I had fished it out of his closet - a starchy white shirt with crisp cuffs and drop shoulders, a pair of black trousers with a pleat front and deep pockets that I had to cuff three times, and a dark jacket (of course, it's not a suit without a jacket!) with glossy lapels and hard shoulder pads that I quickly cut off. I didn't have anything to wear that night, no dress to wear to the fancy party that my friends had fake tanned and blow dried and wriggled into sparkly dresses for. No dress at all really, I'm much more of a skirt kind of gal. So I did what any self-respecting Annie Hall fanatic would do and went straight to my dad's wardrobe. To be fair this wasn't my first foray into menswear. I had been pairing his stripey shirts (sleeves rolled up, natch) with leggings and tennis shoes for months - I was going through a little bit of an 80s-influenced American Apparel phase. But this was to be the first time I had taken a whole outfit; pants, shirt, jacket and all. The shoes would be taken care of at my end. There's nothing sexier than a suit with heels, right? But as for the rest of it? Well, thanks dad.
What an entrance. I've never been so comfortable or content at a party - never before or since. There's something about a suit that makes you relax a bit, it's all about the stance - hands thrust deep into pockets, jacket hanging off your shoulders like a cape, sitting with one ankle rested on the other knee. People came up to me - people who've never really had a nice thing to say to me - and said I looked great. I felt great! I had twisted my hair up into a messy chignon, slicked a bit of gloss on (hey! gloss was hot back then) and tried to emulate some of the greats of cross-dressing. Bianca Jagger in YSL at Studio 54. Diane Keaton in a three piece suit in Manhattan. A slick-haired Helmut Newton muse smoking on a Parisian street. I think I was less knowing, more naive, but oh, it felt good to play a part, even for just one night. It was the start of a long-term love affair with menswear that continues even to this day, and culminates in that suit now residing firmly in my own wardrobe and not my father's (sorry dad! but you did say yes). But at the time it wasn't about subverting traditions of dress or making a statement, it was born - as all good things in my life are - of a need to be comfortable, and a lack of anything else clean. From such beginnings do these things grow.
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