Gert goes Vogueish

Gert does not normally link to articles on Vogue,

but if you google Harvard study says you should shop in track pants you’ll read about a very scholarly study that found that shop assistants in high-fashion stores in Milan believed that if people were shopping in their track pants they had more money to spend.  Presumably, they concluded that the rich don’t have to try to impress.

A mixed blessing, if you sally forth in your trackies. To be taken for a rich person might be good for your amour propre, but do you really want to be the target of voracious shop assistants with their red-tipped talons clutching at your BlackBrazilian Master Card?

The article caught Gert’s  eye because in one of her as-yet unpublished books, The Lies and Life of Bella Hatherley,  fashion-conscious Mummy says of her daughter’s psychologist:

‘She should know better, a professional woman like her.’

   ‘What?’

    ‘You know exactly what I mean. Tracksuit pants. And that hair. No,’ she said when she saw I was opening my mouth, ‘no and no and no. I won’t have it said that I exposed my daughter to a woman like that.’

Could Mummy have been wrong?

But no.  The difference between the sturdily-elasticated ballooned-legged traditional trackpant and the artfully-distressed designer trackpant is as great as the difference between pigs’ trotters and Pieds de porc à la française. And we all know which costs more.  Chapeaux, Harvard University!