“If we consider the philosopher Michel de Certeau’s idea of reading as an act of “wandering through an imposed system”, then Cheap Chic is an A-to-Z that exists both in opposition to and in harmony with fashion’s ironies,” writes Dal Chodha on the 39th page of his recent book, You Gotta Keep Your Head Straight About Clothes, published by Tenderbooks.
Across the 139 x 105mm petals of this precious flower, Dal considers his relationship with the weathered pages of a much revered copy of Cheap Chic, a book whose spine he cracks whenever he’s lost for words when writing on fashion. He lulls us through decades of discourse with a sensory rhythm, totally unique to his writing style. Poetic. Though Dal might call this a misnomer. “A lot of people have mistakenly called my work poetry and me a poet, I’m neither of these things,” he tells me. I rebut.
Cheap Chic, a consumer guide book written by fashion fanatics Carol Troy and Caterine Milinaire, was published in New York in 1975. For Dal, it’s the gospel-esque directory for enjoying fashion with an inherently sustainable attitude that celebrates seasonless simplicity and self-acceptance while promoting thrift and repair.
And it’s a prescient guide for today. “Not just because it urged women to be more economic with the time they spend – on indeed, waste – thinking about clothes,” he writes, “but in its lobbying against needless, seasonal consumption and knackered trends.”
It was in an interview with the designer Christophe Lemaire at his Rue de Poitou shop in Paris that Dal was first introduced to Cheap Chic. On the Eurostar home, he ordered his own battered copy for £77.09. “It was a floppy old first edition covered in scribbles, far from pristine,” Dal tells me, over a coffee. “I don’t really like pristine books, I like to know that someone’s had fun with it.”
Fourteen years on, and the book and its coverstar, a “go-getting, hip-cocking, denim-clad” Jerry Hall remain integral to Dal’s professional life as a writer and thinker, and lecturer at CSM, where I meet him in the University’s vast chamber between classes.
“The photography is all wonderful; the typesetting is great,” he says, sipping his flat white while silencing an incoming call. “What it was saying was unpretentious but very clear. It didn’t talk down to anybody, which fashion writing can. It had a kind of authenticity and slight naivety to it, but I think that’s what makes it so charming. What it was essentially saying was: have fun but don’t be an idiot, you know, don’t lose yourself in it.”
“Personal style over fads. Intelligent and measured consumption. A focus on needs, not wants.” A pragmatic, easy and prudent philosophy. “Less interested in the Xanadu of Paris couture and more in the reality of what people were wearing to work or when they picked their kids up from school,” he writes.
Dal feels as though fashion today is confused, overcomplicated. He finds himself increasingly tired of the dispassionate ways it plays out, where analysis is lacklustre or lost to meaningless noise and terminology is loosely or inappropriately applied to alleviate anxieties. “The images, the shows, the clothes, the conversations that fashion facilitates, produces and inspires has become intertwined with a political testimony that is often second hand and hotly disingenuous.”
“Somewhere, it feels we’ve lost a grip on fashion’s carnal limits,” he writes.
Fashion has come a long way from the symbol of class and snobbism it used to be. Now it is an abundant tool that (mostly) welcomes all. But with such abundance, comes haste and a throwaway culture where each piece might only be worn once before it is discarded to a mountain of garments in Atacama or donated to a country where its presence is detrimental to local textile manufacturing. Fashion might have changed, but it’s confused; it’s confusing.
Products, advertised by people who we aspire to be like, are offered to us as a means for self-improvement. If we buy into this thing, even if this thing is relatively subversive, we’re conforming to a standard of sorts that we deem desirable. In doing so, we’re refurbishing ourselves. “Like anyone who was a teenager in the mid-nineties, I was raised in a culture always trying to upgrade myself,” Dal tells me, from Bedford’s River Island to Yves’ Rive Gauche. “The commodification of our insecurity is really quite scary.”
In 2001, a show called ‘What Not To Wear’ aired on British television. Hosted by presenters Trinny Woodal and Susannah Constantine, the show, which Dal feels sat at the nexus of “matronly harassment and gung-ho high camp”, was about amending fashion faux pas. “It presented the bleak truth of fashion as something eternally wedged between self-hate and self-worship,” he tells me. “With its clipped camaraderie and capitalist Chutzpah, What Not To Wear commits to the notion of self-improvement as an act of bolshy benevolence.”
It was the opposite of Cheap Chic, which encouraged women to study themselves in the mirror and celebrate what they saw. “What Not To Wear was what my generation got instead of Cheap Chic.”
“We ought to seek a fashion – a style – that is ordered, opulent chaos. That lets you get on with being a real living person. Part memoir, part memorandum,” Dal writes. Part memoir, part memorandum, much like his book.
Dal is interested in the development of style, particularly other peoples’. “You might read Cheap Chic and feel like you need a uniform to wear every single day, you might want to find out what works for you, or decide to mend and repair as a revolutionary act.” Cheap Chic provides a framework for approaching this wild, anxiety inducing, and wasteful thing that, in some way or other, we all engage with.
“I don’t like wearing lots of clothes. One jacket, one jumper, these – that’s enough,” he pinches at the breast of his charcoal coloured vintage army overalls. “I also don’t like spending lots of time looking in the mirror. I want it to be quick.” Simple and classic. Classics are clothes that last. The marvellous Fran Lebowitz, as referenced by Troy, Milinaire and Chodha (for the sake of consistency, but Dal for amiability), epitomises this sartorial simplicity, whose personal style – or uniform – they coin, quite aptly, ‘grouchy simplicity’.
“I also like things that don’t give too much away. You don’t know my political leanings, you don’t know whether I’m a vegetarian or not, or how I feel about the atrocities happening in the world. I’m not announcing everything through what I’m wearing.”
Let’s think about performance and perception. “If we talk about consumption (amongst normal people, not people who are loaded and have infinite access to things); the more stuff, the greater the barrier and the distance there is between the actual person wearing those clothes and what we perceive about them. I think fashion can get in the way.” So clothing, as a form of expression, can actually end up blanketing the self? “I think it can perpetuate the confusion,” he confers. It’s harder to make assumptions about people from what they’re wearing, which is fine, but if fashion is a tool for self-expression, what, if anything, are we saying about ourselves? It’s not just “who am I?” but “who else can I be?”
With social media, we’re so aware of what celebs are doing at any given moment. “Whilst I understand, I can’t help finding it a little weird when you start revering celebrities for their ‘own style’, because their style is erratic and ever-changing. They all have stylists, even for getting a coffee. That needs to be better understood by everybody.”
“Young people might look at Kendal and be loving her minimalist moment. So they go out and get all this stuff. Okay, now she’s in Versace, so they have to go and get all that. What celebs wear changes every week. We get gagged about Zendaya but she didn’t choose that, it’s part of a bigger kind of performance.”
Could the lack of personal style displayed by the superstars promote the multiform and perpetuate our impulsivity when it comes to shopping? Stop, take a minute. Think long term. Why am I buying this? Am I buying it because I think I need it or because I need it? Do I want it because I think everyone expects me to have it? Is this a fleeting trend or is it something I will wear until it falls to pieces? When will it fall to pieces? Oh sh*t, the quality sucks, it might fall to pieces after one wear.
“Expression of the self should absolutely be exploratory. We should all try new things and we should all make mistakes too.” Dal worries that social media could stunt this personal growth. “If you start getting social clout for looking and being a certain type of thing, then you won’t change that or continue to develop.” Life on livestream. A feedback loop. A digital reward system in which the outputting of content is fuelled by a currency of likes. “Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or whatever – they’re all different versions of you. I wonder whether this has ramped up the production of clothing,” he says, urging introspection and discovery into oneself at baseline, before asking me: “Who have you dressed as today? Your Instagram or your LinkedIn?”
There’s a lot of noise in the industry. “Fashion shows streamed on TikTok; videos of models telling you what their favourite colour is; a Creative Director being asked what they had for lunch.” Somehow and somewhere, we have to find meaning. “We need a space carved out for writers to have an impact. Real journalism. I don’t mean like “we went to the shows because you couldn’t” or “next season is about this…”. I need someone to tell me what the picture means today, why and how I should engage with it.”
Dal remains infectiously positive. Admittedly, I can be quite the opposite but I agree with everything he says. “It’s fundamental to be upbeat about this stuff. As soon as you start being too sceptical, you’ve lost it,” he tells me. Oops. “Particularly with sustainability and the ethical challenges surrounding production and consumption.” I nod in agreement, though a part of me feels a little cynicism is sensible. “I think a lot of the ways that young people are asked to engage with this subject ends up making them feel like absolute sh*t, rather than telling them: Right, you have the power. Yes, you! USE IT.”
“It’s a more effective way of teaching to show people first hand. Watching a video of all these horrendous things happening in the world, from the safety of my life here, I get it, but I don’t get it because it’s not there.” While the internet might open our eyes to events far and wide, seeing it on a 1080px by 566px screen before watching the next episode of Euphoria does make it a little more Black Mirror than appalling, alarming, awful, abominable, sickening, happening right now, f*ck, F*CK, what can I do to help?
“When times are tough, deciding what to wear shouldn’t be,” he writes. “We want clothes to say too much. The best way to understand fashion – and to address its many problems – is to respect what it isn’t.” You gotta keep your head straight about clothes.