Emma’s uniform is a plain blue shirt—she has many, many blue shirts—and a pale pink pair of jeans from Raey. She’s great on basics, like cashmere jumpers from the men’s section at Uniqlo, and tends to stick to your typical minimalist’s colour palette of grey, navy and black. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t do pattern—she has a borderline obsession with Jeanne Damas and her blossom-covered dresses from Rouje — but when she does venture out in something spotty or stripy everything else is pared-back. She doesn’t pile on jewellery, doesn’t wear jazzy socks apart from on the sofa and doesn’t do “mad” things like style dresses over trousers. I recently made her a necklace out of tiny beads. When I consulted her boyfriend on what colour he thought she’d like he paused and then said earnestly, “Do you have any in black?”
We're all about being bold and brave this month on Who What Wear UK (a mantra we will undoubtedly carry on throughout the year/our lives, okay?) but we thought about how being bold and brave could be visually displayed in the most obvious way: twins. The truth is being bold and brave can mean that you're a minimalist trying out a bright colour for once just as much as it can be that you're the second coming of Diana Vreeland. So we asked fashion journalist Natalie Hammond (and her twin sister) to explain what it's like being so similar and yet so very different…
There’s a very easy way to tell my twin sister and I apart for those with keen powers of observation. It’s not the fact that she has a centre parting or that my face is slightly more heart-shaped. Or that I have bigger feet and she got much better GCSE results. It’s our clothes.
I’m probably not a bold dresser compared to dyed-in-the-wool maximalists like Iris Apfel, Lucinda Chambers, Anna Dello Russo and Susanna Lau, but my wardrobe is definitely, shall we say, fruity compared to my sister’s.
I’m more from the maximalist school of thought. We must have made a pact in the womb about our clothes. I would wear colours bright enough to warrant sunglasses (Le Specs’s Outta Love pair in cow-print, please) and she would dress like an English Jane Birkin. Another French femme, Coco Chanel, once quipped that you should get dressed, scrutinise the results in the mirror and remove one item off before leaving the house. I take the opposite approach, slipping on rings until my fingers are clustered with gold and adding neckerchiefs, brooches, hair clips and garments that are surplus to requirement, like trousers, to perfectly “finished” outfits. Emma characterises my style as, “busy with five necklaces on top”.
Perhaps it was less a pact and more a reaction to being trussed-up in matching outfits as babies. Parents of twins usually have the good sense to buy two of everything. We had complementary baby-gros, leggings, teeny-weeny sweatshirts, puffy jackets and Forever Friends pyjamas. Things changed when we were about seven. One of my favourite photographs of our family was taken when my parents were going to a black tie dinner. Dad’s in a tux, mum’s in a sleeveless black evening gown and Emma and I are in pyjamas—a silky nightie for me and a mangy T-shirt with dalmatians on the front for Emma.
A few years later we started modelling our clothes on famous pop culture duos of the time. Betty and Veronica from the Archie comic series was a favourite and, naturally, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were the mothership. I had scrapbooks dedicated to what I like to call Mary-Kate’s tarot card reader phase when she wore three scarves draped down her tiny frame and enough jewellery jangling around her wrists and neck to fill a treasure chest. Emma prefers Ashley’s wardrobe of oversized shirts and sleek A-line skirts. When I asked what she liked about her clothes, the word she chose was “plain”.
The reason I take comfort in being a confident dresser—clashing prints together, wearing things that aren’t traditionally “flattering” and generally not having much of a rule book—is that I don’t always feel confident in day-to-day life. My clothes might be extrovert, but my personality tends towards the opposite. So although I embarrass easily when someone compliments an outfit and immediately demur, I like being known as the person who’s fearless in the face of things like clogs, flares and combat trousers. I don’t care if you don’t care about clothes, but I do think they should make you feel happy—and my happy place is “busy”.
Opening image: Getty
Original ArticleFashion
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