it cooing affectionately as though it were a dog or a baby. I bought it at a time in my life when I first started to go out a lot and it came everywhere with me, this little container, in which I carried a version of my world in miniature to see me through all eventualities. It was my rock.

Yet rites of passage purchases can be frought with difficulties. When I was nineteen my father gave a me a small fortune (£1000) to buy myself an armchair. I had only ever had other people's cast off bits and bobs before and the prospect of choosing my first piece of furniture was very stimulating. But in the end I could not go through with it. I was stricken with indecision and baulked at the terrible finality of it all. I could not make the commitment and busied myself making mad calculations such as, 'Say I fall in love and have a baby within the next five years and when that child is 18 it leaves home and takes the chair with it-that's 23 years. How can anyone possibly like something for that long?'

The rites of passage purchase I made this week, however, was my daughters first pairs of knickers. I had thought about this at length partly becasue people say that the cuter the pants, the easier the journey out of nappies, but more because I do like every aspect of my daughter's world to be as lovely as can be at all times, even down to the smalls. I knew this purchase would be emotional for me because it marked Mary's development from a baby to a toddler to a child and mine from a new mother to the parent of a little girl.

Soon I was reminiscing over how all the most glamorous children at school (the Helenes and Monettes) sported French stripey Petit Bateau underwear beneath their choclate brown school uniform and how I always longed to have some of my own. These vests and pants represented everything I wanted to be: soft, girlish, and sporty. So when I found myself in Paris, this week, in my favourite department store the Bon Marche, I went straight to the childrens clothes department - probably the best in the world - and bought twelve pairs of 'culotte bebe trois ans', six pink and white stripe, six blue and white.

The degree of pride I felt making this purchase was quite overwhelming. That a daughter of mine should have Paris - bought underwear was thrilling enough, but more important than this was the fact that the pants themselves - like baby shorts with lightly frilled edges- seemed to belong to a world that was so ordered and carefree, one where nothing could go wrong. Suddenly they symbolised the kind of childhood I want Mary to have, that every child should have, and before I knew it there were tears in my eyes.