Grayson's Rise and Fall of the Default Man - this is a no suit situation.

I have just read Grayson Perry’s The Rise and Fall of the Default Man. With the picture in my mind of Grayson’s wild dresses that look like a one of those really fancy bouquets with all the different colours of cellophane wrapped round a hot house of flowers - his discussion of ‘suits’ got me thinking.

I have always been fascinated by our personal costumes – why we don’t call our day-to-day outfits ‘costuming’ I have never known. As it all is – whether we wear the same thing every day to try and look, well, the same every day – or whether we mix it up. Here are three hugely broad ways to generalize UK costuming.

1.    An outfit which is easy to apply again and again and explains a purpose – so uniforms really, but these include suits (THE SUIT) through to a specific choice of band t-shirt, jeans and converse trainers.
2.    A particular style of dressing that allows for a range of dress but does have rules. This can be defined by class, an upper class woman thinks her twinset and pearls is original while she can happily fit in, or it can be burlesque-chic – that kinda 50s look with red lips and tattoos. K Middy is a good example of this; she in essence wears the same dress designed for a conservative voter with a slim waist over and over again. (The one style of dressing all the time is K Middy, not burlesque-chic, although, lord would it be a sweet relief if she did move out of dullsville.)
3.    Someone who literally just wears what they want when they want both regardless and in regard to current trends. They just dress. These are the kind of people when you meet them the second and third time you think you’ve met them before but aren’t sure as they are wearing something that totally counters that first meet. These are ALSO the kind of people when you first see them in jeans and then in a dress and hair pulled up to the sky – you may comment – ‘wow – you look great’ as you had already put them in the converse/skinny jean box at the first meeting.

I think I fit into number 3. YES EVERYONE IS ALWAYS SAYING ‘WOW YOU LOOK GREAT’. They’re not, but I do get surprised looks weekly when I’ve scrubbed up.

Grayson talks about suits for about a third of The Rise and Fall of the Default Man – and that’s where I’m getting. Now, luckily, at the bold wee age of 28, I feel 100% comfortable (83% of the time) in my own skin. This has heightened since I quit the ‘day job’ and chose to run my own life, I have left a system – and though in the arts – a system run very much by men in suits.

Never have I been interested in wearing a suit during my professional life. There is ONE exception to this rule, when I was tired of posing in front of paintings for the papers and considered dressing as Janelle Monae to see if they still wanted ‘girl in suit.’ I didn’t do this. I wore jeans and a parka to muse underneath a Louise Bourgeois Spider instead.

I have never worn or owned a trouser suit, a skirt suit, a grey pleaty thing – except perhaps for school uniform. I did have to wear a tight fitted skirt, shirt, tie and waistcoat when I worked in a five star hotel’s champagne bar, but that all backfired when one day the skirt was so tight I poured boiling hot coffee all over the lap of a be-suited man out for a work do.

I know that when I have strolled into meetings in a holey grey jumper over a ballet style black strappy top and a waist high, thigh high patterned orange skirt – I knew I wasn’t dressed as everyone else. My opinion may not at first have been so valuable for the Default Man and his suits – and that my lively disposition (it’s so Jane Austin no? NAUGHTY LYDIA,) may not initially have endeared me as grey and black could've sans orange and eyeliner – but I was always clean and smart and I was never going to dress that part. I had turned up to the interview for said job in bottle-green boots and a navy dress with a white trim that could only be described as circus-cum-sailor-chic. I also had badly damaged bottle blonde hair.

When I met the Queen and Prince Phillip backed into me at a visit to my work, I wore a black polkadot knee length dress from brick lane, hair spray, eyeliner and bright turquoise heels that I’d grabbed for £7 in Miss Selfridge four years previous. The Queen didn’t ask me to leave for not wearing a suit, nor did the special ops guys I was chatting to as we showed press photographers (all requested to wear suits) around.

I sometimes feel lucky to inhabit my world where I don’t need to, and refuse to dress in a ‘predictable unfussy, feminised version of the male look,’ but hopefully the more meetings and train carriages I sit in working – the less it will matter – and the more people will join me, dressing in WILD variations of some style day-to-day.

Yesterday, on the train down to London, in clashing red ALARM rimmel lipstick and a fluorescent pink jumper from H&M (teamed with skinny jeans and converse) messy hair and stationed between a battalion of men in suits traveling to London for work - ME TOO GUYS, ME TOO – the man next to me offered to get my case down. Now, as a dickhead (not a feminist, as a dickhead, refusing politeness isn’t a feminist action) normally I would say no, but he was in a good spot to grab my bag so I thanked him, and he passed it to me. ‘Woah, that’s light for a mumble mumble…’ I grinned, knowing I had heard what he said, ‘light for a what?’ I questioned. ‘Light for a female’s bag’ he replied. I won’t tell you what I said, I’m sure you can imagine, but I did smile and I did think to myself – ‘well, yes, running my own company and tottering to London for work does open me up to a whole world of really light weight costumes – and not a suit in sight.’