Underwear, outerwear

By Rebecca Willis

I don't mean to sound like a Monty Python sketch, but when I was a student and the pipes froze, if we wanted a cup of coffee we had to melt some snow first. That was not the most amazing thing, though. The most amazing thing, I now realise, was that for the whole of an unusually harsh winter, spent in a house later condemned as unfit for human habitation, I did not wear a vest. I did not even own a vest. I dealt with the extreme cold by piling on jumpers and jackets and coats, usually from the menswear rail in charity shops.

A quarter of a century later, I have a whole drawer full of vests. Most are cotton, but some are silk; some have spaghetti straps, others lead a double life as T-shirts in the summer. Their proliferation is partly because clothes have changed. The whole underwear-as-outerwear thing has left its legacy, and women’s tops are often sheer, lacy or cut so low that you need something beneath to preserve a bit of modesty. But mostly they are for warmth: I even have a cashmere vest, which goes under my party clothes when I suspect an evening of glacial air-conditioning lies ahead.