The truth about compliments
'You scrub up well!' 🔪
Having opinions on the style of others – even people we don’t know – is a full-time job for some. Instagram and TikTok groan with red carpet Statlers and Waldorfs with Anna Wintour complexes handing out snappy soundbites – sometimes great, often wildly inconsistent – and some have even forged a career from it. But in real life, such pithy asides land differently.
When it comes to critiquing how chic others are, I am of the perhaps controversial opinion that you should wait to be asked. There are only two exceptions:
1. A red carpet, which is now, for better or worse, an invitation to be pulled to shreds by the entire universe – which you will be.
2. An unsolicited ‘You look great.’
Nobody will give you the cold shoulder for a simple, spontaneous compliment. If they especially love what you’re wearing, perhaps cautious elaboration will be welcome, but danger zones lie ahead. It’s too easy for a well-intended style compliment to veer into shade. Walking into a room wearing a flash of gingham and hearing someone say, ‘Oh I love that tablecloth checks are back in yet again’ could emotionally scar the wearer for decades to come.
Everything is open to interpretation, of course, and one man’s ‘I love this’ is another’s ‘I think he just said I look like I was recently dug up by Burke and Hare’. Here are some of my favourite fashion backhanders.
Ooh! Very trendy!
Sounds like someone congratulating you for having your finger on the fashion pulse, right? How wonderful. Not exactly.
Translation:
1. What an ugly outfit.
2. You are an attention seeker.
3. In five years’ time, you’re going to look at the photos from tonight and wish you’d worn something plain and functional, like me.
4. We are going to talk about that beret for the next sixty years; the opening line of your eulogy will be ‘ooh la la’.
Don’t you scrub up well?
Spend your life in jeans, then happen to wear a tie or a dress, and you’ll hear this at least seventy times, usually from older relatives who have worn the same outfit to every family wedding since the Right to Buy scheme first went live.
Translation:
Usually, you look like shit.
You look very summery
The gateway drug to a sea of snidey style plaudits. On a hot day, if you’re in candy stripes or florals or bright colours, it can be genuine. But it is also the fragile brûlée lid on a deep mush of judgement.
Translations:
1. You look cold.
2. Your outfit is inappropriate for this very much indoors setting.
3. Put more clothes on.
I could never get away with that
I have mentioned before the outcry from provincial Facebook in 2010 when I did a charity run in red socks. I may as well have been wearing Elizabeth Hurley’s Versace safety-pin frock. Dare to wear a colour or something that doesn’t look like it was retrieved from the sale rail in the Tunbridge Wells BHS and prepare to be treated like Julia Fox in a traffic-cone bra.
Translations:
1. That outfit is wearing you.
2. I am frightened that if I wear a shade other than navy blue, it will make me bi-curious.
You look very smart
A close relative to ‘don’t you scrub up well’, this has an added layer of suspicion. Why do you look smart? What are you up to? Is often followed by the always unfunny: ‘Where you off? Court appearance?’
Translation:
Nice to finally see you in trousers with belt loops instead of a drawstring, you shiftless slug.
You look really nice today
Translation:
The rest of the time, however, you look like someone who rolled round a Sue Ryder shop covered in golden syrup.
What’s the occasion?
Translation:
You are overdressed.
You look comfortable
Translations:
1. You look dowdy.
2. I am uncomfortable, and thus envious.
3. There is a dress code, you know.
4. I see that cardigan is still going strong.
Looking very dapper!
A cousin of ‘scrub up well’ and ‘you look smart’, an accusation of dapperness (dapperdom?) alludes to the fact you are wearing something ever so slightly out of the norm, like you have ideas above your station. Something smart with a pattern. A polo neck with a formal jacket. A cravat. A lapel pin.
Translation:
You’re gay, did you know?
Is that what you’d call… vintage?
Translation:
A car boot sale hates to see you coming.
You've always had your own style, haven't you?
Translations:
1. In the car on the way over, we took bets on what horrible, shapeless garment you’d have thrown over your pathetic body.
2. We all said we were wearing black; why have you got a flowery, floaty dress on, Geri?
I like your dress. Did you make it yourself?
Translations:
1. (If you did indeed make it yourself.) You obviously gave up on the pattern halfway through.
2. (If you did not make the dress yourself.) It looks like you made it yourself – in a windowless room, and with tuning forks and stale linguine instead of needle and thread.
See, you can look nice when you want to
Translation:
You have finally given in and worn the clothes I’ve been trying to force you into the entire time we’ve known each other and you look dreadful, but I would rather die than admit I was wrong and that you do indeed look better in your faded Nirvana T-shirt and jeans you wash every February 29th.
(When responding to an Instagram selfie.) Ooh, you know your angles don't you?
Translation:
Did your other chins get stuck in traffic on the way to the photo shoot?
You look well
The king AND queen of backhanders. It’s a maze of panic and passive aggression, and there is no way out.
Translations:
1. (Occasionally.) You genuinely look great.
2. Last time I saw you, you looked like shit; today, you look less like shit.
3. God, you look awful but I can’t really say that until we’ve had a couple more drinks.
4. I have something weight or skin-related I would like to drop on you but according to Gen Z I can’t say things like that any more so I’m going to vote Reform at the next election.
It takes a lot of self-confidence to wear that
Translation:
One of your balls is hanging out of those shorts.
Going somewhere nice?
Translation:
You have dared to come into the office wearing a non-standard colour or a fabric other than polyester.
Oh… shorts! Interesting!
Translations:
1. Oh… shorts! Inappropriate.
2. Oh… shorts! So you have legs under there? I don’t like them.
You off straight out after?
Translation:
You have worn something sparkly for work and it has reminded me that people do actually have a life outside the confines of this hellscape we attend daily in return for inadequate money but rather than rail against the system, I’m going to make you feel like you’re dressed like a high-class sex worker from a 1980s movie.
Ooh I see you like that shirt! Suits you!
Translation:
Do you have any more shirts or does your wardrobe consist of just that one tired blouse, swinging on a wire hanger, and your old school uniform?
This week is Independent Bookshop Week, and I’d like to thank all the indies that stock my books, or books like mine, and continue to keep the industry thriving and readers well served. Shout out to some of my favourites, which include, but are not limited to: Queer Lit, Manchester; Gay’s The Word, London; Bookish Type, Leeds; Category is Books, Glasgow; Read, Holmfirth; Truman Books, Farsley; Salts Mill Bookshop, Shipley; Storytellers Inc, Lytham; Shakespeare & Company, Paris; Kirkdale Bookshop, Sydenham; Argonaut Books, Leith; Topping & Co, Bath & Edinburgh; Bert’s Books, Swindon; Gently, Ladywell & Brockley; BookBar, London; Ink84, London; Crofton Books, London; Lighthouse, Edinburgh; West End Lane Books, West Hampstead; The Common Press, London; Backstory, Balham; La La Books, Camberwell; Typewronger, Edinburgh; Golden Hare, Edinburgh; Pages, Hackney; Goldsboro Books, London; Lutyens & Rubinstein, Notting Hill; Burley Fisher, London; Owl Bookshop, London; Word on the Water, London.
Phew. And loads of others I forgot. Sorry.
Previously, on The truth about everything*:
The truth about target audiences
I have written before about my strange relationship with Pride Month – that I’m happy it exists, how amazing and unimaginable it would’ve been to younger me, but how I dread the automated, dead…
A colleague once looked me up and down and said “You looked nice yesterday.” That was 15 years ago. Still rankles 😂
My favourite form of this comes from some telly makeover show. The participant/victim is revealed in pro-“styled” mode and is clearly a little upset. She looks like a birthday cake after the foxes have been at it. The presenter’s sidekick pipes up with a hearty “Oooh! Look at YOU!” – the perfect combo of mockery/flattery.