The Cuddle, the Twiddle, the Dangle...why do women infantilise themselves?

Updated: 15:34 EST, 11 April 2009

It beggars belief. A cover line on the new issue of Vogue screams helpfully: ‘The new way to carry your bag.’ Oooh, really? Sod world hunger and the recession, let’s see what it says inside. Apparently, there are not one but four new ways to carry a handbag.

There is ‘The Scramble’, as executed by Kate Moss. She ‘haphazardly grips an evening clutch, chains wrapped around like a messy boatman’s knot’.

Then there is ‘The Cuddle’, as demonstrated by model Agyness Deyn. Yes, you guessed it, she cuddles her bag, as if she were a toddler and it a teddy bear.

The Scramble: Kate Moss 'haphazardly grips an evening clutch, chains wrapped around like a messy boatman's knot', according to Vogue

There is ‘The Twiddle’ (Keira Knightley apparently showed off this particular innovation); it is quite easy because you just twirl it a bit.

And there is ‘The Dangle’, seen performed on the red carpet (where else?) by Chloe Sevigny. She apparently had ‘an over-sized, silk Louis Vuitton envelope casually scrunched in one hand, in the manner one would hold a McDonald’s takeaway’. As if Vogue readers would know what a mass-produced hamburger is.

The feature goes on to describe the bag bacchanalia of someone with several hyphenated names whose vintage Vuitton Speedy Sac is ‘free-floating, unzipped  and stuffed under her arm, inside were notepads, pencils, euros, all mashed together – no purse, no pretence, no fiddling’. 

I swear all of the above is part of a completely serious article. It is not an April Fool, and not remotely ironic.

It seems women these days are not only supposed to look like children, with big eyes and gangly limbs and smooth, poreless skin, they are supposed to think like infants, too.

I had tea with the CEO of one of the world’s best-known fashion brands last week, and challenged him on this very subject. He wheeled out the same old platitudes: fashion has always been about youth, perfection, thinness.

Everyone in the fashion industry – which is plummeting faster than any other, having grown too quickly and become too greedy – wheels out this line of thinking when challenged, but it isn’t true. I have just opened an issue of Vogue from September 1958, and there, photographed by Helmut Newton, was page after page of the most famous icon of her day: Mrs Exeter.

She had grey hair. She had obviously never had plastic surgery and she looked every elegant inch her age. As Vogue said at the time: ‘She is approaching 60, and doesn’t look a day younger, a fact she accepts.’ Young women in the post-war years looked up to those in their 50s and 60s, the only ones who could remember what being glamorous and well-dressed was like.

Mrs E didn’t really shop, either, not as we do today, endlessly, as if it were a religion (I heard last week that Cheryl Cole, having been deprived of shops while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, blew £10,000 at Pret-a-Porter on her return). Instead, with the credit card still in the distant future, Mrs E carefully chose her very few clothes for their wearability and durability.

She was not a real person, but was represented by a succession of older models. But how much better did Mrs E look than Jane Fonda, also in her 60s, does today.

I find it staggering that an actress who discarded her sex kitten persona to become known as Hanoi Jane, and made outspoken films such as the China Syndrome, now rolls around in her beach house in an anti-ageing skincare advert, simpering like an idiot and sniffing flowers.

In the Vogue of 1958, there was not a single ad for anti-ageing creams, diets, plastic surgery or hair dye. Not one. Women were featured exercising, but they were doing stuff like skiing and sailing, not visiting the gym.

This column is a Part Two of the one I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the paucity of articles in women’s magazines on self-defence, rape awareness – anything intelligent, really – and the fact these mags, desperate to attract a slice of the shrinking advertising spend, have become nothing more than Press releases.

The next day, a leading glossy cancelled an interview with me to coincide with the publication of my new book (about my love affair not with a man but with a horse; you see, we all have something to sell). Oh dear. I had thought the women who work on these rags don’t read newspapers.

As the recession kicks in, fear is our biggest enemy. Women will increasingly be infantalised by the very people supposed to be on our side because, let’s face it, you have to be pretty stupid to spend £2,000 on a Vuitton anything.

People will become even more afraid to stick their heads above the parapet.