AWLG

All the World Loves a Glover….Evening Gloves for a Femme-Fatale

I don’t consider myself obsessive. I’m a normal, well-balanced jazz singer with a passion. And a keen feel for getting that old retro-style right. But even I was shocked when, in an idle moment recently, I counted my evening gloves and realised I was the proud owner of 76 pairs. That’s long, satin peel-ables, in every hue of the firmament, not the woolly variety that your mum threaded through your school dufflecoat sleeves on hairy string. Seventy-six pairs. Well – seventy-six and a half, actually. One gorgeous sage-green three-quarter length was all that was left after thieves stole the entire bandstand on a function in leafy Chichester a year or so ago. I miss that glove – I’ll never replace it – I mean who makes sage-green satin gloves these days? Come to think of it, who makes sage-green anything?

Evening gloves conjure up the opulence of a bygone day the same way as tiaras and opera glasses – a heavy glamour that we have somehow forgotten how to do. I won’t say the only reason I became a singer was so I could dress up but I can’t deny it was a consideration. These days we get to dress up once, maybe twice a year, and we’re rapidly losing the art. We seem to think that if we stick a pair of long black lycras with anything it will add instant glamour. But getting it wrong can be fatal. Long evening gloves with a mini dress, for example, conjure more Bet Lynch than Bette Davis…

My first pair were short fishnets, dressing-up box staples from the age of four. Heaven knows what happened to them but parading round the garden in those tatty old mittens playing at film stars started a lifelong fascination.

Back in the heady days of Hollywood every film star wore evening gloves. And the longer they were, the naughtier – Ava Gardner’s most famous glamour shot has her in a black strapless number, her long gloves just that little bit too little loose at the top. “It wouldn’t take much to pull THEM down,” the thought immediately springing to mind. And I would defy anyone who has only seen Rita Hayworth’s striptease number in “Gilda” once to say exactly how much she actually removes. Will Hays reduced it to a single long black glove, stretched triumphantly over her head, brandished in a punter’s face then tossed to the band, but even he couldn’t legislate against Animal Magnetism, and for all the good his Code did Our Rita might just have well have stood there in the buff.

I made a pair once, in poverty-stricken days. Fiddly is the term that comes to mind - all those tiny fourchettes and quirks that go in between the fingers. I had to have a new gown by the evening so I concocted a creation out of a piano cloth in an afternoon. It wasn’t bad if you didn’t look at the seams too closely. I made a pair of extremely long gloves to match – an exercise I won’t be in a hurry to repeat. I pity Queen Elizabeth I’s glover who had to make the fingers extra long so it looked as if the monarch had slim, elegant digits.

The best places to find unusual colours are charity shops and jumble sales. I never pass a pair, however odd the colour – you never know when Tinned-Pea Green or Envelope-Buff might come back…

One of my favourite haunts for evening gloves is the Grace Brothers-esque Fairheads, a charming haberdashery department store in Ilford, Essex. There, in wonderful old glass cabinets, lie wooden drawers jostling with all manner of sensible underwear, tea towels, hatpins, scarves – and evening gloves. It was by accident I discovered that the owner, Douglas Sweet, whose grandfather started the business, is even more of a glove aficionado than myself. A member of The Worshipful Company of Glovers, he is in charge of their modern collection. His job is to obtain gloves of special merit that date from 1800 onwards, especially those reflecting changes in fashion, taste, colour and design.

As Douglas Sweet unwraps two minute pairs of black silk net gloves, decorated with coloured glass stones and gold and silver embroidery, dating from about 1810, the first thing that impresses me is the size. They are like dollies’ clothes. Surely people’s hands weren’t really that size? I observe that mine look huge in comparison. “No they’re not. You’re a 7½,” he says, his expert eye rendering a tape measure redundant. “That’s about normal.” Phew.

Most Victorian evening gloves were cream kid, and so light that they felt as though made of the soft tissue paper in which they are now wrapped. Apparently, the more décolleté the neckline, and the smaller the sleeve, the longer the glove would have been. The really long ones, reaching right to the armpit, are known as “Mousquetaire,” and would have gone with very daring necklines. So much for the prudish Victorians…

The heyday of the evening glove was the Edwardian age. “To put on a pair of these would have taken 20 minutes, a lot of French chalk and the assistance of a maid,” admits Douglas Sweet, showing me another exquisite pair of kid gloves. “The lady would put her elbow on a desk, with her hand pointing upwards, and the maid would have eased the gloves on – fingers first, thumb last. “For eating, the little buttons closing the gloves at the wrist would have been undone and the gloves folded back off the hand.” Even today, gloves are still measured in “button-length” – how many buttons it would take to keep them done up.

After the Great War things were never the same again. Despite the invention of new easy-care fabrics – nylon, then the fabulous lycra, gloves were on their way out. They got shorter, and even though the fifties and sixties saw a renaissance, the death knell was tolling. Designers such as Mary Quant and Zandra Rhodes did their best, as did the Hollywood sirens, but the evening glove was on its way out.

That’s one of the reasons why for me they are so sexy. They are rare, out-of-the-ordinary, and smack of the ever-so-slightly kinky. For me they carry the same appeal as stockings – that old-fashioned pinup naughtiness that is at once modest and rude.

There’s no competition - my favourites are the long satin ones. One special pair is in butterscotch duchess satin (from the classiest boot sale I ever attended,) others in shocking pink which I have been forbidden to wear because from the third row backwards they look like Marigolds. But Sandra’s Law states that however many pairs I have, I will always need to buy – or more often these days – dye a pair to match a new dress. (It’s not hard but it is time-consuming and the results a bit hit-and-miss.) My most valuable are probably a short black pair, exquisitely embroidered with flowers, from a tiny specialist shop in Basel, but glove collecting will never make me rich – even the best are only worth a few pounds.

For all my lamentations, rumours of the demise of the evening glove could yet be premature. Glamour stalwart Madonna was a lone torchbearer for satin-wrapped limbs for decades, but just as she too has begun to flag, the battle cry has finally been heard and the fashion cavalry is galloping to the rescue. Satin is making a comeback – the catwalks of Milan last autumn were filled with silky shiny shimmery stuff shunned for FAR TOO LONG in my humble opinion. The “Old Hollywood” influence was everywhere with direct references to Rita Hayworth’s notorious “Gilda” gloves slinking down Mariella Burani’s runway. And Givenchy’s throttle-tight throwbacks to Audrey Hepburn’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” may scupper a thousand New Years “Stop Smoking” Resolutions with the rush for cigarette holders to go with them.

Even more encouraging is the exploration of fabrics – maverick Robert Cary-Williams’ collection included chain mail gauntlets – and non-fabrics. The ultimate virtual gloves appeared on the arms of Liv Tyler in a Vanity Fair shoot when the body painting craze homed in on a pair of long, lacy mehndi gloves sported by Fashion’s favourite she-elf. The naughty side of evening gloves, too, is being explored in ever-darker ways even beyond the underground fetish clubs of London. I wonder if, when, in 1834, Xavier Jouvin invented a new glove-cutting technique to ensure the most precise fit possible, he secretly fantasised over the innumerable S&M possibilities openly explored in this somewhat less restrained era?

I guess modern active women don’t really want the bother of wearing evening gloves – they get in the way. The thing is, though, we’re just dying to be more glamorous. I saw a great pair of rubber gloves recently, complete with plastic grapes and diamante – but why play at it? The real thing will hardly break the bank – a new pair will set you back between six and fifteen quid and even an antique pair only costs about a tenner. So as a luxurious accessory they’re probably going to cost less than those saucy nylons you got from Agent Provocateur and are infinitely more intriguing (or so I’ve found, anyway…)

Not everyone can be a jazz diva like Anita O’Day who famously used them to disguise the needle tracks on her wrists (as, by the way, Billie Holiday used a gardenia to cover up a ironing mistake in her hair) but gloves can cover up a multitude of sins. I understand that one can tell a woman’s age from her hands, which is reason enough in itself for hedonistic handwear, but frankly I’m for anything that can conceal ragged nails, the ravages of an active lifestyle and the wages of not using a certain washing up liquid…

Site based on a design by Rick Clark,

reinterpreted and maintained by RoninG Systems