My local papers last week were crammed with page after page of school prize-giving photographs of our brightest and best holding hard-won trophies for bursaries, scholarships, sport and all-round high achievement.
Rank upon rank of neat uniforms, big-smile faces and a gratified teacher or two looking on proudly. It struck me as odd that the boys’ groups almost without exception, had identical and singularly unflattering haircuts – shaven well above the ears, flat-topped with a full fringe, they looked as if they were auditioning for bit parts in ‘Peaky Blinders’. Such is the power of popular culture. The thing is, male adolescent features are still forming, ears and noses growing apace and even drop-dead gorgeous Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy doesn’t suit such a brutalist hairstyle. These students will come back one day as mature men, see their pictures on school corridor walls – and cringe.
Looking at old photographs is reputed to engender feelings of warm nostalgia. It does anything but. Rather, a shame-making realization of serial sartorial and style disasters. Our children point and mock. “O.M.G! The hair! The clothes!” Our weak defence, “but it was fashionable at the time,” cuts no ice. Indeed the frequent use of archive photographs in local papers carries the thrice-weekly risk of being featured in the ‘Days Gone By’ page. It’s the hair that dates you. Seventies – long, worn up in elaborate loops requiring 19 hairpins to hold it in place and copious coats of lacquer, a clear but viscous liquid which settled in tiny globules, horribly reminiscent of a severe infestation of nits. My more bohemian friend peered at the world through curtains of freshly ironed hair. Eighties – marriage, motherhood and a business-like geometric wedge cut. Nineties – the ‘coupe sauvage’, staring out from under a guardsman’s shaggy busby. The clothes didn’t help. Please disremember the three-piece pinstripe trouser-suit, worn with a white Stetson hat and the Joan Collins outfit with padded shoulders and a skirt with buttons up the back so I couldn’t sit down. That was the longest wedding I was ever at.
Then there are the photographs that are a bittersweet pleasure to look at. The Loving Spouse and I in our courting days in Bridget the MG Midget that was a death trap on wheels. With the hood down it guaranteed my arrival looking as if I’d stuck my finger in an electrical socket; the annual Debating Society picnic where people brought their best china, glassware and gourmet dishes and in one case, a gas-powered candelabra to sit in a damp sheep field in Co. Donegal; the fancy dress ball where my dearest friend had to be sewn into her Lana Turner satin sheath and for want of scissors at three in the morning the Loving Spouse had to bite the stitches open. (We’re still friends.) Here’s Daughter Dear in my mother’s arms, on Auntie Mollie’s knee, ‘helping Nanny Robinson wash the dishes’ – though father pointed out there wasn’t any water in the basin, which he interpreted as a sign of things to come – an unrehearsed record of special moments that spark fond reminiscence, unlike today when every mundanity is casually recorded by the camera-obsessed.
Today the cult of the ‘selfie’ has brought us primary school kids in lipgloss and Beyoncé-style poses and the problem of ‘body issues’ in girls young as eight; sixteen-year-olds looking forty in over-sophisticated prom dresses and heavy make-up, all caterpillar eyebrows and truck-tyre lips. Contradictory messages at once laud extreme thin-ness and bosom and bottom-boosting implants. The masculine market has captured the pocket money of teen boys (reputed to rarely wash) with exclusive ranges of skincare products. Nor is the more mature woman neglected. Helen Mirren and Jane Fonda, filmed in soft focus with nary a pendant jowl between them, are peddling the use of serums to deflate elderly eyebags and fill in tramlines. Never again will we have to explain that we’re young on the inside, it’s just the outer wrapper’s got a bit creased. Today we must all be ready for our close-up.
