Mancky

Throughout the 1980s, I admired second-hand fake “leopard-skin” coats but never found one which passed muster. There was always something not quite right…. a bad fit, too frumpy, tatty, smelly, or just too trashy…

Then, around 1990, I stumbled across the perfect specimen in Jive Hive on Oxford Road (near Johnnie Roadhouse) priced £25. I only had a fiver on me but, convincing the shopkeeper to take a deposit, I hurried off to get the rest.

Returning within the half-hour, I was dismayed to find someone else parading in front of the mirror wearing MY coat! Complaining loudly, I prepared to retrieve my prize by any means necessary… Evidently, the deposit-taking shopkeeper had disappeared (with my fiver?) leaving her colleague ignorant of the deal. Luckily, a hand-written receipt supported my claim, allowing me to exit Jive Hive a few moments later clutching a fat carrier bag. I felt like the cat who got the cream… only just though.

During the next few years, I pounced on every opportunity to give my leopard coat an outing. It was too dramatic for daywear (seeming to demand make-up) but perfect for nights out during the cold months. Once out, however, I often felt unable to take it off - I was convinced that my coat was such an incredibly desirable object that someone would steal it - and this interfered with the joy of ownership somewhat. I would avoid wearing it to venues where there wasn’t a cloakroom… and even when there was, I would eye the cloakroom attendant suspiciously as I handed it over. A friend christened it my Crimewatch coat - not because I watched over it anticipating a crime, but because she thought I looked like a prostitute when I wore it. My friend was training to be a solicitor… but I didn’t credit her opinion with any professional insight.

I met my husband in 1995; we got a mortgage in 1997 (in Whalley Range, much to my friend’s amusement*) and thereafter we went out much less, having very little spare money. After our first baby was born I was quite depressed for a while. I coped better with our subsequent new arrivals but sadly I became quite fat.

Fat and forty. Suddenly fake leopard seemed like a really bad idea. I imagined myself wearing the coat at the school gate (where else did I go?) and the pitying looks which would ensue. What would other parents think? That I was a fantasist, deranged, or perhaps even an old tart?

So one day I bundled my beautiful coat into a black bin-bag and donated it to Age Concern, along with satin shorts, various mini skirts and some gorgeous brightly coloured tights. Driven to drastic action by my own age concerns, I never-the-less hoped sincerely that someone else would fall in love with my coat and that they would embark on a fabulous new life together…

What an idiot!

This wasn’t just a moment of madness, but a prolonged phase, during which I lost all confidence in my appearance and imagined the future would only get worse. By the time I escaped the spiral of despair, my wardrobe was practically empty.

Over several years since becoming a parent I found that I had completely shed my original identity in the false belief that I no longer had any claim on it; something to do with my own preconceptions about motherhood and age… bound up with our culture’s obsession with youth… and my terror of looking like “mutton dressed as lamb”, a phrase frequently used by my mother to damning effect.

My wake-up call came unexpectedly a few years back when Radio 4′s PM programme requested that listeners send in photos of themselves. I selected a picture of myself and the kids in which I was only visible from the neck down… I don’t know why exactly.

The very first photo which presenter Eddie Mair described on-air was the same; sent in by a mother, it showed her from the neck down with a baby on her lap. The baby was now grown-up, she said, but she still felt that this picture best represented her life. I recoiled in horror… initially with disgust at my own lack of originality… but later with a sense of having wandered unwittingly into an alien landscape full of headless women, only to discover that I had become one of them!

Unhappy Baby In Carriage, Headless Lady Behind for sale on Ebay

The Word Or Woman-Bird by Max Ernst

I have since tried to replace my coat using Ebay… but buying ‘vintage’ clothes on-line is tricky… most of my purchases have been sold on. I have found that many coats made in the 1950s and 60s have ‘bracelet length’ sleeves, which do me no favours, as a habitual non-glove wearer with washing-up hands. I can also tell you that the best way to gauge the quality of a fake fur coat on-line is by seeing pictures of the lining; leopard print’s high contrast pattern is misleadingly photogenic.

Lister Katmandu (by Listers of Bradford) and La France Safari (by Riegel of South Carolina) are the the most consistently good brands of vintage faux leopard fur I have found. Bet Lynch’s coat in the picture above is almost certainly Lister Katmandu, which was made from mohair and acrylic and is apparently fireproof and mothproof. Great British brand Astraka used various faux fur suppliers; my original coat was, I believe, made from Bri-Lon Furleen, manufactured by British Nylon Spinners and sold under license by Astraka.

It only dawns on me now, that by reclaiming the right to wear faux leopard over forty, I am blindly embracing the cliche of the “strong but unsophisticated northern woman”. In attempting to rebel against the stereotype, I may end up simply fulfilling it. I need to learn not to hate that idea… it’s better than being headless.

Being female in Manchester = No Win Situation.

*Whalley Range is/was a notorious red light district.