Thinking of buying dungarees? Just don't expect them to transform you into Alexa Chung

OK, before we deal with your Dungaree Problem, Charlotte, we need to talk about your Compliment Problem. Let us dissect this telling sentence: "My girlfriends say I look good in them, but I don't really believe them." There are three possible readings of this sentence. First, that it is what is succinctly known as a Humblebrag, in other words, a comment that sounds like self-deprecation but is actually just a way to brag, such as: "OMG, I am such a heifer I can hardly fit into this new dress my boyfriend Ryan Gosling bought for me." But I reckon we can dismiss this option because you don't strike me as a humblebragger, Charlotte. You strike me as a confused person, which brings us to option two. Namely, you don't trust your friends when they say you look nice specifically because they are your friends.

I sort of understand this thinking – your friends wouldn't want to say anything that might hurt you, because they are your friends – but only to an extent. What is the point in being friends with these people if you don't trust them? To say that you can't trust those closest to you to tell you the honest truth is a mere half breath away from believing the mean comments of strangers online, and that, Charlotte, will get you in a right muddle. Believe your friends. They love you enough to come shopping for dungarees with you, for heavens' sake, and you chose them as friends because you, hopefully, respect them. Trust your friends.

The third and possibly more plausible possibility is that you don't believe compliments from anyone. Here, again, our path to comprehension bifurcates and we have two options in front of us: you say you don't believe compliments because you think to do otherwise would be unspeakably arrogant, or you genuinely do not believe compliments. These two issues are not necessarily mutually exclusive but taking the former option first, this is an all-too-common belief among British folk in my experience, far more so than among my fellow Americans. Which is not to say that Americans don't suffer from it, particularly the women, because, unbelievably, too many women are still conditioned to think that accepting a compliment is unfeminine. The American comedian Amy Schumer satirised this brilliantly on her Comedy Central show, where a bunch of women stand around rejecting each other's compliments in the grossest of terms ("Look at your little dress!" "I look like a whore locked out of her apartment") until one of them finally accepts a compliment and the rest of them immediately self-implode in horror. Ladies, stop being so masochistic (and rude): accept the compliment.

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Or there is the final option, which is that you don't believe any compliments from anyone, ever, because your self-esteem is that low. For this, seek professional help, because you are being horrible to yourself.

And we now, at last, get to the dungarees. Are they a "sensible" purchase? Of course not, as you well know. Dungarees are not something you're going to wear every day (and, to be honest, I'd wager that at least one quarter of the people who buy dungarees this summer will wear them precisely once before dumping them at the local charity shop). Dungarees, as the very wise and funny comedian Nat Luurtsema once wisely and funnily said, "are like a fancy hat, in that it's obvious you had a thoughtful moment that morning before you went, 'Yeah. I am wearing this'." There is no justification for wearing dungarees – just as there's no justification for wearing what I call a Statement Hat, ie a hat that has no practical purpose. You are only wearing said hat or dungarees for your own enjoyment and to make something of a statement to others, that statement being "I'm the kind of person who wears dungarees or statement hats."

All you need to decide, Charlotte, is why you want to buy these dungarees. Let me tell you a dungaree-ish story. A few years ago, a woman who we'll call Yeldah saw a picture of Alexa Chung in a magazine wearing what I guess is called a dungaree dress. Chung looked great in her dress, sort of like a modern version of 1970s Linda McCartney, and so Yeldah – despite being a sentient adult person who is allowed access to motor vehicles – thought: "Yes! If I buy a dungaree dress I will look exactly the same as Alexa Chung, even though I am not actually Alexa Chung and have a totally different body type!" Reader, Yeldah was me and I did not look like Alexa Chung in my hastily purchased dungaree dress. I didn't even look like Linda McCartney – I looked like an idiot whose body type (narrow of shoulders, broad of beam) is totally wrong for this dress. And lo, Oxfam soon found itself blessed with a once-worn dungaree dress.

What I'm saying, Charlotte, is I know that dungarees are trendy at the moment and, by all means, give them a go. But don't buy them because you think they'll magically turn you into whatever celebrity was photographed wearing them this week. The only reason to get them is if you actually like the dungarees themselves, and feel comfortable in them. And for the love of Mary, learn to accept a compliment, yeah?

Know Your Royals: Grace, Caroline, and the Other Princesses of Monaco

To what can we attribute our enduring fascination with the royal family of Monaco? Just this week, we have seen a lavish screening sponsored by Ralph Lauren of the 1955 To Catch a Thief, starring the luminous Grace Kelly, radiant in Edith Head’s confections; tonight the Princess Grace Foundation holds its annual awards gala; next spring, Nicole Kidman will star in Grace of Monaco, a much anticipated biopic.

Why this ongoing romance with the Grimaldi brood? Well, for one thing, despite the European pedigree, the fairy-tale castles, the whole notion of a “principality,” this family’s modern lineage—okay, half of it at least—is all-American, giving rise to the notion that you, too, can grow up in Missoula or Maspeth—or in Grace’s case, the East Falls area of Philadelphia—and end up with a serious title. Someone who was actually rejected from Bennington College supposedly because her math scores were too low (feel better about your academic career now?) ended up as one of the most admired women in the universe, married to a genuine royal (even if he came from a country of less than one square mile that you previously had never heard of). It’s the original Kate Middleton story, except that the Duchess of Cambridge never worked with Alfred Hitchcock or costarred with Jimmy Stewart or William Holden.

No wonder that more than a half century after her magical nuptials—it is estimated that 30 million people watched the ceremony on television—we still have an avid (almost embarrassing!) fascination with Grace, her illustrious progeny, and their fashionable spouses.

Above, an informal family tree, and a look at the Grimaldi women’s unique and always compelling style.

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Just Say No to the Sexy Halloween Costume

This time of year, every empty storefront in downtown Manhattan, my neighborhood, becomes a Halloween pop-up—vast emporiums filled with slutty Snow Whites and lascivious Betty Rubbles, voracious Raggedy Anns and insatiable Cinderellas. If the position of women and our success in the workplace has been gaining ground during the last half century, you wouldn’t know it from these places, where the female-friendly professions are confined to Blazin’ Hot Firefighter, Stop Traffic Sexy Cop, and Hospital Honey Nurse.

This is vaguely depressing—okay, more than vaguely—until it occurs to me: Why do we need these stores at all? Why should we spend good money on cheesy stuff that will barely last through Susanne Bartsch’s Halloween party when we can channel those funds into real clothing?

Who would buy a flimsy, nasty black cape and a dumb pointy hat when she could be a ravishing witch in a Yohji Yamamoto Y’s cropped cape coat for $440 with a flurry of pea-green Chanel Epatant Illusion d’Ombre eye shadow standing in for rouge on her cheeks? (If you want to spend serious money, Alexander McQueen has exquisite cape variations, including an example enhanced with pearls and made of a patchwork of fox, goat, and mink for $16,452.) And why settle for a packaged flapper costume (these ensembles are having a renaissance, no doubt due to Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby and Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire) when you can locate a gorgeous cerise chiffon beaded dress at H&M, knee-baring in front and calf-grazing in back, for $69.95? Enhance this with an extra-long strand of Fallon bike-chain pearls for $140.

Did the Met Costume Institute’s “Punk: Chaos to Couture” exhibit put thoughts of radical disaffection in your pretty head? A visit to Trash and Vaudeville can supply the $82 plaid bondage trousers, along with a $28 Ramones T-shirt. (Surely, you own your own biker jacket.) If a recent viewing of Kill Your Darlings, starring the post–Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe (his wizard costume is everywhere apparent at Halloween stores, but his Allen Ginsberg is nowhere in sight) spurs a desire for a Beat generation getup, Uniqlo can supply the obligatory black turtleneck for $79.90, you can get the black leggings anywhere, and Capezio, the company that likely shod all those Kerouac girlfriends back in the day, has the necessary ballet shoes for $19.50. And should anyone have the least doubt that you lean to the left of Adlai Stevenson, Miriam Merenfeld has a silver dogtag peace symbol pendant for $125.

But despite the imperatives of feminism and the fact that this is, after all, the twenty-first century, perhaps you are one of the legions of women who are hell-bent on using October 31 as an excuse to walk the streets like a literal streetwalker. To which I shrug and say, okay, well then at least purchase a beautiful L’Agent by Agent Provocateur polka-dot flocked tulle basque for $150, or a rhinestone-inflected teddy for $78 from Victoria’s Secret. For boudoir verisimilitude, add a pair of Mamie Van Doren–worthy marabou-trimmed mules by Jacques Levine, in business making these slippers without irony for the past 77 years. Throw a trench coat over the whole business—you never know who you’ll encounter in the elevator—then get out there and watch the parade.

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Will the county commission create an adult dress code?

A vaudeville routine — one based on the difference between permission and ability — comes to mind when considering what could have been going on backstage before a recent meeting of the Maury County Commission’s Administrative Committee.
Apparently, cooler heads prevailed when discussion was postponed on whether county rules should prevent Americans from wearing T-shirts with political speech printed on the cotton during meetings of our county’s governing body, or even whether placards would be permitted. It seems like an adult version of fabricating a school dress code.
Anyway, somebody suggested that people attending county meetings be prohibited from expressing their political thoughts on shirts or signs.
Why? Well, recently in Columbia, there were many signs and people wearing shirts stating their opinion that the county should prevent the establishment of a landfill near the town line.
“You see,” one official could have told another before the administrative committee meeting, “you can pass a rule to suspend free speech, but you may not enforce it.”
Once there’s a violation of such a rule and a victim of its enforcement, then there’s a violation of the First Amendment protecting free speech. Setting aside what punishment might be imposed, if the victim wants to protect their constitutional right, they may go to court. In my opinion, the county would lose.
There’s no shortage of lawyers who would take the case. The county would pay attorney fees and legal costs. There might even be punitive damages. If the case was brought on behalf of an organization opposing the landfill, then the county might be funding an anti-landfill group.
Admittedly, that’s an extrapolation — just saying what might happen — but it’s a fairly simple legal issue.
Without extrapolating on the ramifications of state law on landfills, elected officials of Columbia and Maury County should by now know about Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 68, Chapter 211, Part 7. It’s the Jackson Law. It lists criteria upon which landfill plans must be judged. It includes authority for municipalities within a mile of proposed landfills.
This isn’t vaudeville.
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Beaded Sweaters

In an ideal world, you would never write about anything you hadn’t personally fondled, examining up-close its precious (and not so) fibers, stroking its winky embellishments to see whether they are worth even a minor commitment of time and money. That said, I am, like the rest of you, hardly immune to midnight googling. Which is how, doing a bit of causal research into fall’s plethora of beaded garments, I come upon a pair of decorated pullovers that are either refreshingly irreverent or in spectacularly poor taste: a sweatshirt at Matches in England offering a mother-of-pearl and crystal depiction of a cartoon bird in a coffin under a chandelier (don’t you love Farfetch? How else could you peruse the stock at Concept Store Riga and Gallery Andorra?) and from ASOS, a gray cotton extravagance from the designer Ashish with Shut Up You’re Not My Real Dad shining in bugle beads.

Before moribund pets and teenage misanthropy arrive on the scene, I have already perused bedecked bombshells all over Manhattan, many of which exude a whiff of Dries Van Noten’s current collection, which featured, among other dazzling, spangled suggestions, a heartbreakingly seductive muffler decorated with swirled beads and shots of gold, that, despite a price tag hovering near four figures, is sold out all over the world.

At J.Crew, I fall deeply in love with a pale pullover, whose neck and shoulders are coated in dark beads, and have a brief fantasy of layering this under a vintage dress in a facsimile of the mesmerizing Prada fall 2013 collection, until a colleague brings me back down to earth by pointing out that I never wear pullovers and the likelihood of this look actually succeeding is depressingly slim. Still, if I insist on trying, for $49.95, H&M has a sweater smattered with rhinestones; for $179.20, the Outnet has a dignified N.Peal bead and crystal-encrusted cashmere crewnecks.

An extremely fetching item at Anthropologie called the Sequined Firecracker Shift (it looks the way it sounds) obviates the problem of what to pair with these fancy feasts. (Well, it’s really a nonproblem—assuming you own slim trousers, a plain skirt, or even a pair of jeans.)

But perhaps you are drawn more to the historical roots of this trend—those pretty decorated shrugs meant to lend a bit of unironic, cozy warmth to chilly shoulders more than a half-century ago. If strict adherence to authenticity is important to you, there are currently on eBay over 1,100 beaded vintage sweaters, everything from ivory cardies to ebony shells, variously laden with polka dots and peonies, starbursts and sunflowers. But search as you will, you will not find an item that disses your father, real or presumptive: Behavior that now seems frisky and semi-adorable would have landed you in reform school 60 years ago.

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