Gloves in a cold climate

Published on Monday 15 December 2008 19:14

THEY keep you warm, germ-free and update your look in one move… Liz Hoggard & Fiona MacGregor sing the praises of gloves

ELIZABETHAN ladies adored them, they ensured screen icons from Greta Garbo to Audrey Hepburn held generations of men in the palms of their silk encased hands, and Dita Von Teese knows just how alluring they can be. But in recent years the glove has been relegated to little more than a woolly mitten whose only purpose has been to protect us from finger chilblains.

Thankfully, when it comes to fighting back for elegance, the gloves are now not so much off, but on again. With fashion currently embracing retro, lady-like glamour and demure forties era sexiness, it was perhaps natural that we would see a resurgence for gloves, items which while worn confirm respectability and in being removed, particularly when peeled back slowly, suggest quite the opposite.

"A lady", as Clarissa Dalloway declares, "is known by her gloves and her shoes." Indeed, Virginia Woolf's opening chapter of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa searches for the perfect white gloves ("above the elbow" with pearl buttons), packs the punch of an emotional thriller.

But it's not just the glove's inherently alluring qualities we have been neglecting to appreciate. Had we only followed our grandmother's stylish attachment to keeping their hands covered in public, we could have saved ourselves winters of germ-ridden misery.

The Victorians wore them obsessively to prevent typhoid infection. They were considered an essential part of every lady's wardrobe. Shaking an ungloved hand was a no-no, only indulged in by the lower orders.

So with flu and other viruses stalking the country, what better time to don a pair of beautiful gloves and protect our hands from unpleasant residues lurking on door handles and banisters ready to attach themselves to any innocently bared palm they come into contact with?

As Scots we should have a particular affinity with gloves. One of the earliest recorded glove makers was working in Perth in 1165 and it is we Scots who are credited with taking the glove-making industry to the US in 1760 where they established Gloversville in what became the state of New York.

While gloves have been firmly associated with royalty, since Elizabeth I made them de rigueur for the ladies of the English court, and the current Queen has always been a faithful glove wearer, now even the likes of Victorian Beckham is keeping her hands under wraps.

On the Milan catwalks even the men were slinking around in gauntlets. Christopher Bailey sent Burberry Prorsum models out in reptile-skin gloves and gloves with extra-long cuffs. So it's time to pick up a pair.

If you've gone for the three-quarter coat-sleeve trend, you'll need longer gloves to keep your arms warm – just look at the current Liberty advert with a model sporting above-the-elbow, patterned mitts, down from 160 to 87.50 in the London department store's sale.

Or how about some motorbike gauntlets to go with the biker boots trend? And a riding glove brings out the equestrian in all of us. Or, if you really want to create a stir, go for Pucci's harlequin gloves with a faux-fur pompon at a stonking 195.

But you don't have to fork out designer prices to keep your hands stylishly covered. There's a host of high street options, from 15 leather gloves in Marks & Spencer to inexpensive woolly numbers from Gap.