Before the publication of each of her books Dolly Alderton takes a moment to herself to see it off into the wild. ‘It’s the strangest part, that transition from private to public,’ she tells ELLE UK, adding that it's a ‘magical’ experience to see ‘something that begun with Post-Its and conversations with friends, and notes and mind maps, a year and a half later become this thing that people buy in a bookshop […] this piece of your brain and heart and mind. I’ll never get over it, it’s the most exciting thing’.
So, this week, ahead of the release of her fourth book – the acutely observed, smart, moving and funny break-up novel, Good Material – Alderton sat on a bench in a London park with a cup of tea and ‘wished it well’.
The drinks were harder – Casamigos tequila and Pómello cocktails – at the book’s launch on Wednesday evening (crab doughnuts, sea bass ceviche tacos, and Keens Cheddar toasties were on hand for sustenance). Held at the TwentyTwo hotel in Mayfair, guests including newlywed Bel Powley, author Elizabeth Day, ELLE contributing editor Camille Charriere, actors Stanley Tucci and Minnie Driver came to toast the author, while DJ Annie Oh was on the decks. ‘It was so fun. I was actually prepared to not have fun,’ Alderton admits, adding she knows how Carrie Bradshaw felt when she felt like an ice-sculpture at her own book launch (‘I’m sorry for quoting Sex and the City, like I always do!’). 'The good thing is, when I was at the table signing books, people kept coming in and telling me they were at a fabulous party.'
Alderton embodied Bradshaw’s attitude to the statement look the night too, in a chilli red Rosie Assoulin dress and Jimmy Choo heels. For the evening, she worked with the stylist Aimée Croysdill, the woman who has helped the likes of Nicola Coughlan and Ellie Bamber find their style mojo. ‘The great thing about having a stylist in the run up to a work project is that you ask someone else to babysit that part of your brain that’s worried about clothes,’ says Alderton. ‘I’ve kind of just wanted to look the same since I was about 16 and the great thing about working with a stylist is they can look at your taste and your figure and they can find a way of maturing that style, making it more modern or fresher’.
Which is? ‘I like glamour and feminine silhouettes. If I had it my way I’d basically look like Geri Halliwell in the Spice Girls in the mid-1990s. I like feeling like a tarty showgirl! Aimée just took that energy I have, that raw taste and found a way to make it more elegant and a bit more grown up’.
We can be our own worst critics, of course. And so another privilege of working with a stylist is that they see us clearly, objectively. Alderton says she’s aware of the ‘rules’ she and her peers can put on themselves, and wonders if it’s a result of being raised in the notoriously not-great-for-women Noughties. ‘I think now with young women, finding their style, understanding their body – probably because of the Internet and how much things have opened up – I think it’s not as rigid as it was for us,’ she suggests. ‘Seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes – particularly when you’ve had that Noughties handbook – can help you throw that handbook away’. She is adamant too that an interest in fashion shouldn’t be ‘belittled’. People are many different, often contradictory, things. Alderton’s shoe collection is as big as her book collection, she says – both bring her joy in different ways.
Clothes are also a powerful tool of self-expression. She knows what she likes but isn’t prescriptive or rigid about it. ‘Most of my work is me sitting behind a laptop, but there is another part of my work which is doing live performances or being at book festivals or out and about meeting people. I think women should be free to do that in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms and that not be distracting from their work; or, if they want to look like Geri Halliwell in 1997 I think that shouldn’t be distracting either’.
She gets a kick in seeing people using fashion to say something about themselves. ‘I am that person who, if I see a phenomenally dressed woman or someone who looks really unusual, I’ll have to stop her and tell her,’ she says. As a publication day treat, she has bought herself a floor-length Alexander McQueen coat. 'I get quite obsessed with things and I love the pursuit. I think it’s since I rewatched Sliding Doors. I wanted a 1990s maxi coat, properly to the floor.'
Since she is so aware of the power of clothes, and given that Good Material is about the messy business of heartbreak – both highly specific and shockingly universal – what is Alderton’s approach to post-break up dressing? Does she go goblin-mode or full on revenge dressing? ‘I’m an ice cream and PJs person for the first phase – it depends how severe the heartbreak is how long that phase is – and then what my friends always say about me is that they know I’m emerging [from that] when I start dressing like I’m wearing the costume department of Rocket Man,’ she laughs. ‘They know that I’m coming out the other side when I start dressing like early era Elton John’.
