THE LOOK AND THE LOOK

The bob is the most wonderful haircut. It falls on a woman’s face and looks alternative on a man. I like how it’s like a hat and is “worn” and also how it’s a real haircut because it’s technical. Each bob differs slightly due to hair texture, despite the cutter using this same standard technical technique. A friend and I play a fun game called, “Richard, if you were a woman, what would you wear?” It can last for hours.

I once told Dries van Noten, after eight lychee martinis, that if I were a woman I’d wear vintage Comme and “just a smattering of his stuff”. I would, I added, “have a talc-white bob like Liz Tilberis”.

I’ve written about Tilberis before. I saw her on The Look, which was an early-1990s documentary series about fashion. That programme changed everything for me. In one particular episode – there were six in total, each one focusing on the various aspects of the rag trade, fragrance, fabrics, the power of the fashion press, and so on – Tilberis, the then editor of British Vogue, turned up at a runway show in Paris. It was Jean Paul Gaultier. It was a scrum. Gaultier was huge – a time of tattoo-sleeve tops and leggings and queer earrings that linked to your nose in silver. It was clubwear and the street, and designers looked to the street for everything. Like at all big shows, the crowd of students, the “no tickets” and the rubberneckers were out in force. All hell broke loose when Tilberis slapped either a photographer or a security guard and he slapped her back. British newspapers reported it the next day. The slap isn’t featured in the scene, just the aftermath. Tilberis squeezes through the crowd and her talc-white bobbed hair falls onto her made-up face. She pushes it back behind her ear: “Bastard!”

I’ve bored my brother senseless with that scene and have an eye-rolling reputation for re-enacting it after a one too many fizzy lagers. Only last weekend, outside a favourite watering hole in London’s Soho, did I take the stage as Tilberis once again; my new side parting really makes it.

“Do your Liz, do your Liz,” imagined friends would say to me at imagined glamorous parties.

As I write this (really quickly and paying no heed to syntax, plot line, what the editor wants), on the Eurostar bound for the Jean Paul Gaultier show in Paris, nearly 20 years later, those tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention.

I’ve watched Tilberis urgently folding her talc-white hair behind her ear a lot. Who was I then? Why was she, with her bob and Chanel bouclé suit in candy pink with the thick gilt buttons so incredibly important? Her look and The Look were vital. Tilberis left us in 1999; I think you should read her memoir, No Time to Die.

Tilberis was the yin to Wintour’s yang. She was a size 14, adored by her staff and never dyed her hair. Wintour is incredible for other reasons.

I have all six episodes of this BBC series on a tape back home at my mum’s. It’s in the ottoman, which is actually a blanket box. It’s a black VHS cassette and I’ve written, “The Look and Clothes Show – do not tape over” in Tipp-Ex. I suspect that, when I pressed play and record at the same time on the old video recorder under the TV, The Look, the Clothes Show, and, to a certain extent, MTV’s Stylissimo, were the only windows into a glamorous world that gripped me. It still does, fashion.

Running home from school so they couldn’t shout stuff and spit, then getting in the house and having ham sandwiches and crisps and then looking through my mum’s Bella and a nicked Cosmopolitan from the dentist and watching and watching my precious black VHS tape, were it. There was nothing else in a little town outside Doncaster.

Saturday night meant pop and even more crisps and telly, and mum and dad going out to the pub and me going through her jewellery and smelling her perfumes and desperately trying to find love letters from an affair with somebody black or Jewish, or records of court convictions, something to try to make her a bit more exotic than she actually was. The nearest I came to anything remotely interesting at our house was when I found those knickers. They were drying in that bit between the mantelpiece and the top of the gas fire where she airs my dad’s socks.

“Mum, your knickers have fallen in the ashtray.” I shouted. She stabbed out her fag and saved them. I saw them. They were dark navy and had a sexy mesh butterfly at the front and holes in. “Give ’em here,” she said and lodged them back to dry. It was only on closer inspection, when she’d gone to the shops to buy even more fags, that I realised they weren’t kinky holes, just holes. These were her “work knickers”, a strange subset of underpinning, where the elastic may have gone a bit or been washed with something they shouldn’t have, and taken on a new colour – white becomes grey or dull red, and so on. “Best knickers” were saved for Saturday nights out.

Fashion programmes like The Look and catwalks and fashion journalists were a new glamour to me. In one episode, which explained, in fascinating depth, the world behind, and the reasons for, runway shows, a blonde-haired fashion editor who went by the name of Lowri Turner (you may know her as that bird who does up houses on daytime telly) was filing copy (fashion editors say filing because it sounds better than writing), but she’s not at a desk. It’s the early morning after the Galliano show and she’s sitting upright in bed in a Parisian hotel bedroom (it looks like the Louvre). She’s staring at her laptop, she’s smoking, the camera holds her in shot. It’s possibly the chicest thing I’ve ever seen. She’s now on the phone to the Evening Standard – they want her Galliano copy. When Turner types she holds the cigarette and the cigarette ash falls dead on the keyboard. It took my breath away. She’s stern with the people on the phone.

In one of the many imagined scenarios of my teenage years, it was me smoking those Gitanes, sitting upright, propped up by expensive pillows, and wearing silk pyjamas in a hotel room in the Louvre. “Feature the fucking crinoline!” I’d shout down a white receiver. There would be ash everywhere and some gin. I may have taken a lover and there would be discarded invites for shows and even more glamorous parties. I’d say lofty things about skirts. There’s also a wig.

This is all very unorthodox thinking, of course, but then I was – unorthodox. When you live a lie at 18, 19 and onwards, that place called Glamour has significance. It’s not somewhere you escape to but somewhere you belong; it’s self-perpetuating and accumulative, because the more you’re there [points to head.], the stronger and more bold the place becomes. In My Teenage Glamour World, the colours are so beautiful, we are all thin, everybody smokes Gitanes, we all throw up. The runway is all the vital organs in one: the brain for thoughts of chic things in satin fabrics and new shapes in all colours, the heart is a jewel box teeming with the unending belief in the good of beauty, and the lungs are what finally let you breathe.

We wear coloured clothes that are hyper real and sometimes we wear black. There are also pecking-stick-thin fashion-monster women with perfect hair and fast pencils who write in spiky letters that form spiky words. There are standards!

by Richard Gray 

Richard Gray is Online Editor for The Sunday Times Style