Author: Ben Tuthill
There’s a lot to be said about Margaret Thatcher, most of it political. I’m only allowed to write about the clothes, and though it’s generally frowned upon these days to reduce female politicians to their style choices, my contractual obligations leave me no choice.
Thatcher could go down in history as a lot of things, but style icon probably isn’t one of them. It’s not like she wasn’t well put together: her loyalty to Aquascutum was admirable, her hair was kind of spectacular and she always looked tough. She didn’t wear anything remarkable, but neither did Ronald Reagan.
One thing I do notice every time I look at pictures of Thatcher is her pearls. Everything about her dress is so serious and business-like, but always against the grey collar is a string of white pearls.
I’ve always liked pearls. As precious objects go, they’re probably my favorite. Giambatista Valli wears his mother’s pearls for his runway bows; I don’t think I could pull that off, but he does. Where does one even buy pearls? I think they have to be passed down from generation to generation. There’s something so old-money about them: no rich grandmother, no pearls.
Where I’m from, no one wear’s pearls. There’s no high society in the Midwest, and there’s not very much history. In the unpretentious Twin Cities, any remnant of old-money opulence has faded into the passive-aggressive haze. No one would wear a string of pearls to a Minneapolis social function. I don’t think anyone has inherited a string of pearls to wear.
When I talk to girls from the East Coast about pearls, they shake their heads. They know people who wear pearls, and they associate them with a particularly unappealing brand of conservatism: elitist, snobbish, proudly anti-progressive. I was sold by Missy Franklin’s giant pearl earrings that she wore through every one of her Olympic races this summer, but my friends from the East Coast just rolled their eyes. They went to school with people like that everyday.
Margaret Thatcher didn’t come from old-money, but she did represent that sort of proud, deliberately anachronistic traditionalism. The England she inherited produced anarcho-punk, Duran Duran, Wham! and Boy George. She came to power just as Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood were taking over the high-fashion world, and she left it just as Miuccia released her first women’s line. Nothing about Thatcher’s comportment was in line with her times, and nothing epitomized that more than her pearls.
There’s something beautiful about that, in a weird sort of way. Someone like Thatcher, more associated with iron than any other material, orderly, business-like and powerful, and yet her signature accessory was something as frivolous as a pearl necklace. It’s as if to say: I’m going to hold onto the past, just because it’s beautiful. I’m going to boss the world around. and I’m going to do it in something historically pretty.
Maybe that conservative compulsion to hold onto something pretty gets oppressive when you grow up underneath it. That seems to be the consensus amongst East Coast transplants in regard to another old-money, conservative staple: Lilly Pulitzer, the Palm Beach dressmaker who died last week, just two days before Thatcher.
There’s something kind of appalling about a Lilly dress: green, pink, yellow, clashing patterns, flowers, giraffes, squirrels. I can’t imagine anyone taking themselves seriously in one. I guess that’s the point: Pulitzer was devoted first-and-foremost to fun. She quit dressmaking in 1984 to become a full-time party host. She started making patterned dresses (correction: her maid started making patterned dressses for her) so that stains wouldn’t show up when she spilled her drinks. Her clothes, her brand, her life, are frivolity manifested.
Maybe it’s because everything in the Midwest is so sensible, but there’s something incredibly appealing about that. An entire seaboard where nearly every upper-class girl owns a dress covered in pineapples? That they wear to polo games where they drink mimosas with boys wearing pink critter pants? That’s insane. My idea of weekend decadence is cargo shorts, speedboating and maybe some coconut bars.
Tell anyone from the East Coast that you admire the green-and-pink, go-to-hell lifestyle, and they’ll scoff. Lilly Pulitzer means miserable brunches at country clubs complete with moronic conversation and repressive gender norms. Stupid, proud, frivolous traditionalism is just stupid, proud and frivolous. What’s a completely foreign dream to me is everyday reality to them.
I guess all the people who are lighting fires in the streets and sending “Ding-Dong, The Witch Is Dead” to the top of the British charts thinks the same thing about Thatcherite conservatism. If anyone in England cares about Thatcher’s pearls right now, they probably see them as a representation of an out-of-date and oppressive traditionalism that contributed to labor-busting, homophobia and senseless warfare. Like I said, I’m not supposed to think about this stuff. I don’t know. Maybe hard-line traditionalism is bad. Maybe pearls are representations of a long history of repression. Maybe the prevalence of flamingo-printed dresses on the East Coast is symptomatic of some deep-seated class issues.
But for someone from a place without much history, or tradition, or luxury, that kind of deliberate, almost rebelliously historical conservatism is kind of awesome. And for that, I’m going to commend Margaret Thatcher and Lilly Pulitzer. For their clothes if nothing else. That’s all I’m authorized to do.
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