Save and Splurge

When I was a child I was once alarmed to hear a rather grand, half drunk, hysterical friend of my mother’s pronouncing that “the upper classes and the working classes - they’re the real people. It’s they who know how to go about things properly, to engage with life. To actually live. The middle classes are simply despicable: seedy, corrupt, useless, inane and banal.” At the time I did not know that this was almost a cliché. I remember chewing over the words in our pine kitchen, peering at our Mediterranean spice rack thinking ‘Wow!’

I thought of this recently when out on a shopping spree for spring clothes. More and more it seems to me that buying something either very cheap or something very expensive is the way forward. A splurge or a snip purchase always feels like an event somehow. Buying something expensive is always a highly exciting occurrence. There’s the rush of nerves, a little shame, a little jubilation, a giddy sense of the privilege of owning something so special, the anxiety about whether you can afford it, whether you deserve it, whether you can live up to it, like Oscar Wilde and his blue and white china. You feel ridiculous as you bask in the approval of formerly glacial shop assistants who now want to know your phone numbers. You get home when you know no-one else will be there to avoid awkward questions. You hide the item for a day or two, eventually taking it out and toying with it. You practise owning it in front of the mirror, wondering what this new departure will say about you and how you can possibly carry it off and then, before you know it, your association with it is no longer provisional. It becomes assimilated into your wardrobe. You do own it convincingly. It’s yours!

When you buy something that is lovely and very cheap it is exciting in a quite different way. For a start that you can regard yourself as overwhelmingly canny. Party to your own clever secret, you feel smug and laugh dismissively at all those who believe that you get what you pay for. Trying on little smooth cotton jersey tops with large collars and short sleeves in Hennes in apple green and blue black that cost £7.99 each, I suddenly felt such a success. The pride with which you can boast that your H & M sea-sidey striped cotton poplin pleat skirts cost fifteen pounds, one red one blue. And you in your mid thirties!

When you buy something mid-priced there is often a complete absence of shoppers’ glee. Browsing for skirts in Whistles or Jigsaw or French Connection, I almost hoped that I wouldn’t see anything I liked because I knew there was not going to be any love involved. Although these shops sell perfectly nice, knee length, A line skirts in which I can feel really quite personable, there’s no thrill in it. In every way more accessible than their cheaper or pricier counterparts (roomier, less daring, more flattering) there’s no excitement because there’s no risk, no sense of discovery and no flush of aspiration. I can feel neat and grown up in a skirt like this, but I really can't feel like a heroine. Besides mid range clothes have all sorts of worrying associations hanging from their hems: mid range equals middle of the road, equals middle aged, equals mumsy, equals eight people at the school gates wearing identikit garments only theirs are in smaller sizes and more recently laundered.

In an interview recently Karl Lagerfeld said, ‘I like the expensive and the cheap - and nothing in between.’ Grand as it may sound, I think there’s definitely something in it.