feminish

I’m back in London town where the clothes are bright, the jeans are tight and pumps are all the rage.

If women’s clothes in the Big Smoke are all about girls bums, in the Big (French) Calm clothes are all about waists - either slinking them in soft silks or marqueeing-over them with rough cotton French Mama floral smock pinnies.

These French Mama floral aprons are a strange phenomenon. A lot of women wear them a lot of the time and a lot of shops sell a lot of variants. At first I thought ‘ah! they have a lot in the shops because no-one buys them’. After several months of patient observation I can now confidently assert that the opposite is the case: the shops have a lot because everybody buys them. Our neighbour, who takes her little rubbish bag out to the bins in the square at the same time every morning, and who has been known to polish her windows more than once a month, has never been spotted apron-naked. I had to wear an apron like that when I worked in a factory canteen frying burgers and selling bags o’ tatties. But I am struggling to think of any situation in which it would occur to me to be a good idea to wear one in my spare time.

They are a kind of housewife’s uniform - a way of saying: Woman At Work. A way to see work in the home as real work, distinct from the rest of life; a way to give that work a formality and uniform. It’s also a practical, cheap way to protect normal clothes. Clothes need protection from cooking oil, and leaking bin bags and bleach. But because women never seem to take these aprons off, it’s hard to see when they are ever their non-apron selves, when they’re the woman who’s not busy keeping house. The apron brigade seem to be full-time identifying themselves with just one ideal: Respectable Hard-Working Housewife Keeping A Good Home. That’s why they wear the aprons up the hill to market; that’s why they wear them to the supermarket. It’s a statement: my waist is irrelevant, and so is even the simplest respect for beauty - but let it be known I can sure as hell dust!

If I’m ever caught wearing one, I give the Internet Gods permission to nuke this site.

I’m back in London town where the clothes are bright, the jeans are tight and pumps are all the rage.

If women’s clothes in the Big Smoke are all about girls bums, in the Big (French) Calm clothes are all about waists - either slinking them in soft silks or marqueeing-over them with rough cotton French Mama floral smock pinnies.

These French Mama floral aprons are a strange phenomenon. A lot of women wear them a lot of the time and a lot of shops sell a lot of variants. At first I thought ‘ah! they have a lot in the shops because no-one buys them’. After several months of patient observation I can now confidently assert that the opposite is the case: the shops have a lot because everybody buys them. Our neighbour, who takes her little rubbish bag out to the bins in the square at the same time every morning, and who has been known to polish her windows more than once a month, has never been spotted apron-naked. I had to wear an apron like that when I worked in a factory canteen frying burgers and selling bags o’ tatties. But I am struggling to think of any situation in which it would occur to me to be a good idea to wear one in my spare time.

They are a kind of housewife’s uniform - a way of saying: Woman At Work. A way to see work in the home as real work, distinct from the rest of life; a way to give that work a formality and uniform. It’s also a practical, cheap way to protect normal clothes. Clothes need protection from cooking oil, and leaking bin bags and bleach. But because women never seem to take these aprons off, it’s hard to see when they are ever their non-apron selves, when they’re the woman who’s not busy keeping house. The apron brigade seem to be full-time identifying themselves with just one ideal: Respectable Hard-Working Housewife Keeping A Good Home. That’s why they wear the aprons up the hill to market; that’s why they wear them to the supermarket. It’s a statement: my waist is irrelevant, and so is even the simplest respect for beauty - but let it be known I can sure as hell dust!

If I’m ever caught wearing one, I give the Internet Gods permission to nuke this site.