Shoes and handbags

I’m not a shoes and handbags kinda woman at all, in spite of bit of a fetish for nice boots, but I was going through my old portfolio from college and came across some pictures I’d drawn in 1981 which reminded me of some shoes and handbags I possessed at the time. 

The Clarks shoes were unearthed in a charity shop and were possibly ‘60s.  Very uncomfortable of course (probably the wrong size to be honest but how we suffer for our art…)  And the handbag I remember well for being fabulously tacky with its silky leopard-print panel and the rest in shiny black patent.  That's a cigarette box poking out – Silk Cut by the look of it –  I think nearly everyone smoked in my year at college. We even had a pet name for them:-  ‘oolies’ (not ‘oilies’ as in ‘oily rags: fags’ but definitely ‘oolies’ for some reason).  The stairwells and lobbies used to stink of our Silk Cut and Rothmans, and occasionally something stronger too. (In the studios themselves, the smell of fixative spray and cow gum was enough to give you more than any nicotine or herbal high.)

Fashion-wise this was a great era for an impoverished student - although I was lucky to be undertaking further education at a time when grants were the norm. I’d moved on from being predominantly punk by that time, there was so much more going on to be into and like many of my peers I was enjoying a wider range of music and clothes.  The latter were mostly hunted out from charity shops which at that time were a fantastic and exceptionally cheap source of unusual old items, because comparatively few people were interested in anything vintage or anti-fashion, it seemed.  And they didn’t have that overpowering smell of industrial-strength washing powder then, either…  

I remember finding a black and pink dress with a scenes of Paris print on it (oh, how I’d love that now) and with a floppy fringe over one eye, lacy tights, the snakeskin slingbacks, plenty of black eye make-up, a plastic ring from a Christmas cracker and an old man’s cardigan to top it all off, the overall look must have been not unlike one of Diane Arbus’ photographic subjects or an extra from 'Summer Holiday' who'd got dressed in the dark.   Great escapism in a year remembered for (amongst many other unsavoury things) Peter Sutcliffe, the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, and Bucks Fizz winning the Eurovision Song Contest…