A Good Dress

On Secrets, Stories, Rockstars & Hemlines

A friend of mine read an advance copy of my book and told me it made him think of a lovely vintage dress with all its stories gathered and sewn into it. I loved that description.

No one walks for pleasure in Los Angeles, certainly not up steep streets anyway, unless it’s a formal hardcore exercise mission or hiking expedition. But being a crazy Australian, one crazy hot day I was trudging up the steep incline of Kirkwood Drive where we were subletting a friend’s house in Laurel Canyon, dragging my recalcitrant, exhausted young sons behind me, carrying my high heel sandals with a rather lovely thrift store vintage floral frock sweatily clinging to me, when a passing car slowed down and a woman stuck her head out the window and yelled ‘I love your dress!’ down the street at me. ‘Thanks!’ I shouted back in surprise. ‘Hey’ she hollered, ‘I’ve got two boys, you’ve got two boys, wanna hang out?’.

‘Sure!’ I bellowed back. She’d pulled up at her place by then and we met up as her family were heading inside. She was wearing a lovely old floral dress. She told me ‘My boyfriend gets so embarrassed when I do this but I’m from New York, doesn’t bother me! He’s English, he’s a musician, he hates its when I yell. But how else are you gonna meet people round here? We don’t know anyone! Let’s hang out with the kids!’ Laurel Canyon was known for it relaxed grooviness. Not to mention its lovely ladies in flowery dresses.

I told her I was a musician too, I loved her dress and my boys would love to see some other kids. So we hung out a few times and now we’re internet friends on opposite sides of the world, and I can clearly see our aesthetic tastes are incredibly similar. Oh, and her shy English boyfriend was Dave Davies from The Kinks, the sweetest humblest guy you could ever hope to meet (and a prolific walker, in the English tradition). Once they came by for a cup of tea when we lived on the other side of town and when he picked up my little acoustic parlour guitar and had a strum I was struck by what a remarkable thing it was to have one of greatest guitarists in the world casually blessing my little axe with his iconic fingertips and how funny that the moment occurred due to a similar taste in vintage dresses and floral patterns, leading to the recognition of a kindred spirit. Dave is of course also an exceptionally stylish fellow.

Dave Davies being exceptionally stylish in the 60s

It’s not the first time either. A little while back I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in many years but had always adored, and I asked her if she remembered how we met, because I couldn’t. She said she remembered well. It was a party, and she saw my dress first. She says she immediately knew that the wearer of the dress was going to be her kind of person. She asked a mutual friend to introduce us and we hit it off immediately. That was thirty years ago and we still get on like a house on fire. A good dress has magnetic powers. It knows things. In a strange coincidence, that friend’s sister had been good friends in San Francisco with the friend I made in Laurel Canyon. It’s such a small world.

The Who’s rock opera film ‘Tommy’ was released in the United States on my fifth birthday. I watched it on the still very new and exciting invention, the VCR player, around nine or ten years old in a small, enclosed room with a bunch of adults who were passing big joints around, back in the time before anyone cared about kids being exposed to secondhand smoke of any kind. I was so excited to see it because Tina Turner was in it, who I utterly adored, probably because her concert was the first I attended as a rock’n’roll toddler, setting me on a path of no return. I later mastered ‘The Madison’, the bizarrely Australia only choreographed dance sequence sensation which was made up to accompany Tina’s hit single ‘Nutbush City Limits’. I won a competition performing it against a group of ‘real teenagers’ at the Royal Easter Show, which was probably the highlight of my short life at that point. As far as I was concerned, Tina was the Queen of everything and could do no wrong. But I hadn’t met the Acid Queen. Or Cousin Kevin. Or Uncle Ernie. The casual cruelty employed against poor little deaf, dumb and blind Tommy by all these evil adults was too much for my delicate, sensitive, over imaginative and almost certainly stoned little girl brain and I had my own full-blown-uncontrollable-meltdown-shaking-crying-freakout and had to be removed and assured the movie wasn’t real and it had a happy ending before being tucked up in bed. My brother also saw ‘Tommy’ aged nine, at the cinema, and also had a freak out and had to leave. I looked the clip up on YouTube to jog my traumatised memory and laughed to see the first comment was ‘I was only thirteen when I first saw this. I have been in therapy ever since’. Same, dude. In an interesting aside, both David Bowie and Tiny Tim were also considered for the Acid Queen role. It’s not hard to conjure. The magnificent Ann Margret has also been deeply embedded in my psyche since that fateful night. I’ve never watched the film again and have been afraid of musicals ever since but I’ve covered a lot of Ann Margret and Tina Turner songs and been somewhat obsessed with both of them - and their outfits - ever since.

Poor Tommy with Ann Margret… what is she doing to him???

Tina Turner as The Gypsy, The Acid Queen in ‘Tommy’

Ann Margret in my dream evening dress, scarring my psyche forever

Tina Turner as the Acid Queen, welcoming me to my nightmares

A dear friend of my mama Mouse worked on the road with Tina Turner for many years in the 90s, taking care of her costumes and her wigs (lovingly referred to as ‘washing the dogs’). Tina was a prodigious shopper and also very generous with giving away her castoffs. Knowing my love for Tina, Jules once grabbed a custom pink rubber zip-up mini-dress from the throw-out pile, made by Azzedine Alaia, The King of Cling - though without a tag or label - that just didn’t work for Tina anymore, for me. Their relationship was legendary and he often designed both on and off stage wear especially for her.  At a private performance at the Palace of Versailles in 1990, Tina launched into ‘I Don’t Want To Lose You’ with the introduction ‘I’m going to do this one for my boyfriend, I call him Azzedine’. 

I squeezed myself into it but it was pretty obscene, even for me, who at that point was reasonably shameless about accidentally flashing my knickers if a dress I loved was dangerously short. I went out in it a couple of times but I felt like a cheap human sausage and finally had to face the fact that even though the dress was by a famous designer and belonged to my beloved Tina Turner, it was not doing me any favours.

Azzedine & Tina - my dress was a similar style without the floaty bits or the cutouts, in fleshy pink

Every now and then when I’ve needed some cash I’ve attempted doing a market stall, selling vintage clothes and the like. I took Tina’s pink rubber number to the Surry Hills market with me, hung it prominently with a sign stuck on it that said ‘Belonged to Tina Turner. $150’. I thought that was a pretty great deal and anyone would jump at it. Cut to the end of a long hot day where I’d as usual spent more money than I’d earned, and Tina’s dress was still blowing in the wind. A rather imperious fashionista came along and scoffed at the idea that it belonged to Tina but offered me $20 anyway. I was completely offended but I do not drive a good bargain and I was too hot and over it all to care much by this point. Not wanting to pack it up and take it home again, I reluctantly agreed. She looked the dress over and found a tiny imperceptible point of damage and said she’d only pay $15, take it or leave it. Fine, I agreed through clenched teeth, already mentally berating myself. Then she rustled through her purse and came out with $12. I thought I had fifteen she said, but I’ve only got twelve. C’mon thats OK isn’t it? Its second hand, and it IS damaged. I just closed my eyes and held out my hand for the pittance and she swanned off with Tina Turner’s Custom Made Pink Rubber Azzedine Alaia Zip Up Mini Dress for $12. Even a Swedish trading card with a picture of Tina in a red dress sells for over $100! Though the whole experience was a little hard to swallow, the part that left the most sour taste was that she was that she had absolutely no appreciation for the history of the dress.

A good dress can outlive its original owner, passing through many fingertips like sands through the hourglass, making appearances in many mirrors with different faces adorning it. But a good dress should always move on to a good new home where it’s appreciated not just for its beauty, but for the secrets and stories woven into it, giving it the kind of glow money just can’t buy.

PS: All my secrets and stories available for preorder here - Lovers Dreamers Fighters - out Feb 16! I’m hoping to be able to make book launch/party announcements soon but with the world the way it is right now, we just have to wait on that… in the meantime please get your pre-orders in cos apparently this means a lot .. and share/subscribe to Loose Connections to help me spread the word, one reader at a time!