Pencil-skirted

High hats easily fit in with high necks, slim sleeves, pencil-skirted suits, straight box coats, long gloves and higher shoes.

The new short coats for the season of 1945-46 show up to sparkling advantage in bright jewels colors over a pencil-skirted suit in black or navy.

More fun than sun in a mirror… pencil-skirted tunic suit dress a-sparkle with bright ‘gold’ nailheads.

Secondly, their volume also plays a part in creating new-season proportions, which essentially boil down to a larger top over a narrow bottom; a way of making a blouse and pencil-skirted outfit feel like it’s coming from 2011 rather than 1992.

Anyway, G. Peck lifted the quality of 1959 South Yarra, with its population of retired colonels, their blue-rinsed ladies and woolly-coated small dogs, the smart young narrow-lapelled, broad-minded advertising executives, the pencil-skirted, stiletto-heeled secretaries tok-tokking along the pavements.

Take away those chauffeurs, those gasoline coupons, those platoons of pencil-skirted, lozenge-spectacled assistants.

Today, though, the sight of a pencil-skirted, high-heeled secretary is fairly uncommon – a hard day spent hot-desking and video-conferencing is best faced in comfortable trousers and a pair of flat pumps, after all – but that very archetype was rather sweetly re-enacted by Maggie Gyllenhaal last year in Secretary.

Plus, we keep having film noir fantasies about men in fedoras and their dangerous pencil-skirted gals downing sidecars.