At a birthday dinner over the weekend I was introduced to this delightful party girl of a certain age whose diet for the evening consisted of chips and Grey Goose vodka on the rocks with lime. She launched straight into the praises of this marvellous gay couple she knew in the area who were mad keen on hunting, kept getting injured but didn’t care, and who she was sure I’d get on with like a house on fire. They did indeed sound like my kind of people. But it was only later, after my new friend had had a few more and she had expressed surprise at the existence of my wife across the table, that she fessed up. ‘I had no idea you weren’t gay. Those clothes. Your manner. That gaunt look…’
I didn’t mind, obviously. In fact, I totally love the idea that people still assume I’m gay after all these years because it means I haven’t totally lost my outré fashion edge. At home, I’m a terrible scruff: filthy jeans, T-shirt. But I do very much still like dressing up on occasion, be it the splendid rat-catcher outfit I got an excuse to wear out cubbing the other day, or the mauve Paul Smith trousers, floral Liberty shirt and Emma Hope ponyskin bootees I wore the other day for a TV encounter with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Vivienne Westwood. Once a fashion whore, always a fashion whore.
Which is why I so identified with so many of the characters in the BBC’s three-part series Oh! You Pretty Things: the Story of Music and Fashion (BBC4, Wednesdays): the high Sixties couple who’d bought all their psychedelic threads from Granny Takes A Trip and made films of themselves communing with nature and talking to trees on LSD straight from the Sandoz labs in Switzerland; the mod who modelled himself on the Small Faces and always knew he was winning when he got wolf whistles from building sites; Andy Mackay, the sax player from Roxy Music, recalling the metallic emerald jacket designed for him by Antony Price.
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