Journals and blogs discussion

I am absolutely passionate about towering high heels, stockings, and garter-belts (which we used to call suspenders back in my English youth)… These outfits transport me right back to those days in the ’50s, when I’d get a flutter of excitement for no apparent reason just seeing suspenders or the tops of stockings peeking out at a tea-shop, café, bank, or on the pavement… There were matronly ladies with ample busts corseted up tight, and bras visible through modest blouses or under the armholes of summer dresses… My first school had a fairly large white building next door that contained a café—it felt like a hybrid between a roadside canteen and an espresso bar…. We were somehow convinced it was ‘bad’ territory… It was where the Teds gathered, along with some Rockers and a group of women who were clearly ‘the bad girls’. As I said, this was the 50s, so they wore high heels and fine denier stockings, suspenders showing through tight skirts, frilly barmaid blouses, fitted sweaters, beehive hairdos, lots of makeup… and they smoked. Interestingly, because it’s the ’50s in my mind, everything is black-and-white. The thing is, even though I was only 10 or 11 (and an incredibly shy, inexperienced boy, completely unworldly) I found them thrilling, and although I didn’t know the word ‘slutty’ back then, that’s precisely what they were… Who would have guessed that six decades later I’d be dressing in high heels and all those other accessories myself, trying my best to emulate them? jiji Xx