There’s a sound that takes me straight back to childhood. Not a song, not a voice, but the click-click-click of a woman’s heels on a hard floor. Close your eyes and you can almost smell the chalk dust and floor polish, can’t you?
I’ve been thinking lately about how we learn elegance. Not from books or magazines – those come later – but from watching. From absorbing. From being a small girl surrounded by grown women who simply dressed a certain way because that was how women dressed.
When I was at primary school, every adult woman I encountered wore stockings. Every single one. My teachers, of course, in their neat frocks and sensible heels. The dinner ladies. The school secretary behind her wooden counter. My mother and her friends. The ladies at the shops. The women on the bus. There was no alternative, you see. Tights existed, but they were rather newfangled and not entirely trusted. Bare legs were for summer holidays and small children. Grown women wore stockings, full stop.
“We didn’t know we were learning anything. We were simply watching women be women.”
And so, without anyone teaching us explicitly, we learned. We learned that getting dressed was a ritual, not a rushed afterthought. We learned that a woman’s legs were meant to have a certain sheen, a certain smoothness. We learned about seams – how they should be straight, how a crooked seam was a small tragedy to be corrected immediately. We learned about the mysterious architecture of suspender belts, glimpsed occasionally when a teacher bent to help us with our letters or reached up to pull down a map.
I remember being fascinated by the tiny ritual adjustments women made throughout the day. A quick glance down to check the seams. A discreet tug at a suspender through the skirt fabric. The way they sat, the way they crossed their ankles, the care they took when climbing stairs. These were the secret choreographies of womanhood, and we watched them all, storing them away for later.
The teachers loom largest in these memories, perhaps because we spent so much time looking at them. They stood at the front of the classroom, elevated and important, and we studied them with the intensity only children possess. The way Miss So-and-so’s heels clicked differently from Mrs Such-and-such’s. The particular shade of tan or grey or barely-there nude that each one favoured. The rustle of petticoats – yes, petticoats were still very much a thing – when they moved between the desks.
We didn’t know we were learning anything. We were simply watching women be women. But those images sank deep, forming a template of feminine elegance that would stay with us forever.
“Getting dressed was a ritual, not a rushed afterthought. A woman’s legs were meant to have a certain sheen, a certain smoothness.”
I think this is why those of us who grew up in that era have such a complicated relationship with tights. They arrived like invaders, practical and convenient, and swept stockings away with brutal efficiency. By the time we were teenagers, stockings were already becoming ‘old-fashioned’. Our mothers might still wear them, but we modern girls had tights. Progress, we were told. Liberation.
And yet. Something was lost, wasn’t it? Not just the garments themselves, but everything they represented. The ritual. The care. The idea that getting dressed was worth taking time over. The quiet understanding that elegance required effort.
I wonder sometimes what today’s little girls are absorbing. What templates of womanhood are being etched into their minds as they watch the adults around them? Leggings and trainers, mostly, I suspect. Comfortable, certainly. Practical, absolutely. But elegant? I’m not so sure.
Perhaps this is just nostalgia talking. Every generation thinks the one before had more grace, more style, more something. But when I fasten my own suspenders each morning – yes, still, after all these years – I think of those teachers in their frocks and heels, clicking down corridors that smelled of floor polish, entirely unaware that they were teaching us anything at all.
They taught us everything.
