The Great Tennis Jewelry Mystery.

Here's the question: why do they call it a tennis bracelet?

This answer is simple: because women's champ Chris Evert was wearing one in 1987's U.S. Open; the bracelet's clasp broke and the match was halted until the jewelry was retrieved. And the world looked at that bracelet and went, "Neat." So all thin strings of in-line diamonds in a regular pattern became known as tennis bracelets. Fair enough.

The corollary: why do tennis players wear so much jewelry? Every time I come across matches on the teevee, the women are wearing earrings, necklaces, and so on. Seems to me -- a former basketball player -- that putting something expensive and fragile on an athlete in play is kind of, well, silly. Possibly dangerous. I even looked up the ITF dress code from 2006 (the only one I could find online) to see what it said about jewelry -- most unhelpfully, there was nothing.

I remain puzzled.

My Cups Runneth Over.

Here is a useful pamphlet on how to be the absolute worst lingerie saleswoman in the short history of one hopeful young lingerie buyer's life.

A clarification: when we say "worst," we do not simply mean "least successful at selling lingerie." Rather, we mean: "supreme at not only discouraging the customer from buying anything, but sending them running out of the store in tears, vowing never to return, and despondent about the current state of their body."

This is, needless to say, a far from everyday occurrence.

1. Don't ask right away if she needs help, even if she is rather listlessly fingering a bra on display and lingering pointedly near where you're obviously chatting with a friend and regular customer. No doubt you also give this woman your employee discount on your severely overpriced merchandise.

2. When you do ask if the customer needs help, exude irritation. When you learn what she's looking for, be sure to point out that you probably don't have it, but offer to fit her and show her to a dressing room anyway.

3. For the fitting, make sure the bra you give her is not only floral -- which she hates and is explicitly not looking for -- but made of a mesh as transparent as possible. Not even the nipples are going to be hidden here. Believe me, few things are more humiliating than standing with your arms outstretched in front of a total stranger in an unflattering bra with your nipples showing.

4. Leave her in the dressing room for at least five minutes, while you stand outside in the thirty-square-foot space and talk loudly about her with your friend. Because if anything is more humiliating than standing with your arms outstretched in front of a total stranger with your nipples showing, it is waiting to do so while the total stranger stands outside and discusses you with her friend as if you weren't there, and unable not to listen.

5. When you do deign to start the fitting, don't forget to point out that she's busting out of the transparent, unflattering bra. Has she put on a lot of weight lately? Also, she's clearly wearing it wrong. Does she wear her own bras that high on her back? How ignorant.

6. Offer to comb the store looking for the skintone, unadorned bra she has requested and specifically intends to wear underneath thin t-shirts in hot summer months. Leave her in the dressing room for another full five minutes.

7. Chat some more with your friend.

8. Assuming your customer has not already thrown on her own clothes and fled in instinctual self-preservation, bring back the six ugliest bras she has ever seen. Make sure at least three are covered in the lumpy details she is specifically hoping to avoid.

9. When she emerges from the dressing room thirty seconds later, having finally given up all hope not only of finding a bra in this store today, but also of ever being physically attractive to anyone ever again in her life, ask how the bras fit. If all has gone according to plan, she should mumble some small pleasantry with a noticeable catch in her voice and a telltale sheen in her eyes, before slinking out of the store with her head hung low in shame. Turn back to your friend, pull out the inevitable bottle of champagne from beneath the counter, and toast your success.

... I wish I could say the above was exaggerated for comic effect. Alas, it was not. I don't want to put the name of the store here, but enquiries will be swiftly and honestly answered.

On Style

So there I was, in Boutique du Designeur, with a rack full of likelies. The date for my friend's wedding verged on the imminent, and I was verging on desperate. Wedding guests were to include an ex-boyfriend of mine, and even though the split was the most amiable in my experience and had even already blown out its first birthday candle -- because breakups are just like children -- I wanted something devastating. Dress as artillery. This meant going a little bit out of my comfort zone, which is how I ended up in a vaguely Grecian deep V-neck babydoll dress of flamingo pink tulle.

It looked, in a word, exquisite. Truly red-carpet material. I could have stepped at once into any fancy shindig you'd care to name: my body, which I normally viewed as either a cumbersome means of carrying my intellect around or a processing system for pot pies and German Riesling, now appeared to consist entirely of translucent skin, perfect boobs, and endless, slender legs. The color, shocking and outrageous, looked fantastic with my photophobically pallid complexion. The saleswoman was all a-twitter.

I did not buy the dress. I am not a pink-tulle-babydoll kind of person.

And this, though perfectly reasonable at the time, now strikes me as very strange indeed. The dress was flattering, perfectly appropriate for a summer wedding, and on the cutting edge of fashion. And yet I declined the purchase because -- and this is a peculiar thing, really -- I did not feel the effect of the dress was something expressive of my, for lack of a less annoying term, personality. As they say: it just wasn't me.

The ostensible initial purpose of clothing, to hear God tell it in the book of Genesis, was modesty. Clothing was coverage, a hiding of shame, a general social agreement that as long as no one's naughty bits aren't showing, we can all pretend they aren't there. And yet, even as we purport to hide the body, we expect those same coverings to express some even deeper fact about a person, about their social status or aesthetic sense or cultural influences or general social attitude. Surely this is just as intimate in some sense as one's physical exterior?

Ideally, then, one's entire wardrobe would consist of bespoke clothing, designed for/by the individual who would be wearing it. For instance, I would love to be the proud owner of a sleek, elegant, dark green velvet double-breasted smoking jacket, but have not yet found one in the real world that meets the high, one might say Platonic, standards set by the smoking jacket of my imagination. Beau Brummel had the right idea: spend hours with your tailor, arguing about the precise line of every last seam and the precise fold of every snowy cravat, and then surely your clothes would be not only individual, but reflective of the individual who impelled their creation.

Of course, this requires money, and time; even in the good old days of the Regency in England, although Brummel was able to bring his sartorial dreams to notorious fruition -- polishing his boots with champagne! -- that option was hardly available to say, your average London streetsweeper or longshoreman or tavern wench (alright, *you* come up with a list of 17th-century urban British professionals). Fashion has always been related to financial assets -- specifically, the more you have of the latter, the more you can generally afford of the former. This is why there was an initial bias against mass-produced clothing when it first cropped up, and why "off the rack" counted as an insult. You weren't getting actual clothing: you were buying a uniform.

But nowadays few of us are intrepid enough to make our own clothes, and even fewer actually succeed in such endeavors. The rest of us, poor peons that we are, are forced to shop; we are no longer encouraged to design clothing, or even to envision clothing that does not yet exist, but rather are encouraged to shop, shop vastly and shop frequently. Individual style has exchanged creativity for consumerism. And I'm not entirely sure we're better off.