UK: There is little women find less attractive than a heterosexual man who knows about clothes, says Celia Walden.
15th October 2010
It happened again the other day. I wandered into a women’s clothes shop to find the place strewn with unclaimed men. They were cluttering up the aisles, lolling unhappily around the entrances to the fitting rooms and reluctantly inching credit cards from their wallets at the tills. They were sitting in the armchairs designed to lessen their agony and staring with glazed eyes at their dithering partners (“The red or the black? Or maybe I should try on the blue?”).
As with wayward dogs and their owners, I don’t blame the dog – I blame the owner. Leave men at home or tie them to a lamp-post outside, but spare them the misery of the high street store – and us the unnecessary traffic. If you think that your husband or boyfriend finds it titillating to watch you emerge, Julia Roberts-like, from your curtained enclave in a series of coquettish outfits, you’ve been watching too many rom-coms. For them, the reality is hours spent doing up zips and seeking out ever larger sizes as the house music rages on. And when you do wear that LBD for the first time, it’ll only provoke memories of purdah in the bowels of some Oxford Street emporium.