Last night we kicked off our Citizen Femme salon series at The Twenty Two in Mayfair, a members’ club so pretty it nearly upstaged the guest list, which is saying something, because the room was full of effortlessly stylish and interesting women.
The topic on the table was the interaction of style and travel: how the modern woman dresses for departure lounges, the fashion house and hotel collaborations, and the choreography of looking put-together. Naturally, my mind went straight to the school gate, because somewhere in the last decade or so, the school run became a catwalk. Fashion, it seems, has conquered the final frontier: paparazzi shots of glamorous mothers dropping their children off are now a genuine sub-genre of tabloid photography, the 2020s answer to the celebrity baby-bump snap. There is a woman at every gate who has not let motherhood delay her blow-dry, who arrives in the latest “it” bag and heels merely dialled down from stiletto to kitten, hair achieved somewhere in the ninety-second gap between wake-up and walk-out. I am, most mornings, doing extremely well if I’ve managed to brush my own teeth and get two small, uncooperative humans into their uniforms with matching shoes on the correct feet.
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Sure, I make an effort if I’m dashing off to a meeting straight after drop-off – nobody wants to arrive looking like you fought a duvet and lost. But the idea that the gate itself deserves a look? That’s new. And it’s ruthless: turn up in gym kit and you’ll be met with a chorus of “oh you’re so good, I could never,” delivered by women who run actual half-marathons and know exactly what they’re doing. The competitive spirit doesn’t stop at outfits, either – who’s started Mandarin, who’s swimming like a dolphin, whose four-year-old is apparently reading Proust. School has been back a matter of days and already there’s a definite hum of competitiveness in the air, oddly terrifying given the contestants can’t yet tie their own shoelaces.
Which is, in the end, what stuck with me longest from last night. Because the smartest thing anyone said in that beautiful room wasn’t about the right bag or the right blow-dry, it was that the outfit is only ever armour, and some mornings you don’t need it. The woman at the gate in full editorial mode isn’t doing anything wrong. But neither is the one in yesterday’s gym kit, hair unwashed, offering her kid a hand instead of a headline.
Style and travel, style and motherhood, they’re really the same conversation. Both are about arriving somewhere as yourself, not as a performance of yourself. The best-dressed woman at drop-off isn’t necessarily the one in the “it” bag. She’s the one who isn’t thinking about the bag at all, because she’s actually there, three minutes late, hair still damp, fully present for the only audience that actually matters.
That’s the real outfit worth getting right.
Sheena
Any Questions or Tips to add?