February 3, 2013 |
Six times a year I receive a vast amount of invites to fashion shows. Great big sacks of invites produced on Smythson stationery, which I then have to open one by one, thus ruining my cuticles. Fashion shows, dinners, store openings, cocktails, coming-out parties, Bat Mitzvahs, weddings, divorces, birthday parties for a miniature poodles named Diana Ross. Don’t get me wrong, it’s vastly fun and means I never have an evening spent slack jawed in front of the telly. In fact, I haven’t had a night in since the late 1970s. Recently, however, I have faced not one but two dilemmas. Firstly, during the day, my vision is a little clouded (to say the least) after drinking 9,000 litres of champagne the night before. And thus I tend to lose half of my papery billets-doux. And secondly, during the early Noughties, at the height of It bag fever, I decided to do away with bags altogether. This intimated both that I had a driver with a Merc waiting, negating the need to cart my crap around with me, and also that I had no need to carry money as people were falling over themselves to buy me drinks. Little did everyone know that I had 20 quid shoved in my knickers and a packet of fags tucked in my sleeve. However, this didn’t solve the problem of having to clutch the invites awkwardly in my claw everywhere I went. But now I have found the solution: it comes in the form of a Smythson pochette. It’s not large enough to be a true “bag”, the like of which I detest, but is perfectly sized for carrying several invitations, a few notes and the Oyster card I have had to acquire since expenses got cut. It suggests that I’ve just left the office after a day of very important dealings, rather than the reality of the fashion assistants having to make a bed for me out of fur coats so I can take a nap. Honestly, it’s a miracle that I ever managed without one before.
by Jack Sunnucks
