The feature in this paper last week on the Sisyphean nature of women's fashion retail in Dunedin was a good read, but it incomprehensibly missed the one enormous contribution these stores make, that of assisting the maturity of a man. Every year, the World Health Organisation figures paint the same picture - the extent to which idiot man has grown up can only be measured by how he handles himself in a women's fashion store.
This has certainly been my main barometer for measuring maturity since some truly awful experiences in Auckland's Ponsonby Rd. It was tough then and, if you couldn't cut it, there was no sympathy. Later, they brought in magazines, coffee and chairs for us, but none of these could hide the nervous male shop-floor straggle. I have consequently worked like 10 Trojans trying to better my performance in these stores over the past two decades, and I would like to think it has brought me to a level of maturity as a man where I can help others.
Last week, a house guest starved of quality women's retail fashion - she lives in Wellington where there is no Carlson store - indicated she would like to spend a morning looking for women's clothes. What would I like to do instead, she asked. I would like to come with you, I said, nonchalantly flicking metaphorical lint off my sleeve. Really, she said incredulously, but what will you do while I am there?
I will advise and opine, I replied.
Our house guest was chasing a winter coat and a dress. I knew of these items from wardrobes in our own house, though for years the extraordinarily fine line between dress and skirt tended to sail over my head - I usually just called them a thing. I knew her colours. This would be, as a child at a kid's birthday party surveying dessert would say, a piece of cake.
It is important for a man to walk alongside a woman when entering a women's fashion store. If you lag behind, as so many do, then your lack of confidence/maturity glows like a red hot coal. And, more importantly, you won't be isolated by those yawning full-length mirrors they have in there.
I freely admit I am one of the worst-dressed men in this town, I make no bones about that, and so it is crucial I do not see myself in one of these mirrors, especially if I am beside a woman who looks like $4 trillion.
And you learn other tools which will eventually help you grow up. You learn to frown slightly at garments, and you build up an impressive vocabulary for conveying the impression you know stuff. You learn to touch a fabric lightly and come up with a perfect word, like a wine taster.
Where a man who has not yet grown up might say a fabric feels soft, the grown-up man will say it feels flocculent. And why spotlight your immaturity by saying a coat fabric feels a little hard when you have the word adamantine in your tool bag?
It helps so much if you know some fashion terms. In Arthur Barnett, a blue dress of incandescent beauty, as blue as the Lucinda Williams song, leapt at us from its rack like an escaped leopard. An immature man would have said "great dress", but I spoke instead of its full circular bias and cap sleeves, its wonderful invocation of the 1950s. The house guest beamed. No woman likes to be in a fashion store with a man who has not grown up. The blood drained from her face when she saw the $430 price tag, but here again, the mature man, the man who can give advice in the bat of an eye, can really make his mark.
"House guest," I said evenly, "are you intending to wear the price tag or the dress?"
Growing up is hard for a man. We need help. There should be a women's fashion store on every block.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
