A is for Accessories

Accessories:

Coco Chanel said that one should start with too many accessories and take one or more of them off. This is because Coco could not accessorise very well herself. When one puts on too many accessories in the first place, one risks somebody stylish walking in on them, and catching them with too many accessories on. Mon Chanel! How embarrassing! Imagine the look of this stylish person walking in on you and your overly-accessorised self, the shock in his or her face, the loss of whatever respect this person has for you. I myself sometimes do this at wherever I happen to be staying- I open every door of the hotel or castle or somesuch, trying to catch an over-accessoriser in the act. It is great fun for the catcher, but you don’t want to be the one caught!
More importantly- imagine your demode self, with one thousand and one accessories on. Imagine how trite and cheap you must look! Imagine how you might look like a goldmine to the men who may see you- not a goldmine they’re sexually attracted to; more like a goldmine where they’re going to approach the owner of wherever you’re staying at for the cost of the land rights to “that large heap of gold and silver that was laying in room one-oh-eight”. That large heap is you, over accessoriser. Non non non, that look is demode.

How is one meant to accessorise, in this case? What is this correct amount of accessories, hm?
I am not a mathematician- I’m not going to give you a formula. It is up to one’s own eye. What I do is I look at the person in question- in most cases it’s myself, occasionally a model. I observe their weight, their height, their hair colour, their favourite music and so on. Really eye this person up- is their neck particularly attractive- will a necklace enhance it? Is this person a fattie? Does this person have unattractive fingers? For instance, my own fingers are terrible- my mother used to tell me: “Don’t smoke Karl, because your hands are much too ugly for it and a cigarette will draw attention to it.” So I wear fingerless gloves and put many, many rings on my fingers. Yet if I had painterly fingers, it would not be acceptable to wear a million rings.

I choose to accessorise with high collars, sunglasses, fingerless gloves and rings- but I’m not going to tell you to wear this (I do hope you didn’t buy this book in order to justify your high collar habit- that’s your own problem.) However, I think everybody should wear sunglasses at least some of the time. Unless you are very stupid, or have very beautiful eyes, sunglasses act as a sort of disguise- a sort of eye shadow. Stupid people do not need a disguise because they’re too stupid to register anything anyway, hm? If one of the accessories you are wearing is sunglasses when your chic friend walks in on your overly-accessorising self, at least you can conceal an iota of your embarrassment.