Get The Look ... Reality Chic

The Age

Saturday November 22, 2008

Janice Breen Burns

Technically, uber-conservationist DrJane Goodall (pictured) ticked all the same frock boxes as Nicole Kidman, Tyra Banks, Kate Bosworth, Sarah Michelle Gellar et al before last week's Glamour magazine Women of the Year Awards in New York. Like them, she wore the requisite fancy formal floor-grazer ensemble, the "bit o' bling" (in her case, a brooch), the hairdo with a wisp or three left to wiggle nonchalantly free. (Note to slavish frockwatchers: three strands short of perfection is the celebrity stylists' "do du jour" at the mo.) But, among the hip-swinging, cheesy smiles and boom-shacka-shacka traffic up the black carpet into Carnegie Hall - you guessed it - the extraordinary DrGoodall struck a strangely sane and genuinely elegant figure. Without faffing condescendingly on about how fabulously fashionable she looked - because, frankly, she didn't - there was, nonetheless, something in the generous plunge of her personally picked tropic-sea silk skirt (four sensible centimetres off the floor) and the comfortable tuck into its waistline of her co-ordinated, cuffed sleeve blouse (modestly high, long and unapologetically bra-less), that spoke volumes about the woman within. The epitome of fashion's second rule: to be an authentic expression of the wearer. A stylist could fill clipboards with tick-lists of advice for this remarkably remarkable plain DrJane: shapewear, proper brassiere, curling tongs, hair lacquer, mature complexion cosmetics, and would probably clad her in black with silvery bling-bits borrowed from Bulgari or Winston and dagger-toe stilettos to accentuate her - now properly strapped in - willowy figure. But they didn't, and she wouldn't, thank God.

-- JANICE BREEN BURNS

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