Men are 'allowed' to spend money on 'masculine' pursuits such as motorbikes without being condescended to, but women who chose to spend their own - often hard earned money - on clothes can be mocked. Yes it's a double standard. Some of the brightest women I know work in fashion. But ...
Too often I see women who've clearly put huge amounts of time and money into their outward physical appearance to attract men - for example the push-up bikini and groomed to within an inch of agony bodies on the beach ... but oddly they don't put the same amount of effort into their minds, as is clear from the lack of thought that goes into their reading material, as one male friend pointed out. Those women don't have style: they're fashion victims - the sorts of women who do strange things such as put silicone sacks into their bodies, and think that when people say "it's what's underneath that matters" they're talking about racy lingerie.
Some of Olympia Le-Tan's clutches are prettier, but if I earned enough money to buy one I'd go for this one as it's both the most versatile and the wittiest.* (Please ignore the horrific styling in the photo).
OLYMPIA LE-TAN
BRITISH SEAMEN BOOK CLUTCH
£1044 at Luisa Via Roma (A selection of different book designs is available at Net-A-Porter.)
I might have experience of British Seamen, but I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't admit to not having read the book. (For those interested in the actual book, it's available at Amazon UK and Amazon US etc - the author, David Mathew, was a Roman Catholic bishop as well as an historian).
To return to the original question, for many men brainy has always been sexy. And accessories have long provided the opportunity to express wit. Fashion comes, fashion goes - but intelligence is always in style.
Sometimes men seem to think with their little heads rather than their big heads, but not always. Take the Duke of Devonshire and his infamous menage a trois which featured in Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Kindle UK; Amazon US). Although it sounds as if the Duke was thinking with his small head in taking a mistress ... Georgiana was a rather silly girl. She wasn't involved in politics; she slept with a politician. Her love life may have been exciting, but she was not particularly interesting - certainly not according to her husband. Far more interesting was Lady Elizabeth Foster nee Hervey, the much-maligned mistress whom the Duke of Devonshire married after Georgiana's death. Thanks to Foreman's biography, Elizabeth is now universally derided.
Although Elizabeth's role as anything other than a bedroom distraction is glossed over in Foreman's biography ... my guess is that what kept the Duke interested in her was her brain and their common interests. Georgiana may have been 'fun' and had a nice selection of hats, but Elizabeth was educated and intelligent.
Edward Gibbon - of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire fame - was a huge fan of hers. She funded a translation of Horace into Italian by Molajoni. And she corrected it before publication where she thought it was inaccurate. The Iter ad Brundusium and the Aeneid were also illustrated and published thanks to her.
She was a patron of the arts as well as a great Classicist. She arranged for the Vatican to have casts of the Parthenon frieze soon after Lord Elgin brought it to London. She got involved in the post-Napoleon repatriation of works of art to Italy. And ...
Cardinal Ercole Consalvi helped her get a permit, and in December 1816 Elizabeth started to excavate, beginning with the Column of Phocas - seen here in the left foreground. Then she dug around the area, down to the Roman travertine paving. Some of her finds can be seen in the Capitoline museum, such as the porphyry column shafts.
I've heard a lot of women apologize for Georgiana, saying she was a 'product' of her age - but so was Elizabeth, and a much more interesting one (or so the Duke thought!).
Books that do sell well to the silicone sex-pots these days are often ones on how to capture a husband. Many of them seem to advise pretending to be a certain way to 'snag' a man but these days marriage is not for life ... and surely the men will divorce them as soon as they realise the fraudulence of their pretense? As a wise contemporary Hervey Lady recently reminded me: it's easy to convince a man to marry one, far harder to keep him interested enough to stay married. Lady Elisabeth Hervey clearly knew the secret to a long term relationship - engaging a man's brains. Witty beats pretty, and I suspect the very clever as well as beautiful Dr Amanda Foreman would agree.
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