Alexandra Shulman is best known for her years as the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, and even better known for her nasty polemic against her replacement EIC, Edward Enniful, as she was leaving. Shulman’s time as EIC of British Vogue was dominated by mostly white covers, while Enniful seemed to do much more to celebrate Britain’s racial and cultural diversity. In any case, Shulman now spends her time writing an occasional Daily Mail column, and of course, she had thoughts on the Duchess of Sussex’s With Love, Meghan. I was shocked that a former EIC of a women’s fashion bible is suddenly against aspirational lifestyle programming – Shulman whines that it takes too much effort to live like Meghan. Meghan really has the racist white women fighting for their lives. From Shulman’s Mail “notebook.”
One of my most hated words is effortless. Effortless dressing, effortless cooking, effortless having a bath. Yet while effortless is a buzzword, a life full of unnecessary effort is constantly laid out in front of us. Meghan’s new TV series demonstrates such an effortful existence that it’s quite exhausting to contemplate.
Home-made teabags of Himalayan bath salt for your guests’ bedside table to show you care about how they sleep, and all that endless plating. I thought only restaurants plated up. But in Meghanland, plating is an essential activity. No longer is a nice bowl of fruit salad OK, it’s all about creating a colour-coded rainbow platter of fruit, or sprinkling flowers on a frittata. Flowers on your eggs? If that’s plating, I’m happy to pass.
It’s unfair, though, to blame all this effortful existence on Meghan Sussex (as she tells us she prefers to be called).
We must also contend with the high standards of Gen Z and millennial tablescaping, involving an exotic display of candles, floral arrangements and table linen every time a few pals are invited over for a plate of pasta. There’s scarcely any space left for plating there.
Meanwhile, beds that used to be perfectly fine with a bedspread flung on top are now meant to be adorned with so many layers of throws and cushions that serious excavation is necessary to discover the poor old sheets and pillows.
No wonder so many people feel they are time-poor. There’s such a huge amount of effort encouraged in the pursuit of the aspirational life. What’s happened to the late, great Shirley Conran’s attitude that life’s too short to stuff a mushroom?
In other times, I might have suggested, as grumpy old people used to, that we need a good war to sort our priorities out. But the way things are going, perhaps we are about to have one.
This is too funny. Like, if I’m being honest, there was stuff in WLM which I would never do because A) I do not care that much and B) it’s too time-consuming when my answer to those kinds of tasks is to throw money at the problem and pay someone else to do it. But I’m not the former editor of Vogue! I’m not writing a Daily Mail column, trying to come up with some “reason” why I don’t like Meghan or why WLM is a bad show. “It takes too much effort” is the argument of the defeated. “Why would anyone want to make anything aesthetically pleasing” FROM A FASHION EDITOR. Besides which, most of Meghan’s tips are not even all that time-consuming (minus that balloon arch). She literally gave a recipe for, like, a seven-minute one-pot pasta dish. She’s like “add some fresh juice in your champagne, it’s lovely.”
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
