Saturday, September 01, 2007

Retail Heiress

When she was a girl, Pamela Myer Warrender might have been the model for Eloise, the mischievous little girl who had the run of New York’s Plaza Hotel in Kaye Thompson’s books. In Pamela’s case, however, she had an even more enticing doll’s house, the entire Myer Emporium in Melbourne, where her father, Norman Myer (later Sir Norman) was Chairman and Managing Director from 1938 until his death in 1956.

“I was passionate about the store,” she recalls on the occasion of the publication of her autobiography, Pamela: In Her Own Right (Hardie Grant, $29.95). “I’d follow my father around at night when it was being closed while he did his rounds checking on things. Quite often I used to sneak up to the kitchens where I got the best milkshakes and chicken sandwiches. My father used to say, ‘The people who work in this store are your friends. Smile.’ So I would smile at everybody. And of course that worked sometimes and it didn’t work other times!”

“Miss Myer,” as she was known then, worked during her school holidays in the store, as did her two younger brothers, Rodney and Beresford, and all their Myer cousins. Her first job was in the haberdashery department when she was thirteen. “On Fridays the store opened until 9 pm,” she writes “and my father told Mr Mathews [the manager] that I wasn’t to leave until I had the figures required for the day. To ensure this happened, I arranged a group of girls from school to bring their friends to buy handkerchiefs and hair clips. They couldn’t come all at once and they had to appear nonchalant – there was an art to the operation – but it always worked. As a reward we went off to Hillier’s Milk Bar in Collins Street for a chocolate marshmallow nut sundae.”

The spirited young Pamela would make this sense of enterprise a hallmark of her adult life, which has been both privileged and tumultuous and marked by great adventures, terrible betrayals and wrenching tragedy. Now 83, Pamela remains the tall, striking-looking, optimistic woman of her youth but her life is very much a simple one these days, the mansions, the country houses, the valuable works of art all gone. She lives in a chic but cramped Toorak apartment, the primary carer of ex-husband Simon Warrender, who is confined to a wheelchair and whom she remains devoted to even though they were divorced in 1985. Her autobiography, she says, is not “a Myer book” (she has already written a biography of her father) but a chance to set the record straight, to help her children know the trajectory of her life and understand “the bigger picture” of how her branch of the Myer family, Norman’s descendents, became estranged from the family business and its vast fortune.

Read more of my feature on Pamela Myer Warrender in the September issue of The Australian Women's Weekly.

Le Male

The following is this month's Deeply Superficial column, published in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

I wonder if the bottles of classic cologne that get wrapped and offered year after year for Father’s Day are the men’s equivalent of a woman getting a vacuum cleaner or a pair of nice socks for her birthday. Let’s face it, it’s difficult to be original here. Most men won’t venture beyond the bracing cleanness of something like Polo Black, dismissing anything more floral or pungent as girlie. For some of them, being given a bottle that has “pour homme” written on it is akin to asking them to shave their legs, an affront to their masculinity.

Like Carrie wearing men’s Jockey briefs to bed in Sex and the City, women are much more secure in their scent sexuality. Quite a few of us wear “men’s” fragrances regularly. (I have worn Geoffrey Beene’s bergamot-y Grey Flannel and a new men’s eau de toilette Kiton Black that smells quite like it.) But it can be agonising trying to get a man to move beyond Old Spice, let alone into something creative like Viktor & Rolf Antidote.

Now, I love Antidote and would happily wear it myself. It’s a men’s fragrance but it has sultry, spicy notes that smell really great on my skin when they dry down. And I think it is an antidote of sorts to the problem - why not give your man a men’s eau de toilette that works well on you? That way, if hates it or is shy about using it, you can steal it back.

Some ideas: Citrusy fragrances like L’Occitane’s Eau Fraiche Verveine Agrumes, a completely accessible light citrus verbena, L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Mandarine Tout Simplement, which smells like crushed mandarin skins or the Hermès Concentré D’Orange Verte, which is extremely uplifting and which I spray all over myself after the gym. In this vein, Aesop has released a deliciously pungent new unisex fragrance called Mystra, which draws its inspiration from Byzantium and blends exotic resins such as frankincense, mastic and labdanum.

At Jo Malone, try her innovative classic Lime, Basil & Mandarin, Wild Fig & Cassis or the almost-drinkable Blue Agava and Cacao, made from the flowers that are ingredients in the best Tequila. The Diptyque Philoskouros is the trend-setter among fig fragrances and, while it is thought of as a man’s cologne, it’s divine on women too. Malin + Goetz have synthesised natural ingredients into a collection of travel-sized bottles “for global nomads” containing fragrances that can be layered. Newest are Rum Tonic and Lotus Root.

Also at Mecca Cosmetica, the heavenly Serge Lutens collection, which includes many unisex possibilities, including Santal Blanc, a white sandalwood that my husband has already stolen from me, Gris Clair, a sweet lavender with an ashy dry down and Fumerie Turque, which has a top note of Turkish rose but base notes of leather and Balkan tobacco. And I think you can’t go wrong with Comme des Garcons 2 or 3, two eau de parfums that contain hearts of florals, wrapped in heady, spicy, exotic notes. (The beautiful silver bottle of CD2 is shaped like a whiskey flask – nothing girlie about that.)

Working on the principle that it’s a pity to waste a perfectly good fragrance on a man who can’t tell his Brut from his Burberry, why not give him Kai eau de parfum – a delicately feminine brew of white flowers that happens to be the favourite scent of Tommy Lee, who claims the fragrance calms him? (Goodness only knows what he’s like without it, if his twitchy performance on Rock Star Supernova is considered.) If you’re really bold you could give him Tom Ford Black Orchid, an OTT tropical fruit salad that’s totally scrumptious, but include two tickets to Bali in the package.

There’s another possibility – his’n’her sets, such as Prada Woman for you and the new Prada Man for him or Armani’s new masculine and feminine versions of Remix. Then, there’s Intimately Beckham for Men and Intimately Beckham for Women. Surely he can’t get upset that you think he’s as sexy as David Beckham. Of course, the downside is that he, in turn, might think you’re as sexy as Posh.

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