Carol’s Column

Clothes to rend the family apart

THERE is nothing quite like the subject of clothes to rend a family apart at the seams. So to speak.

And it's not something recent.

Take Adam.

Forget the serpent. The true story is that Adam and Eve fell out over a fig leaf.

Adam was unhappy with the one Eve was wearing. "It's too small," he said. "it reveals almost all. Find a bigger one. You're making an exhibition of yourself."

"Forget it," said Eve. "If you don't like it, go out and find somebody else."

Which was a bit of a problem.

Since then, things haven't really improved. If anything, they've deteriorated.

Take one night last week.

"Who's that?" said my husband, his eyebrows disappearing into his distinguishedly disappearing hairline.

"Where?" I looked up.

Okay, so our third youngest unmarried son did look a little different in a purple lace T-shirt, a striped skirt and Vietnamese thongs.

"It's your son. Don't you recognise him — a chip off the old block and all that."

"Recognise him?" said the old block snug in his pin-striped two piece with matching waistcoat and designer shirt. "I thought it was Barbra Streisand. Haw, haw."

This was not a tactful thing to say to a 17-year-old son and quarter heir.

Later, much later, after Jamie had departed, my spouse said rather tentatively. "Is there a reason why Jamie is wearing a skirt. Is he trying to tell me something?"

"Dad, it's the ethnic look," replied my second son Ralph who had blown in from London wearing what looked like the remnants of Petticoat Lane.

"You know, Dad, things have changed. Today anything goes."

And, what is so fascinating, is that anything that goes is accompanied by a smell.

Only the other night I took Jamie and his suitably garbed friends to a party. Oh, they looked so grand. In pinks and yellows, blues and violet. In skirts, shorts and other things.

So gay. However, my car smelt somewhat like a sheik's harem.

"Does your mother always drive with her head out of the window?" I heard Dominic Rabinowitz ask my son.

But we're not the only family with oddly clothed and peculiar smelling children.

At my book club meeting, Agatha Crump announced she'd lost her son.

"How lucky can you get?" murmured Bertha Ginkel.

"Yes, he's disappeared behind his hair.

"When he comes down to breakfast, we are not sure which way he's facing and we're not even sure that the orifice into which he's stuffing food is his mouth. It might be his ear." She giggled.

Bertha was more specific. "Well, you might have lost your son," she said, "but I almost kicked mine out. The other day he borrowed my Chris Levine culottes to wear to a party and sat on a hamburger with chili relish."

However, there are advantages to this teenage fad of bright is right. It's rather fun having a family of rainbows on legs and there's no doubt it's catching.

This morning, as I sat down to muesli and peas with lemon juice, a stranger pecked me on my moisturised cheek and shot through the front door.

Wearing crimson baggies, a tent top in turquoise and with an earring dangling from his right lobe, he looked not unlike a walking kaleidoscope.

Who was that? I gasped.

The children were amused.

"Didn't you recognise Dad?" they chorused.

Just then he returned for his spectacles and briefcase.

"Dammit, I must get some matching contact lenses," he muttered.

"Good heavens, you look like a circus," I shrieked, "where's your suit, your waistcoat, your image?"

"Suit? Waistcoat? Image?" he hissed. "You must decide. Do you want to be married to a little grey man or would you rather have the unexpected in your life?"

To dazzle or not to dazzle. That is the question.

■